#dnd melodrama just hits different!

[al-norton]

So my entire dnd groupchat can have fun theorising that my character is secretly a lover of our criminal boss’ wife, but as soon as that turns out to be true it’s all ‘nooooooooo’ and ‘you’ve ruined my family’s honor!’ and ‘not in the church????’ and ‘A SON?!?!?’ I see how it is…

[nerdwriting]

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Fate has plenty of it's own issues - white washing and erasing characters, cringey dialogue, outdated melodrama, etc.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.

[weirdratblogs]

I got hit with a memory from when I was a younger teenager early today while I was at the Credit Union. I was messaging some friends on discord and looking at tumblr intermittently, and I guess that something about the combination of the two apps decided to dig up something from my subconscious?

So, when I was a baby nerd with very little in the way of readily available social interaction - the geography of my area and the demographics mean that the majority of people are much older than I am, and people are leaving the area more than they're sticking around, so I was one of, like, 10 kids on my hill, and 7 or 8 of them were very much stereotypical backwoods West Virginian - I had to rely on the internet for a lot of my 'learning to deal with people' phase. Which... I don't think I have to tell you how that turned out, we all know how the internet can be, but it stands that I interacted with all sorts and sought interaction in very specific ways.

One of these ways was RP - since I was really into DnD, but, as noted, didn't have anyone to play it with. Now, I'm a bit of a moron when it comes to dealing with people and developing social queues, so a lot of forums were outright off the table, and that left obscure social media sites.

One of these sites was called Groupie.

Now, if you were to look up Groupie today, you'd find either the definition of the word or a Chinese owned image and video sharing site, since the Groupie I knew and loved wound up going under after getting into a spat with another company of similar name - and possibly similar concept, I honestly have no idea if that came after Groupie went down, or if they were always superficially the same - called GroupMe.

Actually, on a surface level inspection, I quite like the look of GroupMe, but that's for another day...

Groupie, if I were to give a shitty description, would probably be best described by looking at other, still existing, social media and saying things like, "it's like x, but maybe slightly different."

So, each person on the site was a Groupie, Groupies could make Groups, join Groups, add friends, and PM others Groupies. If I had to describe the actual mechanics behind groups, I'd honestly just point to discord and say, "Remove the Voice and Video Chats, and then add a really broad tagging system with keywords like 'Sports', 'Entertainment', and 'Gaming and Roleplaying'."

So, you'd create a Group with a tag and a relatively short description, then you'd go in and add Channels while waiting for people you knew or some randoms to join up, and it was basically a discord server with only text and image channels. From what I remember, there were only, like, three preset roles as well - Owner, Moderator, and Member.

Mind, my main experience on that site was RP, as I said, so a lot of my time was spent joining new servers, waiting for messages, and then replying, so I can't exactly give you a litmus test for the overall quality of the community. I will say that it suffered from that issue a lot of sites have, where you could lie about your age and find yourself joining servers where it's probably illegal for you to be on them. Like, I don't know if you'd count E-RP as sexting, but I was definitely doing that shit when I was wa~~~y underage.

Christ, as much as I have some fond memories - which I'm slowly unlocking as I reminisce - I was absolutely fucking cringe back then.

Like, one of my first experiences in RP was one where the basic premise was that a bunch of people from our world woke up in another one in the bodies of various fantasy creatures. That one was pretty clean actually, with only a bit of cursing, but there was this one guy that was a neon blue dragon, and someone was a shikabane hime, and I wound up running two separate characters (me in the body of a 4-tailed fox (gotta remember to call it a Kitsune and not a fox otherwise it doesn't count goddamnit, the logic of a 12-year-old) and then, later, my non-existent younger sibling of indeterminate gender in the body of a blue phoenix hatchling) because I wrote myself into a corner as a loner who was slowly losing himself to his sudden magical power... We wound up resolving the scenario through a MacGuffin just so we could restart from scratch with more people there from the start and with less... juvenile attempts at being the number one most important character.

Another was basically Lost, but on an island with all sorts of ruins and shit. It was supposed to be more grounded when compared to other RPs but it wound up just being constant sex scenes across different areas on the island with a little bit of melodrama mixed in. I can't remember what my character was, exactly, but I do remember that he spent the first while picking through the remnants of the plane we'd crashed in, and then the last few dozen posts doing nothing but gratuitous sex scenes in the hot springs with someone who wrote their parts like they'd also never had sex before - let alone looked at a sex-ed book. I'm pretty sure I left that group after a while of being bored...