#gs2e10

Aw man I adore this moment! It's such a small scene that I'd forgotten about it. It is so telling! Demona wants to save the gargoyles, but events have progress past the point of return. Daylight is almost upon them; she cannot save them all. But she could save these two. She almost does! Or almost makes an actual effort. But she sees the vikings coming, and she realizes, I think, that if the worst comes to pass and she and Coldstone and Coldfire return to their brethren dead, then not only will they question Demona about knowing to flee, they will blame her!

But if Robert keeps his word and she returns to find the gargoyles having inherited an empty castle, well then no one would have to know she left. No one would have to have any idea she had anything to do with it. For at least a second time, she puts the fate of all her happiness in the hands of Robert.

God how it must haunt her that she had gone to them, that she had this chance, and she walked away. Left them to die when they were the last of her people she could have saved. She hadn't needed to be alone for sure. The three of them would have been all they had left, and as mad as they might be at her, as much as they might loath her, they would have lived. And perhaps they could have even learned to forgive her and make what they could of the reality of the lives left ahead of them.

This moment will always be FASCINATING to me! Not that it doesn't make sense or I can't understand it. But Demona has literally reached what I think of as the deciding moment in what will become her war against humanity, but she turns her back on raising the last of her clan, leaving their eggs in the hands of humans. And the first human she sees is the Magus. She knows enough of magic that I think she now is starting to understand how the remnants of her clan are now stone.

I can see this as a moment of rare penance. The price she'll pay for her mistakes so that she never has to look at those mistakes again because they've been paid for? To accept banishment from what remains of her clan. Denying herself the chance to lead their progeny?

I can also see this moment as one of believing that it's too close to dawn. That to go down there and kill the humans might not happen quick enough for them to get away anyhow. Or leave the eggs in risk being out, unprotected, while she is stone during the day.

It could also be a moment of her not feeling capable of handling the task of raising a clan alone.

On the one hand, I kind of want to laugh at how perfectly she had convinced herself that her plan had worked so she doesn't have to face the reality that she felt sure at one point it wouldn't to the point of not remaining at the castle, to nearly taking some gargoyles away from her.

But I can't actually, because no matter how true I personally find the above, the reality of seeing this carnage could never be prepared for. The show is for kids and so couldn't have flesh and blood carnage on the screen, but that is precisely what it would look like to a gargoyle. In fact, it looks worse because of the context that it was pure massacre. There was no option or chance for these dead gargoyles to have fought back. To even know that they were about to die before it happened. Their bodies are literally disintegrated. It's not a mere head separated from their necks. Their bodies are in pieces.

This is absolutely a very real and truly horrific scene of gore to gargoyles that Demona has come upon, and no amount of knowing that wasn't unlikely to be exactly what would happen could prepare her for it.

And so she breaks down, and god do I love this animation here. The shadow work and smoke. I almost had a metaphoric thought about how she grows so large in her rage as it first strikes, and then her influence in the frame shrinks down and into herself, but I'm not quite pulling it together.

This coming immediately on the heels of the sequence of Demona turning tragically to stone as the vikings attack, a tear slipping down her cheek, is so telling. As the sun rose on her, she knew it was all a mistake, that nothing good could come from what had been set in motion. She knew it.

But as the sun fell and she awoke, she woke needing to believe that she had always suspected the plan could work. She sees the signs of the castle attacked from the shore and assumes Robert was able to keep her people safe, even while her very presence on the beach, away from the castle, proves how little faith she had in him to keep her alive during the day.

And she waited too long. She was so caught up in her own head and in her own plans that she forgot to consider what Goliath would do in the wake of his discovery. She forgot to consider that he might go into battle and who knows what could happen there.