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THE ONE WHO WALKED AWAY FROM OMELAS: A Closer Look At White Lady
Rebloggable on tumblr here!
CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay contains discussion of reproductive abuse, infanticide, child abuse, and many of the darker aspects of Hallownest’s society.
ALSO, AS USUAL: I read Hollow Knight as anti-colonialist fiction and all of my meta approaches the text from that angle. If you come from a Christian cultural background (regardless of whether you currently practice the religion or not), some of the concepts I am going to discuss may be challenging for you. Please be responsible in your choice whether to engage with this content, and also, be respectful here or wherever else you’re discussing this essay. Thanks.
THE ONE WHO WALKED AWAY FROM OMELAS: A Closer Look At White Lady
Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, first published in 1973, is a staple of literature and ethics courses in North American education (at the very least; English speakers from other countries chime in as to whether they made you do this one as well and how many times they made you do it. Personally I got assigned it like 10 or 15 times). In case some members of my audience are unfamiliar with the story or don’t remember it and are thus wondering why tf I’m bringing it up in a Hollow Knight essay, I’ll briefly summarize it now.
Omelas, the story’s narrator informs us, is a perfectly utopian city where everyone lives in bliss, the people are intelligent and cultured, all resources are distributed communally, and there are no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves. The narrator explains to us that it is a fairy tale-like ideal place of peace and serenity, and then tells us that the city’s utopian splendor hinges on using one unfortunate child as a scapegoat, keeping this child in a state of neverending filth and misery. Citizens of Omelas are shown this child and told the cost of their utopia when they come of age. Most of them overcome their shock and accept this reality because it secures the happiness of everyone else in the city, but a minority of citizens choose to leave Omelas rather than benefit from the child’s suffering.
In United States schooling this story is most often taught as a “what would you do if you lived in Omelas?” sort of hypothetical moral dilemma, and therefore there tends to be a lot of offense about why no one rescues the child in question. This method of teaching the story cleanly sidesteps that Le Guin means Omelas as a metaphor for the way that Westernized, capitalist societies and their many conveniences are uniformly built upon atrocities and oppression. For just a few US examples, we have class inequality, the use of prisoners as slave labor, and the way our military has exploited and continues to exploit Middle Eastern and South American countries for natural resources and to maintain political dominance. Once you learn of your own country’s evils, Le Guin asks, will you accept them for the sake of your own comfort, or will you find some way to take a stand against them, find a way to refuse participating in or benefiting from them?
This is metaphorical in the real world, of course, but less so in Hallownest: The house the Pale King built, demonstrably far from utopian though it is, very literally hinges on the abuse and abandonment of a single child for its survival.
It’s hard to tell just how well-known the Hollow Knight’s plight was in Hallownest before its fall; while there’s a statue of them in the City of Tears and so people must have had some vague idea that a bug was going to suffer for them, we only get definitive confirmation of full understanding from the Pale Court. The Pale King himself was committed to using the Hollow Knight as a sacrifice to lock up the sun; he saw his plan through to the end, after all. If he had any personal doubts or regrets he kept them to himself. As representative of Pale Court loyalists to the player, Ogrim calls his king’s plan “cruel” but he still accepted the Hollow Knight’s sacrifice; he wants Hallownest to return to its golden era and his loyalty to the Pale King is ultimately unshaken.
There is only one person who we know for certain left Hallownest because of the Pale King’s mass child murder and his plans for the Hollow Knight. Everyone else stayed.
Now, as anyone who’s ventured into meta circles has probably observed, one of the most charitable reads on the Pale King and the one often espoused by his superfans portrays him as a tragic character who realized that his children were people instead of empty automata and wanted to love them as a father but sacrificed the Hollow Knight anyway because he loved Hallownest too and believed torturing his child to be the only way to save his country. This read thereby positions the Pale King as an anti-villain tormented by regret over his own ends-justify-the-means modus operandi, but unable to unmire himself from a sunk-cost-fallacy mindset.
This interpretation often goes hand in hand with refusing to engage with anti-colonialist criticism of the state of Hallownest in-text e.g. the perspectives of various native characters on Hallownest and the Pale King, as well as anti-colonialist meta by other fans. It can also extend to offloading blame for the Pale King’s mass infanticide and child abuse onto other characters (predominantly Radiance, let’s be real here, but she’s not the only one fans do this to) because it’s easier to make how the Pale King treated his kids more sympathetic/easier to overlook if one can assert that other people forced his hand.
I find this very unfortunate and distasteful: It’s fully possible to portray the Pale King as tragic and regretful without vilifying Hollow Knight’s indigenous characters or pulling out a corkboard and string to come up with a reason why what the Pale King did to the Moth Tribe and his other neighbors is actually justified.
I also find it kind of funny, actually, because there’s already a character in canon who regrets the dead baby pit and wanted to be a parent to the Hollow Knight but couldn’t choose them over Hallownest and is eaten up inside about everything vessel-related. That’d be White Lady, the very person who left Hallownest because of this!
At this point in the essay I expect that at least some people reading will be thinking, “Citation please???” to which I say I am happy to show you my sauce cabinet. Metatextual analysis of a work of fiction is like Phoenix Wright! Not only can’t you make your argument if you don’t have evidence, you also don’t get to go TAKE THAT!!! into the mic as you slam that evidence on the table, and where would the fun be in that??????????????
White Lady’s love for Hallownest, the Pale King, and the Great Knights is the easiest of her loyalties to note in her dialogue. She continually refers to her husband and knights as “dear” or “beloved” and even after leaving the Pale King still sees Hallownest as belonging to the two of them. She asks Ghost to replace Hollow in hopes of saving Hallownest, saying that of the two “obvious outcomes” to the current situation she would prefer that to the Infection fully claiming the crater or Radiance going free upon Hollow’s death and presumably making short work of the kingdom’s remains.
When it comes to White Lady’s opinions on her children, though, I see less analysis of what she’s actually saying compared to speculation about what the “idea instilled” could be and to outrage about her usage for it/its pronouns for Ghost. I understand why people’s attention is drawn to these things! The “idea instilled” is a very tantalizing tidbit that’s an absolute hotbed for theorizing about Hollow’s upbringing and particularly how the Pale King raised them, and in real life it/its pronouns are controversial because many see them as dehumanizing - hence why fandom tends to only use they/them pronouns for Ghost despite their canon pronouns actually being they/it and the fact that it/its pronouns seem to be used as the default gender neutral pronouns in the game setting.
For the purposes, though, I’d like to go through the substance of White Lady’s dialogue and how she talks to Ghost about themself. I’ll be listing the canon dialogue in quotations and simple summaries in parentheses with them.
“Oh! One arrives. Far it walks to find me. Did it seek my aid? Or did the path carry it by chance to so pertinant [sic] a place? It is true. True, that you were awaited. No. Perhaps that is inaccurate. True one like you was awaited. I have a gift, held long for one of your kind. Half of a whole. When united, great power is granted, and on the path ahead, great power it will need.” (White Lady first questions whether Ghost specifically sought her out for help or whether they came for some other purpose. She has kept the White Fragment in hopes that she would be able to give it to a surviving vessel to help that vessel survive and replace Hollow. Did she know conclusively that some of the vessels survived and escaped the Abyss or did she simply hope that they didn’t all die?)
“The second [obvious outcome to Hollow weakening] I find preferable, and would seek your aid in its occurance [sic], replacement. I implore you, usurp the Vessel. Its supposed strength was ill-judged. It was tarnished by an idea instilled. But you. You are free of such blemishes. You could contain that thing inside.” (White Lady does not order Ghost to replace Hollow - she begs them to do so. She suggests Hollow was raised to have a mindset that makes them unsuited to be Radiance’s jailer but that Ghost is different, and whatever this difference is, it is immediately obvious to her. Her use of “tarnished” and “blemish” to refer to Hollow’s mindset indicates that she thinks this mindset is detrimental to them as well as counterproductive to their task.)
“I’ll offer fair warning. The Vessel may itself be weak, but it is much empowered by that force within. To claim its role requires strength of some magnitude. Prepare yourself well before attempting the task. Prepare well, but don’t dally. Were the Vessel to break prematurely, that plague would unleash with rage and power built of ages chained.” (White Lady gives Ghost advice about how they should approach replacing Hollow if they choose to do so, that they need to strike a balance between haste and preparation. She also wants to preempt a counterattack/escalation from Radiance if the latter is freed, since Radiance is demonstrably pissed about her long imprisonment.)
In this first conversation alone, White Lady demonstrates that she knows Ghost has a mind and will of their own, despite the Pale King claiming that vessels do not have these things. She also shows that she understands the vessels are individuals with different personalities and abilities shaped by their life experiences. She reveals she has been waiting for one of her children to find her and that if Ghost is willing to replace Hollow, she wants to help them. The unspoken subtext to her gift of the White Fragment is that she wants them to find the other half of the Kingsoul if they don’t have it yet, so that they can benefit from its power. In her dialogue about Hornet she further recommends that Ghost try to get Hornet on their side (“If your paths were ever to align, I imagine you might gain yourself a powerful ally”).
Of the rest of White Lady’s lines, her Defender’s Crest dialogue (and Delicate Flower dialogue for that matter) is mostly about her relationships with the knights and her denial over just how much Hallownest has changed since she left it. Her Grimmchild dialogue supplements the Grimm Troupe lore and reminds us that as a settler queen and Hallownest exceptionalist White Lady is a gigantic hypocrite: “[This] land shall never bear so foreign a king,” she tells Grimm (who as custodian to part of the Dream Realm definitely has some connection to Radiance and is therefore likely native to this area himself!), as she sits on land she, a foreigner, stole from Unn, the indigenous god who created Greenpath in the first place. Man, who DOESN’T loathe white settler entitlement!!!
But White Lady’s Kingsoul and Void Heart dialogue are EXTREMELY telling in terms of her perception of and feelings about Ghost, so let’s look at those in detail.
“Ahh! So it bears our once-fractured soul, now complete. Such strength, such resolve, such dedication! Is it more than simply a Vessel? I almost feel like I’m once again in the presence of my beloved Wyrm.” (Here White Lady praises personality traits in Ghost that they presumably share with their father, and which White Lady found admirable in the Pale King. As she knows that strength, resolve, and dedication would be necessary to navigate the White Palace and get the other White Fragment, we can guess that her husband’s habit of building Mario kaizo courses in his house predates his taking the palace with him when he ran away and hid, and that she knew Ghost would probably have to navigate those to complete the Kingsoul.)
“The Kingsoul… What is at the heart of it I wonder? If its curiosity wills it, it should seek out that place. That place where it was born, where it died, where it began…” (These lines have some REALLY juicy theory bait in terms of how the Pale King made his kids into vessels and why Ghost is Like That. However what I find equally juicy is that White Lady clearly knows EXACTLY what is at the heart of the Kingsoul - she knows its secret function and that it’s the key to the Birthplace. Not only that, but she stokes Ghost’s curiosity by telling them there’s something hidden to the Kingsoul and points them to the exact location they should go fuck around and find out.)
“That pulsing emptiness… Truly, it has been transformed by the revelations it found. Does it… feel anything? Triumph? Or hate? If it does, I cannot sense it. The fate of our Kingdom, our Hallownest… that future belongs to you now.”
White Lady wants Ghost to save Hallownest. This is what she asks them to do when they first visit her. But at the same time, she nudges them into obtaining the Void Heart and therefore remembering their childhood trauma - the mass infanticide of the vessels and how the Pale King and the Hollow Knight abandoned them to die in the Abyss. If you visit her afterwards she wonders how this has made Ghost feel and entertains the possibility that they have come to hate (her, the Pale King, the Hollow Knight, Hallownest itself, all of the above…?).
She nudges Ghost into uncovering the mass infanticide of their siblings and their own childhood trauma fully understanding that this could be counterintuitive to getting them to save Hallownest. And then she entrusts them with Hallownest’s fate anyway.
What this tells us is that as much as White Lady loves Hallownest, she also wants Ghost to have context on what Hallownest did to them. Not only does she understand that Ghost is a person with agency, she values Ghost’s agency. She wants Ghost to be able to make an informed choice.
As to why exactly White Lady values Ghost’s personhood and agency enough to potentially jeopardize Hallownest’s survival, I’d like to examine one more set of her dialogue: What she tells you when you have left her prison and then returned to her.
“Do I seem prisoner here? If so, it’s not by any choice but my own. These bindings about me, I’ve chosen to erect. There is some shame I feel from my own part in the deed and this method guarantees it cease. I still feel that urge you see. I always will. A voracious desire to spread seeds upon the land, to propogate [sic] myself, to breed.”
Now, it’s readily notable here that White Lady can tell Ghost is concerned about her current situation and therefore is trying to put them at ease by explaining, and also that she doesn’t seem to understand the concept of TMI (hence my tag for her on tumblr lol). But she is also completely showing her hand here in terms of her personal motivations and the circumstances of her departure from the Pale Court.
White Lady is ashamed to have been party to her children’s mass infanticide. She was not personally involved in killing them the way her husband was, but she still knew she was conceiving them for the Pale King to experiment on them in hopes of obtaining a child sacrifice to use to imprison Radiance and stop the Infection. She describes herself as complicit and she regrets it enough that she refuses to give birth to a second clutch of vessels.
“This method guarantees it cease,” she says, and goes on to explain her instinctive desire to breed. “This method” - she has left the Pale Court and lives now in a chamber in her gardens, further tying herself up in thick ropes so that she cannot leave or have PIV sex (or whatever the snake-in-a-bugsona and tree equivalent is).
This method GUARANTEES it cease. The way she says this alarms me. White Lady decided to leave the Pale King because she was not sure he would not impregnate her again if she stayed. By explaining her strong breeding instinct here, she is saying that she is unsure if she has the self-control not to have sex with the Pale King, and believes that her husband is capable of taking advantage of her libido so that he can create more vessels, even though she emphatically does not want this.
I want to be clear that White Lady’s fear that the Pale King might force her to have more children does not necessarily mean that he actually was willing to commit reproductive abuse. However, the fact that she considers this a realistic enough possibility that she has to leave him to prevent it tells us that the birth and slaughter of the vessels caused SERIOUS damage to White Lady’s trust in the Pale King and to the Pale Beings’ relationship in general.
So, here we’ve seen that White Lady knows Ghost is a person and treats them like one, and that she very emphatically was NOT cool with the dead baby pit + that her refusal to add a new batch of babies to the pit is the hill she’s chosen to die on. (Or at least severely weaken herself on, according to Godseeker.) But there is one more piece of evidence in the game that suggests how she feels about the vessels.
In the final area of the White Palace, after the final grueling stretch of the saws ’n’ spikes gauntlet, there is a secret room. It’s not open like the Pale King’s private lab (which is simply difficult to get into if you can’t freely fly) but is instead sealed off like the chamber with the king’s Sekret Diary featuring his mea culpa re: his motivations. If you find the right section of cracked floor, you can break the sealed passage open and venture in.
This room is the nursery, which many players are already familiar with. The nursery has a tall chair that still faintly has marks suggesting White Lady has sat there, and a bassinet which plays a music box cover of the Shade theme in a major key.
Obvious implication one: This was Hollow’s room when they were a baby. Obvious implication two: White Lady spent a not insignificant amount of time in this room. Obvious conclusion: White Lady desired a mother-child relationship with Hollow, and acted as mother to them in some capacity, if only when they were very young.
Thus we have White Lady’s dilemma: She loves the Pale King, she loves her knights, she loves her Hallownest. But as much as she understands her husband’s belief that the Hollow Knight is his key to victory over Radiance and thus that sacrificing them will save Hallownest and everything she loves, she objects to the Pale King’s mass infanticide on moral grounds and refuses to be party to such a thing again. This very real moral dilemma and the fact she already understands herself to have her children’s blood on her metaphorical hands via enablement put White Lady in an extremely pressing rock vs hard place situation.
So, rather than choose to prioritize one over the other, White Lady simply walks away. Even in the present day, while she may ask Ghost to save Hallownest and emphasize that they can succeed where Hollow could not, so too does she make sure Ghost understands how Hallownest hurt them. If they’re going to be a sacrifice, they’ll be choosing it of their own free will and with context on their past. She leaves Hallownest’s fate entirely to them.
Overall the parallels to that charitable read on the Pale King I mentioned earlier are SO close that it raises a new question: If White Lady shares so much of what makes her husband so well-liked among his superfans, then why doesn’t she enjoy the same kind of popularity as he does?
“Popularity” might be the wrong term when it comes to the Pale King because he’s an INCREDIBLY polarizing figure - the people who don’t like him tend to dislike him Very Strongly. But his fans have a truly feverish devotion to him, and a lot of that devotion is centered around the idea of his character as tragic and regretful. So it’s curious that White Lady, who is textually established as tragic and regretful in very similar ways to this particular read on the Pale King, is not held up the same way by the same group of people.
In some ways it’s really a fool’s errand to try to diagnose why White Lady gets more dislike and less passionate engagement than the Pale King. Every individual fan brings a lot of their personal perspective to which characters they find appealing and which characters put them off. The very reasons I think White Lady is interesting might be exactly why somebody else is allergic to her. And having personal likes and dislikes is fine! I think it’s good to understand why you like or don’t like any given character, and to be able to understand why someone else might feel differently.
At the same time, I do want to point out and speculate about some very general trends that I believe to be influenced by prejudices common in western countries where the bulk of English-speaking Hollow Knight fandom is concentrated. My goal in doing this is to inspire thoughtfulness and self-awareness that people can use in their interactions with the text, with fellow fans, and back in the real world.
Now that we have all put our big kid pants on: I do suspect that part of why White Lady is more disliked or overlooked than the Pale King despite the potentially sympathetic traits they have in common IS because, as we all well know, Fandom No Like Girl. Female characters are held to a much higher standard of behavior than male ones; audiences are less willing to engage with their nuance compared to men. While every girl in Hollow Knight has at least a few really devoted fans, the most popular ones tend to be those who safely fall into “likable” parameters - badass action hero Hornet, friendly and tragic Cloth and Myla. Comparing cases like Tiso and Godseeker (both rude to Ghost) or indeed like the Pale King and White Lady (both colonizers and imperfect parents), it’s easy to see how similar behavior is commonly accepted, forgiven, or overlooked in the men as compared to the women who are more likely to get criticism or outright hate.
But there’s a second layer to this, I think, that comes from White Lady getting her Omelases backwards.
The state of Hallownest reflects both the literal and figurative parables of Omelas. It’s a great place to live if you’re rich and only if you’re rich - the White Palace is the Pale King’s expansive playground and the right side of the City of Tears in particular opulent and gorgeous with huge living quarters for the nobility, but the kingdom’s wealth is built on the hard labor of miners who live in tiny hovels in impoverished shantytowns and on the menial work of enslaved maggots; the Old Stag readily tells us that goods and wealth flow into the capital and palace by the bushel but precious little of that abundance makes it back into the hands of the poor.
Furthermore, Hallownest is downright monstrous in its imperialism: It’s built on land stolen from the fluke tribe and the Mosskin and appropriates resources from the Moth Tribe’s sacred grounds; it dumps its waste into the Mantis Tribe’s water supply and directly on top of the Hive. It maintains its cushy position as the dominant society in the crater not just through its own military might but by forcing the Mantis Tribe to fight a proxy war with Deepnest so it doesn’t have to bother with directly subduing two nations’ worth of recalcitrant natives, and it snatches indigenous children like Marmu and Hornet to give them no other choice but to grow up in what they think of as “civilized” society.
White Lady does not see a problem with any of those things. If Hallownest flourishes based on the suffering of civilizations that were already there before her husband founded it, well, she and her husband are doing them a favor by inflicting westernization upon them. The Pale King pointed at the crater and said “Is for me?” and White Lady said “sure, that tracks!” and they went about the cruel work of colonization unhindered until Radiance showed up with a super soaker full of tang yelling “I LIVED BITCH” and the Pale Beings realized they had perhaps aggroed the wrong god and now had an existential threat on their hands.
Folks who read Hollow Knight as anticolonialist are plenty willing to drag White Lady for this (hello, I am one of folks), but from my own experience I would venture that there’s a decent chunk of English-speaking Hollow Knight fandom at least that does not see Hallownest’s imperialism/the figurative Omelas as a problem, either. A lot of these fans live in countries like the United States, Canada, and England which have incredibly gruesome histories of imperialism that they would rather bury under propaganda than actually address, just like Team Cherry’s home country of Australia, whose history and culture have a palpable influence on Hollow Knight’s story. Having to confront the ways that the state of Hallownest was not so great, actually can lead to cognitive dissonance about one’s own home country and how one benefits from their country’s past and present imperialism. The more privilege one has, the more uncomfortable this is, and the more motivated one becomes to avoid thinking about it.
(The ad hominem nature of modern fandom wank just makes this worse, imo. Someone who’s already bored of others harassing them for liking a character like TPK who’s done bad stuff is much more likely to expect harassment from anyone who has a different interpretation of the text than them, and so ignore or read bad faith into entreaties to engage with political undertones they didn’t notice. Always good to remember that just because someone wants the fictional bad twink to also be a sad twink doesn’t mean they don’t understand that child abuse is bad IRL!!!)
No, rather than Le Guin’s metaphor, it’s the literal Omelas of Hallownest that I think gets White Lady in trouble with fans. Hallownest’s survival does hinge on the torture of a single child, and yet instead of rescuing Hollow, White Lady instead walks away.
See, it’s bad enough that Hollow is a child, but they’re also her child.
In the real world, if someone’s relationship with their spouse has broken down to the point that they’re worried about reproductive abuse the way White Lady is (again, not saying the Pale King would have actually done it, just that White Lady was afraid he might), they might not be able to bring other endangered family members with them when they run, or even return for them, possibly ever. It is a herculean feat just to get yourself out of a relationship where you no longer feel safe, and even once you’re out you’re not going to be okay for a while. In White Lady’s case, even after fleeing she still loves her husband and can’t speak against him for what he’s done to their children even though she doesn’t approve of it. Just like she’s in denial about the knights, she’s in denial about the Pale King too in some ways.
At the same time, even if everyone fully understands that sometimes getting oneself out is the best they can do, this is usually felt as a terrible betrayal to endangered family members who get left behind. Feelings aren’t rational and so can’t always be dispelled by logic, and when your family member leaves you in a bad situation to save themself, that sense of abandonment can leave deep scars. While ultimately the responsibility is on the abuser for creating the bad family situation in the first place, the family member who’s fled becomes the new easy target for resentment and blame. Instead of hating the abuser, you can instead hate this person who could’ve saved you but didn’t.
On top of this, the one circumstance in which our misogynist society unilaterally allows White Women, Specifically* to show aggression is in defense of their children. The Mama Bear trope is baked into ideas about how Women, Specifically should be devoted to motherhood and caretaking, and therefore are allowed this one avenue of anger and violence in the name of protecting their children. Since parents are responsible for their children’s very existence, we expect a good parent to be willing to go to bat for their kids, and this societal expectation is especially strong when it comes to women.
(*Aggression in women of color, particularly in black and indigenous women, is something society polices much harder and more stringently than white women’s aggression because many BIPOC are stereotyped as scary and aggressive in general. I’ve written before about how Hollow Knight loves to prompt players to think about topics by lining up several characters to compare the differences in how they each approach that topic; for the subject of motherhood the text gives us Herrah and Radiance to contrast with White Lady. Fandom does not judge these characters on equal terms. Though thankfully it isn’t the most popular interpretation of her out there, there’s still a large amount of people who frame Herrah as sexually predatory for essentially giving the Pale King her vagina to stop him from conquering her kingdom. Furthermore most of fandom is highly allergic to engaging with Radiance as a nuanced character at all, let alone as an indigenous god who’s not just fighting for her own life but is violently resisting cultural genocide. The reluctance in some quarters to so much as grant these characters Mama Bear points is incredibly telling and is yet another reason I believe we need to have more conversations about anticolonialism in Hollow Knight fandom.
ANYWAY, back to your regularly scheduled angsty daikon essay.)
The venn diagram of Hollow Knight fans with People Who Want To Adopt The Hollow Knight Hollowknight is very nearly a circle. Between their strong protectiveness for Hollow in specific and this cultural expectation Western society has for women to protect their children, I think it’s more understandable why we have this popular idea of White Lady as cold and distant and uncaring and lacking motherly instincts despite how the text of the canon directly contradicts that interpretation on all counts. To make things worse, the fact that she openly clears the bar of Dead Baby Pit Bad where it’s ambiguous whether the Pale King can do the same has the potential to make the double standard even more egregious. Not only did White Lady not save her child, but if she found her husband’s behavior immoral, then why didn’t she stop him??? (Even if she hadn’t been too afraid of forced birth to stay with him, the Pale King is a grown man who is responsible for his own life choices. It’s not fair to either of them to frame White Lady as his keeper.)
Like I said earlier in the essay, despite that fandom has general trends, each individual fan brings their own thoughts and feelings and life experiences to the table. There are very very definitely many people out there who dislike White Lady who do so for reasons that have nothing to do with this. Everyone has a right to their own personal preferences!
I do think, though, that White Lady’s choice to walk away from Omelas is a factor in the broad public opinion of her character. Since in canon this choice illuminates so much of her inner complexity and her flaws, I’d love it if we could take this opportunity to understand how and where fanon has diverged from the text and gain some new appreciation of how well she’s written, so her character depth is overlooked less often.
CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay contains discussion of reproductive abuse, infanticide, child abuse, and many of the darker aspects of Hallownest’s society.
ALSO, AS USUAL: I read Hollow Knight as anti-colonialist fiction and all of my meta approaches the text from that angle. If you come from a Christian cultural background (regardless of whether you currently practice the religion or not), some of the concepts I am going to discuss may be challenging for you. Please be responsible in your choice whether to engage with this content, and also, be respectful here or wherever else you’re discussing this essay. Thanks.
THE ONE WHO WALKED AWAY FROM OMELAS: A Closer Look At White Lady
Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, first published in 1973, is a staple of literature and ethics courses in North American education (at the very least; English speakers from other countries chime in as to whether they made you do this one as well and how many times they made you do it. Personally I got assigned it like 10 or 15 times). In case some members of my audience are unfamiliar with the story or don’t remember it and are thus wondering why tf I’m bringing it up in a Hollow Knight essay, I’ll briefly summarize it now.
Omelas, the story’s narrator informs us, is a perfectly utopian city where everyone lives in bliss, the people are intelligent and cultured, all resources are distributed communally, and there are no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves. The narrator explains to us that it is a fairy tale-like ideal place of peace and serenity, and then tells us that the city’s utopian splendor hinges on using one unfortunate child as a scapegoat, keeping this child in a state of neverending filth and misery. Citizens of Omelas are shown this child and told the cost of their utopia when they come of age. Most of them overcome their shock and accept this reality because it secures the happiness of everyone else in the city, but a minority of citizens choose to leave Omelas rather than benefit from the child’s suffering.
In United States schooling this story is most often taught as a “what would you do if you lived in Omelas?” sort of hypothetical moral dilemma, and therefore there tends to be a lot of offense about why no one rescues the child in question. This method of teaching the story cleanly sidesteps that Le Guin means Omelas as a metaphor for the way that Westernized, capitalist societies and their many conveniences are uniformly built upon atrocities and oppression. For just a few US examples, we have class inequality, the use of prisoners as slave labor, and the way our military has exploited and continues to exploit Middle Eastern and South American countries for natural resources and to maintain political dominance. Once you learn of your own country’s evils, Le Guin asks, will you accept them for the sake of your own comfort, or will you find some way to take a stand against them, find a way to refuse participating in or benefiting from them?
This is metaphorical in the real world, of course, but less so in Hallownest: The house the Pale King built, demonstrably far from utopian though it is, very literally hinges on the abuse and abandonment of a single child for its survival.
It’s hard to tell just how well-known the Hollow Knight’s plight was in Hallownest before its fall; while there’s a statue of them in the City of Tears and so people must have had some vague idea that a bug was going to suffer for them, we only get definitive confirmation of full understanding from the Pale Court. The Pale King himself was committed to using the Hollow Knight as a sacrifice to lock up the sun; he saw his plan through to the end, after all. If he had any personal doubts or regrets he kept them to himself. As representative of Pale Court loyalists to the player, Ogrim calls his king’s plan “cruel” but he still accepted the Hollow Knight’s sacrifice; he wants Hallownest to return to its golden era and his loyalty to the Pale King is ultimately unshaken.
There is only one person who we know for certain left Hallownest because of the Pale King’s mass child murder and his plans for the Hollow Knight. Everyone else stayed.
Now, as anyone who’s ventured into meta circles has probably observed, one of the most charitable reads on the Pale King and the one often espoused by his superfans portrays him as a tragic character who realized that his children were people instead of empty automata and wanted to love them as a father but sacrificed the Hollow Knight anyway because he loved Hallownest too and believed torturing his child to be the only way to save his country. This read thereby positions the Pale King as an anti-villain tormented by regret over his own ends-justify-the-means modus operandi, but unable to unmire himself from a sunk-cost-fallacy mindset.
This interpretation often goes hand in hand with refusing to engage with anti-colonialist criticism of the state of Hallownest in-text e.g. the perspectives of various native characters on Hallownest and the Pale King, as well as anti-colonialist meta by other fans. It can also extend to offloading blame for the Pale King’s mass infanticide and child abuse onto other characters (predominantly Radiance, let’s be real here, but she’s not the only one fans do this to) because it’s easier to make how the Pale King treated his kids more sympathetic/easier to overlook if one can assert that other people forced his hand.
I find this very unfortunate and distasteful: It’s fully possible to portray the Pale King as tragic and regretful without vilifying Hollow Knight’s indigenous characters or pulling out a corkboard and string to come up with a reason why what the Pale King did to the Moth Tribe and his other neighbors is actually justified.
I also find it kind of funny, actually, because there’s already a character in canon who regrets the dead baby pit and wanted to be a parent to the Hollow Knight but couldn’t choose them over Hallownest and is eaten up inside about everything vessel-related. That’d be White Lady, the very person who left Hallownest because of this!
At this point in the essay I expect that at least some people reading will be thinking, “Citation please???” to which I say I am happy to show you my sauce cabinet. Metatextual analysis of a work of fiction is like Phoenix Wright! Not only can’t you make your argument if you don’t have evidence, you also don’t get to go TAKE THAT!!! into the mic as you slam that evidence on the table, and where would the fun be in that??????????????
White Lady’s love for Hallownest, the Pale King, and the Great Knights is the easiest of her loyalties to note in her dialogue. She continually refers to her husband and knights as “dear” or “beloved” and even after leaving the Pale King still sees Hallownest as belonging to the two of them. She asks Ghost to replace Hollow in hopes of saving Hallownest, saying that of the two “obvious outcomes” to the current situation she would prefer that to the Infection fully claiming the crater or Radiance going free upon Hollow’s death and presumably making short work of the kingdom’s remains.
When it comes to White Lady’s opinions on her children, though, I see less analysis of what she’s actually saying compared to speculation about what the “idea instilled” could be and to outrage about her usage for it/its pronouns for Ghost. I understand why people’s attention is drawn to these things! The “idea instilled” is a very tantalizing tidbit that’s an absolute hotbed for theorizing about Hollow’s upbringing and particularly how the Pale King raised them, and in real life it/its pronouns are controversial because many see them as dehumanizing - hence why fandom tends to only use they/them pronouns for Ghost despite their canon pronouns actually being they/it and the fact that it/its pronouns seem to be used as the default gender neutral pronouns in the game setting.
For the purposes, though, I’d like to go through the substance of White Lady’s dialogue and how she talks to Ghost about themself. I’ll be listing the canon dialogue in quotations and simple summaries in parentheses with them.
“Oh! One arrives. Far it walks to find me. Did it seek my aid? Or did the path carry it by chance to so pertinant [sic] a place? It is true. True, that you were awaited. No. Perhaps that is inaccurate. True one like you was awaited. I have a gift, held long for one of your kind. Half of a whole. When united, great power is granted, and on the path ahead, great power it will need.” (White Lady first questions whether Ghost specifically sought her out for help or whether they came for some other purpose. She has kept the White Fragment in hopes that she would be able to give it to a surviving vessel to help that vessel survive and replace Hollow. Did she know conclusively that some of the vessels survived and escaped the Abyss or did she simply hope that they didn’t all die?)
“The second [obvious outcome to Hollow weakening] I find preferable, and would seek your aid in its occurance [sic], replacement. I implore you, usurp the Vessel. Its supposed strength was ill-judged. It was tarnished by an idea instilled. But you. You are free of such blemishes. You could contain that thing inside.” (White Lady does not order Ghost to replace Hollow - she begs them to do so. She suggests Hollow was raised to have a mindset that makes them unsuited to be Radiance’s jailer but that Ghost is different, and whatever this difference is, it is immediately obvious to her. Her use of “tarnished” and “blemish” to refer to Hollow’s mindset indicates that she thinks this mindset is detrimental to them as well as counterproductive to their task.)
“I’ll offer fair warning. The Vessel may itself be weak, but it is much empowered by that force within. To claim its role requires strength of some magnitude. Prepare yourself well before attempting the task. Prepare well, but don’t dally. Were the Vessel to break prematurely, that plague would unleash with rage and power built of ages chained.” (White Lady gives Ghost advice about how they should approach replacing Hollow if they choose to do so, that they need to strike a balance between haste and preparation. She also wants to preempt a counterattack/escalation from Radiance if the latter is freed, since Radiance is demonstrably pissed about her long imprisonment.)
In this first conversation alone, White Lady demonstrates that she knows Ghost has a mind and will of their own, despite the Pale King claiming that vessels do not have these things. She also shows that she understands the vessels are individuals with different personalities and abilities shaped by their life experiences. She reveals she has been waiting for one of her children to find her and that if Ghost is willing to replace Hollow, she wants to help them. The unspoken subtext to her gift of the White Fragment is that she wants them to find the other half of the Kingsoul if they don’t have it yet, so that they can benefit from its power. In her dialogue about Hornet she further recommends that Ghost try to get Hornet on their side (“If your paths were ever to align, I imagine you might gain yourself a powerful ally”).
Of the rest of White Lady’s lines, her Defender’s Crest dialogue (and Delicate Flower dialogue for that matter) is mostly about her relationships with the knights and her denial over just how much Hallownest has changed since she left it. Her Grimmchild dialogue supplements the Grimm Troupe lore and reminds us that as a settler queen and Hallownest exceptionalist White Lady is a gigantic hypocrite: “[This] land shall never bear so foreign a king,” she tells Grimm (who as custodian to part of the Dream Realm definitely has some connection to Radiance and is therefore likely native to this area himself!), as she sits on land she, a foreigner, stole from Unn, the indigenous god who created Greenpath in the first place. Man, who DOESN’T loathe white settler entitlement!!!
But White Lady’s Kingsoul and Void Heart dialogue are EXTREMELY telling in terms of her perception of and feelings about Ghost, so let’s look at those in detail.
“Ahh! So it bears our once-fractured soul, now complete. Such strength, such resolve, such dedication! Is it more than simply a Vessel? I almost feel like I’m once again in the presence of my beloved Wyrm.” (Here White Lady praises personality traits in Ghost that they presumably share with their father, and which White Lady found admirable in the Pale King. As she knows that strength, resolve, and dedication would be necessary to navigate the White Palace and get the other White Fragment, we can guess that her husband’s habit of building Mario kaizo courses in his house predates his taking the palace with him when he ran away and hid, and that she knew Ghost would probably have to navigate those to complete the Kingsoul.)
“The Kingsoul… What is at the heart of it I wonder? If its curiosity wills it, it should seek out that place. That place where it was born, where it died, where it began…” (These lines have some REALLY juicy theory bait in terms of how the Pale King made his kids into vessels and why Ghost is Like That. However what I find equally juicy is that White Lady clearly knows EXACTLY what is at the heart of the Kingsoul - she knows its secret function and that it’s the key to the Birthplace. Not only that, but she stokes Ghost’s curiosity by telling them there’s something hidden to the Kingsoul and points them to the exact location they should go fuck around and find out.)
“That pulsing emptiness… Truly, it has been transformed by the revelations it found. Does it… feel anything? Triumph? Or hate? If it does, I cannot sense it. The fate of our Kingdom, our Hallownest… that future belongs to you now.”
White Lady wants Ghost to save Hallownest. This is what she asks them to do when they first visit her. But at the same time, she nudges them into obtaining the Void Heart and therefore remembering their childhood trauma - the mass infanticide of the vessels and how the Pale King and the Hollow Knight abandoned them to die in the Abyss. If you visit her afterwards she wonders how this has made Ghost feel and entertains the possibility that they have come to hate (her, the Pale King, the Hollow Knight, Hallownest itself, all of the above…?).
She nudges Ghost into uncovering the mass infanticide of their siblings and their own childhood trauma fully understanding that this could be counterintuitive to getting them to save Hallownest. And then she entrusts them with Hallownest’s fate anyway.
What this tells us is that as much as White Lady loves Hallownest, she also wants Ghost to have context on what Hallownest did to them. Not only does she understand that Ghost is a person with agency, she values Ghost’s agency. She wants Ghost to be able to make an informed choice.
As to why exactly White Lady values Ghost’s personhood and agency enough to potentially jeopardize Hallownest’s survival, I’d like to examine one more set of her dialogue: What she tells you when you have left her prison and then returned to her.
“Do I seem prisoner here? If so, it’s not by any choice but my own. These bindings about me, I’ve chosen to erect. There is some shame I feel from my own part in the deed and this method guarantees it cease. I still feel that urge you see. I always will. A voracious desire to spread seeds upon the land, to propogate [sic] myself, to breed.”
Now, it’s readily notable here that White Lady can tell Ghost is concerned about her current situation and therefore is trying to put them at ease by explaining, and also that she doesn’t seem to understand the concept of TMI (hence my tag for her on tumblr lol). But she is also completely showing her hand here in terms of her personal motivations and the circumstances of her departure from the Pale Court.
White Lady is ashamed to have been party to her children’s mass infanticide. She was not personally involved in killing them the way her husband was, but she still knew she was conceiving them for the Pale King to experiment on them in hopes of obtaining a child sacrifice to use to imprison Radiance and stop the Infection. She describes herself as complicit and she regrets it enough that she refuses to give birth to a second clutch of vessels.
“This method guarantees it cease,” she says, and goes on to explain her instinctive desire to breed. “This method” - she has left the Pale Court and lives now in a chamber in her gardens, further tying herself up in thick ropes so that she cannot leave or have PIV sex (or whatever the snake-in-a-bugsona and tree equivalent is).
This method GUARANTEES it cease. The way she says this alarms me. White Lady decided to leave the Pale King because she was not sure he would not impregnate her again if she stayed. By explaining her strong breeding instinct here, she is saying that she is unsure if she has the self-control not to have sex with the Pale King, and believes that her husband is capable of taking advantage of her libido so that he can create more vessels, even though she emphatically does not want this.
I want to be clear that White Lady’s fear that the Pale King might force her to have more children does not necessarily mean that he actually was willing to commit reproductive abuse. However, the fact that she considers this a realistic enough possibility that she has to leave him to prevent it tells us that the birth and slaughter of the vessels caused SERIOUS damage to White Lady’s trust in the Pale King and to the Pale Beings’ relationship in general.
So, here we’ve seen that White Lady knows Ghost is a person and treats them like one, and that she very emphatically was NOT cool with the dead baby pit + that her refusal to add a new batch of babies to the pit is the hill she’s chosen to die on. (Or at least severely weaken herself on, according to Godseeker.) But there is one more piece of evidence in the game that suggests how she feels about the vessels.
In the final area of the White Palace, after the final grueling stretch of the saws ’n’ spikes gauntlet, there is a secret room. It’s not open like the Pale King’s private lab (which is simply difficult to get into if you can’t freely fly) but is instead sealed off like the chamber with the king’s Sekret Diary featuring his mea culpa re: his motivations. If you find the right section of cracked floor, you can break the sealed passage open and venture in.
This room is the nursery, which many players are already familiar with. The nursery has a tall chair that still faintly has marks suggesting White Lady has sat there, and a bassinet which plays a music box cover of the Shade theme in a major key.
Obvious implication one: This was Hollow’s room when they were a baby. Obvious implication two: White Lady spent a not insignificant amount of time in this room. Obvious conclusion: White Lady desired a mother-child relationship with Hollow, and acted as mother to them in some capacity, if only when they were very young.
Thus we have White Lady’s dilemma: She loves the Pale King, she loves her knights, she loves her Hallownest. But as much as she understands her husband’s belief that the Hollow Knight is his key to victory over Radiance and thus that sacrificing them will save Hallownest and everything she loves, she objects to the Pale King’s mass infanticide on moral grounds and refuses to be party to such a thing again. This very real moral dilemma and the fact she already understands herself to have her children’s blood on her metaphorical hands via enablement put White Lady in an extremely pressing rock vs hard place situation.
So, rather than choose to prioritize one over the other, White Lady simply walks away. Even in the present day, while she may ask Ghost to save Hallownest and emphasize that they can succeed where Hollow could not, so too does she make sure Ghost understands how Hallownest hurt them. If they’re going to be a sacrifice, they’ll be choosing it of their own free will and with context on their past. She leaves Hallownest’s fate entirely to them.
Overall the parallels to that charitable read on the Pale King I mentioned earlier are SO close that it raises a new question: If White Lady shares so much of what makes her husband so well-liked among his superfans, then why doesn’t she enjoy the same kind of popularity as he does?
“Popularity” might be the wrong term when it comes to the Pale King because he’s an INCREDIBLY polarizing figure - the people who don’t like him tend to dislike him Very Strongly. But his fans have a truly feverish devotion to him, and a lot of that devotion is centered around the idea of his character as tragic and regretful. So it’s curious that White Lady, who is textually established as tragic and regretful in very similar ways to this particular read on the Pale King, is not held up the same way by the same group of people.
In some ways it’s really a fool’s errand to try to diagnose why White Lady gets more dislike and less passionate engagement than the Pale King. Every individual fan brings a lot of their personal perspective to which characters they find appealing and which characters put them off. The very reasons I think White Lady is interesting might be exactly why somebody else is allergic to her. And having personal likes and dislikes is fine! I think it’s good to understand why you like or don’t like any given character, and to be able to understand why someone else might feel differently.
At the same time, I do want to point out and speculate about some very general trends that I believe to be influenced by prejudices common in western countries where the bulk of English-speaking Hollow Knight fandom is concentrated. My goal in doing this is to inspire thoughtfulness and self-awareness that people can use in their interactions with the text, with fellow fans, and back in the real world.
Now that we have all put our big kid pants on: I do suspect that part of why White Lady is more disliked or overlooked than the Pale King despite the potentially sympathetic traits they have in common IS because, as we all well know, Fandom No Like Girl. Female characters are held to a much higher standard of behavior than male ones; audiences are less willing to engage with their nuance compared to men. While every girl in Hollow Knight has at least a few really devoted fans, the most popular ones tend to be those who safely fall into “likable” parameters - badass action hero Hornet, friendly and tragic Cloth and Myla. Comparing cases like Tiso and Godseeker (both rude to Ghost) or indeed like the Pale King and White Lady (both colonizers and imperfect parents), it’s easy to see how similar behavior is commonly accepted, forgiven, or overlooked in the men as compared to the women who are more likely to get criticism or outright hate.
But there’s a second layer to this, I think, that comes from White Lady getting her Omelases backwards.
The state of Hallownest reflects both the literal and figurative parables of Omelas. It’s a great place to live if you’re rich and only if you’re rich - the White Palace is the Pale King’s expansive playground and the right side of the City of Tears in particular opulent and gorgeous with huge living quarters for the nobility, but the kingdom’s wealth is built on the hard labor of miners who live in tiny hovels in impoverished shantytowns and on the menial work of enslaved maggots; the Old Stag readily tells us that goods and wealth flow into the capital and palace by the bushel but precious little of that abundance makes it back into the hands of the poor.
Furthermore, Hallownest is downright monstrous in its imperialism: It’s built on land stolen from the fluke tribe and the Mosskin and appropriates resources from the Moth Tribe’s sacred grounds; it dumps its waste into the Mantis Tribe’s water supply and directly on top of the Hive. It maintains its cushy position as the dominant society in the crater not just through its own military might but by forcing the Mantis Tribe to fight a proxy war with Deepnest so it doesn’t have to bother with directly subduing two nations’ worth of recalcitrant natives, and it snatches indigenous children like Marmu and Hornet to give them no other choice but to grow up in what they think of as “civilized” society.
White Lady does not see a problem with any of those things. If Hallownest flourishes based on the suffering of civilizations that were already there before her husband founded it, well, she and her husband are doing them a favor by inflicting westernization upon them. The Pale King pointed at the crater and said “Is for me?” and White Lady said “sure, that tracks!” and they went about the cruel work of colonization unhindered until Radiance showed up with a super soaker full of tang yelling “I LIVED BITCH” and the Pale Beings realized they had perhaps aggroed the wrong god and now had an existential threat on their hands.
Folks who read Hollow Knight as anticolonialist are plenty willing to drag White Lady for this (hello, I am one of folks), but from my own experience I would venture that there’s a decent chunk of English-speaking Hollow Knight fandom at least that does not see Hallownest’s imperialism/the figurative Omelas as a problem, either. A lot of these fans live in countries like the United States, Canada, and England which have incredibly gruesome histories of imperialism that they would rather bury under propaganda than actually address, just like Team Cherry’s home country of Australia, whose history and culture have a palpable influence on Hollow Knight’s story. Having to confront the ways that the state of Hallownest was not so great, actually can lead to cognitive dissonance about one’s own home country and how one benefits from their country’s past and present imperialism. The more privilege one has, the more uncomfortable this is, and the more motivated one becomes to avoid thinking about it.
(The ad hominem nature of modern fandom wank just makes this worse, imo. Someone who’s already bored of others harassing them for liking a character like TPK who’s done bad stuff is much more likely to expect harassment from anyone who has a different interpretation of the text than them, and so ignore or read bad faith into entreaties to engage with political undertones they didn’t notice. Always good to remember that just because someone wants the fictional bad twink to also be a sad twink doesn’t mean they don’t understand that child abuse is bad IRL!!!)
No, rather than Le Guin’s metaphor, it’s the literal Omelas of Hallownest that I think gets White Lady in trouble with fans. Hallownest’s survival does hinge on the torture of a single child, and yet instead of rescuing Hollow, White Lady instead walks away.
See, it’s bad enough that Hollow is a child, but they’re also her child.
In the real world, if someone’s relationship with their spouse has broken down to the point that they’re worried about reproductive abuse the way White Lady is (again, not saying the Pale King would have actually done it, just that White Lady was afraid he might), they might not be able to bring other endangered family members with them when they run, or even return for them, possibly ever. It is a herculean feat just to get yourself out of a relationship where you no longer feel safe, and even once you’re out you’re not going to be okay for a while. In White Lady’s case, even after fleeing she still loves her husband and can’t speak against him for what he’s done to their children even though she doesn’t approve of it. Just like she’s in denial about the knights, she’s in denial about the Pale King too in some ways.
At the same time, even if everyone fully understands that sometimes getting oneself out is the best they can do, this is usually felt as a terrible betrayal to endangered family members who get left behind. Feelings aren’t rational and so can’t always be dispelled by logic, and when your family member leaves you in a bad situation to save themself, that sense of abandonment can leave deep scars. While ultimately the responsibility is on the abuser for creating the bad family situation in the first place, the family member who’s fled becomes the new easy target for resentment and blame. Instead of hating the abuser, you can instead hate this person who could’ve saved you but didn’t.
On top of this, the one circumstance in which our misogynist society unilaterally allows White Women, Specifically* to show aggression is in defense of their children. The Mama Bear trope is baked into ideas about how Women, Specifically should be devoted to motherhood and caretaking, and therefore are allowed this one avenue of anger and violence in the name of protecting their children. Since parents are responsible for their children’s very existence, we expect a good parent to be willing to go to bat for their kids, and this societal expectation is especially strong when it comes to women.
(*Aggression in women of color, particularly in black and indigenous women, is something society polices much harder and more stringently than white women’s aggression because many BIPOC are stereotyped as scary and aggressive in general. I’ve written before about how Hollow Knight loves to prompt players to think about topics by lining up several characters to compare the differences in how they each approach that topic; for the subject of motherhood the text gives us Herrah and Radiance to contrast with White Lady. Fandom does not judge these characters on equal terms. Though thankfully it isn’t the most popular interpretation of her out there, there’s still a large amount of people who frame Herrah as sexually predatory for essentially giving the Pale King her vagina to stop him from conquering her kingdom. Furthermore most of fandom is highly allergic to engaging with Radiance as a nuanced character at all, let alone as an indigenous god who’s not just fighting for her own life but is violently resisting cultural genocide. The reluctance in some quarters to so much as grant these characters Mama Bear points is incredibly telling and is yet another reason I believe we need to have more conversations about anticolonialism in Hollow Knight fandom.
ANYWAY, back to your regularly scheduled angsty daikon essay.)
The venn diagram of Hollow Knight fans with People Who Want To Adopt The Hollow Knight Hollowknight is very nearly a circle. Between their strong protectiveness for Hollow in specific and this cultural expectation Western society has for women to protect their children, I think it’s more understandable why we have this popular idea of White Lady as cold and distant and uncaring and lacking motherly instincts despite how the text of the canon directly contradicts that interpretation on all counts. To make things worse, the fact that she openly clears the bar of Dead Baby Pit Bad where it’s ambiguous whether the Pale King can do the same has the potential to make the double standard even more egregious. Not only did White Lady not save her child, but if she found her husband’s behavior immoral, then why didn’t she stop him??? (Even if she hadn’t been too afraid of forced birth to stay with him, the Pale King is a grown man who is responsible for his own life choices. It’s not fair to either of them to frame White Lady as his keeper.)
Like I said earlier in the essay, despite that fandom has general trends, each individual fan brings their own thoughts and feelings and life experiences to the table. There are very very definitely many people out there who dislike White Lady who do so for reasons that have nothing to do with this. Everyone has a right to their own personal preferences!
I do think, though, that White Lady’s choice to walk away from Omelas is a factor in the broad public opinion of her character. Since in canon this choice illuminates so much of her inner complexity and her flaws, I’d love it if we could take this opportunity to understand how and where fanon has diverged from the text and gain some new appreciation of how well she’s written, so her character depth is overlooked less often.