YMMV / American Gods (2017)

• Actor Shipping: Pablo Schreiber (Sweeney) and Ricky Whittle (Shadow) have this trope, which plays a major factor in shipping of their characters.
• Anvilicious: "Come to Jesus" doesn't even bother with subtlety, but outright states that Bilquis' fallen fortunes are the result of men being threatened by a powerful woman.
• Base-Breaking Character: Laura Moon. Half the fans can't stand her because of her selfishness and Jerkass behavior toward Shadow during the time she was alive, while the other half loves her because of those qualities. Another portion doesn't mind her, but is up in arms about her Ascended Extra status on the show and feels that she steals screentime from other, more likable characters. The fact that she is Shadow's wife also made her an easy target for Die for Our Ship.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In "Head Full of Snow," Shadow has a dream where he drives his car off a marshmallow in slow-motion.
• Broken Base: The decision to adapt the novel as a multi-season TV series rather than a simple miniseries. Some fans think it gives the story some additional depth and dimension, while giving the central war story an appropriately epic scope and giving the book's many minor-but-memorable characters a chance to shine. Others feel that it just fills the show with gratuitous padding, and that it's an unnecessary Adaptation Expansion for a novel that—for all its complex themes—boils down to a fairly simple Road Trip Plot with a Final Battle at the end.
• Catharsis Factor: Wednesday's treatment of Jesus may be this for viewers who worship "the old gods" and may have to dig through Christianization, or outright suppression, of the gods they worship/follow/revere.
• Creepy Awesome: Mr. World is the incredibly unsettling leader of the New Gods who freaks out even Mr. Wednesday... but he does it all with so much style that it leaves the fans begging for more of him.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney get this treatment from some of the fanbase. They often treat her as a "girlboss" instead of a selfish cheater who is responsible for Shadow's incarceration and who is unrepentantly asking for forgiveness she doesn't deserve, and Mad Sweeney's many violent, sociopathic tendencies are glossed over to portray him as a rough bad boy with a heart of gold. Pun intended.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Audrey is definitely a much-loved character on Tumblr.
  • All three of the Zorya sisters are beloved despite not being as prominent in their episodes as much as Czernobog. Special mention should go to Vechernyaya for being portrayed by Cloris Leachman and having excellent chemistry with Wednesday.
  • Mr. Nancy, who was beloved by many audiences for his style and his absolutely fantastic speech to the captive slaves in episode 2 of the first season. Orlando Jones also helped put the show on the map with Anansi's powerful monologues in seasons one and two, and after he was fired from the show, the ratings immediately tanked and the show was canned. He wasn't the whole reason why some people tuned in, but he was clearly liked enough that his exit prompted the exit of a very large chunk of fans.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Laura and Mad Sweeney are the most popular ship in the fandom, having twice the amount of fan works about them than the next most popular couple Shadow/Mad Sweeney. They even have a Portmanteau Couple Name - MadWife. Fans were not pleased when Mad Sweeney died and Pablo Schreiber was confirmed to have exited the show. Both Laura/Mad Sweeney and Shadow/Mad Sweeney are easily more popular than the canon Shadow/Laura.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Czernobog calls Wednesday "Wotan", an old name for Odin, foreshadowing Wednesday's true identity.
  • Sweeney also calls Wednesday by a different name, "Grimnir", another name for Odin, when he talks to Laura.
  • Another clue is when he says that Wednesday is "my day", for those who know what Wednesday means.^note Woden's Day
  • Wednesday says he knows charms to heal and to blunt the blades of enemies — he's talking about the 18 Runes that Odin learned hanging from Yggdrasil in the myths.
  • In "The Rapture of Burning", Tyr reveals that he was originally the Lord of the Norse Gods before Odin framed him sacrificing his hand to Fenrir as a moment of shame, essentially taking his throne by conning the people into framing him as the real hero. This has historical significance, as scholars and anthropologists believe that Tyr was the original Top God (or at least a more important figure) of Germanic Mythology before Odin Allfather replaced him in the Viking Age.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The scenes with Vulcan and his followers were already a pretty harsh commentary on aspects of American culture in 2017, but the events surrounding the rally held by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 make them even more uncomfortable to watch in retrospect. It doesn't help that Vulcan's town is located in Virginia, nor that Vulcan and his followers have red armbands with a symbol on them.
  • Czernobog's tearful farewell to Zorya Vechernyaya in Season 3, Episode 2, airing only ten days before the death of Cloris Leachman, the actress who played her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Robbie offering to teach Shadow Krav Maga. Sterling Archer once described Karate as "the Dane Cook of martial arts" and regards Krav Maga as superior. Robbie is played by Dane Cook.
  • The show shares a time slot with Twin Peaks, another show featuring a dead girl named Laura, and another girl named Audrey. Additionally, Twin Peaks stars David Duchovny, while American Gods stars Gillian Anderson, both best known for co-starring on The X-Files.
  • Mr. Ibis is played by Demore Barnes, who played the Archangel Raphael on Supernatural. His first story is about Viking sailors who come to America long before Leif Erickson. Guess who is the patron angel of sailors?
  • Shadow and Jesus talking in "Come to Jesus" about a journey to a pre-destined end became this when the actor, Jeremy Davies, got cast as Baldur in God of War (PS4), a completely different god with a destined death. And considering he's saying this to Shadow, who is revealed to be Baldur in the book, the irony is compounded. Even better, Baldur, despite being distinct, bears a lot of resemblance to Jesus.
  • The King of the Dwarves is played by Lee Arenberg, who you might remember as Grumpy (of the Seven Dwarves) in Once Upon a Time.
• Ho Yay: A fairly minor example, but when Sweeney's arguing with Zombie Laura about his lucky coin, he outright says he didn't mean to give it to Shadow and implies he got distracted by Shadow.
  Sweeney: Damn his dark eyes.
• I Am Not Shazam: Sweeney's past self as an Irish legendary king is often referred as "Buile Shuibhne" in fandom. This is the title of the story he features in, and translates as "The Frenzy of Sweeney" or "The Madness of Sweeney". It is not the character's name.
• Memetic Mutation: Fans have taken to calling Mr. World's Danny Trejo form "Señor Mundo", which is just Spanish for "Mr. World."
• Misaimed Fandom: Mr. Nancy's speech is quite awesome, no doubt, but many people who love quoting the (admittedly excellent) points he makes about the history of slavery and race relations in America seem to forget the fact that he is deliberately provoking the slaves to start a rebellion which will get them all killed - so he can have a sacrifice.
• Moral Event Horizon: Wednesday killed Laura and got Shadow sent to prison, killed Vulcan for not taking his side, and engineers a famine to instigate a war. And he shows no sign of slowing down.
• Narm: There are a few scenes from the first episode that shoot for Bloodier and Gorier and just wind up kind of hilarious:
  • The start of the first episode has a boat of Vikings come to the New World. As they set out to explore it, all of a sudden the man in front — and only the man in front — is given the Human Pincushion treatment and filled full of dozens of arrows in the span of seconds.
  • Later on, the Vikings are fighting each other to the death. The excessive amount of blood (and its obvious fakeness) already undermines the drama of the scene, but one Viking's arm gets lopped off, goes flying still clutching a sword, and manages to impale another Viking. It's so over the top it's impossible to take seriously.
  • It's worth noting that the scene mentioned in the paragraph before is the only scene in the episode to appear in Letterboxed format instead of standard 16:9, apparently to set it apart from the rest of the show. It was also used to have the aforementioned severed arm break out of the picture frame for a moment, literally flying into the black border.
  • At the end of the episode, the Technical Boy's goons just arbitrarily explode into Ludicrous Gibs while trying to murder Shadow. The blood is no less obviously fake and the whole scene is completely out of nowhere. It's later revealed that this is because Laura rips them to pieces with her own two hands, and the viewer and Shadow just can't see her. It's still pretty silly, though.
  • Audrey's ongoing breakdown at her husband and best friend's betrayal is, while entirely understandable and sad, also unintentionally hilarious.
  • Finding out your wife was exchanging nude pics with your best friend while you're in prison: tragic. Only being able to see said picture when looking at your wedding photo: not so much.
  • Mexican Jesus' death was tragic and all, but then a tumbleweed blew across his face and left behind a crown of thorns. You know, just in case it wasn't clear that this was Jesus.
  • After Wednesday reveals his identity accompanied with thunder and lightning and a grand soundtrack, Shadow feels the need to repeat his name for clarification, and Wednesday bellows it out again.
  • New Media's introduction in season 2 comes off like this, given the use of modern social media terms (subscribers, likes, shares, etc) and the heavy influence of the "Japanese schoolgirl" stereotype in her design and attitude. The scene with her and Argus "making a deal" is also weird, given the Does This Remind You of Anything? aspect of it. It also does not help that she was meant to be a replacement to the charismatic Gillian Anderson as Ensemble Dark Horse Media.
• Narm Charm:
  • The sex scene between the Jinn and Salim starts with the Jinn appearing with a flaccid, comically large, CGI penis, but the tenderness and love in the scene manage to overcome it.
  • Also Mr. World's dramatic salsa speech. It would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn't terrifying.
  • The protagonist's name is Shadow Moon, which is bound to either be this trope or just Narm.
  • With all the prior foreshadowing, Mr. Wednesday's real name had gotten to be a Captain Obvious Reveal, but the scene where he reveals it is injected with so much of Ian McShane's gravitas that it is unbelievably badass.
  • Media's speech as David Bowie can come off as this. Especially if you're well-versed in Bowie's music, the constant lyric-dropping in the speech comes off as forced and just a bit cheesy as Media phrases things in... unusual ways to throw Bowie lyrics in there. However, despite this, and in thanks at least in part to Gillian Anderson's performance, the speech still comes off as powerful and is important for understanding the power of human belief in the show's universe, thus making it this trope rather than straight up Narm.
• One-Scene Wonder: More like two-scene wonder: The bartender who appears in episode 1 and 3 of season 1 for her hilarious interactions with Shadow and Sweeney.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Forgive the accidental pun, but between season two and season three, there was a massive Troubled Production issue between the actors and the new show runner. Originally, Orlando Jones, the actor portraying Anansi, was possibly the most well-received character of season one, so Neil Gaiman, the author of the book who has some consultation with the show, encouraged him to write his own lines for his appearance in season two. It also was incredibly well-received, but the rest of the season was not, which then resulted in a new show runner being hired yet again. This showrunner decided that Anansi would not be in season three and fired Orlando Jones, who posted a video on social media outlining that he had been waiting on a call back only to be fired with little to no explanation. He was visibly upset about it, as were his fans and many fans of the show, and the only official word that came down was that (paraphrasing) "his character was not part of the story in the book and that's why he wasn't asked to return." The only problem with that explanation is Laura Moon and the leprechaun, who it bears mentioning are white, both were not featured anywhere near as much in the book as they are in the show, so the explanation came across as an excuse to push a person of color with a prominent role out of the show to replace his screentime with the white characters' instead. Soon after this news broke, Ricky Whittle, the actor portraying Shadow, also went into Orlando Jones' DMs on Twitter and begged him not to keep calling out the show runner for firing him as well as several other actors of color from season three, which was the last straw for many fans. Season three went on to be the worst reviewed and least watched season, ending with the show's cancellation as many viewers were angered by the removal of Jones as well as the other actors of color and so unfortunately, the show's legacy has been tainted ever since.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Media. The idea that every time you sit down to watch one of your favorite shows, you are unwittingly making a sacrifice to a modern-day goddess who may be watching you through the TV screen is pretty terrifying, especially when the series shows that sacrifices to gods generally end in death.
  • Mr. World is this on another level - he displays the ability to watch through the satellites in orbit and also claims to know everything about every human.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The book counterparts of Laura and Audrey are hated for respectively being annoying and having little characterization. The show's portrayal of them receives much warmer reception.
• Ship Mates: Those who ship Shadow with anyone who isn't Mad Sweeney tend to pair the latter up with Laura due to the latter two's chemistry together. It helps that Essie McGowan, another character who has significant interaction with Sweeney, is also portrayed by Emily Browning.
• Signature Scene:
  • From the first episode, Bilquis swallowing the man she was on a date with through her vagina.
  • From the second episode, Mr. Nancy's speech to a New World-bound ship hold full of slaves, telling them of the future that awaits them and their descendants in America.
  • From the first season finale, Mr. Wednesday revealing his true identity to Shadow in the final episode of Season 1, listing the names and epithets he's known by, along with his ravens and wolves, while thunderstorms brew around them.
• Seasonal Rot: Many critics have been disappointed by Season Two, saying that it has potential, but it's wasted, and that Fuller and Green leaving the show was to its detriment, as the direction of the new showrunner, Jesse Alexander (who incidentally was fired from the show during production), just doesn't have that same spark. Indeed, viewership for the show fell rapidly from the first episode of season two, ending at 0.272 million viewers for the finale (compare that with the 0.774 from the first season's finale). Reception only got worse with season three, where viewer numbers declined to the point where the show only broke 0.200 million twice - at one point viewership dipped to 0.110 - and the season finished out at a positively anemic 0.182 million viewers.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney have about 200% more screentime in the show than they do in the novel it's based on, largely due to the show runners discovering a large part of the fanbase ships them. Unfortunately, it's to the show's detriment, as they started giving more time to the two of them than they did to Shadow and all the other characters in seasons two and three. This decision is one of the contributing factors to why the viewers stopped watching the show and it was later canceled.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One of the main problems of the series. Due to the showrunner being changed with each season, numerous actors either left the show or were not asked to come back, which led to some key characters disappearing or being replaced. The most infamous example is with Media: to face the absence of Gillian Anderson in season 2, the writers decided to have the character evolve into New Media, played by Kahyun Kim. On paper it sounded like a good idea and great concept, but most viewers agree that the execution of the character was done very poorly, and New Media paled next to Media's original incarnation... and so came season 3, where the writers decided to change Media yet again, and this time into a whole group of minor social media deities, but without any explanation as to why this change happened (in fact you could miss the link between the characters if it weren't for a few clues). On top of all that Media in the novel AND the first season of the show is known to be a shapeshifter with a thousand faces, and so an easy solution to Gillian Anderson's absence could have been to just give Media another actress.
  • Due to once again the constant changes in showrunners, several characters invented by each of them appear just one time before vanishing and never being seen again (such as Mr. Wood from season 1). Even more complicated is the fact that some of those One-Scene Wonder characters, while being excellent ideas, do not actually fit within the worldbuilding. Case in point: Money from season 2. Everything in him screams New God (he is the literal embodiment of money, banks and modern currencies, with no correspondence or link to any mythological or legendary figures) and yet Mr. Wednesday considers making him an ally in his war, as if he were an Old God (and it is not as if Mr. Wednesday could be chummy with the New Gods).^note Though a possible explanation would be that exchanging coins for stuff is a concept as old as organized civilization itself, and we already have Mr. Wood, a god older than most of the Old Gods who isn't tied to a specific mythology. As for his domain being modern financial concepts, we know from Vulcan that Old Gods can adapt their domains to the modern day and continue their worship.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • This is considered to be one of the main reason behind the Seasonal Rot. Given each season had a new showrunner, causing each time changes in the creating team and acting cast, the television series is filled with abandoned plots and character arcs either heavily rewritten or just cut short with not much of an explanation.
  • While the story is chock full of Old World gods and mythical creatures to build the lore, many found it disappointing that there weren't that many New Gods in comparison. While Technical Boy, Media and Mr. World had plenty of time to be established and were entertaining in their own right, every other example either only makes brief appearances (like the Bookkeeper and his Girl Scouts) or had very little development (Mr. Town and the Director), with the rest of the pantheon having been modernized Old Gods or their Faceless children acting as generic mooks. The book alludes to various New Gods they could have used (gods of trains, planes, junkies, etc.) but chose not to. The season 3 finale revealing that Technical Boy and Mr. World are also just Old Gods with a new modern look just compounds the problem further.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Bilquis's backstory as told by Mr. Nancy is framed as though she's on fallen fortunes because of men being threatened by a powerful woman. Which is indeed shown to be true throughout... except for the part where her followers died because of HIV. There's also the whole "swallowing people whole through her vagina" thing. Especially since her unwitting victims include people on dating apps, or just random strangers with the misfortune of sitting next to her on a plane or a bus. The first onscreen sacrifice in her name is a lonely man whose kids convinced him to start dating again.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The first episode of season two has the meeting between the Old Gods at the House on the Rock. The actual meeting takes place inside Odin's head, where everyone has forms that are exaggerated, glowing versions of themselves. Special mention to the triple-headed Zorya sisters and Mama-ji's multiple weapon-wielding arms.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Shadow/Ricky Whittle's hair in season three is rather...odd-looking, to put it mildly. Perms for black men are not terribly common and the way it was cut with the strange cowlick up front was rather distracting for some fans.

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