Boss Design Studio: Hornet

Behold, I'm standing on text!

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my roughly fortnightly essay series wherein I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think about them.

In this post, I'm looking at Hornet, specifically her first bossfight in Hollow Knight. She has two; I'd do them both in a single post, but they're separated by like two thirds of the game.

If I had to briefly summarize this bossfight, I'd say "test".

Hornet opens her bossfight with a brief bit of dialogue, in which she warns us to back off and turn away from our quest, because it will end tragically. She apparently knows what we're here to do, which is more than we know at this point, and she can sense something terrible awakening in the kingdom. After her speech, she goes into an "en garde" stance for a moment before beginning the bossfight.

Hornet is different from all three of the bosses we've encountered previously. She's very mobile, jumping and dashing around the arena, and she's also much smaller than any of them. You're no longer a small but mobile protagonist fighting a larger and slower boss, you're a small but mobile protagonist fighting a small but mobile boss. And that, combined with the dialogue, makes this feel less like a monster fight and more like one warrior versus another.

Her attacks are also more warrior-like. Unlike the False Knight, she actually knows how to handle her weapon and attack you with it, rather than just waving it clumsily around. She runs and jumps around the arena to reposition, and will occasionally pause in her movement to attack you.

This she does, mostly, by dashing at you (either from the air or from the ground) with her needle (that's the spear thing she's holding). She'll also throw it across the room at you, necessitating jumping over it, before yanking it back with a strand of silk and hitting you with it on the way back. Getting hit on the backswing isn't a universal thing -- with practice, you can learn to dodge it -- but it definitely happens a lot, especially when you're newer at this and aren't expecting to have to dodge the same attack twice.

She also has her "thread storm" attack, which in my experience she uses to make you back off when you're pressing the attack too hard: she hovers in the air, her needle mysteriously disappears, and she whips thread in a circle around herself for a second or so before dropping to the ground. The thread damages you if you're caught in it. The thread storm is honestly one of the hardest attacks to dodge, because its telegraph is rather brief, and it's an area attack so if you're too close when she starts it it can be almost impossible to get out in time.

Hornet is a very vocal boss. She has battle cries, which she yells at the start of her attacks (and which have become memes in the Hollow Knight community, particularly "Shaw!"). I think the battle cries reinforce the "duel between warriors" aspect of the battle; they serve as a constant reminder that the boss you're fighting is a skilled person, not just a large animal or a guy who doesn't know how to use his armor and weapons. They also lend Hornet quite a bit more personality than most of the other bosses.

The stagger mechanic also makes a return with Hornet; she's the first boss to showcase how it properly works. (False Knight, while he does have a stagger, has one based on his remaining health rather than how many times you've hit him; Gruz Mother and Vengefly King don't stagger at all.) After you've hit her... *checks wiki* 11 times, Hornet will pause for a few seconds to catch her breath. That's another thing that I think serves to reinforce the "this is another person you're fighting" aspect.

The boss arena for this fight is in Greenpath, the moss forest area, and it's the first arena that isn't predominantly dark bluish. Instead it's lush and green and honestly quite pretty. It's probably my favorite of the early-game boss arenas. Pay no attention to the corpse in the background.

Hey look, monoliths!

Speaking of whom. When you defeat her, instead of dying, Hornet yeets herself offscreen through the ceiling. Then the background corpse falls over, allowing you to steal its cape, which grants you the dash ability. I actually don't think it was killed by Hornet; she pretty exclusively uses her needle to fight, and the background corpse has a nail sticking out of it.

(I should mention, because it'll make some later things make more sense: The broadsword equivalent of the Hollow Knight universe is the "nail". The more zweihandery ones are "greatnails", and the spears are "nail-lances". Hornet uses a needle, which so far is a weapon unique to her. In the sequel, the equivalent of rapier and dagger -- that's two of his weapons, but well -- is "pins".)

Hornet's boss theme is "Hornet", an energetic and rather upbeat track composed almost entirely of string instruments. It's dramatic, and it's about as punchy as you can get with a palette composed almost entirely of string instruments, but what it isn't is menacing. Nothing about the bossfight is terribly menacing, really; sure it's a battle to the death, but it's not a battle to the death against something evil. As I said in my brief summary, it's more like Hornet is testing you; if you can survive a bossfight against her, you might just have what it takes to survive the rest of the kingdom.

And Team Cherry did a masterful job of conveying that with this entire bossfight. Hornet, though she will stab you to death and in fact is quite good at that, never feels evil. The pretty and honestly kind of tranquil arena, the non-menacing fight music, the little reminders that you're fighting a person and not a monster... Hornet is an antagonist, but she's also one of the good guys; this bossfight is more of a test of mettle than anything else.

(Interestingly, it also serves the same role in a more meta sense: Hornet is the first real difficulty spike of the game, the first boss that uses skill more than brute force and thus requires you to develop an equal amount of skill to defeat her. Just like she's testing the protagonist's skill in-universe, she's also testing the player's skill out-of-universe.)

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time to hear Christopher Larkin play the harpsichord while the bosses throw things at you.