Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga adapts the popular Winx Club cartoon for live-action, making some notable changes along the way. The live-action Winx Club show is part Harry Potter, part Avatar: The Last Airbender, starring a group of Fairies studying magic at the prestigious Alfea academy. The Winx Saga holds true to the original cartoon in many ways, but it also makes some major changes to the world, tone, lore, and characters of Winx Club.

The original Winx Club cartoon was created by Italian comic artist Iginio Straffi, and brought to America via Nickelodeon (and briefly 4Kids). Winx Club ran for eight seasons and tells the story of a group of Fairy friends studying magic at Alfea College — a Hogwarts-like academy in the Magic Dimension. Bloom, a fire Fairy, leads her friends as they stop witches, sorcerers, and other magical creatures from bringing chaos. Fate: The Winx Saga has the same basic premise — Bloom is the protagonist, with a tight-knit group of Fairy friends at Alfea, and together they study magic and fight darkness. That’s where the similarities end, however. Here are all the changes made to the Winx Club when Netflix adapted it for the live-action Fate: The Winx Saga.

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Fate: The Winx Saga Whitewashing Controversy Explained

Before Fate: The Winx Saga even released on Netflix, it was embroiled in controversy surrounding one particular difference from Winx Club: whitewashing. Changes to two of the cartoon’s primary characters – Musa the music Fairy and Flora the nature Fairy – have sparked criticisms of whitewashing and poor diversity. Flora, who was based on Latinx musician and actress Jennifer Lopez, has been replaced with a new white earth Fairy, Terra. Flora is mentioned briefly as Terra’s cousin, but she doesn't make an appearance in the show’s first season. Musa, who was inspired by Chinese-American actress Lucy Liu, is played by British actress Elisha Applebaum in Fate.

Applebaum has not spoken publicly about her ethnic background, and Terra’s addition has been praised by many for introducing some much-needed body positivity and size diversity to the world of Winx. However, the changes have still yielded understandable frustration from fans for excluding some of the cartoon’s lauded racial representation. Flora appeared for season 2, fixing season 1's biggest mistake and adding Latinx representation with actress Paulina Chávez.

Other Character Changes In Fate: The Winx Saga

Fate: The Winx Saga Netflix Teaser

Fate: The Winx Saga makes many notable changes to the Winx Club characters. Bloom, Stella, Musa, Aisha, Sky, and Riven — none were taken directly from Winx Club without alterations. Riven is not so lightly villainous in the cartoon, for instance, and Stella is not written as an outsider to the Winx as she is at first on Netflix's The Winx Saga. Headmistress Farrah Dowling is based on the cartoon’s Headmistress Faragonda, and Bloom’s adoptive parents, Mike and Vanessa, are the same in both shows.

Most of the other characters in The Winx Saga are brand new. Silva, Rosalind, Dane, Beatrix, Sam, and the rest of the supporting cast are added to flesh out the new world of Winx, replacing cartoon characters like Tecna, Roxy, Brandon, Timmy, and Helia. Some backstories and personalities of characters have been changed as well. In the cartoon, Bloom is a Fairy princess rather than a changeling, who was placed with a human family after her planet was destroyed. That story is pretty similar to the one in Fate, but without the royalty part (as far as viewers know) or connection to Alfea.

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Bloom and Sky are love interests in the cartoon (and eventually get engaged), but many of the other character relationships in Fate: The Winx Saga are brand new. Riven and Musa date in Winx Club, for example, and Stella isn’t so mean to everyone and doesn’t have an emotionally abusive mother. Bloom’s immense power pulling from the ancient Dragon Flame is the same in both series.

Fate: The Winx Saga Is Much Darker Than Winx Club

Abigail Cowen in Fate: The Winx Saga on Netflix

Winx Club was intended for prepubescent children, with its last season being targeted at kids as young as preschool age. There were occasionally tenser storylines, but nothing of any severe emotional magnitude. Fate: The Winx Saga, on the other hand, is targeted at an older teenage/young adult audience and has been rated TV-MA. There is swearing, drinking, drugs, and sex; people are also brutally murdered. The Riverdale effect of darkening formerly light teen stories is on full display here, which has been polarizing for fans of the source material.

How effectively Winx introduces more adult content is a matter of debate. In some ways, the weed-smoking, f-bomb-dropping Fairies and specialists of Fate: The Winx Saga are a much more realistic picture of teenagers. In others, all the TV-MA content comes off as forced bids for shock value, which feel cheap in a world that already has Riverdale and is long past The Hunger Games. Ultimately, the balance will be judged differently by each person who views The Winx Saga. What’s certain is that from the twist deaths to the beer pong, Netflix’s show has a starkly different tone and energy than the bright world of Winx Club.

The Winx Saga Villains Are Much Different Than Winx Club

Sadie Soverall in Fate: The Winx Saga on Netflix

The main threat in Fate: The Winx Saga are the mysterious Burned Ones — zombie-like creatures of hard, charred flesh that leave deadly infections when they strike their foes. The origins of the Burned Ones remain a mystery at the end of season 1, even for fans of the cartoon, as Alfea’s new nemeses are brand new for the Netflix show. Winx Club’s plots focused on cartoonish villains — generally one per season — who the Fairies would have to defeat to save the Magic Dimension in The Winx Saga. These villains included witches, monsters, and ancient dark entities, but nothing like what’s seen on The Winx Saga.

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Beatrix seems to be inspired by the cartoon’s evil trio of witches called the Trix, and the Burned Ones could be tied to Winx Club’s primary villain Lord Darkar, but there’s no evidence those connections are anything other than loose similarities. Rosalind seems to be the main antagonist of Fate: The Winx Saga season 2, and she too is a brand-new addition to the Netflix show. Ultimately, the conflicts of the two shows will likely remain quite different.

The Winx Saga’s Fairy World Is Much Different From The Cartoon

Farah Dowling meets with Bloom in her office in The Winx Saga

In Winx Club, Alfea exists in the Magic Dimension, one of several such dimensions. The Magic Dimension is composed of numerous planets and realms – like the planet Domino, of which Bloom is the princess. This wide world is connected by various magical energies and an endless sea, but the actual geography is never all that important. Fate: The Winx Saga, which is missing the character Tecna from the cartoon, switches the Magic Dimension for the Otherworld, which stands in mirror to the “first world,” or Earth. Rather than a sprawling universe of different planets, the Otherworld seems to be one planet composed of seven realms, which appear to function more like countries. People drive places in cars and the general geography of the world seems congruent with the real world.

Netflix’s version also makes some changes to Alfea itself. In Winx Club, Alfea was only a school for Fairies, and the Specialists trained at a separate but nearby academy called the Red Fountain School. The cartoon also makes a more rigid gender divide with women in the Fairy school and men in the Specialists school. In Fate: The Winx Saga, it seems that any gender can wield Fairy magic and anyone can train as a Specialist.

The Winx Saga Changes Fairy Magic From Winx Club

Bloom in Fate The Winx Saga

Fate: The Winx Saga also makes some notable changes to how Fairy magic works. In Winx Club, magic isn’t limited to one of five core elements. Instead, each Fairy has a unique set of abilities tied to their own emotions and personality. Musa is the fairy of music in the cartoon, for instance, not a Mind Fairy. Flora is the Fairy of nature, not earth, and so on. This idea is still manifested in the Netflix series somewhat though, as different Fairies seem to wield their respective powers in different ways. Terra has earth magic that lets her control plants, while her brother Sam’s earth magic lets him walk through walls.

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The Winx Club Movie Will Honor The Cartoon

Young girls posing for a photo in Winx Club

Fate: The Winx Saga was canceled after season 2, with no justification or explanation given by Netflix as to why. That being said, it doesn't mean the world of Winx is over, as franchise creator Iginio Straffi has revealed that he has a movie planned. Straffi was just as shocked as everyone else that Fate was axed, but it means he now has more time to invest in his Winx feature film, for which he's requesting a $100 million budget. With hopes to elevate the franchise to Harry Potter or MCU status, Straffi plans to bring the live-action movie back to its roots, and has explicitly stated that the film will follow more closely to Winx Club than to Fate. This is great news for fans of the animated series, who were a bit nonplused by the changes made for the Netflix show. Fate: The Winx Saga is nearly unrecognizable when compared to its predecessor, with similarities being in the names of the characters alone. The series was obviously tweaked to accommodate a young adult audience, to be more in tune with shows like The Vampire Diaries. That being said, the Winx movie will do a better job at honoring Winx Club than the Netflix show did.

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