Published: March 4th 2023, 10:00:20 pm
It’s no secret that I am a Roxy stan. When she was first introduced back in season 4, I remember taking a quick liking to her, and I was so excited to see the new dynamic she’d bring to the Winx Club after it’d gotten so comfortable with six members. Especially given she was a protege, it would shake things up in a much different way from when Aisha joined the group in season 2.
Unfortunately, Rainbow seemed to do everything they could to get Roxy out of the picture. In order to make the Winx appear 16 again and stay locked away in class at Alfea forever, they needed to remove their mentorship of the young Roxy, to the point she appears older than them in season 6. As such, they kept Roxy from shining, keeping the Winx Club at a solid 6 members, and banishing Roxy to the background.
Though this aggravated most viewers, myself included, Rainbow did try to appease fans by giving Roxy a handful of scenes in season 6, and making her a supporting character in season 7. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly enough. And now, it seems Roxy’s existence has been completely erased. She isn’t in season 8 at all, and with season 9 being yet another soft reboot, it looks like Rainbow is keen to forget Roxy ever existed.
So, what happened. How did we go from Seven being the perfect number to this? Why did people love Roxy to begin with, and what could they have done differently?
Winx was unique compared to other animated series, allowing its characters to actually grow up alongside its audience. They started the series as 16-year-olds, and then became adults who graduated from Alfea. Season 4, then, is the first season where the Winx are graduated adults. In many ways, it feels more juvenile than the first three seasons, but I at least respect its concept of having the girls grow up to deal with more adult problems on Earth. For full coverage of that, check out my video on how Season 4 didn’t age very well.
Still, one of the highlights of the season was the Winx’s new pupil: Roxy, the Fairy of Animals, and the last fairy on Earth. The Winx’s mission in season 4 is to stop the Wizards of the Black Circle, fairy hunters who’d stolen the wings and magic of all fairies on Earth, and are the reason why Earth is so… terrible. In addition to making humans believe in magic, their goal was also to protect Roxy, as once the Black Circle captured her, Earth would’ve been doomed. Well, more doomed than usual.
Roxy doesn’t have many friends, instead preferring the company of animals, including her dog Artu. There are close encounters between the Winx and Roxy in the first few episodes, namely when Stella shoos Roxy away before the Love & Pet shot opens, and when Roxy makes a snide comment on Stella’s vanity when the girls go to the Frutti Music Bar, ordering endless drinks while she bartends.
Roxy’s already having less-than-stellar impressions of the Winx, and it becomes mutual when Tecna discovers someone is breaking Love & Pet’s rule of one pet per person. See, the pet shop’s purpose - aside from introducing toyetic elements for young girls - is to introduce magic into the lives of Gardenia’s citizens through the fairy pets. Roxy, as an animal lover, isn’t a fan of this one-pet rule, and as such, finds a way around this to get a whole shed full of fairy pets to befriend.
The Winx think it might be someone up to no good, perhaps trying to sell off the pets secondhand. Instead, they find an animal lover who’s quite rebellious, doing whatever she wants. And when they realize she has magic, Roxy calls them all nutjobs for saying she’s a fairy. While Bloom was excited at the idea of being a real fairy, having dreamed about it since childhood and loving fairy tale books into her teenage years, Roxy… could not care less.
Admittedly, it’s more of a headcanon of my own, but I really like this contrast between Bloom and Roxy. Roxy, in my mind, hates magic. She prefers a more grounded, mundane life in Gardenia with her father and pets, and so being thrust into this magical quest of saving the world is… annoying, to say the very least. She’s even hostile at the idea of being carted off to the far-off Alfea for a minimum of three years.
And even beyond this distaste of magic, Roxy wants to make her own choices and live her own life. Though she must accept the reality of her being a fairy, and her world counting on her, she still has to choose to embrace being a fairy. She’s not going to passively go along with this. If it’s not a future she wants, she’s not gonna tolerate it.
She’s quite similar to many of the Winx. She has superficial connections to Bloom through being a lost princess who grew up on Earth, which I have… mixed thoughts on. But besides that, she definitely has Bloom’s feistiness, Stella’s sassiness and wit, Flora’s love for the natural world, Musa’s aloofness and occasional snarkiness, and Aisha’s rebelliousness. As for Tecna… uh, she has her hair? Which believe me, we will get to.
So, Roxy is a saving grace of season 4. But what changed going into season 5?
Season 5 has a solid-enough start, but all the red flags are there, especially for Roxy. When there’s a convenient oil spill off the coast, Roxy says she wants to help the Winx, but Bloom tells her to watch the people on the beach. It prevents Roxy from transforming and feeling like an active part of the group. She isn’t even allowed to help like the specialists. I don’t know, not like it would help to ask all the sea life around the spill to get out of the way, or possibly escort any of the fallen workers to safety. Let her be Aquaman, dammit.
The same goes for when Tritannus and the Trix attack the beach. Roxy doesn’t even try to help. She doesn’t transform, instead cowering in the background with the civilians. The fact they don’t even try to excuse this is telling, as Roxy has already been exiled from significance.
Her banishment officially begins when the Winx return to Alfea. Roxy is excited to begin classes (unlike her attitude in season 4), the Winx say she’s gonna do fine… and that’s it. Roxy doesn’t speak for the rest of the season, only being seen along with the background students at Alfea for the rest of eternity. She gets no subplots of her own, we don’t track her progress over the years like the Winx’s three years at Alfea. Roxy gets… nothing.
She gets a bit more to do in season 6… but not much. When the Trix conquer Cloudtower for the seventeenth time, they turn Headmistress Griffin into a crow, because why not? Griffin escapes, and the Winx catch her, giving her to Roxy to care for her. It’s incredibly contrived, both to deliver the news of the Trix’s plans, and to get Roxy arbitrarily involved. It adds nothing to Roxy’s character, nor to the story. It’s just… there. For like two scenes. Oh, and I guess Roxy plays a guitar at the Music Cafe, so… thanks, I hate it.
Season 7 is arguably the most insulting, which is ironic given she gets more here than she did in seasons 5 and 6 combined. Given it’s a season all about animal rescue, and the main villain Kalshara is building an army of fairy animals, you’d think the Fairy of Animals would play a pivotal role in the plot. But she does not. In the first episode, she escorts the Winx through the random Alfea Natural Park - the latest addition to the Alfea Mall - then doesn’t help fight the bird when it kidnaps the digmole. She just lets the Winx get beaten up, I assume to prove how profoundly useless Bloomix is.
Roxy does join the Winx on their first mission into the past… yes, there’s time travel in season 7, and no, they do nothing interesting with it. She transforms in a lazily-animated recreation of her original transformation, and is relatively more useful than any of the other Winx. But unfortunately for her - or maybe fortunately, given how ugly the new form is - Roxy doesn’t gain Butterflix when the Winx defeat the stone giant, despite the fact Roxy told them to look to the digmoles for how to stop it.
Yep. A transformation all about nature and magical animals, and Roxy doesn’t get it. Delightful. Oh but don’t worry, it gets worse. Because in the very next episode, Roxy gets her Stone of Memories stolen by Brafilius, a buffoon and one of the most irritating, terribly written villains of the franchise. Wonderful. This means she can’t time travel anymore, and she’s officially worthless to the narrative. The most she does from here is… have plot birds who yell when a new plot cul de sac appears. Yay.
It’s also made worse given Roxy’s stone got stolen because she wanted to do things her own way, and no one was listening to her, especially Bloom. She was trying to prove herself, and was punished for it by the narrative. She then doesn’t get a chance to redeem herself. The Winx aren’t punished for pushing Roxy to this point, and they don’t develop a newfound respect for her. It just feels like the show wanted to cement to viewers: “No, Roxy doesn’t matter, she will never matter. Fuck you.”
And then… she’s gone. Completely erased. She’s not in season 8, and I very much doubt she’ll be in season 9. Weirdly she’s a supporting character in the first season of World of Winx, who… doesn’t transform? Okay then. Why even have her then? But why? Why do all of this to a fan favorite character? The reason is simple: Roxy is an obstacle.
We’ve talked a lot about how Rainbow’s goal was to keep the Winx eternally young for easy plot generation. By maintaining this status quo, they could theoretically make as many Alfea plots for them as they want. No need for good writing, and all the money you could hope for… ah how capitalism and the profit motive ruin art.
But to do this, they needed to keep the numbers of the Winx Club low to make for easier plots. And they also needed to remove any indicators of the Winx growing older - including their pupil. By making Roxy nothing but a background character with only a superficial relationship with the Winx, they manage to maintain the illusion of the Winx being 16 again, while paying lip service to Roxy fans.
As I’ve mentioned, season 4… is a bit of a mess, but Roxy is one of its best elements. However, her role isn’t perfect. I’m not a fan of the whole “secret princess” plot, especially because her being the daughter of Morgana, Queen of the Earth Fairies, introduces many plot holes about the timeline of events, and how the Black Circle didn’t go, “Hey, maybe the fairy queen’s daughter is also a fairy?” Even though they did have the sense to erase the memory of Morgana from Roxy and her father’s minds. Real thorough, Ogron.
Along with that, Roxy’s powers could’ve used some work. While Flora is a Fairy of Nature, her powers mostly have to do with flowers and plants, and occasionally earth. It’s a decent distinction from Roxy’s animal powers, but to drive the point home, giving her more creative powers featuring the abilities and traits of animals would’ve helped. It would’ve especially been welcome given it was also a season of generic energy beams.
And then her design. She’s generally presumed to be a white girl, given fairy skin and ambiguous hair colors and phenotypes tend to make people go, “Oh, white’s prob the default here.” But does the club need another white girl? We’ve already got Bloom and Tecna, and if you wanna argue Stella is a white Latina - which I do actually like for her - Stella would still be white-passing. I think the club could use a little bit more diversity here.
A lot of people were curious about my redesign of Roxy for the rewrite, where I made her brown-skinned. For why this isn’t that big of a deal, I recommend Veridis Joe’s video about blackwashing, but to summarize, it’s about allowing for more representation of underrepresented groups, and it’s not at all the same as whitewashing, which steals already rare representation away from marginalized groups.
Specifically, I made Roxy South Asian, given Musa is East Asian. Roxy is a mix of Indian and Malay, and I would likely adjust the stories of her parents, as well as little design elements of her family, to show her heritage, as well as cast an actress of that background to voice Roxy. Representation matters, period. Plus, it would mean that Flora and Aisha wouldn’t have to be the only dark-skinned girls of the bunch.
On top of that, because Roxy has pink hair, it makes a lot people confuse her for Tecna, especially casual fans. I remember a lot of people thought she was Tecna’s sister when she was first introduced. It’s just bizarre to have two white girls with pink hair. By having Roxy be dark skinned, and adjusting the shade of pink in her hair, it allows her to remain visually distinct. I tend to give her more strawberry and red shades of pink to complement the greens in her designs.
And speaking of her greens, while I do like green as her main color, it does cause a bit of conflict between her and Aisha. Aisha is a bit of an odd case, since her main color tends to oscillate between blue and green depending on the form. Her Magic Winx is green, her Believix is blue, and even her Enchantix switched from blue to green three quarters of the way through season 3.
To keep things consistent, and to keep Bloom’s blue and Roxy’s green, it’d prob help to have Aisha’s palette be more of a turquoise-y color. Play up the ocean vibe. Roxy, meanwhile, could have more earthy, forest-y greens, as well as some yellow accents in her color palette to differentiate from the pink accents in Aisha’s. Originally, Roxy’s color seemed like it would’ve been indigo, but… thank god they didn’t go that route. She already looks too much like Tecna, we don’t need her stealing purple too.
And design aside, the show has always had little nuggets of queer representation. Mirta’s coding as a witch who becomes a fairy really hits home for trans viewers, and she and Lucy’s friendship is giving bitter lesbian exes who eventually make up. And we all know Palladium and Avalon are an item. The show has always been a haven for queer viewers, and I think having some queer members of the Winx Club themselves would help with that, including Roxy.
Look, she just gives this confident sapphic energy. She’s a lesbian queen, end of story, and I would love her to have a girlfriend. I know she has a boyfriend in the comics, named Manuel, but… he looks like discount Sky. I refuse to accept this on the basis that it’s trash. Roxy deserves better, and so do you, audience. Sapphic Roxy for life.
And most importantly, I really wish they had Roxy build relationships with all of the Winx. This would’ve gone nicely with a more character-driven focus like season 2, with Roxy learning from each of the Winx individually, and in turn, them learning from her. Instead, canon makes it seem like only Bloom cares about Roxy, and everyone else simply tolerates her existence.
I try to do this a bit more in my rewrites, as well as have roxy have her own life outside the club. In the season 5 rewrite, though she does try to be involved with the Winx, she still has classes at Alfea to worry about, along with conflicts with her dorm mates - one being Princess Krystal - and her little friendship with Knut the Janitor.
She doesn’t really commit to being a member of the club until they lose their powers in the midseason finale. Given Earth fairies retain their magic, it allows Roxy some time to shine while the other Winx have to work without their powers, and also allows Roxy to prove herself to gain Sirenix, joining them full time.
That can seem a bit strange given she’s so much younger than the others, and her form was never really explained like the others. Its aesthetic is very similar to Magic WInx, but the marketing and giant wings made it feel more like Believix, likely to make her dolls feel more cohesive alongside the Winx’s.
However that’s solved, including introducing a different power system for Earth fairies, I feel like it would help to have Roxy struggle as a sort of gifted kid. You know the type: advances in many subjects, considered best in class, has all these expectations, only to burn out early in young adulthood and become aimless, depressed, and self-loathing.
That could work really well for Roxy, having her feel isolated from both peers her own age, as well as the Winx given how much older they are than her. Given how Roxy tended to be a loner to begin with, this new situation probably isn’t helping her, and that could give way to a lot of interesting stories for her character… ones which I may or may not explore in the season 6 rewrite.
All in all, I love Roxy. She’s a fun, interesting character with a lot of potential that the show has been squandering for… over a decade now, wow. She deserved a better story. Even if she didn’t become the seventh Winx, they still owed her more than exiling her to the background forever.
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I’m the Unicorn of War… and Roxy is a sapphic icon.