Maddie Keefer
Staff Writer
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Review: ‘Fate: The Winx Saga’ Episode 1
“Fate: The Winx Sage” is a matured spin-off on the 2004 Italian-American TV show “The Winx Club”. The show begins with Bloom, a human from California, adjusting to her new surroundings at Alfea, a college for fairies. As Bloom is a fairy born from two humans, she is not familiar with “the Otherworld” or how a fairy lives. During her first day at Alfea, Bloom meets her roommates Aisha, Terra, Stella, and Musa, and they all help her to adjust to fairy life. While Bloom is getting settled in, she becomes anxious and subsequently ignites her fire powers, leading to a series of suspicions regarding how a human-born fairy can be so powerful. As the episode ends, truths are revealed that will alter Bloom’s life and her interaction with others throughout the rest of the season.
As a spin-off of a show I watched religiously as a child, I was interested to see what elements of the cartoon they would carry over into the teen drama. In that regard, I appreciated seeing the characters represented by racially accurate actresses, and I additionally liked that they kept all the main characters from the original cartoon. Besides the characters, the new series takes a dramatically different approach to fairies, one that is less whimsical and more dystopian.
I appreciate this approach as it will resonate well with an audience that has lived through “The Hunger Games”, “Divergent”, and many other dystopian series, but I do wish they incorporated more of the magic involved in the original show. IN comparison to the shows currently watched by our age group, “Fate: The Winx Saga” greatly resembles “Riverdale” it is a desire to rewrite an older children’s show for the now matured audience. As this series is one of the many news series to drop on Netflix in 2021, it will be intriguing to see the response to the show from the other individuals who watched the original cartoon as children.