Shipping Wednesday and Enid - Just No

I thoroughly enjoyed Wednesday, even though there were a few angsty moments that had me cringing, I mean love triangles are so overdone and I didn’t understand why the boys continued to pursue when she clearly wasn’t interested. Wednesday Addams clearly isn’t romantic relationship material and why should she be. She’s 16 and has plenty of time for that.

Then there is her narrow focus and naivete regarding how things would play out when she made certain choices. It was an aspect that began to grate by the time she’d followed the same bad pattern for the third time, but some people take a while to learn important life lessons and maybe that’s part of the point. Though isolated in many ways, Wednesday comes from a family, that whilst considered weird, is perhaps the best model of how a family should be… everyone is accepted for who they are, and other family members try to help them embrace that.

This difference though has consequences when it comes to joining the outside world. Socially Wednesday is emotionally, and cognitively stunted. When most people don’t understand you or even try to understand you, it makes sense that you would close them off. She says she doesn’t like people, or care what they think, I say – defence mechanism much.

This show has strengths though, aspects I loved; Wednesday’s aptitude in many things and her focus as far as developing her writing really spoke to me, the last one for obvious reasons. That was kind of me at 16, sitting at a typewriter wanting to be a great author.

The biggest joy though is Enid and her friendship with Wednesday. And yes I use that world friendship deliberately.

I will unequivocally say, I don’t want there to be anything romantic between Wednesday and Enid.

Now hear me out before you decide you want to slap me down. My reasons haven’t got anything to do with any gender or whatever phobia. If I had one of those, the list of people I actually like having in my life would be significantly less and the ones I have run pretty much the whole gamut.

My reasons are, well you’ll see.

Enid accepts Wednesday for who she is, she doesn’t understand it all, and the why of it is baffling to her, but she tries. More she respects Wednesday’s boundaries. This is super important in a platonic context, particularly in this day and age.

So much focus in so many areas is on gender equality, the freedom to love who you want and how there should be representation of this variety, and whilst it isn’t a bad thing, some not so good things have come out of it.

One of these things is we are asking our children to make decisions about sexuality at a much younger age than is necessary. Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen, I know of what I speak from personal experience. Our children should be allowed to be children, and not have to decide where they fit on any damn spectrum until they feel ready.

Back to my main point, the friendship between Wednesday and Enid.

Since many people have now seen the show many, many things have come across my social feeds shipping these two.

Just no. Not in any romantic sense and here is my main reason – we need to see more representations of strong female characters as friends, without romantic complications.

Enid has her own strengths and I really want to see Wednesday grow enough to encourage her friend to be the best version of herself she can be, likewise Enid has the capacity to teach Wednesday the social cues she needs to become the best Wednesday she can be. This doesn’t need to be wrapped up in sexual tension and relationship bollocks. It needs to be examined, it needs to be shown, and our girls, who will grow into women, need to see that these kinds of friendships matter. That diversity in friendships is possible.

I want to know that in twenty years Wednesday will be the gothic author, she wants to be and Enid will be the one who managed her appearances at WorldCon, on the one occasion it happened because she knows how to deal with Wednesday’s quirks. They don’t live in each other’s pockets but are always there for each other. When Wednesday is in over her head, Enid can coach her through stuff, like interviews and what to put in social media posts because all authors apparently have to have those. When Enid has her heart broken, Wednesday plots ways to get revenge or worse depending on the circumstances. It’s almost the ultimate friendship because if some jerk tries to DV Enid and she wolfs out and kills him, Wednesday will definitely know how to help her get rid of the body.

We don’t see enough true friendships between women in our shows. I get it, conflict sells, but still in our fight for equal representation can’t we push for things outside sexual parameters. This after all is part of the why of the Bechdel test (two women are featured, talking about something other than a man). These two score high in this regard and we need more of it.

OMG I just had a funny thought, what if they ran a PI firm and Enid was the charm and the muscle with everyone underestimating her, believing her to be the pretty secretary. I know there are some cliches there, but the movie currently playing in my head is pretty fun.

On that note I think I’ll leave you and get back to my movie.