Yo, yo, this bee Eric, here writin' and bloggin' on this dude's blog-o-rama.

Yesterday, you heard DroneBee-Sephiroth-250 drone on about the anti-beeist conspiracy, and stuff like that.

Doesn't he want us to play games? I guess we should BURN all games ever made, right, because they're all anti-beeist.

WRONG.



If there was a jump, I'd ask you to read on after it here. But there isn't one, so this transition is going to be a little awkward.

Okay, first up, I'm half bee, so you can't call me anti-beeist. You can't be anti-something if you're partially that, right? Just like Barack Obama.

The truth is, there is no ANTI-BEE conspiracy. Games LOVE bees. Remember the Halo ARG?

Like, okay, there are monster bees in many games, but I think that can just be chalked up to "bad honeycombs" in the bee community that ruin it for the rest of us. DroneBee-Sepheroth-250 has to admit that sometimes bee behavior (oh god, dodged like 6 puns there) needs to be (ahh!) addressed in the comb.



Use your hivemind, kids!

Okay first of all, Drone just brushes over all the positive images of bees in gamer culture. Like okay, yes, Mario is donning a bee-suit, but that should be taken as a compliment. Is he calling Miyamoto anti-beeist? That's a serious claim. Also, what about games like Maya the Bee and the Bee Movie game? They seem pretty pro bee to me. What would make him happy? There's even a bee weapon in the recent blockbuster Biolshock. More like bee-o-shock, right? It show's that we're strong, bee warriors.



I'm proud of my bee heritage and just glad that bees get a little respect. What is worrying, however, and which Drone completely ignores is the amount of prejudice against spiders.



Seriously. Gamers hate spiders.

Look, as N'gai Crawl says, anti-spiderism is "Not all that bad" because spiders really do crave the sweet nectar of human flesh, the joy of inserting eggs between folds of obese human skin, the excitement of jumping in their hair, but it is a wayy bigger issue than anti-beeism.

So I'm going to do the same thing Drone did and show a few cherry-picked examples from the days of games past that attack spider-kind with their venomous hate.

Early Games and Spidscrimination

From the first days of Adventure and Centipede, games have targeted giant spiders as some kind of "enemy" of "humanity." Spiders are not only considered monsters, they are to be killed, their odd-coloured blood splattered across the pixelated backdrops of gaming history.



Spidscrimination was big, and hit all kinds of early games, anything that could awkwardly illustrate somewhere between 4 and 8 legs in a vaguely spider-like configuration. There's even a whole level in the classic "Forbidden Forest" where you kill nothing but giant spiders before they gruesomely disembowel you.



Games continued to kill off spiders as a routine part of your mission for years.

Genres Crush Spiders Like the Rock Crushes Ass

Hate of spiders grew in every imaginable genre of game. Heck, I've seen evil spiders in educational games for toddlers!

Drone mentioned King's quest and the bee situation. At least the bees end up befriending you. In Space Quest AND king's quest games, there are spiders and robo-spiders you destroy, take advantage of and avoid constantly. Or at least twice. Action adventure titles like Zelda make use of spiders and crab-like things all the time!



RPGs occasionally use hornets, wasps or bees as enemies, but you know what kind of enemy is in almost every RPG ever? Ever since Tolkien put them in the Hobbit?



My theory is that RPG enemies are based on how far you read into the Lord of the Rings. Like if you only made it to the cover, you put in a dragon. If you made it to the dwarves, there are dwarves. If you make it to the trolls, trolls and dragons. If you make it to the giant spiders, there's giant spiders. Since few people get to the end of the whole quadrilogy, you don't get a lot of Witch Kings (for example) or evil hobbits.

But almost every RPG series has giant spiders, nearly from the beginning. Ultima, as with any Dungeons and Dragons clone, Final Fantasy from III on (and IV has topless were-spiders, uh, what ever happened to half-bee half-spiders hybrids, huh?), and in the huge hit World of Warcraft, you kill a spider essentially every four steps.



That's not all. Shmups use bees you say? At least in one of them you ARE a bee, and shoot SPIDERS for fun! Legs snapping off one by one. Ah! I'm down to 6! How can anybody survive with just 6?!

Nearly every SHMUP has some kind of spider or spider-like boss, if not crab or two as well. Everything from Warning Forever, Abadox (as enemies), Axelay, ikaruga (more or less) and more.



And ever since Centipede, games have had you slashing, jumping on and evading spiders. Everything from Castlevania, to Adventure Island to StarTropics to Wizards and Warriors in the olden days, now even Mario Galaxy jumped on the "Spiders are gross, eww, eww let's kill them" bandwagon. Miyamoto is a rabid anti-spiderist.



Now action games like Gears of Spider and Lost Spider focus on killing bugs and have to have giant spider-like things to murder. Do I have to mention head-crabs?



Conclusion

Look, let's face it. There is no anti-beeist conspiracy, but there is an anti-spiderist conspiracy, as long as my third leg. Spiders have faced our spidpression for too long (legs). I'd bet my hybrid bee/spider abdomen that the next big blockbuster RPG will feature a giant spider eating human babies on the cover. And while that's undeniably cool, it spreads the myth that spiders eat human babies very often.

We bees have got it easy. Spidscrimination is real, unlike the silly beepocalypse myth, and it's about time we worked together to challenge spiderotypes.

What can you do? Well, don't get too worked up next time you see a bee in a game. They bring it on themselves with their constant whining. And support spider heroes, even the laughably unspiderly Spiderman. Sure, he's REEEAAAL SPIDER.

Keep it real,

-Eric