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Just caught the newest episode. I have to watch my episodes delayed for reasons (which I won't talk about). Man alive am I loving this. Also, so much drat research and detail just even in the backgrounds. Fuller definitely did not lose his touch after Hannibal in that regard. Like, how many modern Americans even know who Chernabog and the Zorya are, yet you see very accurate small details like The framed image of the Ursa constellation on the wall that line right up with their mythology. Also holy crap the foreshadowing (no pun intended...this time) in this show. In Norse Mythology, when Baldur died, the gnomes were sad and came to Odin, for Baldur's smile was so bright and warm, that even those underground felt his sunshine. So Odin, feeling sorry for them, gave them what he called Baldur's smile, and they returned home. After a while they felt selfish keeping it to themselves, and let parts of it sail on the winds to everyone. In case you hadn't realized it yet, "Baldur's Smile/Sunshine" were dandelions, which Wednesday blows away wistfully as they leave Shadow's house, after he advises him to keep his emotions inside, as it'd be healthier.
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May 9, 2017 01:49
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Captain Lavender posted:Having read ASoIaF and Harry Potter really hurt my experiece watching those shows; 'knowing' felt like a burden. I don't know, actually, if the Harry Potter movies are just bad, or if having read the books took away all the magic, so to say. I'm guessing both. Game of Thrones, it was hard to appreciate anything but the most impressive scenes, just knowing what's going to happen - and now with the later seasons that are not true to the book which just haven't been as good, I've never been able to really enjoy that show like I think I should. Hannibal was like that too, even though it was only the last 1/6th of the show that directly adapted source material. But Fuller knows how to adapt things right.
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May 9, 2017 08:19
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Yeah, I didn't realize it was the Djinn til the credits either. There's been several names that haven't been said out loud yet the credits fully spell it out. I don't think Low-Key was actually ever verbally named, for instance.
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May 9, 2017 18:25
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Schizotek posted:So the "coming to America" historian is Ibis right? Yeah. He's another case of the credits spelling out who he is name wise.
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May 9, 2017 23:29
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precision posted:Oh good God, yes. Invent a new God if they have to, he can be the God of Railroad Hobos for all I care. Or hell, just THE Railroad. Don't tell me America once upon a time didn't treat trains like a god. In its infancy, trains were everything, a shining beacon to prosperity, a figure to look up to, puffing his smoke from his pipes, hauling the great loads and burdens. People put their hopes and dreams in The Railroad. They wrote songs about it, made stories about it, sacrificed a great many lives, in labor, in war, in crime to it. The very shape of America is due in no small part to it. In today's age, The Railroad is old, it's showing its gray hairs, it's weariness, it's faded glory. People are more interested in the air, or the highway, but he still trudges on, having seen everything that makes this country great, and everything that makes it poo poo. People now barely remember he even exists until he gets in his way. They'd rather curse his name than praise it more often than not, but at the end of the day, despite all the age, all the tiredness, all the bruises, America still NEEDS him. And he still has his strength despite everything, so he keeps doing his job, staying less in the limelight than others, still nursing himself, still rambling down the line.
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May 11, 2017 23:03
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Escape Addict posted:I felt Anansi's introduction was far more predatory than his personality in the book. It makes sense for Odin to thrive on bloodshed since you sacrifice lives to him in war and on the gallows. But Anansi thrives on songs and dancing and storytelling. Well, he was insulted by the enslavement of his people, so he had to retaliate (note also how Wednesday also later says how just because he's not fuming doesn't mean he's not pissed at Technical Boy for lynching Shadow, and that there will be repercussions) Also, the wreckage propelled him to the mainland, which was convenient. Also it's funny that you compare him to Bugs Bunny, as one of the primary supposed origins of Bre're Rabbit is a transformation from the Anansi stories the slaves brought with them from Africa. One of the driving forces as to why the bunny was popular in their traditions, is that his wily cunning symbolized the attempts to revolt against the white slavers. Like all trickster deities, not all of these attempts were successful (in fact most weren't), but the motivation, rebellious nature, and overriding cleverness were still a major symbolism for the movements. Considering the amount of work Fuller puts into research and symbolism, I'm sure this connection is not lost on him.
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May 12, 2017 03:40
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TommyGun85 posted:I never did manage to finish the novel as I found the concept and premise to be way more interesting than the actual contents. Of course there's a food god. He wears a yellow suit and has cherry red hair, and we indoctrinate our children young to love him.
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May 12, 2017 15:58
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Shoot, Media IS the god of sports entertainment. Media is exactly why sports are such a big deal today, because she tells us it is.
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May 13, 2017 03:18
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:That's really more a problem with the book, it's just kind a product of the hard on the 90s had for neo-paganism. So it just sort of played fast and loose with its rules to bring in the gods Gaiman wanted to showcase. Honestly, neo-paganism has extended in popularity quite a bit since the book was first written. I have several friends personally that are Odinists even. And in the last 25 years, Olympianism has slowly and quietly come back as well. In the information age, a lot of people are turning to the older ways if for no other reason, than being sick of what is done in the name of the popular Gods. Also I would agree that the Egypt craze of the 19th and 20th centuries DEFINITELY instilled awareness of that pantheon with enough reverence to keep going a while.. Regarding the weighing ceremony, I didn't get any maliciousness out of it. Recall that Bast is still a cat, and cats have no morals but their own. I believe it was both impatience, as well as answering the woman's impudent question about not being sure if she's worshiping the right God--"Too bad, no take backsies." EDIT: ^^^ And just how many Americans do you know that feel awe at the very idea of Xipe Totec? Not friggin many. It'd be interesting to see them incorporate Santa Muerte however, She's quickly gaining a LOT of followers from what I hear. Explicitly being the Goddess of outcasts and criminals kinda makes you enduring that way. Choco1980 fucked around with this message at 00:45 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 00:42
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Of course Gods don't create afterlifes. we do.
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May 16, 2017 03:42
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enraged_camel posted:I'm bilingual and I swear in both languages interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence. Also, to be fair, many Arab countries are bi-lingual. I know at least the UAE speaks both Arabic and English regularly.
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May 16, 2017 05:46
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When I was a teenager, and into my early 20s, I was a super-duper Gaiman fanboy. Heck, I met the woman who would become my ex-wife and mother to my child through a Sandman yahoo group. That said, as I've gotten older, I've realized that he has really big flaws I was ignoring. He's got some absolutely fantastic writing-Sandman for instance definitely holds up, and Overture felt like a return to old friends in that regard as he brought his a-game with him, but he just as often phones it in-Eternals for instance. His novels can be okay, but he goes to the same well far too often. Think about how many of his stories involve a seemingly normal person, who meets a mysterious, possibly magical or alien stranger, who whisks him away on a crazy adventure where the previously thought ordinary protagonist becomes the key to saving everything? How often does he invoke the Mother-Maiden-Crone trope? Really, I would say his best material is his short fiction, as there he is much more efficient and economical with the good bits, not having to add predictive side stories or whatever.
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May 16, 2017 19:09
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Fun fact: Czernabog (as Chernabog) is also the name of that big black devil guy from the Fantasia scene. In his last days before being relegated to nonbelief he was conflated with the christian devil as the slavs were converted. The bit at the end of the book where Chery is much lighter colored and happier and muses that perhaps he and Biel were one in the same stems from the ambiguity of this theory and how Bielebog might not have actually existed in the faith.
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May 16, 2017 19:37
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Steve Yun posted:Dream appears differently to different people. He appears as a cat to a dreaming cat. He has cat eyes when he meets Bast. Martian Manhunter sees him as a flaming skull. Anansi appears as a 70's jazzman to us and as a spider to his followers (in the TV show is this a Fuller thing or is this a Gaiman thing?) Knowing Fuller and Gaiman's work in the past, I'm going to say proooobably both are responsible for Anansi looking like a spider in a suit to the prisoners. Also, didn't Gaiman sneak a sentence or two about Delirium hanging out with the 90s hippies when Shadow met Easter? I swear he singles out a girl in his description that absolutely matches her.
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May 16, 2017 21:26
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Gaiman was never shy about the fact that he found Goth culture beautiful and sexy either. That's why he threw it in so many pieces in the 90s and early 00s.
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May 16, 2017 22:01
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coyo7e posted:Uhh, it's not her cat. She IS the cat I think that sentence meant "The lady's cat", not "Bast's cat" when it said "her cat"
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May 17, 2017 04:18
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Your Gay Uncle posted:Watching this show I can't help but be sad that Hannibal was on network TV. Think of all the weiner filled murder monuments we missed out on. Not empty quoting.
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May 18, 2017 00:48
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Never thought I'd see an adaptation of this book:
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May 23, 2017 00:24
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Yeah, don't use Laura's infidelity as a gateway to mock Gaiman's poly status, or poly in general. Not cool. Poly can work for people, but not those who go into it with the motive of "aw yeah, now I'm gonna have a bunch of free sex!" But this really isn't the venue for this conversation. I personally like that they've fleshed out Laura so much more now, and that she's only perfect in Shadow's eyes, and is in fact extremely flawed, and not a good person at all. Also, note how her true devotion to Shadow doesn't start til after she's brought back, and he becomes her reason for existing. By making her a three dimensional, deeply flawed person, they turn that change from her being a prop in the story to being a very sad, but compelling, three dimensional person.
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May 23, 2017 19:17
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Looking at IMDB, Mr. Nancy is said to be in 3 episodes this season, and so far he's been in one. Kinda odd that Easter is going to be seen more than Mr. Nancy.
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May 23, 2017 23:39
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Edit: fine, I'll spell it out. Mr. Ibis is Toth. Choco1980 fucked around with this message at 21:53 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 21:48
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double nine posted:Nah. Still beaten by You're an rear end in a top hat, dead wife. But Glover was amazing, true. Definitely. He's trying not to laugh at it in fact. Goddamn does Glover just own the entire space he is in as Mr. World. Precision, I must have missed it, what were the major clues about Mr. World's identity from the episode itself? I mean, I've read the book, I know what's what, but I didn't see any overt clues there with the new episode.
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May 29, 2017 02:00
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Media-As-Bowie briefly mentioned Mr. Town to Technical Kid I believe.
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May 29, 2017 02:48
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Toast Museum posted:The whole name is too much and dumb, but "Low-key" on its own probably would've been fine. Oh, Loki has a lot of names. Not as many as Odin, but still quite a few. Skywalker, for instance.
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May 29, 2017 21:05
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Terror Sweat posted:i forgot, what happens when a powerful god is murdered. does he just come back again later in a different form or something I think this past episode dealt quite well in explaining the "afterlife" for Gods. They can die, if they're completely forgotten. Otherwise, they just get paradigm shifts, and change to reflect changing times (like when Media and World try to convince Wednesday to the branding of the Odin Satellite over Korea). Wednesday and his crew are trying to fight against the changing times, that's kind of the whole point. They don't WANT to change, they want to be themselves. The problem seems to be that that's a lot more out of their power than they like to admit. The Gods are powered by belief. By us. What we believe them to be, they become. The old Norse beliefs put Odin (whose name we use constantly for a day of the week) as a wise trickster conman, so that's exactly what he is. Media herself said she's whatever is being played at the moment (note how in her first scene, she corrects Shadow that she's not appearing as Lucille Ball, but Lucille Ricardo. A key distinction). We're a society where we believe whatever the media shows us, so she becomes those same things because we believe in them. Anything else is posture, whether they have control over it or not.
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May 30, 2017 03:16
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yeah, that was definitely Mr. Nancy that feed Wednesday. I have to imagine he had to ask him to somehow, and that was probably the worst part of the whole jail experience for him!
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May 30, 2017 21:37
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Zaphod42 posted:We'll see about the show, but yeah Gaiman said he avoided the Greek Pantheon because it was too well known, but he made an exception for Vulkan because apparently there was a lot of Vulkan related coins found in America somewhere or something like that, plus changing him to the god of guns makes pretty logical sense for America. It's not even really "changing" him. He's the God of Smithery. He built weapons, armor, hell, even ROBOTS back in the Greek and Roman myths, like constantly. The word isn't "Gunsmith" because it was a new idea, smithing guns is just the logical next step from smithing swords. He didn't stop making weapons, he just started making more modern ones.
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May 31, 2017 00:20
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Yeah there are Gods we don't see at all that are definitely things to be aware of. Wednesday is obviously terrified of the Highway God and makes Shadow take the back roads. Also, he only uses phones when absolutely needed; I can only imagine how much more powerful Telephone has gotten since the book was written-cell phones were only just starting to take off at the time as common objects, now smartphones are in constant use.
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May 31, 2017 16:11
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My Lovely Horse posted:The line blurs a bit with smartphones though since most of what they do probably falls under Tech Boy's portfolio, with the social media connections and all. Well yeah, where do you think Anonymous sits in the house of worship?
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May 31, 2017 17:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's funny because you're expecting something scandalous but nah, guy just likes horses. Exactly. It's a completely ordinary, mundane thing for a person bored at work to be wasting their time on, and there's literally nothing weird about it. If anything, that's exactly why it's funny.
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Jun 1, 2017 20:05
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Haven't watched the newest ep yet. But I'd like to just brag that I spent the day at The House On The Rock today. The Carosel and Mikado are particularly striking.
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Jun 4, 2017 23:08
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Toast Museum posted:It's a place in Wisconsin. A friend of mine went four or five years ago and confirmed that it's as weird as you'd expect. The parts of season two that take place there are being filmed on location, so we'll all get to see at least some of it. As I said upthread, my family and I visited The House on the Rock just last Sunday. It's a pretty amazing place, a true shrine to American Artifice, and somehow both peaceful and incredibly creepy at the same time. The Carousel is so big and complex, I thought for a moment that I was experiencing the Stendhal Syndrome while there. You then enter the next area directly by walking through the mouth of a great beast, into an enormous room filled with mechanisms, pipe organs, clock pieces, chimes, and other strange mechanisms. Probably the most impressive thing about The House, is how every time you think you've grown adjusted to the place, you turn a corner and see something else new and bizarre and monumental. We spent over 4 hours walking from one end of the place to the other. I just finally watched the newest episode tonight. It was fantastic, and as others have said, really assures me how they can get away with drawing out this show without it getting boring. In many ways, this show is a road trip themed show. There are just so, so many places they can stop and still keep things interesting. I loved how off-book this episode was without feeling out of character in the least. Also, at the beginning, pre-credits, the "Previously on American Gods" sequence was shown through the same Media monitor as the bank surveillance screen, complete with the mysterious top-hatted figure shown in the reflection.
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Jun 8, 2017 06:19
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I'd argue that quite possibly Mr. Nancy could be present if we see rabbits doing tricky business...Brer Rabbit is believed by many to be an Americanized Anansi...
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Jun 13, 2017 20:13
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Nah it's a good section. It might go on a little long but it's good. They've already shown they're willing to devote time to side stuff too so it will probably be fine.
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Jun 14, 2017 17:28
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precision posted:Yeah but if you're that kind of American then this show is already going to offend you, which is why I find it specifically strange that they would bother with fake dicks. It's as weird to me, as someone who is not afraid of dicks, as it would be if films and shows had topless women wear prosthetic breasts that looked just like their normal breasts (though maybe larger). Every once in a while they do in fact use prosthetic breasts, usually because the actress last minute got shy. Body doubles are more common, but not always used. There's a really weird bit that was obvious to me early on in the 2009 Friday the 13th film where an actress who takes off her top is obviously wearing a chest prosthetic and it really doesn't look like a real chest at all. It instead ends up looking like those renaissance paintings where the artist used a male model as his reference when drawing a woman, and then just pasted vaguely boob shaped bags to the chest in the piece.
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Jun 24, 2017 08:33
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Medullah posted:It was in Predator vision but the Djinn love scene definitely had some of the ol' in and out top o' the morning to you. Not to mention a rather artistic representation of ejaculation.
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Jun 24, 2017 16:42
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