Gargoyles’ David Xanatos is so evil and cool, a 1,500-year-old trope was named after him
David Xanatos, the antagonist of the 1994 animated sci-fi fantasy series Gargoyles, is an unambiguously unrepentant A-hole.
He is also, to borrow a quote from another famous fictional A-hole, a “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” and the owner of a multinational corporation that in his own modest estimation is “bigger than many countries you could name.” That immense wealth and scope of influence is tied up in a vast web of investments scattered across the disparate yet intersecting fields of robotics, genetic engineering, cutting-edge weapons research, and mass entertainment. Oh, did I mention he’s a member of the Illuminati?
If that weren’t enough, David Xanatos ranks as one of the most well-written villains to ever grace the annals of children’s animated television, a character whose aptitude for Machiavellian deceit, strategic guile, and flair for the dramatic are so well known, he has a damn trope named after him: the Xanatos Gambit.
The Xanatos Gambit refers to any plan for which all foreseeable, mutually exclusive outcomes benefit the person behind it all — even those that would otherwise appear to be a failure on the surface. The mastermind accounts for every, and I mean every, possible contingency. A Xanatos Gambit is not a plan that relies on multiple desired outcomes to coincide with one another, but rather one that treats any individual outcome itself as a success.
“We didn’t call it the Xanatos Gambit back in the day,” Gargoyles co-creator Greg Weisman said in an expansive interview with Polygon in 2020. “We called them Xanatos tags, because it was always a tag at the end of an episode. It tickles me beyond belief that the trope is named after us.”
Of course, the trope itself does not originate
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