The Burned Ones make ideal boogeymen for Fate: The Winx Saga season 1, but there’s more to the creatures than meets the eye and the series' biggest mistake is making them villains. By making the Burned Ones villains, the series misses an opportunity to explore a more interesting story. For much of Fate: The Winx Saga season 1, the Burned Ones are considered mindless monsters, wreaking nothing but destruction and death. It’s only during the season finale that the audience learns the Burned Ones have more complex motives.
From the start of the series, the Burned Ones are present as a mysterious, unseen threat, an unnamed evil that could descend on the peaceful haven of Alfea at any time. As Bloom and other students at the school begin to encounter the Burned Ones, they don’t find much to contradict this assumption. The charred humanoids seem to lash out and attack for no reason, leaving innocent fairies and specialists with injuries leading to a slow and painful death. The fear that Dowling and Silva have for the Burned Ones makes their presence outside the barrier all the more terrifying. One Burned One would be bad enough, but as the season progresses, the nightmare scenario becomes reality as more Burned Ones start to appear until the students and staff are once again at all-out war with the creatures.
As non-humans, the Burned Ones are unsympathetic. The audience doesn’t have the same reaction to seeing a Burned One die as they would to seeing the death of an enemy fairy or specialist. The fight against the Burned Ones isn’t a war against enemies so much as an effort to exterminate a plague. This narrative works until the audience discovers in episode 6, “A Fanatic Heart,” that the Burned Ones were once human. According to Rosalind, 1,000 years ago the Burned Ones were soldiers in an ancient war, people who were cursed to become monsters with the power of the Dragon Flame. Now, the Burned Ones are tracking it down, presumably in an effort to destroy it and restore themselves. It's exactly why the series missed an opportunity to not make them typical villains.
The fact that the Burned Ones were once human makes their existence much more troublesome for the characters and the audience. They’re not mindless monsters out to kill, but tortured souls on a mission to find peace. The reveal introduces a more compelling narrative that should have been present in Fate: The Winx Saga all along. Using the Burned Ones as antagonists is a traditional storytelling trope that eventually becomes stale as the audience becomes more familiar with them. Like all monsters, the Burned Ones are only scary so long as they remain unknown. Giving the Burned Ones a mission and a sympathetic history makes them layered characters that could act in surprising ways rather than following an expected pattern of villainy.
Revealing the true nature of the Burned Ones also introduces a moral quandary for the characters. Bloom and the Winx Saga's other fairies can no longer simply destroy the threat they pose without considering the fact that they are also taking human life. The Burned Ones are a group of people who have been wronged, tying into the show's exploration of the nature of war and the aftermath of war crimes. Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 should continue to explore the history of the Burned Ones, gaining more sympathy from the audience for the group and their goals.