The Princess Blog

Part 2 of the Winx Club reboot  dropped on Netflix yesterday, and it seems like fans are completely disengaged with this franchise. No one is talking about it, and it was pretty poorly received in So Diva! Magazine . The latest drop was fairly short, with only six episodes. This batch of episodes focuses more on the Winx girls than Damien, who seemed to be the star of the initial drop. However, the reboot is stuck between old and new story developments with a lot of revisited material from the superior original series , and not all of the changes they made to it are for the better. The first episode of the drop, "The Truth About Bloom," threw me for a loop because the reboot didn't make it clear that Bloom didn't realize she was adopted. Those of us who have been watching the original series for years were well aware of this fact, and dragging it out slowed the reboot to a crawl. After Bloom learned that she was the secret keeper of the dragon flame, had a magical gui...

It seems like everyone was talking about the new Winx Club reboot  prior to its release. Now that it's finally out, no one seems to care anymore. If you're looking for a place to discuss your favorite fairy princesses (and some awesome non-princess fairies), I've got you covered. Winx Club: The Magic Is Back uses a tongue-in-cheek tagline as a promise that this show will deliver more of the original magic of Winx  than the horrendous live-action Fate: The Winx Saga , which was both a commercial and technical failure. Does it deliver on that promise? For the most part, yes. This reboot starts over from the beginning of Bloom's story, with lots of Easter eggs for fans of the original 2004 Italian cartoon, along with new characters and plot points to keep it feeling fresh. Since Winx Club has been around for over 20 years, it's been rebooted a few times to prevent the characters from aging out of their target age group. Yet, none of the reboots thus far have successfu...

Nowadays, reboots of nostalgic properties have become so commonplace that it's difficult to get excited  anymore. In the case of Winx Club , an animated reboot, albeit CGI, is more of a correction/apology for the horrendous live-action remake  that came out four years ago. Fate: The Winx Saga had none of the magic, visuals, or whimsy that made Winx Club such a beloved franchise. Rainbow SpA  issued a different type of apology last year in the form of a completely original magical girl series . Mermaid Magic brought back the charm and nostalgia of magical girl transformations, fantasy, and innocent romance that Fate was missing. Now, they are redirecting their attention back to their original fans by focusing on their newest iteration of Winx Club, which is allegedly coming to Netflix this fall. Although Rainbow launched a short teaser  for the 2025 Winx Club reboot late last year, there was very little revealed about what the girls would look like in their fairy for...

It's official. Hollywood is dead . If the Mulan  remake wasn't bad enough, even our non-Disney childhood favorites are being turned into gritty soulless live-action shadows of their former selves. Remember when things like this used to be a joke? Those days are over. Now we have hyper-realistic Riverdale spinoffs that aren't actually realistic because they feature teenagers with superpowers. They are just realistic enough that all of the whimsical fantasy elements that we loved as kids are now gone, but not so realistic that they are beyond things like vampires, werewolves, or seances. What sort of world are we living in when a show about faery princesses  does not even portray its fairies with wings? I suppose you can argue that maybe they didn't want to reveal the wings in the trailer, but isn't that the entire point of Winx Club ? See for yourself. Does this look the Winx you remember? So yeah, this is Fate: The Winx Saga , which is coming to Netflix on Januar...

Tír Na nÓg is a land of eternal youth that originates from Celtic mythology. It is often associated with  faeries  because they are also common in Celtic myths. The  most common story  of Tír Na nÓg is about a beautiful woman named Niamh who fell in love with Oisín, the son of the leader of the Fianna clan on Earth. She took him back to her homeland of Tír Na nÓg where no one ever aged. They lived happily together there for three years. One day, he decided that he missed his family and wanted to visit them. Niamh sent him back to Earth on her enchanted white horse, but warned him never to touch the ground. Upon returning home, Oisín realized that 300 years had passed on Earth during the short time he spent in Tír Na nÓg, and everyone he loved was dead. When he inevitably touched the ground by accident, the 300 years caught up with his body, and he died of old age. This myth has rarely been touched upon by modern media, but the land of Tír Na nÓg occasi...

I wrote a little about  Winx Club , the 2004 Italian cartoon, in my "Faery Princesses" and "Magical Girls" posts, but I had only seen the first two seasons at the time. Not only that, but I saw the second season over a decade after watching the first. As it turns out, the show has aired seven seasons over the past 13 years, so maybe I wasn't being fair to write about it after having seen so little. I decided to binge everything I had missed to find out. When I started to navigate how to go about watching the later seasons, I discovered that the show was a bit of a mess. There are three different English dubs, and it switched networks several times, with years between some of the seasons. It's no wonder I lost track of it. Was it worth making up for all that lost time? Here's what I discovered. Shows that run for longer than five seasons tend to come up with some absurd ideas toward the end to keep things going. Just look at the ridiculous conce...

The concept of a "faery princess" is often pegged as the most feminine thing a girl can dress up as. Yet, there are surprisingly few stories about faery princesses. The ones that do exist are somewhat obscure. Sure, there's Queen Titania from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but that story contains no faery princesses, and her character is not referenced often in fiction. The term "faery" is derived from the "fae folk,"  who were mischievous sprites from old European mythology that liked to prank mortals with their powers. They did not necessarily have wings, but this changed during the era of of  J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan  around the early 1900s, which portrayed Tinker Bell as a tiny winged woman. Though "fairy" is the more common spelling (even though fairy tales rarely actually have faeries in them), "faery" is more proper because it's closer to the root word, "fae." Surprisingly, Di...

It's the premiere week of  Mysticons , so let's talk about magical girls and their impact on princess mythology. The magical girl craze began in Japan as a genre of anime called  "mahou shoujo."  No one knows exactly how it started, but it is believed that the first magical girl appeared in 1966 as  Sally the Witch . Though individual stories vary, all the series in the mahou shoujo genre contain grade school-aged girls who receive sparkly trinkets that allow them to transform into pretty superheroes. They fight bad guys by screaming magical words and releasing different types of spells, usually in a pretty sequence of recycled animation. The concept seems rather silly from an outside perspective, but it definitely sells. Not all magical girls are princesses, but it is a common overlying theme, most likely because the genre was created for the same target audience. The most princessy magical girl anime would probably have to be  Go! Princess Prett...