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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

It's the exact same for me. The spiders are by far the most visceral fear response, especially if a gruesomely detailed photo pops up on my phone.

Smaller spiders scared me when I was younger, but I have overcome that phobia significantly. Large, hairy, distinctly arthropodic spiders, though...? Yuck.

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Question for both you and GPP; is this fear limited to real life depictions, or basically anything? E.g, if you ever played Skyrim or a game with spider-like enemies does it have the same effect as a real spider?

Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.

I'm also really afraid of snakes, but spiders are okay. Movies with snakes are quite painful to watch too, and I'm very uncomfortable with snakes in video games, but at least I have some control (compared to TV) so it's a significantly better experience

Spider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary.

I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.

I did play Skyrim, and I was fine with it. Something about video games takes the fear out of it. I mean, they're definitely a little bit more unsettling than other video game creatures, but not by much, so I don't get a fear response. I'd react more to a "jump scare" in a game than a 3D spider.

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