#ag analysis

So I have an American Gods fantheory about Laura Moon, and I will explicate it in convenient bulletpoint parlance. Potential Spoilers, as it works off somethings from the book.

Premises:

Laura Moon is dead.

Because she’s dead, the world is dull -dim, muted, cold, and colorless- to her.

Except for anything doing with Shadow, and the color blue.

To her eyes, a weird golden aura pulses off of Shadow.

 This aura is the most significant source of color and light in her world. She directly correlates it to the sun, the source of all life, and can see it for miles, sense it(in the books) from nearly anywhere.

Undead Laura is drawn to Shadow, and her reference to this aura in talking about her new love of him with Audrey suggesting this aura is its primary cause.

In American Gods, deities and other divine beings(daimon in ancient greek, from which we get demon) are sustained by faith; belief, memory, and devotion.

Shadow believes in, remembers with love, and is devoted to Laura.

In the series, Wednesday asks Shadow if he believes in love: he responds “I believe the Fuck out of Love.”

Hinzelmann’s story, the story of the sacrificial child, shows that the Dead can become deities through faith and devotion.

Conclusions:

While Laura is raised by the Sun-Coin Shadow gave her, she is sustained by his belief, remembrance, and devotion.

Laura is a daimon: a divine being and potentially, to Shadow, something like a God.

Corollary:

Gods and daimons are defined and redefined by the belief people have in them.

It is possible that Laura’s newfound interest to Shadow is not just a “hunger” for his devotion and faith, but also partly a slight redefinition of her character to match what Shadow wants from her, though it’s impossible to say anything about this from just one episode.

Counterpoint:

Devotion and belief itself is not enough, the Gods need specific rituals and direct, explicit, belief in their existence and power; they need Worship. This is the point of the visit to Easter and one of the points of the story of Nunyunnini. It isn’t enough for Easter that people celebrate her feast day with her symbols and holy foods; they don’t believe in or worship her when they do it. It’s why Bilquis requires Worship from her sacrifices.

Retort:

This raises a significant contradiction at the center of the book.

The New, American, Gods are not directly worshiped. No one worships Media or Technology or Science or Medicine or Globalism in the personal forms of Media/Fame, The Technical Boy, and Mr. World. No one makes icons and idols to these characters, or sacrifices to them. No one genuinely believes in the existence of, say, movie monsters, yet they appear, fighting on the side of the New Gods, at the climax of the story(iirc). They feed off of mortal participation in their portfolios.

The Intangibles(The Market/Invisible Hand) is debatable on this issue :|

Counter-Retort:

The New Gods are, at essence, conceptual in a way the Old Gods are not, which explains why they would not need the specific worship the Old Gods did.

Counter-Counter-Retort:

Odin’s whole plan is predicated on his ability to feed off of those partaking in his portfolio. If he could not gain power merely from other beings fighting and killing, then there would be no benefit for him in fomenting war between the Old and New deities, since none of them worship him.

Which, incidentally, undermines the whole story. If deities can be sustained by simple participation in their portfolios and representation, then they would be perfectly sustained by the modern world. Heck, Athena, goddess of Athens and Civilization, would be the most powerful deity on the planet and Odin -a God of War, Sacrifice, and Knowledge- would probably be the second or third most honored, and therefore powerful, deity in the US even without widespread popular devotion.

Counter-Counter-Counter-Retort:

But they would have been fighting in his name: The battle between the Old and New Gods is set off directly by Odin’s “death”. The Old God Faction is fighting specifically to avenge him.

C-C-C-C-Retort:

sheabuttertwistout replied to your post: Deities, Death, and Devotion

shadow sees laura as a god how white feminist of you

I didn’t really mean that in the sense of worshiping or him seeing her as “greater than” in someway, but more in the context of what Gods are in AG. Johnny Appleseed is a God. Paul Bunyan, which the book mistakenly presents as a creation of marketing without any basis in actual folktales(or maybe it was just presenting Appleseed as thinking that out of bitterness), is a God. Later in the book you see Car Gods and Train Gods and TV Gods. Does anyone see these as worthy of worship in the conventional sense, or as “greater than”, more “real”, than people? Any person(post-mortem, it seems; I don’t think they present any living people as gods), or thing, or concept infused with sufficient belief, devotion and attention, or love, becomes a divine being/a daimon/a god in the American Gods universe. There’s a line in the Nunyunnini bit which says, “gods come from the heart, and to the heart they return”; who or what do humans hold in their hearts more powerfully than the people they’ve lost, Good and Bad? That, for the most part, is what I meant by the “something like a God” comment; Shadow remembers and is devoted to his wife, even after her betrayals, even after the pain she’s caused him. He loves her, and he doesn’t stop loving her, even if that love becomes more painful and complicated after her death, and what she did, forces him to see her more clearly.

But I also mean it in a different way. Shadow’s concept of Laura, the Laura that Shadow “believes in” most strongly, isn’t the real Laura at all, but rather a sort of  “image of faith” he has constructed out of the meaning he has invested her with. The show is very clear about this in ways the book never is, both because it’s mostly from Shadow’s perspective and he never really questions his devotion to Laura, and because it never really takes the time to be interested in her as a character. The first time we see her in the series she is literally laying, cruciform, on their conjugal bed, in their home, floating in a sea of pure white light which is pouring through a hole in Shadow’s cell wall. Like, the religious imagery in that scene, and thus in Shadow’s concept of Laura(along with his concept of the outside world and domesticity and freedom) is obvious. Equally obvious is how unrealistic it is, and that unreality only grows the more we learn about Laura. But this isn’t a one-sided thing; neither of them sees the other accurately.

Laura -misanthropic, thrill-seeking, selfish, manipulative, very likely deeply depressed, deceitful Laura- saw Shadow as a dangerous, muscular, stupid, exciting thief; strikes him when he refuses to play that role sexually, comes to resent him for loving her and being happy in a boring domestic life and seeking to better himself, hates herself for “bringing a thief(him) home” and sees nothing emotionally fulfilling in how he’s turned his life around with her, blames him for a lack of happiness that definitely plagued her before she ever even met him and which she’s never, seemingly, even considered doing anything about.

Shadow -lonely, love-starved, grief-stricken(before Laura the death of his mother), big-hearted, quiet and invisible Shadow- saw Laura as a way out; as a redeeming love and attention, a lifeline in high seas, a safe harbor from, since the death of his mother, an aimless, self-destructive, and empty life of risk and physical danger. He takes for himself all the blame of his decisions, even the “bad luck” of getting caught, but gives himself zero credit for becoming a better person and making a better life for himself; he credits Laura with that when how he has changed is something she not only doesn’t appreciate, but deeply resents. Like Polunochnaya says he “keeps giving his life away”. Shadow invests too much meaning and loyalty in others, and not enough in himself. He is looking to be part of something; to give himself to something or someone. I don’t think this is racial. I think this has to do with his background, his childhood, and the death of his mother, which I hope they’ll go more into later in the series, and I think it ties into how he chooses to see the people he aligns with and particularly his romantic partners.

That the show goes to such lengths to establish this, far beyond what the book does, suggests to me that this connection between relationships and faith, this metaphor of love-as-religion, as both sustaining and inaccurate, is something the showrunners intend to dwell on, and to use to characterize Shadow and Laura. And race is definitely a part of that.

It’s pretty clear how Laura interprets Shadows blackness; her ease with hitting him, her immediate decision that he was dangerous and “rough”, her resentment at his domesticity, the dehumanizing and patronizing nature of calling him “Puppy” and, as Aubrey says, seeing him as a pet. Frankly I think they make Laura’s racism, how unexamined it is by her, and its role in their relationship rather clear.

What isn’t as clear at the moment, I think, is how Shadow thinks of race. We’ve seen some of it. He worries over racial violence in prison. He physically restrains himself in the face of white racism a handful of times, glosses over being lynched to a doctor to keep cops out of the situation, and we’ve seen his anger, frustration, and fear at being lynched expressed to Wednesday. Aside from this confrontation, though, Shadow doesn’t talk about these things; they’ve been expressed through Whittle’s body-language and the cinematography. I think it can safely be said he is comfortable being black at the same time that he is constantly aware of the ever-present danger racism presents to a black man in America. He is very careful about how he moves and holds himself, and what he does and how he speaks -about making sudden moves, being intimidating, saying or doing anything that could be conceived of as threatening, violent, or loud- because he knows how that gets over-interpreted and where that leads. He is always prepared for racism from white people(his reaction to Wednesday talking about Jesus), and really likes not encountering it(his interactions with Low Key and the Zorya sisters as opposed to how on-edge and closed off he is around Sweeney and Chernobog). He works hard to present himself as non-threatening(the coin and card tricks, how calm and soft and soothing his normal speaking voice is), really doesn’t like being put in situations where he has to be threatening or “tough”, and cultivates patience and a cool head. In this respect Whittle’s performance has been great; I think the critics who’ve said otherwise just can’t see what he’s doing physically. I don’t think Shadow is self-hating by any means. How his concept of whiteness influenced his relationship with Laura is still unclear at this point, I think. I think, perhaps, Shadow’s the sort of person who blinds themselves to the flaws and difficult qualities of the people they love.

The title says it all, really u_u

I commented in Reread/Review 1 that Sweeney’s caliginous tension with Shadow was “Delicious”, and it of course still is but, having now watched Lemon Scented You(S1E5), it has become obvious to me that Sweeney is just promiscuously, omnidirectionally caliginous, to everyone, at all times. Pablo Schreiber’s performance is absolutely a Revelation, and I am amazed to think that a performance so Pitch-Perfect(:|) is being carried out, very likely, with no direct knowledge of or reference to Homestuck.

You would think there could be no possible way someone tauntingly describing to the walking dead how their body is going to rot and fall apart, and how when it does they will reach into said body to take from them what they won’t give freely, could be erotic and sensual. And you would be wrong, because that’s exactly what Pablo Schreiber made it. In his scenes with Shadow and Laura, you could not say whether he was on the verge of punching or kissing them at any given moment, or even if there was really much of a difference to him between those two options at all. The man is an acting genius.