Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo

I'd fourble her board, if you know what I mean.

Originally, the tsuchigumo (translated to "earth spider") and their Distaff Counterpart the jorōgumo ("whore spider" or "binding bride") were a term for people who did not show allegiance to the emperor of Japan, describing them as a frumpy people with disproportionately long limbs and living in holes in the ground. As time went on, the satirical caricature would grow more absurd and the racist connotations would be lost to time and soon they became a malevolent monster known for ensnaring humans for mating and food.

These spiders are monstrous in size (as big or bigger than a man), with Oni-like faces (sometimes including Messy Hair), and can take human form to eat travelers. Jorōgumo uses a lure to attract travelers to feed her offspring, and often has the power to allure men with a song not unlike the Sirens of Classical Mythology; other times she may act as a Shapeshifting Lover. Either way, they tend to be a Seductive Spider. Tsuchigumo has a powerful, hairy body, and can also use illusions to keep his webs hidden and make people ill in order to feed on them.

In modern pop culture, they commonly manifest as Spider People, possessing the top half of a human and the lower half of a spider. Whether or not they are monstrous predators who would sooner kill you when your back is turned or if they are just misunderstood, differs.

In modern Japanese, o-tsuchigumo also refers to ground-dwelling tarantulas (which are hairy, sturdy and have large faces), and jorōgumo to a number of species including wasp spiders and golden orb-weavers (which are known for their coloration and impressive webs).

Sub-Trope to Spider People and Youkai. The Seductive Spider will sometimes overlap with this trope, though not all tsuchigumo and jorogumo are all that seductive.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dororo (2019): A jorōgumo appears in Episode 7. After being injured by the protagonist, she disguises herself as a human in order to hide in a nearby village. She is taken in by a young man named Yajiro, and she ends up falling in love with him due to his kindness.
• In Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest, Erza is transformed into one after she's beaten and captured by one of the Arc Villains, and is set loose on the rest of the heroes (some whom were briefly turned into yokai themselves). Fortunately, since Wendy's magic excels at fixing problems like these, Erza's turned back pretty quickly.
• Inuyasha:
  • The Kumogashira are a group of spider yokai.^note Spiders with human heads in the manga, spider-headed humanoids in the anime. Their leader poses as a monk as part of a plan of luring Inuyasha to him and stealing his shards of the Shikon no Tama.
  • The Big Bad Onigumo/Naraku is strongly associated with spiders.
  • One of the demons that works under Orochidayu is a tsuchigumo.
• Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan: Both Tsuchigumo and Jorōgumo appear. The first one is a Blood Knight that defeats Rikuo once, and the other one is a board member of the Nura Clan.
• In One Piece, elite member of the Animal Kingdom Pirates Black Maria is a giantess of a woman who's very beautiful, dresses and has the mannerism of an oiran (courtesan), such as smoking a kiseru, living in quarters designed after a traditional japanese brothel and playing the shamisen with great skill. We later learn that she ate the Spider-Spider Fruit: Model Rosamygale Grauvogeli, allowing her to turn into a gigantic spider-woman hybrid. For bonus points, Rosamygale were ancestors of the Mygalomorph spiders, which includes tarantulas (referred to as Otsuchigumo in Japan).
• Rosario + Vampire
  • Keito is a jorōgumo who is a member of the Public Security Commission, the first member to try and undermine the Newspaper Club because they have a history of defying them. Her true form has her other four appendages coming out of her stomach with a spider-like face. She has a special type of venom who allows her to control those she bites, having enthralled the original presidents of the Classical Literature, Japanese Tea-Ceremony Club and Yaoi Manga Club to be made as an example to the rest of the school.
  • Kumocchi is a tsuchigumo member of a group of robbers who work under the doppelganger Phantom Thief.
• Wasurenagumo: Two female jorōgumos, a mother and a daughter, appear. The mother is a Kaiju-sized jorogumo who appears as a monstrous human woman/spider hybrid. The daughter is tiny and human-looking with an apparent spider-like lower body, which is never seen besides the spider legs.
• A jorōgumo is an Arc Villain in ×××HOLiC, placing a curse on Doumeki after he unthinkingly tears a spider web belonging to one of her subjects that Watanuki gets caught in, causing his eye to be sealed shut by a cobweb. After Watanuki transfers the curse to himself, she steals his eye, which is a source of magical power, and captures the Zashiki Warashi when she tries to retrieve it for Watanuki. Like a lot of the spirits in the series she takes an entirely human form, appearing as an eerily beautiful and sexy woman in a skimpy babydoll and fishnets with long blonde hair and dark black eyes who walks through the air on cobwebs that she summons from nowhere. She also has the ability to extend her fingernails into Femme Fatalons.
• Yokai Girls: Kirue the Jorogumo, who made a habit of seducing men, taking them back home, and then eating them. Yatsuki nearly got the same treatment but thankfully had some outside help.

Comic Books

• In Usagi Yojimbo, two stories deal with such Yokai: one, titled "Gumo", has a village besieged by monstrous giant spiders lead by a Kumo Onna, forcing Usagi and Sasuke to join forces. Another one quotes the famous story of Minamoto-no-Yoritomo and has lord Noriyuki threatened by a Tsuchigumo living in a screendoor animated by a cursed ink set.

Fan Works

• Constellations: A jorōgumo shows up, manipulating and trying to eat Emma Barnes, and is promptly exorcised by some ofuda that Sunny/Ameratsu had had Taylor make in the lead-up to Halloween.
• Webwork: After Jade is transported to the Emptiness, she's taken in by the Jorōgumo Queen, the former ruler (and last of) that species. She serves as Jade's Evil Mentor, while also slowly transforming her into a Jorōgumo as well so that she can take the Queen's place and have the Vessel containing live eggs implanted into her in order to rebirth the species.

Films — Animation

• Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms: A jorōgumo appears in a scene based on the classic myths; she initially presents herself as a human musician playing a harp-like stringed instrument, then reveals herself to be partially a Giant Spider and attacks Hellboy, seeking to devour him.

Films — Live-Action

• Throne of Blood, Kurosawa Akira's adaptation of Macbeth, exchanges Birnam Wood for Spider's Web Forest, possibly invoking these creatures from Japanese folklore.

Literature

• In the Anno Dracula novel 1000 Monsters, yokai are merely a localized and varied subspecies of vampires. After Dracula had been deposed from Victorian England, many vampires go into exile to Japan and the murderous vampire Claire Millinger got eaten from the inside out by a tiny Jorogumo. But rather than dying again what happened was a Fusion Dance where the result was a giant Jorogumo with Claire's head and personality intact.
• Dracopedia: Dracopedia: The Bestiary depicts the Jorogumo as an armored orb weaver spider with an abdomen the size of a human head and decorated with a pattern resembling a woman's face, which is described as the origin of the legend that they transform into beautiful women to seduce prey.
• Eight Million Gods: A jorōgumo appears working for the villain.
• It: Though it may have been entirely unintentional, the eponymous creature of Stephen King's novel has much in common with this particular brand of youkai. Its true form is a gigantic spider, and throughout the story appears in several humanoid shapes, most notably Pennywise the Clown. The balloons are strictly of King's invention, though.
• InCryptid: Umeko in Magic for Nothing is a jorōgumo who has been killing locals who visit the carnival.

Live-Action TV

• Grimm: The spinnetod are implied to have provided the basis for legends of the jorogumo due to the entry on the creature in Aunt Marie's Grimm journal featuring a painting of a man encountering a jorogumo in a way that implies said man was a Grimm encountering a spinnetod. Rather fittingly, the females of the species (who all usually look incredibly attractive while in human form) seduce men so that they can subsequently feed upon their victims (in other words, the standard MO for a jorogumo) for the sake of allowing themselves the ability to shed their skin lest they suffer Rapid Aging.
• Super Sentai: Tsuchigumo appear as Monsters of the Week in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger (named Arachnofiend in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers) and Shuriken Sentai Ninninger (as Tangleweb in Power Rangers Ninja Steel).
• Supernatural: The Arachne seem to take heavy cues from the jorogumo despite being primarily from Crete, consist of both males and females instead of being a One-Gender Race, and looking primarily like humans (without any obvious spider-like physical traits) who have web based powers and venomous bites. They're encountered in season 6, with flashbacks to Sam's time while soulless and hunting with Samuel showing them hunting a female having started hunting prey in midwestern America. Taking note of how said female is interested in men between the ages of 35 and 50 to seemingly feed upon, and how this makes him and Samuel unsuitable prey (with Sam himself being too young while Samuel is too old), Sam tricks the local middle-aged sheriff into acting as unwitting bait so it would take him back to its lair. And upon reaching the lair, Sam and Samuel kill the monster by beheading her before Sam himself then shoots all the men she'd had webbed up in her lair (including the sheriff) in a attempted Mercy Kill due to believing that they were already dying and 'beyond help' (even "thanking" the Sheriff for his 'sacrifice'. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the Arachne had actually been turning her victims into fellow arachne, not feeding upon them. And by the time Sam attempted his ostensible Mercy Kill, the men had all successfully progressed far enough in the turning process to have gained the Arachne resistance to bullets and fire, allowing them all the chance to escape into the wilderness after Sam and Samuel departed, with the now understandably pissed off Sheriff seeking revenge against Sam later on in the 'present day' segments of the episode.

Myths & Religion

• One Japanese tale states that a jorōgumo lives behind the Joren Falls by the city of Izu; the locals avoided this area as a result, but a traveling woodcutter who didn't know of her presence went to her falls to harvest some trees and dropped his favorite axe into the water. As he tried to get it back, a beautiful woman — the jorōgumo — appeared and returned it to him. The man fell in love with her and went to visit her every day, but grew physically weaker as he kept visiting her. The local Buddhist priest eventually caught on to what was going on, accompanied the woodcutter and, when the jorōgumo shot a thread of silk at them from behind the waterfall, repelled it with a sutra. The woodcutter, even after having learned that the woman was in fact a jorōgumo in disguise, wanted to be with her and sought permission to marry her from a tengu who ruled over the yokai of that region. When the tengu denied him, he dove into the waterfall anyway... and was grabbed by the jorōgumo's webs and never seen again.
• The most famous story concerning a Tsuchigumo involves one plagueing the samurai lord Minamoto no Yorimoto, causing him to feel sick and weak. One day he notices a mysterious boy/old monk coming and going from his room and slash at him with his sword, forcing the disguised Tsuchigumo to escape. With the help of his retainers, Yorimoto proceeds to hunt down the spider in his lair and slay him.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: Jorogumos are monsters resembling highly attractive humanoid women with spider legs sprouting from their backs, which they can retract or extend at will. They reproduce by seducing humanoid males, paralyzing them after copulation, laying an egg in their bodies, cocooning them and leaving them helpless and bound until the infant hatches and eats her way out of her father. The campaign setting has a country, Shenmen, ruled by jorogumos, who took over when its government collapsed and monsters overran it.
• Ravenloft: The Red Widow may have been inspired by the jorōgumo; it's a female Giant Spider (appearing like a color-inverted black widow) that can assume the form of a human woman, which seduces men to drink their blood and use them to fertilize and then incubate her eggs.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • A Punny example in the card Jirai Gumo ("Landmine Spider"), which lurks underground and pops out to attack people who pass by.
  • Tsukahagi, the Poisonous Mayakashi is a Zombie-type monster from the Mayakashi Archetype, his design looking similar to a human samurai with eight astral spider-legs behind him. He has a Synchro-monster counterpart called Tsuchigumo, the Poisonous Mayakashi, a spider-taur with a more mechanized armored appearance.

Video Games

• Atlach=Nacha, an ero-game, has a jorōgumo attempting to blend in with human society. She doesn't do very well with men, but meets a very nice girl...
• Ayakashi: Romance Reborn: Kagemaru is a highly attractive male jorougumo.
• In Daily Life With Monster Girl Online, Kuruwa is the member of a sub-species of arachne called the Jorōgumo. She is unique among other arachne as while other species of arachne have a spider's body in-place of legs, Kuruwa has regular human legs with four black and yellow legs sprouting from her back.
• Dark Parables The Final Cinderella 's bonus story has Chi, Shan's stepsister and a spider witch in disguise, as the main antagonist, appearing as a bewitching woman with Spider Limbs emerging from her back and plotting to marry the Prince (Shan's fiancé) after putting a curse on the former, and must be defeated with a Flaming Sword to complete the bonus game. For ulterior points, her hideout is hidden behind a waterfall and "Chi" can mean spider in Chinese.
• Dragon Project have two Jorōgumo-inspired Behemoths in the form of Grinning Ayame and Grinning Yurami as the Fire Soul Sword and Shield and Earth Soul Great Sword Behemoths respectively. Both eyeless spider Geishas carry a parasol that nullifies damage above, and in Yurami's case, she casts a shadowy mist that nullifies all damage until it's removed, preferably with a fast hitting fire weapon/magi.
• The Arachtagon from Dragon Quest XI is a colossal spider monster who dwells under the city of Octagonia and traps the defeated fighters to drain their strength and bestow it to the man responsible for its presence. Design wise, it resembles a realistic-looking spider with a Oni visage, sporting jutting fangs, horns and a scar over his eye.
• Flash of the Blade have a Jorōgumo boss who first appears as a woman playing a shamisen as you enter an abandoned house full of cobwebs. And then she sheds her disguise by popping out gigantic spider-legs from her back. And appropriately enough, she can summon swarms and swarms of Giant Spider enemies at you.
• Legendary: The Box has "Tsuchigumo" (erroneously translated as "Blood Spiders") as enemies, taking the form of red Spider Swarm that will reform unless you find and destroy the Queen spawning them.
• Monster Hunter: Rise: The Rakna-Kadaki is a gigantic spider-like monster that is heavily based on the jorōgumo. The webs on her body are meant to invoke a wedding gown to reference the jorōgumo's name meaning "Binding Bride," and she can spit fire like the youkai she is based on.
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade: A tsuchigumo is fought in a web-filled castle room. He captures Torahime and her soldiers, and is fought alongside his children, who also appear earlier in the dungeon leading to him. A jorogumo, Dayu the Courtesan, is the final boss of the fourth and final DLC, Hell's Where The Heart Is, seducing the deuteragonist Seikichi to lure out and capture the protagonist, Rajyaki.
• Musya has the Tsuchigumo as a recurring enemy type, depicted as a gigantic spider with a skinny human face.
• The Ninja Warriors (1987): One of the mooks is named after the creature.
• Nioh has a whole level set in a ruined castle infested by giant spiders with a Jorōgumo as the boss: in this case, it's a huge, monstrous spider with armored legs, a vulnerable abdoment and a woman's torso where the head should be, with two more legs emerging from the sleeves. It is stated that, rather than a person, she's the manifestation of the spirit of Matsunaga Hisahide's beloved teapot Hiragumo (Whose name means Flat Cloud but, since Kumo can be read as spider, has given pretty much everyone free way to give Matsunaga a spider motif).
• Nioh 2: the second DLC, Darkness in the Capital features a boss fight against the Tsuchigumo, appearing as a massive humanoid with multi-jointed long limbs, spiky spider legs emerging from its back and a head which mixes a skull with a tarantula eyes and chelicerae. Appropriately enough, you also encounter Minamoto Yorimitsu in the same DLC.
• Ōkami: The first boss is based on the jorōgumo (translated as Spider Queen). You later meet the tsuchigumo (Bandit Spiders) as an Optional Boss.
• Onmyōji (2016) features Jorōgumo as a collectible SR-rank shikigami, which takes the form of a giant spider with the upper body of a beautiful woman sprouting up from the middle of its back. She's a Literal Maneater and attacks by sending a Spider Swarm at enemies which can stun them. She sides with the evil god Orochi and is fought as a recurring enemy in chapter 22 of the story.
• Otogi: Myth of Demons and its sequel have Tsuchigumo as recurring enemies, being former human exiles turned into spider monsters, lead by their boss, Chitou. In the second game one of the heroes, Tsuna Watanabe, has a bone to pick with them.
• Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army: Tsuchigumo appears in the intro and as a summonable minion.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War's version of Shelob is basically a jorōgumo, spending most of the game in the form of a beautiful woman. She's implied to prefer her giant spider form, but uses the human form to interact with (and manipulate) the protagonist.
• Sine Mora has a boss named Tsuchigumo. Appropriately enough, it's a huge robot spider that fires out web-like Bullet Hell patterns.
• Spiritual Assassin Taromaru have two classic Yōkai, the Jorōgumo and Tsuchigumo, as two separate bosses, depicted as having a humanoid body with a spider's abdomen.
• Super Paper Mario: Mimi has some characteristics of a jorōgumo: her true form resembles a robotic Giant Spider, but she usually presents herself in less-unnerving, humanoid disguises.
• Touhou Project: Yamame Kurodani from Subterranean Animism is a tsuchigumo with powers over disease. She herself is rather friendly, but her disease powers caused her to be lumped with other hated youkai who live underground.
• The Rewinder has a Jorogumo monster as an Advancing Boss of Doom... and a Hopeless Boss Fight. If she catches you, she'll skewer you with her talons. If you outrun her, she catches you in a cutscene anyway and impales you, but at least in the second outcome your partner will find a way to revive you.
• Yo-kai Watch: Tsuchigumo (called Arachnus in English version) is a rare "Classic" Yo-Kai introduced in Yo-kai Watch 2, while Jorōgumo (called Arachnia in English version) is a Palette Swap of Tsuchigumo. Both are male instead of the traditional female.

Web Original

• In the Monster Girl Encyclopedia, Jorōgumo is a nice and harmless spider girl by day, but turns into a sadistic rapist when alone with her lover by night.

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls: A jorōgumo-like creature named Darlene appears in the Season 2 episode "Roadside Attraction". She's never identified as one and her human part is distinctly American, but her basic appearance and modus operandi — a female spider-like monster who adopts a human guise to seduce and attract the men she preys on — fits the jorōgumo myth quite nicely.
• One of the major villains in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is Big Mama, a yokai that switches form between an attractive older woman and large spider monster. She's a female Seductive Spider like a jorogumo, but her bulky fur-covered spider form is more based on a tsuchigumo (if not the even more monstrous ushi-oni).
• In Teen Titans (2003): the alien Chrysalis Eater who tries to beguile and devour a hapless Starfire bears an uncanny resemblance to a Jorogumo, appearing first as a mysterious beautiful lady and later as a monstrous spider-like predator.
• One of the Youkai the turtles and Usagi encounter in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) episode "Osoroshi No Tabi" is a jorogumo that takes the form of Usagi's friend Akemi.

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