Macbeth, Adaptation, and the Maturity Gap
Something I’ve always found fascinating about the early days of the Gargoyles fandom is the assumption that Macbeth would absolutely despise Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It felt like one of those ideas that everyone just agreed on without really questioning it. Of course he’d hate it. His life had been turned into a tragedy, his wife into a monster, his name forever linked to ambition and bloodshed. I remember reading fanfics where he called the play a travesty, or where the specter of Gruoch literally haunted the production. It all felt very intuitive. Very fandom.
Then came the 1998 Gathering, when Greg Weisman was asked about it, and the answer quietly flipped the table. Macbeth, he explained, had been friends with William Shakespeare. Drinking buddies, even, though Will never knew who his companion really was. Macbeth wasn’t offended by the play. He was amused by it. Demona, on the other hand, saw it as poetic justice. Macbeth had even, at times, worked as an actor in Shakespearean productions. Some fans were genuinely shocked by this revelation.
But the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more it feels exactly right.
A lot of us geeks have a very fragile relationship with adaptation. We lose our minds over details that do not matter. Eye color. Costume seams. A line of dialogue reworded. A motivation slightly reframed. The smallest deviation from a source text can be treated like a personal betrayal. So we project that mindset onto characters like Macbeth. Surely he’d be furious. Surely he’d feel slandered. Surely he’d be offended that his wife was turned into one of literature’s most infamous villains.
But that reaction says far more about fandom than it does about Macbeth.
Because here’s the thing that really seals the joke. Lady Macbeth is clearly not based on Gruoch at all. She’s based on Demona.
The ruthless ambition. The goading. The pushing Macbeth past moral limits and then receding into the shadows when the consequences come due. From Macbeth’s lived experience, that dynamic belongs far more to Demona than to the woman history remembers as his wife. Which means that, from his point of view, the world has spent centuries blaming Gruoch for sins that were never truly hers. That isn’t insulting. That’s darkly funny.
It also explains why Macbeth can sit across from Shakespeare with a drink in hand and find the play entertaining rather than enraging. He understands something that a lot of fans do not. Once your life becomes story, it stops belonging to you alone. The play is not a documentary. It is a myth. A distillation of guilt, ambition, and consequence, shaped by rumor, fear, and dramatic necessity. And after centuries of living with his own choices, Macbeth has the perspective to see that clearly.
Demona’s reaction fits just as perfectly. Of course she sees it as poetic justice. A woman driving a man toward monstrosity, immortalized in verse, her influence recognized even if her name is erased. That kind of narrative vindication would appeal deeply to her sense of tragic inevitability.
What this ultimately reveals is how emotionally mature Macbeth is compared to the average fan. He doesn’t need the story to flatter him. He doesn’t need it to be accurate in every detail. He knows who he is. He knows what he did. He has already been judged by history, by time, and by himself. Surviving that gives you a thicker skin than any message board ever will.
So no, Macbeth doesn’t rage at Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He laughs. He acts in it. He lets it live its own life.
And in doing so, he proves something quietly damning about fandom culture. A cursed medieval warrior with centuries of blood on his hands can handle reinterpretation with more grace than people who melt down over a cape being the wrong color.
That feels very Gargoyles. And very true.
