the Winx saga "tries to be modern, but the result is failed

Destiny: The Winx Saga met with great success on Netflix France: the series rose to number one in the platform's ranking from the weekend of its release and continues to dominate the top of the podium. In this adaptation of the cult cartoon, we follow Bloom, a young 16-year-old fairy, who enters Alféa, a boarding school in the Other World. If her comrades grew up in the fairy universe, Bloom, she spent all her life on Earth and was raised by human parents, without knowing her magical powers. We looked at the show's promise: playing the nostalgia card, but modernizing the franchise with woke biases. The disappointment unfortunately lived up to our expectations: if Destiny: The Winx Saga does everything to establish a narrative and characters in tune with the times, the result is worthy of the dustiest series of the 2000s.

Too binary characters

Destiny: The Winx Saga tries, by choosing a cast with a somewhat strong diversity, to give voice to characters who could be considered as outsiders. But aim aside, as when Terra engages in a seen and reviewed debate on teenagers "nerds" and teens "cool" from school. It's as if this never-ending battle between two cartoon groups propels us straight into a movie Disney channel or in Gossip Girl. The problem is that we are in 2021 and today we are aiming for much more nuanced characters. Not to mention the whitewashing of the original characters, deplored on social networks, which only proves the lack of sincerity of the project.

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A treatment of fairies not really feminist

Destiny: The Winx Saga is thus full of clichés. If we try to give the floor to Terra, an endearing character because she does not respond to the dictates of beauty and she is not the most connected of her comrades, she remains confined to the role of overweight teenager, badly in her skin and secretly in love with one of the handsome kids in her chest. A terrible label. Not to mention Stella, who singlehandedly embodies the spoiled, beautiful little girl, in short: who has everything going for her, and who charges those who do not fit in the "cool kids" box. Stella, it's a bit of this unpleasant mix between Serena van der Woodsen and Regina, from the movie Lolita in spite of me. The female characters of Destiny: The Winx Saga deserved more than that.

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A plot that does not escape stereotypes

If this leap backwards makes our hair stand on end, it's because we know that series like Skins, Glee or more recently, Sex Education have had the intelligence to offer us characters worked with finesse. On the plot side, the impression of a nagging show is the same, since Destiny: The Winx Saga does not reinvent the genre of the teen series in any way. The biggest script twist is indeed a love triangle, in all originality (no). As for the denouement, it is about as subtle as the "Toudoum!" of the Netflix credits.

If the stereotypical feelings of teenage girls make us roll our eyes, we also regret not finding this sorority so sincere from the cartoon of our youth. Bloom, Terra, Musa, Aisha and Stella take a long time to really appreciate and help each other, and the rivalry between Bloom and Stella doesn't help. However, when you arrive in a new school, magical world or not, isn't the idea of ​​making new friends at the center of our teenage concerns? As for the male characters, they are also a digest of all the possible stereotypes of a teen series. Riven and Sky, with their dreamy looks and arrogance, being the worst.

Destiny: The Winx Saga will therefore have made every effort to assert itself as a woke and inclusive series, but unfortunately falls into the most nazi clichés of the teen series, with its archetypal characters and its narration seen and reviewed. A pinch of feminism and a zest of diversity in a dull and banal universe, it is decidedly too little for the sauce to take.