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What’s your favorite Yellowjackets rare pair not like genlissa I mean absolutely out there

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Jackie deserves whatever she wants, and like i guess shes picked shauna as what she wants, and I will respect that decision.

“shauna doesnt deserve jackie” even if that’s true i cannot think of one scenario where jackie would let that stop her

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Natalie Scattorcio is Rose of Sharon Cassidy

natalie scatorccio is the sort of emotionally closed off character that you’d find in a post-apocalyptic video game who’s been surviving on her own for decades with nothing but an impressive stash of stale whiskey and a stray dog that follows her around everywhere

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I'm literally saying this with my shipper lenses off. This has nothing to do with liking or not liking them as a pairing. But I really truly think its foundational in understanding Yellowjackets to see that Jackieshauna is not fan service, they were built into the story with those particular undertones to their relationship from the beginning and it was for a purpose. The romantic and erotic elements of their relationship arent just piled on top of the story to add a bit of interest, the way romantic relationships often are, they are woven into the fabric of the show. It informs everything. It is the root cause of everything. For every major theme in this story, we can see how they set the precedent. The descent doesn't even begin without the secrets they kept from one another, and the reasons they kept them.

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baby purples martins have paused their slopping to

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i've written on it before in past metas but i think i sort of danced around the point in a way that could be communicated more sharply: i think it's super crucial to lottie's character to think of the wilderness as an abuser & to be curious about the ways that dynamic drives her actions and relationships with the other girls.

the wilderness as an abuser meta (with some lottienat side action)

i don't know if i have the energy to explain this as well as i'd like but something that can happen in an abusive relationship is "love bombing" -- there's the pop psychology slant to this which can get super reductive so i'm not trying to go there, but the main thing to understand with love bombing as a real tool of abuse is that it's often meant to isolate you. it's meant to make you feel that the person doing it is the only person who can really give you that degree of affection or attention or fondness & that if you let them go, you'll never ever ever be loved in that way again. (it keeps you in the cycle of abuse by preying on your insecurities and feelings of scarcity.)

the fact that lottie becomes a sort of conduit to the wilderness and therefore has a unique and special relationship to it that's admired by some of the girls who end up following her is deeply troublesome, not least because it plays into lottie's spiral into derealization but also because it's essentially giving someone who entered the wilderness profoundly isolated a sense of being needed for something that's yoked to her being unmedicated and growing progressively unwell.

i've waxed on in past metas about lottie being mixed, how untalkable her diagnosis would have been, the relative absence of her parents-- it all functions to make her an island. she's known but unknown. no one truly sees her, but the wilderness is of her and it can only be communicated to the other girls through her & that's a very dangerous avenue for lottie to gather a sense of self from because it's predicated on not just being unmedicated but on the fervent desire to take care of her team by following the whims of this new belief system.

how that all gets back into abuse-- the combo of the delusions and the feeling of being special, which is rather chaotically denied and affirmed by the girls over their time in the wilderness, is a kind of love bombing. you might argue that lottie doesn't actually feel special or god-like (and i actually think this is true-- she feels like a drowning acolyte trying to keep it altogether) but her baseline perception is that she is special because heavy are her shoulders wearing the crown through s1-s2. it's not the kind of grandiosity that smacks you in the face because it's much more restrained. lottie simply knows she's the one who hears the wilderness. she even knows it hurts and you must sacrifice to hear the wilderness, but it's coming from a place of love. she will give of herself for her girls, and she will partake in this relationship (as much as it torments her) to keep them safe.

lottie doesn't wield her connection to the wilderness like a weapon necessarily. she's not flaunting it. it's a steady knowing inside her. she's chosen.

and in any case, the wilderness is an abuser because what it demands of lottie are things you experience when you're going through abuse:

loss of personhood

as lottie deregulates she begins to lose the sassyness, bite, and sense of humor that we saw pre-crash. we get a bit of her old self right after the plane goes down: her snipes at mari and travis, and we get the briefest flash of it in the bathtub scene with natalie: "you fucking loser."

these moments are lottie to some extent, which we see echoed through to her medicated state in the adult timeline: "asshole" she calls natalie, calling tai out for simone, calling misty out for really killing someone, etc etc. even just smiling and being happy to dance together...

but in the wilderness? lottie is fucking losing the plot. she's so unlike herself, she's tormented, she's wearing the same clothes, she's saying less and less and less, she's pushing boundaries. her whole personhood is turning into acolyte, prophet, etc. her value system is blurred and hard to retrieve.

she's not pre-crash lottie at all.

punishment

this is a huge one. so one aspect of abuse is withholding attention to torment someone when they do something that isn't to your liking. this is so plain in lottie's relationship to the wilderness. for example, when everything goes down with javi and the queen draw (an outcome we know lottie didn't want), she proceeds to crown natalie as leader. the fact of the wilderness becoming silent to lottie around the same time as crowning natalie feels really important, because natalie is not the type of leader who is going to let shit fly that far off the chain again. we totally see the contrast in how nat walks the girls through survivalism in the spring. under nat's leadership, there is no cannibalism. imo, this is one the reasons lottie picked her (alongside the fact that i think she knew nat needed it but sidebar). she saw that nat would lead them through without the kind of horror that killed javi (and she was right)

but also, it seems like the wilderness really didn't fuck with that because it left her.

punishment, punishment, punishment. "you tried to play a game with me, you tried to give it off to someone else, but you can't, you can't, you can't." the wilderness is inside lottie and it has deep and incredibly cruel wants, but it's also the only thing that made her matter... it's the only thing that had her with both feet on the ground. and now it's left her and the absence feels like a hole in her chest. she's going to go fucking crazy if she doesn't get that connection again, that piece of her that actually for once mattered and that actually for once was needed and seen by other people. and this is how the wilderness draws her back to it. "you thought you could be anything without me? you can't." it's why imo, the second she starts to feel it again, she starts making choices at the expense of travis, at the expense of akilah, at the expense of nat, and to some extent at the expense of shauna (enabling her mental break as well).

because when you're living through that kind of abuse and the abuser has made itself your whole world, personhood, and identity, then other people become unreal. you can't really consider their needs because they're barriers to you trying to survive.

on the topic of punishment, i could talk a bit here about the mari warning as well but i already wrote a meta about that, so i'll link:

stockholm syndrome

i mean this one writes itself. lottie can't leave the wilderness because leaving the wilderness would be psychic annihilation. she's found too much personhood and meaning in her connection with the wilderness (and ofc, she's bought in to the idea that staying would be better for everyone: "what home do you have to go back to, nat?") without the wilderness, what is lottie?

i feel like there's a necessary degree of empathy that needs to be adopted when considering lottie's desire to stay behind because it would be easy to call it "selfish," which i mean she is (to our knowledge) an only child of rich elites, so there is that... but i also think purely considering it selfish and self-serving is a bit of a disservice to what it feels like to be abused. first of all, we already know from the cave scene with akilah that lottie doesn't think leaving will actually be leaving. the wilderness is inside now. one of the things that keeps victims of abuse from leaving their circumstances is that they are presently surviving it, regardless of how truly awful it is, & that attempting to leave might provoke enough anger that they'll either actually be killed or others (like their children) will be.

there's a lot of fear with even asking for help because there's often an earned paranoia around surveillance (which really matches the energy of lottie's conception of the wilderness & how she doesn't seem willing to communicate her torment to others) and an associated concern that even discussing trying to leave will trigger some form of violence. personally, i really do think lottie was willing to stay behind on her own and be with the wilderness, as wretched as that existence would have been. the fact of others wanting to stay with her was reassuring because the wilderness is fucking scary. she wouldn't be alone and yes it's awful but can you blame her for not wanting to be alone? lottie's whole life has been oriented around being alone with her own personal torments. maybe we can have a little sympathy for lapping up the offer to be with her team, even though it ends up hurting everyone.

natalie & lottie & abuse

but yeah, so that brings me to lottie and nat. one thing that i think is really fucking interesting about their dynamic in the scene where lottie says that she's staying is that nat is a survivor of abuse. if you take this meta i'm jotting down and put it in contrast to nat, it's pretty jarring. lottie is a lot like nat's mom in this situation, who we know was at least getting thrown around by her gun-violent father and possibly worse. the sort of similar deliriums (likely through drugs and alcohol with vera and ofc schizophrenia with lottie) is heart-breaking, and the concept of nat watching people descend into that both pre- and post-crash is also heartbreaking.

i mean, if you really go down that this path, you can see lottie being beat up by shauna as a super triggering event for nat bc of the way it might bring her mom to mind. i wrote a meta about her physical reactions here:

but yeah bringing that all back to lottie and nat's interaction when lottie says she doesn't want to go-- well shit, it seems like that would be a lot like nat's mom "choosing" to stay with her father despite the fact he's a piece of shit.

i don't know how extensively nat considers all this or relates it back to herself, but we do get an inkling that she acknowledges the wilderness as something bad for her team in the scene of her telling it off in the plane that they're going to leave it behind.

so nat thinks of the wilderness as bad and lottie is here telling her that she's staying and nat is trying to convince her to go and lottie won't fucking go, & then lottie says something (in a bid for connection imo but so badly worded) that shuts nat down and drives her away.

nat's choice to walk away from lottie in that moment is the choice of a child of abuse to walk away from someone who is not ready to end a relationship with their abuser. i think it's helpful to not necessarily read this interaction as antagonistic or abandoning but as nat's natural sort of orientation toward lottie, which has always been to not participate in the abuse whether she really understands it as abuse or not. she's an eternal skeptic and this decision to turn her back just as much as any of her other actions says, "i won't be a part of you hurting yourself."

which tbh to me is the whole tragedy/tension of their dynamic.

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Snakes have no business being as good at climbing as they are without limbs.

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Shauna being a canonical sadist and Lottie being a canonical masochist is so…..

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if tumblr shuts down we should all develop car crash fetishes and form an underground community that reenacts famous car crashes for sexual pleasure

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okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

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This might be a big ramble but I hope it makes sense

Jackie, Shauna, and Ghost Jackie:

Theres a lot of discussions about what it says about Shaunas perception of Jackie that Ghost Jackie is so much meaner than Jackie ever was. It tends to focus on how shauna misremembers Jackie though or a more direct analysis of what these hallucinations say about her state of mind generally. One thing I dont think gets enough attention though is how Ghost Jackie is a response to the anticlimax that was her last fight with Jackie.

In that fight Shauna is going deep and personal every step of the way. She is tearing apart all of Jackies self conceptions and views on what she values, and to an extent being really sloppy about it. If Jackie was a meaner person, or a person more intent on living when presented with a fight or flight scenario, she could have called out obvious lies like Shauna not even liking soccer more effectively. I think in a way, Shauna was most deeply hurt that night (not the next morning) by the fact that the hardest Jackie could hit back was quoting Beaches. Shauna wanted Jackie to hate her for what she did and for it to be symmetrical with her own "hate" for Jackie. If jackie hated her it would mean a transformation of their relationship, but a transformation of their relationship that was on equal terms and would probably in a way be energizing to jackie. The jackie in shaunas head would react with holy fury against her sidekick turned rival. Tried to destroy her in exactly the way shauna felt like she deserved to be destroyed. The real jackie just crumbled and literally died.

This is where shaunas perceptions of jackie and the real jackie do butt up against each other in ghost jackie. Shauna refused to face the reality that she hurt jackie and Jackie could not hurt her back that night. After the morning, she could never ever bring herself to acknowledge what that might mean about Jackies feelings for her because that makes everything so much worse. She didnt feel properly seen, properly acknowledged by Jackie, but it turned out that Shauna also didnt see and acknowledge what Jackie was. At that point recognizing the reality of the situation is just losing her a second time on a more existential level. She still loved the queen bee perfect princess Jackie in the same way that Jackie loved her best friend shauna who would never do anything to hurt her. Jackie dies dreaming of that version of Shauna coming for her, and Shauna keeps resurrecting her Jackie in her head to have the only relationship with her that she believed they would have.

This is kind of why I think there will be an inevitable point, probably when Shauna is dying, where shauna has to confront some image of the real jackie.

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honestly lottienat in s3 was pretty good for me. i think their lack of interaction (and generally lottie's lack of verbal interaction with most people throughout the season) is a reasonable transition into her going nonverbal post-rescue. it makes a lot of sense for lottie and natalie specifically to be awkward and on each other's periphery after lottie crowned nat. (remember: they largely hadn't reconciled everything going on between them in s2 before the queen hunt & nat seemed super triggered by the lottieshauna beating + the prayer circles and the deification of the wilderness is an ongoing tension).

then, you have to factor in lottie moving toward shauna's leadership & making some patently confusing decisions to onlookers (voting for ben's execution and then shoving the rifle out of the way). while i think you could reasonably read lottie crowning shauna as a partial move to save nat after she killed ben, this is also fucking confusing. on nat's side of things, this girl seemed to play to ben's advantage during the trial then turned around and voted against him then saved him then showed allegiance to shauna after specifically giving nat the leadership at the end of s2. like, jesus? what the fuck?

but what's so cool about s3 is that, yes, there is tension between them but there's also a lot of softness? by all metrics, nat should be as pissed off as travis toward lottie after she axes the frogger and tells everyone she's staying behind. by all metrics, lottie should be pissed off at nat for killing ben (who she had been putting so much energy into saving as the bridge). but neither of them really seem that angry with each other, besides a few sparks of frustration from natalie. even beside all that, she still turned around and tried to coax lottie to come back while everyone else called her crazy.

man, i don't know. there's just a lot of fun subtext to play around with in s3 wrt being connected, being betrayed, and feeling drawn to each other besides all that (nat turning around & lottie diverting the group when nat's pushed to the ground). imo it made the most sense for their dynamic, and while i would have liked more one-on-ones, i think it's true to form that they're just circling each other all season, some interesting glances and exchanges, but mostly just hesitant. & i also think it's true to the ways lottie doesn't seem able to share much of her interior with the others through s3.

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Gideon, about Harrowhark: I don't care if she's dead and in hell or whatever Gideon like five minutes later: kill me, kill me if it'll help, if there's a CHANCE it will help please kill me, I will die for her

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Atmospheric Railroad is always the episode I recommend to get people into the podcast.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to get into WTYP, but doesn't know where to start? From the beginning? Most recent and go in reverse? Just pick a random episode and wing it from there? Or maybe something more specific?

you can do them in an order at all really, the YouTube ‘top videos’ is probably the safest bet

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Do not my friends become addicted to water, for you will regret its absence.

hate when I'm trying to just take a normal drink but it turns out I'm thirstier than I thought so I end up gulping it down like a goddamn cartoon characer. the indignity of water lust.