Netflix’s tone-deaf casting of Winx Club has social media buzzing.
Netflix has turned the beloved Italian animated show about fairies, Winx Club, into a much darker live-action series called Fate: The Winx Saga. While the original’s aesthetics are made up of bright, pastel-glitter colors and landscapes, the latter is darker and takes more after Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina than it does the childhood favorite. However, these are not the greatest criticisms of the adaptation; the show has been accused of severely white-washing the original characters and generally lacking diversity.
The first look of the cast betrays the issue. The main characters in the original were Bloom, Flora, Musa, Aisha/Layla, Stella and Tecna. Many of these were largely based on famous 2001 celebrities: the blonde Stella is said to be based on Britney Spears/Cameron Diaz, Musa on Lucy Liu, Aisha on Beyoncé, and Flora on Jennifer Lopez.
In the live-action adaptation, the only character of color is Aisha, played by The Stranger’s Precious Mustapha. Meanwhile, Musa is played by Elisha Applebaum who is of mixed ancestry and is a quarter Singaporean, a fact that further enrages fans because it displays an intentional white-washing of a character who, in the original, is fully Chinese. In fact, Musa even dons traditional Chinese clothes at one point and her parents in the series, Ho-Boe and Matlin, are clearly East Asian.
Some may argue that the new version, Fate Winx, does not have the exact same characters. For example, instead of the tanned, Latinx Flora there is Terra, played by the white actress Eliot Salt. And there is no Tecna (who is definitely British but in some speculations half-East Asian too) though one can assume the new character Beatrix took her place. Many were confused why, if they were creating entirely new characters, those characters had to be white in a cast that already lacked diversity?
netflix after putting 1 black and 1 plus sized woman in a show and calling it diversity pic.twitter.com/XnpbQdCt2X
— maria ⁷ (@STATEOFTEAR) December 10, 2020
not netflix whitewashing the asian and latina characters of their live action Winx Club 🤡 pic.twitter.com/UghzpbkcM7
— Paula just launched THE PAPER REELS! (@thepaperreels) December 10, 2020
On the other hand, many welcomed the fact that the cast did give some representation to body types other than the unrealistically proportioned ones in the animated version. Many are also noting that there are people who are using the argument of white-washing to mask their fatphobia. While these are certainly legitimate claims, it raises another concern: plus-size and BIPOC are not mutually exclusive categories of representation.
The creators did not need to change the ethnicity of a character or create a new white character for plus-size representation when they could’ve easily cast a plus-size actress of color. These trade-offs perpetuate harmful ideas that diversity and representation need to come in neatly packaged boxes that cannot overlap because that would be too many oppressed identities in one. This kind of attitude is what brings us primarily white lesbian characters or only cis gay men.
The white plus size woman replacing a woman of colour in winx club is the perfect analogy for how white women equated fatphobia to racism 😂😂😂😂 no 🙂
— Cat-A-Boo (@shamrabug) December 11, 2020
Another disappointment around the casting of side characters is the fact that while “Sky” and “Riven” were kept for the Netflix adaptation, Nabu and Roy- two clearly brown characters- were not. While their ethnicity was not defined, they were clearly darker-skinned and were quite beloved in the original. Sky and Riven were white and remain so in the remake.
A consolation might be Dane, a new character played by Black actor Theo Graham, though we don’t know how big of a role he has in the series yet.