real talk why do so many fantasy universes think giant spiders are necessary
The sad part is there’s a decent chance a large proportion of them can be blamed on one spider.
The tarantula that bit JRR Tolkien as a child.
He swore he didn’t have a spider phobia and the experience had nothing to do with the man-eating giant spiders in The Hobbit, the even more giant and even more man-eating spider in Lord of the Rings, or the unholy eldritch spider from outside creation that plunged the world into darkness and made literal Satan scream like a little kid in the Silmarillion. Very few people believe him.
Given LotR’s influence in the fantasy genre, there is a high probability that tarantula is the progenitor of even more fictional spiders than Ungoliant was.
wow fuck that one tarantula
“fantasy universes have too many spiders” factoid actually just statistical error. Georgs Spider, who bit JRR Tolkein & is to blame for menacing over 10,000 fantasy universes, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
OK, but, tbf, the fear of spiders is one of the very few things that is credibly believed to be genetic memory.
Genetic memory here doesn’t mean ‘we all have a literal memory buried deep within our psychology of some incident that affected a distant ancestor’, it means that spiders were enough of a danger to enough of our ancestors that certain shapes and movement incite an instant fight-or-flight reaction, because the people who reacted that way tended to live more than those who didn’t.
I currently live in a country where no native spiders can kill me or even make me sick. Most of them can’t even bite me. But most of the world is not like the UK in that regard. Africa is not like the UK in that regard. Anywhere with a rain forest is *really* not like the UK in that regard.
A lot of our ancestors directly benefited from finding spiders really fucking scary and being hyper-aware of their movements and shapes.
Hence: a fuck of a lot of people are terrified of spiders who have no extant reason to be.
Tolkien had a legitimate fear of spiders and that plausibly influenced his writing about them. That they caught on so strikingly in the imagination of fantasy readers is not solely down to Tolkien, though.
Compare and contrast the number of trolls in computer RPGs and the number of giant spiders.
I’ll help: while there are some trolls, there are a fuck of a lot more spiders. Tolkien wrote memorably about both. Even hobbits, or ‘halflings’ (as they are often called to avoid copyright infringement) haven’t caught on remotely as well as you’d expect if we could blame all this on Tolkien.
I therefore humbly submit that the reason that giant spiders are in so many fantasy universes is that a very large number of people find them inherently terrifying. They are therefore both something that springs easily to mind when a writer wants to scare someone and something that captures the imagination when it is used.
Also: I know it can’t hurt me, but my fear of spiders makes me genetically superior for a different environment, OK?
Snakes, too. There’s definitely a reason why so many people find snakes utterly terrifying. It’s probably more surprising that some people aren’t bothered by snakes.
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