Buffy was quite clear on this subject - leprechauns are entirely mythical.
Except for bigfoot.
Perhaps tracing back to Sandman, where Gaiman was tying together decades of DC’s fantasy and horror comics into one universe.
oh woops I realized I completely missed the part in the OP about “set on a contemporary earth”
Sorry 
No wonder Red Dwarf hadn’t been mentioned yet, lol…
Highlander: The Series was close. There were immortals, and that’s almost it. The few others I can think of in the spoiler box One immortal with psychic powers. One immortal pretending to be a vampire, IIRC. One magic pool. And one Zoroastrian demon, but the less said about that, the better.
Yes, he was barehanded. See p. 15-16 of Chapt. XII.
There were a few where the mystery turned out to have a mundane resolution. The “hungry ghost” haunting a Chinatown turned out to be a cover for a black market organ harvesting ring, for example. Or the lake monster that ate Scullys dog being revealed to be an escaped alligator.
I think this is true of most of the modern zombie genre. I’m hard-pressed to think of a zombie story that doesn’t do this. Indeed, while zombies sometimes make an appearance in other works, stories that start out as zombie stories seem to hew pretty closely to that line, and not branch out.
Well, you’re right, but two nitpicks: First, Mulder and Scully are specifically assigned to the X-Files. That’s going to skew your sample pretty far. Second, I just assumed that we don’t see the weeks where it’s not supernatural.
Well, I didn’t mean “everything” quite literally. Harry Potter isn’t “just” magic and wizards, there’s Hippogryphs, Centaurs, Werewolves, and so on.
Yeah, I noticed that too. While almost everybody has to do a zombie story, zombie series tend to be grounded squarely in the zombie apocalypse.
No aliens, though. While the HP series did feature a wide variety of mythical creatures, to the best of my recollection it was just mythical creatures, and primarily mythical creatures from the Greek, British, and Scandinavian traditions. So there were limits to what sort of imaginary creatures were included in the HP world.
There’s got to be a named TV Trope for that. But I’m not going near that website until I’ve got stuff done.
All Myths are True (Warning: TV Tropes link)
Though you do wonder what kinds of “mythical creatures” witchs & wizards in the Far East dealt with.
IIRC the Japanese kappa were mentioned briefly in the third book, as one of the creatures Prof. Lupin was training the kids to defend against, so it may be that in the HP universe all mythical creatures are real but tend to stick to their native lands.
It occurs to me that the HP universe doesn’t include Tolkien style elves (house elves like Dobby are quite different). And while the wizards are shown celebrating Christmas as a gift-giving holiday, if the Christian God or the gods of any other faith exist in the HP universe then they remain quietly behind the scenes.
Maybe. Harry’s parents have a Bible verse on their tombstone. There is some Bible literacy in the magical world.
There are also Bible verses on tombstones in the real world. This is evidence that Christians exist, not evidence that their religious beliefs are an accurate reflection of reality. In the Harry Potter series then magic, unicorns, dragons, etc., are all definitely real, but we are never told that the Christian god, or any other god, actually exists or even that prayer or religious symbols have any power against dark magic.
god damn it…:smack:
Yes, I think we agree. Clearly, some wizards and witches are Christians. They don’t have any more evidence for it than Muggle Christians or real-life Christians.
I knew I’d seen one. I think the one I ran into was the subtrope Fantasy Kitchen Sink.
My apologies to msmith537 and anyone else that has now fallen into the TV Tropes abyss.
DC did this LOOOOONG before Gaiman was writing for them. He revived a bunch of characters, and made some additions to the cosmology, but the syncretism was an established thing.