[SPOILERS] So, I am a Spider Light Novel Just ended. What are everyone's thoughts?
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So, I am a Spider just ended and boy am I a bit let down. The ending was very anticlimactic.
I just felt oh I don't know like all thr tension in thr sails was let out.
What did everyone else think.
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Yeah, it felt pretty unsatisfactory.
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I thought it was going fine until it just ended. I didn't mind White solving the final battle (I'm not sure whether I should be annoyed the sword didn't do that much after all its build up or glad Shun wasn't able to Divine Protection his way into solving everything), but the way everyone got teleported out and surprise, the end was not satisfying at all.
White being stuck with D also wasn't great, she literally says "How come I get stuck with the bad ending?" and I'm agreeing with her. She just figured out a volume ago that she was friends with Sophia et al., now she's not seeing them for at least a very long time (how long-lived are they without the system?), and probably not while Ariel lives. Like, D was never going to let her stay away permanently, but they're actually immortal, White deserves some time to relax.
And of course, the copy-pasted two sentence epilogues chapter just kind of felt like an insult. If you don't care enough to write a proper epilogue for these characters, please just don't write them. I've been rereading the series after finishing it, and noted that the author said Ronandt's part in volume 5 was cut from the WN to the LN due to page count limits. All the spider volumes have been on the shorter side for LNs, but if proper epilogues were cut because the editor/publisher/whoever said it was too long, I'd be pretty annoyed. Especially since I heard the extra EX volumes, unlikely to be translated, have at least some epilogue-style chapters.
I was prepared for much worse given what I had heard, and the ending doesn't ruin the series or anything. It's fine enough in concept, but the execution was just not there at all.
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I agree that it felt a little rushed. I don't think it was someone dropping the door on the author, though; I think they just ran out of ideas and decided to close it rather than keep squeezing a stone.
White ending up with D was inevitable. I would've called bullshit if she didn't, really. The LN's ending was already pretty saccharine compared to the WN's (which is a good thing; I'm glad we didn't get the WN's ending), but White successfully escaping D would have made me go, "Wait, this is a fake-out, right? She's gonna' wake up from this dream and it'll turn out she never got away after all, and also that everyone we like is dead."
Kumoko/White was never allowed to just revel in her power for very long, because she was always being compared to something that could kill her. This is what set Spider apart from other power-fantasy isekais for me. In Abilities Average for example, the space between when we first see Elder Dragons to when Mile starts trouncing them is tiny, and most of the time she's completely uncontested. In Spider, the space between when Kumoko defeats Araba and when Mother starts moving to kill her is tiny, and most of the time she's completely running for her life.
D was the final bigger fish. If the story had gone on longer, we could have seen her run away from D, but my guess is that the author thought about expanding the setting to encompass a struggle between White and D, but that would mean bringing in weird multiverse stuff and also rotating out character who isn't a god, and decided that they didn't have enough material to make the story stay good after doing that. White overcoming or permanently escaping from D on her first try wouldn't make sense, so we get a bit of a downer ending, where everyone gets a happy ending except our protagonist.
At least she didn't end up in a terrarium this time (unlike in the WN).
I would have loved to see a bigger epilogue, though - like some actual PoV's from people in the post-system world, to see how they handled putting their lives back together. If bigger fish were a constant in Kumoko/White's PoV chapters, the consequences of White were a constant in everyone else's, so it seems incongruous that after the epilogue, I have no idea how the people of the world and their recorded history will remember White.
This was a bit of a downer post, so I guess I'd say I don't like the ending, but I don't feel like it retroactively makes my enjoyment of the series lesser or wasted - so as bummer endings go, it's not half as bad as Mass Effect or Life is Strange.
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It makes me wish the last 2-4 volumes had been planned a bit better, revised from the WN more? But that assumes the WN was already finished by then which probably wasn't true.
Instead of the rushed ending, cut some of the filler out of the earlier volumes to make space for a richer ending and a real epilogue.
I don't hate the ending, it just could have been better.
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Oh good not the only one thinking it rushed a bit.
It kinda felt off over since we caught back up to the present. I’m thinking it may be due to the focus shifting from Kumoko surviving/untangling the web of the plot to save the world from (still kinda surprised Japan has a thing for this) evil elf guy
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I think if the author just included a few extra chapters about epilogue and maybe allowed White to you know stick around with the rest of the cast for a little bit before being swiped off to be with D then it would have been all right. If the climax had been made into two volumes instead of trying to shove everything into one it would have felt more natural.
