I wouldn't read too much into it. It's fun to extrapolate the events into real world science and such, but at the end of a day it's a TV show. The ultimate answer to "why wasn't this addressed in the series" is "because it wasn't interesting." If Greg and Co. had a story to tell about gargoyles being weakened during short days (maybe one set in polar regions), then they'd tell it, but they're not going to delve into such fine details just for the heck of it. Greg said in his "Grief" ramble that he'd let his desire to get the "gargoyles age half as fast as humans" detail into canon override story logic, and it kind of shows. The way it works into the story is kind of contrived.
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Sun, Jan 5, 2020 3:14:10 pm EST from 174.28.6.34

It might be a mark of the series not focusing much on the seasonal cycle (apart from "Eye of the Beholder" being set at Halloween, and "Her Brother's Keeper", "Re-Awakening", and "The Price" being set in winter). And probably the production team not having enough time to address that element.
Todd Jensen
posted @ Sun, Jan 5, 2020 7:28:02 am EST from 68.231.65.221

I wonder if there are limitations on gargoyles in the winter because they have less time to absorb solar energy. Or maybe they have to eat more. We've never seen any difference in behavior based on season; most likely a good eight hours or so is enough and the rest is just wasted.
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Sat, Jan 4, 2020 10:42:57 pm EST from 174.28.6.34

It would certainly make a great reversal of humans' response to the solstices.
Todd Jensen
posted @ Sat, Jan 4, 2020 8:12:19 pm EST from 68.231.65.221

Actually that reminds me. Because it's so far north: nights in the Scottish highlands are SUPER short. The sun doesn't set until well after 10pm and rises at about 8am.

But during the winter, nights are incredibly long. The sun sets at 4pm and rises at about 7am.

Meaning those long days in the Scottish highlands during the summer probably would be absolutely terrifying.
Alex (Aldrius)
posted @ Sat, Jan 4, 2020 9:21:00 am EST from 174.89.28.125

Hi Mr. Weisman. I have a question for you:

I don't know if you are aware, but in the "Early Warning" episode of Whelmed: The Young Justice Files the host quoted you on something you told him in conversation. This is something that used to happen now and then, but lately it happens in almost every episode: "Greg texted me this", "Brandon emailed me that", "Greg/Brandon told me whatever", etc.

So, looking at your 2-year backlog of 2000 questions, I'm wondering: why are you giving BTS information to this one person while the rest of your fanbase has to submit questions and wait months (at least) or YEARS (worst case and more likely scenario) for an answer???? It must be really cool to be so intimate and chummy with one's idol, and I bet the host feels super important and validated, but this is some double standard bullshit!

Are you aware of this? And if you are, how can you be okay with it? Don't you think this is unfair? You have thousands of fans who support your work whichever way they can, but 99.9% of them have never even met you in person, let alone exchanged emails or text messages with you.

If I make an entire podcast dedicated to kissing your asses, will I earn the same privileges? Will I be able to ask all my questions without a waiting queue? Will I get to hang out with you, have lunch together or exchange personal contacts?

(Originally I posted this on AskGreg, but then I decided I shouldn't have to wait 2 years for an answer, for all the reasons above.)
Jordan
posted @ Fri, Jan 3, 2020 7:21:46 am EST from 51.89.139.91

Considering the nocturnal nature of gargoyles I wonder if there were any clans in Egypt or Babylon and if there were whether worked with the humans during the early days of astronomy.
Matthew
Insert Inspirational Quote Here:________
posted @ Fri, Jan 3, 2020 12:48:58 am EST from 73.158.223.17

If anything, gargoyles would fear the Summer Solstice, as shorter nights might make them afraid they’d never wake up again. This conversation reminds me, though, of one of my favorite Doctor Who quotes:

“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs, as if to say, ‘Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.’”
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Thu, Jan 2, 2020 9:29:01 am EST from 174.28.6.34

I suspect gargoyles would have taken a different view of the winter solstice than humans have. For early humans, the shortening days and lengthening nights would have seemed terrifying - the fear that the sun might abandon them altogether; it's thought by many scholars that the various "winter solstice" festivities such as Christmas developed out of both a longing to restore the sun, and relief that it did recover, that the days began to lengthen again - the sun would not die after all.

But gargoyles are nocturnal, so the lengthening nights would mean more time to be active. (It'd also mean less time in sleep - so there'd be one potential drawback.) From what Greg Weisman has written about gargoyle culture, I doubt that they'd be as likely to think in terms of "the sun dying" as humans were.

Being nocturnal, gargoyles would have had plenty of opportunity to observe astronomical events, though we don't know how many of them would have taken an interest in that. We can safely assume, though, that they didn't give names to the stars or groups of stars as humans did - and probably saw that as one more case of humans being strange.
Todd Jensen
posted @ Thu, Jan 2, 2020 7:47:25 am EST from 68.231.65.221

Yeah, that's fair. I respect what TGS was trying to do to keep the fandom alive, especially in those early internet days when fanfic was less well-known, but I wish they hadn't billed themselves as the rightful heir to Greg Weisman. I stopped reading it when they disbanded the Quarreymen after less than a full season. Such a waste of potential- I would have had the mutate woman murder the Yakuza guys and be mistaken for a gargoyle, and the resulting fear lead to a resurgence of anti-gargoyle sentiment. I gather the next arc was about a prophecy involving Goliath and Elisa's romance, so I'm glad I quit because I generally hate prophecy-driven stories. To roughly quote Lindsay Ellis, they're popular because you don't have to spend a lot of time setting up personal character motivations, but they're hard to make compelling because there are no personal character motivations.
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Wed, Jan 1, 2020 9:41:05 pm EST from 174.28.6.34

Yeah, Greg mentioned in the archives that gargoyles might celebrate the Solstice.

Ah, that TGS story... the one where Demona was having dinner with everybody two months after Hunter's Moon because Angela threw a fit. The very thought of that story makes me want to drink til I puke.
Greg Bishansky
posted @ Wed, Jan 1, 2020 12:48:02 pm EST from 73.167.128.71

I think TGS had a chapter about the gargoyles celebrating the solstice and treating it like a New Year's celebration. Obviously that's not canon, but it makes sense that they'd commemorate the longest night of the year.
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Wed, Jan 1, 2020 12:24:16 pm EST from 174.28.6.34

Happy New Year, everyone!

(And I still suspect that the Manhattan clan is puzzling over what the fuss is about. Though - it occurred to me just now - maybe Goliath would see a bit of the point about it after some thought, like his response to the "exchanging tokens" part of human wedding ceremonies in "Vows".)
Todd Jensen
posted @ Wed, Jan 1, 2020 8:38:10 am EST from 68.231.65.221

We are defenders of the night!

May 2020 be better than 2019
Greg Bishansky
posted @ Tue, Dec 31, 2019 9:50:04 pm EST from 73.167.128.71

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone - or Happy Hogmanay, to quote from the gargoyles' home country (though I don't know if "Hogmanay" had started by the 10th century - and even if it had, the gargoyles might have seen it as a human practice. As I mentioned last week, separating the years from each other, determining when they start and finish, and numbering them would have certainly seemed foreign to the clan.)

Read the "Bad Guys" trade paperback to complete the 25th anniversary review - and an appropriate day for it, in light of Sevarius's big scheme.

Let's see if we can get the last two sentences of the opening narration in this week.
Todd Jensen
posted @ Tue, Dec 31, 2019 9:09:36 pm EST from 68.231.65.221

Who’s using my info. My names bright and I never wrote that comment
Bright
posted @ Tue, Dec 31, 2019 7:24:59 pm EST from 74.65.227.92

Hi Mr. Weisman. I have a question for you:

I don't know if you are aware, but in the "Early Warning" episode of Whelmed: The Young Justice Files the host quoted you on something you told him in conversation. This is something that used to happen now and then, but lately it happens in almost every episode: "Greg texted me this", "Brandon emailed me that", "Greg/Brandon told me whatever", etc.

So, looking at your 2-year backlog of 2000 questions, I'm wondering: why are you giving BTS information to this one person while the rest of your fanbase has to submit questions and wait months (at least) or YEARS (worst case and more likely scenario) for an answer???? It must be really cool to be so intimate and chummy with one's idol, and I bet the host feels super important and validated, but this is some double standard bullshit!

Are you aware of this? And if you are, how can you be okay with it? Don't you think this is unfair? You have thousands of fans who support your work whichever way they can, but 99.9% of them have never even met you in person, let alone exchanged emails or text messages with you.

If I make an entire podcast dedicated to kissing your asses, will I earn the same privileges? Will I be able to ask all my questions without a waiting queue? Will I get to hang out with you, have lunch together or exchange personal contacts?

(Originally I posted this on AskGreg, but then I decided I shouldn't have to wait 2 years for an answer, for all the reasons above.)
Jordan
posted @ Tue, Dec 31, 2019 6:27:47 am EST from 51.68.205.163

Now here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again!
SomeGeek
posted @ Tue, Dec 31, 2019 12:30:26 am EST from 69.255.235.204

Frozen in stone for a thousand years...
Algae
"Of course, we all wear costumes." ~Double Trouble
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 1:56:35 pm EST from 86.45.213.181

We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect....

(Technically, by just one of them.)

I read the rest of "Clan-Building" in the latter part of the week, but the comment room had slowed down by then so much - and I had barely any new insights into the "Stone of Destiny" and "Timedancer" stories - that I didn't post on that until now.

I did have a thought, during the 25th anniversary "Gargoyles" reviewing, about the second season. During the early part of it (between "Leader of the Pack" and "The Price"), the clan's situation barely changes, in contrast with the events in Season One, where we saw it do things like moving out of the castle into the clock tower. There are a lot of changes, but they're mostly to the supporting cast, especially the humans: Fox leaves the Pack, she and Xanatos get married, Fox is pregnant, Derek gets turned into a Mutate and, after working for Xanatos a while in that new form, breaks with him, Matt finally meets the gargoyles and makes contact with the Illuminati Society, Xanatos and Demona's alliance ends, etc. The gargoyles do have some changes in their lives - Broadway and Hudson decide to learn how to read, Brooklyn becomes second-in-command, Goliath and Demona's break-up is established in "Vows" as permanent, he and Elisa become closer - but the clan's overall situation by the end of "The Price" is almost exactly the same as it was at the start of "Leader of the Pack".

And it struck me as why that was. In Season One, the gargoyles were busy adjusting to the modern world and exploring it (even making errors along the way - cf. the "trio trilogy"), culminating in their finding a new purpose in it: protecting Manhattan. After that, they had no new goals to seek out beyond the ongoing "protect the city" one, meaning that the clan became relatively static. (Also, in Season Two, Xanatos switched from trying to capture the gargoyles and control them to increasingly attempting to make his own gargoyles - which he'd been doing already in Season One, such as with the Steel Clan - or other goals; instead of directly targeting the gargoyles, he'd manipulate them to unwittingly assisting him in those schemes, such as Goliath inadvertently destroying Sevarius's "cure" and "killing" Sevarius in "Metamorphosis". The sole exception was "The Price", where he captured Hudson as a guinea pig for the Cauldron of Life. It made sense - it must have become clear to Xanatos by that point that even he couldn't make the gargoyles work directly for him - but it did mean that the gargoyles seemed less in immediate danger in their encounters with Xanatos after that.) That made it natural that the focus would shift at times to the supporting cast (note that the biggest story from this period, "City of Stone", was by Greg Weisman's own admission and that of his superiors, more about Demona and Macbeth than about the gargoyles).

Which gives new meaning to the revelation in the Avalon World Tour that other gargoyles had survived, that Goliath, Hudson, the trio, Bronx, and Demona weren't the only gargoyles left. The species had a future after all, and the clan (once reunited) had something more to strive for than just foiling the "villain of the episode". (We even saw the immediate consequences with Angela as now a member of the clan.) Which was followed up, soon afterwards, by the gargoyles' existence being revealed to the world and their having to deal with that - and the clan's overall situation continued to change once again, culminating in Brooklyn, at the end of "Clan-Building" being much older and introducing four new members into the clan.
Todd Jensen
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 7:56:33 am EST from 68.231.65.221

Stone by day, warriors by night...

(Fifth)
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 7:22:30 am EST from 174.28.6.34

On the subject. If anyone cares, I found the intro in french. It's pretty... epic... french dubs are so fun to listen to, sometimes it's like watching the whole show fresh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lr_dHtaaPc
Alex (Aldrius)
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 4:08:18 am EST from 184.147.105.136

It was the age of Gargoyles...
Alex (Aldrius)
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 4:03:22 am EST from 184.147.105.136

Third!
"It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear."
Matthew
Insert Inspirational Quote Here:________
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 3:06:27 am EST from 64.85.228.110

SECOND!

"... Superstition and the Sword ruled . . ."
Phoenician
"The suspense is terrible, I hope it lasts" -- Willy Wonka
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 12:51:06 am EST from 68.231.126.227

Been a while since we did this...and I think the closing out of the year that gave us the 25th anniversary of "Gargoyles," as well as its resurgence in the popular consciousness thanks to Disney+, is just the right opportunity.

*AHEM*

One thousand years ago...
Masterdramon - [kmc12009 at mymail dot pomona dot edu]
"I'm still Lily, and that's who I'm always going to be!" - Lily Hoshikawa
posted @ Mon, Dec 30, 2019 12:13:09 am EST from 67.161.2.198