#'cause going 'Oh this is from some vague unnamed african religion' and then making it evil leaves a bad taste in my mouth

[canary-song]

This started off quite simple, and it started out with wanting a non-evil portrayel of the Spider God. It quickly became far too long for me to put fully succinctly.

But it goes something like this:

You are a God of stories. Perhaps you weave them, perhaps you have taken them from others, perhaps you simply annotate in the margins of pre-existent ones. What matters most is that this is how you live - telling tales.

You yourself are a story, in this sense, one believed and beloved. It is through being cherished that you preside over humanity, and through this you grow close to its storytellers. Humanity, and its writers, are your anchor. The more compelling a story, the more your chance of survival.

And then, like any aged tale, you are forgotten. You struggle to remain in the consciousness of the dwindling number that aknowledge you. You exist soley, desperately, in the artifacts they once gifted you. Others come and leave. Others from further prey on the needy, the hungry. Your likeness is sold to the nearest collector for a family's dinner. You can't fault them.

This happens in a cycle, and with every hand you pass between, more of you is lost - names go easy, and easier still, oral tradition. Then its location, context, years lost to the murk of black market archeological sales.

You land in the hands of Norman Osborn's people. You are starving, tired, barely corporeal in the land of the people you once loved. You are an ocean from your inception, in both distance, years, and memory.

And they have the gall to drop you.

With what little you have left, but yet sheer scraps, you manifest and strike out in vengeance. This is not to help you, nor is it strategic - you're furious, betrayed by the slow bleed-out death of culture and the long dream of imperialism. You sink your teeth in. You make quick work of the pawns of one in a long line of fools.

This will not save you.

But in this process, by the whims of this narrative even you are bound to, you chance upon someone else. What is special isn't necessarily who he is, so much as it is what surrounds him. He's motivated, so much that its eating him alive, towards goals you recognize are completely impossible. His idealism will kill him.

But first he will live. And he will live longer than perhaps he would expect - because this story is stubborn, as are you.

It might just be what you need.

And after all, what's more compelling this era than a tragedy?