Hornet

Hornet is a major character in the video game Hollow Knight, a metroidvania-styled platformer game created and published by indie game studio Team Cherry in 2017, and its sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong (currently pending release) in which she is the main playable character.

Basic Information
Hornet is a very important character to the plot of Hollow Knight, and is also the first boss considered to be a serious heightening in difficulty throughout the progression of the game. Despite the fact that her name is Hornet in a game where everyone is a bug, she's a spider. This is actually significantly relevant to her as a character. She's also the half-sister of the player character and the Hollow Knight (no, you do not play as the Hollow Knight in Hollow Knight, that's a different character).

She has two pale long horns, (haha horn-et I am so smart my parents never loved me as a child) and wears a muted cloak. She actually has more legs which can only be seen when she skitters in Silksong, but this usually isn't shown.

Her weapon of choice is a needle made especially for her. In Silksong we may see her wield other weapons or clothing, but again that game isn't out yet.

For more information, see her article on the Hollow Knight wiki.

Nonhuman
Bug. Though a lot of people draw her as having a body like a human woman for some reason anyway.

Technically Antagonist
You fight her as a boss two times throughout the game, but after that she becomes a supporting character. She explains herself that she's just testing the player to see if they're strong enough to get through the dangers of what lies ahead. Eventually she directly helps the player in the second-to-final boss.

Power
She's a very skilled combatant, and is also technically a demigod because one of her parents was a Higher Being (analogous to gods in this setting).

Angst
Oh boy is there a lot to say here, and to fully explain it all it's almost necessary to explain the whole backstory of the setting of Hollow Knight. Essentially, the area used to be ruled over by a moth sun goddess (her main domain was dreams, this will be important later) called the Radiance, but then her power was usurped by a new god called the Pale Wyrm, who shed his giant worm body and metamorphosed into a bug-sized bug to live among his subjects and called himself the Pale King. Everyone forgot about the Radiance in favor of venerating the Pale King, so she got really mad and started infecting people through their dreams to be part of a kind of hivemind, essentially taking over their consciousness and this was called the Infection.

The Pale King obviously wasn't cool with this, so his plan to stop the Infection was to create a being completely devoid of thought or dreams that the Radiance could be trapped inside. He used another ancient force called the Void to do this, and essentially what he did was create a million void babies (they're actually called Vessels) with his wife and try to find one that was actually completely hollow. Pretty much all of them except for one were deemed failures, and he tossed the rest of them back into the pit the Void comes from (called the Abyss) and sealed it up because he was ashamed of what he'd done.

The one he picked, which was named the Hollow Knight, wasn't actually hollow at all, and just really really wanted to impress their dad because they loved him, but he didn't know this at the time. He also chose three powerful bugs from Hallownest (that's what the kingdom is called) to essentially be in a coma for the rest of their lives to sort of astral project to keep the Hollow Knight sealed up when they were sealed with the Radiance inside their mind. The other two of them aren't really relevant to Hornet's story, but one of the bugs picked to be a Dreamer was Herrah the Beast, who was queen of the spider kingdom adjacent to Hallownest called Deepnest. She only agreed to be a Dreamer if the Pale King would have a child with her, because she both wasn't considered to be of noble class by Hallownest (she's referred to as a "common beast" several times) and didn't have an heir apparent for Deepnest already, and she wanted the heir to Deepnest to both have noble/godly blood and have ties to royalty of both Deepnest and Hallownest. She went into her eternal coma when Hornet was a young child, and even though the two of them had little time together, there's a point ingame where you have the opportunity to read Herrah's mind while she's dreaming and literally every single one of her thoughts is about how much she loves her daughter and how this was a worthy sacrifice. The player has to kill her in order to break the seal, and if you've done things in a particular order, Hornet comes to the plinth she's laying on to mourn her death. Understandably, there's a lot of angst created about this whole situation, because it's sad as hell and Hornet needs a therapist so bad.

Burton
Hollow Knight just sort of has that gothic-esque style as a general rule.

Dominating
She's a powerful opponent against the player both times you fight her, and she makes it clear in no uncertain terms that she won't hesitate to kill the player if they aren't strong enough.

Mysterious
She appears a few times throughout the game before and after her boss fights, and her origins are shrouded in mystery until very late game.

Theme Song
This is the music that plays when you fight her.

Fanon
A lot of the fanbase just considers it common knowledge that Hornet is into women. The most popular pairing with her in it is her and another female character shown in the Silksong demo as a rival-type character whose name is Lace. Gamer bros consider this pairing implausible for some reason even though Lace literally calls Hornet "delicious" prior to fighting her.

Before Silksong was teased, a lot of the bugs of Hallownest don't really seem to care about/interact with other NPCs, making most shipping just random. A popular ship was her and Quirrel, another fan favorite because they had like one interaction where she tries to kill him. Canonically because she is related to both the Hollow Knight and the player character, a lot of fan-works depict them working together or Hornet showing affection for both of them. She calls the player character "Ghost" or "Little ghost" often, leading to people assuming she uses this as a more affectionate nickname.

There are many usually joke arguments about whether or not she's made of Void similar to the main character.