Needed more of this duo tbh

literally me bitch and blue back in 2020/21 (the golden age)

the holy trinity

i kinda love the detail of how in the very early episodes of winx s1, the winx don't entirely realise just how sinister the trix are. they obviously feel disdain/rivalry with them and think they are particularly nasty witches, but to them it still appears to be kind of line with fairy/witch feuds that they've heard about before between students from alfea and cloud tower. take for example musa thinking she can just say "not today" to icy after icy and stormy confronts her for spying on riven and darcy, as well as the slap. for the winx it really starts as a teenage mean girl drama thing. the trix on the other hand are literally planning out war crimes.

Small update for that one young Griffin post I did a while ago. Camera quality was bad then so I'm posting a better one.

here u go blicy nation, i present to you: icy and her silly gf, bloom

darcy is a light sleeper but she could sleep anywhere, the insomnia makes it very easy

A bit old Stormy redesign

May or may not be actually writing the third chapter for my driven fic if anyone cares

Im musa sun stormy rising and lucy moon

What are your Winx Club big three? Like astrology. (I saw it on TikTok lol)

I think I'm too offline to understand this question.

dont forget to follow me on Instagram >:( https://www.instagram.com/azi_makes_art/

mirta thoughts

[image description: sketches of Mirta from Winx club. She is dressed in autumnal colors in a cozy grunge sort of outfit, with stompy boots and a denim jacket over layers of striped knits. Her hair is cropped short except for two long rat tails she keeps braided over her shoulders. End description.]

Were Darcy and Stella set up to be narrative foils?

A lot of people showed an interest in my “hot take” (although it really isnt a hot take lol) post about Darcy and Stella being supposed narrative foils and asked me to elaborate. And in full disclosure..,, The more I think about this take the more stupid it sounds but then again, the dumber the theory, the more I like it. And I think this one is pretty cool, even if it might be my imagination and my tendency to overanalyze details that weren’t actually meant to mean anything all. But first things first. I’ve received two questions about what narrative foils are, so here’s a short description that I copied from wikipedia; a foil is a character who contrasts with another character […] in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities [of each other]. And this is exactly what I think Stella and Darcy were meant to do; to contrast each other while also highlighting that witches and fairies really aren’t all that different. 

Now, why do I think they were meant to be narrative foils? Well, to begin with, the writers of Winx really seem to enjoy making their heroes and villains foils. Bloom is a narrative foil to both Icy and Valtor, and one could argue that Faragonda and Griffin are as well. With Stella and Darcy, the first thing to look at is what might be the most obvious part of this relationship; the powers. The relationship between their respective powers parallels the relationship between Blooms and Icy’s fire/ice powers. Light and dark, clarity and deceit. Their powers are two sides of the same coin. Light powers have commonly been associated in almost all cultures with truth, enlightenment and protection, while dark powers are connected with chaos, mental disarray and manipulation, and yet one can not exist without the other. Just take a look at some traditional symbols in many cultures, yin and yang, the celebration of midsummer and the equinox as the times where light and dark are equal. They always contrast each other, it’s their one inherent quality.

Further, Stella and Darcy have personalities that share strong similarities while simultaneously being complete opposites - once again highlighting the yin/yang kind of relationship, where there’s always bound to be a similarity between light and dark. Stella is impulsive and cheerful, loud and expressive. Darcy is all about control, and she’s very emotionally restrictive. But they share some interesting similarities. They both operate as second in command in their respective groups. They’re the respective “hot girl”-stereotype as well, but they live this out in very different ways. Both of them are obviously very pretty and know that their looks can gain them attention and get their will through. Stella expresses at several points that she often feels that people struggle to see past her appearance and that she often feels people only see her as pretty. Darcy also uses her beauty to have people do her bidding, the most obvious example is the Riven ordeal in season one. They’re also both the most fashion-conscious within their respective groups.

Now, let’s talk about character design. Darcy and Stella have the same eye color. And it’s an uncommon eye color, which has led many people in the fandom to speculate if Darcy might be Solarian. Straffi actually put a lot of love and effort into character designs, enough effort to hire actual high fashion designers to help draw the outfits of the show. And so, I’d like to think that not much was left to just pure coincidence. Additionally, it’s an interesting detail to note that Darcy’s secondary color is gold, and Stella is often presented with some purple in her transformations. Here, have these shitty side by side comparisons I made to show my point (and thanks to @bitchatcloudtower for helping me notice this!);

I think that the creators of the show were trying to make a point to highlight these narrative similarities in season one, but then gave up and settled with having Bloom/Icy as the main narrative foil relationship. The Stella/Darcy one is only shown a few times in later seasons but is a bit more prominent early on in the show. In the episode “Date with disaster.” Darcy disguises herself as Stella in order to steal her ring. They chose to specifically send Darcy to steal the ring, despite the trix being fully capable of using illusion powers to send anyone (we see them turn Knut into a human, and Stormy can change her appearance in season two). Arguably, Icy would have been a better actress and had more success at finding the ring, sending her would have made more sense. I think that sending Darcy was a deliberate choice made by the creators to highlight that they were setting Stella and Darcy up as narrative foils, similarly to how they were setting Bloom and Icy up. But like many early subplots in winx, it was buried and forgotten about, or in this case just never explored that much more. Intentional or not, I think it’s an interesting thought.

quick riven expressions

Icy was 22 when she fell in love with Tritannus but she acts like I did whenever I had a crush in 8th grade

Darcy slaying like a QUEEN