hi!!! how would it be missing the “point of the show” to have travis or ben be your favorite character? saw that post of yours and i was genuinely just confused lol
Okay this is tricky, sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t have posted that because I never want to police anyone’s personal preferences, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having those be your favorite characters, but I do still ultimately stand by what I said, and I’ll explain why. I want to start with a disclaimer: it’s completely okay to love Travis, Ben, Walter, and Jeff (I actually love them too! I talk about how much I like these characters quite often on here and used to get hate comments for it regularly! I have written an entire essay about how much I love Travis’ character!). These are all well-written characters and I understand why fans of the show are connecting with them. But let me tell explain why I think at least some people (not all!) who are choosing the male characters as their favorites over all of the female characters may be missing the point of the show.
The showrunners have been clear from the beginning: Yellowjackets is, at its core, a story about womanhood. This isn’t just a series that features a lot of female characters by coincidence—it’s a deliberate, thematic choice to center female narratives in a genre space (horror/survival) that has historically marginalized or objectified them. The show deeply investigates the emotional and social terrain of femininity. It’s not just about survival in the wilderness—it’s about surviving adolescence, surviving friendship, surviving motherhood, surviving trauma, and surviving the ways society asks women to shrink themselves. It confronts the nuances of female rage and grief, the complexities of female relationships, social dynamics between women, what it’s like to be a teenage girl versus a middle-aged woman (and how both of these age groups are extremely misunderstood). And this show has given us an ensemble of fascinating, complex female characters to display these themes through.
The men—Ben, Travis, Walter, and Jeff—are intentionally peripheral, serving to reflect or support the emotional journeys of the women. Yellowjackets is deliberately shifting the focus away from male-centered narratives and giving space to messy, complex, powerful female characters. There has always been a broader pattern of centering men in female stories. Audiences, especially those conditioned by decades of male-dominated media, often cling to the more familiar lens of male characters, even in stories explicitly designed to shift that gaze. Male characters have long been allowed to be messy, complex, and morally ambiguous while still being embraced by audiences. Female characters, on the other hand, are often expected to be traditionally likable and two-dimensional, or else they're dismissed as unhinged, annoying, or irredeemable.
Elevating male characters over the female protagonists, especially in a show that so thoroughly and intentionally centers women, can be a way of retreating to comfort rather than engaging with the discomfort and complexity of the female experience the show is offering. Choosing Ben or Travis or Walter or Jeff as your favorite, when surrounded by such emotionally rich and narratively central female characters, might signal an unwillingness (conscious or not) to fully sit with the show's core themes. I have seen a lot of comments like, “All of these characters are unlikable now, Jeff is so funny and sweet he’s my favorite” which, to me, might signal that discomfort with absorbing the show’s themes.
But of course these are just my humble opinions and please feel free to take this with a grain of salt if it doesn’t apply to you! And I never want to send hate to anyone for their personal preferences, engage with this show however you like!
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