The burden of leadership in Yellowjackets
There is such an interesting burden that each of the Yellowjackets leaders (Jackie, Lottie, Nat, and now Shauna) have had to carry of being the group’s scapegoat; the embodiment of the group’s darkness and therefore the one demonized to absolve the rest of their sins. Each have served as a symbol of the state of the group at a given time, a physical manifestation of their deepest needs and urges.
Jackie was a symbol of society, representing the team’s pre-crash identities and last shreds of civilization they clung to in the wilderness. Before the crash, she was revered and worshipped, but as the group’s desperation began to increase and their needs began to shift to something more primal, Jackie became a living reminder of the life they left behind and the societal constraints they were just starting to shed. Her resistance to change and insistence on old social norms made her an easy scapegoat for the group’s early struggles to adapt. The traits that once garnered admiration from the group (Jackie’s composure, her traditional femininity, her social confidence) became liabilities in the wilderness. What once made her a leader now made her a threat, a mirror reflecting who they used to be and how far they were falling. Therefore, Jackie was the first to be cast out; a symbol they could sacrifice to avoid confronting the shame of their own loss of innocence and moral decay.
Lottie was a symbol of faith and spirituality in a time of desperation for the group. As starvation and fear took hold, the team turned to something larger than themselves for meaning; something to explain the inexplicable and justify the unthinkable. But as the group’s belief in her grew, so did their dependence on her. Their belief in her as a prophet gradually evolved into worship of her as a divine figure in her own right. They made a teenage girl into a god. She became the scapegoat for the horrors they committed in her name. When the faith they had placed in her didn’t offer the salvation they hoped for and she inevitably broke under the weight of their expectations, they dismissed her as “crazy” and cast her out again. Even after the crash, the narrative persists that Lottie made them do those terrible things, when in truth, they molded Lottie into the figurehead they needed to justify the things they were already willing to do.
Natalie became a symbol of pragmatism and conscience, a reflection of the group’s desire to return to order after the chaos of winter. Like Jackie before her, she tried to reestablish some sense of society, grounding her leadership in fairness, logic, and restraint. She didn’t ask for power, but she stepped into it because the group needed someone to set limits, to draw a line between survival and savagery. In many ways, she embodied the group’s collective remorse; their quiet longing to repent for Jackie and Javi’s deaths and to take the necessary steps to prevent that kind of darkness from ever surfacing in them again. But following Natalie meant confronting what they had done, and few were ready for that. Coach Ben’s return gave the group an easier target; someone to redirect their guilt and rage onto. Instead of reckoning with their own actions, they focused on punishing him for his perceived betrayal. Natalie’s calls for reason and restraint began to feel like judgment, and her moral clarity became alienating. Therefore, she was ridiculed and cast down when the group’s remorse and attempts at recreating civilization were overpowered by their own primal urges.
Shauna is a symbol of the group's brutality and rage. Her turn as leader has come at the peak of the group’s suppressed grief, anger, and loss of control. The group needed someone to act out their darkest impulses, and Shauna became that person. She was made the butcher (literally and symbolically), tasked with executing the physical horrors the others could not. The group unthinkingly offers her up to execute Nat after the card draw and elect her to butcher Javi’s body. By pushing her into that role, they created a vessel for their own savagery, then blamed her for it. And by continuing to blame her, they can go on pretending they had no choice, that the darkness lives in her, not in them.
I keep coming back to Van’s line about Lottie in Season 2: “She’s like this because of us.” The survivors may try to distance themselves from their leaders’ choices, they may point fingers, assign blame, but the truth is, Jackie, Lottie, Nat, and Shauna became exactly what the group needed them to be. They needed Jackie’s normalcy, Lottie’s faith, Natalie’s pragmatism and remorse, and eventually, Shauna’s rage and capacity for violence. The leaders didn’t act in a vacuum; they were shaped, elevated, and used by the group. And the others were just as complicit in everything that followed. Jackie, Lottie, Nat, and Shauna didn’t just carry carried the weight of their own sins, they carried the entire group’s. They were not simply leaders. They were vessels, absorbing the group’s collective fear, projection, and shifting morality. And in doing so, they became the easiest ones to sacrifice when the group needed someone to blame.
