#dbjkdbjkdbjkdbbdd

[wistcrias-arch2]

a little meta on how I see cady: I think, after watching a boot with danielle wade (my main cady inspo) as cady, I have a bunch of thoughts about how I view and write cady. I guess I’ll start with sorting her. cady is definitely a slytherin, simply put. I do want to take the deeper hogwarts sorting quiz for her, because I feel like her values are gryffindor, but the way she approaches them ( her secondary house ) is slytherin. outside of that quiz, though, she is definitely a slytherin if I had to choose!I think she is cunning in the sense of like... being able to view the world the way she was raised, in that everything is an eco-system and has a hierarchy. cady does value community, and though she’s not as fiercely loyal as slytherins can be for their own in the musical, I don’t think we had a chance to see it, which I’ll touch on later. 

cady’s also achievement-oriented, and while she’d like to play fair ( burned hufflepuff possibly? ) when the going gets touch, she’s not above resorting to less than palatable means. but as we saw in the mathletes competition, cady loves winning, and she loves being on top, but I think though her natural inclination is to be like the predators she was surrounded with most of her life, her heart and mind want her to be better and go against that instinct and try to play fair. to be better than an animal, in a sense. or, regina, if you want to be clever about it. she wants to win the competition, but not by squashing another girl’s self-esteem for no reason. this doesn’t even speak to slytherin, in my opinion, honestly, because she really doesn’t benefit by bringing someone else down? like the musical tells us: you’re not smarter for having called someone else dumb. but that’s just how cady sees it; someone else might think they benefit by doing that.

I do think cady’s also very ambitious, but here’s where danielle’s portrayal really takes route in how I write cady. danielle’s cady has a lot more anxiousness and a kind of... desperation and longing to fit in and be liked than erika’s. erike’s in my opinion is more relaxed, and catches onto things quicker. her decisions seem to be more voluntary and earnest, whereas I feel like with danielle’s she’s at first pressured into doing things because she wants to be liked and accepted. her distress is evident in where do you belong, and so is her anxiety. I feel like a lot of her actions are impulsive, and in a sense... immature, because if you think about it, cady hasn’t had much social interaction at all. she’s a child in that sense, and learns based off what she sees. like many primates do, the people she surrounds herself with become her identity to a degree. she learns revenge from janice, and she learns what makes you powerful at school through regina. it’s a very human, and natural thing to do. and it does, make her cunning and ambitious, or rather, it brings those things out that I think are in all of us to a degree. 

it’s only when we get to the end of the musical that we can start to really see who the real cady is. she is ambitious and clever, but she also wants to be kind and wants to be accepting and better than her base self. she’s also still trying to figure out who she is and what she believes in. and for someone who’s experiencing such immense culture shock, puberty, and public school for the first time, let alone trying to navigate complex relationship dynamics, you can’t really blame her not fully knowing better. and to her credit, she does take accountability. and while regina tells her not to apologize for things that aren’t her fault (which is good advice), cady’s apologies are heartfelt and unlike regina, she doesn’t see them as a way to weaken yourself, but rather a strength. regina also uses the “if i was a guy itd be different” explanation/excuse and “don’t be sorry” stuff in a not so great way, but that’s a meta for another day. 

and another thing: cady is new to all of this western world stuff, so when internalized misogyny plays a role in the dynamics between women in adolescence, since she has nothing to relate it to in her life, she relates it to the only thing she possibly can: something that a lot of people do. for her, that’s her life back in africa, again. it’s the only way this could make sense for her. and because of that, I think she feels less guilty about all the actions she had to take, because if we’re going off an eco-system, that’s just the way the world works. natural selection and the more “fit” animal comes out on top. but they’re not animals. and when cady tries to justify being “the good guy” she realizes how messed up everything’s gotten, and she realizes that she’s a person, and so is regina, and so is janice. and she has to –– must –– be better than that. she has to be fearless.