Everyone knows some amount of mythology, and mythology is a vital part all of our media, new and old. The Lion King is Hamlet is The Oresteia. American Gods takes a less subtle approach, and feels like the grown-up version of the Percy Jackson series. Mythology is known as a thing of the past; contemporary myths are few and far between, and the ones we do have are widely accepted as false, i.e. Bigfoot. Religious stories are old.
Neil Gaiman masterfully blended the old gods with modern day society; I was awestruck by how creative and innovative some of these ties were. The people's relationship with gods of any culture were never simple and clean, and they didn't always make sense. The gods of American Gods feel so much more believable than Percy Jackson's, of which had little variation from their sources.
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