#thailog

Top 20 Greatest Disney Animated Television Villains (according to me). This only counted for villains who were original creations for their respective shows, meaning no Shere Khan, Ursula, Jafar, Hades, Cruella, Yzma, Scar or Mother Gothel here like they were on the other list - the only semi-exception is Evil Emperor Zurg because the Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command version of him is presented so differently as a character compared to the Zurg seen in Toy Story 2).

And for those curious, this little douche is the runner-up:

There’s a tendency I’ve noticed over the years when people talk about Gargoyles season three. They’ll say something like, “Well, The Goliath Chronicles just focused on the Quarrymen as the main villains,” as if that’s a reasonable creative choice that simply didn’t land.

And I don’t think that’s right at all.

I think it fundamentally misunderstands how Gargoyles uses its antagonists, and more importantly, what actually drives the story.

Because when you look at what Greg Weisman does with the property, especially in the canon comics that continue from season two, the contrast is not subtle. It is overwhelming.

We’re sitting at around fifty canon issues now. That’s a real continuation. That’s not a hypothetical “what if.” That’s the story, as intended, playing out over time. And when you look at how those issues distribute attention among the antagonists, the hierarchy becomes undeniable.

The Quarrymen appear in three issues. Three. With a small cameo in a fourth.

John Castaway shows up in eight issues total, and most of those are brief appearances. He’s not driving arcs. He’s not reshaping the board. He shows up, represents a piece of the world, and then recedes when the story moves elsewhere.

Now compare that to Thailog, who appears in sixteen issues. That’s not incidental. That’s a character who matters. That’s a character who can sustain conflict, who can complicate things, who can operate as a long term antagonist with agency and presence.

And then there’s Demona.

Demona appears in twenty eight issues. Only three of those are cameos.

That’s not just prominence. That’s narrative dominance.

That’s the story telling you, repeatedly and consistently, who actually matters.

And this is where The Goliath Chronicles completely loses the plot.

Because what that season does is take the Quarrymen and try to elevate them into the central antagonistic force. It treats them like the endgame. Like this is the primary conflict the series has been building toward. Like if you just scale them up enough, they can carry the weight of the entire narrative.

But the Quarrymen were never built to carry that weight.

They are a reactionary force. They are a symptom, not a cause. They represent fear, prejudice, escalation. They are what happens when the world learns the gargoyles exist and responds badly. That’s important. That’s thematically rich. But it is not the core of the story.

They don’t have the history. They don’t have the intimacy. They don’t have the mythic weight.

Demona does.

Demona ties directly into Goliath, into the past, into the betrayal, into the tragedy that defines the entire series. She is not just an external threat. She is a personal one. An ideological one. A historical one.

She evolves. She escalates. She regresses. She forces choices. She reframes the conflict every time she appears.

She is not just part of the story.

She is the engine of it.

But if Demona is the emotional and thematic core of the conflict, David Xanatos is the structural one.

And this is another place where The Goliath Chronicles gets it completely wrong.

By the end of season two, Xanatos has changed. After Alexander Fox Xanatos is saved from Oberon, the relationship between him and the clan evolves. The feud ends. He welcomes them back to the castle. There is trust there now.

But it is not a heel turn.

It is not redemption in the traditional sense.

Xanatos does not become a good guy.

He becomes something far more interesting.

He is their host. Their landlord. Their ally when it suits him. And still very much himself.

The Goliath Chronicles flattens all of that. It turns him into a straight up benefactor. A patron. The nuance is gone. The edge is gone. The sense that he is always thinking three moves ahead, always willing to manipulate outcomes to his advantage, disappears.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting, because this is one of the few places where you can argue that The Goliath Chronicles may have actually created its own kind of “genie out of the bottle.”

There are a lot of fans who walked away from that version of the show believing Xanatos became a straight up good guy.

And when those fans engage with the comics, or with people who are more familiar with Weisman's intended trajectory, there’s friction. Because they’re working off two completely different understandings of the same character.

One version says Xanatos reformed.

The other says Xanatos evolved.

Those are not the same thing.

And the comics make that distinction very clear.

Xanatos will still manipulate the clan when he needs to. He will still use them as pieces in a larger game. And occasionally, they will cross swords. Not because he wants to destroy them, but because his goals and theirs are not always aligned.

At the same time, there are boundaries.

They can trust him not to betray them in their sleep. They can trust him to keep them safe in the castle. He is not their enemy in the way he once was.

But he is not their friend in the way a simpler narrative would define it either.

He is something uniquely Gargoyles.

So the question becomes, is that simplified version of Xanatos too entrenched to undo?

Maybe.

But if it is, Weisman is undoing it anyway.

Quietly. Consistently. Over the course of dozens of issues, he is reasserting who Xanatos actually is. Not through interviews. Not through declarations. Through the text.

And that mirrors the larger point.

The Goliath Chronicles tries to simplify Gargoyles on two fronts at once. It inflates the Quarrymen into a primary villain they were never meant to be, and it defangs Xanatos into something safer, cleaner, and far less interesting.

In doing so, it strips away the layered antagonist structure that defines the series.

Because Gargoyles does not run on a single villain.

It runs on a network of them.

You have Demona as the emotional core. The past that will not stay buried. The tragedy that keeps repeating.

You have Xanatos as the constant variable. The man who has moved from enemy to ally to something in between, without ever losing what makes him dangerous.

You have Thailog as the chaotic inheritor of Xanatos’s worst instincts.

And you have the Quarrymen as the world pushing back.

Each of them serves a different function.

Each of them adds a different kind of pressure.

And when you reduce that down to “the Quarrymen are the main villains now” and “Xanatos is basically a good guy,” you are not just making different choices.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the machinery of the show.

So when Weisman says the Quarrymen were never meant to be the main villains, he is not rewriting history. He is not offering a retroactive excuse.

He is reaffirming the structure that the story, across dozens of issues, consistently supports.

The Goliath Chronicles tried to turn Gargoyles into something simpler.

The comics remind you why it was never simple to begin with.

Thailog may have existed for much mess time than Goliath, but he clearly his brain is his same age and he is treated as an adult. One who even dates his "father"'s ex omg. One may argue that gargoyles have a very different concept of parenthood which makes it possible for Goliath to see a clone as a son, but does it really feel like a son, when it's more like an artificial twin? It's not like Delilah is ever called Elisa's and Demona's daughter, nor any of those clones with negative colored mouths are the clan's sons.

I dunno, Thailog has not received much screentime yet at the end of season 2 anyway, which is the point I've reached so far, so there's still much to explore. I don't think I like him very much as a concept though, an evil clone doesn't feel original, especially in a very creative series.

Gargoyles #4 -May 2007- SLG Publishing

writer/creator: Greg Weisman

pencil artist: David Hedgecock

color artist: Dustin Evans

cover pencil artist: Greg Guler

Like- oh, that’s the wrong Hordak? Wronghordak.

Or— That is not Enrique? NotEnrique.