Is there any specific explanation to why our little knight respawns at benches?

[goldenjw]

Since dying is not a mechanical only thing in the game (shade is "echo of a previous life"), I wonder... Yet I cannot come up with a satisfying answer to this question.

[Darc Vader]

My best guess is that resting at a bench re-centers the knight so that is where the void resonates the most and as such you reform there. Or something to that effect.

Obviously non-canon, but the best explanation I can come up with.

[dbinderim]

'Echo of a previous life' to me suggests a parallel universe jumping power. Perhaps the Void is able to forcibly push the reality where the hollow knight dies into another universe. And the Shade is the echo of that push. So what that universes residents see is an unstoppable Knight who defeats all barriers in one go.

[ElectroRanger]

I like to think that once you unlock the steel soul mode it makes more sense, since you really shouldn't be returning to life at all...

[PixelDemise]

The way I always saw it, was that you, AKA the controlled entity, was just a self-repairing golem with minimal intellegence. The shade inside of you is the hollow-ness meant to contain the final boss, but otherwise has little to no effect on the golem.

Respawning at a bench is literally respawning. The golem rebuilds itself at the last "safe" location though Soul powers, but is incomplete. Thus you need to go and find the shade again, and recapture it.

Why dying without gettnig the shade back spawns a new shade despite not having one in you... I don't think they thought that far. Or maybe the Abyss remakes the golem, and the reminents of it inside the golem form into a new shade.

[zero hope >:(]

I think Void is an integral conscious entity, whereas siblings and shades are her temporary spawns who are capable to incarnate as corporeal beings (Hornet, Hollow Knight etc) and develop some kind of personal identity. Void itself is what controls Hollow Knight Jr. Once his body is broken the chunk of the Void which was in charge for controlling the HK gets lost there and lingers until it gets dissolved end absorbed, thus way re-joining the Void mass and bringing back some part of temporarily lost HK identity.

It never explains respawning on the benches tho.

[jabberwok]

Originally posted by zero ambition:

I think Void is an integral conscious entity, whereas siblings and shades are her temporary spawns who are capable to incarnate as corporeal beings (Hornet, Hollow Knight etc) and develop some kind of personal identity. Void itself is what controls Hollow Knight Jr. Once his body is broken the chunk of the Void which was in charge for controlling the HK gets lost there and lingers until it gets dissolved end absorbed, thus way re-joining the Void mass and bringing back some part of temporarily lost HK identity.

It never explains respawning on the benches tho.

This sounds the closest to what I would've imagined, though I might see the Void as having a will without actually being conscious. Personally, I think that vessels have some individual consciousness and freedom, based on the player's actions (not to mention Hornet's dialogue, though it seems to me that she may have been made differently than the vessels). The shade itself makes some sense as an incomplete component of yourself, but I don't really like to imagine the respawning as canon. The bosses waiting around while I die tens or hundreds of times over the course of the game strains credibility a bit too much for me. Kind of hurts the story if I'm incompetent but immortal.

The benches work as a mechanic, but in the context of the story, any explanation for respawning at them strikes me as slightly lame. So I'd rather just ignore that part.

Maybe when you respawn, you are actually a different vessel entirely. You head to where your dead sibling bought it and absorb him, gaining power in the process. Not that I actually want to imagine it that way...