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[American Gods] are real if you believe in them
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Holy fuck that opening scene was incredible!
Just some straight up dong
Did he play that gigantic dong?
Not his style. Not his type.
Djonng
I mean, there was a length of pipe involved...
Oedipus is associated with the Sphinx and he had his ankles pierced through (the name Oedipus refers to his injured feet)
But that's not exactly a robot leg
An unlucky leprechaun could be an amazing part of an ongoing show.
Pretty funny to see Neil fanboying about Anne Rice. After the second episode, she ordered the book (he retweeted her on that). Wonder what she'll think about the third?
Considering the road trip format of the book, it would be pretty easy to stretch things out without feeling like the pacing suffers.
At least I finally understand what Lucky the Leprechaun was so worked up about.
If it meanders its way up to and past the season finale, I might be less enthused by this show going forward.
Also, the Salesman from the Coming to America vignette is about as picture perfect as I had imagined him when I had read the book.
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[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Yes it was
It was.
Ch 7
edit- hmm, apparently "minor quibble" is redundant. Or a real tiny one I suppose.
"Oriental" is generally considered a slur in the US, but you're trying to draw a comparison to the art movement of Orientalism
The most important character in the story after Shadow is Wednesday and he's from a European pantheon, although I would personally struggle to connect ancient Norse religion with any modern notion of "whiteness"
The new gods are mostly manifestations of modern Western or Westernized culture
Shadow has a multiracial background
Those would be my observations without going into too many spoilers
Yes it's a white as hell dude writing about all of this, but it shows how much effort was put into almost each and every story within the plot to a certain degree. I don't like backpatting creators for doing the bare minimum, but Gaiman did go far beyond that in this case, as he does with a lot of his stories. Normally I don't care for people, especially white people, writing stories about cultures that are not their own as if they are the foremost experts on such topics. With AG, though, the entire plot is about how much of a skewed perspective America as a whole has, and how frankly the Western white population has, either twisted, broken, or forgotten such cultures and their beliefs.
The nature of orientalism is trying to paint the other side of the world, historically Asia which includes the Middle East and India, as some Other. The Other which is terrifying, brutish, salacious, altogether everything which challenges very stock-standard Western notions of how the world works or should work. I don't think that's the case with AG, because it also reflects on how warped Western culture is, specifically what Americana and nationalism and industrialisation has done to older spirituality.
That said, there are aspects you can't ignore, such as this being a story about a black man being written by a white man. I feel that is somewhat mitigated with the TV show, just because now there's more than just one or a handful of voices in the mix including Whittle with his performance. Doesn't help that the show runner himself is also white, and I'm also not someone who can speak with any authority on the matter. Just personally, I wouldn't use "oriental" or "orientalism" to describe what AG is doing with the stories about PoC in America and their old/current beliefs.
well now we get to make fun of it being the story of america, as told by an englishman!
I frankly don't trust us to tell our own stories.
That particular religious tradition sits at the heart of the story, with the tree, the squirrel, with what is about to happen at the end
And Shadow is also very much heir to that tradition
In the book, people around him never seem quite sure of his ethnicity, I personally don't believe Gaiman intended it as a story about non-white characters and beliefs, more a story with non-white characters and beliefs in it
And I was obviously talking about the Norse gods when I talked about a white writer writing non-white characters.
I don't know if there is a better word
I thought it was important because they are the gods which Gaiman chose to sit at the center of the story
The "non-white" gods are all very much caught up in white-man Wednesday's works
I don't think it is a story which homes in on those other gods to the same extent
I'm mostly talking about the book here so our perspectives may differ, I would argue that Gaiman did anything but shine the spotlight on Shadow's ethnicity (to figure out his background you have to gather clues like sickle-cell disease being more common in black people)
I think he's saying that things like Jinn or Anansi feel less like authentic tellings of those characters than recontextualizing the stories into a white american world.
Like, Uncle Remus stories are African stories that were transcribed and written by a white person for other white people to read. Some of the stories of Brer Rabbit actually are Anansi stories that were recontextualized by white people trying to take them out of the context they originally came from and put them into the plantation south.
But it isn't the kind of stories that slaves and african americans in america were telling, it isn't in their method of telling the stories, and it isn't in the same tone as their stories. Compare stories like Brer Rabbit to authentic african american stories like High John de Conqueror.
There's an authenticity and way of telling a story when it's being told by someone from the culture it originates from. Instead of being recontextualized into a different culture.
American Gods feels like a very inauthentic way of talking about these beings in the story. But that's also actually kind of the point.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
It's explained in the book. There's also a bit in the latest episode
The slave ship stuff did feel weird, because Africa did not (and does not) share a common religion, language, or culture. Indeed, one of the defining aspects of the growth of African culture in the Americas is a complex negotiating process of many diverse peoples becoming new groups. Voodoo / voodou / vodun is not a 1:1 transplant of any one African religion for instance, the version that flourished among slaves in the Caribbean combines common elements from several African religions, as well as elements of European Catholicism. Basically what I'm saying is that that scene would be sorta like Thor showing up to give a speech to a bunch of Italians, Spaniards, and Norwegians, and the story treating it like obv these are all the same dudes.
The slave ship story also seemed to fully accept the idea of slaves as utterly subaltern, passive victims then and for hundreds of years to come, with their only option for agency as self-destruction. While slave ship suicides certainly were a thing, framing it that way is really kind of bullshit. Africans in America didn't just sit around being victims for hundreds of years, it's an old false euro-centric canard recast as a supposedly black voice. I think comparing that attitude to Orientalism really is a very fair comparison to make.
Gaiman's always been pretty up front with the fact that while he has an artistic interest in American identity and history, he is not American and he doesn't get all of it. It's easy to forget that Shadow isn't white in the novel for instance (at least, I totally forgot he was), because it rarely ever comes up through dialogue or characterization. And Gaiman plainly has a lot more familiarity with European mythologies than African ones, and so the European myths enjoy much more specificity to them.
Now on the other hand, Gaiman does seem perfectly earnest in his desire to represent a diverse sample of American immigrant experiences. And there is no correct answer to "how black do you have to write your black characters." And I think any sort of argument that white guy Gaiman has somehow wronged by trying to write a black character is horrendously wrong-headed, the sort of thing that discourages diversity by scaring off authors from even attempting to include any background but their own. Writing is hard! But it's still a weakness in the text and a fair critique to point out, too.