Shoutout to u/Silvery_Barbs_5e --if not for your beautiful presence, I would've forgotten this in my digital vault.
*I forgot to mention that Oil of Antimony was a toxic chemical preparation developed by Paracelsus, so it's especially fitting that Wednesday begins her "prep" with a red-violet mixture.
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Related:
Breakdown of Laurel's notes
Alchemy-related posts compilation
You made many people HATE Laurel and that is impressive 🖤
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A Byronic heroine is the female counterpart to the Byronic hero, though she is considerably rarer in literature. She is typically independent, rebellious, intelligent, emotionally intense, morally complex, flawed, proud, uncompromising, and alienated from the world around her. She rejects conventional social expectations, carries some form of darkness or suffering from her past, and often embodies existential doubt, melancholy, cynicism, or a fierce, brooding defiance. Most importantly, she is not a passive romantic object. She possesses her own desires, agency, and power.
In other words, pretty much everything about Wednesday's character (and Catherine's).
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There are different subtypes of the Byronic hero across literature and media, depending on their primary motivations. A few examples include:
The Brooding Lover - the classic brooding, bad-boy romantic lead, such as the love interests commonly found in shojo manga, as well as Heathcliff and Mr Rochester
The Vengeful Outcast - the alienated figure whose suffering drives him toward revenge, such as Heathcliff and the Count of Monte Cristo
The Anti-Hero/Vigilante - the morally ambiguous figure who pursues justice outside conventional morality, such as Batman
The Monster - the dark, alienated, and often misunderstood figure who exists outside the boundaries of society or humanity, such as Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature.
The Byronic hero often overlaps with the anti-hero and villain because his moral ambiguity makes him difficult to classify as either wholly good or evil, giving rise to the Hero-Villain archetype, which exists somewhere between the two.
So far, we've got Monster Tyler, Vengeful Outcast Tyler, and Brooding Loverboy Tyler…maybe we'll hit the jackpot in Season 3 and get Vigilante Tyler.
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Related:
Tyler as a Gothic Hero-Villain
Wednesday and Tyler are written like classic literary romance
I've seen conjecture online that Weyler isn't dark romance, and I'm here with a Bachelor's degree in Literature and Writing to tell you it definitely is. Here's a heavily edited picture of my college transcript as proof of expertise. (Why yes, I did graduate Magna Cum Laude. Thanks for noticing. Some people partied in college; I spent my time analyzing symbolism at 3 a.m. because I am a nerd at heart.) 😏
Dark romance isn't just sad people with pretty faces or a beast with a heart of gold falling for a fair maiden. It's specifically a romance built around attraction that exists alongside manipulation, danger, obsession, violence, power imbalances, or other morally troubling dynamics.
By that definition, Weyler fits the genre remarkably well.
Wednesday arrives in Jericho and quickly realizes there's a murderer in the area. She meets Tyler, who initially presents himself as helpful, attentive, and genuinely interested in her. He's sweet, but with just enough edge to make him intriguing. Over time, Wednesday develops feelings for him.
Then she discovers he's the very monster she's been hunting.
This revelation recontextualizes their entire relationship. Tyler didn't simply keep a secret from her. He manipulated her. He used her obsession with solving the mystery to his advantage. He exploited her trust and her feelings while actively deceiving her.
That's not romantic. It's predatory.
And in dark romance, that's exactly the point.
Dark romance doesn't ask readers or viewers to ignore harmful behavior or pretend it's secretly healthy. Instead, it explores why attraction can persist despite those dangers. Wednesday is drawn to Tyler while he's actively lying to her, and that tension between desire and threat is one of the defining features of the genre.
By Season 2, Tyler's descent into madness with violence and instability become even more pronounced. The relationship isn't becoming safer or healthier. If anything, the emotional and moral stakes are getting darker.
Then there's the gothic element.
Jericho is a town built on secrets, violence, and buried histories. Nevermore has the atmosphere of a gothic castle. The Addams family legacy is steeped in darkness, mystery, and generational secrets and baggage. Tyler is literally a monster struggling with the most destructive parts of himself.
Those are classic gothic conventions.
The relationship doesn't just happen to take place in a gothic setting; it's reinforced by it. The atmosphere of dread, the family secrets, the monstrous transformation, and the constant presence of violence all situate Wednesday and Tyler within a distinctly gothic romance tradition.
What makes dark romance compelling is that it refuses to simplify attraction into neat moral categories.
It's easy to say, "He's the villain. She should leave him."
Realistically, she probably should.
But that's not what dark romance is interested in exploring.
The genre asks what happens when the attraction is still there despite the danger. It examines the uncomfortable space where someone can be both sympathetic and destructive at the same time.
Tyler isn't evil without nuance. Donovan was a terrible father. Tyler was manipulated and tortured into becoming a Hyde. He was sent away to a boot camp and returned isolated from his peers and denied meaningful support. None of that excuses his actions, but it does complicate them.
The attraction is real.
The manipulation is real.
The danger is real.
And that combination is precisely why Wednesday and Tyler fit so comfortably within the dark romance genre. If anything, Weyler exemplifies many of the genre's core conventions rather than existing outside of them.
Sixty-five years ago today, on 11 August 1961, the name "Wednesday" was revealed for the pigtailed Charles Addams character in The New York Times. The name had been given to her by toy manufacturer Aboriginal, Ltd., after the nursery rhyme "Monday's Child".
Wednesday was first introduced to the public in a Madison Avenue shop window, with the Wednesday doll released during the first week of September 1961.
If you're interested in learning more, I wrote about the Wednesday doll and her brother Irving (now Pugsley) in more detail here.
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Happy Name Day to our Princess of Woe!
It's 2025, and the question of whether Laurel has control over Tyler is still a confusing and unclear topic, but there's always this one line that confuses me.
That is, "Tyler was able to stand up to Wednesday; he was smart," but wouldn't that imply that Tyler deliberately deceived Wednesday?
I have two options here:
"Tyler has ALWAYS been under Laurel's control" = therefore, everything Tyler did was Thornill's idea.
Or
"Tyler was clever and beat Wednesday" = his deliberate cunning indicates that he intended to deceive Wednesday, because if he had been forced to do so, he would have shown little desire to deceive her.
Wouldn't the fact that many fans consider Tyler "smart" enough to deceive Wednesday imply that he never cared about her?
I find the middle ground, meaning less than total control, a very unlikely choice because Tyler never willingly helped Wednesday but merely tried to gain her trust.
The "trip" to the Gates mansion, however, is a strange moment because Tyler seems to have deliberately exposed important clues to unmask Thornill.
I felt that scene seemed written to advance the plot, not to respect the psychology of Tyler's character, and the fact that Tyler unwittingly "helps" Wednesday exposes a structural problem in the script: the character serves the plot, not the other way around.
For me, in that context, if he were truly cunning or completely devoted to Laurel, he would have hidden or manipulated those clues.
Or, rather, he would have tried to find excuses not to take Wednesday (and Enid with them) to the mansion, perhaps by saying that he took the wrong turn.
If he had been "smart" I think he would have been able to help Wednesday better and the scene at the police station seems a bit forced because it happened literally at a moment extremely close to Crackstone's resurrection, he could have done it even before if he had been smart enough.
Deceiving someone isn't a passive act: it requires intention, emotional control, and purpose.
So... yes, if we consider someone "intelligent" and "skilled at lying," that undermines any notion of total control.
The character's writing is honestly really poorly handled in my opinion.
New interview with Jenna!
Alembic: an apparatus featuring a tube bridging two vessels, used for the distillation and purification of substances.
Phlogiston: an element proposed by the phlogiston theory, it was an 18th-century theory suggesting that all flammable bodies contain phlogiston, and release it when burned.
White arsenic (Arsenicum album): a crystalline substance created through a rersublimation, it is renowned for its ability to “kill” metals.
