doodlegraveyard:

Hi, @seth-the-whalelord, i am sorry because oh gosh i have a LOT to say and you prompting this means im not gonna be able to think of anything else ahhhh.

OK so like. lets ignore how in general the timeline is really fucked up (flashbacks with the company of light and Griffin and Faragonda’s relative ages are very confusing) but lets just ASSUME, path of least confusion that Domino got iced exactly as many years ago as is appropriate based on Bloom’s age (I actually haven’t decided if i’s scaling the girls ages up slightly yet.) So basically it got destroyed when Bloom (and all her other peers in her age range here) were babies. That’s a BIG event to happen in relatively RECENT HISTORY and I have issues about how I want to make it clear that this is an event that has affected basically every world in the magical universe. BUT LETS PUT THAT ASIDE LETS TALK ABOUT THE WITCHES.

So my issue is the Ancestral Witches are meant to be these, hugely ancient beings formed at the beginning of the universe. But, they never… felt…. That cool to me? They’ve existed for all of time but it took them literally until what 15-18 years ago to get at the Dragon Flame? Despite the fact that it seems like pretty common knowledge where it is?? And the fact that they later named them and then the backstory with Griffin working with them and Valtor… that was before they got banished so to me it seems like they shouldn’t need the proxy of someone working on their behalf, like they do when they’re guiding the Trix… That feels to me like big powerful witches and villainesses and definitely big bad material but not like the unspeakable ancient things that I imagine when you say OLD AS TIME ELEMENTAL EVIL, you know?

Another thing: Arcadia. We have a direct counterpoint to “the first witches” in “the first Fairy who flew”. I actually like how vague her existence is and how strange and uncanny she looks. She almost comes across as a minor goddess, or someone who has basically ascended to demigod hood. I think one of the reasons I like her vibe over the ancestral witches is… she seems so… separate from reality and above what’s going on in the mortal planes. She waits for the Winx to come to her, instead of meddling/ the AW are pretty much exclusively into getting the trix to meddle for them. Or building a boy (Valtor) to do stuff for them. Idk. That said im actually not how im handling Arcadia or the existence of the water stars at all im just thinking ab the contrast of how they’re presented. Basically even when they’re spooky shadowy crone figures the witches strike me as beings of the material rather than an old-as-time type set of entities.

Anyway making the first witches these ‘’’’first creatures of evil’’’’ really fucks with the limp ‘well, not ALL witches are evil’ assertion that the show tries to make (but also doesn’t remember half the time). Like, that can definitely be the NARRATIVE that gets pushed, and I do think that the Ancestral witches themselves should be properly evil big bads, but you can’t build the worlds universe on ‘witches were invented to be evil, and fairies are meant to good’ and then benignly go ‘oh not realllyyyyy. I mean MOSTLY but not really. You know. Not the 2 witches we like (one of whom becomes a fairy)’. That can be the story a lot of people believe, but you cannot build it into the literal history of your world setting and then turn around and ask the audience to think otherwise.

I think what makes most sense to me is that Belladonna, Liliss, and Tharma are the names of the last INCARNATIONS of the Ancestral Witches but not the original/actual identities.

I think they were just witches once. Not quite from the beginning of time but from a long, long, long time ago. They had names no one remembers anymore, and names before that. They were witches who garnered such power that they wrote their identities into the flow of magic itself, who unmoored their spirits from their selves so that when they died they did not truly die.

Basically, they’re Liches.

I like the idea of the Witches recurring in history, reappearing as different women across the eons as their spirits find new lives to subsume. It’s not a bloodline (even though the trix call themselves the AW’s ‘direct descendants’ - unless Belladonna, Liliss and Tharma all fucked and had children, and each of the girls could directly trace their ancestry back to them… first of all why, how, wouldn’t families keep that an awful secret because presumably being related to the people who tried to kill dragon god and nuked the fairy Vatican would make their lives DIFFICULT - despite that language I always assumed they were kind of styling themselves as spiritual successors (which.. might be the literal opposite of ’direct descendant’ but what can I say that’s the vibe I always got)

I think, in my version of things, they’re… sort of like their successors. ( I have them style themselves as Inheritrix - Hence, Trix) but well, really the Trix are really more like…

Vessels.

Or, they will be, when they’re strong enough.

One of the big reasons Witches are looked down on is that there’s this pervasive cultural sentiment that they’re greedy and power-hungry. They Want what they don’t Have, they will Take what Is Not Theirs. This has a little bit to do with the way I conceive of the concept of positive or negative magic - not dark and light but more like electric charges or polarity. Fairies (+) generate magic, and Witches (-) absorb magic from outside sources. I think there’s actually a very important place for Witches in the magic ecosystem, and both fairies and witches have a part to play in keeping balance. The ancestral witches represent the worst extreme of witch dysfunction. They take so much that they cling onto life, stealing the lives of other witches through generations. They refuse to be swept away through the river of time, to return to the flow of Magic, to take their part in the cycle.