#oh look i talked myself back around to saying the girls cannibalize jackie again

[wistfulwatcher]

I don't understand why Jackie's team-mates are envious(jealous) of her, .Jackie is just a normal girl, what is there to envy?

an age-old question about popularity, anon!

jackie being a normal girl is part of it, i'd imagine. from the outside jackie has everything that a teen girl is supposed to want or need: wealthy parents, trendy clothes, a long-term boyfriend (break ups notwithstanding), she's pretty, and athletic, popular (she would have won prom queen), gets decent grades (though good or great grades seems more likely since we know she's not the best athlete on the team), has a loyal best friend, and has a leadership role in her chosen club. from the outside, what isn't there to envy about jackie?

especially when you look at her teammates, most of whom have something "wrong" with them compared to the above list. natalie has abusive and neglectful parents and does drugs to cope with her trauma, while jackie barely seems to drink. misty is an outsider who can't connect with anyone, but jackie is popular and a leader and so good at it that she even makes misty feel welcome. shauna struggles to assert herself and go after what she wants, but jackie tells her what to wear and drink and who to date without a second thought. taissa and van are gay women in the 90s, who either weren't out pre-crash (implied) or at the very least weren't dating anyone, and so the ease with which jackie and jeff got together and broke up on repeat must have been so frustrating to watch. lottie falls into many of the same categories as jackie, but while jackie's parents fawn over everything she says and does, lottie eats her meals alone at home and her father "shows love" with jets that take her miles away from him.

we talk about jackie being doomed by the narrative, and she totally is. but she's not just doomed to death; she's doomed to be two-dimensional. yellowjackets is a story about the relationship between a girl and her trauma, and you can't have a relationship when you're dead. like nat says, she's the "lucky one" because she gets to become a symbol (of rules, or social mores, of normalcy and safety) for the rest, instead of struggling alongside them. and what need does a symbol have of complexity? my first paragraph makes a series of assumptions about jackie, any of which could be false. we get glimpses here and there of jackie having feelings and thoughts and concerns that don't align with the things that make her someone to envy, but we don't know. we won't ever know in a way that matters to jackie. anything we learn now will be used to tell us something about the girls who are still alive, because jackie's only real function is to be fodder for them.