So I'm a Spider, So What?

I loved the first few volumes of this light novel. The world building, the characters, the slow buildup of the mysteries of how the world works, the strategies of the fights, they're all great. However, at some point the later volumes just start to feel tedious and filled with filler, and this gets worse as you get closer to the end. And then perhaps because the author wasted so much time on meaningless filler, the end feels incredibly rushed, anti-climactic, and pulled out of the author's ass. Nothing in volume 16 makes any kind of sense in terms of logical actions that real people would take,and the characters constantly contradict themselves just to make the plot work. Like, "I'm going to destroy half of humanity." Half a volume later, "No, I wasn't actually going to destroy half of humanity. I just said that to troll." It's ridiculous. My score for the early volumes was a 9, but the end brings it down to a 6.

Spidersekai is a compelling paragon of story progression and character traits, in not just the isekai genre but entire fiction. What Okina Baba has given to us is a web woven by multiple spiders, all of whom are characters in the story. The web gets bigger with time, and complex as the lives of these characters get intertwined. What makes this work stand out? 🕷 After an entire class gets reincarnated in a fantasy world, the classmates don't stand on the same side. My favorite aspect from Kumo Desu, it clears the delusion of being classmates, that is, being classmates does not equal to being friends.On the other hand, neither does this mean being enemies. Self-preservation, yourself before the other. 🕷 Factions, this element is played perfectly by the author. Humans, elves, demons, monsters... it all flares up the world building. Betrayals and schemes, cooperation and vengeance. Along with the students, their homeroom teacher gets reincarnated as well. She is portrayed as someone who tries to gather and protect them, doing anything to avoid watching them fight each other. 🕷 Main Character. Shiraori definitely has the hots for me to rank her high on her design. That's not it, the beginning arcs are entertained by the lively dialogue between Kumoko and herself. I adore her. She will remain somewhat mysterious as the books loosen up the focus on her. The author's literature is flawless, and official translations are worth spending for. Tsukasa Kiryuu's colorful art adds flavor to the read. Character designs and lore remain two of the finest elements. Although the world building isn't the most unique I enjoy the geographical relationships between various societies. The spidersekai fanbase is a good commmunity.

Up untill the very end of the series it was an absolute 10/10 to me. I liked the way the story was structured, how complex it got with time without turning boring. In my opinion, characters were nicely written, had their actual personalities rather than being common tropes that can be named with one word. I can absolutely recommend this book to everybody who likes this genre. Ending however was really bad. For some reason everything happened faster than usual by the end of the series, it felt rushed a bit. Also I'm really dissatisfied with epilogue. It was really simple, to the point oflacking minimum required details to give a sense of closure. Sure I'd love to see some short stories later down the line, but with ending like this this it will be necessary to get an actual conclusion to this beautiful mess of a story.

I adore Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? (KumoDesu), though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I enjoy it so much. At the start, it was the inhuman protagonist struggling to survive that kept me going. Then you learn that there’s more to the world than meets the eye, and that the weird things that are happening are there for good reasons. Then the story shifts, and it’s the diverse cast of characters with interesting interpersonal relationships and conflicts that drove my engagement. In this way and others, there are multiple disparate arcs in KumoDesu that naturally lead into each other, and that might be thething I enjoy most about this story. I also enjoy the characters and the worldbuilding, and most of the story. Read more about those below! KumoDesu has a large, diverse cast of interesting, multi-faceted characters. And if you’ve read the synopsis, that may come as a surprise. But it’s true! One of the coolest things about the story is how many chapters are told from alternate perspectives, which all give different insights into the world and the people in it. On top of that, there’s a wide variety of character interactions throughout the story, from funny to serious to slice-of-life. These people feel realistic and grounded despite the fantasy setting, although it would be misleading to imply that the setting isn’t also realistic and grounded. Because it is both of those things. Not that magic is at all realistic or anything; just that everything about the setting makes sense, given the initial assumption that magic exists. You probably won’t believe me when you start reading. The initial arc has “LitRPG” written all over it, after all. But some of the best parts of the story for me were when things clicked together, and I was like, “holy crap that makes sense!” This happened a lot, and I loved it. I'd be happy to provide concrete examples here, but almost anything I could provide would spoil a lot; you'll just have to trust me. KumoDesu’s world is thought-through and carefully put together, and that’s great. The story, as it happens, is similarly well-constructed, despite a few pitfalls. The plot is driven largely by the world and the characters, and as such, events feel natural when they unfold. Because part of the plot is a world mystery, some of this is not evident until later, and this is compounded by the fact that some side stories are set at different points in time. I enjoy the story greatly despite and often because of this. However, some story beats won’t tickle everyone’s fancy—they differ wildly in the long run. If you’re only in it for the action-packed first arc, some of the later bits won’t satisfy; and if you don’t care for that first bit, you aren’t even going to know about the very different later arcs. An even bigger pain point might be the abrupt ending. The web novel's ending was revised a bit in the light novel to make it more palatable, but this also increased the pace of the already brisk finale. I like a good denouement, so this was disappointing, but at least there is an epilogue. Everything so far has been mostly praise, so let’s take a minute to talk about the prose. While grammar throughout KumoDesu is nearly impeccable, the style doesn’t always come across very flatteringly. From reading the WN, I understood that the main character has a habit of repeating things in a more incredulous tone. Something like, “Oh, I’m screwed. [two line-breaks] I’m screwed!” In the LN, it doesn’t always come across this way, and will sometimes manifest as a second paragraph simply rephrasing the previous paragraph. This does make some sense, because the main character is also a very careful thinker, and doesn’t make important decisions lightly. But it can give some portions of writing a slower feel than they perhaps should have. There are a few other quirks, which I’m certain are artifacts of translation from Japanese to English, and it’s hard to fault them for this. A lot of the translation is very good, and it’s not very noticeable at all except for the character names, some bits of culture, and pop-culture references being obviously Japanese. I only found a few translation errors, and only for minor skill names getting mixed up or translated differently in different spots. The cast and world are great, the story is good, and the writing is ok. What else even is there in a book? The illustrations? They’re lovely! I highly recommend checking out some version of Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? if it sounds at all interesting. The LN is good, the WN is free, the manga has more pictures, and the anime has color and sound. (Maybe don’t watch the anime unless you are allergic to paper or something, though. If you need music, my soundtrack for KumoDesu is Neighborhoods by Blink-182.)