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the toxic friendship of fate the winx saga's winx club: a thread
as most of you guys know, fate is a netflix show based on winx club. one of the most important themes of winx club was female friendship and unity. you would obviously expect fate to decently portray this aspect. however, fate's idea of friendship is kind of... sketchy.
i will bring up instances of their toxic "friendship" and give my perspective of this on a writing standpoint. also, this isn't hate. it's constructive criticism and just my opinion.
let's start with bloom. during the entire show, she was very selfish and egoistical. after finding out that she is a changeling, all she cared about was learning more about her past even if it meant endangering the lives of her so-called friends and even the entirety of alfea.
bloom didn't care about releasing rosalind, the most dangerous fairy the otherworld has ever known, in order to satisfy her personal gain even after being told it's a bad idea by aisha. and guess what? she faced absolutely no consequences for this.
aisha ironically got the most sh!t out of this situation as her friends vilified her and called her a snitch because she reported the whole plan to farah. she received no apology and this was never addressed again as the story continued.
the impact of releasing rosalind was catastrophic. she killed farah and took over alfea. yes, bloom is unaware of this the former but the mere fact that farah told her about how dangerous rosalind is yet bloom still felt unbothered about this situation at the end of s1 is weird.
let's compare fate bloom's attitude to her animated counterpart. winx club bloom feels like a totally different person in regards of how she treats her friends. this bloom would've never released rosalind or thought about the whole thing without consulting the winx.
cartoon bloom lamented about being a descendant of the ancestral witches because it may put her friends in danger, she left alfea after unintentionally poisoning flora, she shared her dragon flame with the girls after they lost their powers. she is selfless even in the nick era.
cartoon bloom always thinks about the people around her before thinking about herself. this is an aspect that i didn't identity in fate bloom who was pretty egoistical.
musa was an awful friend. from the beginning to the end, she's been nothing but rude to terra unprovoked. i get that the writers tried to portray her as an introvert and yeah, she cared a lot about her personal peace but her whole character was depicted terribly.
she literally tunes out terra because she doesn't want to listen to what she has to say when terra was just trying to be friendly. she even openly admitted that she took the plant terra gifted her just to get her to shut up and leave her alone.
musa is an empath. she obviously felt terra's sadness and insecurity from the get go but kept on being rude to her which shows she really doesn't care. why was she hiding her relationship with sam from terra as if she cared about her feelings?
terra was treated so horribly during the entire series that at some point i was glad that this wasn't flora. can you seriously picture the winx treating flora like the fate girls treated terra?
when aisha talked about how she would end up fat if she didn't swim, terra obviously felt hurt by her words and neither aisha nor musa cared. aisha clearly didn't know her words hurt terra but musa most have felt terra's discomfort yet laughed along with aisha?
after dane, beatrix and riven made an insta story mocking and fatshaming terra publicly, none of the girls stood up for her which i find very disgusting. this was never addressed among the group and they never confronted riven or dane about it.
try to picture this in the setting of the animated winx club. do you seriously think the winx would've let such a thing slide? a boy publicly humiliating one of the girls would've had his ass whooped.
the only time this is mentioned is when bloom tells beatrix she doesn't want to talk to her because she hurt her friend (referring to that insta story about terra) yet she ends up befriending beatrix and forgetting about the whole thing. this supports my claims about fate bloom:
she doesn't care about her friends as long as the situation benefits her. she doesn't care that beatrix hurt terra because beatrix may help her learn about her past. yeah, who tf cares about terra being humiliated? she has to learn about her past by befriending this awful person.
the idea of female friendship according to fate also refers to fighting over a boy. an uninteresting one at that. the main issue that primarily relates bloom to stella is sky. they both are interested in sky and this gives birth to animosity on stella's part.
on a writing standpoint, everything about this is just terrible solely due to the fact that the toxicity between the girls is suddenly shoved under the rock at the end of the series in an illogically weird way:
terra randomly starts missing stella after she leaves even though all stella has ever done was criticize her fashion style, musa and terra become besties after musa admits that she's dating sam, stella and musa have a "deep" conversation, the girls reunite to help bloom...
as a viewer, you feel confused. when did the girls become so close. what happened that brought them together like this? apart from going to a party and fighting together once, i can't identify the plot that made them become friends. why? because that plot never happened.
the writers just decided to write out all the unsolved conflicts, forgot about the unanswered questions and exclude logic in order to get the girls to become friends. that's the simplest answer. bad writing.
i didn't talk about how stella treated the girls because she actually has a decently written narrative that explains that: her abusive mother. i still find it strange how she suddenly became friendly and warmer at the end with no explanation.
aisha on the other hand was just not given enough spotlight for me to analyze. she felt empty as a character even though musa is an eveb emptier and blander character. aisha's friendship with bloom mostly involved her taking care of bloom and not having a narrative of her own.
