‘Fate: The Winx Saga’: New Coming-Of-Age Fantasy Series On Netflix

Fate: The Winx Saga has just been released on Netflix
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on January 22, and a day later the six-part series has already climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 Shows. It has shot to number 1 in the U.S. and number 3 in the U.K. overnight.

From the creator of The Vampire Diaries, Brian Young, comes Fate: The Winx Saga, a live-action reimagining of the Italian cartoon Winx Club from Iginio Straffi. The six-part series follows the coming-of-age journey of five fairies attending a magical boarding school, named Alfea, in the Otherworld. Much like in Harry Potter and its wizarding school, at Alfea, the young fairies must learn to master their magical powers, with all the usual dilemmas that comes with being a teenager, and of course, being magical beings afterall, the added life-threatening monsters. For this first season, it is one particular kind of monster the fairies face—monsters called the Burned Ones.

Clearly targeted for the pre-teen fans of the cartoon Winx Club who have now grown to their teenage or young adult years, Fate: The Winx Saga is your stereotypical coming-of-age fantasy drama with its angsty and rebellious central female character who discovers the unique power she has that makes her special and different from everyone else.

The first episode begins as Bloom (played by Abigail Cowen) arrives at Alfea. Bloom is a sixteen-year-old fairy, who, as we will find out, comes from the human world and never knew magic was real until a few months ago. Her parents, who are not fairies, do not even know that she is at the boarding school in Otherworld, but believe her to be somewhere in the Alps. She only discovered she had powers after losing control, and putting her parents in immediate danger. Bloom was brought to the school by its headmistress, Mrs Dowling (Eve Best) to learn how to control her powers.

Bloom’s first day at Alfea starts with a meet-cute with the school’s popular boy, Sky (Danny Griffin), who will eventually turn out to be her character’s season-long love interest. Bloom then soon meets her five roommates, each with their own distinctive powers, and British accents, beginning with light fairy and princess Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen). Bloom shares a room with water fairy Aisha (Precious Mustapha), while earth fairy Terra (Eliot Salt) shares with mind fairy Musa (Elisha Applebaum).

The series focuses mainly on Bloom’s character, and her teenage existential crisis, as her origin is steeped in mystery. She soon discovers through her roommate Aisha, that she was in fact adopted. She is what Aisha terms a “changeling”—a fairy child swapped with a human one which was stolen by fairies, according to folklore legends. Through the mystery of her birth, Bloom searches for her own identity, who she really is. The answer to this question, the series suggests, she can only really find through the friendships she forms.

Fate: The Winx Saga feels like a variation on the same theme explored in previous series on Netflix, such as the Arthurian reimagining Cursed and the demon-hunting nuns fantasy Warrior Nun. Each offered a similar formula for coming-of-age dramas: a young woman, with a mysterious past she is unaware of, who discovers she has special powers, that distinguishes her from anyone else. She is finally revealed to be the key, the solution, to the main problem at hand. And, of course, there always seems to be some kind of obstacle to date their love interest. In Bloom’s case, he is dating one of her roommates. It is seemingly a winning formula.

With only 6 episodes, Fate: The Winx Saga is an easy and entertaining series to binge.