Okay, look: Spider-Man is Anansi, you fucking dork. It says it right there: The Amazing Adventures of This Hybrid Freak. Some trickster. All the quips, the double identities, the lies. Why do you think all his enemies are animals, too? He’s there to gloat. Again and again, Anansi defeats the Rhino, the Vulture, the Chameleon. It’s the old myths regurgitated, stripped of all their creativity, simplified in morality. He just went from being voices to pictures. We decided to give him a body, because of course the bastard knows how to modernize.
Today, Spider-Man is fucking Christ. Who does every little kid wanna be now? Not their divine prefiguring, but a pajamaed teenager with fucking cum-spitters on his wrists. His image is everywhere. The new Eucharist isn’t the food but the lunch pail it’s in. And now actual adults are giving their lives for this freak. Billions of dollars at the movies. Billions of hours on YouTube. And fanart – have you seen the fanart? They call them Spider-sonas, people actually subordinating themselves to Spider-Man, hiding their own faces behind Anansi’s mask. And the stark colors, the red and blue, the big blank curved eyes – that’s what it is, a traditional African mask. Spiders don’t look like that, obviously, but it’s only their essence that the masks represent. This kid’s not just any spider. He’s an ancient god. And he thrives even without that name of Anansi, for now he’s throttled Spider and Man, the generic elevated to something singular. Kids today fucking think a fireman is a superhero that shoots flames from his dick.
It was God’s technique, too. Build up this exclusive tetragrammaton and then claim “god” for yourself. But now it’s stale, because it isn’t a name, and it’s not relatable. In fact, here’s how I know that God is, for all intents and purposes, dead: he never made a fucking sequel. He never said, “What if Jesus was a woman?” “What if Jesus was black?” “What if Jesus was anime?” “What if – what if Jesus died instead of Lazarus, so Lazarus became the new Christ, except he didn’t have the power of resurrection, but he does have a wingsuit?” We need an image, and we need iteration. That’s how you get people interested. That’s how you meet them at their culture. Make so many stories that every story is a Jesus story. Make him ubiquitous. Make Jesus movies, make Jesus videogames – if you really feel like Christ, then maybe you can do it without needing the bracelet to remind you. The bracelet’s a gimmick – Anansi actually gets millions of kids to look like himself. Even if it’s just one day a year. Especially if it’s one day a year, a day whose spoils last for months, a day everyone spends weeks preparing for. They channel Spider-Man and thank him for their harvests. God just can’t compete. Obviously, God has a bad fucking agent.
God’s done shit in the past ten years. But look at Spider-Man. Scientists invented the multiverse so Spider-Men could populate them. That’s not even a joke – our education system is so severely spaghetti-dicked that people’s first and freakishly enough only exposure to radiation or quantum physics or space travel or the fucking multiverse is in these baby-shit “Learn to Read with Pictures!” superhero shit. And so even if they do read about it, it’s because Aunt Spider-Man told them to. No matter how much they end up learning, they will never not associate it with whatever Spider-Man movie first dared to utter “multi-verse” as if it were the secret name of God. And of course it’s hyphenated then, “multi-verse,” because it’s new and they’re just getting accustomed. Multi-verse – just like an epic poem; just like folklore. And now Anansi gets to decide the illustration. Because it’s all done in illustrations.
So he presents his model, and now everyone conceives of this whole shit as a web, and Anansi is in the popular mind sovereign over every universe. The propaganda is real if we believe it – we’re doing all the work for him. And now this tiny trickster doesn’t even need to hide. He doesn’t need to shapeshift anymore because he has eight eyes, flicking between as many dimensions per second. If Anansi for some godfuck reason wants to be a pig, then just jump over. It’s perfectly convincing, and with a perfect escape. No more risks or complications. No more getting caught. There’s a Spider-Man comic that says our world – our real fucking life – is just one of the timelines in the Marvel world, some sad universe that never got a Spider-Man, where any of the thousand Peter Parkers on our census could’ve been the lucky one, if only we had the spider. And all you need is one elementary schooler to read that and wonder, just to themselves, if that could be true. Because there are infinite dimensions, right? So maybe, somewhere out there, Spider-Man is real. And now Anansi’s got his grip in you.
Look, Spider-Man wasn’t “invented” in 1963, or if he was, he’d already been hijacked by the time he took the mask off. Anansi wasn’t invented. He just was, and is, and he’s gonna fucking be to come. But then what’s the point? Why’s he colonizing the minds of all our children and man-children? He’s not gonna mobilize them. He’s not gonna be any more active than that other God. My theory: It’s just entertainment. Pure pleasure. He likes to know he can do it. It’s just as shallow as us – we follow Spider-Man because we want the power fantasy, and he usurps them to make the fantasy reality. The more you occupy yourself with this worship of Anansi, the happier he is. But if you think it’s all fine and fun, then I guess you have no right to condemn him. It’s all just noise, after all.
At least the old myths were original.
