one of the most complex and delicious choices they made with misty is that she genuinely understands what kind of attention is valuable. they crafted this character who is so desperate for love, so hungry for attention and companionship and recognition, a woman who would doom her entire team to a life in the wilds just to hear one more nice thing said about her, and then they put her in a position to grab at fame. when the team is rescued, misty would have been barraged with offers to tell her story. media appearances, interviews, book deals. people would be able to recognize her on the streets, she would have been (at the very least) a local celebrity for the rest of her life. she smiles when she sees the flash of the cameras getting off the plane; she wants to be seen, and the offer is right there in her lap.

instead, she stays silent. she stays out of the limelight, she says as little as possible, just like they all made a pact to do. can you imagine just how difficult it was for her to say no? for her to see that people would be falling over themselves just to talk to her, that she could have used what happened to make connections, make friends, be famous and lauded, sympathized with, talked to, complimented. she could have told the world how SHE was the one who saved them, who got them through the worst moments of their lives when the plane crashed.

and the price for all of that is to admit to some cannibalism? she has no shame about what happened. she eats jerky and wears heart necklaces and remembers the wilderness with open fondness. besides, she knows how to sell herself, how to spin what happened. when she pretends with jessica, she paints the perfect portrait of a victim, the perfectly sympathetic survivor wracked with guilt for what she had to do.

all of that is right there within her grasp. so why doesn't she go public? she displays absolutely zero guilt over breaking the black box, or anything else she did in the wilderness. literally the only reason she never breaks the silence is to protect her team. her friends. to honor whatever pact they made. a pact she makes in '98, when they're still together. when she thinks their lives are all so deeply entangled and their bond is so permanent and unshakeable that it would be easy to choose this family over public attention. it makes sense that she keeps quiet in the beginning.

but the team breaks up, and as far as misty knows they all go their separate ways. still, misty stays quiet. years pass and no one calls her, no one visits. so she goes on unsuccessful dates and works a job where her co-workers seem to barely tolerate her. she gives socks to gross men who still don't call and lives alone and gets a parrot who never talks to her.

she spends her adult life living with her loneliness because the people she loves asked her to, and then forgot she existed.

25 years of this deep sense of loneliness and she never wavers. never tries to tell her story or make a grab for the fame she knows she could still get when she looks at "25th anniversary" splashed over the tabloids. in a world that has grown up around her to create social media and influencers and viral posts. every single day it would have gotten easier for misty to reach out and take even a small slice of the attention she so badly wanted her whole life.

instead, she quietly follows her actual friends. she tracks weddings she's not invited to and the birth of children she'll never meet. she registers to vote for a woman who might not even know she's still alive, and decides that it's enough. that 25-year-old memories of true connection are better than acknowledgement from a million strangers. she collects all of these little details and files them neatly, an umbilical cord of connection that she is the only one supporting. like this information will be important again, relevant again. she sustains herself for twenty-five years off of the mere possibility that maybe, somehow, someday, she will be part of her team again.

and then, like finding the flashing red light of a black box while she's all alone, the universe rewards 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.

and to think that this all happened because laura lee called her piano teacher a cunt

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.

thinkingthinking about all the accidental kills .. javi falling down the ice, jackie falling asleep outside at the mouth of winter, crystal falling off the cliff .. and the nat tragedy .. and how accidental doesn’t mean blameless .. how “accidental” is so perfect for them to make up a /story/ that absolves them

the “accidental” is so convenient to feed the myth of IT. they basically form a structure/situation where death becomes a highly likely possibility and try to do it the best way they can so that it doesn’t become Murder. so that it’s not Them but the Wilderness who chose.

nobody being really responsible for nat’s death is so … utterly bleak. maybe no one is to blame, maybe the big wilderness IT is, maybe they just wanted to “”play”” into the game, give it weapons and elements of story and see how it went, keep the fuel going, maybe they wanted to gamble, maybe it’s all they know.

Soulmates.

I was in a discord server earlier, and we got to talking about the Yellowjackets as soulmates, and I thought I'd share those thoughts here, just a nice little put together catalogue of all those thoughts put together. I might add to this, too, as more pairings and relationships come to me.

For the record, I want to point out that I think that all of these characters are soulmates, far beyond ship dynamics, far beyond romance. What makes up the insides of one makes up the insides of the others because they are all the same: teenage girls trapped in either growing or decaying bodies. Their souls are all mated to the others in some way or another.

Tai and Van are a pair. Two separate souls that are a part of a matched set, like socks. They can be worn mismatched, certainly, but they really are at their best together. Tai gives Van a purpose. Van calms Tai's "demons." They can exist without each other, live without each other, love without each other, but they just are at their best together.

Lottie and Nat are that sort of star-crossed soulmates, doomed soulmates. There's a red string of fate but its severed somewhere in the middle. They can be good for each other, laugh and smile and hold each other close. They can be the worst of each other, holding knives to each other's throats, laughing in the face of it. They're the epitome of a missed chance. What kind of missed chance? That's up for you to decide.

Misty and Nat are the kind of soulmates that don't seem like they'd match, but they work so good together. The believer and the skeptic (though who is who changes with the circumstance, the belief, the skepticism). Orange and blue. Salt and sweet. Chaotic good and lawful evil. They're diametrically opposed but in a way that makes sense, in a way that works together. They each feed off of what makes the other their opposite. One is running, the other is chasing. Of course one would die at the hand of the other.

Lottie and Laura Lee are the kind of soulmates where each thinks they are the worshipper while the other is the god. A prophet, a believer, a worship under the sun. Souls that just burn brighter around each other (and that pun was unintentional the first time but very intentional with the emphasis). Both want to help the other. Both want to hold the other. They are belief without boundaries personified. Each is Icarus. Each is the sun.

Tai and Shauna are soulmates in a way that recognizes "That is my person." Two people that have so much in common, who understand each other, who both recognize the want in the other. They have an understanding and a care for each other that's fierce. I see you, you see me, ad it might not be pretty, but we will be honest with each other. Especially as the two of them have aged; time has not erased their understanding of one another.

Jackie and Nat are soulmates in a way that isn't explored a lot in the show but has been discussed, from what I've seen, really well. Foils. Two sides of the same coin. Opposites. Rich girl, poor girl. Prude, slut. There are certain stereotypes around both of them that, from a glance, seem to play out. One only needs to look deeper to really see it. Unfortunately, from the show, we never really see the two of them see past their expectations of each other.

Jackie and Shauna. Two heads, one heart. I don't know where you end and I begin and all that. We've been there, we've done that. We know it by heart. They're not a pair because a pair implies separation, and there is none. You can cut out your heart, and you can even replace it, but it's never the same. They're two shattered halves of the same fucked up whole. When one piece is gone, the hole cannot be filled properly ever again. There are some species of worms that, when worm cut in half, can keep living as two separate entities. That does not negate the fact that it was once one whole creature. They're unhealthy together. They're unnatural apart. One did not live long enough to remedy either of these facts.

(If Jackie's heart was still beating, I know it would beat in time with Shauna's. I hope Shauna ate it to feel it beat with hers one last time.)

the thing about ben is that he knows he’s going to die. he’s known since the bacchanalia, he knows they’re going to eat him, he knows he’s never going home. he doesn’t even particularly like misty. it’s not his job to take care of these girls anymore; no one would have blamed him for stepping off the ledge. and yet, he steps back to save misty from the pain of watching him die. he goes back to the cabin to wait for his death again. how much of his time in the wilderness is saving off death to give the girls just a couple more days of humanity?

posting these mari thoughts i had on here too bc i can’t stop thinking abt her like UGH

The way the other girls are so ready to have Lottie recommitted for being “homicidal” and “crazy” when they’re all accomplices in a recent murder and cover up, some of them have killed other people and literally are not mentally well to the point of hallucinating (or they maybe haunted in Tai’s case), especially after what they did IN THIS EPISODE is just so twisted and shows how entirely fucked up and toxic the group is.

“We all got over it” did you?? Because as far as I’m aware NONE of them have ever gotten over it. They mask it, they ignore it, they refuse to acknowledge anything. And that’s the root of all their problems. That’s the root of all of their actions and thoughts and motives.

Lottie was doing well (well, ‘well-ish’ lmao) until they all showed up.

And I don’t mean this is a “fuck them, fuck the show” way, I mean it in a “and this is why we can’t for a moment believe that these women are going to have a happy ending because they refuse to look at the damage that they cause to one another and those around them when it comes the their trauma and actions” way.

the way that adult Natalie is cold toward Misty & keeps her at arm’s length & adult Misty’s obsessive desire to protect Natalie at all costs is put into such a new context when you understand that Natalie resents Misty not for trapping them in the wilderness not for being “weird” or “crazy” but because Misty SAVED her.

adult Natalie in season 2 repeatedly states that she is a bad & toxic person while demonstrating the opposite. According to her, she hurts everyone around her but in reality she can’t even kill a goldfish when she tries. I think that what we clearly see in the last episode is that Natalie hates herself for living.

Natalie will never forgive herself for the moment she stopped trying to save Javi - an innocent child she’s spent months searching for - her friend - her lover’s only family - the ONLY person willing to selflessly fight to save her.

Natalie Scatorccio is broken by the end of season 1. She’s holding a gun to her mouth. But season 2 shows us how & why she broke. It’s not because everyone turned against her & her friend held a knife to her throat. It’s because she hates herself for the selfish choice to survive & WHO PUSHED HER to make that choice? Who held her back & begged her to stop trying to save Javi? Misty.

this show is actually brilliant in how new information gives new context. season 1 would have you believe mistynat is a fun investigative duo. a wacky perky “crazy” girl & her goth partner who keeps her distance emotionally but has a good heart. season 2 shows us that EVERYTHING goes back to the moment that Misty saved Natalie’s life at the cost of Javi’s life. Natalie will never forgive herself for that & she’ll never forgive Misty & they are forever intertwined because of it. hand in unlovable fucking HAND do you understand

going thru mistys tag and ive seen 0 fake deep posts about how the phantom of the opera being her fave musical is so real bc its about a man who doesnt fit in, who cant ever fit in. doomed to be an outsider just bc of who he is. who finds solace in unconventional things. and the only time he meets someone who listens, and shares every part of himself with her, she doesnt want it. she doesnt understand it. and she never could, bc in the end, no matter how much he wants them to be, they arent the same.

i feel like I could scream about misty quigley endlessly, but it all really just boils down to this:

the character concept of, "unimaginable horrors happened to this person and they are, in fact, the greatest moments of her life," is just off the charts compelling

The Yellowjackets' Cards

Misty pulls the Eight of Diamonds. Eight traditionally represents resurrection, regeneration, and new beginnings. The Diamonds suit symbolizes the merchant class, autumn, dedication, ethics, confidence, stability, and advancement. The Eight of Diamonds specifically is a sign of healing, passion, and safeguarding.

Akilah pulls the Seven of Spades. Seven traditionally represents warfare, protection, completeness, perfection, grace, and divine mercy. The Spades suit symbolizes the military, winter, water, grief, and loneliness. The Seven of Spades specifically is a sign of certainty, warning, loss, perception, intuition, and kindness.

Van pulls the Jack of Hearts. The Jack is a symbol of common blood, loyalty, good luck, deception, innocence, and new beginnings. The Hearts suit represents the Church, spring, fire, love, vows, and childhood. The Jack of Hearts specifically is a sign of love, youthful passion, emotional support, reconciliation, and the pursuit of inner knowledge.

Shauna pulls the Four of Diamonds. Four traditionally represents creation, completion, mental stability, change, and freedom. The Diamonds suit symbolizes the merchant class, autumn, dedication, ethics, confidence, stability, and advancement. The Four of Diamonds specifically is a sign of strength, a need for confrontation, sensitivity, dissatisfaction, defensiveness, stubbornness, rebellion, intuition, good fortune, new beginnings, change, and charm.

Travis pulls the Ace of Clubs. The Ace historically represented bad luck, but in the present day it represents strength, authority, power, and victory. The Clubs suit symbolizes agriculture, peasantry, summer, youth, and the earth. It is also the lowest-ranking suit in games that prioritize suits. The Ace of Clubs specifically is a sign for good luck, prosperity, abundance, power, and influence.

Tai pulls the Six of Spades. Six traditionally represents power, imperfection, humanity, broken connection, restored connection, union, romantic union, materiality, and success. This number is also associated with Satan/the Beast. The Spades suit symbolizes the military, winter, water, grief, secrecy, loneliness, obsession, and development. It is also the highest-ranking suit in games that prioritize suits. The Six of Spades specifically is a sign of infidelity, dishonesty, turbulence, rootlessness, growth, denial, avoidance, change, change, and renewal.

Melissa pulled the Three of Hearts. Three traditionally represents power, cycles, life and death, divinity, completeness, fulfillment, and perfection. The Hearts suit represents the Church, spring, fire, love, vows, and childhood. The Three of Hearts specifically is a sign of success, love, opportunity, and aid.

Javi pulled the King of Spades. The King is a symbol of masculinity, maturity, control, and command. The Spades suit symbolizes the military, winter, water, grief, secrecy, loneliness, loss, and development. It is also the highest-ranking suit in games that prioritize suits. The King of Spades specifically is a sign of reason, logic, authority, discipline, justice, dominance, charm, observation, cruelty, obstacles, and boundaries. Reversed, the King of Spades is a sign of irrationality, control, judgement, and dishonesty.

Natalie pulls the Queen of Hearts. The Queen is a symbol of leadership, authority, confidence, femininity, and power. The Hearts suit represents the Church, spring, fire, love, vows, and childhood. The Queen of Hearts specifically represents unconditional love, compassion, creativity, intuition, healing, counseling, warmth, and self-love. In a reversed meaning, the Queen of Hearts is a sign of insecurity, fragility, dependence, self-sabotage, martyrdom, and over-giving.

big fan of the yellowjackets season 2 trailer’s title card designs for the cast and the little hidden meanings in them:

shauna is an easy one, we see jackie’s necklace in plain view. jackie may not be in season two, but she will continue to haunt shauna in her own ways. plus, it means the necklace’s journey to pit girl is still underway. I also like that the sticks look a bit like a nest, considering there’s a chance shauna might give birth to her doomed baby this season.

taissa’s card has this very fun double/mirror effect that really focuses on her biggest issue this season, which is this strange dissociation with this other side of herself (that sammy called “the bad one”). there’s a really fun shot of the trailer where her reflection is sentient which is one of my favorite filmmaking tropes (it makes me think of the shot in the movie “Us” where you realize the fun house reflection is a whole other person.)

I’m not sure about the meaning of the bone shape in taissa’s title card yet, but these and all the bones in the title cards seem to be similar to the weapons they wield during the big fight scene. interestingly enough though, taissa is wielding in axe in this scene:

axe lesbian and sword lesbian to the rescue...?

natalie’s design is also very fun, the main detail in hers is the dead bird we see earlier in the trailer. I like that all the characters have had some sort of animal associated with them (deer for lottie, wolves for taissa, rabbits for jackie and eventually shauna.) my guess is natalie’s animal will be the bird.

misty is also often associated with bird symbolism (the owl camera, her pet bird caligula) which like shauna and jackie could just be a good indicator that their stories are intertwined.

I could also make the argument for misty’s animal being a cat, with her cat-themed nurse scrubs and Halloween outfit. It would explain her prey-and-predator relationship with the rats and birds around her (natalie included) from watching the rat in the pool to keeping them trapped in the wilderness right under her paw. her bird-themed secret camera is intended for natalie, so it fits.

the bone shape is interesting too, my first thought was that it almost looks like a heart if you step back enough. natalie’s story is a tragic love story at its core so I think that’s very fitting if so.

misty’s was a little trickier for me, but I do think the bone weapon on the right looks like an axe which gives me a fun flashback to her iconic axe wielding scene. there’s also a little yellowjacket bug which I think is cute.

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

mitsy quigley and travis martinez never quite being part of the group but as soon as they get just a hint of recognition and belonging being willing to do just about anything to maintain their Spot in the Club... pair of leeeeellllssss