matilda!!

lottie quietly doing the best she can to lean into what she hopes is real to give the others protection and faith, yes! but it isn’t I CAN LEAD YOU (especially this season) it’s I can quietly do the things that can’t hurt, in case they help. it can’t hurt to prick my finger and they’ve come back safe so far and I’m aware of my mental health I’m OH so aware and I know the dangers of delusions being proven correct by happenstance by setting up an infallible cause and effect by building my own reality BUT but. it’s just a prick and it’s just a sip and if I don’t do it now and they don’t come back safe then I AM the reason. it can’t hurt IT CAN’T HURT.

but see, now she’s stuck. she’s wedged into this place of having followers and she can’t tell them how she feels, partly because she isn’t even sure how she feels to begin with because nothing is real and everything is far too real!! (because BECAUSE lottielee jackieshauna parallels and so much post laura lee was not in our view, we didn’t fall as deep deep deep into the rabbit hole with lottie as we did with shauna, but this season has confirmed it for us. lottie and shauna both lost reality when they lost Them and they were both already girls with a loose grip of reality to begin with) so it’s That, but it’s also because she isn’t Lottie The Girl From New Jersey Who Shoplifts, she’s not herself, she’s what they make of her. she’s Lottie The Reason We Will Survive This.

she was on the other side of this dynamic, she felt that anger at jackie, she felt that sense of betrayal, she felt that letdown, that rebellion in her heart. because jackie wasn’t serving them the way they wanted needed craved being served. jackie couldn’t be that person. jackie who had been divisive in her leadership before they even crashed, because what is leadership if not a spotlight that people can adjust to make you glow like something ethereal or to point out all your flaws with great illumination? jackie had larger than life expectations put on her (and they were warm and sunny and positive some of the time yes, but that all curdles when it’s left in the spotlight too long.)

so suddenly lottie is divisive. there are teams around her and against her and myth built up, but the myth isn’t that she’s the bratty unhelping girl who gets whatever she wants like it became for jackie, the myth is she is our only hope. she is our savior and salvation and seer. and she doesn’t need to even say anything to make that so. jackie didn’t need to say anything to make them color her selfish (other, but bad). lottie doesn’t need to say anything to make them color her anointed (other, but good). she is girl vessel, girl hopes, girl dreams, a witch hunt where she Better Be A Witch.

doomcoming lottie snapped. she was On drugs and she was Off drugs and she was tired and she gave them something to cling to that they could shape into more with the seeds of the past (bear and blood and you get the picture) that they’d already been trying to plant in her image. (jackie did the same that night. she snapped, she yelled, she gave them something to cling to that they could shape into more with the seeds of the past that they’d already been trying to plant in her image, do you SEE??)

and of COURSE natalie understands both lottie and jackie. of course she knows what it’s like to be doing nothing but your best, to not want the responsibility, to be seen more as liability than asset, even though the only reason you can fail so hard is because you provide so much. before the crash and after, because girl carrying the weight of family secrets and girl who bears their insecurities and girl who SEES that they are insecure so she cannot even bring herself to be ANGRY with them and girl who hunts. girl who hunts and feeds, but now who hikes and disappoints, because there is no game to bring home, but that can only be Her Failure because it is Her Contribution, do you hear me are you with me??

so natalie walks for miles and she eulogizes jackie and she steps out of her reward her one small comfort and she makes sure that lottie sinks into the hot water and she apologizes, she apologizes, she apologizes. because maybe she’s mad, maybe she says it isn’t fair in the heat of the moment, but at the end of the day she knows who she is and what she is and all that they’ve made her and she carries that responsibility. (like jackie the girl she wasn’t home to save and lottie the girl she doesn’t know how to reach. it’s too late for them, there are no words to undo it. jackie was sealed when she made captain and natalie was sealed when she pulled the trigger and lottie was sealed when she warned van.)

and taissa finally TAISSA. she has hidden her secret. little girl looking in the mirror and seeing something that shouldn’t be there and older girl who is hearing things that she shouldn’t hear and leading people places she shouldn’t be able to lead them to. she doesn’t want it and she’s made it the Most Known of them all. don’t tell lottie, don’t tell the others, don’t bring it up. and van who champions her so naturally, so routinely, so lovingly for all the normal things. van who believes in the supernatural. van who has simply refused to die. van can’t hold it in anymore, because taissa’s sight Brought Back Javi. but tai doesn’t want her to mention it to the others. tai is perceptive and tai understands power struggles and she’s tired and hates this part of herself and she’s scared and she’s logical and she doesn’t want to Be Lottie (not lottie the girl from New Jersey who shoplifts, but lottie who better be a witch).

so maybe I’m seeing things myself, maybe I’m reading too deep, but here’s what I saw in old wounds.

lottie, who sits quietly while the others discuss her prophecy. lottie, who seems to have developed an openness to a different view of jackie in her death, because she was girl there and now she’s girl gone and she served them again in death and maybe lottie didn’t quite have the right idea of her and maybe lottie is in her seat now, in a way. lottie, who wanders into the snow without ever really agreeing because it was never really a choice, and cuts her hand because it can’t hurt IT CANT HURT.

natalie, who signed up to hunt when it was spring and warm and possible, who knows that it will be hers always and forever now. natalie, who will always be the reason they are starving, more than the reason they are fed. natalie, who is jealous of the girl who is bone, because she was allowed death. natalie, who has sympathy for all of them and knows that lottie has been made her rival through the mechanisms of group projection than her own volition. so she bathes her and tends to her and apologizes to her.

taissa, who has always been a leader and always been under scrutiny but did so in a way She Could Control. taissa, whose deepest secrets are being unfolded before her eyes because she can’t stop herself from divulging them when she is unconscious. taissa, who might start to think that maybe lottie didn’t ask for this.

so jackie is bone, and natalie is hunter, and lottie is seer, and taissa might be even more so. natalie alone in the realm of the mundane (for this), but aware of them all, so I’ll set her aside for a moment.

jackie accidentally opened the door to this spiritualism. she was the seance and doomcoming (and the first communion), but she didn’t mean for it to be that. she meant to cheer them up.

lottie thought that jackie had it wrong, thought that she didn’t use her position to protect the girls, because she refused to work with the woods and lottie tries to save them and protect them and negotiate with the wilderness for them.

taissa thinks that lottie has it wrong, because she feeds into their delusions and her power is a runaway train in this setting and taissa wants to keep them alive in the best way. the practical way. except that logical leadership never led to anything out here and her other self, her spiritual self, found javi after months.

pedestals and wrecking balls and clearer views once you’re hoisted up with the girls on them. girls who are not Them but who are What Others Say. shauna dictating jackie and mari dictating lottie and van dictating taissa and everyone dictating natalie. everyone meaning the best and riding the high of delivering it, until it’s cut out from beneath them. you don’t go from great to fine. the mighty don’t fall to land on a straw bed with the rest of them, thanks for trying and welcome back. they are Icarus and their love for the others is flight and their belief that They Can Do It Better is the sun and the sun burns. in death or in life or in dreams.

and maybe in old wounds lottie understood jackie a little more and taissa understood lottie a little more and nat, who has always been able to understand them all, can watch and wait and hope that it changes things. but it won’t. because they aren’t driving their own stories anymore.

It is so easy to hate Jackie, because she is the unattainable standard girls are held to. She is what girls are told they must be, what society at large tells them is valuable, she is someone able to be missed to be remembered. She is all those things, and yet she is still human. She is not an awful horrible relentless bitch, her morality the price paid for this respect and success in societies game. She has her moments of cruelty, yes, but they mostly stem from misplaced frustration and protectiveness or deep seated and well deserved hurt. And she spends more screen time showing care, love, kindness, or protectiveness than she does cruelty. She is not an angel, the 'oh you just want to hate her but she's just too good' girl. She is flawed, she hurts people, she is complex and the narrative shows this to us.

But what can you do with a girl like that? You can't blindly hate her with no further thought, write her off as nothing but a bitch. She is messy and complicated, she provokes messy and complicated feelings. People feel, in a way, that she managed to escape or cheat the shackles of girlhood somehow. She played the game and reaped the reward. They are resentful of the softness and leniency shown to her that would never be afforded to others, resent the relative ease of her life pre-crash with others who they feel more deserving of it.

But Jackie is so terribly unhappy. She is so preoccupied with what other people think, it matters to her, it has to. People will always find ways to survive and this is the way she has, she has found a place for herself in the world where she is held in high regard, where she is loved and valued and missed and praised and envied. She didn't become the societal ideal by accident. This is careful this is curated, this a choice and one with a heavy cost. A hearty reward yes, an enviable one, but one that comes the the weight of standers no one could never hope to maintain.

It is so easy to hate Jackie Taylor, this complex, flawed, ultimately loving and caring girl as you see her reduced to the perfection she sold her happiness and true self to maintain, as you see those around her demonised and dehumanised in different ways. But Jackie's treatment is a form of dehumanisation in and of itself. The person she was wasn't good enough to miss, they had to sand it down, smooth her out, turn her from a hurt young girl who didn't deserve what happened to her, a girl just like the rest of them if only with a more dramatic end, to the perfect victim, the pretty, forever smiling dead girl.

We don't really know anything about the ones who died in the crash, and Laura Lee's death has this poetic sense of sacrificial rightness about it, she got on that plane knowing it might not work, she got to say goodbye, her arc as saved-turned-prospective savior is complete. Her arc as saved-by-God turned killed-by-whatever-rules-in-the-wilderness is complete. She passes on her faith and dies a grand, dramatic death (literally goes out with a bang).

But Jackie. Jackie is nothing if not loose threads and 'wait, that's it?'s. She's this character who we first see having sex with her boyfriend and not enjoying it, looking at herself in the mirror in fractured reflections and clearly experiencing deep turmoil about her sense of self vs image, glancing longingly and guiltily at her best friend even as she keeps up the act of golden girl, getting called the leader and uniting force of the Yellowjackets. In the first episode alone we are already presented with all the pieces that could shape up to be a fascinating puzzle once solved.

And those very interesting glimpses of what her arc of self-discovery and self-acceptance may look like (both in, like, a queer way but also in a dropping her façade of Perfect It Girl Who Knows What She's Doing way) (or maybe a darker, self-loathing and continued denial arc, I'm not picky!) get reinforced over and over: it turns out she's not a very good leader. She has sex with Travis and seems to have another moment of 'welp, that didn't work'. She finds out Shauna's had sex with someone and is clearly hurt by it beyond 'you didn't tell me'. She's jealous of how close Shauna is with Tai. She turns out not to be a very good team player when she doesn't get to lead. We know she dies, we think she will be hunted down by a pack of mad women and slaughtered in a frenzy of hatred or something else breathtaking and dramatic.

And then... she dies. She dies, not in a big explosion or with an act of inhumane violence. She dies in the cold, unseen, afters very stereotypical teenage girl fight with her best friend, and any possible character arc she might have had dies with her. Her death is the catalyst for so many things that will be crucial to the other girl's arcs, but her own is just... done. Just like that. No more possibilities for her. No more of her dealing with internalized heteronormativity, no exploration of her relationship with her parents, no hating or loving Shauna, no more anything. She's dead. Who is Jackie Taylor when societal conventions are stripped away and she is the rawest, most honest version of herself? Someone who dies, alone and hurt and heartbroken. Someone who becomes ostracized from a group she once understood to the point that there is no other way forward but for her to die. A teen girl, with insecurities and drama that in another life she might've looked back as an adult and consider overblown.

Shauna tells Jackie during their final fight that she will peak in high school, and she does. Her development ends in high school, the scattered pieces of her complexities and flaws and potential are blown to the wind and left to be picked up by Shauna in her flawed, subjective recollection. Who could Jackie Taylor have turned out to be if she hadn't died? No one. There is no version of this story in which Jackie makes it out of the wilderness. And so the threads of all the possible paths of her development are left for us and Shauna to pick up and fantasize about, without ever knowing for sure which of them, if any, might have come true.

I think that's why her death is the most tragic, because it feels the most realistic. No chase through the woods, no explosion, no brave sacrifice, no unnameable violence except for a few cruel words. She just... dies. Alone and cold and dreaming of being warm and loved and of her best friend saying back the words Jackie once said to her ('You're my best friend. You know that, right?'). She dies and any meaning attributed to that death is done so after the fact, because it in itself is just fucking... simple and fucking tragic.