Oh God, I need to rant about it. I'll illustrate with video later, but for now it'll have to be stills and text.
This is canon:
Fabian: Who you talking to, little girl?
Wednesday: Use “little” and “girl” to address me again and I can’t guarantee your safety.
Fabian: This is my place. Get out!
Wednesday: Thing, a hand here?
This is ANTI-canon:
It's not just canon that goes against what we saw on screen, but it drastically changes the core characterization of the main character for no reasonable purpose. I would argue that it's unreasonable to take this scene away from NC Wednesday, since it highlights her lack of empathy and hypocrisy: canon Wednesday doesn't care about people like Fabian who are obstacles to her goals, and within this she is also the elitist snob she accused Xavier of being.
Taking away her assertion that she's not to be perceived as a little girl is also further stripping her of her identity as someone who 1) isn't to be patronized and 2) does perceive herself as better than those around her (just as Bianca said to Xavier/what Wednesday overheard when she was stalking). Nearly every single thing she does is to try to prove that she's "better" (ordering Donovan around once she brought him the evidence he said he wanted is a prime example).
Ofc, there's the baby face/short queen element to this particular Wednesday situation, but addressing all of that would dive deeper into psychological fanon, and I'm trying to stay with canon here.
Wednesday asserting herself here in canon is also her means of telling people Don't fuck with me. I'm dangerous. And that is the awful truth: Don't fuck with Wednesday Addams. She put pirhanas in a pool because the boys in the pool picked on her brother. She sent mouse traps to the editor who rejected her novel. She will physically mutilate you if you piss her off.
And what did Tehlor Mejia do with that NC Wednesday?
Mejia turned her into a soft and caring goody girl who is sympathetic to the plight of the homeless and who did NOT order Thing to get rid of Fabian, and instead chided him for doing something so "unnecessary" by attacking him on his own. Mejia literally woked-up* a character who was definitely unfeeling towards the other character's situation (especially after he called her a "little girl").
And I despise using that term, since it's become so ingrained in the culture that anyone who uses it is automatically some kind of right winger. I'm not, but in this case it's a relevant term: This characterization of Wednesday speaks to a traditionally woke crowd:
because by the very dictionary definition of the word, mejia!Wednesday is woke Wednesday. And that's not what she was in Netflix Canon, at least not in the same manner of what it means to be in our non-fictional world.
Again, ranting about wokeness in our culture isn't in my vocabulary. I've seen the idiots who do rant about it in the other fandoms. It's just one very apt descriptor for m!Wednesday in this scene, softening her to be aware of the societal fact of Fabian's homelessness and to consciously express that to Thing. It's Mejia's own self-insert (speaking of one of my drafts about self-inserts and its saturation in fandoms); only someone like that would clutch pearls at the original scene and be compelled to correct it to align towards their own feelings instead of coming to terms with negative aspects of a character we all love (since coming to terms with it would mean ripping little holes in their carefully crafted ideologically humanitarianistic identities; how could one so in harmony with humanity love and relate to someone who hates humanity?). Mejia did this throughout the entire book while preserving some of her dry, people-hating sarcasm, but this here is one of the more blatant examples (along with the Tyler Rave'N conversation) of draining NC Wednesday of her peevish, bilious existence like a smug fanon vampire.
Once again, for people in the back:
Canon Wednesday did not give a flying shit about Fabian. She was insulted by him and his presence was hindering her investigation. She had no qualms ordering Thing to give her a "helping hand" that included violent assault and didn't give a second thought to the guy after Thing was done shooing him off.
And even though this was such a 'little' thing in canon, it's a big thing in the grand scheme of Mejia's totally unnecessary defanging and softening of Ortega's portrayal of Wednesday Addams. It's a betrayal of what she worked so hard to give us, and is insulting to her and the character's fans who love and respect the cold, calculating, unsympathetic Wednesday with the sharp tongue and IDGAF attitude that we saw on screen.
*This type of 'wokeness' is more of a corrective transference of righteousness that ignores the existent righteousness of a flawed character. Canon Wednesday is a deeply flawed character whose methods are, by real world standards, violent and absurd methods by which we real worlders only dream about using. Wednesday exists in a world where those violent fantasies can be acted out with little consequence. Those are her own little social justice moments, as twisted as they are, and to take them away from her is taking key positive characteristics from her that make her Ortega's fictional 'Wednesday' and forcing her into a role that's more palatable to someone judging fiction with the same metrics as they would judge reality.
