Aisha and Roy, The NoTP — Pt. IV: 3 Problems With Roy as a Character

I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since my last “Aisha/Roy NoTP” post. Time to wrap up this series…with a couple more posts. At least. ? Read Part I, Part II, and Part III if you haven’t already.

Let’s cut to the chase. Roy was a poorly-written character, not just as a love interest but as an individual, too. Here are three problems with him.

1. Roy’s Job

So Roy worked for Aisha’s father, huh? I don’t buy it.

Why not? Let’s compare him to the other Specialist who joined the group after season one: Helia.

When Roy brought the Odysea Explorer to the Winx in “The Power of Harmonix” (Winx season 5, episode 6), he also introduced himself to Aisha:

Princess Aisha, your father sent me. I’m Roy…

Hold your seahorses. Doesn’t that seem strange? If Roy worked for her father, why didn’t she know him already?

As Bloom said in “The Light of Gorgol” (Winx season 8, episode 9), Aisha knows Andros better than anyone. Sure, she doesn’t know everyone who lives there, but she knows the who’s who of the realm: her family, her servants, the mermaid royal family and their servants, and even the wizard who built the Omega Portal. She even knew the Pixies! They’re not from Andros, but her family supposedly visited them every year, so there’s the connection.

You’re telling me someone that well-informed, who is also the princess, didn’t know her father’s assistant? A guy who seemed to be the only Specialist in the royal court? That’s fishy.

When Helia debuted in Winx season two, the other Specialists already knew all about him. They told the Winx his name, his personality, a rumor about him (he dropped out of Redfountain), and his relationship to Saladin. Not only did that tell us everything we needed to know about Helia, but it also helped anchor him to Redfountain. He had a reputation there, and while being Saladin’s nephew has added nothing to his character (at least in the show), we believed it because of their ages.

Rainbow needed a foundation like that for Roy, too. Why? Because:

• They introduced him as part of Aisha’s inner circle, so we needed to know their relationship.
• We hadn’t seen a Specialist from Andros before (not that it wasn’t possible).
• The Winx went to Andros in season three, but we didn’t see Roy with the king then. So where was he?

The fastest way to validate Roy’s job was to have Aisha, the princess, recognize him from the royal court. But she didn’t. Worse, he didn’t seem to know her, either. When she snapped at him for trying to escort the Winx on their Sirenix mission, he was surprised. You’d think a guy who worked for the king would know the princess’s personality!

“Well, maybe Roy was new,” you say.

Sure, that’s possible, but how did a newbie get so high in the pecking order? He didn’t seem to have a boss; instead, the king himself was his boss. And as I’ll talk about in the next section, Roy had a lot of responsibilities, too.

His status implied he either A) had worked for the royal court for a while and built a lot of trust, or B) had skills that launched him to a top position. But Rainbow didn’t justify either of those assumptions.

What Was His Job?

I keep calling Roy King Teredor’s assistant, but I’m not sure what his job was. He did a little of everything in season five. First, he chauffeured the Winx in the Odysea Explorer, but after a couple episodes, they started driving it themselves. (In the comics, he never drove it for them.)

Then in “The Gem of Empathy” (Winx season 5, episode 9), he showed up in Zenith before the Winx’s mission because he was “assigned to patrol Zenith’s waters”. (How convenient.) So was his job protecting the oceans? I guess that’s believable…except for one thing: he sucked at fighting.

Moments like this weren’t rare. Roy got his butt handed to him a lot, in both seasons he was in. Why would King Teredor ask a weakling like him to guard another planet’s ocean? Or be his bodyguard at the Sovereigns’ Council?

Nothing about Roy justified the confidence the royal court seemed to have in him. And no, being a “nice guy” isn’t enough. You need more than “niceness” to protect kingdoms and oceans, but even his fans seem to realize being “nice” is all he had going for him. That’s all they ever talk about. (More about this in a future post.)

I think we know what his actual job was: love interest. That’s it. The “king’s assistant” part was a flimsy excuse to put him near Aisha.

Rainbow didn’t hide it, either. For example, remember the party in “Secret of the Ruby Reef” (Winx season 5, episode 8)? It was for Alfea and Redfountain students, right? So why was Roy there? Yes, he was a Specialist, but as far as we know, he wasn’t attending Redfountain yet.

Did someone invite him? It must not have been Aisha, based on how he acted in that scene.

By the way, can we talk about his first Specialist uniform? I’ll admit it: it looked cool, at least compared to the eyesores the Specialists used to wear. (Yes, I didn’t like their original uniforms. Screw nostalgia.)

But we never saw anyone else wearing it, even though it was supposedly a Specialist uniform. (He had the same cape, too.) No one at Redfountain wore it, so it must not have come from there. We can only guess he got it as part of his job. It’s a wetsuit, after all. Makes sense for an ocean realm.

But in Winx season six, he traded it for Sky and the gang’s new uniform. That’s another sign Roy’s assistant job didn’t matter: he seemed to quit the next season! Otherwise, when would he have had time to run around with a bunch of Specialists in Magix?

Maybe Roy never really joined the squad. After all, his gem color didn’t fit in with theirs. ?

Also, at least Brandon, Future King Sky’s assistant, is still technically doing his job: protecting Sky. I bet you forgot that being a king’s assistant was Brandon’s shtick first, four seasons before Roy showed up. So Rainbow didn’t even give Roy a unique job!

Bottom line: his job made no sense — or at least Rainbow didn’t do enough to validate it. Why did he need a prior connection to Aisha, anyway? Also, why for so long did her love interests have to be from Andros? Jordan from the comics wasn’t (as for as we know), but her other comics-only love interest, Silvan, was from Andros and had a prior connection to her (childhood friends)! ?

What gives, Rainbow? You didn’t limit the other Winx’s options like that!

Anyway, I think the writers slapped Roy together at the last minute and didn’t think through the details. Not even his name. Speaking of which…

2. Roy’s Name

Here’s a common tip for naming characters: don’t give two main characters the same first initial. As author Janice Hardy wrote in her blog Fiction University:

Main characters with the same first initial can make it hard to remember who is who. Ashley and Alice could confuse readers if they think of the character as “the girl with the A-name”. (And they do this more than you’d think.)

“The Name Game: Do All Your Character Names Sound the Same?”

“The girl with the A-name”? That’s right. Even the first letter of a character’s name becomes a part of their identity.

If I asked you to name a Winx character whose name starts with “M”, who would you think of first? Probably Musa — not Mike, Mitzi, Mandragora, Mark, Mirta, Mavilla, or Miele. Musa is one of the Winx, so she’s the most important and memorable “M” character.

How about “V”? Probably Valtor, even though Vanessa was the first character we met whose name starts with “V”. But Valtor played a bigger role in the show, and even his mark looked like a “V”!

Why do we associate first letters with specific characters? To quote NY Book Editors’ blog post “How to Choose Character Names”:

Readers don’t actually read the entire [name]. They’ll stop at L, for example, understanding it to be Laurie. But, if you introduce a new character, Lauren, now the reader must read the entire word and then take time to remember the differences between the two characters.

“How to Choose Character Names”

Wait — they’re talking about books. Does this apply to TV and movies, too? Yes.

For example, in the Game of Thrones series, George R. R. Martin gave some of his characters the same or similar names because he didn’t think it mattered. But in the HBO adaptation, the writers changed some of the names so the audience (and probably the actors, too) wouldn’t get confused. (This Wiki page has a list of name changes.)

In most cases, though, they kept the same first initials. It can’t be helped, since the stories were already written. But if you’re working with new material, you can prevent the confusion.

What confusion? Imagine a show with four characters: Debbie, Daryl, Donté, and Delilah. Now imagine that in the first two seasons, Donté dates Debbie, Debbie dumps Donté and dates Daryl, then Donté dates Delilah.

Did you follow that? Maybe. Was it annoying? Yes. And I hated writing it.

The Name That Looks The Same

As you know, Winx Club broke the first initial “rule” long before Roy showed up. But at least we can physically tell the characters apart, right? For example, no one’s gonna confuse Brandon with Bloom or Sky with Stella (even though they’re both blond). Plus, aside from first letters, those names aren’t similar at all.

But we can’t excuse Roy as easily. He was the worst case.

First, we have Riven, the original “R” Specialist. He and Roy shared the screen in Winx seasons five and six, and they would have again in season eight if Aisha had chosen Roy. But except for similar updoes (and possessiveness of women), Roy and Riven had little in common, and their names looked different enough.

But there’s another major “R” character who came before Roy and whose name is too similar to overlook:

Roxy.

There’s no saving this one. Roy and Roxy may be as different as popcorn and pop music, but their names are just one letter apart! Before season five, if you said “Roy”, people would have thought it was a typo!

These two didn’t share the screen often, but it happened at least once. In “The Shark’s Eye” (Winx season 5, episode 23), she stood with the Specialists at Stella’s fashion show. And since Roxy played a bigger role in Winx season seven, she and Roy would have been together more often if Aisha had chosen him.

I feel sorry for the storyboarders. Not only were Roy and Roxy both in the fashion show scene, but Riven was there, too. All three “R” characters at once, and two of them have nearly-identical names. Yikes. (Fun fact: I accidentally wrote “Roy and Roy” in one draft of this paragraph.)

Worse, even spelling both their names out doesn’t help. The first two letters are the same, and X’s and Y’s look alike!

Bottom line: Rainbow shouldn’t have named a new character Roy when they’d just introduced a popular character named Roxy the season before. It also brought the number of main characters whose names started with “R” to three, which was more than any other letter.

3. Roy’s Priorities

Riddle me this, Aisha/Roy fans. If he was so respectful and gentlemanly, what made him think it was okay to make a pass at his boss’s daughter? He didn’t think that might be inappropriate?

We’re not talking about the daughter of a retail chain CEO. This is the princess. Marrying her comes with perks: a crown, a castle, servants, lots of money, and a kingdom full of subjects. Quite the promotion opportunity, don’t you think?

Also, why would a “humble” guy like him think he was worthy to date the princess? Ironically, that’s one way Nex’s personality justifies his love story with her. A bold guy like him might not think a princess is out of his league. Heck, he probably didn’t know Aisha was royalty!

But Roy did, so he had no excuse. Of all her love interests, he should have been the most hesitant to get close to her. I don’t mean acting shy around her at a party; I mean staying professional with her as long as possible.

But screw that! He went for it right away and even had the nerve to call himself her “friend” a couple weeks after they met. Don’t forget that part: Roy courted Aisha in Winx season five for a couple weeks at most. (See Part II.) So he wasted no time going from, “Pleased to meet you, Your Highness” to “Hmmm…can I tap that?”

The worst part is we don’t even know why. Why was he attracted to her in the first place?

I won’t stop asking this because it’s essential to a well-written relationship — and a real-life one! Yet I’ve never seen anyone in the Winx fandom, not even Aisha/Roy fans, try to identify what he liked about her. What were his feelings? Why did he wanna be her boyfriend?

If we don’t know the answers, why did Aisha and Roy need to be a couple? Maybe friendship was enough because they had nothing deeper to connect them or anything missing to add to each other’s lives.

Bottom line: Rainbow rushed Aisha and Roy through their master/servant phase without explaining how or why that dynamic changed between them. That’s on top of speeding up her grieving process and shoving her back onto the dating market less than a year after Nabu’s death. Those factors — working for her family and her still mourning Nabu — should have been major obstacles for Roy, but Rainbow ignored them and forced him and Aisha together. Yet we don’t even know why he liked her.

What was the point of this pairing?

TL;DR

• Rainbow told us Roy was Aisha’s father’s assistant, but they didn’t validate it in the story. We didn’t know how (or why) Roy reached that status or why we never saw him in the royal court before season five (besides the obvious reason). In the end, his job felt like a thin excuse to put him near Aisha just so he could be a love interest.
• Rainbow committed at least two character naming sins by calling him “Roy”. One, he had the same first initial as two major characters who came before him: Riven and Roxy. Two, his name was only one letter apart from Roxy’s.
• Because of his job, Roy should have been the most hesitant of all Aisha’s love interests to get close to her. She’s his boss’s daughter and the future queen! Isn’t that unprofessional? Yet he went after her within a week or two of meeting her.

That’s it for this post. Next time, I’ll revisit the “Roy was nice” argument and talk about another implication of it.