memory-garden

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butchers your queen

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I know pre-crash Lottie is considered a bit hard to characterise because we don't get much time with her, and Lottie does go through a clear shift due to her grief and slipping into psychosis, but I do think we know enough. Ultimately, she's who she always was; outwardly confident, single-minded, idealistic, deeply caring, and desperate for people to open up to her, all whilst being hesitant to open up to them in return for fear of being rejected. We see it in the way she carries herself in the Pilot, in Nat saying she only talks shit when people deserve it, and, conversely, how lonely she appears in her family home. A child eating breakfast alone at dining room table meant for eight. Is it any wonder her room is full of photos of the team pre-crash, perhaps the closest thing she ever had to her idealistic understanding of family. She likely claims Shauna's baby as "ours" because of this same compulsion, a desire to finally have the family she's always wanted. Creates a community in her adult life, and pulls Nat into it because she knows Nat's alone too. Because she's always known Nat wants the same thing, a proper home; both of them identifying that truth in each other though they can't bring themselves to voice it. The only time Lottie even comes close to acknowledging it is when she asks Nat what she has to go home to.

All Lottie's ever wanted is to give the people she cares about what she believes they need, even if it's not what they want. Even if they might hate her for it. She cares too deeply to do anything less. I think it's been made clear, the wilderness didn't change any of them fundamentally, it just uncovered a truth or potential in each of them that was already present. Lottie's desire for family and community has always been at the root of almost every decision she makes, and that didn't start in the wilderness. Her relentlessness, desire to protect "her own", and ability to see fundamental truth, didn't start in the wilderness. Lottie has always been Lottie, with her core traits and desires exactly what they always were. She just expresses herself differently as her perception of reality changes.

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just saw someone call Lottie Matthews straight. like. fine ig but I’ve never seen a straight girl be as weird obsessed with other women as Lottie is. she goes passively suicidal over 2 different women and then has a 3rd one we all know she’d be trying to impregnate if it was physically possible

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queen of hearts

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Can we just acknowledge that Lottie is the only person we ever see Nat accept comfort from? Throughout the series, in both timelines, Nat suffers alone and in silence. Travis reaches out to touch her after both Javi and Coach Ben’s deaths, but she walks past him in both instances. When she finds Travis’ body, Misty attempts to comfort her but Nat pushes her away. Whenever Nat breaks down, she turns inward, shutting others out instead of seeking connection. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final moments of 3x09, when she begins to sob and everyone around her vanishes, leaving her utterly alone. It’s a visual metaphor for the profound isolation that defines how Nat experiences pain.

Given the nature of Nat’s home environment, I don’t think she ever learned how to accept tenderness and physical intimacy beyond sex. It’s foreign to her. And, on a deeper level, I think she doesn’t believe she deserves this kind of intimacy and unconditional care.

But, in this moment with Lottie, she finally allows herself to be held. For what might be the first time in her life, she feels safe enough to surrender, to lean into someone else’s care without flinching. She even feels safe enough to regress to a younger version of herself, a form of healing her inner child as she lays her head on Lottie’s lap. We see Nat engage in simple hello or goodbye hugs (or moments of sexual intimacy) with other characters, but Lottie is truly the only character Nat physically embraces in this unguarded, emotionally vulnerable way.

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That awkward moment when you kidnap your highschool situationship and force her join your cult activities (therapy) and you start to mend the gap between each other. Then all of a sudden your other teammates from highschool show up and none of them has any idea of what’s going on, but it’s making your schizophrenia worse because it’s triggering the trauma from that one time you were all in a plane crash together and you were unmediated. You’re getting actively worse and it’s making you lose yourself again so you tell everyone to leave, turns out almost everyone has been in the murder of a guy named Adam and now everything’s fucked 10x worse. You propose a hunt which ends up getting your situation killed. You just wanted to keep her safe. It was never supposed to be like this.

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a protection spell that is doomed to fail eventually in the future… or something like that 🐝

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animal crossing lottienat n old doodles

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lottienat cowboy au where they're (one-sided) rival bounty hunters!

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Sketches of LottieNat pre crash kisses because I have free will and can draw

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how that scene went basically

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"We got too arrogant. It’s unhappy with us. We have to prove our faithfulness."

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lottienat 🚬 buddies i know thats true

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dynamics i've been wanting to gif: lottie & natalie - yellowjackets Good game, loser. / You talking shit? You little bitch.

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I feel like I'm goin' nuts every time I see a post that says "oh they were all supposed to be insane cannibals but now only Shauna is like that and everyone else is just scared of her." No, they literally just condemned Coach Scott to death, tortured him because of a gas-huffing prophecy, ate him, and danced around his severed head like 3 episodes ago. Only Natalie objected to this on any meaningful level, and she was ostracized and punished for it.

The reason they're freaked out about Mari is because she's one of them, instead of an outsider. Literally, in the finale, they make a distinction between killing "enemies" and spilling their own blood- this is the line that some of the girls aren't willing to cross. That doesn't make them not villainous, or violent, or cannibalistic! It's actually not "better" to display some guy's head on a spike just because he's Not One Of Us. Shauna is terrifying because she's unwilling to make that distinction- she literally interrupts Van and Tai's plot to give Hannah the queen! Which they rationalized because she wasn't one of "them." And, in the adult timeline, Taissa decides that Shauna is the problem because Van dies, when approximately 1 day ago she was considering hunting down random people to murder on Van's behalf. It's easy to rationalize violence when it's not happening to people you care about, which is the brutal philosophical bedrock of civilization. The one taboo that most of the Yellowjackets are unwilling to break is killing the people you love, and Shauna has had her ability to love stripped away to nothing.

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wdym u have a bunch of team dresch tickets, natalie..