One of the greatest and most profound tragedies of Yellowjackets has and always will be Nat’s inability to free herself from the prison of that plane. She’s the one constantly returning to it, a sarcophagus holding the ghosts of her old world. She finds herself there in her nightmares, and in her final moments she recognizes that this plane has held her soul captive for 25 years. No matter what happened before the wilderness, within the wilderness, and after the wilderness- her essence was tethered to that sarcophagus where she so devotedly laid her friends to rest. It’s where she returns in her death, mocked by a ghost of her former self that she never left. And when she lays Ben to rest there, she feels the ghosts of this place pulling at her, taunting her. She rejects it, threatens it by claiming it can’t keep her there. But in the end, it’s not true. In the end, Natalie never was able to free herself from that place and everything that came with it. In the end she was fractured between two worlds and unable to make the peace between. So in the end, she returns to the souls she laid to rest there.
"I'm not supposed to be here." "We both know that's not true."
everytime nat tries to help ben she gets it wrong. she insists on the trial being two thirds majority, so they have to keep voting and eventually find him guilty. she tries to keep him alive which only puts him through more pain. she mercy kills him and literally the next fucking day people show up that would have rescued them if his fucking head hadn't been on a spike.
i love her so much, she is so fucking kind and so determined to do the right thing and the universe (or the wilderness or whatever) keeps fucking her over so it's no fucking wonder she ends up the way she does.
there's something so poetically tragic about the fact that a simple majority win would have saved Coach Ben but Nat's insisting on a two thirds majority in her fervor to save him ended up condemning him nothing she does and everything she does works whoever she tries to save dies including herself
thinking about nat's hand twitching to reach out and stop shauna
something something about it hitting far too close to home for nat.
seeing shauna beating lottie to a bloody pulp and immediately being transported back to her childhood.
paralysed by fear like she’s just a scared little girl again. unable to help, all she can do is stand and watch and hope it’s not her next.
OH WHAT THE FUCK.
like im sorry what do you mean natalie pulled her friends, her people, from starvation and winter into a flourishing community. what do you mean she taught gen to hunt and helped akilah raise animals and built them a garden. what do you mean she led her teammates out of fire and into a beautiful home and tried to help them put their hurt and pain behind them. and then they got rescued and none of that fucking mattered anymore. they got rescued and she lost her purpose. only it wasn't just her purpose as the hunter, it was her purpose as their leader, as their guide, as the one who brought them back from the brink. what the fuck.
the yj fandom doesn’t talk enough about how nat guessed ben was gay bc he never looked at the girls boobs, meaning she was expecting grown men to be looking at her and her teammates that way. she’s canonically a statutory rape victim, when travis asked her about how many guys she’d been with she mentioned sleeping with an older man at a concert while she was “fucked up”. there’s also the bobby farleigh thing, although we don’t know how old he is, just that he graduated, meaning he could be 18 or 25. her dad was a violent misogynist who viewed her as his property and thought her having sex was her being tarnished. she felt empathy for travis, which i understand but she was also willing to excuse him being misogynistic and literally pointing a gun at her. she’s so used to men being awful that she accepts it, probably rationalizes it as just being how men are. she reminds me of my older sister.
This is my favorite Natalie scene because it’s so perfectly representative of her character and morals. She buys something from the vending machine and it doesn’t work, so she breaks the glass with a fire extinguisher and only takes what she paid for.
Nat will do bad things to get what she needs (in this case M&Ms lol) but only if she views it as fair and necessary in some form. The machine took her money, so she’s going to get what she paid for, and nothing more. She has integrity. Even after 25 years, she is still the same moral compass she was out in the Wilderness, which is why she is the character most riddled with guilt.
How dare you leave this Jason Todd discourse in the tags.
