Excellent excellent excellent post! I had a really great discussion about this same idea with a mutual of mine a while back—this fanon perception of Ben as incompetent, while understood to be partly a joke, still permeates all the social media and fan spaces. And if I may take a moment to narrow in on his failures since this post has done a fantastic job of hi-lighting what he did well, and does it so eloquently—The fandom often singles out the moments where he fails as a leader [intentionally written in and meant to evoke narrative richness both for the sake of the team persevering on their own and for the metaphorical and literal fall of authority about which the show is making commentary] and exaggerates these instances as this way of proving -> “LOOK AT HIM!!! LOOK AT WHAT HE COULDN’T DO!!! of COURSE he’s a shitty leader!” as if these decisions and indecision weren’t written exactly by design and with respect to his role as a mentor (more specifically what that means in the confines of world being built), with the show’s broader commentary on authority in mind. These failures of his being, more often than not, simply taken at face value is not only unintuitive but also wildly inaccurate to the very marrow of how Ben is written.
I’ll say additionally I think many of these critiques are usually bad faith arguments made by portions of the fanbase who don’t really see him as a character outside of what he can offer to the team, or outside of his role as the only adult (and I realize I’m echoing @toomanyfandoms25 here, hiiiii <3) in an attempt to justify and moralize the misdeeds of the team in contrast and in perpetuity (despite the series not being one which requires moralization to attach ourselves to and love/relate to these characters, and in fact is one which quite often does the opposite by asking audiences, prompting them to leave their conventional senses of morality at the door by allowing us to assume that these characters can and will do something immoral in the name of survival, and also allows us to understand that even those lines, the lines of what is actually necessary for survival, will begin to blur.)
There is, to me, no greater irony than those who will shout from the rooftops about Ben’s incompetence and general inability to lead while simultaneously both treating and judging him as if he’s still teaching this group of students in a classroom back home when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Purporting that the team cannot be held the the moral standard of a normal society because they don’t live in a morally typical landscape (which, they don’t, but if we’re going to insist on doing so for him, it feels only right to make it the same across the board.) while simultaneously holding him to the absolute highest moral standard by way of his being the only adult without really stopping to consider authority doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to.
Aaaaand, not to hijack your ideas because I would still love to hear all of your thoughts on Ben and disability—very intriguing line of thought on his representation of the most marginalized and vulnerable sub-sects of masculinity and on his role as an authority figure.
If I am being so very honest (thank you for bringing this up btw even if only briefly)—I think so much of the vitriol for Ben is a result of ableism that the fandom would rather not confront. He’s the only disabled character on the show and people are constantly making comments about how useless he is and how much better off the team would be if he were dead (real quotes from twt & tiktok btw. are we serious????) because he is, quote unquote, not contributing to the team’s survival, as if he didn’t teach them the very fundamentals of hunting, skinning, and butchering which made it possible for the team to make it to their first winter with semi-adequate nourishment in the first place. As if he didn’t also teach Nat the basics of cartography, giving the team the ability to map and familiarize themselves with their environment, which has the potential to keep them from life and death situations and locations. All of this to say that while the team is fully capable of learning these skills on their own, it would have been a lot harder to do so from scratch, without his knowledge and ability to teach in a way that prioritized team work and reliance of each other. He may not be able to contribute physically to the practice of hunting and gathering but the knowledge is invaluable.
Of course the Yellowjackets fandom is not the only fandom with a propensity for ableism but that said there is still an astounding lack of understanding about Ben’s disability, both in how it informs his every decision, functioning as an inciting force and motivator for his arc both physically and emotionally, and how it is perceived and reacted to (albeit unconsciously) by the team. There’s never any explicit instances of ableism written from the team toward him but I think there is a general sense of frustration with anyone who doesn’t contribute to the team’s survival in tangible and routine ways… physically involved ways, because hunting and gathering are laborious tasks (à la the team’s frustration with Jackie, in my opinion, a strong undercurrent of their frustration with her post-doomcoming, barring the importance of their deflecting from Travis’ assault.) and it makes them frustrated. There is a noticeable difference in the ways they interact with him in the immediate aftermath of his injury, and how they interact with him as the months drawl on. On the level of following his authoritative decisions, but also on sort of a molecular level, too.
The reason he falls from authority has very little to do with his inability to make decisions or the efficacy of those decisions, and much more to do with the fact that he is making these decisions on behalf of the group without having the ability to fully adhere to them himself, and in the eyes of the team: if he can’t do xyz, why should he tell us what to do? Does the team view this as a transgression in and of itself? I’m still not entirely sure.
And this is not even to scratch the surface on the concept of agency and all the ways his is violated as we move into season three. I wrote a half meta/half ramble rant post about Ben and agency (here, if you’re curious or interested) and have written generally about his arc in season three at great length before on numerous occasions <3
TLDR: Ben Scott is competent! I’m sick of people acting like he isn’t and willfully missing the point ❤️
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