A young girl awakens inside some sort of enclosure. Pushing her way out, she discovers that she’s not only been reborn in another world, but as another spieces: one among hundreds of baby spiders. And as she also soon discovers, it’s a dangerous, spider-eat-spider world out there. But armed with video game knowledge, she swears that she’ll survive, gaining the skills she needs to grow and strengthen herself. Meanwhile, in apparently another part of this world, young noble students prepare to attend some prestigious academy, with connections to reincarnation themselves.
Well this first episode was every bit as strange as the premise indicates. And it was a struggle for me to get through at first, as it features quite a bit of violence (somewhat gory and somewhat cartoony) and the obvious grostesqueness of the spiders. The series quite obviously finds much of its tone in all this oddness, emphasized further by the upbeat and offbeat personality of the protagonist. Your mileage will vary on the spider protagonist and Aoi Yuki’s voicing of her, which was fun but also a bit grating, and this coming from a fan of Yuki’s (though I will say that I found her singing in the ED to be verging on genius). But that which has me considering returning for future episodes is the connection between the spider and the greater world; particularly intriguing is what role reincarnation plays in this universe, as the residents here seem to employ it within the world, not as a means to be “isekai’d” into it, and that’s even more interesting to me than having the season’s most unusual leading character.
So I’m a Spider, So What? can be streamed through Crunchyroll.
Regarding reincarnation – I got the impression that these were her classmates regrouping as best they could. I feel a bit sorry for the people they “replaced” who were presumably living their lives until an isekai high schooler replaced them.
I think you’re right, and their teacher as well? If so, it’s a fascinating plot point.
As a light novel reader I can say that the student and the teacher did not take over the bodies of innocents, they were all reborn as babies with full knowledge of their previous lives and grew up in the new world. This is stated in the first human chapter in book 1 so I do not consider it spoiler material. The anime has skipped a few chapters of the humans growing up to get to the point where their story line starts to get interesting so this information was not included.
Maybe they’ll fill us in during the next episode…
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