Wednesday Addams

Wednesday Addams is the daughter of Gomez and Morticia Addams, known for her pale skin, dark braided pigtails, and a morbid, deadpan personality. The character originated in Charles Addams's single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker in 1938, where the family members were initially unnamed. In 1964, for The Addams Family television series, cartoonist Charles Addams named the character Wednesday after the line from the well-known English nursery rhyme: "Wednesday's child is full of woe". In the original cartoons and the 1960s TV show, Wednesday was a quiet, sometimes sweet-natured little girl with a fondness for spiders and a headless doll named Marie Antoinette, which her brother Pugsley would happily "guillotine" at her request. The character evolved in later adaptations, particularly the 1990s films starring Christina Ricci, into a more severe, stoic, and darkly witty preteen with openly evil tendencies, a version that became iconic and highly influential. Wednesday is the eldest child of Gomez and Morticia Addams, and the older sister of Pugsley. She was born on Friday the 13th and had a typical Addams upbringing, which included learning fencing from her father and developing a love for all things macabre. A formative event in her childhood was when bullies ended her pet scorpion, Nero, which led her to swear never to cry again and to seek revenge on those who harm her family. The series begins with Wednesday being expelled from a "normie" high school for attempting to end Pugsley's bullies by releasing piranhas into the school pool. Her parents then send her to their alma mater, Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for "outcasts" (those with supernatural abilities). At Nevermore, Wednesday discovers she has inherited psychic abilities from her mother's side of the family, specifically her distant ancestor Goody Addams, a powerful witch from the 17th century.