Fate: The Winx Saga (Netflix, 2021)

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shevek
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Just going to put this trailer right here.

Very much doubt they're going to have anything approaching the costumes from the cartoon, which were very cute
and almost J. Scott Campbellish in their coquettishness.

Last edited by shevek 1 year ago, edited 2 times in total.
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Femina
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Frankly... the idea seems like a flawed nonstarter from the get go.

Go all out Marvel with this stuff... or just make something else.
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shevek
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Yeah, Femina, the Twitter mob is already trashing it from the Woke perspective.
Apparently (and very uncharacteristic of Netflix) they're making it *LESS* diverse than the cartoon show which ran for over a decade.

Also, I think the show's considerable fanbase wanted it to return in cartoon form, not have it be a live-action "Riverdale with Fairies".

Here's Clownfish's analysis of it. Kneon and Geeky's kids watched the show. The message is "watch out younger millennials - they're plundering the 2000s now".

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shevek
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Well, well, well.
Looks like we were wrong about this show!

I was watching a recent Youtube video from Yellow Flash where he talked about how Rings of Power was decreasing in popularity, dropping to #4 on overall watched minutes. But lo and behold, on that very same chart, holding its place at #9, was Fate: The Winx Saga.

So I was thinking - really? This show came out last year and it just now caught on to audiences? Nope. The first season in 2021 was successful enough that they greenlit a second, which already debuted on Sep 16 this year. (I didn't hear anything about this from any media plugs).

So I've decided to watch this show from Season 1 onward to see if it's overall any good and worth the audience attention it's obviously getting.
I'll check back here at the end of the first season to take a breath and evaluate.

In the meantime, if anyone else has been watching this series, feel free to chime in with opinions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Six hours later:

Alright, I watched Season 1 of Fate: The Winx Saga. More accurately, I watched Episodes 1-3 to get the feel, read the summaries of Episodes 4-5,
then jumped ahead to Episode 6 (the Season 1 finale) to catch the resultant ending which created a strong setup for Season 2.

It's an 'adult' (hard PG-13) version of the extremely popular long-running Italian-produced Winx cartoon of the 2000s.
There is a fair amount of expletives. I'm sure everyone's fine with that.

There's also a steady stream of enough random woke terminology to fill a gender-studies semester - in just 4 episodes, I counted: feminist, sexist, mansplaining, homophobic, toxic, problematic, gender issues, co-dependent, and damsel. And an implied bisexual triangle, with one of the three coming out as gay. Why they had to throw all that in, for a fantasy show that was about magical powers and fairies, I don't know. That's just how Hollywood works these days, I guess. Maybe that's how writers entertain themselves.

Anyway...there are three quite beautiful actresses in this, all in their 20s.
The redhead who plays the main character Bloom (the fire-powered fairy) is gorgeous in a girl-next-door mode. She looks great when using her fire abilities, and ultimately grows fairy wings and flies for a bit.
The blonde who plays the Solarian princess Stella is a solid knockout. She's like a Barbie doll with a serious attitude and a healthy sex drive.
And then there's the diminutive 'bad girl' Beatrix who is a rambunctious delinquent with goth tendencies. She turns out to be crucial to the plot.

As I feared: there's some violence and some sexiness, but there aren't any real sex scenes, nobody bares any skin, and there aren't any tight costumes. Everyone's just wearing fashionable teenage clothes - not surprising given that the show takes place at a school for fairies called Alfea,
kind of the Hogwarts of the Otherworld realm (they even mention Harry Potter once). Do expect superpowers (water control, fire blasts, plant control, mind empathy, and so on), which I suppose makes this definitely a superhero show of some sort.

And I do have a few questions about how things work in that realm. It's a place that runs on magic, but somehow they have cellphones, computers and motor vehicles, and they also have electricity (which apparently works on some kind of conduit to a magical well). Not only that, but the cellphones can somehow reach people in the First World (our Earth) even though I don't see any satellites orbiting the Otherworld, and the fairy powers also still work on regular Earth, as well (we know this, because Bloom demonstrates to her adoptive Earth parents that she can generate fire). Yet when it comes down to fighting a war against evil superhuman goblin-orcs with poisonous claws (called 'Burned Ones') the soldiers of the kingdom of Solaria don't have any guns, tanks or airplanes to wage it. How does that work? (budget constraints, I imagine)

It was a fun watch, very much a dark take on what was obviously a lighter cartoon. And it's wildly popular: apparently the Season 2 episodes (which I'm going to get to in a few days) were the #1 streamed show in 76 countries. That's impressive, and certainly a reason for Netflix to continue the show even if there isn't as much comparative hype for it here in the States. Critics hated it on Rotten Tomatoes, but the high audience review rating are keeping it alive.

If you watched it, interested to know what you think.
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