American Gods...How is this good?

Renegade-pizza

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I've watched the first 5 episodes of American Gods and I am completely turned off by it. I've seen the raving reviews and my mom tells me the book is really good. I like the idea behind the setting (gods being legitimate entities that are powered by faith).

This show seems to exemplify "Style over substance" almost perfectly. The camera constantly shifts and focuses on random things. There's a lot of weird imagery that feels like the director is screaming: "Check out my awesome metaphor! Of course you don't get it. You aren't sophisticated enough." Then proceeds to vigorously touch himself.

This is further exacerbated by the plot moving slower than a sloth on sleeping pills. I understand the need for subtlety and drawing out the intrigue, but it has a similar issue to the second and third seasons of the Walking Dead; nothing happens.

The last big problem I have can be summed up with one spam message: DICKS EVERYWHERE!! One episode literally dedicates 10 minutes of its time to two gay Muslims fucking. I first thought: "Oh, an entity from Islamic mythology. This could prove interesting and he's got his dick out." Massive chunks of episodes are dedicated to sex scenes that add nothing. Game of Thrones had a similar issue, but those scenes tended to be short, skip able and there were actually interesting plot lines that made it easy to overlook the obvious pandering.

TLDR; I really dislike this show already and don't get the praise (unless critics are huffing their own flatulence)
 

PsychedelicDiamond

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The book really is good, though. I haven't seen the show but the gay sex scene between the Djinn and the taxi driver was in the novel and I kinda respect them for not cutting it out.
 

Renegade-pizza

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PsychedelicDiamond said:
The book really is good, though. I haven't seen the show but the gay sex scene between the Djinn and the taxi driver was in the novel and I kinda respect them for not cutting it out.
I don't have an issue with "the gay." I just feel that its an unnecessary addition.
 

fletch_talon

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Its a scene that shows how the gods and other beings have different interactions with humanity. Bilquis showed the need for worship that drives them. The Djinn showed how some of them repay that worship/belief.
The Djinn specifically said he doesn't grant wishes. What he did instead is grant the man a fresh start and open his eyes to the fact that homosexual sex can be an expression of love and intimacy, not just a quickly blowjob with a random stranger.
I do think the leadup needed to clarify that Salim's previous sexual encounters had been shameful experiences to make it clearer that it wasn't just a transference of magic djinn juice, marid musk, efreeti ejaculate. The only reason I'm aware of that is that I read an article explaining it.
 

Ogoid

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Yeah, I sorta forgot it was even going on after two episodes or so.

I think "style over substance" is definitely an apt description; the introduction with the Vikings struck me as particularly silly as compared to the book, as did the over-the-top violence. Also, overlong sex scenes were overlong.

Shame, really. I quite liked the book.
 

happyninja42

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Renegade-pizza said:
PsychedelicDiamond said:
The book really is good, though. I haven't seen the show but the gay sex scene between the Djinn and the taxi driver was in the novel and I kinda respect them for not cutting it out.
I don't have an issue with "the gay." I just feel that its an unnecessary addition.
It's not an unnecessary "addition", it's a part of the book, and is fairly significant to explain the Djinn's travels across the lands. The book has a lot of little short stories in it, describing how the various gods still exist and interact in the world, with their followers. And like it or not, a lot of what the various gods of our history deal with, is fucking. How to fuck, who to fuck, what positions to fuck, what time of year to fuck, how many of them you can claim as mates when you are fucking, etc. Fertility gods are spilling out of our history like a cornucopia, and I can't count the number of stories involving gods coming down to earth and fucking some human (Zeus did it so much, he even got kinky and started shape shifting when he did it.) So yeah, sex is a thing in stories about gods.

As to your criticism of the show in general....eh, yeah it's not great for me at this point, having finished the first season. It's got a few interesting bits, and I like the show's Shadow Moon WAY more than the book. It's an OK show for me. Not great, but not bad. It's serviceable, and I think they do a good job of adapting the novel as best they can.

Personally, I don't really remember much about the book in details, just broad strokes of the plot and theme. I've said in other threads about this show, that I found the book protagonist so absolutely dull and bland (and yes, I KNOW that was on purpose, it still doesn't make him interesting to follow in a book), I really don't remember much of the main plot. I remember the little things, like how the man and the Djinn met, and it changed his life, and revitalized the Djinn. I remember Shadow's wife and her slow decay, I remember how the book ends, and what Mr. Wednesday's plan. That's most of it really for me. I really didn't like the book much, I read it when it came out, and I remember people going nuts over it, all I thought was "Eh, this sounds like a decent campaign in Scion". And that was about it.

If you like the setting, and you are into table top roleplaying, I STRONGLY urge you to find a copy of SCION, by White Wolf. It's an old game, but it's pretty much the setting of American Gods. All the pantheons are real, and still exist, and you play one of their children, in your growth to a full god yourself. It's a really fun damn game, and I highly recommend it.
 

DaCosta

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Game of Thrones never had a problem with gratuitous sex scenes. What the show had was sexposition, sex in the middle of exposition scenes so that the dummies won't turn off, like Littlefinger explaining his backstory to the prostitutes touching themselves, if you just skipped them, congratulations, you missed loads of exposition in the early seasons.
 

bastardofmelbourne

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The book is genuinely really good, though I'm not as impressed by it as I was when I was a teenager (the main character's name is Shadow, for fuck's sake.)

I can understand not liking the show. It's a bit of a weird mixed bag. It's not going to be for everyone's tastes.
 

maninahat

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I enjoyed it a lot, in that it really wants to show me things I've never seen before, prolonged gay sex scenes and all. I'm willing to give a show a lot of points to take basic risks, such as throwing in some vivid abstract imagery, or by not assuming its audience has the brain of a 14 year old boy. The actual plot is very straight forward, but spiced up by things like raining gunfire and Gillian Anderson's celebrity impressions.

I agree that it is drawn out, especially when the finale comes around and basically resolves absolutely nothing that's happened so far save for a couple of plot reveals (which were already known to the viewer from previous episodes). It has certainly got me to start on the book, as I'll be damned to wait however long it takes for the second season to come along.

Happyninja42 said:
If you like the setting, and you are into table top roleplaying, I STRONGLY urge you to find a copy of SCION, by White Wolf. It's an old game, but it's pretty much the setting of American Gods. All the pantheons are real, and still exist, and you play one of their children, in your growth to a full god yourself. It's a really fun damn game, and I highly recommend it.
Thanks for the recommendation. My Favourite thing in the show is the introduction of each, quirky god, and I spent the whole time wondering what an RPG of it would be like.
 

FalloutJack

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It's American Gods. It literally is just that. It's the book in video form, pretty much. You, personally, don't have to like it, but the appeal of the book that got so many TO like it is there. No more words need be said.
 

Breakdown

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I liked the book, but the series is terrible. I thought the plot would need to be padded out a bit, but instead each episode feels like it's been stretched to breaking point. Scenes last too long, pointless animations that add nothing to the narrative, Shadow and Wednesday seem to have the same conversation over and over again.

Most of the extra stuff seems to be there to make the story more politically correct at the expense of characterisation and narrative, along with the really lazy stuff like Nazi Trump Town and Black Lives Matter Boat.
 

Arnoxthe1

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BeetleManiac said:
It's high time we as a society stop blushing and giggling at any mention of sex and start talking about it like adults.
WTF is there to talk about though? Sex doesn't need explaining. Maybe it's also high-time we as a society admit that porn is just that. Porn. And I'm not even talking about tasteful nudity or whatever.
 

LysanderNemoinis

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I'm just wondering at what point someone puts a fatwa on all the people involved because of this. I really hope everyone on the show has good bodyguards.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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I kinda love the show. But I have never read the book. Strangely enough [for me] I wasn't even aware of its existence until the show. I especially loved episode 7 - A Prayer for Mad Sweeney. I thought it was fantastic.
 

RedRockRun

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Is Mr. Nancy as preachy in the book as he is in the show? That last episode in particular.

Wow, we should all feel sorry for Bilquis, the chick who vagcuums up unwitting men so that she can feel like a pretty princess again. Also the Iranian Revolution was totally just about evil MEN being uncomfortable with a STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN [sub][sub][sub]who vacuums up men into her fucking vagina.[/sub][/sub][/sub]
 

happyninja42

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RedRockRun said:
Is Mr. Nancy as preachy in the book as he is in the show? That last episode in particular.

Wow, we should all feel sorry for Bilquis, the chick who vagcuums up unwitting men so that she can feel like a pretty princess again. Also the Iranian Revolution was totally just about evil MEN being uncomfortable with a STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN [sub][sub][sub]who vacuums up men into her fucking vagina.[/sub][/sub][/sub]
As I recall, yes he was. He is/was a trickster and con artist type god. I remember one bit...I think it was in American Gods, but it might have been the spinoff Anansi Boys (about 2 of his children), where he tells a long winded story about why he "loves himself a high titted woman" (I took this to mean a woman with smaller, firmer breasts, that didn't hang down due to gravity). The audience (a clustering of gods, were just as annoyed by his story as Wednesday and Shadow were). Basically yeah, he has a reputation for "spinning" a tall tail. As the god of spiders, it makes sense. Personally I found him one of the more enjoyable gods in the book, as he at least had some personality and charisma.
 

RedRockRun

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Happyninja42 said:
RedRockRun said:
Is Mr. Nancy as preachy in the book as he is in the show? That last episode in particular.

Wow, we should all feel sorry for Bilquis, the chick who vagcuums up unwitting men so that she can feel like a pretty princess again. Also the Iranian Revolution was totally just about evil MEN being uncomfortable with a STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN [sub][sub][sub]who vacuums up men into her fucking vagina.[/sub][/sub][/sub]
As I recall, yes he was. He is/was a trickster and con artist type god. I remember one bit...I think it was in American Gods, but it might have been the spinoff Anansi Boys (about 2 of his children), where he tells a long winded story about why he "loves himself a high titted woman" (I took this to mean a woman with smaller, firmer breasts, that didn't hang down due to gravity). The audience (a clustering of gods, were just as annoyed by his story as Wednesday and Shadow were). Basically yeah, he has a reputation for "spinning" a tall tail. As the god of spiders, it makes sense. Personally I found him one of the more enjoyable gods in the book, as he at least had some personality and charisma.
That sounds like the Anansi I'm familiar with. He's a good-natured trickster who slips out of tight spots using his wits (or his children saving him), but from what I've seen in the series he's just some fist-pumping cookie cutter BLM'er.
 

Zhukov

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Watched the first episode, didn't bother going back for more.

I enjoyed the book well enough, although I seem to have forgotten a lot (there was gay djinns fucking in there? You'd think I'd remember that). I have no need to see it cheaply rendered in TV-o-vision.