Wednesday’s Child is Full of Neurodiversity
Also: Personality Disorders
Massive spoilers for Wednesday. Do not read this until you’ve watched the first season. Don’t do it. Go forth and watch Wednesday. I will still be here when you get back.
Disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist; I am a palaeopathologist. I have no authority to diagnose living patients with anything at all and I’m just having a bit of fun attaching diagnoses to fictional characters. To steal a joke from the series I’m good at one type of head-shrinking, but not the kind we’re talking about here.
At this point it’s not really a hot take to declare that the Wednesday Addams played by Jenna Ortega in the Netflix series Wednesday is autistic. It’s fairly obvious even to neurotypicals. Ortega even chooses not to blink or blink as infrequently as possible on screen. Wednesday has always had a flat atonal delivery, but this Wednesday is atonal, expressionless, unable to read emotions, but deeply emotive, has a strong sense of justice, intense special interests, and although capable of manipulation and lying, doesn’t seem to understand it and although gullible, is not classically so. Basically, she has some deficits in theory of the mind. She’s autistic.
But we already knew that.
