Spoilers for the early seasons of Winx Club and all of Fate (or just the first season if they get renewed).
To be honest, I did not want to watch this show. It was an edgy remake of a beloved 2000s childhood cartoon. I didn’t expect that it to be good, but a coworker convinced me to give it a try. I only listened because she gave me this piece of advice on how to approach the show.
Don’t look at it like a remake. Look at it like it’s loosely inspired by Winx Club.
A cool chick I work with!
This is great advice to approach any remake with, honestly. Nostalgia can be enlightening in some ways, but in others, it is a hindrance. Luckily, this wouldn’t be much of a problem for me with Fate.
I can barely remember the original Winx Club. I remember little things like Bloom being a long-lost princess, that the three villain witches went to a different school, and the fact that the boys went to a third school. I also remember the style and the flair of the original costumes and how diverse the original cast was.
…And that’s about it.
So, I went in with fresh eyes and an open mind.
The Characters
I hated the main cast for the first three episodes. Except for my baby Terra, she’s 💖perfect💖. By the end of the season, I warmed up to a lot of the girls. That being said, I still hate Bloom and Aisha.
Bloom’s problem is that she is the main character and knows it. Every interaction with her has to be about her and her mysterious past. As a result, she comes across as very self-centered and vain. Bloom is also very impatient, reckless, and naïve. She plays right into the villains’ hands because she believes everything Beatrix tells her. All Bloom needs to convince her that she was tricked is for one person to come along and tell her that previous person lied to her. She does apologize at the end of the season for how she’s been acting but only for the last day. I doubt she’ll get any better if they have future seasons.
Now on to Aisha, the real fixer of the cast. She tries way too hard to be Bloom’s friend. I think they wrote her to be Bloom’s best friend, but Bloom’s self-center nature makes it come off as a one-sided relationship at best. Since her story centers around her connection with Bloom, she seems pretty separate from the rest of the group (minus Stella, Bloom’s enemy). Since Aisha gets a job as Dowling’s assistant, she gets even more separated from the group. This makes her ratting on the girls at the end of the season feel even worse. I think they were going for her trying to put her foot down about Bloom’s bs, but the fact that everyone else is on Bloom’s side makes it look like a straight-up betrayal. Also, Aisha doing this means that 2 out of the 3 black characters are untrustworthy. Not a great look when paired with all the whitewashing. The writers try to fix things by having Aisha help Bloom fight the Burned Ones in the finale, but it was too little too late.
Stella isn’t as bad as the show makes her out to be. Most of her negative interactions with Bloom are started by Bloom doing something rude. Bloom kept Stella, her campus guide, waiting while she flirts with Sky. Bloom implies that there is something wrong with Stella wanting to change clothes to go to a casual party. Stella isn’t an angel, of course. She does maliciously tell Riven that Bloom is a changeling, knowing that he would spread it across the school, and she did blind another girl with her magic in the past. The story implies that she is working towards becoming a better person. Hopefully, there is a redemption arc in her future.
Musa is very inconsiderate of other people’s emotions, which didn’t make sense because she is an empath. Much later, we learn that she is grieving, which does give some justification, but that doesn’t undo the damage to her likability. Musa would regularly make her roommates uncomfortable (her interactions with Terra) or ignore their distress (Bloom’s changeling angst or Stella’s defensive meanness). I recognize she isn’t the group therapist, but so many plot points could have been solved if she reached out to her “friends” about their problems. Also, it would have helped if they took out the line where Musa says that she can’t turn off her magic.
Terra is a precious cinnamon roll who doesn’t need to be protected cause she can kick ass all on her own. I think the reason I like her character so much is that she is an attempt to make an original character as opposed to rewriting a preexisting character. The writers do need to be careful with her character, though. She walks dangerously close to the line of weaponizing her niceness. That’s when someone is ruthless and mean, but they hide behind a kind exterior. If anyone notices their ruthless behavior, they play the victim when confronted. Terra just barely avoids this by showing that she genuinely cares about the people around her.
Moving away from the main group, we have Beatrix, Riven, Dane, and Sky. They’re pretty much the only other characters of note.
Beatrix was kind of boring to me. She is a pretty standard edgy, smart girl. Maybe if there is a season 2, we’ll find out more about the villains’ side that makes her more interesting but right now, I couldn’t care less about her character.
Riven’s in the same boat. He’s an insecure bully, and I predict that he will eventually end up in a relationship with Terra once he finishes his redemption arc. (That is if he gets a redemption arc.)
Dane just sucks. I think the plot is trying to say that life has been hard for him because he’s bi or pan, but that doesn’t account for his jerkass behavior towards Terra, who was nothing but kind to him. Sure, that doesn’t entitle her to a relationship, but it does mean that his meanness was undeserved.
Sky, the self-proclaimed fixer, is super codependent. With Stella, he was the only one who knew her and an escape from everyone’s expectations. With Bloom, he is her ally as a fellow lonely orphan. With Silva, he tries to be his father’s perfect replacement as a talented Specialist. Are we sure he isn’t the changeling here? He seems so ready to change himself to belong with anyone that will take him. In all honestly, Sky is in desperate need of a coming-of-age story where he finds himself.
I think it is important to remember that these characters are to be a bunch of teenagers. (I think they are between 16 to 18.) Them being a little immature and bratty is understandable.
Just How Long Has It Been
At first, I thought the season lasted for about a week or two, but then a character got attacked by a Burned One, and we are told something interesting.
According to Professor Harvey, magical injuries inflicted by a Burned One take “weeks to months” to kill the victim. (I wanted to take a screenshot of that moment, but Netflix hates screenshots. Oh well. He says it in episode 5, minute 32.)
When Silva got attacked in episode 2, he was on death’s door by episode 3. We can assume that about a month passed between those two episodes.
While this isn’t the standard amount of time that passed between episodes (episode 5 started a week after the end of 4), it seems safe to assume that they were at least a couple of months into the school year by the end of the season.
This realization does reflect poorly on the development of the friendships of the main cast or lack thereof. Speaking of which…
Friendship? Where?
For a show about a group of friend, the girls are pretty secluded in their storylines.
Musa and Terra begrudgingly stick together while Bloom has Aisha trying to be her friend. Stella mostly hangs out with Sky. When she does spend time with her roommates, she’s with Aisha and Bloom and a foil.
Aisha and Musa seem to be the only ones in the group who are genuinely friends with each other. Though now that I think about it, Aisha is pretty friendly with everyone. Which makes it feel like she isn’t friends with any of them.
It felt weird at the end of the season when everyone kept insisting they were friends. It feels more like they are a group of people who have mutual friends, not a friend group. Every time they said it, I was like, “since when?”
What Was The Reason, Rosalind?
Rosalind’s plan doesn’t make any sense.
Before Aster Dell, Rosalind was headmistress of the Alfea. Everyone on the staff was loyal to her and beloved everything she said. That changed when she led the attack on Aster Dell and killed all the residents.
Dowling, Harvey, and Silva all turned against her only because they thought she went crazy and tricked them into killing innocents. They stripped her of her headmistress title and locked her away in a secret room beneath the school.
At the end of the season, we find out that the people they killed were Blood witches, which apparently meant they were fair game? Upon hearing the truth, the teachers suddenly feel relieved to know they only killed witches. (Well, not Silva, who felt bad for killing his friend while trying to save nonexistent innocents.)
So what does Rosalind do after tricking Bloom to release her? Reclaims control over the school.
She got Silva arrested for trying to kill Sky’s surprisingly alive father, got Stella’s mother’s army to support the takeover, and killed Dowling.
To review, Rosalind only lost control of the school, and her subordinates mutinied because she hid the fact that the village was full of blood witches. If she told them about the witches, they would have followed her and continued to do so without question.
How Would I Rate It?
Honestly, Fate is mediocre at best. The characters mostly fit into YA archetypes without a lot of deviation from the path. At this point, it has the potential to get better or worse.
But I’m willing to stick around and see how things go.
I hope they make Bloom more likable, but at least I like her roommates. I hope they add more people of color to the cast to fix the whitewashing of characters like Flora and Musa, but I appreciate that they added a plus-sized actress to a story that traditionally featured super skinny characters. I hope that they give the villains descent motivations because I don’t understand their motivations right now. I hope they bring back the fairy transformations with cute outfits because Bloom unlocking her own introduces the potential for everyone else getting one too.
Right now, Fate is at a solid 2.5 out of 5, and I hope that it gets better.
I Think Thinks 