Review: SO I'M A SPIDER, SO WHAT?

With so many modern fantasy manga about random guys falling/reincarnating/etc. into other worlds, I guess it was inevitable that someone would write a story about a GIRL doing much the same.  So what does modern shojo isekai look like?

SO I'M A SPIDER, SO WHAT? (Kumo desu ga, Nani ka?), based on the original story by Okina Bab and character designs by Tsukasa Kiryu, with art by Asahiro Kakashi.  First published in 2015 and first published in North America in 2017.

PLOT:

All she can remember was drifting to sleep during class, only to be consumed in a dark wave of pixel, a lot of pain, and then...nothing.  The nameless girl emerges from the darkness only to discover she has been reborn as a lowly cave spider with only the skill to appraise her surroundings?  Now it's a race for her to master her new skills while surviving deadly creatures and humans alike.

STORY:

Well, it's nice to see an isekai story that rips off one of the few good examples of the genre!  While it's still running very much with the video-game-world conceit that so many of these stories use, this book clearly takes a lot of cues from That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime.  That's obvious not just in the choice to reincarnate the protagonist as an inhuman creature, but also with the emphasis on our unnamed heroine's internal monologue and using her skills to heighten her senses and understand her world.  She may not have a name, but there is some sense of character to her.  She shows a determination to live, as well as a quick-thinking mind that's able to make the most of her limited skills and occasionally crack a metatextual joke.

That being said, there are some downsides to this approach.  This first volume feels incredibly repetitive, as it mostly entails the girl-turned-spider exploring, eating various creatures, and fiddling with her skills and stats. She never even so much as leaves the cave, and after a while it feels like Baba was just kind of spinning their authorial wheels until they had a clearer vision of where the story was going.  There's also way too much emphasis on watching her stats increase, as the whole thing comes off like one long session of level grinding.  It's an approach that probably works fine in print, but should have been condensed a lot more for the sake of a manga.

ART:

Since we never leave the cave and barely see any people, most of the story's visuals have to be carried by the protagonist and her new arachnid form.  At least it's a cute one, even it's basically Alphonse Elric's face slapped upon a dog-sized spider.  Still, Kakashi gets a lot of mileage out of her expressions and poses, making the most of her extra arms for emphasis.  The animal designs are not particularly inspired, being only slightly fanciful and larger version of real-world creatures like frogs, centipedes, and snakes.  The battles aren't particularly inspired visually, even if the protagonists makes the most of dashes, webbing, and biting.  Again, I feel like this is a story that works better in print than in manga form because it's not visually dynamic enough to truly merit one.

RATING:


So I'm a Spider, So What? is a disappointment.  Cute faces can't make up for too much grinding and not enough progress or spectacle.  Maybe someday we'll get the good female-led isekai story we deserve, but this is not it.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 5 volumes available.  All 5 have been published and are currently in print.