Fate: The Winx Saga season 1 introduced an elemental system of fairy magic, which in many ways resembles the bending powers from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. However, Fate’s elemental abilities are different from Avatar’s in a few key ways, setting the new series apart while still evoking the popular Nickelodeon cartoon. Bending is at the center of Avatar’s rich fantasy universe, and it’s interesting to see how the abilities in The Winx Saga compare.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s world consists of four nations, each with an affinity for a particular element: the Water Tribes, Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Air Nomads. In this universe, people have the potential to be born with bending abilities for one of those four elements through some combination of genealogical history and spiritual acumen. Only the Avatar can master all four elements.
In Fate: The Winx Saga, only Fairies are gifted with magical abilities, but every Fairy is born with an affinity for at least one element. The show also seems to be building a world where different realms/kingdoms are associated with different elements, but the lore of The Winx Saga's Otherworld hasn’t yet been expounded on enough to tell exactly how that will take shape. Here are some of the biggest differences between the elemental magic abilities in Fate and the bending powers from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Let’s get the most glaring disparity out of the way first: Avatar has four elements, while Fate: The Winx Saga has six, adding mind and light to the shared ranks of air, water, earth, and fire. Mind magic deals with thoughts, memories, emotions, and dreams, like Musa’s empathic abilities to read how people around her are feeling or take away some of their pain. Light magic is pretty self-explanatory, shown in season 1 to hold abilities from basic light projection to invisibility and illusion. It’s even possible that Fate could introduce more elements later on, though that seems unlikely.
Obviously, these two new additions vary pretty dramatically from the bending in Avatar. There are some parallels between mind magic and energy bending in that they both relate to the inner essences of people, and both light and mind share some traits with the spiritual sensing and astral projection powers Jinora shows off in The Legend of Korra. Overall though, The Winx Saga’s extra elements are unique from the world of Avatar.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, lightning is the highest-level firebending technique and one of the rarest bending abilities across all four elements. It’s performed by manipulating the energy in the air around the bender, forcing an imbalance and a subsequent collision of positive and negative forces, which is then channeled as lightning. In Fate: The Winx Saga, however, lightning is a power wielded by air Fairies, not fire.
Season 1 of Fate: The Winx Saga shows lightning mostly through the duplicitous (and murderous) Beatrix, for whom it seems to be the primary method of air magic. The decision to make the ability air-focused does make some scientific sense, as lightning is caused by static and charge imbalance in the air itself. That doesn’t mean Avatar and Korra’s fire-based lightning doesn’t make sense (both have origins in firebending’s manipulation of energy), but it is interesting to see a different take on the deadly ability.
Plant life is generally immune from bending in the world of Avatar, except for some limited control afforded to waterbenders. By manipulating the water within plants, some characters like Katara, Hama and the denizens of the swamp are able to execute a range of abilities, from using vines and trees as weapons to sapping water directly out of plants to use in other bending techniques. Even in these instances though, waterbenders only control the water within the plants, not the plants themselves.
In Fate: The Winx Saga, some Fairies are able to directly control the movement and growth of plant life, but that power belongs to earth Fairies, not water Fairies. Terra is the primary example of this in season 1, as she uses her magic constantly to weaponize plants, speed up and control their growth, and perform various other flora-based techniques. Primarily, this just shows a difference in philosophy between the two shows, with Avatar defining “earth” as anything rock/soil/dirt/sand-based, and Fate using a broader inclusion of different elements of the natural world. It’s unclear if earth Fairies can control metal like some earthbenders, or if water Fairies can control plants (though that’s been hinted at).
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, most benders of the same element share a comparable range of abilities. There are certainly some differences in skill and power, high-level abilities only accessible to a select few (lightning, metal, lava, bloodbending, flight), and divergent disciplines like sandbending, but most of those variations are caused by training and discipline, not inherent ability. Yes, there are strong earthbenders like Bolin who can, for instance, lava-bend without being metalbenders, but for the most part, two firebenders or two waterbenders will have access to the same core powers.
By contrast, the ways individual Fairies channel their elemental powers in Fate: The Winx Saga varies wildly. This is most clear in season 1 with earth magic, as it has the highest number of visible, prominent practitioners. Terra’s magic manifests primarily through plants, her brother Sam’s in the ability to walk through walls, and their father’s in the power of altering earth’s state (turning rock to quicksand, for instance). It isn’t explicitly stated that Terra couldn’t possibly learn to use her earth magic in other ways, but the general idea is that each fairy’s element takes shape in a way that’s unique to them. This idea comes from the original Winx Club cartoon, where there were no core elements, and each fairy had a wholly distinct set of abilities.
The last major difference between elemental abilities in Fate: The Winx Saga and Avatar: The Last Airbender is that in the latter, only the Avatar can bend more than one element. Early on in Fate, it’s revealed that multiple powerful Fairies possess the ability to channel more than one element, as Headmistress Farah Dowling tells her class they may one day wield other powers. Dowling explains that every fairy is born with one element, and it’s implied that many never move beyond that birth power. However, it’s not uncommon for normal Fairies to control more than one element once they are older and trained. Since each core character only possesses one element each by the end of Fate: The Winx Saga season 1, it should be interesting to see if anyone unlocks more powers as the story continues.
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