Name: I'm a Spider, So What? The Complete Series Review
Item: So I'm a Spider, So What?
Rating: 90
Author: Pelouch

Waifra

I'm a Spider, So What? The Complete Series Review · Waifora

Yup all 16 volumes. Spoilers are behind spoiler tags

This is a story about a socially inept spider, a really cool Demon Lord, a generic Isekai Hero, his harem(ofc) and his awesome older brother, an extremely dedicated teacher and a self proclaimed evil God. And that's just the tip of the Iceberg.

It has 4 main threads which I call Main Spider thread, Isekai Hero thread, Demon Lord thread and Teacher or elves thread with 3 main arcs The Beginning arc volumes 1-5, The Apotheosis arc volumes 6-10, and the Sariel Arc volumes 12-16, Volume 11 is a completely different thing which I call catching up with Julius.

Characters
I have to start with the characters otherwise explaining the story would be impossible, the thing is this LN has a wealth of characters so I'm just gonna include the super big shots

Spider: The titular character with a ton of personality, I'm going to call her S for spoiler reasons and also for short, she is what gets the series moving, reading her inner monologue is a treat she's the kind of character that only a God can disturb.

Shun(Schlain): the annoying generic Isekai Hero, he's unfortunately integral to the story, he's sheltered from both lives and is the righteous hero archetype played straight, his one saving grace is that every character around him is at least somewhat interesting while most of them are really interesting, he's brothers with Julius.

Julius: Shun's elder brother and the true Hero in his own right.(His artwork is the one on the banner)

Ariel: The Demon Lord with a turbulent past. I can't say much cause spoilers but she's awesome, she shows up at the end of arc 1.

Sophia: Reincarnated as a Vampire she "sides with the Administrators", she plays important roles in all the arcs.

Admin D: The mysterious self proclaimed evil God.

Potimas and Oka: The leader of the elves and his Daughter, Oka is a reincarnated teacher who wants to save her students.

Kuro or Güile: An admin subordinate to D, he plays a role towards the end so can't say much about him

Anyway those are the major players most characters are treated well and have satisfactory arcs even the minor ones, except for maybe Oka who kinda fizzles out in the end in favor of everyone least favorite hero Shun who loves to hog the spotlight even a tricky character like D is well developed

Story
A freak accident happened in a classroom in Japan and as a result everyone got Isekai'd + Tensei'd, unfortunately for our MC she drew the short end of the stick and got reincarnated as a really weak baby monster spider in the bottom level of the most dangerous labyrinth in the world, fortunately this world is fairly gamelike and she's gonna use that to survive.

So like I mentioned before this series has 3 arcs The Beginning or the Elroe Labyrinth arc which is half S figuring out the Isekai world game like system to survive and escape and half setup for Shun and Oka and some other reincarnations, plus a bunch of foreshadowing it's honestly kinda painful because Shun is the pov most of the time, the timeline is a bit messy and the setup can get annoying but it definitely 100% pays off.

In the second arc Apotheosis we ditch Shun (good riddance) and we drop all pretenses of gamelike elements and focus on S, the Demon Lord Ariel and their allies in a trip to demon lands as we learn a bunch of truths about the world, this arc is mostly through S perspective. I said it ends on volume 10 but the actual cutoff point is:

Spoiler, click to view

Shiro's(spider MC) chat face to face with D and Shiro telling Ariel that her plan to save the world is pointless.

Lastly the third arc Sariel, well explaining this arc is all spoilers.

Spoiler, click to view

Shiro explains to Ariel the truth of the world so they shift focus to wipe out the elves to save Oka and thus the reincarnations on her behalf and Saving Sariel from the system.

In this arc S takes a much more background role than ever before as the author delivers payoff after payoff for all the setup and we focus on basically everyone else.

So the story is great but the way of writing is pretty weird, the author is often self deprecating because the main character is a spider but my favorite LN has the MC as a bear and there's another good one with the MC as a sword so there's nothing to be ashamed of, imo the human MC Shun is the problem the payoff to his story is great but the character himself is not that good, to rub salt in the wound there was a perfectly good substitute available in the form of Julius but alas.

Volume 11 is also a big irregularity since it's kinda pointless:

Spoiler, click to view

I'm all for catching up with Julius but he's been essentially dead since volume 4 so it's hard to get invested basically volume 11 is about 90% side stories, this series has a tendency to re-tell the same events from multiple povs so that makes volume 11 somewhat redundant too, the whole Sariel business was also a bit of a dud for me, I was in the same boat as Shiro when I say that I only cared about Sariel because Ariel did.

I also have a few gripes about the ending:

Spoiler, click to view

The fact that D set everything up to mess up with Shiro big time only to ditch everything by telling Oka and Company how to win by facing her as the final boss was tbh underwhelming, now is my personal theory that D got fed up with everything and just wanted to end the series to go play with Shiro but it remains that the last volume has a distinct Shiro deficit she even cries cause she was forced to forfeit her battle against Kuro because of D even though she was totally gonna win.

Art
It's great, the character designs are always on point, is not that big of a deal for a LN but it contributes a lot to the atmosphere and world.

Closing thoughts
I find impressive that despite going without main girl S for volumes at a time, having an irregular writing format and having a garbage main(ish) character like Shun the story is still great and totally worth reading, the humor is great too, mostly thanks to S, in fact there's a joke that's set up in volume 5 only to be paid off in volume 13, that's some real dedication, there's also some mysteries here and there and it's all really well written like the transition from gamelike rpg Isekai to a more conventional type of story in the second arc is way smoother than it has any right to be. If you like spiders, rpg elements and/or multiple story threads or really because Kumoko(our favorite spider MC) is awesome give this a shot it's real good.