They also have a terrible hatred of insects and bugs and kill them in a variety of awful ways, and are thus hated by them as well.
They call him offensive names instead of calling him by his actual name. They are both very abusive and treat him like a slave, forcing him to do hard labor, beating him for no good reason, and feeding him nothing but fish heads. In the beginning of the film, when James awakens from being asleep in his room, Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge come into his room, and Sponge calls him a "lazy little bug", and along with Spiker, orders him to get up and get to work. In the movie, after James' parents get eaten by a rhinoceros, he is sent to live with his mean aunts, Spiker and Sponge, who adopt him. However, they trip up over each other and both meet the same end. Sponge attempts to save her own life instead of Spiker's when she notices the giant peach rolling towards her. Dominated by Spiker, Sponge is apparently a bit more dim-witted and gluttonous, thinking of eating the peach while Spiker seizes the moneymaking opportunities it will bring to make them rich.
Both she and Spiker are vain, each singing praises of their imagined beauty while they are in fact repulsive, but each usually ends up attacking the other's repulsiveness. They never call James by his real name, and instead call him mean and insulting names like "rotten little grub", "disgusting little maggot", and "nasty little beast".Īunt Sponge is a greedy, selfish, and morbidly fat woman, who is equally as cruel and repulsive as her sister Spiker, and presumably the younger of the two. Instead of caring for him, they force him to do all the work around the house, they had a tendency to beat him when he disagrees with them or backtalk, and almost always make him go into his room without dinner. Spiker and Sponge are the sisters of James's late father. After the death of James' parents, the two had no choice but to take in James and "raise" him.