one of the biggest things I can advocate for (in academia, but also just in life) is to build credibility with yourself. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking of yourself as someone who does things last minute or who struggles to start tasks. people will tell you that you just need to build different habits, but I know for me at least the idea of ‘habit’ is sort of abstract and dehumanizing. Credibility is more like ‘I’ve done this before, so I know I can do it, and more importantly I trust myself to do it’. you set an assignment goal for the day and you meet it, and then you feel stronger setting one the next day. You establish a relationship with yourself that’s built on confidence and trust. That in turn starts to erode the barrier of insecurity and perfectionism and makes it easier to start and finish tasks. reframing the narrative as a process of building credibility makes it easier to celebrate each step and recognize how strong your relationship with yourself can become
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
or, the nat scatorccio + masculinity essay, featuring guns
warnings for mentions of: physical abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and canon-typical violence
the gun (part I)
nat and the specific side of emasculating trauma she faces from her father (separate of the implied sexual trauma, which is its own thing in this grand scheme of being a daughter under the patriarchy) has always been interesting to me.
and you might be saying, 'how can someone be emasculated if they're not a man'?
the scene. we all know the scene. where nat's father mocks her, saying that she was a little girl who cried killing a turkey.
it's fucked up. it’s humiliation, a direct attack on a perceived failure in that moment. he's deriding her emotional response, her femininity, her softness. and yes, this is partly because he’s a misogynistic, abusive dick who sees women as lesser. that’s evident.
and this is the point where i'm going to lose a lot of people but stick with me an autistic transgender is talking listen and learn.
maybe... it's because nat isn't a good enough son.
masculinity, for nat, becomes both this curse and a conduit. it’s the language her father speaks, so, to be close to him, she has to speak it too. there are these expectations she never asked for but still feels bound to: be a provider, be strong, be the man, be a good son.
and the gun becomes the rosetta stone. it’s not just a weapon. it’s a symbol of acceptance and legitimacy. the one object that says: you’re tough enough. you’re one of us. you matter.
natalie clings to it, not out of fascination with death, but because it's the only thing she’s ever been allowed to hold that made her feel powerful. it’s the only thing that ever shut her father up.
the gun becomes her backbone. her barrier. her voice. when jackie threatens her pride, she says she’ll find something to shoot. because in every context she enters, the rules are the same to her: power is what protects you.
and masculinity, even if it’s not hers by birth or biology, is something she performs to survive.
sticking with the devil you know
i don't think it's a mistake that all of the people nat has described as her best friends and the only people who understood her are men. because really, it's all about the devil you know. and what nat knows is men.
you can almost chart her entire character through these acts of borrowed masculinity. they’re not performative exactly, but they are compensatory. she becomes tough because that’s the only language she’s ever seen love in. she spits, she drinks, she swears. it's pattern recognition.
but it's also her father and the connection she could never form with him: i’ll never be your son, but i could be what a son is supposed to be. i could love you in that shape.
and with this line of thinking, we have two different approaches to take: coach ben and travis. the only two male figures besides javi that nat associated with in the wilderness.
starting with the subtle mirroring between nat and coach ben— it’s vital to painting a picture of how nat struggles with her identity, because really, what do a teenage girl and a gay man have in common?
well, a fucking lot, actually.
on paper, they couldn’t be more different, but emotionally, there’s a common wound: neither of them was ever able to be the kind of man they were expected to be.
ben is emasculated by his queerness in a heteronormative culture. nat by her gender in a hypermasculine household. they both exist in a liminal space here, cast out of traditional masculinity, yet not safely tucked into the feminine either.
and then there’s travis.
nobody’s son, nobody’s daughter
nat and travis bond, in part, because they're both failed sons.
travis carries the weight of a father whose standards he could never live up to because he was rendered fundamentally unable by an unfortunate circumstance. nat carries the absence of a father she tried to shape herself around. neither of them gets to become the man someone expected them to be.
but unlike ben, travis isn’t just haunted by that pressure, he’s actively suffocated by it.
travis is expected to be a provider, a protector, a stoic older brother. he fails. repeatedly. and it eats him alive.
nat steps into that role instead. she’s efficient, skilled, emotionally detached when she has to be. she hunts. she saves. she survives. in doing so, she takes on the traditionally masculine qualities in the group: decisiveness, independence, toughness. she becomes the one who performs and provides. she doesn’t do it to dominate. she does it because she has to— if no one else will take control, who will?
she has learned, at home, with her father, that stepping into masculine power is sometimes the only way to be safe. or to be useful. or to be respected. or to be loved.
travis slips further into emotional fragility. he gets overwhelmed, he spirals, he clings. his masculinity collapses in on itself. he starts to embody a kind of repressed femininity: he’s vulnerable, emotional, sensitive, consumed by shame. his crying, his jealousy, his bodily discomfort, they all read like traits that, in the world he grew up in, he was taught to bury.
nat sees it, and she doesn’t mock it, because she recognizes it. she has an advantage that travis does not— she knows both sides.
this is the heart of their connection. they’re constantly trading places.
when nat initiates sex, it’s not coy. it’s blunt. travis, on the other hand, flinches at vulnerability. he doesn't know how to be with her without feeling like he's losing something. his masculinity is too brittle for the kind of power nat embodies. her identity— masculine, feminine, and ever shapeshifting to fit needs— is intimidating to him.
and then there’s the point of travis’ assault.
doomcoming marks a break, not just in the group, but in travis himself. up until that night, his masculinity, however fragile, is something he still clings to. he’s the default man, with ben unable to provide for them. the protector by title, if not always by action.
but in one frenzied, drugged-out moment, that identity is torn from him.
he’s hunted. pinned down. stripped. touched. reduced to an object of desire and violence by people he trusted, people he lived with, people who later tell themselves they didn’t mean it. it’s rape-adjacent, maybe even rape-interrupted, and the aftermath is undeniable.
from that moment on, travis no longer occupies the space of masculine power in the wilderness. he becomes afraid, withdrawn, and passive. he questions himself, his control, and his place in the group. even in scenes where he lashes out or tries to assert dominance, it’s not coming from confidence anymore. it’s coming from fear. because how can he be the man, the provider, the protector, when he was the one held down?
the assault feminizes him. not inherently, but symbolically, through the lens of the world they’ve been raised in. it flips the gendered dynamic he tried to cling to completely on its head. suddenly, he’s the one whose body became a site of violation, the one who couldn’t fight back. and in a hypermasculine worldview, that makes him less than. not just in the eyes of others, but in his own as well.
and here again, nat becomes his echo.
because nat’s own history is marked by implied sexual trauma, glimpsed in throwaway lines. we don’t know everything, but we know enough. in a way, both of them were assaulted into femininity, into that culturally ingrained position of being acted upon rather than acting. their bodies became weapons wielded against them. their agency got overwritten. and instead of finding solidarity in that shared experience, they bury it. turn away from it. let it become shame.
nat knows what it’s like to carry that kind of violation in silence. to pretend you’re okay because you’re scared of what it means if you’re not. to make yourself harder, meaner, louder, until no one asks what happened to you anymore.
both nat and travis are broken by the same force: gendered violence. they just respond to it differently. travis internalizes it. nat externalizes it. but both are defined by it. and they both start crumbling under the weight of performances they can’t sustain.
travis was supposed to be a man. he wasn’t. nat was never allowed to be one, and still ended up performing masculinity better than most of the boys around her.
nat becomes the traditionally masculine figure. the one who controls the weapon. the one who touches first. the one who can compartmentalize. the one who doesn’t cry. travis becomes the emotional one. the one who’s hesitant. the one who flinches. the one who can’t reconcile his body with his feelings.
the gun (part II)
but when shauna takes the gun from natalie in season 3, it doesn’t matter that she’s a teenage girl. it doesn’t matter that she’s not a man. what matters is the gesture. the snatch. the grab. the sudden removal of power.
to natalie, it’s not shauna anymore. it’s her father.
it’s the same entitled reach. the same assumption that whatever she’s holding, she doesn’t deserve to. the moment shauna takes the gun from her hands without asking, she’s back in that house again.
natalie doesn’t just lose the weapon, she loses the illusion that she’s safe. that she’s in control. that she’s grown. and the scariest part is, shauna probably doesn’t even realize what she’s done. because to shauna, the gun is a power play.
to natalie, it’s a lifeline. it’s safety. agency. autonomy. the only thing that’s ever made her feel like she could stand toe-to-toe with the terribleness around her. it’s not about violence. it’s about not being the victim again.
so when shauna rips it away, it becomes a reenactment, a revival of every time natalie was told she didn’t get to choose. that her body, her fear, her choice didn’t matter. and suddenly she’s not natalie the hunter, the provider, the survivor. she’s natalie the daughter. natalie the target.
the wilderness never gave her peace. but it gave her power. it gave her a role, however brutal. and when that’s taken from her, especially by someone like shauna, someone who should understand, it’s worse than betrayal.
trigger discipline
when nat puts the gun to her chin, it’s not just a suicide attempt. it’s an inheritance.
because this is how her father died. by his own hand, by the gun he used to measure worth. the same gun that mocked her tears, that made her feel small, that taught her love was something loud and fatal.
so when she chooses the rifle, his weapon, their weapon, it’s not just to die. it’s to belong. to be the son he always wanted, in the most final, irrevocable way. to prove she can do it like he did. meet him on the same ground, muzzle to mouth, and say: look, i finally got it right.
there’s something intimate about it: the gun has always been her tether to power, to safety, to manhood, and here she is, turning it on herself. as if to say, if this is what made me strong, maybe it’s the only thing strong enough to end me.
it’s a moment of total collapse, but also a moment of brutal clarity.
because for natalie, the gun was never just a tool, it was the narrative. the object that made her feel close to her father, to manhood, to value. the one thing she could hold and feel capable, but also the one thing that always threatened to erase her.
and when she doesn’t get to pull that trigger, it's not just failure. it’s interruption, disruption. a moment that could’ve ended in legacy but doesn’t.
because she doesn’t get to die like her father. she doesn’t get to decide how the story ends. it's never been her choice.
she’s forced to keep going, to live in the aftermath. to let that gun go, heavier than ever, not just with the weight of almost-death, but with the unbearable truth that it wasn't enough.
that she couldn’t even do that right.
father, son, and ghost
nat’s life was shaped by a identity that was never hers, but always loomed over her, through her, inside her. she was never given the chance to just be a girl. she grew up under the thumb of a man who spoke only in anger and expectation. a man who didn’t know how to love a daughter, but maybe could’ve loved a son.
so she tried. she picked up the gun. she learned to take up space the way men do: violently, defensively, without apology.
but the tragedy is, no matter how convincingly she performed it, she was never allowed to be it. the world wouldn't let her. the wilderness wouldn't let her. even when she was leading, she was overlooked. even when she saved lives, she was sidelined. even when she held the gun, people saw something less— not a protector, not a threat, not a son.
she chased that ghost of being the son her father might’ve wanted, of mattering in the way that boys are allowed to matter. because what do you do when the only version of belonging you’ve ever known was never made for you? when everything you built yourself around was rooted in someone else’s expectations?
she never got to be a boy. never got to be a girl. she just became something outside, a weapon.
and in the end, she was still trying to protect people. still trying to shoulder something. still trying to earn that invisible nod of approval.
when she dies— when she becomes the sacrifice— it’s not because she’s the chosen one. it's because she was useful. because she’s been trained, her whole life, to step in front of the barrel.
there’s nothing redemptive about it. it’s not a neat conclusion, and god knows it's a product of poor writing and circumstances.
but maybe it’s the most honest one, dying the way she lived: carrying a role she didn’t ask for and trying, always trying, to be enough.
There’s no way Nat doesn’t know or at least guess abt Lottie’s mental issues bc the way she treats her vs how everyone else does is starkly different. With everyone else, it’s “i can’t deal with crazy right now”, “she might actually be crazy”, etc, while with Nat it’s “this is very real, i promise”, “we buried him, remember?” which is such a soft and understanding way of going about it. Even when she’s angriest at Lottie, it’s “what is making you do this?” seeking understanding rather than dismissing her so callously as crazy. The simultaneous specificity and vagueness of seemingly knowing she has issues perceiving reality but not knowing exactly why she’s acting the way she is implies this middle ground of knowing something but not everything. And with how observant and naturally accepting Nat is (like figuring out that Ben was gay just by observation) i wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is something she just picked up on during school and that she and lottie had an understanding about
My most used stamp by far is to record what album I’m listening to. When starting an album always start from the first song and listen to the entire thing in one sitting.
Just discovered AI music making exists and we are heading toward a hellscape fr.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I’ve always found myself disagreeing with the reading that Jackie was fundamentally incapable of surviving in the wilderness, or that she died because she flourished in civilisation and the Wilderness culled her for being weak. I think it overlooks a lot of the deeper, more nuanced character context.
TW: Discussion of suicidal ideation and depression
It’s worth remembering that the very first act of brutality in the wilderness was Jackie’s doing, setting a precedent for what was to come. She left Van, someone she considered a friend, to burn alive at the possibility that helping her might risk Shauna’s life in some way; that’s an incredibly revealing insight into Jackie’s character. It shows us what – or who – will cause her to override all other principles. We see this hold true throughout the season, where she acts in petty, vindictive, and manipulative ways with Shauna as the catalyst (e.g. picking a fight with Nat, publicly exposing Shauna’s pregnancy, sleeping with Travis). Yellowjackets goes out of its way to highlight how anyone, no matter how squeamish or good-hearted, is capable of terrible things and becoming a base version of themselves in extreme circumstances, and Jackie is no exception.
There’s a lot made of her not pulling her weight around the camp, but Jackie does make a genuine effort after Shauna points out that people are noticing her lack of pitching in. She organises the seance to boost morale (even if it backfired), she checks the snares and fishing nets, she’s part of the rescue party for Tai and Van, and she helps prepare for Laura Lee’s fight. Hell, even before the pep talk, she helps with the foraging and finds the abandoned plane. She’s certainly bratty about it at points, and the resentment from the others isn’t totally unwarranted, but it’s less that Jackie doesn’t want to contribute and more that she doesn’t know how; her entire frame of reference has been upended.
I feel there’s sometimes a false conflation between maladjustment and incompetence or laziness when it comes to how we interpret her behaviour in the wilderness. It’s the lack of feeling that she has anything of value to offer in these new circumstances that leads her to give up so easily, because for Jackie, perceived inadequacy is a source of paralysing shame. If she believes she’s needed, then she’s able to find the resolve within herself. There’s reason to believe that Jackie could ultimately have adapted with the right motivation, but between losing the respect of her teammates, being kept at arm’s length by Shauna, and discovering just how little her best friend apparently thinks of her, she loses that and succumbs to her apathy.
Something I also don’t see accounted for enough in this discussion is that Jackie undergoes a significant character arc in the first season. It’s a self-destructive spiral, but it also sees the breakdown of the pretences and values she previously devoted all her energy to upholding. By the time we get to Doomcoming, she’s ’a fiercer, more honest, more nihilistic’ version of herself. Although her fight with Shauna was an inevitable breaking point, if Jackie had survived and found something to live for (i.e. recognising that Shauna still needed her) I think we could have seen a major shift in the dynamics and her character because, as messy as it was, they would have finally aired their long-festering grievances towards each other and taken a step towards emotional honesty (I’ll caveat this by saying that the words of the argument itself weren’t necessarily honest, but the catharsis was). Of course, Jackie isn’t there when she dies, and it’s holding onto those vestiges of self-denial that seals her fate, but this is a recurring theme in Yellowjackets – characters are killed off just as they’re on the cusp of actualising, due to a combination of collective complicity and their own fatal flaw.
Like many characters in Yellowjackets, Jackie is often regarded in a reductive way by the audience, much like how she is by her peers. She’s characterised as a vapid mean girl when she’s a very deliberate subversion of that archetype. She’s compared to an animal associated with innocence and prey when the text of the show makes it clear that this doesn’t truly represent Jackie as a person, but the warped idea of her filtered through outside perspectives.
Though really, who can blame them when Jackie’s own sense of self is so fractured? She’s introduced to us faking pleasure for her boyfriend while the lyrics “I’ll burn my eyes out before I get out… I wanted more than life could ever grant me, bored by the chore of saving face” blare in the background. The whole song is about how things can’t get any worse because you already feel like a suicidal shell of a person trapped inside your life. None of this is subtle, yet it’s still so easy to overlook. In a lesser show, our first impression of Jackie could have been of a self-assured girl living in total contentment to juxtapose her fall from grace in the wilderness, but instead it chooses to present us with something much more complex: a girl who’s miserable when nobody else is looking.
Because the Jackie who thrived in New Jersey was the Jackie who excelled at performance. Many of the hallmarks of success for which she’s lauded are hollow, a pretty veneer. To paraphrase Ella Purnell, in reality, she’s deeply lonely; she has no real intimacy or connection with anyone that isn’t Shauna, who she clings to with every fibre of her being to the point of suffocation. Yet the act is so convincing that Jackie is forever remembered for the facade she constructed, and as what others made of her in turn, when the truth is she didn’t even know herself.
Jackie was depressed and unfulfilled long before the plane crashed; the wilderness just stripped away the only things that gave her a true sense of worth and purpose – or rather, it exposed how fragile those things were in the first place. Shauna was already chafing against her; her team was already doubting and undermining her; she was already feeling lost within herself. Jackie was sheltered and prissy and didn't take well to their new lifestyle, but it wasn’t any of those things that ultimately did her in: it was high school drama and clique culture; it was a codependent homoerotic friendship; it was the remnants of civilisation’s social dynamics placed in a life-or-death context; it was the years of societal conditioning, emotional isolation, and repression that kept Jackie in a gilded cage her entire life.
While thematically her death was necessary and represents the collapse of the old order, I don’t believe the tragedy of Jackie’s death is that she was a lost cause, always destined to die because of some innate deficiency of character; it’s that it was avoidable and could have been prevented by the characters not caving to their insecurities. Jackie’s pride born of shame; Shauna’s refusal to self-reflect or accept her feelings; their respective issues with communication; Misty’s fear of ostracism and desire to feel included even if it meant throwing people under the bus; Tai’s faltering confidence in her own control and authority; Ben’s abdication of responsibility; Lottie clinging to faith for a sense of meaning; Mari aligning herself with whoever holds power in the social hierarchy; the collective disgrace over their actions that Jackie called out. Just as the Yellowjackets brought the Wilderness back with them, they brought the wounds of civilisation to the wilderness, and it was that, not the cold, that doomed Jackie.
Jackie herself represents civilisation in the same way rabbits represent her: while there’s a connection, it’s not a simple or clear-cut one. I’d argue that if she can be boiled down to any one theme, Jackie more accurately represents how society suppresses young women (especially queer women, because Jackie’s comphet/closeting is essential to understanding her) through expectations and presumptions, how it dictates their identity and strips away their personhood and agency. This theme is baked into the premise of the show and permeates all of its main cast, much like Jackie literally and figuratively does. There’s a reason she’s the very first character we’re formally introduced to, and in such a specific way. Jackie is so frequently misunderstood because she’s designed to be misunderstood. But we’re provided all of the tools to see the broken person at the heart of it all.
I think it does the show a disservice to sanctify Jackie, just as it does to demonise Shauna (and visa versa). The former is as multifaceted and flawed as anyone else in the cast, and the latter didn’t start out as a bad person — in fact, she was one of the most caring characters in the show before her experiences in the wilderness hardened her. They were both capable of great selflessness and empathy and selfishness and jealousy. They both hurt each other, those around them, and themselves. They both relied on maladaptive coping mechanisms; Jackie’s controlling anxious attachment and Shauna’s avoidant attachment that manifested as resentment. Their relationship only reached the explosive conclusion it did because they were both crazy about each other in similar yet conflicting ways and didn’t know how to express the intensity of their love.
It's been said that Jackie’s only crime was being a normal teenage girl while the rest of the Yellowjackets were feral by comparison, but you could make the case that they were all normal teenage girls, each with their own struggles. I believe it’s a misconception that Jackie was somehow uniquely immune to the Wilderness. ‘It’ represents ‘one’s truest, most authentic self’, in Lottie’s words. Jackie very much possessed that self, but locked it away and buried it. The Wilderness can be read as an allegory for what society stifles: mental health issues, queerness, sexuality, trauma, uncomfortable emotions. It is the destructive, liberating product of unleashed repression. Jackie’s character embodies that repression, a repression that runs so deep it destroys her. Not because she didn’t feel ‘It’, but because she felt it so strongly she had to smother it inside herself until she was convinced there was nothing left but an empty shell.
Jackie is a character revealed through contrast and contradiction, through what’s left unspoken. Despite everything, she possessed to capacity to change, to self-actualise, to accept herself, and that’s what makes her role in the narrative so poignant. There’s a bleeding hole of a person carved out among all those lies, but that person was always real.
“Right now, there is a version of you that knows exactly who you really are and what you really want. A primal, elemental self. And there is nothing more painful than hiding that self.
“We want to blame the world for our pain... the parent who didn't support us, the lover who didn't love us back... but the truth is, we are the ones making ourselves sick.
