“Aisha’s Relationships as Stages of Life” Follow-Up #1: Downland Diplomacy

In my post “Aisha’s Relationships as Stages of Life”, I mentioned how the Winx fandom seems to think Aisha needs to be tamed. She’s a wild child with no gentleness or tact. Thus, she needs a calm, mild-mannered boyfriend to “balance her out” and soften her up.

Why does the fandom think this? I think they’ve forgotten (or ignored) Aisha’s backstory and the implications of it. She’s a princess, so her parents pressured her to become a quiet, delicate “mistress of etiquette”. But that’s not what she wanted for herself. Now that she’s free from their chains, she’s getting to express a side of herself (her “rough-and-tumble” side) that she had to suppress when she was a child.

Does that mean Aisha rejected her princess training? No! She can’t erase such a huge part of who she is, and she doesn’t even want to. As she said in Winx season three, she’s always been proud to be the princess of Andros.

And she’s good at it! Of the three royal Winx — Aisha, Stella, and Bloom — Aisha arguably has the best manners and the strongest sense of responsibility for her kingdom. She takes her role seriously, but she also wants the freedom to be herself.

When she’s with her friends and Nex, she can act like a normal girl. But in a situation that calls for tact and diplomacy, she switches on princess mode. The “Stages of Life” post had three examples of scenes like this, but I recently found another one I had forgotten about.

In “Darkar’s Prisoner” (Winx season 2, episode 24), Aisha, Sky, and Brandon went to Downland to ask Princess Amentia for help in the battle against Darkar. You remember how temperamental Amentia was, right? In order to meet with her, the Specialists had to follow a dress code: wear feathers from a Downland bird. Then when they arrived, she threatened to kicked them out because the feathers looked ugly on them. ?

While the prince and his assistant struggled to hold their tempers, Aisha stepped up and won Amentia over by playing along with her whims and laying out the situation clearly. Watch the scene below.

Here’s a bonus example. Amentia agreed to help the Winx and the Specialists defeat Darkar, but only if Sky and Brandon could beat her in a duel. Aisha watched from the sidelines…with a cup of tea:

I bet she’s been to a lot of tea parties in her lifetime.

Anyway, Aisha knows how to be civilized and gentle. She doesn’t need her boyfriend or anyone else to tame her.