In a world where shows set in high school regularly come with trigger warnings, Peacock’s Supernatural Academy, an animated adaptation of Jaymin Eve’s fantasy book series, is refreshingly targeted to its young audience. Centered around a cast of suave vampires and wizard children who juggle school and romance with saving the world, Supernatural Academy is content to tread familiar ground in a way that’s both culturally calibrated for 2022 but also disappointingly traditional in the treatment of its characters.
Things go awry when Jessa (Larissa Dias), one of the popular wolf shifters at the titular academy, meets her twin sister, Mischa (Gigi Saul Guerrero), who’s been kept apart from her for the past 16 years. Unlike Jessa, Mischa was raised as a human and slowly acclimates to the Supernatural Academy. The story takes place in a Hogwarts-like school, but the show’s characters skew more toward those of Twilight, as Mischa forms a bond with human-appearing monsters like vampire Max (Vincent Tong) and the dragon-shifting Brax (Cardi Wong).
Though these characters are plainly archetypes, with Mischa’s introversion juxtaposed with Jessa’s extroversion, watching the twin sisters achieve a newfound trust as they survive the exploitative schemes of their nefarious headmaster, Kristov (Brian Drummond), lends an interesting circularity to their characters. Mischa, for one, blossoms into confidence to protect Jessa just as her sister recedes into doubt. Unfortunately, the revelation that they’re dragon-marked beings eventually subsumes the show’s initially satisfying slice-of-life pacing, turning into a tired dash toward a finale centered on saving the world.
Supernatural Academy attempts to grapple with social issues, especially toward the latter half of the season, as Jessa, Mischa, and their ilk are singled out by magic society as potential catalysts of a world-destroying evil. In a particularly harrowing scene, Mischa and Jessa are told that they don’t belong at the academy because of their dragon mark. It’s a striking parallel to the fear and prejudice that teens of diverse backgrounds experience, though the series never fully commits to exploring those comparisons.
The best YA fiction possesses a self-awareness of how closely its scenarios resemble their real-life analogs, but a militarized camp of dragon-marked children separated from their parents is merely gestured to in Supernatural Academy. With characters that truly represent the multitudes of its target audience, the world of Supernatural Academy feels truly modern compared to its YA predecessors, but it flounders when the story shifts away from its rich tapestry of young characters to focus solely on a race to save the world.
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