Phobias

[Shin Mefilas]

A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation

For me, I suffer from Lepidopterophobia/Mottephobia I.E. I have an irrational fear of moths and to a lesser extent butterflies.  This is both odd and annoying, as I find insects and arachnids very intreasting. Think that part of it stems from the fact that while I like them, I'm not fond of them touching me. For example I hold an ant or small spider on my hand no problem but am totally against anything else touching me even the likes of a caterpillar. While insects can make contact with you at any time, moths seem to be a pretty bad offender carelessly making contact with your body and unlike a Fly don't get off  at the slightest movement. 

If that wasn't a good enough cause we can also place the blame on Silent Hill. While survival horror is easily may faviort genre in gaming it's here that I really started to be scared of stuff growing up. From the first zombie in resident evil to even the raptors in Dino Crisis. However the game that hit me the hardest was Silent Hill, I sat and watched my parents play it and while I enjoyed it a lot the game really, really got under my skin. To this day I can only watch playthroughs as the games simple put me too on edge for me to play and enjoy at the same time. Silent Hill plays into other fears of mine, such as isolation, fear of whats in the dark, being hunted etc. Hell I went to see the film when it came out with my parents and while it was just ok and not really freaky all the way through, when the siren first started and the world shifted to it's dark counterpart I just kept sinking lower and lower into my chair in pure terror. Unlike my phobia however this never impacts my life. So to get to the point, the original game has an boss that pushed my fear a bit to hard. The Twinfeeler/Floatstinger

I think that I already had a dislike of moths already and having this giant beast come floating out of the darkness in a game that was already pushing my buttons hard just pushed me over the edge psychologically speaking. Other games likely didn't help either as Resident Evil was guilty of not only having giant moths, but giant moths with parasiting offspring. An idea I cannot help but have in mind when seeing a harmless little moth.

Other stuff may have also contributed. One of the Omen sequels had a scene where a butterfly crawls in and out someone's mouth while movie Phantoms has a giant moth eat a guys face off.

This also lead to have a pretty nasty shock when reading The Island of Giant Insects manga

Turns out some moths and butterfly species need extra salt in their diet during the breeding season. They normally get this from rotting fruit and the like but this can lead them to drinking fluid and tears from around the eyes of other animels, which is freaky enough but some moths actually have begun adapting to drink the blood of living animels not unlike mosquitos. Well this lead the giant ones in the manga draining people of the blood and fluids... nice.