The Spiders from Mars

[anonymous]

So @Kenshin9977 found the following in the game files of Zetsubou no Shima:

 

 

As you can see, the Spiders are being called "Spiders from Mars", and whenever the Red Planet is mentioned in the game, CoDZ is fascinated. It started a discussion on Discord with @Dizzie Bonkers and @ProjectKMR raising some interesting points about Lovecraftian connections as well. All those neat things included, I felt like transcribing it down into a single post here on the forums. So, enjoy!

 

So aparently, Lovecraft's stories include paranormal giant spiders: Atlach-Nacha and the Spiders of Leng. @ProjectKMR mentioned that the Spiders of Leng are only briefly mentioned, and to his knowledge were never seen again by H.P. Lovecraft later. Atlach-Nacha, on the other hand, was created long after Lovecraft passed away. So while they are Lovecraftian in nature, and yes they may be in the mythos, Lovecraft himself had nothing to do with Atlach-Nacha. The fact the Spiders are little to not mentioned by Lovecraft himself, however, does not mean that they couldn't have inspired the developers of Zetsubou. Essentially the creatures live in the Lovecraft universe, but are just not worked out by H.P. Lovecraft himself. The same can be said about for example the World Eater, the likely inspiration for the giant monster in the sky of Shadows of Evil: This extra-dimensional eldritch entity that consumes dimensions even originates from the Marvel Universe.

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"There were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng's almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of the neighbouring vales." 

~ H.P. Lovecraft , The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Spiders of Leng are monsters at the service of Atlach-Nacha (coming back at that fella later) that populated the Plateau of Leng, which is described as a Dimensional Anomaly, a place where different realities converge, and its precise location cannot be pinned down. This could relate to Zetsubou in two ways: Either it is about the fact the Spiders occur in a fracture, or it has something to do with the Dreamlands. You see, the Plateau of Leng seems to be located both on Earth and in the Dreamlands, an alternative realm that accessible via underground tunnels (sounds very much Agartha/Aether-like, doesn't it?). Also, regarding Zetsubou is R'lyeh, Cthulu's lair, it might be fair to say the location of Pohnpei is at least extraordinary, with a connection to the realm beyond. Would that mean the Spiders have some sort of connection with the Vril-Ya? We'll get there in a minute.

 

So Atlach, also called the Spider God, she is the mother of the Spiders of Leng. It came from Saturn with Tsathoggua, a eldritch god (Apothicon?). It dwells in a cave system beneath Mount Voormithadreth, in Hyperborea. There, it spins a great web, forming a great bridge between the Dreamlands and Earth. Also note that she was much larger than the Spiders of Leng.

"Evil rises" it says. We know that at a certain point, an Apothicon came to Pohnpei. Could this represend Tsathoggua, the entity that took the Mother Spider to the island? That she birthed the other spiders makes sense, but we always thought the idea that Division 9 created the Mother Spider themselves. However, consider this: Why is the Mother Spider trapped in the caverns beneath the island, not used as a weapon but merely experimented upon, leading to the creation of Widow's Wine. Why does it appear Division 9 barely could control the Spiders? There is this alarm that goes off when "the spiders of Mars" arrive, could this perhaps be when a bridge between the Dreamlands and Earth is temporary formed, allowing the spiders to invade?

So could the big spider be Atlach-Nacha, coming with the arrival of the Apothicons? But how about the reference to Mars? First I should notice that the 'Spiders of Mars' is a direct easter egg reference to 'War of the Worlds', where the warmachines of the extraterrestials were called the Spiders of Mars. In our Zombieverse, however, we were introduced to the Vril-Ya, an alien faction that at some point inhabited Mars. We also have the Mars references in Shangri-La and Tag der Toten, so I think it is safe to say there is some link between Mars and the (proto-)Keepers or Apothicons. It is also stated that Atlach-Nacha inhabits the region Hyperborea, which used to be a Vril-Ya city as well. Whilst it usually is associated with an Arctic region (Hyper=far, Borea=north), it could be that due to continental drift this location moved to the Pacific Ocean, where Nan Madol are the renmants of the extraterrestial stronghold.

 

Are the Spiders really coming from Mars? Consider this thread when you play Zetsubou next time  Also, if you wanna know more about the ties between Zetsubou and real mythology, I recommend this thread.

[RichKiller]

Searching "Spiders from Mars" lead you to a band named "The spiders from Mars":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spiders_from_Mars

I think this part is interesting particular, given all the UFO references and so:

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The name came from the UFO sighting on 27 October 1954, where a stadium crowd thought they had witnessed Martian spacecraft, which turned out to be migrating spiders, and not from the Martian areographic features often labelled as 'spiders' and 'baby spiders.'