it's the way lottie symbolizes hope... or false hope (does it matter? "there's no such thing as false hope, there's just hope"). and the second she's out of it the group SPIRALS. akilah realizes nugget has been dead all this time. mari has a breakdown and sees blood on the walls. "the other tai" comes back. so of course lottie can't be the one who dies - hope is too valuable. so they'll hunt each other and they'll eat each other and they'll blame it all on her.
yellowjackets has slowly established that misty quigley is afraid of water.
she didn't swim in the lake with the others, she watched that rat in her pool— either watching it drown (perhaps not because she's "evil," but because she was unwilling to go in and save it) or watching it swim (and regarding it with a jealous curiosity, because she can't or won't ever do the same). she was even hesitant to get in the sensory deprivation tank, where we saw a brief panic before her "revelation." the only reason she got in at all was to stay at the compound, for nat.
this is not the first time this has happened, nor the most meaningful— when javi fell through the ice into the lake, and nat was at the edge, everyone was afraid to step forward, lest they fall in. but misty, who's terrified of water, leapt across it to save her. without hesitation. she didn't care about the risk, about it being her greatest fear.
because if it meant saving her, misty would swim across the ocean for natalie.
last kiss
(day 31)
This particular scene at the party in the pilot episode drives me insane
Still thinking about "It's not evil, just hungry. Like us. Just let It in." For everything that can be said about the season two finale, I think that line, at least to me, gets back to the core of what the show is about: this gaping, hungry thing that ate them back then and is still eating them now. The horror of the situation. The guilt of it. The way that they cannot move on from it, even now, no matter how hard they try. They weren't evil out there, they were hungry, and they were traumatized, and they were trying desperately to make sense of their situation.
That's the horror of it all, to me. It's not evil. It's just hungry. And there's still more left to consume. The Wilderness didn't teach them to devour each other; society teaches girls to do that from the moment they can understand social dynamics. The Wilderness is, however, teaching them to give into that hunger, and, in turn, to feed It, too. It's not gonna stop until they're all devoured, and maybe that's the mercy.
Thinking about Shauna and how she is so horrifically unfit to be a suburban mother, but wears the suit of it nonetheless. She has boxed herself into the life she believes Jackie would have had and will fight for it tooth and nail.
She has a terrible relationship with her daughter, but still tries to tuck her in at night with the toy she stole back at gun point. Her relationship was on the brink of unraveling, until her affair with Adam fell through and she realized Jeff could now see her wholly. She is so bored by suburbia, but on some level, still wants to believe she can be a part of it.
She is a caged animal who has clung to her own trap for so long, it has molded into her skin. She chews at the bars of her cage and its name is Jackie.
the amount of werewolf coding that both taissa AND van have, but in entirely different ways, is actually insane. like we have taissa, who is hiding her real identity and desires, who refuses to acknowledge the reality of herself, who isn’t afraid of anything but herself, who sees wolves around every corner and hacks them to pieces (subtextual werewolf coding). taissa, who also quite literally becomes an entirely instinctual, predatory, dangerous, possessive version of herself at night and doesn’t remember any of it. taissa, who attempts to resolves it with “i should be tied up at night” and bites her girlfriend who doesn’t care and refuses to leave her. taissa who, in the future, kills her dog and traumatizes her family and puts her wife in critical condition while in her altered state because she’s too terrified of herself to face it (actual blatant werewolf coding).
and then we have van, who’s dog-coded and loyal and ostracized because everyone knows she’s different and they can see it on her physically (subtextual werewolf coding). van, who is the victim of a literal wolf attack which nearly kills her and leaves her scarred. van, who gets bitten so hard she bleeds by her girlfriend, who is already allegorically a werewolf, and then follows said girlfriend around while she’s in her altered state at night. van, who clings so intensely to being alive that she willingly transforms into the most unafraid, brazen, feral version of herself, surrendering to the hunt, to howling, to feeding, to fucking, to the occult and the blood and the fucking oblivion of it all. van, who protects the pack, who protects its leaders with her teeth, who recruits the others into it with her, and refuses to let them pretend it isn’t real. (actual blatant werewolf coding).
oh, and they’re both covered in blood. and repeatedly fully naked as if it’s their default. and at home in the woods, loved by the woods, where the wolves live.
"i'm pretty sure it's exactly as bad as it looks" - 1x01 // 2x03
we talk a lot about Shauna being ruthless and violent and resentful, and not to say she isn't those things but also--
Shauna, who risks burning alive to save Van.
Shauna, who pauses to comfort the reunited Tai & Van after the latter is found safe
Shauna, who consoles and looks after Javi all through season 1 while his older brother is busy being misogynistic and getting fucked
Shauna, who takes on the job of butcher despite not necessarily wanting or enjoying it and never complains or slacks off even when the task becomes traumatizing
Shauna, who tries to get Jackie to eat, to keep going, when everyone else has given up on her by that point.
Shauna, who has to be goaded, essentially given permission before she becomes violent
Shauna, who loved her baby in spite of the stress her pregnancy added to an already precarious situation, who spoke to him and cradled him and futily tried to keep him alive, who buried him away from the others to keep him safe in death
Shauna, who kept her daughter's favorite childhood toy in her car long after she'd outgrown it, to always keep a piece of her close by
Shauna, who sees Tai struggling and invites her to stay over, so that Tai won't be afraid to sleep
Shauna, who goes along with Jeff's boring, milqtoast furniture salesman fantasies because while she doesn't love him the way she did Jackie, she does care about him and wants to make him happy
Shauna, who was the only one of the group to show up to Misty's how to get away with murder seminar and thank Misty for going to the trouble
Shauna, who is soft-spoken where Jackie is loud, conciliatory where Jackie is pushy, helpful where Jackie is lackadaisical, proactive where Jackie sulks.
Shauna, who's not a perfect friend or mother or wife but who's still quietly one of the nicest, most empathetic of the Yellowjackets and yet because she got drafted into being the group's butcher, wrote bitchy journal entries, and did one fucked up thing behind her best friend's back (which she immediately regretted and agonized over) gets rebranded by fandom as caustic, overly-snarky and quick tempered when it takes her 10 episodes to get pissed off enough to raise her voice
Dead cabin guy and his technicolor dreamcoat have haunted me since the wardrobe reveal in season two, and today im going to make it everyone's problem.
Travis wears the coat first. He and Natalie take the blessing and go out to look for Javi. Travis hallucinates (prophesies?) that Javi is dead and buried beneath the snow, but Natalie shows him it's only a fox. Travis finds the strange, mossy tree stump. The next day Travis has strong feelings about which direction is best to search for Javi in, and we don't see more of him until Nat reveals the bloody pants. Not that weird, all things considered. New season, new wardrobe additions. Hiking on a caloric deficit with PTSD, you'll probably hallucinate. Pretty standard stuff.
Then Nat wears the coat. She takes it to lay Jackie's bones to rest at the crash site, and while she wears it she sees (hallucinates? prophesies? I'm not sure!) the white moose that they'll later lose to the lake (ergo the hunt, ergo Javi dies for real but more on that later).
We get to Old Wounds, the hunting competition, and Lottie wears the coat now. You see where I'm going with this but just to be thorough: she enters the realm of death dreams, talks with Laura Lee, almost freezes to death.
Episode five. Melissa wears the coat. Maybe that's not important! Maybe it's just to show that they all share the wardrobe, and that the side characters are as equally All In This Together as the main characters are. Or it could mean something that a peripheral character, wearing important wardrobe, framed in antlers (not unlike Travis in 2.01), has the line "maybe he did die, and that's his ghost." It's a little suspicious, and at this point starts to feel like a pattern.
Who wears it next, who wore it best!? That's right baby, it's Paul! For his dreamworld drifter, hallucination hunk Coach Ben Scott. Nicholas Urfe himself. Ben spends almost all of his time in a dream, until *drumroll please* Paul, very pointedly, takes the coat and walks out the door. "Where do you think you are, Ben?" he puts the coat on. "You had to have known you couldn't stay here forever. [...] What matters now is that you aren't welcome here anymore." Following Paul means committing to death (to dream), and until interruption that's the choice Ben makes. Because letting Paul (and the coat) go would mean committing entirely to reality.
Of course, the pièce de résistance is something I didn't even notice until I went looking for it. The first dozen times I watched, I thought that after Lottie's beating Shauna brought her a blanket. "Lottie's cold." But she doesn't. She brings her the coat. Lottie is laying with it when, in a fever dream, she witnesses/hallucinates/prophesies parts of the hunt.
It's there again (on the back of the chair) when she sits by the fire and speaks for the wilderness, appointing Nat their queen. Ben watches, having woken from the dream himself, as they all bow to Natalie and leave reality behind for good.
Of course, there are a lot of times when characters hallucinate strange things in the cabin while not wearing the coat, because they're all starving to death and traumatized. Mari. Shauna. Akilah. But in addition to that, it seems like a pattern worth noting that in each instance where a character wears the technicolor coat, the line between the real and the imagined seems to blur with more ease. Does dead cabin guy's technicolor dreamcoat help the Yellowjackets connect to the dream realm?
I'll be brief here with the biblical parallel: blah blah Joseph is the favorite son (you were always its favorite), his father gives him a technicolor coat (they're nothing special, they don't change color in the cold or anything). blah blah Joseph starts having prophetic dreams etc etc his jealous brothers throw Joseph down a pit (the wilderness chose) and bring his bloodstained coat back as false proof of his death (hanging on a branch. a couple miles back). You get my drift.
Does it mean anything? Who knows. But in a series where wardrobe is such an integral part of the storytelling, it felt worth paying attention to.
“Storytelling” and Van in the role of storyteller. She tells them movies to keep them entertained, keep them sane. The Truth About Cats and Dogs. While You Were Sleeping. The Princess Bride. As an adult she has the video rental store—throwbacks, 80s movies. Keeper of old stories, stories she told in the woods.
What about something you haven’t heard before? The wilderness was lonely and violent and misunderstood. Also beautiful and full of life. Later—Lottie isn’t sick. We did this to her.
It’s called a narrative.
Van, mouth of the prophetess. Showing the queen around the room. Telling them what it means, declaring the rules: “it chooses.” It’s called a narrative. Calling off the hunt. “The wilderness chose.” It’s called a narrative.
I think this season of yellowjackets has been doing some rlly clever stuff with Shauna's pregnancy, specifically examining the ways pregnancy gets fetishised.
Shauna's pregnancy is a group event, it's a baby shower Shauna never agreed to, it's Lottie touching her body without consent, it's Misty and Crystal planning a song as if this isn't going to be intensely traumatic, it's 'OUR baby'.
So much of Shauna's dream sequence is just her and the baby - getting to have intimacy, and solitude, 'I just want to enjoy this moment'.
It may not be 'real' but the group DOES cannibalise her baby, in the same way Shauna cannibalised Jackie before ever touching her corpse. They're cannibalising the story of her baby, taking it in and using it for fuel.
And, of course, the instant her baby is dead, they all turn away. The camera turns away.
i like how the writers play with our appreciation of misty. "i don't like teen misty but love adult misty" is a common feeling among casual/first time viewers, often partly due to teen misty breaking the black box so early in the show. and it's so well done, because yeah that's the point. that's what teen misty was seeking when she developed acting skills. adult misty is funny and more private/restrained. she's more acceptable to others, allowing her to live in her "everybody likes me" fantasy, as long as she makes sure nobody who isn't a yj looks too close.
so, when someone starts the show and thinks the gap between teen and adult misty is huge (despite no real changes when it comes to her actions, her motivations, her moral compass), it only shows how GOOD of an actress misty is. my talented, dedicated and underrated queen
☔️🌿🫧
Boycott. Please remember to boycott. Only these three. You can make a difference.
please be aware that the palestinian BDS national committee has an official list of companies you are currently encouraged to boycott, and it is not the same as what is included in this graphic. while this post is partially correct in encouraging targeted vs untargeted boycotts (see the second image below for why this is important), it is also vital that everybody is on the same page as to what specifically is being targeted
as of october 23rd 2023 (the date the above graphics were tweeted) and october 30th 2023 (the official website) the companies that BDS is specifically targeting are:
as the graphic indicates the BDS movement supports & encourages the additional boycotts of dominos, mcdonalds, papa john's, pizza hut, and burger king. disney and starbucks are not explicitly mentioned by their official channels at the present time. if consumers choose to boycott these companies as well it should be in addition to & not instead of the companies on the official list
as a general rule, please avoid sharing boycott lists & graphics that do not come directly from the BDS movement themselves or which do not reflect the list currently on their website. circulating incomplete or inaccurate lists, even when they're as small as the above, is just as confusing and misleading to the consumer as those massive 60-brand long lists
My piece for Rosemary month day 1, from the start! ^u^
Gonna cry
:x
