The long-running Italian cartoon about a group of best-friend fairies, Winx Club, is one of the few explicitly girl-focused shows to make the transition to a darker, edgier live-action. Fate: The Winx Saga by Netflix casts the same spell on the bright, visually vibrant cartoon that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Riverdale did on their family-friendly Archie Comics counterparts. It has a surprisingly nuanced plot that delves into the consequences of war across generations — but it comes at a cost, both for the characters and for that familiar sense of friendship and mutual support. In the first episode, we see Bloom (Abigail Cowen) moving into Alfea, a boarding school for fairies and specialists (male fairies) in the Otherworld. The first person she speaks with is a specialist named Sky (Danny Griffin), who discovers that Bloom is from the "realm" of California and that she had no idea she was a fairy three months ago. She meets her roommates, including Stella (Hannah
Children grow up in whichever faction their parents belong to, but at the age of 16, they must take an aptitude test to determine which faction they belong to, and the next day, at the Choosing Ceremony, they must choose their life path.
Tris realizes she doesn't belong in Abnegation with the rest of her family, so she makes the painful decision to leave her family behind and join the Dauntless. A difficult initiation process follows, and not everyone will survive. Tris struggles to find her place among the Dauntless as she tries to figure out who she is and who her true allies are. Tris has a secret that she discovered about herself during the aptitude test, as if finding oneself in a new group isn't challenging enough. A secret she has been instructed not to reveal lest it harm her.
The following are a few of my favorite quotes from the series:
“Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It's about learning to control your fear and be free of it."
“We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.”
"I suppose a fire so bright isn't supposed to stay."
"I'm curious if worries ever truly go, or if they simply lose their power over us."
“Knowledge is power. The ability to do evil...or the ability to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not an evil.”
Final Thoughts:
The foundation of this society is ridiculous (but it is a dystopia, not a proposal for a new social order, so I'm not saying it is a poor novel idea!). People in this society have been raised with these principles since birth, and as a result, they take them for granted. It can be difficult for an author to build this world in such a way that the reader can understand it without killing the pacing with an info dump, but this book does a very good job of it, letting us see what it's like to live in Abnegation daily, then meeting members of other factions and seeing how their behavior differs.
If there is value in such a separated society, the worst thing is that at the age of sixteen, you must make a life decision with little information. People evolve! What if someone resembles Erudite as a teenager but as they grow older leans toward Amity or even Dauntless?
It is possible. Unfortunately, you must choose between remaining loyal to your group or starving in the factionless. Tris spends a lot of time in her brain, investigating every angle of the situation, which I can identify because I constantly examine every angle of a situation before making a decision, whenever I can. As they compete for admittance, Beatrice and the other initiates who have just picked their new group have a lot of strong disputes. The novel is action-packed and well-written, making it an excellent start to a trilogy.
However, I was a little upset with how some plot details were simply ignored — whether because “as a sixteen-year-old, you just disregard it as being insignificant” or because the author forgot, I'm not sure. This series has a truly fast-paced style to it, which is both amazing and unnerving at points.
If you enjoy reading novels and books, be sure to check out our review on;
📘 The Book Thief - by Markus Zusak - "A Novel of Love and Loss."
📘All the Bright Places - by Jennifer Niven's - "A heartbreaking and beautiful novel about grief and redemption."
📘The Folk of the Air Trilogy - by Holly Black - "A true story of Adventure, Love, and Survival."
📘 Digital Fortress - by Dan Brown - "The code that could kill you."
📘 The Alchemist - by Paulo Coelho - “A Masterpiece of Fiction.”
A well written blog,. 👍 Really impressed by the way you wrote the whole thing.
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