If the Mainstream and Mainstream AI Dictated the Margins and What it Means to be Marginal? “Weird Girl” Wednesday Addams and Netflix-Defined, Internationally Transmitted, Non-normative Girlhood

The series Wednesday (2022-) has been one of Netflix’s biggest hits, and a hit with teenagers especially, in the US, and worldwide. Its eponymous teenage heroine is shown to be someone outside the norm, from a family of monster-like people It has also become a socio-cultural phenomenon. Excerpts, like the dance scene, have gone viral and inspired people to replicate them and be “non-conformists.” But how does Netflix depict this popular non-conformity? This “difference”—or what it means to be a “weird girl” or an “odd girl”, to live as a girl on the margins—is not being defined by the margins, or actual “outcasts”, but by men, working for the powerful juggernaut Netflix, which styles itself as the world’s first international TV network, and has exceptional reach and power, as it broadcasts its media products all over the world, simultaneously, in many languages, at once The creative choices behind the depictions on Wednesday are partly attributed—not only to human creativity or caring about empowerment and valorizing the “weird” girl—but to algorithms and AI that aimed to give viewers a form of palatable, popular “weirdness.” It would thus be interesting to examine Wednesday as media content that targets young viewers, and the messages about normative and non-normative, and marginal, and non-marginal, girlhood that the series is transmitting worldwide.