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The Creative Directors Behind Fate: The Winx Saga Must Not Be K-Pop Fans

Also, they have a pretty wrong idea of the role fashion should play in a show.

There are a few words that will stand out across most reviews of Netflix's Fate: The Winx Saga - drab, boring, flop, flat, unimaginative. Critics and audiences consensus is that the show is not only a mediocre-at-best story, but also an atrocious (and ultimately confusing) choice of adaptation of the color pop and fairy magic cartoon it’s based on, 2004 italian cartoon Winx Club.

Fate has plenty of it's own issues - white washing and erasing characters, cringey dialogue, outdated melodrama, etc. But where it truly, unequivocally fails is as an adaptation. Fate misses everything that was magical and lovable about the original series, in all levels, from bizarre writing choices, - such as never actually developing any sense of friendship between the characters, who are based on a cartoon about…..a group…….of friends -, but it's especially and immediately felt in the art direction and costume design.

Winx Club is set on a fantastical world, Magix, where each of our main characters hail from a different planet, à la Sailor Moon. Alfea, the fairy school they attend, is the most common background: a pastel colored, futuristic high tech-meets-fantasy, art nouveau inspired castle. Alfea sets the tone for the whole visual of the cartoon: bright, colorful, futuristic meets vintage, leaning into the technological positivism of the Y2K style, uniting it with magic, DnD worthy monsters and, of course, fairy wings. Often featured are also the Red Fountain school, where the Specialists train, and especially Cloud Tower, the goth and gothic inspired witch school Alfea has an OxBridge rivalry with (How cool would that be in a live action? I guess we’ll never know…).

On Fate, Alfea is the only school we ever see, and it’s another beige boarding school in not-Britain, somehow set in a magical world where everyone has the exact same technology and even social media that we have on Earth in 2021, no transformations and, most egregiously, no fairy wings.

This lack of visual creativity is pervasive throughout the whole show, and its most heartbreaking iteration is in the characters' wardrobe. The styling has the barest bones of a color scheme, - such as 'Bloom has to only dress in red since fire, duh',- the clothes are ill fitting, bland, dark and very dated. These are supposed to be teenagers who enjoy fashion, and yet they look like varying types of soccer moms from 2010.

The series seems to operate on an old and tired vision that women and girls can’t have depth and have adventures and fight monsters while also caring about fashion, a vision that the original show played a big, big role in challenging in the early 2000's. Fashion and costume design sets as much of the tone of a visual medium as the script does; through clothes we can gauge characters’ backgrounds, passions, and personality.

Winx Club has some of the best examples of this in the cartoon sphere - Bloom’s comfortable and bright style, Stella’s glitzy and bold, Musa’s edgy and cool, Aisha’s sporty and fun, Techna’s neon and tech gear inspired, Flora’s earthy and romantic, they all work as extensions of each character and serve a narrative purpose. And that’s not even mentioning how insulting it feels that in their quest to make Winx “edgier, darker” and fit for an older audience, the creators of Fate somehow decided that was in opposition to caring about style and fashion. Most “girly” shows, including the Winx Club are just as much adventure action shows as the ones geared towards boys, and it’s emphasis in fashion, friendship and color does not detract from that. The original run of the cartoon deals with war, violence, grief, abusive relationships and even genocide; leaning into those plotlines would not require Fate to erase any integral parts of what made Winx so beloved, and the fact that they did shows that the Netflix team completely missed the point of fashion in the original show, and really, the point of fashion and costume design in the world building of any show.

That, however, is not a mistake K-Pop makes very often; (This might seem like a bit of wild swerve in topic, but stay with me here). Unlike it's western counterpart, the Korean pop scene never lost the emphasis on music videos and how the visual medium can complete and potentialize music and performance; the K-Pop culture is very album and concept oriented in a way that has been all but lost in many other pop circuits, and the music video, styling and set design of a ‘comeback era’ is a key point of excitement among fans.

As such, music videos that follow storylines, connected universes, boundary pushing concepts and visual effects are the norm, rather than the exception, and a list could be made of works that are beautiful examples of what a live action Winx adaptation could look like. In fact, and very smoothly, here is a small list of exactly that!

A Small List of K-Pop Music Videos That Are Better Winx Club Live Actions Than Fate: The Winx Saga

3. Red Velvet - Psycho

If it was a darker and more somber look that Fate wanted, there was a way to make it actually appealing. While it still feels a liiitle too grown up and elegant for Winx, (maybe this author is biased, as a full proponent for the Y2K fun) Psycho makes a very compelling argument for a witchy, mysterious, fairy tale-esque show that could look scrumptious and definitely not boring, or even a gorgeous example of what the witches in Cloud Tower could look like. Black and white, dark green, pastel blue and pops of jewel tones make Psycho's color palette. To add interest to the understated colors, the styling is heavy on textures; We see plenty of stonework, intricate embroidery, tassels, lace on lace on lace, feathers, bows, opera gloves and lots of glitter. All of that is offset by bold, dark makeup, leather accents and eerie cinematography. Needle & Thread, Marchesa Notte and Self Portrait lend their hyper feminine and intricately detailed tulle gowns, juxtaposed with the creepiness of the lyrics and the dark backgrounds; their deep berry and green fairy tale looks are built with pieces from Zara to Nina Ricci to Dolce & Gabbana to Alexander McQueen.

Red Velvet’s more edgy styling for 2018's Bad Boy would also not feel out of place on the Trix.

2. IZ*ONE - Fiesta

IZ*ONE kicked off 2020 with sweet and fun Fiesta. The MV features rooms with mismatched décor that go from retro to space opera, rocky faux landscapes that feel other worldly, and visual effects that would look perfect on the back of a transformation sequence. Mirroring the set design, the girls wear various outfits by sustainable up and coming brand Chopova Lowena. Their signature skirts made with discarded and repurposed fabrics give a cool and interesting twist on a schoolgirl look that would look very sweet for a band of school fairies that occasionally go off to save the world. Also, wouldn't those bedazzled headphones look great on Musa's fairy outfit?

1. Aespa - Black Mamba and Next Level

Aespa is what fans call a monster rookie. With only three music videos under their belt, they still have some of the most visually interesting work in the industry right now. Their concept is very tied in with high tech, featuring even AI avatars of each member, packaged in a glitzy, fantastical and futuristic aesthetic, candy pop meets cyberpunk. I think I’ve exhausted ways to say that is exactly what a perfect Winx adaptation should feature.

Their debut smash hit, 2020’s Black Mamba is truly a perfect moodboard for live action Winx. Wearing a sequined and colorful mix and match of Dollskill, Gucci, Didu and Balenciaga to a backdrop that features some alien fairy forest realness, a pyschedelic fever dream, rooms straight out of a Y2K catalog or donning lime green and black techwear inside a metro fighting the "black mamba", Aespa look through and through the part of fashion loving fairies who save the world together, while looking fierce, stylish and, most importantly, interesting.

The styling and the sets jump seamlessly from more casual colorful fits with blouses, shirts and baggy pants to barren, darkly lit backgrounds and fringe-and-glitter heavy pieces necessary to fight giant snakes, in a way so fitting to transformation outfits for magical girls we could cry.

In their third MV, 2021's Next Level, the cyber in their concept is taken up a notch (get it. because Next Level-), set to a futuristic urbanscape intersped with a planet made of crystals and the ocasional alien fauna popping up again. We get treated to Monse, The 2nd Skin Co., Johanna Ortiz and The Attico styled to fairy princess standards, sporty sky racers and a white and sequined group styling that is top ten fairy busy saving the world uniform material, or maybe even a specialist worthy getup.

This particular look from Ningning is so Techna that it almost feels as if it's mocking Netflix.

And doesn’t this Karina trapped inside the "black mamba" in Alexander McQueen feel like a perfect Dark Bloom moment?

These are only a few examples of interesting and creative designs that are in line with what a live action Winx Club should have given us. There are so many more I could list, even among other TV Shows, like Sex Education and even polemic dark Euphoria, that know how to have fun with style and design without losing the depth of their stories. In the end, it's hard to justify why Fate creators even wanted to make an adaptation that didn't even try to capture the heart of its source material, and all we can do is watch one more "Restyling Fate: The Winx Saga" video on Youtube whilst mildly dreading season 2.

[nerdwriting]

What the Ten Rings Could Mean for Marvel's Phase 4

[ This article contains very light spoilers for Shang Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings] 

This week highly anticipated, if clumsily advertised, Shang Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings, starring delightful Simu Liu, premiered. It's the first movie of MCU's phase 4 to actually be set in post Endgame world (Black Widow being a prequel or midquel of sorts) and though it is mostly a standalone introduction to our martial arts hero, it undoubtedly contains many clues to the paths the universe timeline is about to go on.

The story revolves much around Shang Chi's father, Wenwu aka The Mandarin, his eponymous ten rings (refashioned as bracelets), and his army, also called, you guessed it, The Ten Rings. MCU's Wenwu is an amalgamation of different (and more polemic) Marvel Comics characters Zhen Zu/Fu Manchu, century's old criminal and Shang Chi's father, and The Mandarin, wielder of the 10 Rings and formidable adversary to many a character, most notably Iron Man.

The Ten Rings have appeared in the MCU before, and so had The Mandarin in a pretty convoluted way; Tony Stark is captured by the Ten Rings organization in the first Iron Man movie, and it's leader even seems to be in possession of one of the rings. Sir Ben Kingsley plays a Mandarin that turns out to be a fake in favor of Guy Pearce's Mandarin, and then that also turned out to be a Fandarin in follow up short All Hail the King. Now with the premiere of Shang Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings we finally get the answer as to that little big question and Mandarin's definite incarnation with Tony Leung, cinema legend, in the role. (Plus a side of Marvel dragging itself for it's messy handling of the characters and storylines in the past, which is always fun).

Shang Chi features two post end credits scenes, one in which Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Bruce Banner unhulked (Mark Ruffalo) show up to investigate the origin of the ten rings. We get no answers, as per usual, but definitely some interesting hints as far as their role and importance in future installments could be, in the form of a "beacon emission", which sounds like comic book for "multiverse shenanigans" .

In the comics the rings all have different properties and powers, and are part of an alien spaceship, so more sci fi than magical per se. While that seems in line with what the MCU's been establishing so far, new installments like WandaVision and Loki seem to play with unexplained mystic and magic. On the other hand, the slowly set up multiverse seems like it'll deal quite heavily in Marvel's space properties, so all roads are open.

Given the enthusiastic response to the first couple of days of Shang Chi, it's a no brainer we'll be seeing more of him and the rings, and hopefully soon.

[nerdwriting]

“I’m gonna change the course of history.”

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, coming to theaters on September 3

[nerdwriting]

11 of The Best It's-Autumn-and-I'm-Curled-Up-at-Home-In-My-Couch Comfort Movies In No Particular Order

Some days exist for the very purpose of movie marathoning. You know the ones, gray, chilly, rainy, autumn or fall-like days where the only sensible thing to do is wrap yourself in blankets, get some popcorn and a mug of cocoa and treat yourself to a cozy home cinema experience. Here are 10 movies across many types and genres to help you set the mood:

1. Practical Magic (1998)

Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock's witchy 90's flick feels like it was a movie made specifically for cozy fall nights, (ironically, since most of the story is set in summer). With October coming ever closer, what is better than a movie packed with magic, love, gorgeous kitchens, midnight margaritas and some sisterly necromancy?

2. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

The ultimate comfort movie. Breakfast at Tiffany's is a classic for a reason. The perfect balance between fun, charming, beautiful and a little melancholic for flavor. It features Audrey Hepburn's iconic Givenchy looks (and décor!) and heartwarming performance, a little gift shop theft, sprawling sunrises in New York, super rats, soulful balcony serenades to George Peppard and the OG friends to lovers tale. This movie was made to be watched on a chilly, cozy day. For those interested in getting into older movies, Breakfast at Tiffany's is the best and most charming entry point.

3. The Godfather (1972)

While not exactly many peoples idea of a comfort movie, there's something undeniably cozy about watching the descent of decent war hero Michael Corleone into ruthless mafia boss while you sit snug and safe in front of your TV. Whether it's the coloring or the music or the suspense, The Godfather is an absolute top tier Fall program.

4. A League of Their Own (1992)

Counting with names such as Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Lori Petty and even Madonna, this film really is in a league of it's own. Sisters Dottie and Kit join a nascent women's baseball league and fight to keep it alive and relevant with the lack of funding and care from male investors and organizers. There's baseball, there's road trips, there's the establishment of women's sports leagues, there's complicated sibling relationships, friendship and companionship, there's dancing and Madonna and Madonna dancing, and, of course, baseball, if you're into that.

5. Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)

Divine Secrets has it all: life long magical friendships, fraught and very complicated family relationships, surprisingly good mental health and addiction depiction for the early 00's, and some questionable southern accents. The story starts with Siddalee Walker (Sandra Bullock, queen of cozy popcorn flicks, clearly), famous playwriter in New York, upsetting her mother Vivi (Ellen Burstyn and Ashley Judd) when an interviewer implies she was a bad mother. After an epic long distance fight, Vivi's friends, the eponymous Ya-Ya Sisterhood, "kidnap" Siddalee and bring her back to her hometown in Louisiana for a nice and painful rehashing of their youth and Siddalee's childhood, and some long overdue healing.

6. 101 Dalmatians (1961)

While counting considerably less accolades than it's Golden Age or its 90's Renaissance, the art direction and style of Disney's Silver Age is particularly charming and beautiful. 101 Dalmatians has had a few versions over the years, but the original 1961 film still holds up in a special way. It's strong lineart and warm, cloudy autumn London are the perfect background for this canine and human family's odyssey to get their puppies back from iconic villain Cruella De Vil, and the perfect mood for a comforting marathon. Also it's high time we as a society acknowledged what a bop Roger's Cruella tune actually was.

7. O.S.S 117 - Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)

This french parody of 60-70's spy movies is a series that deserved to be a global hit. Jean Dujardin stars as Bond-esque buffoon, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, in a witty but loving take on the spy genre, cultural imperialism and France's 007 predecessor, and it's every bit as hilarious and delightful as it sounds. The first installation is a personal favorite, the absolute best pick me up for a cold autumn day. This one is what you could possibly call a underground sort of movie, but depending on where you live it's available to you on Prime Video! 12 out 10 stars, highly recommend.

8. The Mummy (1999)

There are some movies that are practically perfect in what they set out to be, and The Mummy is one of them. It's scary, it's funny, it has adventure, suspense, amazing costuming, ancient Egypt, mummies (of course), double crossing, ancient curses, doomed love, Rachel Weisz as a cute librarian, Brendan Fraiser as a cute bounty hunter, and Oded Fehr, in general. What else could we want? The Mummy is the ideal rainy saturday, popcorn on your lap, feet under the blanket, home theater adventure sorta movie.

9. Sabrina (1954)

Classic, blueprint, romcom of romcoms, Sabrina even had a 90's do-over with Harrison Ford (inspired choice of a Bogart substitute, won't lie) and Julia Ormond, but nothing beats the original. Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn at her most fashionable and charming star in this timeless puppy love turns to pining turns to maturing into your own person turns into finding what you really want out of life and love. It has chocolate suflés, Paris, romantic boat rides, and crucial life advice of the "don't carry glasses in your back pocket" variety. Get yourself popcorn and a blanket and enjoy this romance the way it was supposed to be enjoyed.

10. Knives Out (2019)

If you've ever holed up at home on an autumn day drinking wine from a mug and playing Clue, you know why Knives Out is on this list. Set on a detective board come to life and counting with a star studded cast, Knives Out is a whodunnit layered and twisted up and flipped upside down like a pretzel, or a donut, as it may be. (whodunut?? sorry.) Hired mysteriously by an anonymous source, P.I Benoit Blanc pokes into the conditions surrounding the apparent suicide of the eccentric Thrombey family patriarch, Harlan Thrombey, who happened to be a whodunnit writer himself. It's a perfectly balanced mystery, complete with sharp commentary, comedy, tension, and the lushest set and costume design to come out of the last few years.

[nerdwriting]

wait, everyone? can’t some people still know?

[nerdwriting]

The Good and The Bad about the Spider-Man: No Way Home Trailer

The trailer for the latest Spider-Man movie is here and fans are in a whirl. It actually managed to break Avengers: Endgame 24 hours views record.

The trailer drops right into a complicated moment for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, where people know Spider-Man is Peter Parker and expect public retribution for the supposed killing of Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhall). Peter then goes and asks Cumberbatch's suspiciously willing Dr. Strange for a favor - pretty please erase the entire worlds memory of who Spider-Man is. Simple stuff. No biggie.

Unsurprisingly, the very fabric of space and time is messed up by the small favor and we see the realities of the multiverse folding in on themselves, before we are bid farewell by a familiar face - Alfred Molina's Doc Ock from Tobey Maguire's run of the spidey suit.

As far as trailers go, it's a pretty epic one, and its bucketload of info dumping has fans speculating that a red herring might be at play. All in all, exciting things are set to come in this installment, the mid step to tie the MCU's phase 4 plans laid out in Loki and WandaVision.

However it seems a good part of the excitement and buzz around the trailer seems to come not from the plot and theories themselves, but rather all of the easter eggs we could count.

Molina's Doc Ock reveal, Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin laughter, is that Daredevil's arm to the side, will Maguire and Garfield's Peters show up, so on, so forth. In a world of Ready Player Ones and Cinematic Universes popping up everywhere, we are more excited because we recognize these things from this other thing and that one guy that we saw on that one movie that we loved, back then, and yeah, that is kinda genuinely exciting, but sometimes it also feels like it's at the detriment of the stories we are telling right now.

Spider Man: No Way Home has an ambitious role to fill, so let's hope the movie and its story end up being more than it's ability to list characters we loved from that other thing, that one time.

[nerdwriting]

Why Didn’t The Eagles Just Take The Hobbits To Mordor?

Because that would probably be pretty boring. Thank you for reading!

I jest, I jest. Why didn't the Eagles simply fly the One Ring all the way to Mordor? It would likely save all characters involved a lot of time, pain and walking. If the Eagles could save Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom after all was said and done, what stopped them from assisting the Fellowship from the beginning? This is a question that has haunted discussions of Lord Of The Rings since before the age of men.

At face value, it might seem a simple and obvious plot hole in one of the most beloved epics of all time, but if we take a bit more time to analyze the EP (Eagle Plan), it’s actually more complicated than the internet thinks.

For starters, the eagles are not simply cute and helpful pets that Gandalf calls when he wants. They’re among some of the oldest creatures in Tolkien’s world, and serve Manwë, one of the Valar, directly. They have their own society and concerns, and in particular a society that has been implied to think that the wars with Sauron are Middle-Earth’s problem to deal with. Elrond says as much in the council at Rivendell “[…]they who dwell beyond the Sea would not receive [the One Ring]: for good or ill it belongs to Middle-earth; it is for us who still dwell here to deal with it.”

If they wouldn’t even receive the One Ring, what’s to say they’d be willing to participate in a mission to destroy it? The Eagles help are more in line with political favors rather than being in service of our heroes. And on top of all of that there is still the temptation of the Ring to consider. If it’s danger level is in proportion to the power of its bearer, to the point that the likes Gandalf and Galadriel don’t even want to look at it, who’s to say it wouldn’t corrupt the Eagles also?

Another obstacle would be the logistics of such a mission. The giant eagles are, well. Gigantic. The Fellowship sought to be a stealth mission, and even with covering long distances on foot, a separation, two pairs of hobbits going in different directions and the confusion it brought, sneaking through unused passages with the help of Gollum, and Aragorn’s suicide battle to distract Sauron and empty Mordor, Sauron still caught on to what was happening and sent the Nazgûl after Frodo and Sam immediately, luckily a minute too late. It’s pretty hard to imagine that a bunch of giant Eagles carrying a merry band of misfits in their general direction would escape Sauron’s notice, or that of his soldiers and spies.

Not only would they lose the element of surprise, but Sauron’s own arrogance and inability to even imagine that the Fellowship sought to destroy the Ring rather than use its power for themselves was a key element in their plan working, one which also served a thematic purpose in the story. One does not simply fly into Mordor, and such.

And finally, we reach the main reason why the Eagles didn’t fly the Ring to Mordor, after all: that’s not the story J.R.R Tolkien or Peter Jackson wanted to tell. Tolkien has said previously that: “[...]the eagles are a dangerous machine. I’ve used them sparingly and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness.”

Lord Of The Rings is not a story about the speed or effectiveness of a mission, about strategizing and calculating. It's about the journey these characters must go through, internally and externally, how they grow throughout the story, and how they change the world they exist in and the ways we can relate and see ourselves and our own world through them. It's about friendship, courage, strenght of will, what it means to be hero.

With that in mind, it is a bit hard to mind a “plot hole” such as this.