Remaking Characters
What do Aisha and Nex have in common with the candy that kids are gonna eat tomorrow?
No, this isn’t a joke about how sweet the couple is. ?
Candies are products.
So are cartoon characters.
It might be weird to think of characters as products, especially if they’re humanoids. (Aisha is a fairy, but what is Nex? He’s not from Earth, so he can’t be human, right? Oh, forget it.) Ultimately, all the Winx Club characters started off the same way as candy. Someone had an idea, made it real, then presented it to the public.
Iginio Straffi thought up the Winx, his studio Rainbow made a show about them (and a bunch of other characters), then they aired it on TV hoping someone would watch it.
If characters are made, can’t they be remade? Other products get remade all the time. Just like with candy, you can always change the look or the “recipe” (i.e., the characters’ traits). Maybe one “flavor” didn’t catch on, but with some tweaks, it could become a hit.
My hope is Rainbow will recognize Aisha and Nex’s worth, remake them, and reboot their love story. The Netflix live-action show could be a place for it, but they’d face the same obstacles holding them down in the cartoon: the Winx fandom’s negative opinions (mainly of Nex) and attachment to Aisha’s other love interests (mainly Nabu). I bet the fandom hopes Nex won’t even exist in this version.
A New Story
I think the best solution is to put Aisha and Nex in a new story that has nothing to do with Winx Club. That might sound ridiculous, but it happens all the time. Heck, it’s already happened to other Winx Club characters.
Remember PopPixie? It was a separate show (and franchise) all about the Pixies. The Winx weren’t even in it. Rainbow changed the lore of the Tree of Life, gave the Pixies transformations like the Winx have, redesigned and renamed Pixie Village, and even turned Digit and Livy into boys (Winx Club didn’t have male Pixies).
Here’s the reality check, though: the Pixies got their own show because they were popular. According to Iginio Straffi, they weren’t even supposed to be recurring characters in Winx Club. Season two was gonna be their only appearance. But kids loved them, so that’s why the winged troublemakers were still around even in season seven. (I can’t find the source for this fact, but it’s something from an interview I read several years ago.)
As for Aisha and Nex, they’re not popular. Aisha has always been one of the least popular Winx, and most of the fandom hates Nex. Why would you make a separate story about a pair of characters that hardly anyone likes?
It’s a fair point, but I think these two have some things going for them that could make them popular. They just need a new setting. People who don’t watch Winx Club wouldn’t have any of the biases created by that story. I’ve told people outside the Winx fandom about Aisha and Nex, and they’ve been able to see the couple’s potential. That’s a sign they could win over a different audience.
Bottom line: Rainbow needs to remake Aisha and Nex. They may be a product combination that’s not catching in Winx Club, but that doesn’t mean they’re doomed forever. I have some ideas, but I’m not sure if I wanna share them. I’ll think about it.
(Wait, didn’t this start off about candy? Um…enjoy your Halloween, everybody.)
A remake sounds great….or another spin-off. I’d like to do one but I would need the rights to Winx Club from Rainbow and it’s probably gonna cost me A LOT of money, a seven figure deal at the very least, and I’m not rich.
You know, it doesn’t even have to be a long cartoon show. A book series about them would work too, or a live-action movie, a web series, an animated mini-series (8 episodes with a run time of 60 minutes, maybe?). I too have so many ideas for a lot of Winx characters and not just the main ones, but the recurring, lesser important ones as well (Andy, Andy’s band mates, Mitzi, the corporate dudes trying to burn down Vanessa’s flower shop in season 1, Mitzi’s little sister, Mitzi’s two friends from season 4…).
I wish Rainbow would be open to work with their fans. They don’t even have Twitter, so HOW can we reach out to them?! They’re so isolated from the fans, it’s almost hurting my heart. I know that there has to be some sort of distance to the fanbase but too much distance isn’t that great either. And there are LOTS of Italian Twitter users, so the language barrier is no excuse.
But perhaps Iginio’s age has got to do with it also. He is not a young adult any more and that might be a reason why he stays off of social media (although I have seen people in their 70’s and 80’s posting stuff online). Or he just dislikes it, which I can understand.