I can't keep a consistent blog

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.