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softantlers · 9 days ago

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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.

#yellowjackets meta #lottienat #lottie matthews #natalie scatorccio #idk man im tired #a dissertation at 4pm on a wednesday

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