jesus is arachne with good vibes
And you're onto something with the envy point: the crowd manufactured the collision. Arachne didn't start by claiming rivalry - people kept saying "she must have been taught by Minerva." That chatter forced the comparison on both of them. Arachne could either accept the frame (my skill is borrowed) or reject it (my skill is mine), and rejecting it was automatically an insult. Her skill was never allowed to just be skill; the moment it got famous, it got positioned against the goddess whether she liked it or not.The disguised-old-woman scene shows exactly what Minerva actually wanted: keep the skill, keep the fame, just yield the credit. "Be the greatest mortal weaver" was the deal on the table - supremacy within the hierarchy, in exchange for acknowledging it. What she couldn't tolerate wasn't Arachne's excellence. It was her independence.
