Season 1 Summation: W.I.T.C.H.
Feb. 12th, 2012 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameSeason one of W.I.T.C.H. is a story with an identity crisis. The adaptation of the first story arc of the comic book was envisioned as a slice-of-life series about five preteen girls who were surviving middle school, family, and love while fighting an evil empire in their off-time. A-plots focused on problems at school: Will’s birthday, a community service project, Taranee failing a history paper… At the same time this is going on, the girls have to fight Phobos’s latest plan, which was usually a Monster Of The Week deal. There were hints of an overarching plot, but everything was very episodic. Production was pretty messy—voice dubbing wasn’t always right, animation was off-model to the point that Irma’s costume was the wrong color (seen every episode in the opening sequence), and sometimes there were timing issues with the audio/visual synchronization.
And then Jetix came along. Disney created the special programming block for its action shows, such as acquisitions from Saban like Power Rangers. It was the perfect solution to its identity crisis of being known for family-friendly fare and trying to appeal to the all-important 6-11 aged boys who bought toys. And because W.I.T.C.H. had the whole fighting monsters shtick like Power Rangers, that separated it from the tweenage girl fare like Hannah Montana, and so the powers that be told everyone involved to change the tone of the story to fit better with the action shows it would air alongside in Jetix.
With the shift from Hannah Montana to Power Rangers, the series had to focus more on its story arc than the characters’ personal lives. Background character Elyon became a major part of the plot, and this caused a genuine rift between the girls. The storyline became more serious, and less focus was given to the culture shock of a Meridianite on Earth and more was given to a teenage boy leading an army. Through the course of the season, a young man proved himself a leader and saved his world, a young woman learned what kind of leader she was, misfit friends became a powerful and inseparable team, a scavenger became a hero, and a young orphan learned where her family loyalties truly lay.
So let’s explore the characters.
Will
Will arrives to the story as the new girl at school. Having moved from Fadden Hills, she’s sure she’s not going to fit in and just wants to survive middle school. Things change when Hay Lin invites her over and the girls learn their true destiny as the Guardians of the Veil. Will is granted the Heart of Kandrakar and becomes the leader of W.I.T.C.H.
She clashes initially with Caleb, the co-leader of the team, and this stems from a difference in experience. Will is entirely new to the job and to the world of Meridian, and Caleb’s been doing this for a while. He’s the leader of the Rebellion, and he knows exactly what’s at stake. It doesn’t really hit home for the Guardians until they get to see what the people of Meridian are going through under Phobos’s rule.
Will is brash and hardheaded, prone to making bad calls when it comes to tactics. As a character trait, this may stem from her lack of power; the other Guardians all can control an element as well as have flight and strength granted to them from their powers. Will only has the baselines of strength and flight; she’s the power that brings them together and gives them their powers, but she has no real power set of her own. But she’s the leader, and so Yan Lin trains the girls to listen to her and not question her orders.
But of course, they do. Will doesn’t always make the best calls, and they have consequences. Caleb loves to point out when her plans are stupid early on, but the biggest problem comes when the Guardians learn that Elyon is the long-lost Princess of Meridian. Will decides that the best way to protect Elyon is to keep this knowledge from her and allow her to live a normal life. Cornelia argues that it’s a dumb plan, but she goes along with it. Then Elyon learns the truth and is manipulated against the girls. Cornelia blows up at Will completely and quits the team. Will herself is easily blinded by her emotions. Many of her bad calls come from thinking with her heart rather than her head. She doesn’t like Prof. Collins, so she jumps to the conclusion that he’s a spy sent by Phobos. She has a crush on Matt and doesn’t like the new girl who also likes Matt, so she challenges her to a ski competition, knowing she can’t ski. She doesn’t know how to keep a handle on her emotions, causing her to clash with her mother and with her friends, and it causes a major conflict with her as a leader.
If there’s a word to describe Will, it’s “learning.” She’s new to this whole thing. She’s still learning how to be a Guardian, how to be a leader, and so on. She makes mistakes, but she does what she can to put them behind her and do better next time.
Irma
The way Irma is generally remembered is as the sarcastic one, the Sokka of the group. Though to be honest? She starts off as the enforcer. When Will first joins their circle of friends and becomes the leader, Irma is the one to defend her. She argues with Cornelia in Will’s defense—though, to be honest, she probably does it equally for the chance to annoy Corny—and she actually likes being a Guardian. She does it because she wants to protect the people of Meridian.
Irma kind of degenerates into the sarcastic one, but she always enjoys what she’s doing as a Guardian. She’ll snark at the villains, at Caleb, and Cornelia, and everything, but she has her heart in what she’s doing.
As W.I.T.C.H. has a large cast, a lot of the characters lose out on character development. Irma sadly is one of them, despite the promise she showed in the first one. However, she always makes up for it with great moments, such as riding alongside Caleb dressed as knights into Meridian and Rider Kicking Cedric.
Taranee
Taranee’s another one who falls into the trap of essentially being a trope. She’s the shy, smart one. She’s easily frightened, though she gets over her fears by the end. She begins becoming bolder in battle too, making wisecracks with the other girls. So, good. Character development.
Will is the one who comes up with a plan, but Taranee’s the one who comes up with a strategy. If Will says what they’re going to do, Taranee says how they’re going to do it. Probably the best example is in “The Labyrinth,” when she uses the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to make their way through Phobos’s maze.
But other than that, there isn’t a whole lot of focus on her. She doesn’t even get that many great battle moments—sometimes she’s the one that has to be taken out of battle because she has fire and that solves a lot of problems in a fight. So if you’re looking for meaty development for her, wait for the next season.
Cornelia
Cornelia’s one of the rare few members of the cast who isn’t a trope. She starts out that way, being the haughty one of the group, who has conflicts with the other girls, but then the Elyon arc happens.
Cornelia butts heads with Irma frequently, but it’s nothing serious. When Elyon is duped into joining Phobos, then Cornelia loses it with Will. Elyon is her best friend, a girl she’s known since kindergarten. They know everything about each other. It kills her to have to fight her, and she does everything possible to try to save her. This easily could make Cornelia the real hero of the season, but compared to Will, she’s a little more in the background.
This whole arc does a great job on her development. Against all sense, she’s determined to save her best friend, and she refuses to hurt her. She steals the Heart of Kandrakar at one point to try to sneak into the palace to talk to Elyon, believing that if they actually talked, maybe it would solve their problems (hey, it would have solved a lot in Kamen Rider 555). It’s clearly torturing her, being unable to reason with her best friend, and she begins taking it out on the others—not just Will, but by the end, she’s taking it out on Irma too.
At the same time this is going on, she and Caleb are beginning to fall for each other. Yeah, they hint with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that they find each other hot from the beginning, but things really start to get more serious between them during the Elyon arc. Cornelia is torn between her friends and her best friend. She’s arguing with Will, which puts her at odds with the other girls too, but Caleb is still somewhat of an outsider. He’s on the team, but in the way that a Sixth Ranger is on the team—he’s got the advantage of being removed from their day-to-day lives and comes from an entirely different world, literally. She argues with him too, but he at least tries to reason with her, just like Cornelia’s trying to reason with Elyon. And I think the mutual determination between them is what begins to attract them to each other, though to be completely honest, it does get a little too serious out of nowhere. I like to compare it to Kevin and Gwen in Ben 10: Alien Force. Out of the blue, they’re attracted to each other and start pushing and pulling toward and away from a serious relationship. Out of nowhere, they’re suddenly boyfriend and girlfriend, even when you look at it in context. Not enough time is given to develop this relationship, and I think that’s why things get complicated between them next season.
Hay Lin
Of all the characters of W.I.T.C.H., Hay Lin gets the shortest end of the stick. I really don’t think the writers had any idea what to do with her. She really comes across as the biggest trope-character. She’s the happy one. A bit of a ditz.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Hay Lin…maybe a little more in season two, but that’s just about everybody, to be honest. But I really feel like she had nothing to work with. They show that she’s artistic and creative…and that really doesn’t go anywhere. They play too much with making her a ditz, signing up the girls for things like the play in “Ambush at Torus Filney” and not really catching onto things like how Will and Matt or Cornelia and Caleb want to be alone.
Her most important role on the team really seems to be providing them with a mentor. Yan Lin has more time devoted to her, and really? She’s a terrible mentor. She doesn’t really advise the girls on how to handle a situation. She gives them some background information and tells them to trust Will’s judgment. It doesn’t really provide a whole lot of emotional support. Half the time, Caleb proves to be a better mentor, since he’s got experience and at least tries to deal with everyone’s emotional problems, but I’ll get to him in a moment.
Even if the writers didn’t want to have Hay Lin come off as too crucial in a team structure that already had the hostage’s best friend, the leader, the smart one, and the Rebel Leader, the writers really could have given her more to work with. As she stands now, she’s not a particularly strong character.
Caleb
And now we come to Caleb, the only boy on the team this season. In the original comic, he was a minor character—a Murmurer (Whisperer in the series) who had gained human form and sentience and rebelled against Phobos. In the series, however, he’s completely retconned into a more important character. He’s human through-and-through, the young leader of the Rebellion. He’s charismatic to his men, a great strategist, and an excellent warrior—everything the Rebellion needs, and he’s only fifteen or sixteen.
And that’s where things really get interesting with his character. It’s great when you have the experienced fighter on the team, but you need to give him some kind of character flaw that conflicts with that. Does he have a personal tragedy? Does he doubt he can keep this up? In Caleb’s case, his biggest problem is the fact that he’s a teenager. This is where they absolutely nail the whole “teenagers who happen to be superheroes” deal. Caleb might be the leader of the Rebellion, but he’s only old enough that he should be in high school. He’s outranked by girls younger than him from a world where they don’t have to put up with the danger he does. He’s impatient and more than a little sexist in the beginning before he grows to respect Will and the others. And he makes a lot of dumb mistakes because of this impatience. He thinks that he’s got to be that great Rebel Leader, so he’ll try to make a move on his own to get one step ahead of Phobos, only to land himself in a lot of trouble, such as “Ambush in Torus Filney” or even “The Rebel Rescue.”
And we see that part of it seems to come from the fact that he believes his father is dead. When he finds his father toward the end of the series, this actually becomes a major driving force of his character. He asks the Guardians to go with him on a perilous mission to save Julian in “The Underwater Mines,” and when his father is recaptured at the end of “The Battle of Meridian Plains,” his drive to break him free again is what gets him and Blunk into trouble in the beginning of “The Rebel Rescue.” For what’s pretty much a last-minute addition to his character, that’s a great way of handling it.
Caleb is also suspicious and distrustful, and it doesn’t go away easily. He’s cynical about Will when he sees that this twelve-year-old is the Guardian who had tried to fight off Cedric before, and he demands to know where her “older sister” is. He takes a long time to admit that Blunk is his friend, mostly because he believes that Blunk sacrificed himself to save Caleb’s life. But at the same time, he never gets over his prejudices about the Passling race. He doesn’t trust Tynar when the Guardians rescue him against Caleb’s advice, and it turns out that Tynar is trustworthy and crucial to them winning over Phobos’s forces.
But at the same time, there is this excitement in him that betrays he’s not completely lost. He geeks out when he explains what he’s seen on Earth to Aldarn. He brags about his dad to the girls. He tries to impress them at every turn. It’s this great note of tarnished innocence—there’s still hope for him. In some ways, he fits this mold I call the “Secondary Rider”—a type of “Sixth Ranger” on the team who has a well-developed backstory that at times is more interesting than that of the lead. But what prevents him from being a second lead is that if you remove him from the story, you don’t have a huge gap. The series’ writers clearly do everything they can to boost his importance, to the point that I feel like they really wanted to write about Caleb more than the others, but if he wasn’t there or had a diminished role, they’d still be able to tell the same story.
Antagonists
I’m grouping all of our baddies together, if only because they really didn’t have a whole lot of sane development.
First up, obviously, is Phobos. He’s powerful, yes, but he’s not terribly bright. As the story goes on, he starts making dumber and dumber moves, like foregoing any kind of security measures on the Book of Secrets when Elyon can easily get to it. He’s very stereotypical in his evil—he makes Meridian look like a dark, evil place, simply because he likes dark, evil places. There’s no real drive to him—he just wants power. Which could have been a good thing—sometimes you don’t need a complex villain with a sympathetic backstory. The problem is that Phobos has way too much focus throughout the story, and being such a flat character makes him look like a really stupid character. Had they kept him hidden for most of the series, like Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar, then they at least could have maintained him as a threat. Build up the suspense until he appears. Instead, he comes off as a whiny brat with a power trip, a lot of the time.
His right-hand-man is Cedric, who shows how being a flat character can help. Cedric doesn’t have much in the way of development. He’s Phobos’s yes-man who tries to take down the Guardians and the Rebels. He appears a lot, but he’s fighting most of that time. You don’t want to see him talk about his internal strife, no. You want to see him and the good guys fighting each other. There are enough close-calls in battle that he continues to seem like a threat, and he’s at least conniving enough around Elyon during the buildup to her joining the dark side that you can see there’s a brain behind that. Although you do end up wondering why he continues to work for someone who so verbally abuses him like Phobos if he’s smart enough to manipulate Elyon, and this pays off well in season two.
Miranda isn’t even worth commenting on. It’s not that I think she’s a bad character—she just shows up out of the blue toward the end and turns out to be a monster. We know she’s evil—she’s voiced by Princess Azula, for one—and she’s essentially hired to be Elyon’s Diversionary New Best Friend. She turns out to be an almost spider-like creature rather than a little girl, and really, is it any surprise? She doesn’t show up enough to get any development and really seems more like an afterthought, that things might seem a little creepier if the only people Elyon hangs out with in Meridian are men at least twice her age.
And I have to add Elyon here because she spends most of the time opposed to our heroes. Elyon’s characterization is a mess. I’ve pointed this out throughout the reviews. She’s being manipulated by Phobos, so they can try to keep her redeemable toward the end. But she does so many things that are just plain horrible: possessing Matt’s grandfather, being willing to execute Caleb, and so on. She says she wants the girls to leave her alone, and she alternates between attacking them and begging them to leave her in peace and going completely guano loco and trapping them. She says she cares about the people of Meridian, but she never asks herself why the Rebels are insisting they need to steal grain to feed the people. She never asks herself why her best friends are suddenly acting against her and why her parents are suddenly horrible; sure, they may have lied to her, but then why should she believe the bookseller who lied to her too?
Elyon is a frustrating character. She would be absolutely fascinating, but they really have no idea what to do with her. She needs to be a threat and she needs to be redeemable. There’s no middle ground, and I’ve seen characters done a whole lot better in other franchises who were both a friend and an enemy simultaneously (perfect example: Ren Akiyama in Kamen Rider Ryuki). She works best as a plot device, a vehicle for someone else’s character growth—in this case, Cornelia’s. And it’s a shame, really, because there is a lot of material to work with, but it’s so haphazardly handled.
In conclusion…
Season one of W.I.T.C.H. has a lot of problems when it comes to tone and characterization. But as it goes on, it gains a stronger voice as it becomes more of an action series. Its biggest problem is its large cast—between trying to change things from the comics and trying to focus its plot, it loses its chance to develop all nine of its main characters.
So let’s see how things improve as the chessmaster of Gargoyles, Greg Weisman, takes the reins in season two.
And then Jetix came along. Disney created the special programming block for its action shows, such as acquisitions from Saban like Power Rangers. It was the perfect solution to its identity crisis of being known for family-friendly fare and trying to appeal to the all-important 6-11 aged boys who bought toys. And because W.I.T.C.H. had the whole fighting monsters shtick like Power Rangers, that separated it from the tweenage girl fare like Hannah Montana, and so the powers that be told everyone involved to change the tone of the story to fit better with the action shows it would air alongside in Jetix.
With the shift from Hannah Montana to Power Rangers, the series had to focus more on its story arc than the characters’ personal lives. Background character Elyon became a major part of the plot, and this caused a genuine rift between the girls. The storyline became more serious, and less focus was given to the culture shock of a Meridianite on Earth and more was given to a teenage boy leading an army. Through the course of the season, a young man proved himself a leader and saved his world, a young woman learned what kind of leader she was, misfit friends became a powerful and inseparable team, a scavenger became a hero, and a young orphan learned where her family loyalties truly lay.
So let’s explore the characters.
Will
Will arrives to the story as the new girl at school. Having moved from Fadden Hills, she’s sure she’s not going to fit in and just wants to survive middle school. Things change when Hay Lin invites her over and the girls learn their true destiny as the Guardians of the Veil. Will is granted the Heart of Kandrakar and becomes the leader of W.I.T.C.H.
She clashes initially with Caleb, the co-leader of the team, and this stems from a difference in experience. Will is entirely new to the job and to the world of Meridian, and Caleb’s been doing this for a while. He’s the leader of the Rebellion, and he knows exactly what’s at stake. It doesn’t really hit home for the Guardians until they get to see what the people of Meridian are going through under Phobos’s rule.
Will is brash and hardheaded, prone to making bad calls when it comes to tactics. As a character trait, this may stem from her lack of power; the other Guardians all can control an element as well as have flight and strength granted to them from their powers. Will only has the baselines of strength and flight; she’s the power that brings them together and gives them their powers, but she has no real power set of her own. But she’s the leader, and so Yan Lin trains the girls to listen to her and not question her orders.
But of course, they do. Will doesn’t always make the best calls, and they have consequences. Caleb loves to point out when her plans are stupid early on, but the biggest problem comes when the Guardians learn that Elyon is the long-lost Princess of Meridian. Will decides that the best way to protect Elyon is to keep this knowledge from her and allow her to live a normal life. Cornelia argues that it’s a dumb plan, but she goes along with it. Then Elyon learns the truth and is manipulated against the girls. Cornelia blows up at Will completely and quits the team. Will herself is easily blinded by her emotions. Many of her bad calls come from thinking with her heart rather than her head. She doesn’t like Prof. Collins, so she jumps to the conclusion that he’s a spy sent by Phobos. She has a crush on Matt and doesn’t like the new girl who also likes Matt, so she challenges her to a ski competition, knowing she can’t ski. She doesn’t know how to keep a handle on her emotions, causing her to clash with her mother and with her friends, and it causes a major conflict with her as a leader.
If there’s a word to describe Will, it’s “learning.” She’s new to this whole thing. She’s still learning how to be a Guardian, how to be a leader, and so on. She makes mistakes, but she does what she can to put them behind her and do better next time.
Irma
The way Irma is generally remembered is as the sarcastic one, the Sokka of the group. Though to be honest? She starts off as the enforcer. When Will first joins their circle of friends and becomes the leader, Irma is the one to defend her. She argues with Cornelia in Will’s defense—though, to be honest, she probably does it equally for the chance to annoy Corny—and she actually likes being a Guardian. She does it because she wants to protect the people of Meridian.
Irma kind of degenerates into the sarcastic one, but she always enjoys what she’s doing as a Guardian. She’ll snark at the villains, at Caleb, and Cornelia, and everything, but she has her heart in what she’s doing.
As W.I.T.C.H. has a large cast, a lot of the characters lose out on character development. Irma sadly is one of them, despite the promise she showed in the first one. However, she always makes up for it with great moments, such as riding alongside Caleb dressed as knights into Meridian and Rider Kicking Cedric.
Taranee
Taranee’s another one who falls into the trap of essentially being a trope. She’s the shy, smart one. She’s easily frightened, though she gets over her fears by the end. She begins becoming bolder in battle too, making wisecracks with the other girls. So, good. Character development.
Will is the one who comes up with a plan, but Taranee’s the one who comes up with a strategy. If Will says what they’re going to do, Taranee says how they’re going to do it. Probably the best example is in “The Labyrinth,” when she uses the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to make their way through Phobos’s maze.
But other than that, there isn’t a whole lot of focus on her. She doesn’t even get that many great battle moments—sometimes she’s the one that has to be taken out of battle because she has fire and that solves a lot of problems in a fight. So if you’re looking for meaty development for her, wait for the next season.
Cornelia
Cornelia’s one of the rare few members of the cast who isn’t a trope. She starts out that way, being the haughty one of the group, who has conflicts with the other girls, but then the Elyon arc happens.
Cornelia butts heads with Irma frequently, but it’s nothing serious. When Elyon is duped into joining Phobos, then Cornelia loses it with Will. Elyon is her best friend, a girl she’s known since kindergarten. They know everything about each other. It kills her to have to fight her, and she does everything possible to try to save her. This easily could make Cornelia the real hero of the season, but compared to Will, she’s a little more in the background.
This whole arc does a great job on her development. Against all sense, she’s determined to save her best friend, and she refuses to hurt her. She steals the Heart of Kandrakar at one point to try to sneak into the palace to talk to Elyon, believing that if they actually talked, maybe it would solve their problems (hey, it would have solved a lot in Kamen Rider 555). It’s clearly torturing her, being unable to reason with her best friend, and she begins taking it out on the others—not just Will, but by the end, she’s taking it out on Irma too.
At the same time this is going on, she and Caleb are beginning to fall for each other. Yeah, they hint with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that they find each other hot from the beginning, but things really start to get more serious between them during the Elyon arc. Cornelia is torn between her friends and her best friend. She’s arguing with Will, which puts her at odds with the other girls too, but Caleb is still somewhat of an outsider. He’s on the team, but in the way that a Sixth Ranger is on the team—he’s got the advantage of being removed from their day-to-day lives and comes from an entirely different world, literally. She argues with him too, but he at least tries to reason with her, just like Cornelia’s trying to reason with Elyon. And I think the mutual determination between them is what begins to attract them to each other, though to be completely honest, it does get a little too serious out of nowhere. I like to compare it to Kevin and Gwen in Ben 10: Alien Force. Out of the blue, they’re attracted to each other and start pushing and pulling toward and away from a serious relationship. Out of nowhere, they’re suddenly boyfriend and girlfriend, even when you look at it in context. Not enough time is given to develop this relationship, and I think that’s why things get complicated between them next season.
Hay Lin
Of all the characters of W.I.T.C.H., Hay Lin gets the shortest end of the stick. I really don’t think the writers had any idea what to do with her. She really comes across as the biggest trope-character. She’s the happy one. A bit of a ditz.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Hay Lin…maybe a little more in season two, but that’s just about everybody, to be honest. But I really feel like she had nothing to work with. They show that she’s artistic and creative…and that really doesn’t go anywhere. They play too much with making her a ditz, signing up the girls for things like the play in “Ambush at Torus Filney” and not really catching onto things like how Will and Matt or Cornelia and Caleb want to be alone.
Her most important role on the team really seems to be providing them with a mentor. Yan Lin has more time devoted to her, and really? She’s a terrible mentor. She doesn’t really advise the girls on how to handle a situation. She gives them some background information and tells them to trust Will’s judgment. It doesn’t really provide a whole lot of emotional support. Half the time, Caleb proves to be a better mentor, since he’s got experience and at least tries to deal with everyone’s emotional problems, but I’ll get to him in a moment.
Even if the writers didn’t want to have Hay Lin come off as too crucial in a team structure that already had the hostage’s best friend, the leader, the smart one, and the Rebel Leader, the writers really could have given her more to work with. As she stands now, she’s not a particularly strong character.
Caleb
And now we come to Caleb, the only boy on the team this season. In the original comic, he was a minor character—a Murmurer (Whisperer in the series) who had gained human form and sentience and rebelled against Phobos. In the series, however, he’s completely retconned into a more important character. He’s human through-and-through, the young leader of the Rebellion. He’s charismatic to his men, a great strategist, and an excellent warrior—everything the Rebellion needs, and he’s only fifteen or sixteen.
And that’s where things really get interesting with his character. It’s great when you have the experienced fighter on the team, but you need to give him some kind of character flaw that conflicts with that. Does he have a personal tragedy? Does he doubt he can keep this up? In Caleb’s case, his biggest problem is the fact that he’s a teenager. This is where they absolutely nail the whole “teenagers who happen to be superheroes” deal. Caleb might be the leader of the Rebellion, but he’s only old enough that he should be in high school. He’s outranked by girls younger than him from a world where they don’t have to put up with the danger he does. He’s impatient and more than a little sexist in the beginning before he grows to respect Will and the others. And he makes a lot of dumb mistakes because of this impatience. He thinks that he’s got to be that great Rebel Leader, so he’ll try to make a move on his own to get one step ahead of Phobos, only to land himself in a lot of trouble, such as “Ambush in Torus Filney” or even “The Rebel Rescue.”
And we see that part of it seems to come from the fact that he believes his father is dead. When he finds his father toward the end of the series, this actually becomes a major driving force of his character. He asks the Guardians to go with him on a perilous mission to save Julian in “The Underwater Mines,” and when his father is recaptured at the end of “The Battle of Meridian Plains,” his drive to break him free again is what gets him and Blunk into trouble in the beginning of “The Rebel Rescue.” For what’s pretty much a last-minute addition to his character, that’s a great way of handling it.
Caleb is also suspicious and distrustful, and it doesn’t go away easily. He’s cynical about Will when he sees that this twelve-year-old is the Guardian who had tried to fight off Cedric before, and he demands to know where her “older sister” is. He takes a long time to admit that Blunk is his friend, mostly because he believes that Blunk sacrificed himself to save Caleb’s life. But at the same time, he never gets over his prejudices about the Passling race. He doesn’t trust Tynar when the Guardians rescue him against Caleb’s advice, and it turns out that Tynar is trustworthy and crucial to them winning over Phobos’s forces.
But at the same time, there is this excitement in him that betrays he’s not completely lost. He geeks out when he explains what he’s seen on Earth to Aldarn. He brags about his dad to the girls. He tries to impress them at every turn. It’s this great note of tarnished innocence—there’s still hope for him. In some ways, he fits this mold I call the “Secondary Rider”—a type of “Sixth Ranger” on the team who has a well-developed backstory that at times is more interesting than that of the lead. But what prevents him from being a second lead is that if you remove him from the story, you don’t have a huge gap. The series’ writers clearly do everything they can to boost his importance, to the point that I feel like they really wanted to write about Caleb more than the others, but if he wasn’t there or had a diminished role, they’d still be able to tell the same story.
Antagonists
I’m grouping all of our baddies together, if only because they really didn’t have a whole lot of sane development.
First up, obviously, is Phobos. He’s powerful, yes, but he’s not terribly bright. As the story goes on, he starts making dumber and dumber moves, like foregoing any kind of security measures on the Book of Secrets when Elyon can easily get to it. He’s very stereotypical in his evil—he makes Meridian look like a dark, evil place, simply because he likes dark, evil places. There’s no real drive to him—he just wants power. Which could have been a good thing—sometimes you don’t need a complex villain with a sympathetic backstory. The problem is that Phobos has way too much focus throughout the story, and being such a flat character makes him look like a really stupid character. Had they kept him hidden for most of the series, like Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar, then they at least could have maintained him as a threat. Build up the suspense until he appears. Instead, he comes off as a whiny brat with a power trip, a lot of the time.
His right-hand-man is Cedric, who shows how being a flat character can help. Cedric doesn’t have much in the way of development. He’s Phobos’s yes-man who tries to take down the Guardians and the Rebels. He appears a lot, but he’s fighting most of that time. You don’t want to see him talk about his internal strife, no. You want to see him and the good guys fighting each other. There are enough close-calls in battle that he continues to seem like a threat, and he’s at least conniving enough around Elyon during the buildup to her joining the dark side that you can see there’s a brain behind that. Although you do end up wondering why he continues to work for someone who so verbally abuses him like Phobos if he’s smart enough to manipulate Elyon, and this pays off well in season two.
Miranda isn’t even worth commenting on. It’s not that I think she’s a bad character—she just shows up out of the blue toward the end and turns out to be a monster. We know she’s evil—she’s voiced by Princess Azula, for one—and she’s essentially hired to be Elyon’s Diversionary New Best Friend. She turns out to be an almost spider-like creature rather than a little girl, and really, is it any surprise? She doesn’t show up enough to get any development and really seems more like an afterthought, that things might seem a little creepier if the only people Elyon hangs out with in Meridian are men at least twice her age.
And I have to add Elyon here because she spends most of the time opposed to our heroes. Elyon’s characterization is a mess. I’ve pointed this out throughout the reviews. She’s being manipulated by Phobos, so they can try to keep her redeemable toward the end. But she does so many things that are just plain horrible: possessing Matt’s grandfather, being willing to execute Caleb, and so on. She says she wants the girls to leave her alone, and she alternates between attacking them and begging them to leave her in peace and going completely guano loco and trapping them. She says she cares about the people of Meridian, but she never asks herself why the Rebels are insisting they need to steal grain to feed the people. She never asks herself why her best friends are suddenly acting against her and why her parents are suddenly horrible; sure, they may have lied to her, but then why should she believe the bookseller who lied to her too?
Elyon is a frustrating character. She would be absolutely fascinating, but they really have no idea what to do with her. She needs to be a threat and she needs to be redeemable. There’s no middle ground, and I’ve seen characters done a whole lot better in other franchises who were both a friend and an enemy simultaneously (perfect example: Ren Akiyama in Kamen Rider Ryuki). She works best as a plot device, a vehicle for someone else’s character growth—in this case, Cornelia’s. And it’s a shame, really, because there is a lot of material to work with, but it’s so haphazardly handled.
In conclusion…
Season one of W.I.T.C.H. has a lot of problems when it comes to tone and characterization. But as it goes on, it gains a stronger voice as it becomes more of an action series. Its biggest problem is its large cast—between trying to change things from the comics and trying to focus its plot, it loses its chance to develop all nine of its main characters.
So let’s see how things improve as the chessmaster of Gargoyles, Greg Weisman, takes the reins in season two.