Thread:ADour/@comment-25192437-20150124024009/@comment-25192437-20150124035343

ADour wrote: I thought Ero was The Other.

And Kaine was being called The Other because it was its avatar.

OK... Ero is the Other, but for a while she manifested and tried to kill Peter... OK, this is gonna get long and complicated... So... J. Michael Straczynski introduced the concept of spider-totems when some old man tells Spider-Man he got his powers from a totemic spider-deity called the Great Weaver, who spins a mystical force called the "Web of Life" that gives all the spider-themed heroes their powers. Flash forward to Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Vol 1 3, where Peter partially turns into Man-Spider and kills Morlun after he broke Mary Jane's arm, then sheds his skin and wraps himself in a cocoon under the George Washington Bridge. He has a vision of the Great Weaver, who offers him a new chance at life by embracing his inner spider. Peter accepts the offer and is reborn with new supernatural spider-powers, like night vision and stingers. What's left of his original body is eaten by pirate spiders and manifests into a humanoid entity called "Ero" in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Vol 1 4. Ero claims that Morlun should have killed Peter, but he'd been resurrected by the Great Weaver and she'd come to kill him to restore the natural order. Spider-Man eventually kills Ero by feeding the spiders to a flock of birds and stepping on the last one. Post-One More Day, however, he no longer has stingers or organic webbing (which he got from the Queen), but no explanation was given as to why.

Scarlet Spider Vol 2 14 retcons Ero and the Great Weaver into the same entity when Kaine was killed by the Lobos siblings. His corpse was cocooned by a swarm of spiders, and Ero appears in his mental world and reveals herself as the entity who resurrected Peter with new powers, calling herself "The Other" and offering Kaine the same deal she made to Peter, while revealing that following Mephisto's meddling Peter rejected its offer (although how he came back to life is anyone's guess). Spider-Verse further splits JMS' Great Weaver into the Master Weaver, who is the chief spider-totem deity that spins the Web of Life and Destiny and gives the Spider-Totems their powers, and turns Ero/the Other into a lesser totemic deity that turns its avatars into spider-monsters when it takes over.