Fate: The Winx Saga Is The Anti-Harry Potter | Screen Rant
Netflix's Fate: The Winx Saga is thematically similar to the magic-based Harry Potter franchise — but it subverts expectations cleverly.
Netflix's Fate: The Winx Saga has a lot of similarities to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter franchise - but ultimately subverts them in quite a creative way. Fantasy TV is more popular than ever before, and Netflix's Fate: The Winx Saga draws inspiration from the Nickelodeon animated series Winx Club. Thematically and stylistically, though, it's very different - and it most certainly appears to have been heavily influenced by the success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and films.
Both Harry Potter and Bloom are "Chosen Ones": infants born with a unique destiny and a power beyond their peers, orphaned due to mysterious circumstances surrounding their births. The two are brought up in the ordinary world, only learning their mystical heritage when they become teenagers, and are brought to a school of magic - Hogwarts in Harry's case, Alfea in Bloom's. There, they serve as "viewpoint characters" for the audience, increasingly focused on discovering their own identity and origins, manipulated by their elders because a war is coming. The similarities are quite striking between the two properties, and even the characters of Bloom and Harry parallel one another. And yet, it's easy to overstress these similarities, because Fate: The Winx Saga makes one creative choice that turns the show into the antithesis of Harry Potter.
The core difference is in the adversarial relationship between Bloom and Alfea headmistress Farah Dowling. At first, Farah seems very much the Dumbledore figure, the master manipulator, but it soon becomes clear she's out of her depth and a pawn in somebody else's game. What's more, while the young wizard was originally somewhat overawed by Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series and saw him as a surrogate father figure, Bloom has a deep-rooted distrust of authority and senses Farah is hiding things from her. The relationship becomes increasingly adversarial; where Harry's initial teenage rebellions were implicitly encouraged by a watchful Dumbledore, with the headmaster only interfering when Harry went too far with the Mirror of Erised, Bloom's actions are in open defiance of Farah - especially when she frees Rosalind.
It is this action that leads to Fate: The Winx Saga completely subverting the Harry Potter formula. By the end of Fate: The Winx Saga season 1, Bloom and Farah have learned to trust one another, and they finally look set to bond in the Harry/Dumbledore formula. And then, in a shocking twist, Rosalind is appointed replacement headmistress - and secretly murders Farah, snapping her neck with magic. Bloom and her friends return to school to be told there have been a lot of changes. It is as though Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban began with Harry returning to Hogwarts after his first summer holiday to learn Dumbledore has mysteriously disappeared and Severus Snape is in charge - or possibly, depending on the direction Fate: The Winx Saga takes, Harry Potter's biggest villain: Voldemort himself.
This is actually quite a smart approach for Fate: The Winx Saga because it means the first season plays with the audience's expectations for the fantasy genre. It begins by roughly following a familiar formula, then turning it upside-down. The potential is therefore established for Fate: The Winx Saga to become something truly creative and very different going forward. Hopefully, this fantasy series will be renewed by Netflix so viewers get to see what the show becomes.