The last thing she remembers is a sudden and painful moment in the middle of Classical Japanese class. And she definitely never expected to be reborn into another world. But she was reborn into another world. One remarkably like a video game. Except she wasn’t reborn as a hero–she’s a spawn monster!
So I’m a Spider, So What? joins other isekai titles in Yen Press’s catalog with a type of story not often seen in light novels that have been brought to the U.S. so far. Our protagonist hasn’t been reborn with some grand destiny. Grand destinies are a little hard to have when you’re a three-foot-tall spider.
Yeah, that’s what I said. A three-foot-tall spider.
…yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
While a three-foot-tall spider is definitely not an image I want floating around in my mind, Okina Baba’s writing and Tsukasa Kiryu’s illustrations make the heroine of our story seem actively cute, which is great, because almost the entire novel is from the perspective of the girl who’s been turned into a spider. (She’s currently nameless in the series, but we’ll discuss that shortly.) The second perspective is that of Shunsuke Yamada, another boy from the heroine’s class back in Japan who’s been reborn as a young prince named Schlain.
Baba’s decision to include Shun’s perspective in the story does a lot for the worldbuilding–Shun explains different rules about the world, which he had the benefit of learning because he was born as a human–but its most important role is serving to contrast between the two characters. In Japan, Shun was well-liked with solid friendships, while the heroine didn’t even have good relationships with her parents. In the fantasy world, Shun was reborn into incredible privilege, both as a human and as a prince, while the heroine was reborn surrounded by hundreds of her new siblings as they tried to eat each other.
Charming, I know.
And while Shun describes a comfortable life in the castle, where he’s tutored by skilled teachers and levels up his Skills in a safe environment, the heroine has to learn everything about her new world through trial and error.
The trial-and-error learning the heroine undertakes is the bulk of Volume One and the most charming part of the book. She spends a lot of time panicking, which seems reasonable after one of her first sights upon waking is a hundred-foot-tall spider eating one of the baby spiders. But as she progresses through the story, she develops both her capital-S skills–Poison Resistance, Acid Resistance, Spider Thread–and skills that can’t be quantified by the fantasy world’s leveling system.
Both the Skills and the skills are what truly makes So I’m a Spider worth picking up. The heroine purchases just one Skill with her skill points at the start of the story, Appraisal, which Shun describes in his chapter as one of the most difficult skills to use and level up. The author makes it fairly clear that the heroine’s Appraisal Skill is going to be important to the story, but it’s also hilarious to watch the heroine figure out how to use it. (At first, it’s basically useless. When she looks at a frog, Appraisal tells her <Frog>.)
Capital-S Skills are important, but the drama of the story comes from the softer skills. The heroine describes herself as reclusive: no relationships with anyone from school, the barest relationship with her parents, a life that consisted mainly of eating a cup of instant ramen before hopping online to play MMORPGs. And at first, she tries to mimic her old life by building a safe web home where she just has to sleep and eat.
But then tragedy strikes her new home in the form of a band of humans coming to hunt her down. She realizes she can’t be proud of the life she’s lived so far–or either of them, really. And she decides she has to change.
Over the course of her journey, the heroine learns to take care of herself. She builds homes and defensive structures for herself; she learns to make traps, then sets them; she pushes herself to go beyond her comfort zone and begin to explore the dungeon she was born in.
And isn’t that what a hero’s journey should be like?
The print edition of the light novel is absolutely worth picking up. The cover is absolutely lovely, with the heroine herself appearing at the very top in all her adorable three-foot-tall spider glory. There’s also a full-color fold-out mini-poster in the front of the light novel with two sides: an illustration of her escape from the humans who burn down her first home and another of her first encounter with an earth dragon.
Despite being written in a style that takes getting used to as an American reader, So I’m a Spider opens on a light novel series with a heroine’s journey unlike any other you’ve read before. Pick up this light novel if you grew up playing RPGs, if you love offbeat stories, or if you ever wished you could wake up with a clean slate to completely remake yourself.
4.5 out of 5 stars
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