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What Van Palmer Means to Me

(this is an entirely self-indulgent rambling essay, but my options were writing this or sobbing over seeing adult Van in the trailer for the hundredth time)

A huge thank you to @woodenpicador for proofreading this and especially for all their encouragement to actually share this.

When I started watching Yellowjackets in December 2021 on a whim and a few friends’ recommendations, I couldn’t have predicted it would be my reason to join a fandom for the first time in my life. I definitely never expected to connect with one of the characters as deeply as I did.

But why would I expect to connect with one of the characters? I had never seen myself truly reflected media before. There have been a few characters I’ve felt some level of connection with over the years, like Jo March in Little Women and Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You, but my love for them and other characters was built on the foundation of headcanoning key changes to the characters’ identities (see: Jo March is a nonbinary lesbian in my heart). I had never before been able to truly see myself in a character as they were presented in the source material. As sad as it sounds, I don’t know if I ever really expected to get to see myself reflected back in a piece of media.

Van Palmer was the first time I truly saw myself on screen. Seeing her meant so much more to me than words can ever really describe, but I’ll make my sincerest attempt. Seeing a character be so unapologetically a lesbian and especially, a butch lesbian (in 1996, no less) was huge for me and I’m sure many other masc, butch, nonbinary, or otherwise gender nonconforming lesbians. While Van is far from the first butch lesbian in media (though we are severely underrepresented), she is one of the first I’ve seen that’s been allowed to exist fully beyond an amalgamation of stereotypes. She’s a fully realized character who is also butch lesbian. It’s so clearly evident that she’s a full character, not a prop for a storyline or a character created to check a representation box.

Van Palmer is a soft, sweet, loyal, caring, smart, funny, sarcastic, dorky film nerd who loves her girlfriend deeply, and she’s butch. She has so many traits beyond the more obvious parts of her identity and the beautiful thing about her characterization is that those traits are treated as just as much a part of her as her being butch. Van is butch and she’s soft. Van is butch and she’s loyal. Van is butch and she’s a dork.

For me, seeing a butch lesbian on screen who’s also inherently soft and sweet and loyal was groundbreaking. In a lot of ways, it infuriates me that having a butch/masc/gnc lesbian character with those traits in media has been so rare in the past. People who know masc/butch lesbians in real life can attest to those traits being the standard not the exception, but for a long time media portrayals of us have relied heavily on (mostly) negative stereotypes to paint a caricature of our identities rather than committing to an accurate portrayal of us as actual people.

Being exposed to negative stereotypes of masc lesbians in media and then hearing those biases repeated in real life made it so much harder for me personally to realize and accept that I’m butch and that I’m attracted to other masc/butch lesbians. When you grow up seeing and hearing only negative stereotypes about your identity, it’s so hard to embrace that identity.

Especially as someone who spent my teens and early college years heavily closeted for various reasons and could tolerate dressing more femininely, I spent some time after coming out as a lesbian trying to be femme, and femme4femme no less. It was so hard to accept that I was masc, knowing all the privileges I would have to give up to embrace that. It was even harder to allow myself to actually label myself as masc/butch knowing all the stereotypes that would come with that label.

I remember being newly out to myself as a lesbian and going down the checklist of stereotypes in my head to reaffirm that I couldn’t possibly be masc or butch. This wasn’t exactly hard: the only example of a butch lesbians I had seen in media were hardened, stoic, archetypes of a “fuckboi” copy and pasted from Shane (to be clear, I love Shane, but it’s exhausting when she’s the only representation masc lesbians are allowed to have) with small details changed. As embarrassing as it is to admit how hard it was to accept myself back then, I want to illustrate why the representation masc/butch lesbians finally have in Van Palmer is so important and necessary.

Though I had already been presenting masc for a while when Yellowjackets aired, it wasn’t until I saw Van that I felt comfortable actually labeling myself as masc and butch and truly accepted that part of my identity. I was able to see a butch lesbian on screen being soft and vulnerable, where that softness wasn’t something she had to find but something that was as much a part of her as any other part of her identity. Watching Van be a soft, sweet, dork who uses sarcasm as her armor was the first time I saw myself reflected back in a piece of media. When I saw her on screen it was just this lightbulb moment of “oh, actually I can be butch and still be everything I already am.” Seeing real representation for the first time in my life in Van Palmer allowed me to actually accept my identity and stop trying to apologize to the world for being gender nonconforming.

At the same time, seeing Van was also a little bittersweet. I could see the person eighteen-year-old me had been too scared to be back in the mid-2010s. However, I’m so incredibly grateful that young butch/masc/nonbinary/gnc lesbians now have Van Palmer on their televisions because maybe, just maybe, I would’ve accepted myself a little bit sooner had I had a character like Van to look to back then.

Van’s very existence as a character has been a monumental stride for butch/masc representation, but her storyline in season one, including her relationship with Taissa have also demonstrated marked changes for the better in lesbian representation and queer representation overall that I never could have imagined. I watched Van’s New York monologue in episode seven and was immediately filled with dread because I had seen different iterations of that same monologue so many times before. They always ended in a beloved queer character dying too young and too soon. Van’s “death” at the end of episode seven didn’t shock me, because I had expected it since her and Taissa’s kiss in episode five. It was her survival in episode eight that did. The deliberate subversion of the “bury the gays” trope with Van was a true turning point in queer representation. The writers took what we have all been unfortunately trained to expect by decades of watching the characters who represent our identities die in the first act, and twisted it into a story of a queer characters survival time and again, despite all odds. That the queer character happens to be a butch lesbian, an identity that is often ignored altogether, makes her survival so much more meaningful. It’s also incredible that Van and Taissa are in not only a lesbian relationship (and they come out) in 1996, but also an interracial relationship. Depicting a relationship between a Black lesbian and a butch lesbian is huge when lesbian and sapphic representation is still predominately and nearly exclusively white femme4femme couples. I could write a whole different essay on why it’s so important to have Van and Taissa’s relationship on screen and praise the decision for them to be in an established relationship, but I’ll save that for a different day.

The day we got the casting announcement for adult Van and I saw a post that read “Van lives,” I wept because it meant that I would continue to see myself on screen. While I had believed that Van would survive, I had watched people theorize (and almost delight in) all the different ways this character—who had finally given me and many other people representation—could die. That casting announcement allowed all of us who have known, loved, or been a Van to breathe a collective sigh of relief that those people had been wrong, and, as surreal as it seemed, Van Palmer would get to grow up.

After the casting announcement, the question loomed: Van lives, but would butch Van? At times, doubt crept in and I began to worry that the tradeoff for Van’s survival would be a feminized version of her that would be “more palatable for audiences” in the present timeline. When I saw the first promotional photos of adult Van I screamed “oh my god, they’re actually letting her be a dyke,” and then I sobbed. It was the moment I actually allowed myself to fully believe that I would get to see her grow up and become a true older version of the butch lesbian that had finally given me representation for the first time in my life.

I couldn’t possibly write this without acknowledging the actor who has single handedly made monumental strides in representation for butch, masc, nonbinary, and otherwise gender nonconforming lesbians everywhere by originating the role of Van Palmer. Liv Hewson brought Van to life with so much care and added so much to the character, in a way I don’t believe any other actor could have. From clocking Van as a lesbian long before they were told she is one to all of the improvisations they added, Liv had a huge role in creating Van. I’m not sure we would even be meeting adult Van in a few short weeks without Liv.

There are infinitely more things I could say about Van Palmer, but I’ll end here. I am so incredibly grateful to have Van as representation and I hope that everyone who has had a hand in bringing her to life on screen knows what she means to so many of us. I am placing my full trust in the writers to continue to beautifully portray this groundbreaking representation on screen and allow her story to continue in both timelines until the final episode.

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