cantstandlosingyou

[cantstandlosingyou]

a thing about lottie, teen timeline lottie specifically, is that the moment she took on her role as the team's spiritual leader she lost all other sense of identity.

i think the show subtly shows us how, despite how little of pre-crash lottie we see, that she behaved as a normal teenage girl mostly. she went to parties. she smoked. she cussed. she got along with some people. she didn't get along with some other people. all normal teen girl stuff. even the beggining of their time in the wilderness, when she was still medicated, she blended in with everyone else, got annoyed when travis took food, she even confessed her whole sthing with stealing tj maxx clothes.

but then as time passes by and lottie, now completely of her meds, starts seeing things and feeling things, and trying to understand and process everything that's happening she's slowly detaching herself from the rest and from this last sense of normalcy she had.

and when she starts gaining support as spiritual leader, when more people start thinking that there must be some kind of higher meaning to lottie's visions, then they don't see her as a team mate anymore either. and all of this further pushes her away from any sense of normalcy she had left, but it also drives her apart from everyone else. because they don't see her as an equal anymore. some think of her as some kind of god-adjacent-like figure (ie mari or van in season 2) or just straight up nuts (ie shauna or most of the team in season 3).

but there's one person who still treats her as normal (or as normal as possible given the circumstances). there's someone who tries to bring her back down to earth, to everyone's level, and it's nat. and i think that's what lottie finds so conforting about nat, because even with her visions and her feelings, nat still treats her the same; her view on lottie is not altered by lottie's mental illness. and that's another reason i love lottienat's season 2 bathtub scene, because lottie doesnt get to just be a normal teenage girl talking shit with anyone else on the team.

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last hot take of the day: while xander and willow might not have always been the bestest of friends to buffy, somtimes people put too much shit on them. i mean, they have certainly made a lot of very very big mistakes friendship-wise, but it is clear that their intentions are never intentionally harmful, and i think that putting the entire brunt for their disagreements on them kind of ignores a lot of nuances in their friendship, and in buffy herself as character. i mean, in the show it is shown to us time and time again how being the slayer, the chosen ONE, buffy always ends up feeling isolated from everyone. even as they helped her in her job, she knew she could never make them fully understand her, and that rift in their relationship has been there since day one.

it's also why i think the buffy reboot could do a good job at tackling this issue. i mean buffy is no longer alone in her position as the slayer, and that opens the door to a brand new way of approaching life for buffy, and, consequently, of approaching her closest relationships, allowing for their friendship to actually grow and develop in a healthier way.

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and while i'm still here can i talk about how a lot of love triangles in modern media ctually brought forward a lot of disguised hate comments. like the summer i turned pretty started coming out so now it's okay to hate women???? and that's without mentioning the blatant homophobia and racism i've also been seeing????

[cantstandlosingyou]

i'm feeling controversial so i thought might as well put out some opinions out there.

first up: i don't want either angel or spike on the buffy reboot. there. i've said it. there's many reasons, the most obvious one the fact that as both james and david are not actual vampires they've aged (which is a good thing btw!), but to me it's mostly because i really liked the ending of angel being quite open, and i think it would totally take the whole mistycism or whatever away from the series finale to find out what happened. i actually want no mention of them, in exception of like maybe how no one knows where they are or something extremely ambiguos like that.

[cantstandlosingyou]

"The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live"

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ok so what if i said that adult timeline lottie is possibly one of the most misunderstood characters in the yellowjackets fandom huh

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cangel deserved better this, fredsley deserved better that. wes and angel had such an important relationship, especifically in the earlier seasons and they never got proper closure to their whole season 3 fallout.

i mean, i truly think that wesley is probably one of the people who understood angel the most. let's not forget he was the one that could see through him when he fired the rest of the team in season 2.

i also loved the growth in their dynamic there was so much mutual respect for each other, but you could also tell that all that time truly made each of them care so much for the other. and that's why angel's so harsh about the whole fake prophecy ordeal in season three. because he truly felt so hurt and betrayed, because how could wes think that he'd ever do that. but then also wesley worked soo hard to figure out the prophecy about connor, for angel. i mean i know that it was fake and all, but he truly believed so much in angel it was unconceivable to him that it could happen, he desperately wanted to disprove it to the point where he thought he couldn't tell anyone, becuase he truly thought it almost impossible. but he also understood how hard it would've been for angel if it were true. and that's why he was so hurt after everything went down. because everything he had done was with the intention of helping angel, of taking care of angel's son. and angel didn't see that.

and also how, even then, still hurt, still mad, still alone, wesley put all his efforts into finding angel. i mean, he even let him drink his own blood to make him feel better.

and i know that angel understood more about where wes was coming from in season 5, and that wes understood why angel was slowly losing hope and, in a way, growing frustrated with, basically everyhting. but their relationship never truly fully recovered, and they never even got a scene in which they try to talk through their issues. and i know that it's impossible to expect them to go back to how they were, but i just wished they'd, at least, try to grow together y'know. i wish they'd decided to work on fixing what was broken, instead of just never fully acknowledging it and growing apart at a moment were they both really needed each other.

[cantstandlosingyou]

i've always thought that if writers really put their hearts into it they could workout a way to not have to either assasinate a character (literally or metaphorically) or recast them when an actor leaves a show.

i mean, especially nowadays with technology and such. for example if it's a workplace centered show, then maybe the character got a better job elsewhere, yet still keeps in contact and doesn't just ghost everyone or fights with everyone. i know it's a little harder for other type of show but i still think it can be done. in fact, i started watching veep last week, and what i'm thinking is something similar to how the potus, being such an important figure, has never made a physical (or any other kind) appearence. i find it very brilliant both how the way achieves this, and the way it works great for this show especifically, and it only reinforces this idea of mine.

[cantstandlosingyou]

okay i know it's probably because she's a relatively minor character who only really exists for comic relief. however. i think it's odd that spike is the one who gets paraded around by the fandom as The Exception to general vampire behavior when harmony kendall is literally right there.

does she eat people? yeah. but she very obviously doesn't do it out of any kind of malice. a girl's gotta eat, y'know? but unlike literally every vampire we know of, when she returns to someone she knew as a human (cordelia), it's legitimately just to hang out with her. and yes, she has a LITTLE trouble with her bloodlust, but she keeps it mostly under control all on her own. even spike returned to his own mother to kill her (with good intentions, but still). harmony just wanted to hang out and find a place she could fit.

is she a bad person? yeah, but only kinda. she's quick to double-cross and, again, eats people. she's disloyal and vain and selfish. but the fascinating thing about her is that none of those traits (except for the eating people) came from her becoming a vampire. she was all those things even as a human, and simply retained them into vampirism. but they also didn't really get any worse. functionally, she's the exact same person she was before being turned, which is nuts because no other vampire had that experience. would she have killed people as readily as a person? probably not, but the fact that her behavior and personality haven't changed at all... i feel like that's super fucking significant. right???

which isn't to say that spike isn't also an outlier to a certain extent, or that his more aggressive traits didn't exist in some form when he was human, but his change was big. noticeable. yeah, he's one of the more human vampires in the buffyverse. his ability and willingness to change and grow for the better shouldn't be dismissed. but he also only really changed because of external forces (the chip, buffy's belief in him, the soul). without them, he just wouldn't have changed the way he did. he was better than a lot of other vampires, but he was still a vampire.

where spike chose not to eat people after the chip and to win buffy's affections (something only really perceived as possible by anyone due to the chip), harmony chooses not to eat people without anything forcing her into that position. be it money, attention, acclaim, etc, she's perfectly willing to not be evil if it just means getting those things. no chip needed, no soul needed. someone says don't eat people, she doesn't eat people! mostly. she's not perfect, and she's still not a good person, but yeah.

[cantstandlosingyou]

buffy's most important relationship.

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noo because what do you mean that next season we're probably gonna see teen taivan break up (or at the very least the lead up to said break up) and we won't have adult taivan because van's frickin DEAD??? after everything they went through????? after everything i went through??? you can't just take my emotional support lesbian couple??? how am i meant to survive without them???

[cantstandlosingyou]

mari ibarra doesn't haunt the narrative. but pit girl does.

and not in a convetional way, because of how the timelines are written in the show, it would be difficult for pit girl to haunt the survivors, and literally impossible for her to haunt the teens. pit girl haunts the viewer.

with it being the literal first scene of the show, pit girl is always hanging over the viewer's head. wether consciously or not, as time passes the show plays with this. because we know pit girl's ending. we know it's coming. and up until season 3 we basically don't know anything else. but the show plays with what little we know.

there's honestly soo many ezamples but some of the most obvious ones are the passing of jackie's necklace, the first scene of season 3 with mari running in her iconic pit girl dress. even hannah's addition this season adds up to all of this given her obvious resemblance to pit girl: pale skin, dark hair.

so yeah, mari ibarra may not haunt the narrative. but pit girl haunts us. she has a screen time that probably adds up to less than 10 minutes, yet those are arguably one of (if not the) most impactful 10 minutes of the show. and it may not be as impactful to the characters themselves as it is to us viewers because of all this (even though it's obviously super impactful to them). because for us mari being pit girl was a moment of revelation, of culmination, it was the moment when you connect the last 2 pieces of the puzzle.

[cantstandlosingyou]

jackie taylor/lottie matthews, wilderness au, jackie taylor lives, friends to enemies to lovers, 80k words, slow burn, angst, hurt/comfort, 20+ chapters...

now who's with me...

[cantstandlosingyou]

im watching veronica mars season 2 for the very first time in my life and what do you mean i just witnessed a cordelia and willow reunion ???

[cantstandlosingyou]

biblically accurate vanessa palmer

[cantstandlosingyou]

as much as faith totally needed to be there for s7 of buffy given everything that was going down with the potentials and the first and whatnot i really wish she had spent more time with the angel investigations gang. i feel like she was such a great fit to the team. so much untapped potential there.

i mean we already saw how beautiful her relationship with angel was, with him helping her redeem herself, and always believing in her, but i really wish we had seen how her bond with wesley continued to develop y'know, given their former watcher-slayer relationship it would've beeen soo interesting to see how their dynamic continues to grow. and she and gunn had soo much chemistry in just those few chapters they totally would've hit it off. it also would've been nice for her to develop some healthy female connections and i mean, who better than fred for that, they could've had an episode similar about it, kind of like the harmony centric episode in season 5 where she befriends fred. i truly think faith would've fit right in with them.

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something i find very compelling about the angel gang in comparison with the scoobies is how it truly feels like they are all equals.

i mean each and every one of them brings so much to the table, and they all acknowledge the other's importance. not one of them thinks they're more important than the others. and you can also tell how noticeable the absence of just one of them is to the entire team. how much they all need the others, in every sense. it feels, to me, like they truly work as a unit. we can see all this in season 4 episode 10, when inside of angel's pure happiness-soul losing-perfect dream he straight up says it: they're all champions.

on the other hand, and this is not against the scoobies in any way, because i actually adore them, but they truly mostly rely on buffy. and yeah i know that willow's magic has saved the day time and time again, and how they all help with the research and stuff, but at the end of the day everything is still centered around buffy. we see this at the beggining of season 3, when buffy left after being kicked out and they struggled fighting with some vampires; we see this when buffy dies, we see how magic alone was not enough to keep the demons at bay; we see this in season 7, when they try to kick buffy out, only to end up being ambushed. no matter what, they rely so much on her, whether it is to make the hard choices, or to lead them, or to fight, they just don't work all that well without her. and i guess what actually bothers me is that they never really acknowledge that. i mean, yeah, she is the slayer so it's kind of given that she should be the one to do what she does, but sometimes it feels like they just take that into account when it's most convenient, and forget it when they don't really agree with what buffy wants/thinks they should do.