I’m sharing a snippet of my “Heartbreak Anniversary” rewrite. I’ve also changed the title to “The End of Beginning” because it just felt more suitable to the story. I’ve split it into three chapters, and this is from the first chapter. Just a side note, the highlighted “her” in purple is Griffin and the italicised paragraphs are flashbacks. Here’s what I’ve conjured up so far:
...the reverberation of the ghostly past clouded Faragonda’s thoughts. Her vision muddled, finding herself back on the battlefield on the planet of Domino.
No fauna. No flora. The evergreens dissipated into infertile drylands. The blue ocean evaporated into the depressive sinkhole of nothingness. All native species slowly evanesced in thin air. Ashes rained from the sky, metamorphosing into brittle snowflakes, cementing in the ground. The land relinquished to the blasphemous spell, bolting the once vibrant realm into the deserted vacancy of inhabitability. The displacement of life and death reversed the victorious wins of the remaining living members of the Company of Light into grieving losses. A life for a life. A fortuitous exchange of consequences. The entirety of Domino, from the Royal Family, its people and its home had vanquished alongside the Ancestral Witches and the monsters they summoned.
And underneath the barren pandemonium, Faragonda lay helplessly in everything in between in her own pool of blood. From the treacherous rubbles to the lifeless bodies that circumambient her obsolescent vessel, she was hardly breathing. Barely moving. Scarcely living. Sheathed in a cornucopia of severe injuries. She had taken a hard beating from the Wizards of The Black Circle.
A redundant echo of faint screams of Faragonda's name claimed the desolate wasteland. A familiar figure rushed towards her. Muffled cries clenched her pulsating rage in a fist. Trapping it in a cage. Green energy beams radiated from her frail palms. Ready to unleash her fury after seeing Faragonda’s state. Her anger surrendered in defeat. Anguished tears streamed down her face, falling to her knees, next to the moribund fairy. Her voice wavered in fear trying to cast a healing incantation, but the weight of her exhaustion overpowered it. Not even Palladium, Rhodos or Alyssa’s spells were of help. Faragonda wearily held her hand, gripping her close to the fairy’s heart like she was her lifeline, reassuring the witch.
“Don’t do this to me, Faragonda!” Her tearful words tried to hammer a promise out of the fairy. And as the fairy blinked twice, she did not wake for a third in Domino.
The sound of glasses clinking aloud snatched Faragonda's attention back to the present. Her fingers soaked the lachrymose memory that nostalgia pulled out of the archives from her face.
It's still a work in progress, but feel free to share your thoughts with me. :)
What it says on the tin. I broke this into multiple parts because otherwise it would be insanely long. Enjoy!
Link for part 2 will go here
Let's address the elephant in the room: yes, Even a Witch is in part a real people fic. I don't see anything weird or wrong about it and I'm only writing this because I've seen several people being negatively weird about it. At the time I was friends with a directioner who had a fic involving 1D, her self-insert and Dora the Explorer, my idea was tame in comparison. I never intended to be anything but respectful. Including Halestorm as characters in my fic was meant to introduce more people to their music, an operation I succeeded in.
Since I also deeply admire them as people, I also tried to stay as close to the real deal as I could, basing the behavior of their characters and several anecdotes on songs, interviews and videos. It is all public info, easily accessible if you have the patience to watch hours of interviews and read pages of articles.
The characters on the page are far from being the real people anyway. Everything of them I could pour onto the page, is just what they meant to be available to their fans. There's also incorrect bits due to me not knowing some things yet.
If any of this is troublesome for you, drop it here and scroll past.
Why did I start where I started?
Even a Witch started with a dream I had when I was 15. Said dream encompassed the events of Chapter 3 - The Rock Show, thus it needed an intro to explain why Icy and the Winx were on relatively good terms.
If I wrote the intro now, I'd make the first two chapters a single chapter. There's several instances in the first 30-something chapters where the pacing just isn't the best, because it was my first ever fanfic and I didn't have the experience I do now. Writing this fic has taught me a lot, and it is the first story I've ever written from beginning to end.
I have always wanted more than what the show gave us for the Trix. The comics gave us a little more, but still not enough. The finale of season 6 gave me a solid chance to intervene without retconning much: the Winx bent over backwards to get the Wizards of the Black Circle a fair trial a couple seasons earlier, surely they wouldn't let the Trix rot in a book forever without a trial when they never really did anything comparable to leading to the near extinction of magic users on a whole planet. Thus the choice to change that single decision and not trap the witches in the Legendarium.
Also I liked the Bloomix and Dark Witch designs and despised Dark Sirenix.
Story structure
I am a pantser. This means I don't really do outlines, or detailed planning for chapters. Therefore my outlines look a lot like I know what's going to kickstart the action, I know a couple things that need to happen in the middle, and maybe I have a vague idea of what I want for the ending. The large gaps in between are filled gradually as the story goes.
For Even a Witch, that meant I usually made a detailed outline for 3-5 chapters at a time, and when those were written I outlined the next few chapters.
Detailed is kind of a big word though. Have an example of my outlines of the beginning of the Altaduna arc:
• Amaryl's kitchen shift
• Transformation
• Trip -> Enclosed Territory
• Andrea
• Xavier
• Donnie
• Trip-> Altaduna
• Mustakar
• Flute
• Retransformation
• Valtor >:(
• Xavier / Donnie and Stormy?
This did not end up being what happened (things got more complicated between "Mustakar" and "Retransformation"), but you understand this is by no means detailed.
The overall structure can be summed up like this:
• chapters 1-24, first act (this section could've been much shorter)
• chapters 25-35, Downland arc
• chapters 36-45, Altaduna arc
• chapters 46-57, transformations (could've been shorter as well maybe, it's the downtime before chaos ensues)
• chapters 58-66, Imaginaerum arc
• chapters 67-74, final arc plus epilogue
None of these parts had a prefixated length, since these labels are very much an afterthought.
Chapter 1 - Prologue
Chapter 2 - Wake Up, Wake Up
These two chapters also have a lot of exposition, though it is decently filtered through the povs of the characters. It was unavoidable, it's all things that needed to be clear to readers but that would've been deadly boring to write. Seriously, you did not want to read all I had in mind for the trial and I do not want to translate all of those technical terms.
One thing I wanted to do was to make sure everyone was on board with the characters. A crossover always attracts people who are new to one of the fandoms, so I made sure to give quick and basic physical descriptions of every main character in order to avoid whatever the character equivalent of white room syndrome is. Going back to it, I could've done it a lot more swiftly, but hey, it got the job done. On that note, a good chunk of the story is wordier than it needed to be due to my English not being as polished at the time.
Icy had been functioning the way she was expected to for so long, she didn’t know who she was when she no longer had to fight. When all she was good at became the thing she had to avoid, she didn’t know what to do. It hurt so much to look back to the wasted time, the sacrifices, the continuous giving it all for someone else only for that someone to turn on her when they felt like it; and knowing she had to react didn't make the "how" any clearer. The concert was a wake up call, it gave her something to look forward to as well as the motivation to get better. She felt pitied by Stella and Bloom, and she didn’t want their pity. She had to get back up, and by the end of the chapter some of her old self has resurfaced through her snark. But it's just the surface.
Darcy and Stormy react to the trial in a fundamentally different way compared to Icy. We'll get to it later on, but the main reason for this is that Darcy and Stormy had something to go back to. They may have been scared to do so right away, but they did have someone to go back to. Icy didn't.
The metaphor/theory of the four pillars is completely made up. If anything like that exists, 15yo me did not know it. I am still surprised by how well it still holds up with readers, definitely an element of pride in these first chapters.
Chapter 4 - History Class
Chapter 3 - The Rock Show
Chapter 6 - Awakening
Chapter 5 - Going Back Home
Inciting incident in Chapter 3 - kickstarts the whole "must keep them a secret" thing
Chapter 7 - Magix
For the entire concert Icy is disassociating, hard. Everything takes her away from the now and back to her past, she acts like she's doing better (or tries to) but her mind is still stuck.
Even after rescuing Lzzy, she is still stuck. Icy is not allowed to forget her situation ever, or else she can get herself, Darcy and Stormy in serious trouble. And yet, the most unexpected and not really pleasant event turns into a brief relief for her, because Lzzy and the band don't know her. They give her the grace of a fresh start free of assumptions and pity, and she latches onto that immediately.
Part of that is rooted in the Bonding, which I used to explain the instant feeling of mutual trust between Icy and Lzzy. To me, a Bonding can happen between two magical creatures who complete each other. It isn't a fairy-only thing, and it can bind any magical creature. In their case, neither of them would've had the impulse to keep in touch with the other, not with the same urgency.
Darcy was a complicated character to write. Her resolution on sticking together clashed with her need for solid ground: Icy was soft ground, the kind that can suddenly become a landslide. Darcy didn't want to get caught in that, and distanced herself from Icy. She wanted the old Icy, the one who always had a next step in mind, never slowing down. But Icy needed to shed that version of herself, to be vulnerable and fragile in order to find herself as a person. Darcy didn't allow her that vulnerability.
Nobody picks up on it right away, but Stella and Bloom do realize that Icy is being much more open about what she feels and wants than she's been ever since the trial, and Darcy quickly notices as well.
Chapter 12 - In Your Room
I am very happy with one thing though: the distance Icy puts between herself and her guardians, calling them her "father's parents" while Lzzy referred to them as grandparents. She makes it very clear that there is no affection there
"I am cringe but I am free" sweet Titan are there lines I'd rewrite in this chapter.
Chapter 13 - Teen Idle
This is just such a messy chapter. This is THE chapter that you read and think "yeah a 15-16 yo wrote this". The biggest issue I have with it is the way it goes about sexuality, where "sexuality" means relationship with sex in general, but the problem stems from the fact that I was, in fact, 16 at best when that was written, which meant I was still not fully comfortable with or even fully aware of my own identity. I was pondering the possibility of being bisexual, and didn’t know polyamory existed, let alone that it was my preferred relationship style. I worked all that out through writing, and it is clear as day if you know where to look, and it is awful to read. But it's also really cool to be able to see that journey so I don't go back and edit it out to fit present me.
That being said, it annoyes me how much the winx read as prudes and I am genuinely sorry about that.
Icy really went from being anxious about being out in public to working customer service. Damn. Now that's character development!
Chapter 14 - Fairies and Witches
Jokes aside, there's a solid reason why I built her character that way. It is very much in contrast with her canon self. While in canon Icy does not quite want the spotlight and is happy to scheme in the background so long as her plans work out and she gets her due, taking pride in her reputation and abilities, in EaW Icy is forced into the spotlight: she is the leader of the Trix, in Alfea, always tagging along with the most famous group of fairies around. The trial has made her known even outside the schools. In season 3 and 5 she could afford to show up to places and most people would not have known who she was, now she is in a school that knows her face way too well and hates her guts. Moreover, she is ashamed about her past and is still in the process of recovering from it, an extremely vulnerable process which will be made much harder by people like Amaryl.
Chapter 15 - The Witch of Time
I honestly don't have much to say about my high school friend group. They knew about the fic, I explicitly asked if they wanted to be in it and what their powers would be and even the outfits were done with their direction (I'm still disappointed that only one of them went for wacky magic hair colors, but then again I just gave myself a dyed lock of hair too). We fell apart through the years, as is obvious while reading, and honestly it's only because of timing that so many of them made it to the finale. I ran out of good in-story reasons to take them out by the time I wanted to do so, and by god I am a writer first and petty second. If there was no good way to pull them out, they stayed.
Aire is the one exception. We're still in touch well into our twenties. At first she wrote her own parts and I just edited them to match our styles so it wouldn't be too jarring (there wasn't much work to do in that sense though, she is a good writer too), but then she just couldn't deliver them in time for the speed at which I wrote (guys I was fast), even with 5-10 chapters of backlog as I used to do back then, so I took it upon myself as well and she judged if she liked the direction it went in or not.
Chapter 16 - First Day
The concept for Aire's character was workshopped together, as well as her outfit and her arc. I lowkey wish we had worked more on her, because I'd like to even just design her Gloomix and Disenchantix. Fun fact: Aire used to have pastel pink eyes initially, I had to go back and edit everything when real Aire retconned it to ocean blue.
About Amaryl: I needed a minor nuisance to spice things up before the introduction of the actual villain, in part because otherwise school life was just boring and I hated that everything always happened at the beginning of the school year in the show, in part because I wanted Icy's fears about what she'd have to deal with to be confirmed. Amaryl was just one of the fairies who met my criteria of "I don't want to make more OCs": she shows up in the later seasons, she is old enough to have lived through most of the Trix's bullshit, and she had a name and power known widely enough. If you say "Amaryl" and then "the Alfea student who hated Stella" most winxers know who that is.
(Yomi, on the other hand, is a niche comic reference and is only seen once, but she canonically has class with the Winx that one time so she was good enough)
Chapter 17 - Bet
Fairix is a made-up-on-the-spot transformation meant to show that other students also advanced in level. If I try hard enough I could come up with consistent lore for it, but it does not have any as is.
Chapter 18 - Clouds on the Horizon
Chapter 19 - Getting Ready for the Ball
Oh here we go, the subplot I'd happily erase from the story. I dislike what I did with the concept of magical creatures having extended lifespans based on their power level now, especially all the existential crisis it brought along, because I did not really give closure to any of it. When I wrote this part maybe there was an idea of having Icy and Lzzy Renounce the added lifespan, but it never really fit the rest of the story and currently I don't care enough to write it into newer fics. Also because many things changed for Icy and I'm no longer sure she would do it at all.
Chapter 20 - The Ball
I do like the little arc about Lzzy resenting and rejecting her powers, it could've been done better though.
Chapter 21 - The Ball Part Two
Chapter 22 - I Am the Fire
Chapter 23 - Caught
Chapter 24 - Life's Too Long
Chapter 25 - He Ain't Dead (Again)
The thing I love the most about Aire's existence is that she allowed the world to feel much bigger and not centered entirely around the Winx and Trix. Yes, she gets tangled up in their business anyway, but majority of the time Aire is choosing to do so rather than being dragged into it passively. Even with the bet her roommates trick her into, they do weaponize her pride but ultimately Aire is still the one to agree. Through her character we get to see a glimpse of "normal" student shenenigans, how they are handled, and how connections are formed outside of battles — something the show lacks even in season 4 (Roxy has no connections other than her dad and her dog? No friends she might want to tell about her powers? Alright she is similar to Bloom so we can see how Bloom has come full circle from mentee to mentor, but also, boring). Being from Magix, Aire has no fish out of water plot, she just wants to be respected by her peers and get a diploma while also getting up to adventures like the ones she grew up hearing about.
Alec is part of said bigger world, together with his teammates (admittedly very much background characters, but I did my best to make it feel like they had a connection with Alec and each other for the little time they appeared on the page). In real Aire's sections he starts off as your typical Male Love Interest: annoying, pushy, self-centered but still very perceptive and, of course, hot. As the chapters went on and I took control, he turned into a slightly different character, one who talks a lot but is actually afraid people around him don't actually tell him things the way they are and only stick around if he's fun or successful enough.
A side note: you may notice that none of my OCs, nor canon characters like the Trix with a vague canon backstory, are royalty. This is because by the time I was writing this I was already sick of Rainbow making every recurring character a royal: Diaspro, Crystal, Tritannus and Nereus, Roxy, Galatea (and I love Galatea, let's be clear)… Like, guys, who are these royals RULING OVER? Are there even citizens?! The comics do much better under this aspect, bringing to the table the lives of more common people regardless of their ties to the Winx themselves. There's old friends of the Winx, like Flora's penpal Lorelle or Tecna's childhood friend Iris, but also random people who are just there by circumstance (and that's the majority actually). They're engineers, students, fishermen, old collectors, retired teachers, researchers, and they make the world feel actually rich and lived in.
Chapter 26 - Blue Eyes
I have been asked how and why I chose Valtor as my main antagonist. I admit I do not remember my exact process, but it was something along these lines: the villain needed to be an actual problem for the girls in order to not be defeated in two chapters (this excluded: DarkAvalon, Diaspro, Chimera, most comic villains, obviously Kalshara and Brafilius cuz season 7 was not out when I began writing); they also needed to have beef with both Winx and Trix (this excluded the Black Circle, which was still a hard pass since they come back and are defeated again in the comics). After counting villains that were dead-dead with no chance of survival (Mandragora, the Ancestral Witches), I was left with Darkar and Valtor. Valtor, being the vengeful self-absorbed character he is, lended himself very well to the scheme of going after Lzzy and the boys as revenge and in general of focusing on his opponents personally. Darkar is more of an impersonal villain, he will absolutely demolish you but won't chase you without reason. Valtor, however, is very keen on going out of his way to make life harder for his enemies even at a social level. Plus, it was a great chance to make the ending of season 3 a little less underwhelming by giving Valtor a reason to appear so weak back then…
Chapter 27 - Line of Defense
Those of you who read See-Through have a clue about how much Icy is still gaslighting herself about her spicy experience with Valtor. I might elaborate further elsewhere.
Chapter 28 - War Council
Chapter 29 - A Witch Is In Love
Chapter 30 - Veneno
Chapter 31 - The Cure
Chapter 32 - Back To Downland
I believe this chapter showcases how much the Trix have grown attached to the Winx at this point. The moment the fairies are taken out, the Trix find themselves without the crutch which had carried them around Alfea that far. It did not feel too wrong to be there, if they were there with the Winx, but without them? Without them it's empty and overwhelming. I really like the choice of making Icy go to Tecna's desk to work on Xavier's notes (whose name, by the way, does not come from Professor X, it's merely the Spanish form of Saverio which I found a bit off sound-wise when paired with "professor" all the time), it was her way to feel closeness and comfort.
Chapter 33 - Blood on Crystals
Chapter 34 - It's Safe Enough to Sleep
Chapter 35 - Quarrel
You could probably already tell by now but I am such a sucker for the concept that creatures linked by a Bonding can feel what the other feels. I pity the Pixies because their fairies will sooner or later have R rated experiences of various kinds. I imagine this effect varies from species to species, for example the Winx only ever seem to sense when their Pixies are in danger, while with a same species Bonding positive feelings also get passed on more easily.
One thing I tried to be mindful of and bring back from the first seasons is how the environment could affect someone's magic. That, combined with the comic canon bit that when a magic user is very shaken they have a hard time transforming or even accessing magic altogether, made for a few interesting situations that would not otherwise have had high stakes.
Anyways, of course I used this concept for both innuendos and angst. It was the obvious choice to make.
Chapter 36 - Alone
In particular, I used it as a tool to make Icy realize two things. One: she cannot act like her actions only affect herself anymore, because Lzzy will directly feel their impact, especially when they concern Icy's health and safety. Two: she does not need to act alone anymore, she can rely on someone else at least emotionally. "But Darcy and Stormy…" as stated before, Darcy is still wary of Icy's state and keeping a certain distance while at the same time enforcing their usual dynamic, and both her and Stormy are too tied to Icy's past to help her. The blank slate Lzzy offers her is the one thing Icy needs but isn't willing to allow herself. For a great deal of the story Icy beats herself up over the fact that her past actions and her mere existence pose a danger to her newfound loved ones. This is never fully solved, even though it gets better as years go by. Even by the time her kids are the ones off on adventures, Icy occasionally feels like she was selfish to have kids at all and she's condemned them to live in her shadow, a very uncomfortable one. The Downland incident and Lzzy confronting her afterwards are the beginning of the process of deconstruction of such belief.
Chapter 37 - Hold Me Tight
Chapter 38 - A Pixie's Prophecy
Every time someone comments on it, I apologize for following in Rainbow's footsteps and giving couple drama to skloom of all ships. However, I proudly believe I did better than Rainbow ever has in that Bloom and Sky actually solve their issue and learn from it, and will not have to have the same argument over and over and over again in the future. That is, usually, the point of making a couple (or any pair of characters really) argue with each other, to give them something to overcome, learn and grow from.
I love the Halestorm road crew to bits. I made up Susan in order to avoid giving the role everyone would hate to anyone real. I really really wanted for Lzzy's fears in regards to people finding out about her powers to be confirmed, because while it tips off a crisis for her it also makes her decide that she wants to be fully in control of when her family learns about it, and the longer she waits the more likely it is that it happens on accident or via a third party.
Both Bloom and Sky are hot headed, stubborn, and feel the weigh of responsibility as the leaders of their team and future rulers of a kingdom. It is, in fact, of utmost importance that they learn to communicate in a honest and effective way if they are to rule together!
Chapter 39 - Xavier
Looking back to it, Lzzy taking refuge in Magix after being discovered can be read as a metaphor for escapism. Kinda digging it, but I'd lie if I said it was intentional. For sure what was intentional was the role switch between her and Icy, which was important to me to show that what Lzzy contributed to the relationship in terms of support and reassurance could be reciprocated by Icy, and to slide in the fact that Lzzy kept pushing down her crush while Icy is so far removed from her own feelings that you can't even say it's denial, she does not even realize she has a crush at all. "Ah yes, I am comparing my experience with the guy I obsessively crushed over to this person I am extremely close with and who genuinely enjoyes my company too. Surely that means nothing at all" - Icy at this stage of the fic.
Chapter 40 - Altaduna
Chapter 41 - Useless
Chapter 42 - Amnesia
Chapter 43 - Apart
Chapter 44 - Human Again
Valtor did not lie when he told Amaryl the potion he wanted her to give the Winx was a diversion. He knew full well that Stella has the ring of Solaria, the only reason the spell was a nuisance for longer than a couple hours is that Stella was a victim of it as well. A lucky shot for him. I do think there's missed potential in the fact that we were told the ring of Solaria and other objects came from the Dragon, and then that just. Was never mentioned again. That would've been a cool Bloomix quest honestly… each girl had to connect to the spark Bloom gifted them by connecting with a Dragon relic or something like that… Not a fan of how there would've coincidentally been relics that matched the girls' powers, but it would've been more interesting than what earning Bloomix actually was.
Donnie is admittedly not the most well-rounded character in the fic, I mostly used him to differentiate Darcy and Stormy's family bonds. The idea of making Stormy, usually regarded as the most impulsive and irresponsible of the trio, be the one who had actually known the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling while their parents worked was an interesting subversion in my mind. It kinda frames her carelessness as a way to catch up on all the fooling around she had to sacrifice to look after her baby brother.
Andrea is also a friend's insert, we keep in touch to this day despite having met literally in the comment section of the fic. Back then I published with a 10-12 chapters of buffer while continuing writing, so she commented on the first chapters and we started talking when I was still around chapter 20 with writing. Then I was kept from writing for months between chapter 35 and 36 because of irl reasons, so Andrea's character had all the time to be planned and inserted. I'm pretty happy with her, she shows alternative educational paths for fairies outside of the schools and also how the Winx's actions reshape the magical achievements of other fairies too, who can now pursue Sirenix without fearing its curse.
On the other hand, Darcy used to be very close to her parents, and had to cut them off when she was turned into a witch by Liliss despite their accepting mindset. Both of them, however, have good memories of family and home, something they long for and want to return to, but are scared to pursue because they are ashamed and afraid of being a disappointment, or being met with anger or fear.
Speaking of Darcy, during this arc she is pushed to her limits. Icy is too pissed off at being a fox to be of any support to her, Stormy is knocked into her own overthinking spiral by the meeting with Donnie, Stella is a deer and pretty over being cursed into looking like an animal, so Darcy is pretty much alone with her thoughts even in the off chance she wanted to share them. She's also pushed into a leadership position, since Vanir is mostly there as a pilot, Aisha is in Alfea, and Tecna is more of an idea person than a leader. Throughout the chapters Darcy often comes up with strategies too, but more often she directs how the team implements them. Faced with the upteenth unforeseen obstacle, she breaks down. Understandably so, since in the past eight hours she had to deal with a curse on her friends, meeting a walking reminder of the home life she wants but denies herself (Donnie), having to chase a mythical artifact and having to do an old man's dirty job to get the artifact. She feels like the universe is constantly moving the goal post and she has to keep chasing after it, and she is tired because she's been doing this for way too long. Walter's offer to share her burden gets to her because finally someone goes out of their way to help her without her needing to ask (which she wouldn't do due to her sense of guilt and the belief that getting near her means deadly danger), and that point Darcy allows herself one of the things she had been denying herself: a normal love story, no strategy to follow.
Altaduna was a challenge. Despite coming from one of my favorite comics (issue n50), the setting and story itself is quite orientalist. The plot is basically a retelling of Aladdin but if the Genie was a little bitch, the setting is a simple stereotypical village and the outfits of locals are… what they are. I am not fully satisfied with the way I expanded the world, though I tried to widen it by using stories I was familiar with, aka some of the adventures of Sinbad (og but mediated by Disney comic adaptations), hence the Roc reference. Yes I remembered there's also a Roc on Domino, no I did not care. I needed the Amers to not make it easy to get to the Flute, otherwise a good chunk of character development was not gonna develop (Darcy, first and foremost), hence the classic quest arc.
Guilt really is a feeling I often use to tip characters off the edge. Lzzy also spends Arejay's amnesiac period feeling terribly guilty about being the way she is, because that's the reason Valtor is targeting them, that's why her brother lost his memories. Her whole life is at stake, as well as that of the boys and of the people around the band wether professionally or emotionally, and knowing this Lzzy spirals into another moment of rejection of her powers, ready to give up on and erase everything regarding magic and Icy if it means everyone else can be safe. It is not something she wants at all, but she is overwhelmed dealing with her old life while trying to figure out the rules of the new one in the midst of an emergency.
Bonus points, for once it's Icy who gets the Bonding Special Alarm Sense without being able to intervene :)
Chapter 45 - Betrayed
Darcy really carried the heist, along with Stormy being the reason she and the others were alerted about the first group's capture. I feel like Stormy is highly underrated when it comes to her strategical abilities and quick thinking. She is the one who took care of making the whole of Cloudtower forget there was an explosion is season 1, meaning two things: she is as competent/book smart as her sisters, and her impulsiveness in battle doesn't make her dumb. Hence why I often gave her moments of insight and ideas that got the situation rolling in the right direction. Darcy, on the other hand, is widely recognized as a good strategist and I did not touch that, but in this particular situation her skillset is exactly what's needed for the mission, from invisibility spells (which Stormy and Icy also know how to cast, but one's in a cell and the other's a fox) to hypnosis and mind-reading to multiplication. A variety of powers without which the heist simply would have failed.
I honestly do not remember how I got the idea of turning my winxsona into a witch. I know where it came from in terms of magic spectrum headcanons (see the whole idea of positive and negative magic not being a birth thing but a matter of both attitude and study, with neutral being the default state of beginners and bipolar being the state of those who use both energies alternatively like Mirta and, well, my winxsona). I do not know when I decided to go through with it for my character. However, looking at what was going on in real life at the time I can get an idea. Baseline I was no longer accommodating to my own detriment and people did not like that.
Faragonda be like "of course trouble would still follow the Winx and Trix even if they're on the same side now".
Well that’s not the note I meant to end on, but oh well. I don't wanna break up the next arc, so that’s how it is.
Some of you had asked questions back when I first mentioned making a post like this. They will be answered in the next part, but everyone is welcome to add more! I'm always happy to answer! However, this one time I'm asking you to keep it on topic about the story, writing craft, and not unrelated or generic character headcanons. My ask box is always there for that 💙
Link for next part here on the bottom too, I'm not making you scroll all the way up again
This is kinda related to the last ask about witches I think. I think CT probably accepts more students just based on the numbers we see especially compared to Alfea. Love the detail about it being alive although the detail about the guardians (in s3) is just confusing since... wouldn’t we have seen them in s1 and s2???
I love Griffin. She’s very cool, fiercely protective of her students, and a badass lady. She has a cool backstory as a former ally of Valtor’s but choosing to join the Company of Light which just makes her the coolest out of the three headmasters imo. Not sure what else to say but she’s protective and willing to fight alongside her students in a way Faragonda and Saladin aren’t (though Saladin seems a lot older so I don’t judge too harshly.)
Ngl as much as she looks cool in her nymph form, the hair’s ugly. You can really see how bad of a style it is in the reboot as well. Yeah that’s like the only thing they brought back from the og series 100%.
Anyways for this redesign I looked up nymphs in mythology who have really flowey garments and flowers. But since she’s not nature based I took inspiration from the Phoenix. Plus it makes sense since it’s whole thing is dying then coming back, like how Daphne died then cane back as a nymph ghost (and then actually came back if you count season 5. Maybe I can give it a pass then if we use that logic) For her hair I was going to have it down but it looks better when it’s floaty. I gave her the bangs she has in season 6 and a crown shaped braid since it looks neat.
Trix 18 years after season 8 according to the plot of our role-playing game with @edenkain ✨
I know that they are a bit crooked and in many ways they didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted, but... It is what it is. I've forgotten how to draw on anything other than paper, haha...
