Manga-Mania May: Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka?
By waezi2 1 Comments
Reincarnation is a well-known concept. You die, and then you are reborn as something new. Now try and imagine how much it would suck to be reincarnated as something so pathetic, so low on the food chain, something so ugly and loathed as one can get… While still remembering that you used to be a human. Pretty sucky, eh?
That’s the case for Kumoko, the female protagonist of “Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka?” she used to be the nobody teenage girl of her class until she was killed in an explosion and was reborn in a fantasy world as… a spider. Kumoko is small and weak compared to all the other RPG-styled monsters of her new world and the only thing that keeps her from getting eaten is her human intellect and creativity.
“Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka?” is a really, really WEIRD manga. As well as gross as our heroin has to eat and… well, spiders aren’t vegetarians. As Kumoko experience her new world and defends herself form all sorts of monsters, we get to realize how awesome spiders really are. Sure, it helps that the she is drawn cute, a realistic-looking spider would have been a bit hard to root for. But I still think that it takes a special kind of writer to make us want the least liked creature on the planet to succeed.
The artiest did an amazing job. After all, how many people can turn a “EEEEW” creature like a spider into the cutest thing you have ever lied your eyes on?
Seriously, I want THIS as a plush toy:
While traveling through the dungeon, Kumoko meets new creatures that she will have to either run away from or kill. This is no longer the easy life of a high school girl, in order to survive she will have to hunt while exploring this weird dungeon she was born in, and the artiest introduces us to lots of weird creatures, with many of these being redesigned (creepy)versions of animals we know from the real world.
If you want to read about a RPG nerd who now has to do whatever necessary to survive which includes growing a backbone, then this is the manga for you.
That’s one down, 29 to go.
I’m Waezi2, and thanks for wasting time with me.