#study:yj

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Lottie saying “you were always its [the wilderness’s] favorite” to Nat is my favorite because if you interpret the show as non-supernatural then it’s basically Lottie saying Nat was her favorite of the team and the most trusted to lead. And Lottie and Nat are the two characters that struggle so much with their conscience and caring about others, so Lottie seeing that in Nat too and trying to make her leader so she can try to slow down this course the Yellowjackets are on and do less damage… basically trying to get Nat to help her, because Lottie knows she’s stuck in this position because of the other girls now (cemented after Misty told them they did the hunt because of her). But she knows she can trust Nat to still have some humanity even if ultimately it doesn’t win out. It’s just a romantic notion

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also I love when Nat is tripping in the pilot and sees Misty across the bonfire and that being a parallel to when Misty kills her in the future

I love how much it reminds me of Haunting of Hill House and this whole vibe of the wilderness haunting them without any constraints on time. like a pre-destined and fated thing but also not really because time is a flat circle. and the pendulum showed them an infinity symbol when they asked if they would survive the wilderness

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so in the scene where the yellowjackets get rescued, eight people walk to the plane. in Blood Hive, during the seance, we can tell that almost all of the answers given with the pendulum are bullshit (obviously) but especially because the last unserious question asked was misty wanting to know if ben likes her. the pendulum said yes, which we know isn't true 😭

but then javi asks if they're all going to die out there and after that, the window flies open and lottie is 'possessed', speaking french. the answer to javi's question about if they all would die was for the pendulum to swing to show eight, and the girls are sitting there debating what that means, so mari suggests it's an infinity symbol, not an eight.

i wonder if that was the man in the cabin telling them ahead of time that there would only be eight survivors, since javi asked. but maybe also the infinity symbol showed that the wilderness would 'be with them forever' too

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The scene in the pilot where Nat explains that she thought she did drugs to numb the trauma, but in reality it was simpler and it was that she was depressed because she felt like she lost her purpose and her place. This makes so much sense to me. Like modern life is so cut off from the way we are biologically built to live. There’s less tribalism and more individualism. People live more independently and cut off from each other in a lot of ways, only made worse by the internet in modern society.

Even if it was a cult, what they had in the wilderness was still an intimate society and like a pack. They knew their role and place and everything was simple. Not so over complicated and hollow feeling like modern life can be. They were always helping the pack. They were a part of the pack. They also allowed themselves to be free, no longer held back by societal restrictions. There has to be a longing for that which pushes them to revert back to being a cult in the adult timeline

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travnat is starting something toxic already.. like you can see it take root. travis feels emasculated and insecure because nat slept with bobby before they knew each other, and instead of considering that nat was manipulated (even when he had jackie standing there telling him it was considered creepy to her/other girls that bobby was sleeping with girls still in high school even after he graduated) or even that it was something nat regrets, he’s angry and assumes she has poor character like bobby. he thinks she’s of little worth because she slept with bobby

i can understand him feeling hurt she withheld the info/lied but it’s also not his business who she’s slept with unless she’s carrying an std, so? especially because in this time period, girls were being slut shamed even more than now. and that’s basically what he’s doing to her right now

then you have the way her dad was a freak about her sex life… being controlling about if she does it or how, acting like it’s some mark on her character if she did. so of course nat wants to fix things with travis and get his approval :/ travis is regarding her with the same contempt, like she’s dirty/tainted, as her father did. and nat can brush it off more easily with travis because she can just say that it’s him being hurt because she fucked his bully, but deep down even she knows that that’s an insane thing to be insecure about, given nat and travis didn’t know each other when she fucked bobby. she even tells him she regrets it and honestly she shouldn’t have even had to because she was the one who was a victim of that weirdo

travis is a teenager and it’s not malicious, he just genuinely feels hurt and has misogyny to unlearn. but it’s a particularly unhealthy thing for nat to have to go through because of her specific trauma. travis having a relationship with ANY of the other girls, even jackie (despite that she seems like she could be a lesbian) would still be less toxic than this shit with nat, just because the other girls either do stand up to him full stop (and stand on business) or they don’t possess nat’s unique trauma about sex and male figures

so it seems intentional, writing wise, that nat is paired with travis and gravitates to him. like i think they wanted to showcase allll of this, which is only reaffirmed in the adult timeline when everyone keeps saying nat and travis were bad for each other specifically. this probably only got worse after what she did to javi and all of the other shit they did in the wilderness

i think some kinds of toxicity are interesting to explore in a pairing (if they have good romantic or sexual chemistry as well), but since travis and nat don’t and their romance scenes make me cringe, i would never be able to ship it 😭 also this specific kind of toxicity (just misogyny and like? emasculation? or something?) gives me the ick and is not something i would want to explore or deconstruct in a shipping way. and that aside, the het ship taking up so much of nat’s screentime is also pretty tone deaf for ‘the lesbian show’. so they’re kind of just set up to fail with part of the audience. the casual viewers and people who do like most m/f they see in shows might enjoy the nuances of travnat but i think all of the above reasons are why they are disliked by the queer fandom

like honestly it would be more interesting to explore how nat’s relationships to women become closer because of the wilderness and the matriarchal cult and how that spirals out into her sexuality. her tension, borderline jealousy and overall conflict with jackie is explored far better in fics than in the show, for example