“time did reverse”

This is the same girl who, when she felt Travis pulling away and drifting toward something she didn’t understand or agree with, staged his little brother’s death just to force him into grief and pull him back toward her. Then she slept with Travis immediately afterward while covering up the leg wound she used to stage Javi’s death. She allowed Javi to die in her place and used the Wilderness as an excuse (“the Wilderness chose”) even though she had never expressed belief in it before. She lied to the group for months about Coach Ben’s whereabouts. She helped capture Coach Ben, was the one to suggest how he should be executed, and couldn’t even meet his eyes while he begged her to help him.

As an adult, she committed insurance fraud and likely a range of other cons to support her drug habits, assaulted and blackmailed her former sponsor, and deliberately inserted herself back into Travis’s life the moment she learned he was finally stable and happy with another woman, with the clear intent to ruin it. When he cut off contact with her, she tracked him down and broke into his house. She stalked Misty, broke into her house with a rifle, and then later exploited Misty’s need for validation to get her help covering up a murder.

She manipulated Kevyn’s lingering feelings for her to access confidential police information, slept with him, stole his gun while he was asleep, and used it in a reckless heist in which she nearly killed someone on suspicion alone. And when Lottie was hesitant to let the other survivors stay at her compound, fearing the dangerous mental state she was beginning to spiral into, Nat convinced her to let them stay and “stop resisting” in order to continue to fuel her own path toward something that felt like healing to her. AND SO ON.

Lottie enters the wilderness freshly removed from medication she had been forced to take for most of her life, and she is immediately placed in an environment defined by constant stress, starvation, sleep deprivation, and repeated severe traumatic events in a very short amount of time. Her hallucinations and delusions are not only present, but are repeatedly validated as real and prophetic by the people around her and even relied upon for survival. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that her mental illness will shape the way she interprets events and makes decisions. That does not mean schizophrenia causes violence or that it alone explains her behavior. But it does mean that the way she experiences the wilderness is fundamentally different and the trauma she experiences along with her preexisting mental health condition interact to cause her to spiral rapidly and severely. To put it simply, mental illness and environment will always interact.

Trauma, lack of societal restrictions, desperation, a need for control and validation, self-preservation, meaning-making to cope with suffering, denial, genuine spiritual belief, and mental illness all interact with each other to form the Lottie we know.

There is also another layer to Lottie’s behavior that has less to do with the symptoms of schizophrenia themselves and more to do with the lifelong stigma surrounding it. Before the crash, she is repeatedly told that she is sick, dangerous, and in need of suppression. She grows up fearing her own mind and learning to constantly hide and mask it from others. Then she is suddenly dropped into an environment where the very experiences she has been taught to suppress are validated, revered, and become the basis for belonging and connection. For someone who has spent her entire life feeling alienated and controlled because of her mental illness, that shift is incredibly powerful. It helps explain part of why she becomes so invested in maintaining her connection to the Wilderness and why she is willing to manipulate or coerce others in order to keep that belief system intact.

So the post starts with the arguable statement that Ben's most defining characteristic is his incompetence, and goes on to dissect a scene that is the clearest display of Ben's competence...both as a teacher and as an outdoorsman(? I guess? that's the word I'll go with here). It makes the (much more justifiable) argument that this scene illustrates the violence of patriarchy, through Travis's wielding of the gun and the misogynistic comment he makes toward Nat/the girls, and claims that Ben's "passivity" in this scene--the fact that he doesn't yell at Travis or punish him in some way--makes him complicit in upholding this system. There are definitely moments in the show where Ben is passively complicit in the violence of others--although, interestingly, this is more common in the face of the new society that the girls create in the wilderness, rather than in service to the patriarchal society they left behind--but I disagree with the reading of Ben as passive, here. He's supportive: he creates a system based on skill (the penny and can tests) that the teens can choose opt out of (like Shauna) and in which they all have equal chance of succeeding, but he isn't a stickler for the rules, and bends them to allow Nat the opportunity to address Travis's misogyny in her own way. His flexibility with his own rules reveals a sense of justice--Travis is being a dick and should be taught a lesson--but also trust, since he trusts Nat to be able to teach this lesson, which she does.

So to jump to the heart of this scene--and the part where the poster's and my readings diverge the most--Nat's just failed the penny test, and Travis, as the only boy and the only one who's passed the penny test so far, crows that hunting should be handled by men and that women should stick to what they're good at, like sucking cock. Just writing that makes me want to punch him again. Nat demands another go. Jackie, more concerned with the fairness of Nat's do-over than with Travis's disgusting comment, objects: "Can she do that?" Ben's reply: "I'll allow it."

And I LOVE this moment, guys!!! I just love it! Ben's off-screen here, IIRC, so we don't see his face, but we see what he sees: Nat's expression, furious and determined, and we know what he knows--that that penny isn't going anywhere. The Yellowjackets are at the end of an undefeated season, and Ben's known and worked with the girls on the varsity team for at least a year, much more likely longer than that. He's definitely seen that expression on Nat's face before, and he knows what it means. The claim that I've seen people make--that Ben just turns a blind eye to Travis's grossness and lets Nat dangle in the wind--doesn't hold water when you see the moment Nat and Ben share here. They make eye contact and share a look of private triumph--a quiet echo of the girls' more vocal celebration.

Nat's so proud of herself! Ben's so proud of Nat! And Nat remembers this moment later, when she needs advice about Travis. She seeks Ben out and is incredibly vulnerable with him, discussing her sexuality with him, and trusting that he won't judge or shame her. I just love their relationship, and I see a throughline of shared trust between them from the penny test moment through their intimate conversation and beyond.

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