ENTJ 8w9 Characters
Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams is one of the most iconic gothic heroines in pop culture, brought to new life in Netflix’s Wednesday. Fans of the Addams Family have long admired her macabre wit and sharp intelligence, but in this personality profile, we’ll dive deeper into her psychology using the MBTI and Enneagram systems. As an ENTJ 8w9, Wednesday is defined by her fierce independence, relentless drive for control, and refusal to conform to societal expectations. Her dark aesthetic, biting humor, and unshakable confidence make her the perfect modern gothic anti-heroine and a fascinating case study in personality typing.
Extraverted Thinking
Season two opens with Wednesday boasting she learned how to “control” her psychic ability; this relates to her mother’s remark that she is always trying to bring everything under her control and to manage it, but because she forcefully directs her life, she loses her psychic powers. Then she becomes obsessed with regaining them using any method possible. She wants to “rule” the school, and insists if anyone is going to bring chaos to it, it will be her.
Rather than accept help from others, she frequently insists she can do it on her own, and bites off more than she can chew, because she sees herself as the most rational, competent person in the room. When she realizes Tyler has killed his master, she decides she will become his new master so she can control him, and prevent her vision of Enid’s death from coming true.
Wednesday is driven, ambitious, and firm. She uses Enid’s wolfing out ability to subdue Tyler and protect her friends in the second half of the season, after they switched bodies. Wednesday is forever creating firm boundaries with her friends, and insulting them in the process because she doesn’t “do” feelings. Like her grandmother, another ENTJ, she focuses on getting the job done, whatever that may be (solving crimes, preventing monsters from hurting the people she cares about, and getting revenge).
Wednesday can come up with and execute plans quickly, such as when she joins a social group at school, and figures out how to sabotage the competition the night before (she and Thing equip their boat with spears and other tricks to ensure they come out ahead).
Introverted Intuition
Wednesday is arrogant and bull-headed in trusting her hunches even when they are wrong (she has too much faith in her intuition, insights, and singular conclusions, which leads her to accuse the wrong person of a crime), and who connects the dots to solve mysteries around the school. She instinctively figures out complex intuitive puzzles, such as how to access the secret tunnels or figuring out Agnes’ “what is missing?” riddle to save her friends.
Given the chance to kill Tyler when he’s hooked up to Isaac’s machine, she hesitates and then frees him, perhaps out of her emotional attachment to him or she intuitively knows he has something to offer her in the future. She wants to control him initially and risks her life to do so, even though her mother warns her such a plan would be reckless and foolish.
When an editor sends her manuscript back full of notes, Wednesday says she does not intend to change a single word of it, showing her lack of flexibility when it comes to her individual vision for her artistic work. Ni-users can get so locked into “one way forward” that they fail to consider alternatives. Wednesday sees herself as a novelist and has no interest in anything else; she says being obsessive about one thing is an asset, not a liability (even if others see it as a problem). Writing what you know is a crutch for the imaginatively impaired.
Often, she has a sense there is more going on than meets the eye but has not “connected the dots yet.” She does eventually realize the truth about Thornhill (after a couple of false leads) and piece together the entire story, without having anyone tell her what happened, but it’s a slow process of getting there.
Extraverted Sensing
Wednesday’s tendency to leap on instant opportunities places herself, Enid, Agnes, and her other friends into danger. She recruits all of them to help her capture the Hyde so she can control it, even though it could rip all of them apart. She physically investigates crime scenes and enjoys getting her hands dirty; even as a child, she loved taxidermy and digging up graves. Wednesday challenges her mother, and Bianca to fencing duels.
When she thinks visiting a ghost will help her recover her psychic abilities, even though she’s warned that it could be dangerous, she runs out to the graveyard and engages with the spirit, never once thinking it could have negative consequences (resulting in a body switch that could get both her and Enid killed).
In the first season, she’s constantly in action and taking immediate advantage of opportunism: sneaking into cars, visiting morgues after hours, going to scary haunted houses in the middle of the night, facing down monsters, and being willing to torture or kidnap people. She baits a serial killer and then tortures and shaves his head before she turns him over to the authorities.
Introverted Feeling
Wednesday doesn’t know what matters to her until she almost loses it. Her emotions are subdued, and difficult to bring to the surface. She sees her mother as sentimental and emotional, and denies having feelings. Weems has to point out to her that things like hatred and a desire for revenge are emotions, because Wednesday denies she has any.
She knows what she likes (writing, solving mysteries, tormenting her brother, getting revenge) and what she dislikes (showing affection, admitting she cares about Enid, or “gushy” displays). Wednesday has no interest in making friends, but eventually gathers a group around her of others who share similar interests and values; she has zero concern for what anyone else thinks about her, and does not bother to adapt to them or try to make them like her. When in Enid’s body, she bluntly tells off Enid’s cheating boyfriend and breaks up with him. It’s a huge growth moment for her, when she can actually hug Enid.
The Enneagram 8
To Wednesday, everything is a turf war. Nobody gets to control her, tell her what to do, warn her to be careful, or assume she feels any emotions for them. She has no problem confronting dangerous situations without fear (in fact, that often gets her into trouble) or in telling off authority figures, since she rejects any consequences or limitations anyone wants to put on her. She is highly assertive, arrogant, and aggressive, constantly denying to everyone that she has sensitive feelings or any emotions at all. Wednesday makes it clear that she’s the only person who gets to bully her brother, and her desire to control Tyler shows that she wants power for its own sake (and probably, because having a Hyde would be useful).
She looks down on feelings as making others weak, which is one reason she conflicts so much with her 2w3 mother. Morticia wants an emotional connection, and Wednesday sees her as gooey and pathetic. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her or what they say about her, but shows tough-love (she tells her brother he is pathetic and too emotional; when Enid asks for her support in wishing her well on her date, Wednesday says “if he breaks your heart, I’ll nail-gun his”; even though she says she doesn’t care about anyone, when she sees three townies bullying one of her not-friends, she stops them and throws one of them in the stocks; when she sees her brother being bullied, she retaliates by dumping piranhas in the swimming pool; she even has her parents intimidated and concerned about her activities).
Rather than waiting for things to happen to her, she makes them happen through her high-energy investigation. Her opinions are dry and blunt and cutting (saying ‘write what you know’ is a crutch for the imaginatively-challenged) and like a lot of young 8s, she refuses to apologize, admit when she has been wrong, or admit she has vulnerable feelings. It shocks her that anyone would steal and threaten to burn her manuscript, because you’d have to be an idiot to mess with her (in her mind).
The 9 Wing
Wednesday just walks away from conversations she doesn’t want to have, people who irritate her and who aren’t worth getting revenge on, or her mother when she becomes emotional. She does not want to be bothered by them. It annoys her that she has to share a room with Enid, who has an explosion of color, noise, and fills their shared space with rainbows and howling friends. She blocks her out, puts down duct tape, and peels the color off her side of the window.
Often, it helps her to think to immerse and lose herself in her cello playing. Wednesday does her best concentrating when she blocks out all outside influences and just focuses on the music, but then rejects and ignores the advice of her music teacher in how to deeply connect to the notes. She just wants people to leave her alone and stop being a problem. She comes across as genuinely disinterested in other people and unaffected by the outside world. She spends a great deal of time alone, is self-reliant in problem-solving, and withdrawn/disinterested in the idea that she might need anyone’s help.
A Complicated Dark Heroine
On the surface, Wednesday Addams seems like an introvert who wants her alone space… but if you look at how she wants to “control” her environment and master her abilities, it’s a bit like if Hermione Granger (another ETJ female) went “dark.” She has a strong Te/Se bounce in which she misses intuitive insights because she is so quick to leap into action without foreseeing the consequences; this is common in immature ENTJs and particularly so for 8s, whose aggression leads them into impulsive decisions. Many ENJs struggle with a self-sabotaging lower Se. But they write her well, as a likable cynic who isn’t as much of a hard-ass as she tells herself she is; she cares more about her friends than she is willing to admit.
