#society doesn’t vanish in the wilderness. it just shifts according to necessity.

[novelconcepts]

hi novel! i just saw your yellowjackets and american gods post and you managed to articulate something that's been rattling around in my head since I saw the first episode. I feel like in popular culture, "lost in the wilderness stories" like lord of the flies tend to be viewed as "watch these people become uncivilized." But with the yellowjackets, they're not necessarily becoming uncivilized - they're just creating a new society / culture that has set roles (butcher, acolyte, prophet, etc) and rituals (the card game, the masks, etc.). One of my favorite things has been watching the team slowly develop the customs that will eventually become the well rehearsed hunt we see in 1x01. Like I got really excited seeing Shauna cover her face with the scarf to carve up Javi because I was like "oh is this why the end up wearing the animal masks." To your point, if you built a society from scratch and were isolated in it for almost 2 years because that's the only way you could survive, it's probably very hard to return to the old one which is also essentially new. Blame it on my sociology degree but I fucking love analyzing this show and your meta is amazing.

Yes, this exactly! Like we love to pretend these stories are about the brutalist nature of uncivilized behavior, but that’s not it at all. It’s about finding what works to keep people safe and fed and going. You shed the parts that are just…extraneous, and you learn new skills you’d never need in suburban New Jersey, and it’s all just a shift to a new kind of perspective. It’s so interesting. Especially because we know “civilization” isn’t that different, in certain ways. It’s just about what society deems palatable. It’s not okay to stab someone who upsets you, but we see in the Taylors, and in the political event Taissa attends, that people will say truly vile things and just paste a smile over it. That sort of behavior gets dropped in the woods because it serves no one. It’s replaced with violence, but both kinds do damage. So we have a bunch of kids who have spent 17-18 years learning the rules of society, and then have to unlearn them in a hurry just to survive. Those who can’t shift their perspective, acclimate to the new rules don’t make it. It’s violent, and it’s devastating, but it does have rules. It’s something I can’t wait to see more of down the road.