#Vessels

[illustratus]

Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by Claude Lorrain

[hieronymusarchives]

Crab tureen, 1736-95

Artists in Jingdezhen, China. Porcelain

Peabody Essex museum, Salem MA

[itscolossal]

Studio Ibbini Juxtaposes Negative Space and Botanical Filigree in New Laser-Cut Paper Works

[agsilverart]

"Night Sky" - hollow knight It's not referred to anything in particular, I just liked the idea. It depicts the vessels and the shadelord swirling around the Hollow Knight. An alternative title could be "Children of the sky". If we see their father, the Pale King, as the moon, then they can be the stars, while the shadelord is the black sky.

[queruloustea]

i do so wish to give the hollow knight and every one of their several thousand siblings a big ol' hug sometimes

[ltwilliammowett]

My dears, here are some impressions and beautiful pictures of the Hamburg harbour birthday. Unfortunately I wasn't and won't be there as my health doesn't allow it. But I hope you like to see some pretty ladies with sails and special vessels, like Naval vessels, Icebreaker, Research and Wreck Search Vessel, Coastguard and Tugboats.

[forrksie]

A piece I drew for a friend who is not on here, their OC and Pure Vessel 💜🤍

[nuveau-deco]

Snuff Bottle. Chinese origin, made during the Qianlong reign period (1736–1795) of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Medium is pink glass with white and black overlay. Dimensions: h. 7.3 cm x w. 6.0 cm x d. 2.8 cm. From the Princeton University Art Museum, object number: y1936-539.

(Source: artmuseum.princeton.edu)

[eskalivr]

Darkins

[illmoraineakoi]

Friendly Reminder that the Vessel Eggs are Freaking Huge.

Also Obligatory Birthplace Egg is the only Egg Asset with Void Vines attached to it remark.

It was always strange to me how large Vessel eggs really are, especially because there really seems to be little need for it. Vessel hatchlings/nymphs are Tiny. Why are the eggs so big in comparison?

There seems to be waaaay too much unnecessary/excess space in each egg if there's only one Vessel per egg. Usually with eggs, by the end of the gestation period, the spawn is cramped in there with very little excess room. Extra unused space is wasteful, and biology hates being wasteful.

This is why I've personally always subscribed to the headcanon of Vessels eggs actually being more like Egg Sacs/Egg Cases than typical eggs. Both are when, for irl bugs, multiple larva/nymphs hatch from the same "egg"-like gestational container. Egg sacs are common for spiders (they make the actual sac itself with silk; here's a great video showing how one is made.) while cockroaches are know for egg cases (Here's a video of some hatching.)

Ghost's egg clearly isn't that much bigger than the other egg assets, it's just less destroyed, so it's size is a good reference for how big all of them would have been. And it's big enough for at least a handful of Vessel nymphs to have fit inside at once.

^ Case in point.

(You could probably squeeze a few more in there if you treat it more like a the sphere it's supposed to be and also depending on the horns. The main limiter are the heads/shells, since those are the hard parts* of a Vessel; Vessel nymph bodies seem to be quite squishy and flexible.)

(*= This is assuming that Vessel shells were hard during their gestation period. There is a chance they might not have been, since newly hatched nymph insects tend to have flimsy bodies for a while. The Birthplace memory shows that Vessels had hard shells at that point, and that seems really close to the point of hatching, so it seems likely that they hatched with hard shells rather than needing to wait a bit for them to harden up. Also, Vessel biology is weirdly wonky, so irl stuff doesn't really matter.)

Also, curiously, it seems Vessel eggs have two layers:

There's the outer shell, but there's very clearly a second, inner thing that has been broken out of. The different in the breaking look from the outer shell suggests this inner layer is made of a different material. The Pale King's egg lacks this, to it's at the very least unlikely to be a Wyrm thing, or at least not a Wyrm thing on it's own. It might be something unique to the union of Wyrm and Root and thus unique to the Vessels.

It could be a Root Thing, but we know jack shit about the White Lady and exactly how much she contributed to the Vessels.

I mean, we know literally nothing about how the Vessels were made besides Pale Babies Get Thrown Into The Liquid Shadow Pit To Get Stuffed With Black Goop, but that's besides the point.

There's also two alternative theories for why the eggs are so big that I'd like to touch upon: Void Swelling, and Stunted Development.

Let's go with Void Swelling first.

In snake eggs, the eggs tend to get a bit bigger by the time they hatch. Normally, it's not too much. Sometimes, however, the eggs really seem to swell up. Most people I've heard/seen talking about this think that the eggs are absorbing and retaining water from the humid incubation environment. Sometimes it's indicative of a problem; sometimes those swollen eggs start to rot, making it clear that that gestation has failed. Other times, the snake just hatches with a lot of egg goop.

It's possible that the Vessel eggs are so large because they've just been swollen up from the Void infusing into them.

Two problems with this theory: Vessels eggs are clearly hard-shelled, and hard-shelled eggs don't swell. At least, I've never heard of them doing that, but I'll admit I'm not a bird person. Perhaps some eggs got stuffed with way too much void and popped open before it was ready to hatch.

The second issue is that the Abyss is not what I would call a humid place (or, at least, it doesn't LOOK humid), and we don't see any liquid Void anywhere near where the eggs are in the Abyss. All the liquid Void we see is to the left of Vessel Corpses, and we see no egg assets anywhere on the way to and around the Lighthouse.. This makes it rather ambiguous how the Void even infused into the eggs at all, let alone if liquid Void was involved. Given how deep the Birthplace goes, it's impossible to tell what was at the bottom of that shaft before all of the corpses stuffed it up.

Unless ambient smoky environmental Void could have stuffed into the eggs enough to engorge them, which is also a possibility. Void is weird and we know little about how it works/behaves. Still unlikely due to the hard shells, but it's a theory.

The second theory is less about too much Void in the eggs and more about not enough Vessel.

It's possible that, at the time of Void infusion (and thus, death for the gestating Pale Children nymphs) the influence/corruption of the Void caused the Vessels to just stop developing. Dead things don't grow or develop after all.

Perhaps the eggs are so large because the original offspring that was supposed to hatch from those eggs were really supposed to be that large. They were supposed to be the spawn of a Wyrm and a Root combined. Even if the White Lady hadn't of been so big at the time of the Vessel Plan, she's shown she was always capable of eventually growing large. And if the offspring took aspects from PK's original Wyrm form over his dinky bugsona, which I would assume to be possible bc DNA and Genetics, then a larger size would also potentially be expected.

Or maybe some Pale Children would have gotten the Wyrm gene while others got the Bugsona gene, which is what Hornet got, and is absolutely hilarious to think about. Imagine getting riffed on by a twelve foot high sibling bc you got dad's Short Gene.

There's one issue with this theory, and that is of course, Broken Fucking Vessel. Broken Vessel always throws wrenches into Vessel theories, it's like their favorite past time.

Broken Vessel has aged. And, Hollow, more obviously, but BV is the main confusing one. Broken Vessel proves that Vessel can age on their own, without the potential influence/assistance of the King. BV proves that Vessel development isn't permanently stunted.

The most logical solution to this issue I've seen is exposure to the Void. Vessels, on a fundamental level, are made up of Void. It is intrinsically entwined with their very physiology. They're not just walking corpses stuffed full of Void and a Shade, their very flesh IS Void and that Shade.

Case in point:

BV, out of any other Vessel outside of Hollow, is the one who could have potentially come into contact with Void after leaving the Abyss. They're found in the Ancient Basin, which at the time of the game is heavily Void tainted (likely due to the Lighthouse being off and PK fucking off to Buzzsaw Land. That light had likely been the only thing keeping the Void suppressed underneath the Basin.)

PK could have used Void to supplement Hollow's growth into adulthood because Vessels probably literally cannot grow or age without it. Hence why Ghost and all the other escapee Vessels are stuck as nymphs while BV grew a tiny bit.

Of course, the solution to the BV issue also ruins the stunted embryonic development theory too. It's a rather poor and weak theory that I've included only because I though it was a bit interesting. Thinking about what the original Pale Spawn would have been like is always interesting to me.

With that, I have just one more thing to point out.

Ma'am, how the FU--

[rima-niki]

Icarus if they ever become a god/vessel should be the Vessel of Change

In this essay i will-

[illustratus]

Vessels in a swell at sunset by Ivan Aivazovsky

[chasingrainbowsforever]

~ Neutrals ~

[itscolossal]

Slouching Ceramic Vessels by Philip Kupferschmidt Ooze with Heavy Drips and Gloopy Glazes

[the-east-art]

Analogies for a person who was a vessel for an angel:

A tree that lightning struck - cut open by something from heaven

tupperware that once housed spaghetti or curry - permanently altered by contents long gone

a phone with a broken battery - this item no longer can perform the miracles it once could

A broken radio - it once knew how to hear the voices of many, and now hears only the one station

Her childhood teddy bear - it used to have a voicebox in it that when you squeezed it, the bear would hum a song. It was broken long ago, and while the stuffed animal is still a stuffed animal there is a piece inside that will always be broken and and the pieces of that device rattle when you move the stuffed animal

A lantern with a fake candle in it - it does not flicker and glow and dance the way a true candle does, a facsimile of what it should be

I'll add more later maybe