#and thought you were getting sisterhood of the traveling antler mask?

[jilyandbambi]

the people who are pissed at Natalie's death and writing off the show bc it turns out the point of Yellowjackets wasn't some 3rd wave feminist #yas queen parable about rejecting societal norms and finding true freedom in the woods remind me of the annoying Intro to Womens Studies nerds who interpret the ending of The VVitch--y'know the movie where a malevolent entity uses starvation and grief to destroy the minds of an entire family so that he can isolate and sexually enslave the isolated & devastated eldest daughter for eternity--as a cathartic feminist metaphor.

people, the principal says it in the first minutes of the show: "all i know is that what happened was a tragedy. A terrible tragedy."

A. TRAGEDY.

because the Yellowjackets worked their asses off to get to Nationals. It was the biggest moment of their lives. They LOVED soccer. They were FREAKING PUMPED to get to Seattle and win the title. This was their DREAM.

because Jackie was a happy, perky kid from suburbia who was looking forward to going to college with her best friend. who found something to love about literally everyone but was doomed because you can't rally a starving team with a rousing speech and an ice breaker

because Shauna was going to go to Brown and grow up and find the confidence to be HERSELF instead of Jackie's best friend. And then she and Jackie have a fight and Jackie dies because of Shauna's betrayal, Shauna's jealousy, Shauna Shauna Shauna. Jackie will be a child forever because of Shauna, so how could Shauna dare grow up? She can't put her grief to rest because Jackie was never laid to rest because of Shauna. So Shauna comes out of the wilderness and marries Jackie's boyfriend and has Jackie's child and gets older year after year but never grows up because one night when she was 17 and scared she and Jackie had a fight and Shauna waited until the morning to say "I'm sorry."

because Taissa had a plan, had goals, had a future already mapped out. Nationals. Howard. Law school. Becoming a hot-shot NY lawyer. Because she got out of the wilderness and kept chugging along with The Plan because she HAD TO. But none of it is real to Taissa because you can't live and be numb, and Taissa has to be numb because if she lets herself celebrate the wins that she managed to swim while her fellow survivors sank, she’d have to remember that she too killed and ate her friends to get there. And Taissa--so distressed by what they did to Jackie she dissociated into amnesia--can't accept that, can't have that be who she is because it would ruin everything she wanted for herself. And then it's all ruined anyway.

because Lotte was a girl with psychic powers AND schizophrenia. She needed her meds!! Stopping treatment cold turkey is painful, disorienting, and SCARY, she needed support, she needed someone to tell her what was real and what wasn't because without her meds it was impossible for her to discern for herself. She needed support but got made into a god instead. And now a false prophet is all she knows how to be.

You get the idea.

The Yellowjackets didn't find freedom from society and the chains of the patriarchy when their plane crashed. They found starvation and guilt and loss and pain. The wilderness isn't a god of decadence and pleasure and ecstasy. It takes more than it gives. The team got to survive in exchange for slavish devotion and grief, and their childhoods, their dreams, their achievements, the people they loved more than themselves, the lives they’d been perfectly happy to keep on living.

They get rescued, go home, and grow into fractured adults who all, to varying degrees, actively make their lives worse because functionally, they're still scared, guilt-ridden kids lost in the woods who know no matter what that nothing will ever be okay again.

NONE OF THEM are glad that this happened. NOT ONCE does anyone say, "You know I'm grateful for this awful traumatizing experience because without it, I never would've [X,Y,Z]" NOT EVEN MISTY, who broke the transmitter so she could have friends for 5 more minutes. THIS SHOULD TELL YOU SOMETHING.

Yellowjackets is a TRAH-JAH--DEE.

#yellowjackets #yellowjackets spoilers #yellowjackets meta #yall are on my nerves #you saw some teens playing dress up and making out in the woods #and thought you were getting sisterhood of the traveling antler mask? #little women but in the 90s and with cannibalism? #bitches will say 'nothing u learn in school will ever matter' #and lack the ability to correctly interpret the basic surface-level themes of a 1hr program #WE GET IT u read The Song of Achilles during English instead of participating in the class discussion on 1984 #but now look where u are