Spiders

I never considered that I had an issue with spiders. I would scoff at people who couldn’t shoo a spider out of the house or couldn’t kill/remove a spider. It’s just a household pest like flies or silverfish. I’ve been the primary spider killer in my house (I also remove dead and partially consumed rodents that the dog or cat dragged in) with my kids asking me to rid the offending spider from their view. Note: next time I will tell the kids to kill the spider themselves.

I do have an issue with hollywood/fantasy spiders as in Harry Potter, LOTR, and The Hobbit. I can not watch the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets scenes with the giant spider Aragog and his kind. I have to close my eyes or leave the room since I have a physical reaction to seeing these unreal arachnids. In The Lord of the Rings, I have the same loathing of Shelob, the giant spider menaces Frodo.

Watching The Hobbit, the attack of the Milkwood Forest spiders on Bilbo and his companions completely unnerved me. I did reflect back when I was 12 reading the Hobbit for the first time and remember that these Great Spiders did make an impression so many years ago. I wonder if this was the beginning of my fictional spider aversion.

Oh, and I hated the 1990 movie Arachnophobia too, spending much of the movie with my hands in front of my eyes.

I suppose there is some evolutionary support for spider aversion since some are poisonous and it’s best to leave them alone. Real spiders are fine for me; fictional sentient spiders, not so much.

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