Influences: Gargoyles
In an effort to get me to blog a little more on this website, I have decided I am going to write a few entries or so about my influences. These don’t have to have been conscious (although some would have been) but they definitely influenced the way I saw characters, storylines and world-building – or provided inspiration thereof – and thus eventually affected my own writing.
One of these things was a little series called Gargoyles.
One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was the age of gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night, we were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again! We are defenders of the night. We are Gargoyles!
The above quote was spoken by the central protagonist, the gargoyle leader Goliath, over the opening credits of the second season (the first season had no voice overs at all, merely music), and sums up the basic concept. In this Disney animated series, gargoyles turned to stone during the day, and became flesh at night and fought to protect their castle. After the massacre of almost all their clan, the few remaining members were cursed to be stone during the night as well, until the “castle rose above the sky”. Fast-forward to 90s New York, the spell is broken and the gargoyles awaken. And thus we have our story.
I won’t go into the whole story of Gargoyles here, but you can check out the wikipedia entry or the video by Nostalgia Critic for a humourous summary, complete with clips from the actual show.
So where does Gargoyles fit into my influences? Apart from being the first thing that started me off into liking things that can only move around at night (as Nostalgia Critic says above, “They’re like stone vampires?”), Gargoyles was also very well-written and heavily into ancient mythology, Shakespeare and science fiction. How many “kids’ shows” that you know of have Macbeth and Puck as characters, delves into Arthurian myth (and brings in Arthur himself), and discusses on bioethics, gun control, literacy and prejudice? Gargoyles definitely set my standards high when it came levels of characterisation, use of myth and research, and not talking down to the audience simply because they are children.
But I think the real effect Gargoyles had on me is that it introduced me to the concept of grey. And the best example of grey is definitely the character of David Xanatos (pictured on the right). In a conversation, I described him as grey “what with [him] being a bad guy and then a possibly good no wait back to wait what the hell is he doing now. Okay so he’s a – GODDAMNIT”. My conversation partner agreed. Although placed in the role of the villain, there are many, many occasions where he teams up with the good guys to stop a common enemy. He loves, he laughs. He’s grey.
And because of that sheer awesome that comes with being morally grey/having a million different shades of grey I think I am much more open to having characters with so many layers – I started writing them at a much earlier age than my peers, anyway. Most other villains I “encountered” were more black than grey, and after encountering the wonder of grey I started to reject them (or seek the potential for grey within them).
So when it came to creating characters of my own, it seemed natural that the greyness of vampires would attract me. After all, as the AVL says, “vampires were people too”. And the greyest of the grey is definitely my vampire king Athanasios. Although not a master of the gambit (he is much more straight forward), Athanasios does share a lot with in common with the other also death-named man – both of them have a close “assistant” – Xanatos has his personal assistant Owen, while Athanasios his lawyer/day person Matilda (unlike Owen, Matilda has no supernatural abilities1). But as we agreed, there are also many differences – and I am not talking about the castle on top of a skyscraper that Xanatos has2. It mostly comes down to the way the grey presents itself and the way they present themselves when not scheming/doing. Athanasios’s grey choices just tend to have results that are able to be looked up more positively than the results of Xanatos’s schemes3.
I’ve only noticed that my love of the morally grey character does in fact stem from watching Gargoyles as an itty-bitty now that I have been watching the DVDs this past week – the first time in over ten years that I have actually had a chance to watch more than half an episode. Athanasios is not Xanatos, but they are both cut from the same morally grey mold that Gargoyles was merely the first to expose me to.
Oh, and the whole stone vampires thing. That too.
If you’re interested in checking out Gargoyles or are an old fan whose interest has been rekindled, you can order the complete first season and the first half of the second via Amazon.com. Sadly, the release date for the second part seems to be “the twelfth of never”.
- Unless you count these, of course. And yes, Catherine Tate is the most accurate choice for Matilda’s portrayal. [↩]
- Athanasios would like to point that he could have one of those if he wanted, but he is not an “arrogant wanker” like Xanatos [↩]
- And once again Athanasios wants to point out that this could also be because Athanasios is not an “arrogant wanker”. *facepalm* [↩]
Like many others in the blogoverse, I will be taking part in a little thing called 
