We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

If it helps, I just did a quick search on the ask greg archives, and from my very brief look it seems like they tended to use epithets or titles?
(i'm not in gargoyles fandom so idk how well that works but)

 

That helps a little, yeah, although thinking about it more is making me rabbit-hole into other things because apparently my brain is still stuck on "this is dumb" about the whole thing.

(tl;dr: titles work, especially in small groups like the clan was even before the betrayal and the curse, since there's only going to be so many people who can reasonably be referred to as 'the weapons instructor' or 'the youngling teacher' or 'the leader', but epithets like "the younglings" or "the old man" get really vague, really fast if you've got a sustainable population at all. The trio should not have been the only ones in their generation, even before the rest of the clan was smashed to pieces, and Hudson dang well shouldn't have been the only elder who was still around to provide advice and help out. From a Doylist perspective, I get that the writers needed to limit the cast and didn't want to waste time showing a lot of faces that we weren't going to get time to get attached to (and probably wanted to keep the aspect of 'the whole clan, save Our Heroes, got wiped out' to as much implication as possible because this was a kids' show), but from a Watsonian perspective, I'm ending up at 'this is dumb'.)