#die spinne

... Und die flüsternden Puppen. Oder: Der Auftritt der Spinne.

Atelier d’Ora – Benda

illustration for Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel “Die Spinne”, 1920s

© Nachlass Madame d’Ora, Musem für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

The Narrator (The Stanley Parable) "He literally controls the whole game, while the player is technically in control of Stanley, the narrator does have control of the world around him. He actively manipulates Stanley's feelings and surrounding to get what he wants. He makes a fake wife for Stanley to play with his emotions, he gets angry and spiteful when he clicks the button to turn on the mind-control facility so he blows it up while giving Stanley the illusion he can stop it just to play with him. He also wants to hear how he's the best and his game is the best in the game causing to him to suffer in the skip-button ending. While he's not fully connected to spiders there is a ending where he's connected to tape-recorders and makes it look like they are just him to play and manipulate Stanley more. There is also a bit of the dramatic irony that is the fact he's also trapped in the game which is funny."

Clarimonda (The Spider) ""Die Spinne" reads like a Web statement, and like a statement it can be hard to parse what's really happening from the perspective of someone who is actively being mind-controlled. As such, who or indeed what Clarimonda is is extremely ambiguous. We know that, at the beginning of the story, she had already mind-controlled three people into hanging themselves from the same window in the same hotel room on three successive Fridays, and that a spider was found on or near all the bodies.

When the narrator moves into the room in order to investigate, she appears to him as a pretty woman in the flat across the street and slowly takes control of him. He compulsively watches her through the window and imitates her actions, believing at first that she is imitating his as a kind of Simon-Says-like game. Over time he realizes what's really happening to him and goes into great detail about his helpless terror. At one point he calls for help in a moment of lucidity, and afterward she makes him cut the telephone cord. His account concludes with him writing down that he has imitated her in the tying of a noose and is trying to focus on writing because he knows what will happen the next time he looks at her."

Sheev Palpatine (Star Wars) "Darth Sidious led a double life as the kindly Senator Sheev Palpatine from Naboo, masterminded his rise to Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the dissolution of the Galactic Republic after a millennium and the establishment of a new Galactic Empire, clandestinely ruled by the Sith, with himself as its tyrannical, fear-mongering ruler. His grand plan began with a proxy conflict on Naboo that he helped engineer, while also pulling the strings to develop a clone army for the Jedi in the conflict in the years to come. Over time, he would help initiate a secessionist crisis that would require the Jedi to go to war alongside this clone army, then use the clones to wipe out the Jedi and the Separatists to secure control of the galaxy. When Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star, he began to seek to corrupt Darth Vader's son to be his new apprentice. From coordinating and eventually betraying the Trade Federation as they attack Naboo as an excuse to replace the incompetent Valorum as Chancellor, to setting up the various trade guilds in the Galaxy to take on the Republic as an excuse to access emergency powers, to getting Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader to kill Count Dooku to replace him as his apprentice, and then promising to save his wife from certain death with his knowledge of the Dark Side so he would turn his back on the Jedi, those are just a few of the manipulative things he's done. This guy was running both sides of a galactic war so he could make the Republic accept him as absolute ruler for life, all in the name of his thirst for UNLIMITED POWER."

Clarimonda (The Spider) ""Die Spinne" reads like a Web statement, and like a statement it can be hard to parse what's really happening from the perspective of someone who is actively being mind-controlled. As such, who or indeed what Clarimonda is is extremely ambiguous. We know that, at the beginning of the story, she had already mind-controlled three people into hanging themselves from the same window in the same hotel room on three successive Fridays, and that a spider was found on or near all the bodies.

When the narrator moves into the room in order to investigate, she appears to him as a pretty woman in the flat across the street and slowly takes control of him. He compulsively watches her through the window and imitates her actions, believing at first that she is imitating his as a kind of Simon-Says-like game. Over time he realizes what's really happening to him and goes into great detail about his helpless terror. At one point he calls for help in a moment of lucidity, and afterward she makes him cut the telephone cord. His account concludes with him writing down that he has imitated her in the tying of a noose and is trying to focus on writing because he knows what will happen the next time he looks at her."