Dance of the Spider Queen

If you haven’t seen The Dance of the Spider Queen, you should totally check it out because by all accounts it’s AMAZING. It’s probably better to wait until you’re old and about to die though, because at the end of it she devours you.

The Spider Queen got her powers from this guy known as The Dance Wizard. His real name was Meltazarg, so you can see why he might want to go by something different. He invented all sorts of dance spells during his life, including Bug Dance, which makes all the bugs in your house do a really cool dance that mesmerizes people, and Dance-a-holic, which is a spell that makes people feel drunker the longer they dance and saves you a ton of money if you go out to clubs and party a lot.

He was actually trying to create a spider-specific version of Bug Dance when things went wrong. The plan was to make it work on all nearby spiders, but he figured he should test it on just one first to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. The problem was that he did all the algebra wrong and he used the multi-spider version on just one spider. The dance she did was so mesmerizing that it even worked on Meltazarg. In fact, he was out of it for days. Which is good because he didn’t feel a thing the whole time the spider was eating him. I know this sounds rough, but the spell wore off of her long before it wore off him and all that dancing made her super hungry. Besides, she’s a spider, so you can’t really blame her.

Anyway, it took her several weeks to finish eating Meltazarg, and by the end of it she was totally bloated and swore she’d never eat another wizard again. Of course, we all know how that goes, when you’re like, “Oof, that was tooooo many lemon bars. I’m never touching those things again as long as I live.” And then two days later, you turn to your sister and go, “Hey, are there any of those lemon bars left?”

Yeah, so the spider started going around hypnotizing people with her sweet dance moves, and then she’d eat them and move on to the next house. Hey, guess what? If you spend all your time either eating or dancing, you develop some pretty swole-ass leg muscles. And she had eight of them. She quickly became the biggest, buffest spider in the whole kingdom, which is scary enough, but when you add in that she also knew a dance that would hypnotize a room full of people, it gets into the “Holy shit, this is like that time in Hellraiser II: Hellbound where Pinhead says, ‘You’re suffering will be legendary even in Hell,’ and dear god that sounds really not fun! What would that even look like?” territory.

Anyway, people took to calling her “The Spider Queen,” mainly because it seemed like an appropriate name, but also maybe they were hoping if they were super deferential she might spare them. I’ll let you guess exactly how often that worked. Oh, and also she ate a queen from a minor kingdom once and started wearing the crown, so that might have also been part of it.

Obviously, every now and again some knight would go on a crusade and try and slay her, but none of them ever came back except one guy who said he threw his sword and chopped her head off before she could start her dance and her acidic spider juices melted the blade, but it turned out he was a liar who dropped his sword in a lake when he saw a baby goblin who was foraging for berries.

Anyway, there’s still like a bajillion dollar bounty on The Spider Queen, if you want to try and collect it. I mean, I personally don’t recommend it, but I’m not your mom, so do what you want.