I'm 30 hours into my third playthrough of Hollow Knight, and not once in that time did I imagine a consensual torso plunge into Hornet, the spider warrior. But people change, and after a quick peruse of the Hollow Knight Rule 34 subreddit that I stumbled into while looking up how to access the free expansions (it's the internet, it happens), I have learned that spiderwebs are not the only silky ropes in Hallownest.
Note: It's very NSFW from here on out. Also, spoiler warning for Hollow Knight's final boss, who has sex just like everyone else in Hallownest.
Hollow Knight is ideal fan art material. It's hand drawn and the character designs are simple enough to allow for less skilled artists to chip in, while experts have all that blank space to experiment with. Take Hornet, for example. She's essentially just a mask, eyes, and a red cloak. What's underneath it all is left to the imagination, and for some particularly enthusiastic horn-heads, what's under there doesn't look like any bug I've ever seen.
[Note: The original article credited the wrong person for the cropped Hornet GIF above. It now includes a link to the original artist's work. Apologies for the mix-up.]
The bulk of Hollow Knight erotica focuses on Hornet, depicting her with an enlarged butt, full breasts, typically spread eagle or bent over to highlight her imagined feminine characteristics. The top rated post of all time is an incredibly detailed animation of Hornet masturbating—of such high quality it's inadvertent head canon now, sorry. This is all page one material, if you want to experience it firsthand. Make sure you're somewhere private, please.
Hornet with a big ass was surprising when I started writing this, but now I'm a weathered Hollow Knight erotica person. Feminine Hornet is easy, predictable.
I'm happy to see a decent amount of Hollow Knight erotica doesn't adhere to gender norms.
Zote's biggest fan, Bretta, gets the big butt, thin-panty treatment too, along with Iselda, a former warrior and currently the extremely bored wife of a certain map-maker. Some folks are into Queen Bee Vespa's head-thorax-abdomen ratio. There's a lot of the fully grown Hollow Knight deep inside just about every character in the game, as expected. Hornet gets pregnant, glows orange. It's sure something.
I'm happy to see a decent amount of Hollow Knight erotica doesn't adhere to gender norms. Femininity and masculinity and the sex of the character are interchangeable in plenty of pieces, faithful to the source material. The gender of the Hollow Knight is never addressed in-game, so the amorphous nature of the abyss the Hollow Knight was built to contain is a perfect fit for erotic fan-fiction. The abyss can be whatever it needs to be, just like us.
The scene is impressively expansive considering it's centered around a Metroidvania about bugs. There's the Hollow Knight gazing into the hole of a fellow abyss vessel, implicitly having done the deed with a larger copy of themselves. Or the hard-bodied nude Mantis Lords, who I'd definitely let eat my face. The true final boss even gets the rude and nude treatment. Have you ever seen a moth god that lives in a dream realm demand satisfaction? (Please, do follow the light.) I have a website for you.
Not your usual final boss. Art by Reddit user Red_Bulb.
Some of it goes too far in one direction or another for my comfort, but most of the artwork is fairly pedestrian, at least once you get over the fact that someone thought to make Hollow Knight erotica in the first place. They sure did, and they made quite a lot of it.
Still, the Hollow Knight erotica community is tiny compared to something like the Overwatch scene, so it's been slower to see bugs from The Grimm Troupe or Godmaster expansions show up with human parts and no clothes. I have no doubt it'll happen, but I'm also in no rush for more after the evening I've had on the Hollow Knight Rule 34 subreddit.
I'm certainly curious, though. I guess I have a new reason to be excited for Silksong.
