It is one of the series that exploded viewing scores in the first days of its release on Netflix: WednesdayWhere wednesday in VO, dethroned Stranger Things and The Bridgerton Chroniclesaccumulating more than 341 million hours of viewing.
A record for the series co-created by Tim Burton, which centers on the eldest daughter of the famous Addams family, Wednesday. Gothic atmosphere, black humor and mysterious investigations: the ingredients are there to fascinate the spectators… But also to unleash the social networks. Wednesday’s dance, performed by actress Jenna Ortega, took TikTok by surprise, becoming a global trend within days.
In episode 4, titled The ball of misfortunesthe teenager launches into a jerky choreography, face closed, on the song Goo Goo Muck of the band The Cramps. Surprise: on Tik Tok, Internet users remixed this somewhat strange dance on the accelerated version of bloody mary by Lady Gaga, a song released more than ten years ago. On the application for creating and sharing short videos, Internet users film themselves, sometimes disguised as Wednesday Addams, reproducing the dance from the series. The hashtag #Wednesdaydance has, at the time of writing, more than 427 million views on the platform.
The revenge of the bizarre, the marginalized, the harassed
If the Internet is so passionate about Wednesday Addams and his dance, it is perhaps for his infinitely quirky side: alone dressed in black in a crowd dressed in white, the heroine clashes, intrigues, as her movements can seem strange.
The love of social networks for the character of Wednesday is then explained by the highlighting by the series of “outcasts”, that is to say those considered strange, bizarre, marginal, normally rejected by society because of their appearance or personality.
The work of Charles Addams, the creator of The Addams Family, was originally intended to ape American capitalist society and the traditional family. The reboot of Wednesday by Tim Burton testifies to the growing interest in fiction for these offbeat characters, quickly taken up by social networks, such as the character of Eddie in Stranger Things.
For this choreography, created by actress Jenna Ortega herself, we find inspirations from punk icon Siouxsie Sioux, dancer Bob Fosse. The actress has also viewed a number of archives of gothic clubs from the 1980s and 1990s. A purely punk and gothic inspiration that suddenly becomes very popular, while these subcultures have been largely mocked for decades.
Many Internet users have also expressed themselves on the recovery of Wednesday’s dance on social networks. Some have decried the hypocrisy of recuperating Gothic aesthetics, even as those sporting these aesthetics were harassed and mocked during their teenage years. “Do you find her cool whereas before you made fun of people dressed like her? “, tweeted an exasperated Internet user.
Wednesday, a character on the autism spectrum?
For several years, the characters developed in numerous series and films produced by Netflix have embodied a certain diversity: skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity, mental health, forms of disability…
If series like Atypical focus very directly on the spectrum of autism, many Internet users explain that they see “autistic-coded” characters in other fiction, that is to say, who present characteristics that are found in people on the autism spectrum. A way for people with autism to find representation in media productions that are still reluctant to represent atypical neuro characters.
Eartho Kam, creator on Tik Tok, explains the different signs that may show that Wednesday Addams would be on the autism spectrum: strong sense of justice, difficulty or excess of eye contact, very specific interests, hypersensitivity to colors…
She is not the only one to decipher this character as “autistic-coded”: on Reddit, Twitter or Tik Tok, many Internet users have pointed out all the details of the series supposed to prove that the heroine would be on the spectrum of autism. One thing is certain, it is that Wednesday continues to fascinate social networks, one dance step at a time.