Pretty much here for the J/C

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Bill Watterson – Calvin and Hobbes (1986)

Hergé – Tintin (1947, Tintin Magazine)

Jeff Smith – Bone (1993, Bone Holiday Special)

Walt Kelly – Pogo (1950, Maclean's Magazine)

And a bonus:

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

Season 1 Kira..... I'm so sorry girl... You deserve the world...

I recently found out she was only 26 during season 1 and I'm only 26 right now and... yeah...

inspired by this new favorite picture of mine

Hey maybe you guys should stop writing for the Addams family cause you don't get them at all.

And when she's given good material to work with I love Catherine Zeta Jones as Morticia

Part of that is being the opposite of the shitty sitcom family where the wife is a nag, the husband is an idiot, the mother-in-law sucks, and no one seems to like each other very much. The Addamses actually love each other. There's no 'take my wife' bs. If Gomez calls Morticia a battle-axe or the ol' ball and chain he means it to be highly complimentary. There's none of the nonsense like in the pics OP posted. Gomez or Morticia lives with their mother in law (it depends on which version whose mother she is) who is literally a witch (geddit, 'my mother-in-law is such a witch...') and get on great. They genuinely and openly support, love, and care for each other through thick and thin.

But the biggest problem that Netflix's Wednesday has is that to make a really good Addams show rn would mean scrapping the Sabrina the Darksided Witch/boarding school Monster High concept, going back to basics, and having them live next to an upper-middle class, conservative values, MAGA family and letting their differences fuel the plot.

A really good Addams Family show would have Morticia fighting against book bans at the school and having hilarious misunderstandings about what her neighbour means about "Liberal witch hunts." It would celebrate queerness, and gender (and species) non-conformity because the Addamses are queer and gender non-conforming, and not always definitely human (Cousin Itt, for example). You know Fester's gender identity is probably something like 'an abomination.' If one of them gets asked, "What are you?" the answer is a prompt, "An Addams."

They would be fighting for co-ed sports so Wednesday can trounce a boy at fencing, and would find out her chromosomes are just 'spooky' or something.

There'd be an episode about immigration and being targeted by ICE. OFC several Addamses come from somewhere weird and arrived in the USA via broomstick, or tunneling from some underground community of cryptids, or other hilarious misadventure. Gomez would desperately want to be blackbagged and treated like a dangerous animal (cue a major flirting moment between him and Morticia). They would permanently scare ICE out of the town.

Wednesday would fiercely support Landback. Pugsley would get redpilled and learn a lesson real quick. Gomez would get into (and out of) Crypto, and Morticia would have run-ins with MLM 'huns.' They would advocate for freedom of religion. Granny would rally alongside Evangelicals to have religion in school, only to reveal she meant witchcraft. They would support UBI, and be anti-landlord. Easy episode idea: Gomez is a landlord and goes on a spiral about it ("But, Gomez, you love leeches and scum" "Not this kind! Morticia, they've painted everything white, in my name!!!" "No!") and they wind up in a battle with the town because he wants to unburden himself of this shame and the town wants to stop free community-owned housing.

The point is that Netflix isn't going to touch any of that with a ten foot pole. They don't want to; that's way too political for them. Instead, they made this wildly unrelated supernatural teen drama that has nothing to do with the original concept or world that the Addams Family exists in (they're outsiders in the real world, that's the point).

And, worse, Netflix's Wednesday actively goes against the original themes by being vaguely conservative in its values.

Netflix's Wednesday fails the assignment so bad I'd laugh, if it wasn't so disappointing and enraging. Just take a look at what the Mary Sue had to say about the whole "werewolf conversion camp" debacle for a microcosm of the many things wrong with this show.

"It wants to use hot-button topics like conversion therapy and colonization but it doesn’t understand how to work them into the metaphor. In fact, it barely knows how to work with the basic metaphor of “monsters” and how they function in the horror genre in general. In storytelling, the monster or the freak has always been the stand-in for the societal outcast. For the person who can’t be controlled by the dictates of polite society. They are the subtext for the outcast. But Wednesday makes the subtext text by literally splitting the characters into “outcasts” and “normies.” And yet the outcasts, the monsters and freaks who live on the fringe, are also the privileged and elite."