Rainbow nails and pitch black: how Enid and Wednesday echo Seanan McGuire’s wayward children

What does Wednesday and the book series Wayward Children have in common?

Some stories begin with a door. Not one that opens for escape, but one that offers recognition. A door that says: this world was made with you in mind.

Stories like these offer more than escape. They create emergence, something louder, sharper, stranger. They make you visible. In both Wednesday and Wayward Children, the journey stitches together the fragments that never fit: the claws you were told to file down, the shadows you learned to love, the grief you carry like a name. These are tales of transformation through collision. A cello string stretched against a howl. A pastel nail glittering beside a raven's feather. The real magic hums in that contrast. Not in sameness, but in survival.

In Wednesday, the shared dorm room becomes more than a clash of pinks and grays. It flickers like a threshold, a liminal space where enamel claws meet cello strings, where glittering wolf howls coil around ancient family curses. Enid bends reality with every spark of neon, turning sunlight into spellwork. Wednesday drapes silence like a veil, each movement carved from ancient ritual. Together, they weave a tension that sings in two voices, distinct, dissonant, and fiercely alive.

That energy hums with the same charge found in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. These are portal fantasies where kids find magical worlds that match the shape of their souls, and then return changed, marked by that belonging. The books speak in the language of queerness, neurodivergence, and refusal to shrink. They understand that identity isn’t a disguise to be removed. It’s a home to be built.

So maybe the question isn’t just what Wednesday wants to say. Maybe it’s what it dares to become.

The world behind the door: what Wayward Children really tells us

Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series begins where most fairy tales end. It follows not the journey into wonder, but the ache left behind once that world slips away.

At its center stands Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a sanctuary for those who crossed into other realms and carry their echo in every step. These are not generic adventures. They are intimate, unnerving, strange. A clockwork kingdom built for a girl who lives by rigid patterns. A world of sugar and rot, perfect for someone who finds beauty in both. A forest that reshapes grief, a saltwater realm that soothes with stillness. Each door matches a pulse, a need, a hidden truth that finally finds air.

The children who return carry entire worlds in their eyes. While families call it confusion and schools suggest correction, Eleanor’s home offers something else: space for memory to take root and bloom, without apology.

McGuire’s writing flows through gender, neurodivergence, longing, queerness. Not as banners, but as breath. Each volume dances to a different rhythm, but they all turn the same key: the search for a place where the self becomes more than bearable. It becomes sacred.

Shared thresholds: how Wednesday mirrors the wayward

Wednesday Addams walks through Nevermore like a ghost in her own story. She’s present, but not at rest, a creature of routines, resistance, and sharpened solitude. Enid Sinclair, all fanged warmth and chaotic color, becomes her accidental tether to something almost like belonging. They clash. They orbit. They bleed into each other’s space like two worlds with mismatched gravity.

This dynamic resonates deeply with the way McGuire’s children navigate the aftermath of their journeys. Just as Jack and Jill return from a world of gothic horrors with opposing desires, or Nancy longs for the stillness of the dead while surrounded by noise, Wednesday and Enid embody that same contrast of internal landscapes. One seeks stillness. The other howls. Yet neither fits the world that claims them.

Like the wayward children, they’re not framed as puzzles to be solved or fixed. Their identities pulse with conviction. Wednesday carries precision without apology. Enid burns in full color. What the narrative offers, even if tentatively, is the possibility of coexistence without erasure. A kind of gothic synesthesia, where difference creates resonance rather than rupture.

This is where the Netflix series begins to feel like its own portal fantasy. Not one of glowing doorways and otherworldly kingdoms, but of dorm rooms and cello strings, where magic slips in sideways. And somewhere between claw polish and bloodlines, it asks the same question McGuire’s books whisper: what if your world isn’t out there, but already beside you, just waiting to be seen?

Dorm rooms and dichotomies

In Wayward Children, Nancy shares her room with Sumi, a girl from Confection, a world of sugar, nonsense, and unfiltered brightness. Nancy has returned from the Halls of the Dead, where silence is sacred and stillness is survival. Sumi, all chaos and curls, moves through the world like a kaleidoscope that never stops turning. They are night and day, sweet and solemn, static and kinetic, but they aren’t enemies. They are a mirror with no demand for symmetry.

There’s a moment early on when Sumi bursts into Nancy’s life like frosting on fire. She jokes, teases, touches her things, asks strange questions, calls her a servant of the Queen of Cakes. Nancy, calm and composed, doesn’t reject her. She answers. She listens. There’s friction, but beneath it, recognition, the kind of bond that forms not from agreement, but from being seen and staying visible.

This rhythm echoes in Wednesday. Enid and Wednesday share a space divided down the middle, but their differences aren't obstacles. They’re coordinates. Enid throws light and glitter like a wolf who’s never been told to sit still. Wednesday composes her silences with surgical precision. They move toward each other sideways, with glances and grudging care, learning the shape of one another without trying to redraw it.

Nancy and Sumi never become a love story. But they become a story of contrast held without correction. Of intimacy born from proximity. And Enid and Wednesday follow that same quiet gravity, one that doesn’t ask for sameness, only presence.

A door half-open: will Wednesday follow through?

In Seanan McGuire’s universe, queerness moves through presence. It is architecture, myth, and inheritance. It shapes the doors. It chooses the worlds. The Wayward Children series places otherness at the center, and by doing so, it offers a kind of narrative that refuses to apologize, soften, or subtextualize identity.

Wednesday exists in a different landscape, tied to legacy IP and bound by audience expectation. Yet even within those limits, something unruly pulses beneath the surface. The bond between Enid and Wednesday is framed with care, tension, and vulnerability. It carries the scent of becoming. And the fandom—loud, sharp, unrelenting—has named what the show has not. Wenclair is not a side note. It’s a question waiting to be answered.

So what happens now?

Wednesday Season 2 has the chance to cross a threshold. Not as bait, not as ambiguity, but as affirmation. To say that gothic girls can fall in love with werewolves and still keep their cello and their claws. That difference isn’t a wedge. It’s a constellation. That a dorm room, or a garden of monsters, or a friendship laced with friction can hold something holy.

If Wayward Children teaches anything, it’s this: the door answers those who are ready. It responds. To longing, to truth, to the refusal to disappear. And maybe Wednesday is almost ready to knock.