In the middle of the night (which later turned into an early morning...) I’m doing some self-reflection and thinking of deep stuff… like if Winx Club has changed me or my life and how.
I’ve seen many humorous memes about characters X and Y becoming “my personality” or “making me how I am today” and I’ve always found them adorable, but somehow I haven’t been able to relate to them completely. Of course I have my favorite characters and I love their personalities but they haven’t affected my personality. Some people see some characters as their role models but my own role models were always musicians or people I knew in real life, not fictional characters. (And I don’t mean it’s wrong to have fictional characters as your role models etc, I just didn’t personally experience it that way.)
Then I realized that maybe Winx hasn’t affected me in the most obvious way but another way instead. Winx was my introduction to the whole magical girl genre (including the concept of magical schools)! Before I found Winx, I used to draw comics and write stories about animals (bunnies, who would've guessed) who kinda had an ordinary life: they played outside and tried not to get eaten by predators. After I found Winx, oopsie woopsie, the animals drastically got some magical powers and the comics started focusing on the epic battles between the bunnies and their predators. Inspired by Winx I also drew them some power ups and they started going to a magical school. At the same time I didn’t want to write any “normal and ordinary” stories without magic anymore. Inspired by the magical girl genre I started reading other magical girl comics and mangas (such as W.i.t.c.h., Sugar Sugar Rune and Tokyo Mew Mew) and I also started getting more into fantasy literature in general. Before Winx I didn’t kinda have any preferences on what to read, I just read some random children’s books (ok I just realized that I liked Barbapapa very much but I didn’t have any other favorite books or series and I kinda forgot Barbapapa after finding Winx). After Winx I started acknowledging what genres I’m truly interested in.
Also, Winx Club was the first passion of mine (alongside with music), it was the first cartoon ever I could call myself a fan of. Of course I’d watched lots of tv series before which I liked but none of them felt as catchy, special and the one. I liked some Disney princesses but I was never that much into them and I “grew over” them in a few years and didn’t care about them anymore. Winx Club was the first series that came to my life and stayed.
So, I think Winx affected my creativity and other interests very much. I started playing that I have magical powers too, like if I was swimming I splashed the water around and imagined I have water powers, I started dreaming about what kind of magical powers I’d love to have and how’d flying feel like. I played with my friends who also liked Winx and we drew fairies and wrote stories together. After Bloom turned into Dark Bloom, I got obsessed with the power of hypnosis and it became the main trope when I was playing with my dolls or writing stories. Someone turned into evil all the time.
And speaking of evil, actually Cloud Tower and the witches were a bigger inspiration to me than the Winx girls! It wasn’t a certain character whose look I copied but the witches’ style overall which I loved very much and it was kinda my kick start to gothic culture: I got into gothic clothes and gloomy stuff and figured out how I want to express myself. (Nowadays I wear more cozy clothes but I still consider myself as a goth.)
I had many hobbies as a kid but Winx gave me some completely new hobbies: I created my own Winx website and started blogging. I started writing reviews of some Winx episodes, movies and dolls, I collected Winx merch (before Winx I collected rocks and random stickers hehe) and took photos of them, I continued writing stories, collecting all kinds of information about Winx like it’d be my major in uni and I tried to learn how to edit pics (I was never very good at it but at least I had fun). If I ever need to create online content (about anything outside of Winx too) or make an online course or something like that, I think it’ll be easier for me since I kept creating content and blogging for so many years. Also writing overall has always felt easy for me.
Also, I think liking Winx kinda affected my attitude overall: I’ve never cared about what I “should” like when I’m x years old. When I became a teenager, many people stopped liking the stuff they used to like as kids because they thought it’d be childish and embarrassing to like certain books or tv series etc. I never felt the urge to fit into the box: I liked Winx so much that I didn’t care if someone considered it as childish. I also kept liking W.i.t.c.h. and other magical girl stuff and I still like them as an adult since I was really young when I realized that it’s not your hobbies or interests that make you childish but your behaviour. So I kept liking things that made me happy.
This sounds very cringe but when I was in the elementary school, I had such a bad attitude towards English and I hated studying it because I thought I won’t need it (I know I know this is ridiculous but I was a kid so please don’t judge me) but after finding out how much information about the Winx characters and places there were on the official Winx Club website I understood that I NEED to learn more English. My English teacher knew I was into Winx and she bought some Winx stickers to motivate me: if I won a bingo game I got a sticker as a reward. A couple of years later, thanks to Winx, I also started writing on the Winx forums and interacting with people all around the world - and that gave me more motivation to develop my English skills. And today I’m still interested in learning more languages since I’d love to communicate with people on the forums of different languages and read more Winx books in different languages.
Last but not the least, thanks to Winx I’ve found a heart warming community and I’ve got many friends who are important to me! I’ve learnt new things about different countries and cultures and we can also talk about other stuff besides Winx too.
So I accidentally ended up writing a novel even though I was supposed to answer one question, oops. Maybe I’m like Faragonda after all since I keep repeating the same jokes and giving a speech long enough to make Stella fall asleep.
