Giant Spider & Me is an Iyashikei manga series by Kikori Morino that began in 2016 before concluding in 2018 and spans 3 volumes (14 chapters) in total. It has been licensed in English by Seven Seas Entertainment.
Nagi lives with her father in the mountains, but he has a strong desire to travel, so he tends to leave home often. While Nagi is able to manage living by herself, that doesn’t make life there any less lonely. One day, while carrying home a pumpkin after tending to the fields, she comes across a strange giant spider.
After finding out it means no harm and feeding it a dumpling made from the pumpkin, the two decide to live together, forming quite an unusual friendship. From here on, the story follows the duo's day-to-day life in the post-apocalyptic world.
Giant Spider & Me contains examples of:
- A Boy and His X: A 12-year-old girl and her giant Friendly Neighborhood Spider.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Nagi does this to Asa after watching it finish its meal for the first time. Asa reciprocates by copying her, much to the former's embarrassment.
- Boats into Buildings: The Carpenter's house, and it's a surprisingly nice one at that. It also serves as a cafe.
- Christmas Episode: Chapter 14: Happiness & A Buche De Noel.
- Cooking Stories: Every chapter includes a new type of food alongside its recipe. Most of them come from Nagi though other characters such as the Carpenter have their hand in the spotlight as well.
- Cozy Catastrophe: Aside from encounters with wild dogs and people’s initial distrust towards Asa, the series is overall quite laid back.
- Cute Monster: Make no mistake, Asa’s as fearsome as you’d expect a creature its size to be, but unless Nagi is directly threatened they’re otherwise very friendly. They behave more like a well-trained dog than an arachnid.
- Disappeared Dad: Nagi's father. She mentions that he’s fond of traveling, going from one place to the next. By the time the story begins, he’s on his longest one yet.
- Fear of Thunder: Asa isn’t fond of it, along with loud noises in general.
- Friendly Neighborhood Spider: Asa, though anyone who first sees them disagrees with this notion. Belle's father brings up the possibility that it is still a baby, and spending time around humans during its formative years will result in behavior not typical for its species.
- Giant Spider: Asa is the titular giant spider, though they aren’t like any other spider. Giant size aside, there are two sets of teeth in place of mandibles, it has an actual tongue, it seems to be warm-blooded, and there are leaves growing on the abdomen. They also have no problem eating all sorts of human food, although coffee has an intoxicating effect, similar to catnip for a cat. Nagi herself notes she has no idea what Asa is, and after going through all the books at her house, the only thing she's confident about is that Asa's species was undiscovered before the apocalypse.
- Go Through Me: Confronted by Belle pointing a rifle at Asa, Nagi puts herself between them. Belle's father quickly breaks it up before the situation escalates, scolding her for threatening others with it.
- Little "No": The Carpenter's response when Nagi asked him to fix the rooftop window. Since the request came up so suddenly he is in no obligation to accept it.
- Minor Living Alone: Nagi's father has a strong wanderlust that urges him to travel across the world and there's no mention of her mother so it falls on her to take care of herself.
- Offscreen Teleportation: For an animal as big a person Asa’s quite nimble and they hardly even make much of a sound. It's because of the latter that Nagi doesn't notice it wrecked the window on her rooftop to get in, and only finds out once it started raining.
- Planimal: The abdomen of Asa is covered in foliage. After molting their old skin in Chapter 13, Asa has a completely new set of vegetation on its back suggesting this to be the case.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: How exactly the world came to an end isn’t directly explained. It all happened before Nagi was born. A flooded city is shown in Chapter 1, but the specifics are left vague.
