spn 5.19
okay, huh.
I was flailing through most of the episode, until the part where the boys had to rescue KALI. Uh. What?
And then on rewatch everything started to fall apart. There was so much fail, here, show. I kind of see what maybe your original intention was, and I loved Kali's speech about westerners, but why were all the non-christian gods eating people. What? That and the fact that Lucifer could just swat them like flies undermined that whole cool speech Kali gave.
Other fail:
-Ganesh and Kali are major gods of a major current world religion. Including them with the likes of Loki, Baldur, and Odin as bickering pagan gods was rather insulting to Hindus, I would think. Apologies to pagans who currently worship Odin or the greek pantheon, but those folks < Hindus as far as number and history. (see comments for my own fail, this was a stupid thing to say.)
-Why was Ganesh an african-american man when they were fairly specific with the casting of the other gods?
-why was the only Asian god also the only god not to speak english? Kali, Ganesh, Odin, Baldur, and Mercury all spoke english.
-show: eating people? really?
I'm sure there's more.
I can possibly fanwank some of this fail away (the gods inhabit vessels just as angels do, maybe; maybe they'd depowered themselves to some extent while having their rival-mob-meeting but didn't get Lucifer to do the same when he showed, I don't know. Doesn't erase the fail.)
I'll talk about what I did like in another post, but I have to say I found all of this to be way more problematic to me than the whore episode, because for me the show's portrayal of women tends to be pretty decent, and they've had really kickass female characters I've liked. But when it comes to non-christian belief systems, they have never shown me a glimpse that they're trying in any kind of good faith. I wanted to love this one, because I've so wanted anyone to point out that hey, christian apocalypse, there are other worldviews out there. But this wasn't the way to do that, execution-wise.
update: yourlibrarian just linked me to this article about a couple of public responses by Hindus on the episode.
I was flailing through most of the episode, until the part where the boys had to rescue KALI. Uh. What?
And then on rewatch everything started to fall apart. There was so much fail, here, show. I kind of see what maybe your original intention was, and I loved Kali's speech about westerners, but why were all the non-christian gods eating people. What? That and the fact that Lucifer could just swat them like flies undermined that whole cool speech Kali gave.
Other fail:
-Ganesh and Kali are major gods of a major current world religion. Including them with the likes of Loki, Baldur, and Odin as bickering pagan gods was rather insulting to Hindus, I would think. Apologies to pagans who currently worship Odin or the greek pantheon, but those folks < Hindus as far as number and history. (see comments for my own fail, this was a stupid thing to say.)
-Why was Ganesh an african-american man when they were fairly specific with the casting of the other gods?
-why was the only Asian god also the only god not to speak english? Kali, Ganesh, Odin, Baldur, and Mercury all spoke english.
-show: eating people? really?
I'm sure there's more.
I can possibly fanwank some of this fail away (the gods inhabit vessels just as angels do, maybe; maybe they'd depowered themselves to some extent while having their rival-mob-meeting but didn't get Lucifer to do the same when he showed, I don't know. Doesn't erase the fail.)
I'll talk about what I did like in another post, but I have to say I found all of this to be way more problematic to me than the whore episode, because for me the show's portrayal of women tends to be pretty decent, and they've had really kickass female characters I've liked. But when it comes to non-christian belief systems, they have never shown me a glimpse that they're trying in any kind of good faith. I wanted to love this one, because I've so wanted anyone to point out that hey, christian apocalypse, there are other worldviews out there. But this wasn't the way to do that, execution-wise.
update: yourlibrarian just linked me to this article about a couple of public responses by Hindus on the episode.