Hello ladies and gentlemen of this sub, this morning I finished watching season 5 for the first time and I want to share with you my thoughts/review. I'm going to split this in 3 categories: animation, characters and plot. (Grab your popcorn, this will take a while)

1-animation: this is the only part that I consistently enjoyed. The 2d animation looks really good (although I prefer the old artstyle), and the 3d animation wasn't bad either in my opinion. I mean when you compare it to other 3d animations of the time it looks inferior but rainbow was never a master of 3d animation and I think they did a good job.

2-characters: can't say much about the Winx, they're pretty much the same they were in season 4 but bloom is slowly getting more and more attention, shame on that. I didn't like Stella as much, she always wanted to be a stylist and this is the first time I saw her showing how much she loves doing this, so much that she even hosted some fashion shows. Too bad that everytime this happens her dresses suck, she fails to realize it and when everybody dislikes them she throws a tantrum and acts as a child. How to ruin a character 101. Another character I have a minor problem with is best girl Flora who everytime has to fight a monster always needs to remind that "we shouldn't hurt them". I get it, it's in line with her pacifist personality, but it just comes off as annoying, but not as much as Stella. The two transformations are okay, I definitely prefer harmonix design-wise (the long dress looks really good on the girls) but the sirenix feels similar to enchantix and believix (what I mean is that they have a dress that covers the upper body, a skirt, large wings and high heels. At least enchantix and believix look different and unique, while every girl has the same sirenix. Yes, they also have the same harmonix, but like I said, I liked it better). Oh, I almost forgot about Roxy. I just can't find a reason as of why they cut her, but not completely because she still shows up every now and then. They could have easily found a way to include her in the plot, after all she now studies at Alfea and the girls are back Alfea too for some reason. I don't know. Maybe she didn't sell enough merchandise. And then there's Tritannus. I really didn't like him, they nailed every chance they had to make him dislikable. First of all, I can't take seriously a villain whose name contains the word "anus". Secondly, he's just not intimidating, outside of his monster design (whereas the previous villains didn't need to look like monsters to be intimidating, but more on that soon). Why isn't he intimidating? Well, there are multiple reasons. Let's compare him to the other bad guys of the show: we have the descendants of the powerful evil witches that destroyed an entire planet in order to obtain the ultimate power, the enbodyment of the force that opposes the one that created the entire universe, a fraction of that same force corrupted by darkness, and a group of wizards who almost destroyed every fairies of Earth and caused the inhabitants of the planet to stop believing in magic. And who do we have here? Basically a kid who was denied the throne. And why does pollution make him strong? The show doesn't know, so why should i? It's never explained, and it's honestly stupid. If they wanted to make a psa about not polluting the ocean, well they could have just made one instead. Then, Tritannus doesn't really fight, but instead usually sends his minions to combat, and only jumps into action when his minions are defeated or the Winx are close to him. How can I be scared of someone if I rarely see his powers in action? One could argue that Darkar on Valtor also used the Trix often, but they didn't completely rely on them, Darkar had already set his plan in motion before meeting the Trix (he kidnapped the pixies to find out the whereabouts of their village) and Valtor traveled from planet to planet to obtain more power. But the thing that disappointed me the most was how we don't see the consequences of his action. Valtor corrupted people and stole energy from planets, and we see how this affects them throughout the season until the Winx defeat Valtor at the end and everything is fixed. The wizards killed almost every fairy of Earth, now the people of Earth don't believe in magic anymore and the remaining fairies want revenge until the Winx solve the conflict near the end. I thought this was really cool because it showed us the powers of the villains outside of battles and how powerful they truly where. Meanwhile Tritannus does something, something happens to a planet, and by the end of the episode it's over. This doesn't show me his power, doesn't make me feel scared of him if it's over quickly. Tritannus is just bad, there's no redeeming quality about him. Not even the personality, he's just "I'm not the king so I hate my family for this. You must die". And don't get me started on his relationship with Icy, it's super cheesy and incredibly annoying.

3-plot: well actually, let's talk about it. This is just one of many plot points that could have, and should have been developed more and better. We always saw the Trix together and now something happens that separates them. This would have been an amazing plot point, they could have made Darcy and Stormy leave Icy and Tritannus and fight against them out of frustration and anger or pursue the same power they were looking for and become the new rulers of the universe. Another disappointing plot point was the loss of memory of Sky, again, this has so much potential but they never do anything interesting with it. They could have made it so that he looses his pendant that he wanted to give to Bloom permanently and he has to recover his memories in a different way. Bloom helps by trying to remind him of the time they spent together and tries to make him fall in love with him again, while Diaspro tries to win his heart and seemingly succeeds, but then at the end Sky confesses his feelings to Bloom similar to how he did in the Darkar fight and it unlocks his memories. Then there's the whole thing about the curse of the sirenix which, again, they didn't do anything with it. They should have shown how it affects the characters involved, maybe the Winx could have temporarily lost control of their powers, or Tritannus could have been corrupted and permanently turned into a monster like Politea. Speaking of which, Politea feels like she was included just to reach the 26 episodes number, she appears once and is never mentioned again. This could have been fixed by introducing her at the beginning when the curse of the sirenix was first mentioned, and then make her more relevant to the plot one way or another. But overall the story is not terrible, it's interesting enough to catch the attention of a kid, but it could have been more.

Overall, there are some parts that I liked, the animation is good and the plot, while not well developed, works fine enough. If you're a kid you'll definitely enjoy season 5, but unfortunately I'm not a kid anymore and I didn't like it as much as the previous four. (not gonna lie, it was even painful to watch at times). If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 6/10. And with that, I should start season 6 now, but based on what I know I'm kinda scared. I want to know how bad it truly is, but I feel it could leave me with some serious brain damage. If you read 'till the end, thank you for reading and let me know what you think.

tl;dr: the animation is good, the villain is trash, the plot feels underdeveloped at times, but overall it works as a kids show.