#AntiHarry Potter

[thenightling]

Why Wednesday is NOT a Harry Potter rip-off

Most of the “Hot Takes” about the Netflix series Wednesday are that it’s a shameless rip-off of Harry Potter.  Why? Because there’s a boarding school and supernatural creatures?   

Wednesday features Wednesday Addams going to Nevermore Academy, a school for “Outcasts.”  In the context of the show Outcast means monsters or people with super powers.  The school residents include werewolves, vampires, gorgons, and sirens as the main species based cliques. And the Principal was a shapeshifter. Other supernatural creatures in attendance include a telekinetic, an artist who has psychic visions and can temporarily bring his art to life, and a boy who can control bees.  A ghost and a Hyde monster also makes an appearance. And Wednesday, herself, is a seer.

 As far back as the 1930s the Addams Family has had witches. Charles Addams, himself, said that Morticia was a witch and he was her creator.  In the 1960s Addams Family show the opening theme song has the line “So get a witch’s shawl on, a broomstick you can crawl on.  We’re gonna pay a call on... The Addams Family.”  Grandmama brewed potions in every incarnation of the family and cursed a man in the 90s Addams Family movies.  Morticia’s sister, Ophelia, had flowers growing out of her head in the 1960s show.  If you think there was nothing supernatural about The Addams Family, you clearly were not paying attention.       

Now, in the show Wednesday, anyone with powers or who is of another species other than human, are called Outcasts.  Everyone else is a Normie. No, this is not a rip-off of Harry Potter’s Muggles.  In role playing games I sometimes had ordinary human characters called Vanillas.  In The Dresden Files TV series they were called civilians. Fables called them Mundies, which was short for Mundanes.  In Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula books the humans are sometimes called Breathers or Mortals.  Breathers is also what the ghosts in a few young adult book series call humans.  That and “Fleshies” like in the Casper movie.  In Bewitched and Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, non-magical people were called mortals.  The vampires of Anne Rice’s novels the human characters are called mortal.

So between Civilians, Breathers, Fleshies, Mundies, Mortals, and Vanilla, the idea of the supernatural society having another name for the non-magical ordinary humans also was not invented by J. K. Rowling for Harry Potter. You would have to have had very limited experience with the horror and fantasy genres if you think Harry Potter was the first to come up with the concept of a school of the magically incline.  

The Worst Witch- about a little girl in Witch School, was first published in 1974 and the first movie version was in 1986 and then it had two TV show adaptations. 

Even Monster High- which I, myself, have compared the school in Wednesday to- was not the first of it’s kind.    

In 1988 there was an animated movie called Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School where Shaggy got a job as a Phys Ed Teacher in an “All Ghoul school” inhabited by the daughters of the classic movie monsters.  You had the daughter of Dracula, the daughter of The wolfman, the daughter of The mummy, and a daughter of a ghostly phantom.  Sound familiar?  It was Monster High before Monster High. 

And don't forget even the novel Dracula in 1897 mentioned Scholomance (School of Magick) a mystical school supposed to be hidden in Eastern Europe over a lake. Also unlike Harry Potter, in the world of Wednesday, much like True Blood, the general public do seem aware that werewolves, vampires, and the like exist.  

Does Wednesday borrow from other Gothic Horror and teen dramas or who-done-its?  Of course.  But it’s done in its own unique way.  And it’s a spin-off of a beloved property, The Addams Family.  So just sit back and relax and enjoy it for what it is.  This is not a rip-off of Harry Potter.  It’s a hodgepodge of Gothic fantasy and it’s the first time Tim Burton has felt like ...well, himself, in over fifteen years.  Stop looking for reasons to hate it and just have fun. With Gothic horror films like The Invitation also embracing old Gothic Horror tropes, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman finally having its own TV show adaptation, I find it to be a breath of fresh air to see 2022 being the year that Gothic Horror has finally made a pop culture return without a cynical deconstruction by people who never appreciated the genre.  I had been hoping for this kind of entertainment for a long, long time.