‘Chilling adventures of Sabrina’ and the new adolescence

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The second season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina premiered on Netflix last week. Here our first impressions

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is an original Netflix series that premiered for Halloween last year. After launching a Christmas special, Netflix now brings back the second part of the adventures of the teenage witch. This series is produced by Warner Bros. Television and made by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, author of the comic on which it is based.

Leer en español: El mundo oculto de Sabrina y la nueva adolescencia

This second season consists of nine chapters, unlike the first, which had one more. The premise remains basically the same: Sabrina Spellman is a 15-year old half witch half human who must decide between her two natures, between her two schools, between her two groups of friends, ultimately, between good and evil.

The new adolescence

Although the story continues where the Christmas special left her, Sabrina will no longer be the same in this second season. For the beginning of this second part, Sabrina will have celebrated her witch's baptism, that is, she has signed the book of the Dark Lord with her own blood, promising him blind obedience.

In the first season of the series we had seen Sabrina closer to her human side: she is very critical of the coven traditions, always tries to do good, spends more time with her friends and her human boyfriend, refuses to obey blindly Satan. While it is a sympathetic character with which it is easy to identify, in the last episodes of the first season we see an extremely good Sabrina. She would do everything for her boyfriend Harvey and for her friends Susie and Roz. She wants to protect them at all costs and for that, she makes any kind of deeds. At the end of the first part, Sabrina is unbearably good.

In this second season, however, we see her more inclined to her dark side. In the first episode decides to leave the Baxter Institute and her human friends completely to be able to train in the dark arts of witches. Although at the end of the first season it is clear that Sabrina agrees to be baptized only from within fighting the Dark Lord, in this second season we see her enjoy the coven traditions and their satanic powers.

We now see a Sabrina more smiling and mischievous and much less whiny. Although they follow all the feminist premises that were also seen in the first season and for which Sabrina struggles in both the coven and the human world, we see her yielding a little more. Thus, we will now see a teenager who feels more real: she explores her sexuality, she experiments with her powers, she uses them not always for good, she allows one or another lie, she is tempted by the devil.

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The adolescence of the 21st century

Do not confuse the reader. This new series about Sabrina Spellman is not inspired by the 90's series Sabrina, the teenage witch. It was also be based on a comic, but different from the latest version of Sabrina. It is a series of comics of Archie Comics of 1962 in which on her sixteenth birthday Sabrina Spellman discovers that she has powers and thereafter try to live with them while having a normal life. This series of comics was the one that inspired the 90's series in which we saw a much more innocent and tender teenager.

In the series of 1996, Sabrina's biggest problems have to do with her aunts Hilda and Zelda not embarrassing her in front of her friends or letting her party. In the Netflix series, however, it is already taken for granted that Sabrina can go out alone with her friends and it is her aunts who promote the temptations in her. And it is that this is inspired by a more recent comic: of 2014, in which there is a very different conception of adolescence and Satanism.

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Sabrina's being a witch does not have to do with having powers that can make life easier or more difficult, but following traditions dictated by the cult of Satan. Thus, the new teenager proposed by the second part of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not only compared to the first season but also a new conception of adolescence more typical of this century that shows the temptations of a 15-year-old girl more than her moral dilemmas.

Although also from Archie Comics, the comic on which Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is based is much darker and of a 1960s aesthetic (because it is set in the sixties, when the first comic about Sabrina Spellman came out, on which the series Sabrina, the teenage witch ). In this way, do not be surprised if you see in the series of Netflix sculptures to Satan, gothic and terrifying references, or if after seeing it you dream of the devil himself.

LatinAmerican Post | Juliana Rodríguez Pabón

Translated from "El mundo oculto de Sabrina y la nueva adolescencia"