I recently watched “So I’m a Spider, so what?” (蜘蛛ですが、なにが？) with the other guy and as usual, I wanted to share a couple thoughts about it.
First of all, a word of warning: this is not a review and I’ll be referencing specific events from the show to make my point. This means mild to heavy spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.
Also, I’ll be shortening the anime to SIP. Don’t question it. sip
With that out of the way, let’s start with…
The Good
The first thing that comes to mind is how easy it is to watch the show. We watched it in two sessions, including 15 episodes in the second one, and that was rather smooth sailing overall. Even very good anime can easily get tiring when watching so much at once, but that didn’t happen here.
That is also impressive considering how little actually happens, plot-wise, in the first third or so of the show. In general, it is rather entertaining to watch Kumoko and her various antics. The anime brought them to life with pretty good CG and voice acting, making the most out of our spider girl. She’s the type of character that I’d usually find obnoxious, but that did’t happen here.
Another facet I liked a lot was the show’s take on isekai fantasy. What felt like some generic Isekai story at first managed to develop its own distinct flavor over the course of the show. For one thing, I like the fact that, while skills and levels like in RPGs exist in this world, in contrast to most comparable stories, there’s actually some background to them. They aren’t there only because <author> wanted that stuff in their story, but they’re a part of the greater mystery of the world our reincarnated teens are living in.
There’s one more thing that was impressively well done. Due to that, I didn’t even realize what a feat it is until I actually thought about it after finishing the show. We mostly follow two perspectives, the human side and Kumoko’s side. As a viewer you’ll probably assume these are happening at the same time, but they’re actually 15 years apart. This is something that is hinted at already in the first or second episode, but only becomes clear once Julius tells us about the Taratect scarf his mother wove, as well as how he brought back Fey’s egg from the Great Elroe Labyrinth back then. That still doesn’t explain everything though, and the show manages to unravel many mysteries, slowly, one by one, as a synergy of what we see from both perspectives.
On the storytelling level, that was not just very well done in terms of how little you’d notice this at first, but also how well the two perspectives complement each other and how the show manages to make this a very satisfying process of discovery.
The Bad
On this side, I’ll have a lot more to say. Don’t take that to mean that the anime is bad or that I didn’t enjoy it though.
First of all, I want to talk about the fights since they make up a significant part of the show’s run time. But before I go into concrete details, I’d like to make a little excursion first.
What makes a good Fight Scene?
This show was the first one to make me ask this question, I’ve never really thought about it before. I mainly came up with three factors that I believe make fighting scenes entertaining to watch. Note that I don’t believe all of these factors have to be present. Any one of them can be enough to make a fight scene entertaining to watch.
The Epic Factor and Rule of Cool
This one is the least concrete, but should be the easiest to understand. It is mainly a combination of visuals and sound, the amazing effects etc., whatever may make you feel like what I’m watching is really cool! I don’t think I’m able to describe this in more detail, it’s something you just feel. The first example that came to my mind is Megumin’s explosion from KonoSuba. It probably applies to all her explosions, but the best examples would be those against the Mobile Fortress Destroyer, and the one she did with Yunyun against Sylvia in the movie. It can live through much smaller details though, e.g. a bit of screen shake drastically increases the feeling of impact you get from… well, impacts.
Choreography
This one’s a bit harder to explain. It’s not so much on the level of how things look, but rather the actions themselves we see animated on the screen. Creative fighting choreography can make fights very entertaining to watch, through what is happening in every moment. This is the part that distinguishes fighting scenes from e.g. just swords hitting each other over and over again. It’s much more difficult to give an example for this, mostly because it’s something that you usually won’t remember in detail, as it’s about the tiny things that happen from moment to moment. In general, you could probably include almost any kind of acrobatics used in combat. This factor is purely based on movement. The first good example that comes to my mind is from RWBY: how Ruby very actively uses the recoil of her weapon to propel herself in various directions, or enhance the force of her scythe’s melee attacks. Now, it’s kinda cool that recoil works out the way you’d expect in the RWBY universe, but what I’m getting at with this example are the specific moves that Ruby uses it for. Here’s a section from RWBY’s “Red” trailer that showcases exactly what I mean. Though this is also very close to falling under the first factor.
Unfortunately I can’t come up with a better explanation or any more concrete examples from anime right now. Most things that would go under this category are certainly much less explicit than the example I gave.
Strategy and Viewer Engagement
This is the highest layer of what is happening in a fight scene. How this contributes to enjoyment you may wonder? I at least enjoy fight scenes much more if I can actually engange my brain in them, when I can reasonably think about what can happen in a fight, when they are to some degree predictable. It is very rare to see this in action, and usually that only works in very specific cases, because the audience needs to have a very accurate image of what all the characters involved are capable of, what their strengths and weaknesses are etc. If that is given, it allows the audience to think along: how could the engagement play out? Who is likely going to win and how? If the audience has the necessary information (and the author is consistent in how they let these engagements play out) then it is much easier to appreciate e.g. what sorts of tricks and strategies the main character comes up with to beat overwhelming odds. It allows us to see these fight scenes similarly to thematic conflicts, though here we can’t derive any value from the conclusions these conflicts reach.
Most fight scenes fail in this regard, due to inconsistency and capriciousness on the side of the author. If the main character constantly pulls stuff out of their ass that just so happens to conveniently allow them to beat opponents they should have no chance against, then, at least in my case, engagement is rather low. What’s the point in thinking about the MC’s “arsenal” and possibilities, if I’m not expecting a logical resolution anyway?
Back to SIP
Looking at the show at hand: I never found its fight scenes particularly entertaining, and I believe that’s because it didn’t perform well in any of the three factors I’ve outlined above.
- Epic & Cool: SIP is neither of these. I remember how, after I’d finished SAO years ago, I’d still rewatch specific scenes of it on Youtube for several weeks after that, because I found them that cool. While I don’t do that anymore, I don’t remember a single scene from this show that gave me a comparable feeling.
- Choreography: there’s not much to explain here due to the nature of this factor, I didn’t see much of this either. The movement in the anime is not very creative I’d say. It’s not pure bad either (except for the second to last episode) but nothing exciting.
- Strategy: SIP does try this several times, but it often falls flat due to how difficult it is to grasp Kumoko’s abilities. At some points it is almost ironically bad. My favorite example is that scene where Kumoko, Ariel and young Julius meet. A sudden stalemate occurs as the three are doing nothing but staring at each other. Then Ariel casts a spell on Kumoko and she just… dies. She got oneshot by the most uninterestingly head-on attack you can imagine. It would be something different if Ariel were simply that strong or it was a surprise attack, but they’d been fighting on somewhat even footing until then. And now, Ariel randomly decided to do it at that specific point. And somehow Kumoko failed to dodge or defend in any way, despite staring straight at Ariel and seeing it coming. Why didn’t Ariel do that from the start, if it’s apparently so easy to kill her this way? This was an incredibly unsatisfying resolution to this fight, as it defies all logic and is very boring. Moreover, moments like these undermine my trust in the series' consistency for all fight scenes that follow.
And since we’re talking about boring resolutions already: I hate how the skill system is often used to facilitate exactly these boring resolutions. This is perhaps the worst part of this specific trope which all the other shitty isekais abuse. So the protagonist finds themself in a pinch, but… lucky them, they suddenly acquire a new skill that neatly solves the problem! This is disappointing for two reasons: why introduce this conflict in the first place, if it is simply resolved through means that are devoid of any narrative value or consequences? And second, the mechanisms that lead to the acquisition of skills are typically not or so ill-defined that the author can essentially ass-pull them whenever they need it, which, if abused enough, significantly lowers any engagement in these fight scenes.
Besides, skills are so frequently acquired or levelled up without apparent effects to the viewer that they turn into background noise at some point. To some degree, this is very realistic. Someone who’s played RPGs and roguelikes might know that sometimes the biggest upgrade you can get would be a boring boost to your base stats, rather than some fancy new skill or special effect. Still, at some point the walls of text that skills lists turn into feels almost like the “power level” trope from Shounen series. Longer wall of text = more skills = more powerful. It also breaks the flow of the anime a little, in that I want to pause and actually read these texts, but doing so would be a huge time investment, and one that is mostly wasted at that. There’s also the evolutions which are kinda just there, they don’t feel like they have any impact except changing her visuals. Which is nice, but again feels like a mechanic that is either very shallow or not explained enough.
One more thing that bothered me is that the series fails to make me feel the “stakes” most of the time. Kumoko is fighting for her life in almost every single episode. Maybe that’s already the problem, but in any case I’ve very rarely felt excited about what the outcome of an engagement might be. Most conflicts are just her fighting some monster in the dungeon which has no thematic relevance besides being her current obstacle anyway. And while the stakes have always felt low, the series then even goes as far as giving her an immortality skill. Eh… Well, at least it has limitations I guess.
I also find it disappointing that, as the main character of the series, Kumoko has practically no development. In fact, her entire setup is a bit weird… We’re told she was the shy girl at school who was also bullied. Meanwhile, in her new life she’s the embodiment of hyperactive… ahem, I mean HYPERACTIVE. While I guess you could also take that as some prime “show-don’t-tell” at work, she’s been like that right from the start. That again could be attributed to her being freed from the chains of modern society and being allowed to be herself. It’s a real shame because that could be a very interesting setup. But in the end that is only me speculating, almost none of this actually happened visibly on-screen, and the series itself never bothers to comment on it. Ultimately, she’s a character that is simply very hard to believe.
Another facet of this is her having apparently no qualms about killing humans at all. It’s not like it doesn’t make any sense. She grew up as a monster in a harsh environment where you kill to survive, and humans were her enemies. But again, it feels like the series kinda glosses over this a little when it’s something that very much feels worth at least commenting on.
A bit of a side-complaint and not an important one, but anyway: For the first half of the show, before Kumoko left the Elroe Labyrinth, I had almost no grasp of her size. Since she’s spending her time in a cave fighting ever new monsters, we have no benchmark to measure her against. I’m currently reading the first volume of the LNs so I now know that she was about one meter in size from the very start, and that probably never changed until she shed her spider body. But watching the anime, I assumed she was very small at the start, closer to the size of real-world species, and that she grew bigger and bigger through her evelutions. The series never said anything like that, but when we practically never get the chance to compare her to any known reference objects, we can only guess, I guess? This is just something that surprised me when I noticed it while reading the novel, and after thinking about it a little more, I got surprised this surprised me in the first place. Anyway…
At this point I realize I probably put this article off for too long, because I’m pretty sure when I started writing it I had much more to say. Guess you’re not getting a chonker of an article this time. Well, a few more points I still have though:
Some of the character conflicts on the human side bother me… a lot. Taking Hugo for one, he’s the spitting image of the generic edgy villain. He was never interesting and only seems to be there to give us some spicy conflict from the start. The anime builds up the confrontation with him for at least a few episodes before he finally tries to kill Shun, only to be destroyed by Oka, and that’s pretty much the end for him. I mean, sure he comes back for revenge later, but the only thing he adds is my aggravation at his simplistic, edgy, egoistic character. There’s a much bigger and potentially more interesting conflict going on anyway, who cares about Hugo? When Sophia said they were only using him, I think the author probably felt that. But that again makes me wonder why. After they defeated him the first time, he stopped adding anything to the conflicts that followed, and even before I’m not sure what his act was supposed to do for us. Just put us on our toes and be more excited for the action that is to come? If so, I guess the show succeeded at that, but I also feel scammed. Because the action that followed was more about Sophia, the entire insurgence etc. and Hugo may as well have been missing from all of that. The fact that he still appeared at the end and Sophia actually told him he’d been used gives me a little bit of hope that there might be more to come for him… but I guess we’ll see about that.
Add Sophia herself to the mix, and I’m not sure it gets better. While it seems that Hugo just so happened to find his ego-genes in his new life and betray his friends for no better reason than that, Sophia has a much more interesting background. Being one of the “quiet” kids, a bit eerie even, and generally shunned or even bullied by her former classmates, she comes into this new world and is eventually saved and sort of… raised even? by our spider queen. On the other hand, she also seems to turn into a very generic edgy villain not much better than Hugo. Does she have any motivation at all? I don’t even remember, maybe she was just trying to support Kumoko, though I do remember her getting very prickly whenever someone calls her by her old nickname. Aside from that she seems to take great pleasure in making Shun and his mates suffer, but is apparently fine working together with Kyouya etc. who, unlike Kumoko, neither did anything for her, nor received similar treatment (bullying) in their previous lives. She and Hugo make for a pair of characters that are simply annoying to watch and make me hope for someone to kill them quickly. Not because it’s the resolution to an interesting conflict, but because I don’t want to see them anymore.
Finally, the overarching conflict between the two sides, at least from the student’s perspectives, seems nothing but dumb. I take great issue with it if a central conflict is justified entirely by bad or non-existing communication between the sides involved, and that’s what this is. I mean if you look at Kumoko vs. the Elves, there’s some justification there obviously, but why are the reincarnations so utterly unable to have a proper conversation and tell each other what they’re fighting for? Even though they spend a lot of time talking in the middle of the fights (another bad trope taken too far here) towards the end, most of it is meaningless and it is frustrating watching them fail to bring up the one thing they should be talking about. Instead, we get intermissions of good friends fighting each other and being like “nooo why would he do that?” and meanwhile I’m screaming on the inside “just ask him you fucking idiot”.
Taking a step back, this conflict is, in a way, very realistic in that both sides have different levels of knowledge, neither side has a good grasp on what the other thinks or feels, so overall they just misunderstand each other. But there’s a reason you rarely see conflicts like this in entertainment media, because… they have little to no thematic value and are nothing but frustation to watch as a viewer who has the knowledge of both sides and naturally questions the entire point of the conflict.
Shun takes this almost to the peak of irony (or rather frustration) when he, having to fulfill the generic isekai protagonist role, insists they have to fight for all that is good and never give up etc. This is after his allies, only moments earlier, reached the conclusion that they do not have the slightest chance of beating Sophia, and even trying would be kinda pointless since she made it very clear she actually has no intention of hurting them.
At this point I gotta say I don’t have have a problem with generic za hiiro characters like Shun. At least from what I’ve picked up through my very limited exposure to the anime community, many people are bothered by characters like his. I absolutely have to agree that they’re not interesting, because they’re usually very predictable and boring, and you’ve seen them a hundred times already. But they usually don’t actively bother me as characters like Hugo and Sophia do by being plain obnoxious on-screen.
But when this happened, I had to agree for once. Shun was trying to force a fight in situation where that was completely unnecessary. At the same time he presented it as if it was the right thing to do when it really wasn’t. Even the entire depiction threw me off though. I have no idea whether SIP is self-aware enough that they’re actively trying to make Shun fall on his face. If so, this would be the perfect setup for that. But then again Shun was allowed to play his generic hero character the entire time and it was always played completely straight. And when he held his little speech, his friends, who were just about to make the right call and do a tactical retreat, suddenly all agreed with him. I feel like I’m getting mixed signals here. In any case, seems like I’ll have to keep reading the novels to get it or hope for a second season to see if this entire situation has had a meaningful effect on our characters.
Finally, the last thing that bothered me was the second-to-last (I believe?) episode. There’s nothing interesting to say here, apparently they ran into trouble and thus out of time during production, so the entire episode consists of perhaps the most hideous CG and animations I’ve seen so far. This was also the episode where they laid all their frustrating conflicts bare, so the episode as a whole was a pain to watch.
So, that’s it from me. Here goes the usual disclaimer: even though I may have said quite a few negative things here, I found the anime very enjoyable to watch. Enough that I’ve started reading the light novels and I’m excited for the things I’ve missed out on and what’s to come.
See you at the next article o/