HBO Eyeing Neil Gaiman’s American Gods; Will a Casting Race Fail Soon Follow?
by Latoya Peterson
My, my, my. HBO is going all in with their fantasy acquisitions these days. First Game of Thrones and now Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. According to Deadline Hollywood:
The project was brought to HBO by Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and it was brought to them by Robert Richardson. The plan is for Richardson and Gaiman to write the pilot together. [...]
American Gods, the 2002 book that won both the Stoker and Hugo Award among other prizes, lays out a battle between two sets of gods. One consists of the traditional gods and mythological creatures who got their power because people throughout history believed in them. They are losing steam as people’s beliefs wane and are in danger of being supplanted by a new set of gods who reflect America’s preoccupation with technological advancements and obsessions with media, celebrity, technology and drugs. The protagonist is an ex-con who becomes the traveling partner of a conman who turns out to be one of the older gods trying to recruit troops to battle the upstart deities.
The main character of American Gods is Shadow, a wandering ex-convict who finds himself in a battle of mythology – the older Gods of folklore, brought to America by waves of immigration and kept alive by their devotees are set to face off against the newer Gods like the internet and the media. But what is most compelling to me isn’t just the story line – it’s that once again, Gaiman has been explicit about which of his characters are nonwhite by design. Gaiman, writing on the WELL message boards, explains his thoughts around Shadow:
[I]n my head at least he’s one of those people whose race doesn’t read easily — in the celebrity world, Vin Deisel’s an example of the same kind of look. But it seemed appropriate in a book about America that the hero was of mixed race.
Gaiman is known for writing with racial politics in mind. Back when I read The Sandman series, I had assumed Dream and his cohort where generally intended to be white, though folks from other, browner mythologies would occasionally enter the world. After that, I read American Gods and Anansi Boys and was thrilled to realize there were characters of color all over the place. Anansi Boys took it to a new level, by specifically marking white characters as other. I also read Neverwhere, and coded the Marquis as white in my mind – so when I watched the BBC version, I was astounded to see there were *two* black characters cast in major roles. So, for that reason, I’ve always been a bit more fond of Neil Gaiman compared to other fantasy writers – even if every book isn’t inclusive, his worlds, overall, are far more inclusive than the average urban fantasy universe.
Now, this does not mean that Gaiman is immune from the occasional bout of race fail – Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children’s Literature had a very public go-round with him last year, about how he conceptualized the United States. In her initial post, “What Neil Gaiman Said“, she explains:
In a 2008 interview about his The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman said
“The great thing about having an English cemetery is I could go back a very, very, very long way. And in America, you go back 250 years (in a cemetery), and then suddenly you’ve got a few dead Indians, and then you don’t have anybody at all, unless you decide to set it up in Maine or somewhere and sneak in some Vikings.”
Really, Mr. Gaiman? Is that what you think?
I’m guessing (or hoping, perhaps) that Mr. Gaiman knows better, and might want to recall those words. Maybe he did recall those words, somewhere… Has anyone got info on that?
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