#Natalie Wilder

[nataliescatorccio]

REUNION (noun): the action of being brought together again as a unified whole @yellowjacketsnetwork event 02: reunion

[riccissance]

something something shauna being most in-touch with her teen self during an act of violence and natalie being most in-touch with her teen self during a moment of vulnerability

[nataliesscatorccio]

Shauna and the baby were probably both going to die. depending on your interpretation of the dream realm, maybe for a time Shauna did die. something brought her back, or kept her from staying there. but it wasn't Mari's "wilderness, I hope Shauna doesn't die" or Travis' well intended but useless blood magic (recall Lottie "can't this just be enough? please?" it was never enough) or even the baby's death covering the symbol on the blanket in blood. those are futile hopes and bargains. the baby was already doomed. and the wilderness doesn't trade, we know this. it chooses. someone has to die. it took Crystal and spared Shauna. Shauna thinks she's been snubbed by the group and by extension the wilderness when it takes Javi and Nat is crowned, but what she fails to see is that she was chosen first. she keeps being chosen! not to die, to live. Coach Martinez dying to put her oxygen mask on. Jackie dying to later feed her. the wilderness taking Crystal (where is her body? it belongs to the wilderness now) to get Shauna through a dangerous labor. Nat dying in her place as the queen of hearts twenty-five years later. maybe it always did like Nat best, but it killed for Shauna first. and it kept killing for her. for girls like Shauna (and for girls like the Wilderness) isn't that just the shape love makes? a knife wound.

[hauntedbythenarrative]

My feral girls, my father would say if Helen and I appeared together

Yellowjackets (2021-)//Formerly Feral, from Salt Slow; Julia Armfield

[alicentflorent]

I think teenage Lottie was lucid enough to understand that the power of the wilderness stuff had gone too far and that she hated being used as the girls scapegoat and forced into a leadership position she never wanted so she passed leadership over to Nat, who was always the most logical and who always fought against the supernatural elements and actually kept them alive with her hunting abilities. Lottie figured Natalie would be their best chance at survival and that she wouldn’t let them take the supernatural beliefs too far so Lottie just used the whole “wilderness saved Nat because she was meant to lead” as a way to get the group to follow and believe in Nat in hopes that her leadership would put a stop to the hunting and cannibalism and take the burden off Lottie

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[axinite25]

more yellowjackets text posts because 🐝

[fatalforesight]

have you guys considered nobody in the wilderness has died in ways that couldn’t be considered a martyr? we know Jackie yes and to a degree Laura Lee but also Javi. Javi died a martyr against the group’s hunger. saints… the saints they are so tragic the saints the saints the saints

[kafkaesqueer]

Lottienat is so funny to me if you think about it from Lottie's pov. Imagine liking a girl and making up rituals to keep her safe but also to have an excuse to touch her but it only makes her annoyed at you, then her boyfriend -whom you tried to hunt down and have an orgy with when you're on mushrooms- can only get it up at the thought of you during their first time cause you helped him calm down during a panic attack once so now you're unknowingly a part of an imaginary threesome between you, your crush and her boyfriend.

[blu3dexr]

Me: “Your honor it was casual….”

The photo:

[hauntsthenarrative]

Blessed be the Daughters of Cain

Bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers committed long before their conception

Blessed be their whore mothers, tired and angry waiting with bated breath in a ferry that will never move again

Blessed be the children, each and every one come to know their god through some senseless act of violence

Blessed be you, girl, promised to me by a man who can only feel hatred and contempt towards you

I am no good nor evil, simply I am, and I have come to take what is mine

I was there in the dark when you spilled your first blood

I am here now as you run from me still

Run then, child

You can't hide from me forever

[kings-paintbrush]

”The Wilderness”

work in progress, extra stuff under the cut may not finish due to Art Fight.

I’m a black, queer artist! My art tag is #king’s paintbrush and my requests are open!

LINK TO ALL MY YELLOWJACKETS ART THUS FAR!

and remember, reblogging helps artist!! ^^ :3

It’s always MOTHER Nature. I’ve already shown this to a few of my mutuals but to explain the symbolism; she’s a black woman, to sort of explain away the French component of the wilderness. She’s hatian creole. The hair will be in really tight coils/curls, but with a few… oddly placed braids. Hair braiding is just a really common girlhood thing in my opinion. I say oddly placed bc I want it to sorta look like a little girl did them

The wilderness is brutal, it IS survival. It is hungry, it is violent. But unlike man, she is not brutal without reason. She is not evil, she is hungry. To be a woman is to be in constant pain one way or the other, to be born is to die in a sense. In order to feed, to eat, you need to kill something to prosper.

she has a chubby/mid sized body to kind of mimick my own. And to mimick the older beauty standards of being wealthy = more food = more attractive. To strive under the wilderness would acquaint to being well fed. (And like how Greek statues have belly rolls, those r so pretty)

the wilderness in this interpretation isn’t human, the deer “mask” is fused to her face, it is her face.

some drawing details; Akilah’s dead mouse is in the antlers

The body is going to resemble a skinless cadaver, like the muscle models seen in science (or the collosal titan from AOT-) she’s meant to be foaming at the mouth, to sort of represent the feralness of the girls

I may modify the pose, she’s hunting, stalking, like an animal

I guess at the end of the day, humans are animals.

[angelicalghost]

Yellowjackets aesthetic.

[deankarolina]

A Softer Wilderness ⤷ the things we did

[milf-lover42]

If you think I will ever be over Misty breaking the hunt rules to save Natalie you are wrong.

If you think I will ever be over Nat making Shauna look her in the eye, not just to make her think about what she’s doing, but so that Nat isn’t facing Misty when her throat is cut? Making sure at least Misty doesn’t see the very moment the life drains from her? You are wrong.

If you think I will ever be over the incredible amount of hesitation and anxiety on Misty’s face when Nat and ONLY Nat draws a card? You are wrong.

If you think I will ever be over the fact that while Misty stays up to care for Lottie, Natalie stays up and in a corner to make sure she can see and protect everyone sleeping on the ground level, both denying themselves sleep to keep everyone else safe as the Caregiver and Protector of the group? You are wrong.

And if you think I will ever be over the adults splitting into the believer (Lottie Tai Van) and non-believer (Misty Shauna Nat) groups when they argue at the beginning, you are wrong.

[sleepylittle-wolf]

Young and sweet, only seventeen...