This article discusses Silksong's plot and endings. Finish the game first if that matters to you.
Six and a half years passed between Silksong's announcement and its release. Tens of thousands of people hit Steam simultaneously on launch day and took the servers down for a while. In the end-of-2025 award season it beat out a number of AAA titles.
What interests me more than the numbers is this: in an industry whose mainstream narratives still default to male characters as the first sex, this game imagined an underground kingdom of bugs driven by female characters and focused on female experience — and the way it does it is unlike most works that fly that flag.
1. The world: a matrilineal society borrowed from insects
The series is built on an enormous subterranean bug kingdom in which a higher being grants ordinary insects intelligence and then rules them.
In Silksong, Pharloom's rulers are the higher being Grand Mother Silk and the weavers she granted intelligence to — Silk herself and the entire weaver people are female. Hornet is the daughter of Herrah, queen of Deepnest, raised in Hallownest by the White Lady, and trained in combat by Vespa of the Hive.
That all-matrilineal structure is not invented from nothing. It borrows the real organisation of colonies like bees and ants — what biology calls eusociality: a few individuals monopolise reproduction, most are sterile and altruistic, generations overlap, brood care is cooperative, and the colony as a whole constitutes what is termed a superorganism.
In The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson lay the outline out plainly. The queen is the only fertile female and monopolises reproduction, functioning as the superorganism's reproductive organs. Workers are sterile females who forage, build, rear and defend, functioning as its somatic cells. Males contribute mating value and die afterwards, treated as disposable germ cells.
Eusocial insects are roughly two percent of insect species and about half of insect biomass — the adaptive power of that division of labour is strong enough to make them one of the dominant forces in terrestrial ecosystems.
Carry that logic into fiction and reproduction and offspring necessarily become the central subject. And in this underground world, the capacity to reproduce belongs to females, often without males involved at all.
2. Maternity as power, and as injury
This is where I think Silksong is at its most ruthless.
Grand Mother Silk's practice of motherhood is paradoxical from the start: she wants offspring, and she treats her "daughters" through control and extraction. She granted the weavers intelligence as a higher being and declared herself their creator and mother — but the substance of that relationship is exploitation, because she needs the weavers producing the silk that keeps the entire kingdom running.
When the weavers saw through it and fled as a group, Silk did not respond with maternal appeal. She switched to the face of a ruler: pursuit, capture, and the slaughter of large numbers of weavers to harvest their silk.
At that point maternity has become absolute ownership of the next generation's reproductive and productive capacity.
After the betrayal, Silk used vast quantities of silk to make new life and called it her daughter. The first attempt failed, and that daughter, Phantom, was discarded as defective. The second, Lace, succeeded, and for a long stretch Lace worships her mother, serves her, and helps hold the regime together.
And in the final confrontation with Silk, Lace turns — and helps Hornet fight her own mother.
Set aside the biological drive to perpetuate a species: why is Silk so fixated on having offspring? She personally produced her daughters' predicament and drove all of Pharloom into the disaster of the silk curse. The plot is pressing a fairly sharp question: intergenerational exploitation does not disappear because a society is matrilineal and power is held by a single sex.
Matrilineal is not utopian. That clarity is what puts Silksong ahead of a lot of comparable work.
3. The ending: the real victory is letting go
The game has multiple endings.
In one, Hornet replaces Grand Mother Silk, loses her rebelliousness, and becomes the new ruler — Pharloom stays under the same severe control, with a different figure seated above it.
In another, Hornet admits she feels an instinctive ambition when faced with power, but wants the power relation itself to change, so that every bug can be free. On that route, in the third act she recalls what her mothers and her teacher taught her and recognises that she can choose: not only to take on the responsibility of saving Pharloom, but to hand its citizens the right to decide their own future.
The politics showing through here are feminist in colour and also step past a binary frame: real freedom is not seizing the ruler's power and installing yourself, it is dismantling the oppressive structure itself. That costs something, and it takes collective weight to achieve.
Hornet wins in the end not because she out-fights anyone, but because she chooses to let go.
4. Hypersexualised or desexualised? She offers a third answer
Now to character design, which I think is where Silksong actually breaks through.
In classical feminist film theory, Laura Mulvey named the male gaze: in mainstream narrative grammar, women are placed as the object to be looked at, the target of desire, while men are the default looking subject and the engine of the story. That analysis still partly holds in games — games are inescapably audiovisual, and gaze is everywhere in them.
But the interactivity of games opens a wider field. Recent scholarship has been reconsidering the limits of the classical concept: genres built on combat and adventure give women players a contradictory space, one that may still reproduce real-world stereotypes while also offering room to exercise agency against them.
Within that coordinate system, the industry has been stuck between two poles.
One is intensified sex characteristics — body curves and how much skin the outfit shows. In anime studies, Tamaki Saito's Psychoanalysis of the Beautiful Fighting Girl analysed this line of figures: they hold power at a symbolic level, while their bodies and their personal development stay permanently arrested in girlhood, and that permanence and harmlessness ultimately serve a fantasy of omnipotence. It looks like an overturning of women's position as the other, and functions as a suspended fantasy product.
The other is desexualisation — the Western tendency to strip traditional femininity from a warrior. Overcorrection carries its own cost. Analyses of The Last of Us Part II have argued that the character construction faltered by ignoring players' instinct to look at a game character as a designed product; at that level the gaze is not even about gender, and a de-gazed, low-femininity character fails to carry the fantasy for players of any gender, taking the experience down with it.
Hornet is a third answer.
Narratively, her family of origin is purely matrilineal: she is a powerful woman raised by three powerful mothers, and in the climactic sequence her memories of those three are the source she draws strength and clarity from. This matters, because Silksong does not do what many games do and blur a female character's family and upbringing out of focus. It makes that history the substrate of her motives and values. From beginning to end Hornet has her own ultimate goal. She is nobody's appendage, and certainly not a device to advance a male character's arc.
Visually the approach is anti-anthropocentric: the design leans toward a naturalistic, genuinely insect-adjacent presentation. Hornet has clear feminine markers — a slim, efficient build, and a voice that reads unambiguously as female, though not a coy or seductive one; the performance is firm, forceful and rather intellectual. Her garment is somewhere between a dress and a red cloak, vivid in colour but extremely spare, stripped of decorative excess, suited to an adventurer (it even functions as a float in some fights) while keeping something youthful about it.
Taking her gender seriously and refusing the gaze turn out to be compatible.
5. From Samus stepping out of the armour, to Hornet putting the robe back on
On the subject of clothing, this genre has an old tradition worth revisiting.
In 1986 Metroid produced the first playable female combat character in the medium's history, Samus Aran. In an era when Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda were both built on rescuing a princess, that alone was a departure. And to the surprise of players at the time, the most formidable being in the galaxy, sealed in metal armour and startlingly agile, was a woman — and on a fast completion, Samus removes the suit and appears in a bikini. That moment was received by many male players as a reward and an incentive, and later entries kept the device.
Silksong has a comparable beat: Hornet is captured and imprisoned partway through, and her weapon and belongings are taken.
But look at Hornet beneath the cloak and she is nothing like early Lara or Samus. Those two are simultaneously formidable adventurers and sexual symbols, and the contradiction between acting subject and looked-at object never resolves, because both are highly sexualised constructions. Hornet's body carries no sexualised features at all — which shuts off the visual-pleasure machinery that turns a female character into an object of voyeurism at the source.
Forty years ago a cohort of players got excited about Samus's reveal, with a woman's body treated as a hidden reward waiting at the end of a long fight to be uncovered. Forty years on, when Hornet breaks her tormentor's neck, puts her robe back on and takes up her weapon, players watch her stand with something closer to reverence, cheering for her and fighting alongside her.
The female combat hero is no longer a body being watched. She is simply an acting subject. Somewhere in those four decades, this medium's gender imagination was quietly rebuilt.
6. Gender awareness, not a gender label
Hornet's womanhood stays prominent throughout, but what is prominent is awareness rather than labelling.
Plenty of games establish that a character is a woman through dialogue or someone else's description, and then refuse to connect that to any detail of a real woman's situation. Silksong does the opposite, working through Hornet's own recognition of her position, her choices and how she expresses them.
When an NPC asks in a leering register whether he might call her "sweetheart," her answer is, in substance: call me Hornet or say nothing. Elsewhere she is invited to a hot spring and finds the proprietor spying on her — and rather than using the setup to display a body, the game hands you control and lets you beat the voyeur bloody.
She is also not only a hunter. On the town's wish wall she uses her strength to resolve residents' problems, and when a resident is ashamed of being weak, she offers comfort. Her manner across different encounters is both soft and unyielding, neither servile nor arrogant — which breaks both poles of the usual discipline, the demand that women be gentle and the demand that a heroine be strong enough to stop reading as a woman.
The supporting cast works the same way. Silksong gives its female NPCs and bosses distinct moral positions and drops them into genuine ethical and political conflicts, which lets them display judgement, scope and capability rather than the stereotype that women's stories are about romance. Shakra searching for her teacher, and the flea warriors defending their people, both pursue goals independent of the protagonist's line. Hornet and the needle mistress are teacher and student, with a transmission of technique and a duel at the end of it; Hornet and Shakra meet by chance and become peers; the cathedral attendant offers her help and concern. None of these relationships run through blood or marriage.
7. It never fell into the "issue-first" trap
The industry has long assumed that a female character stripped of obvious feminine markers will strain players' taste and sell poorly.
Silksong taking down the storefront on launch day is a fairly direct answer to that. Hornet's anti-gaze, anti-anthropocentric body does not stop anyone from enjoying how sharp and quick she is to control, or the warmth under the cold surface.
The key, I think, is that this series never led with gender as a thesis to be delivered. The first game offered an experience with no gender distinction at all. The second foregrounds a female protagonist, but does it in a way that steps outside the human-centred binary and sits flush with a matrilineal insect world.
So it does not provoke resistance to being lectured, and it gives women players an identification that is not stereotyped, landing finally on an emotional resonance that runs past gender identity altogether.
What a player takes from a game comes down to design, narrative richness and the distinctiveness of its aesthetic. How a character is gendered, and how sexualised they are, matters far less to whether a game is loved than the industry assumes.
That is the direction Silksong points in.
Sources and notes
This is a critical essay and discusses plot and endings. Theoretical sources: the male gaze is Laura Mulvey's; the descriptions of eusociality and the superorganism follow Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson's The Superorganism; the beautiful-fighting-girl analysis is Tamaki Saito's. The figures of roughly two percent of species and about half of insect biomass are commonly cited estimates that vary by methodology. Silksong did receive multiple year-end awards; specific award names and bodies should be checked against official announcements, so they are not itemised here. In-game lines are paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim. The Last of Us Part II, Metroid, Dead or Alive and Tomb Raider are referenced as comparisons and have no production connection to this game.
Image credit
In-game screenshots and official promotional art, copyright Team Cherry, reproduced here for illustrative purposes.
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