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Yellowjackets

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    A-H 
  • Actor Shipping: Ella Purnell (Jackie) and Sophie Nélisse (Shauna) have been shipped by some parts of the fanbase on sites like Tumblr and Twitter due to their on-screen chemistry and real life friendship, despite both being straight, Ella is dating Max Bennett Kelly and Sophie claiming to see Ella as an elder sister. One particular thing that shippers have latched onto is the fact that Sophie loves to take pictures of Ella (with both admitting that Ella's Instagram account is mostly pictures Sophie took of her), and Sophie has admitted to being "obsessed with Ella's face" at one point. At one point, Sophie even described Ella like a painting. It's also not just limited to fans, as Ella once revealed that when she got home from filming the first season, that everyone there was convinced that she and Sophie were dating, and Sophie has revealed that she gets how some people would assume that they have "gay energy" as well.
  • Adorkable:
    • Jeff outside a police station while his wife and daughter are being interrogated decides to blast NWA's "Fuck the Police" for maximum Cringe Comedy potential.
    • Mari can actually achieve this with how ditzy she is, including singing "I'm too sexy for this cave" to herself while being held prisoner.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: See here.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • Travis doesn't appear to have any issues with the girls, even though they tied him up, sexually assaulted him, almost killed him on Doomcoming (except Jackie, Natalie, Misty, Van, Taissa and Coach Ben) and basically murdering his brother. Given that he's Driven to Suicide in 2021 and spent years as an addict, it seems everything did catch up to him after all.
    • Nobody has any issues around Jackie's death except Shauna; Mari even outright blames just Shauna, although every single character in the past timeline has a role in Jackie's death by neglecting to check on her at all after she stormed out. This is exaggerated in that nobody seems to have a big problem with cannibalizing Jackie, which may be justifiable by the fact that they're starving, but the indifference about her death from even sympathetic characters like Natalie is jarring, and that Travis lost his virginity to Jackie mere hours before her death is an even bigger ignored story.
  • Ass Pull: Shauna revealing in the Season 3 finale that the survivors had completely blocked out a good deal of what happened in the wilderness from their memories. This had only been hinted at once before back in season 2 note , which can make it feel like it comes out of nowhere. Several reviews noted it comes off as a cheap excuse for anything that happens in the flashback story not lining up with their previous behavior in the present story, as there had been increasing complaints about. Of course, given that this is revealed in the closing moments of the episode, it's unclear whether this is actually the case or she's just employing a Self-Serving Memorynote  which would be consistent with her character, so time will tell.
  • Award Snub: A notorious self-imposed case, as Liv Hewson requested to not be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Emmy due to their non-binary identity. This sparked serious discussion about how to handle identities that simply hadn’t been considered to exist at the time such awards were first designed, including changing the category name to Best Performance as a Male/Female Character, though it was noted this just caused an issue when the character is also NB.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Opinions seem to be split down the middle on Coach Scott. Some fans view him as a funny, likable character with some good comedic relief moments, and an endearing Tragic Backstory. Others find him irritating and useless. His actions at the end of the Season Two finale, in which he burns down the Yellowjackets’ cottage (though he insists he didn't), have only further divided fans’ stances on him.
    • The jury is out on Mari too. After two seasons, her characterization boils down to 'mean girl with occasional humanizing moment'. Half the fandom finds her too underdeveloped to bother getting invested in, while the rest enjoy her as an enjoyably mean Troll. Her further character development in the third season and turning out to be the pit girl has only further complicated matters.
    • Misty too. Half the fandom loves her character and appreciates her for occasionally moving the plot along and her comedic partnership with Natalie as adults, or sees themselves in her portrayal as a teenage outcast/loner/loser type nerd girl who seems to get more hate than is warranted, but a lot of people blame her for everything that happened in the show, thinking that when she smashed the flight recorder box she doomed them all.
    • Even Shauna herself gets this treatment moreso in Season 3. Viewers either view her as a Tragic Villain whose life was ruined by both the loss of her best friend, baby and the wilderness trauma or a sadistic bully who willingly abuses and tortures people she simply hates out of jealousy and spite. Or both.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Misty's hallucinations while in the sensory deprivation tank. She meets the human embodiment of her pet bird Caligula, and he reaffirms that she has done nothing wrong. It doesn't move the story forwards at all and feels very tonally inconsistent even with the wildness of the show at times.
  • Bizarro Episode: "Doomcoming" feels like this even for the weirdness level of this show. The episode opens with Shauna killing her lover Adam on the mistaken pretense that he's the blackmailer. Things only get weirder from there, as back in the woods, the girls, convinced they are only days away from starvation, decide to hold their equivalent, of homecoming, the Doomcoming. It starts off fun enough, but then they get high off of magic mushrooms that Misty mixed into the tea and soup. Jackie decides she doesn't want to be a virgin anymore and pulls aside Travis to go have sex with him. Several of the other girls end up confronting them, pull Travis away and very nearly kill him because they're so out of their minds at this point that they think he's a stag.
  • Catharsis Factor:
    • After spending the entire season slowly taking over as the Antler Queen and bullying and abusing almost everyone around her (especially Natalie, Melissa and Coach Ben) and causing the deaths of Coach Ben and Kodi, it is satisfying to see Shauna finally get her comeuppance in a slow-burn karma in both timelines; in the wilderness timeline, despite earning the title of the Antler Queen after Mari's death, not only do Natalie, Misty and Van rebel against her to call for rescue but now the rest of the survivors have grown to hate her and no longer fear her, with Travis giving her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech for insulting Javi to his face and in the present timeline, Jeff and Callie leave her while Tai and Misty cut ties with her (especially after Van's murder).
    • Relatedly, the last scene of season 3 where Natalie makes contact with the outside world with the satellite phone. After three seasons of the girls enduring horrors and sinking deeper and deeper into darkness with no rescue in sight, Natalie — who has had one of the worst experiences in the Wilderness but never lost her humanity like some of the others did — finally scores the team a true win. The set-up of the scene, Natalie crying for help and culminating in her screaming into the void, only for someone to answer back, "I can hear you," is absolutely designed for cathartic release.
  • Diagnosed by the Audience:
    • Misty's Blue-and-Orange Morality, Establishing Character Moment of watching a rat drown, habit of picking up bits of other people's personalities such as Crystal, and ease to resort to brutal and violent solutions suggests she's a clinical sociopath. Her parents are conspicuously absent in both timelines, and a key factor in a lot of sociopaths is parental neglect.
      • Alternatively Misty is presumed to be autistic by parts of the fandom. She has difficulty reading social cues, seems to be sensitive to loud sounds and certain textures, shows less empathy for certain characters but not a complete lack of it (you will often see her empathizing with Natalie, but rarely see her sympathize with someone like Jackie for example), she's shown to develop hyperfixations (Broadway, criminal podcasts, medicine), challenges with understanding social norms (thought it was appropriate to touch her coach while he was sleeping; this may also be indicative of past sexual trauma or grooming though) is seen to mask around others (uses customer service voice, and keeps up this bright and cheery appearance around others most of the time,) for the most part only ever really slipping up and letting the mask fall off around Natalie, and (very rarely) the other survivors. Also tends to have meltdowns under extreme duress.
    • Shauna's habit of making everything all about her, high sense of self importance, willingness to hurt those who she believes have hurt her in revenge, and manipulative qualities point to a case of narcissistic personality disorder.
    • Taissa having a second personality in "the bad one" indicates Dissociative Identity Disorder, albeit a very stereotypical depiction if there's nothing supernatural going on.
    • Lottie does have general anti psychotics medication, but her actual condition isn't specified, and chances are she actually is psychic. But if she isn't, then her visions read as schizophrenia.
  • Draco in Leather Pants:
    • Shauna gets this a lot, with plenty of viewers quick to sweep her worst deeds under the rug and chalk them all up to the trauma she suffered in the wilderness, which while horrific, ignores the fact that she was still implied to be pretty awful before the crash - since she was sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend and frequently pulled Never My Fault whenever she was challenged (infamously Blaming the Victim when Jackie called her on the 'Doomcoming' antics). This often involves making other characters out to be much worse to make Shauna the victim, most notably Jackie who is often reimagined as a bully who knowingly treats Shauna badly. As a result, these fans were not happy when Season 3 suggested that Shauna was the show's Villain Protagonist, and the flashbacks to the wilderness were intended to be a Protagonist Journey to Villain.
    • Misty also gets this due to her actresses's performances and more open and jovial nature compared to Shauna, despite her litany of crimes, such as destroying the transponder that could have saved them early, harassing and attempting to drug Coach Ben, abusing her elderly patients and kidnapping and killing Jessica Roberts, even before Shauna snapped. While she has plenty of fans who Love to Hate her, there are many who brush aside her worse qualities and emphasise her as merely 'misunderstood', and a minority even insist that she is the most well-adjusted and sanest of the Yellowjackets.
  • Easily Forgiven: Travis doesn't seem to have any issues with Lottie, either in the past or the present, even though she was leading the charge of girls who sexually assaulted and nearly killed him on Doomcoming. In fact, the next time they are shown interacting after that, he is implied to be attracted to her as she speaks to the wilderness. He also has no issues with her stemming from the fact that Javi was killed as part of a hunt to save her life. By Season 3 however, it's implied he is scared of her, and is just humouring her, with a moment where he tries to trick her into walking into a trap presumably to kill her after she's prevented them from going back to civilisation with Hannah and Kodiak.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Laura Lee is beloved by fans after showing Hidden Depths beyond being the Token Religious Teammate, her sweet nature endearing her to many. Despite dying in only the eighth episode, many a Fix Fic has her surviving or turning out to be alive.
    • Akilah became a fan favourite in Season 2 thanks to her expanded role and cute friendship with a mouse she called Nugget. Him turning out to be Dead All Along only endeared her to fans even more. Likewise, it soon became clear that she was easily the nicest of the Yellowjackets survivors.
    • Simone is also very well-liked for being a good parent to Sammy and the Only Sane Man among the adult cast.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • The large number of mysteries on the series has led to a huge subculture of theories regarding it, particularly on Reddit. Some of the more wild theories involve time-travel, certain characters that have been shown to die still being alive somehow or resurrected, and certain things being some sort of dream or hallucination.
    • The identity of the girl being killed in the first scene was originally assumed to be Lottie, due to both having long dark hair and her appearing to parallel Simon from Lord of the Flies. But since Season 2 reveals she survived to adulthood, the most popular candidate is Mari. Upon Season 3's introduction of Hannah, a scientist lost in the woods with long black hair, she immediately became the prime suspect. But then when the Season 3 finale rolled around, it turns out that Hannah is a Red Herring and Mari was Pit Girl all along.
  • Fan Community Nicknames: The Fellowjackets or the (Yellowjacket) Hive.
  • Fandom-Specific Plot:
    • Following the end of season one, which saw the deaths of both Laura Lee and Jackie, there were a large number of fanfics that undid them. For Laura Lee, it simply meant having her jumping from the plane before it exploded. However, for Jackie, it often involves Shauna, Natalie, or another Yellowjacket waking up earlier in the night and saving her before she freezes to death.
    • Should Laura Lee survive the plane explosion, she usually ends up crippled from the fall and/or disfigured from getting caught in the explosion. Should she survive into adulthood, she'll usually be involved in Lottie's cult and romantically involved with her.
    • A semi common plot thread has Tai accidentally crippling another of the Yellowjackets instead of Allie, sparing that specific member from the crash.
    • A few more racy writeups have the Yellowjackets lock up Travis and make out with Jackie during Doomcoming; whether Jackie is fine with this varies.
    • Similarly to and often in tandem with the above, several fanfics have Jackie lose her virginity with a different character than Travis— most typically Natalie.
    • A few fanfics have someone else draw the Queen of Hearts during the first hunt, typically either Tai or Van. In the former case, Van will tearfully allow Tai to be sacrificed. In the latter case, Van will Face Death with Dignity while Tai unsuccessfully fights and/or begs for Van to be spared. Occasionally, Tai gets into a rebound relationship with Shauna afterwards.
    • Jackie and Laura Lee are sometimes depicted as ghosts observing the rest of the Yellowjackets in the Wilderness together, sometimes specifically tailing Shauna and Lottie. Jackie often gets jealous and/or distressed that Melissa got into a relationship with Shauna.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The veiled leader figure with antlers seen in the cannibalism scenes in the "Pilot" has been dubbed the Antler Queen, which is so popular that the cast and crew began to use it.
    • The girl murdered in the first scene via falling into a trap is named "Pit Girl".
    • The corpse found in the cabin in 1996, and presumably its original owner, is often called "Cabin Daddy".
    • "Snackie" for Jackie, after her corpse gets cooked in a failed cremation attempt and her desperate teammates decide to eat her.
    • Many fans refer to Jessica Roberts as simply "the reporter." Notably, many do this even after it's revealed that she is not actually a reporter, but a private detective, or more specifically, according to her, a "fixer" for rich people.
    • "Javioli" for Javi following he becomes the next person cannibalized by the group after falling through the ice on a hunt.
    • Unnamed Yellowjackets that only exist in the background get dubbed "Breakfast", "Lunch", and "Dinner".
    • Melissa was nicknamed "Hat Girl" and even after her first name was revealed, her surname is jokingly said to be Hat or Hattersall. Even her most common ship name with Shauna is Shaunahat (based on another ship name Shaunanat).
    • "Ben BQ" for Ben once he is finally killed and eaten by the group. Helped by the fact that the researchers even mistook the scent of him cooking for a barbecue
    • As Shauna became increasingly deranged, violent, and tyrannical during season 3, several nicknames highlighting how awful she is sprouted up, including: Pregnant Satan, Local Terrorist, Bisexual Stalin, Shaunnibal Lecter, and Oshauna bin Laden.
    • "Wilderness Jesus" for Lottie, due to her acting as the group's prophet. Her walking over the sticks covering the pit without falling in has been compared to Jesus walking on water.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Shauna is married to Jeff in the present and had an affair with him in the flashback storylines, but most fans and fan content instead ship her with Jackie due to their Les Yay filled friendship in the flashback storyline. For example, Shauna/Jackie have the most fics for the show on AO3, with over 2,154 fics as of April 2025, easily outnumbering Jeff/Shauna. Even Jackie's death has done nothing to stop their being shipped, with many Fix Fics being written where Jackie lives and gets together with Shauna.
  • Fan-Preferred Cut Content: One idea for the Adam/Shauna affair was to reveal that Adam was actually Javi, which some fans would have liked, finding Adam to be a bit of a weird Red Herring without it, given his lack of online presence and obsession with Shauna are just innocuous otherwise.
  • Fans Prefer the New Her:
    • Coach Scott gets an overgrown beard thanks to living in the wilderness for so long, and probably not being able to shave on his own. However the bearded look is very popular with fans.
    • Several of the girls are introduced with shoulder-length hair that grows out because of how long they're stuck in the wilderness, and presumably isn't their preference. Granted they look better than you'd expect, but Shauna and Mari look positively stunning with longer hair, giving them an Unkempt Beauty.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Misty's one companion is her pet African Grey Caligula, whom she positively dotes on. A viewer familiar with such birds will note that an African Grey's purported lifespan is 20-30 years, but as pets they can easily live twice that. It makes perfect sense the emotionally immature Misty would prefer a lifelong companion whom she'd never have to deal with losing.
    • During their first date, Adam quotes Mother Night to Shauna, who responds by quoting Slaughterhouse-Five. Both are works by Kurt Vonnegut, who had a rather cynical view on humanity, just like the show. Additionally, Mother Night is about Becoming the Mask (which happens to Shauna in 1997 when she becomes more and more violent, eventually becoming the Antler Queen), while Slaughterhouse-Five deals with atrocities humans are capable of doing, which nicely fits the show about a group of people willing to do anything to survive, no matter how violent or cruel their ways of achieving that are.
    • The Antler Queen's cloak is white with black locks of hair draped around it revealed in season 3 to be Mari's hair. This makes it resemble an ermine cloak, which is traditionally worn by royalty.
  • Ghost Shipping:
    • One of the most popular season one ships is Shauna/Jackie. It continued to have a fanbase even after the season finale killed off Jackie. So instead, a lot of fans have taken to writing Fix Fics where she never died and instead got together with Shauna or even just shipping Shauna with Jackie's literal ghost. This is helped by the fact that the present day Shauna hallucinates a vision of Jackie's ghost.
    • Laura Lee and Lottie are not as popular as Shauna and Jackie, but still have their ardent fans. Laura Lee dies in episode 8 of Season 1, but they remain popular due to Laura Lee's influence on Lottie's character, and the fact that Lottie still sees Laura Lee in the present day.
  • Gotta Ship 'Em All: The plane crash survivors are shipped in almost every which way, particularly the titular team, due to the younger cast having chemistry with everyone. The most common combinations are Jackie/Shauna, Taissa/Van, Lottie/Laura Lee, Misty/Natalie and Akilah/Mari, but there are also fans for Natalie/Lottie, Taissa/Shauna, Lottie/Shauna, Natalie/Jackie, and Misty/Natalie/Lottie. A very specific example is Jackie/Shauna and Jeff/Shauna. The latter pairing was not remotely popular until late in Season 1, but it's now common to mutually ship them, viewing Jackie as Shauna's true love and Jeff as a Second Love post Jackie's death.
  • Heartwarming Moments: A meta example. When a producer asked Melanie Lynskey to lose weight for the role, she refused, wanting to show that a larger woman could still be sexually desirable. The rest of the cast rallied around her, with Juliette Lewis even writing a strongly worded letter to said producer supporting Lynskey.
  • He's Just Hiding:
    • Some people are still holding out hope that Laura Lee will return after the plane she was in exploded.
    • Jackie was another one many people refused to believe is dead due to her journal shown in "Saints" conspicuously referring to movies that came out after 1996. The creators had to come out an insist that yes, Jackie is dead but there is a reason for the journal references.
    • This was even the case for Lottie in Season 3, with some conspiracy theories that her death was faked until the finale confirmed that she did indeed die.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Poor Laura Lee never makes it to the winter, but we at least get to see how Jane Widdop looks like in their winterclothes in It's a Wonderful Knife . Ironically in that film, their character starts the plot by wishing she was dead. And considering Laura Lee's Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with Lottie, at least in another universe, Laura Lee finally gets to kiss a girl.
    • Mari gets a bit smitten while watching Travis swim at which point Jackie mockingly states she can't be that desperate after only 3 days in the woods. Kevin Alves and Alexa Barajas started dating in real life so yes, Jackie, she was that desperate.
  • Hollywood Homely: Misty describes herself as ugly, she's told that her hair is unflattering, and her adult version practically has to twist an unexceptional date's arm into a romantic encounter with her. She's played by two conventionally attractive actresses: Samantha Hanratty and Christina Ricci. However, it's also clear that her personality is extremely off-putting to everyone around her, so it's possible that this is the reason she's so repellent. Indeed, once we're introduced to Walter, who is a fellow psycho, he finds her very attractive.

    I-W 
  • I Knew It!:
    • Many fans guessed the identity of Lottie's murderer in Season 3 long before it was revealed, due to Shauna seeming too convenient a Red Herring, and her DNA being found on Lottie meant that Callie could have been the murderer. Though revealing it as Accidental Murder was quite unexpected.
    • Mari was the most common guess for the identity of the "Pit Girl." This gets confirmed in season 3.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Jackie. She's portrayed as somewhat spoiled and egotistical, but overall a very nice and charming girl before the crash. Though she Took a Level in Jerkass during their time in the wilderness, she dealt with a lot on top of the brutal situation: Shauna cheating with her boyfriend Jeff and then gets pregnant with him, a fact she only finds out because she reads her diary. She goes through Sanity Slippage and pettily tries to throw Shauna out of the cabin in a fit of anger, only for Shauna to turn it back on her and throw her out in a tantrum, forcing her to sleep outside. Jackie then freezes to death and dies a pretty slow and unpleasant death. And if that isn’t bad enough, to rub salt in the wound, her starving teammates resort to eating her corpse after their attempt to cremate her goes wrong and ends up cooking her instead.
    • Callie becomes one in Season 2. While the first season had shown her as a standard Bratty Teenage Daughter with only one Pet the Dog moment, she quickly realises that her mother is a murderer and her father is complicit in covering the crimes up, not to mention she gets strung along by an adult man. While her lying to the police doesn't make her 100% sympathetic, the fact that she spends most of her screen time being used by everyone, and the implications of having Shauna as a mother can't help but make one sympathise with her.
    • Shauna herself follows the same line as her daughter in terms of audience sympathy. Her jerkass credentials include sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend, being responsible for said friend freezing to death, and in the present manipulates her teenage daughter, has an affair just to spite her husband, and murders an innocent man. But in the present, it's clear she feels her best years are behind her, she admits that she didn't want to be a mother or married to Jeff, she clearly carries the guilt of Jackie's death and to cap it off, the baby she gave birth to in the woods was stillborn.
    • Natalie is something of a Jerkass in the beginning, with her Brutal Honesty and penchant for violent solutions, but she becomes a bigger Woobie as more of her backstory is revealed. Her father was abusive, and she had to witness him accidentally killing himself with his own shotgun, it's implied she's been sexualised by adult men, and in the present she is heartbroken over Travis's suicide. Season 2 even reveals that she was nearly hunted down and killed by the other girls for food, and carried the guilt of letting Javi drown when he tried to save her.
    • Mari spends the first two seasons being a Jerkass with no shortage of Kick the Dog moments, but Season 3 reveals that she was only twelve when she watched her four-year-old cousin die of brain cancer, and she becomes rather pitiable while captured by Coach Scott and clearly feeling guilty for the others forcing her to lead them to where he's hiding.
    • Lottie's dad seems to be an aloof Jerkass whenever we see him in flashbacks, particularly subjecting her to electroshock therapy to "fix" her and being intolerant of any possible supernatural beliefs his wife might have. When we meet him in the present, he's rather pitiable, suffering from dementia, and he seems to have struggled to connect with his daughter.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Natalie is often shipped with almost every other character on the show. In canon there's her romance with Travis, but her two most popular fanon ones are with Lottie and Misty, with some even going so far as to ship her with both. There are also those who ship her with Shauna, Jackie, Taissa, Van, and Laura Lee. It helps that her teen and adult actresses, Sophie Thatcher and Juliette Lewis, have good chemistry with the rest of the cast.
  • Les Yay:
    • Plenty of it to go around with a largely female cast, but special attention has to be paid to Jackie and Shauna, who are extremely affectionate with each other but also easily divided by jealousy. Some even theorize that Shauna slept with Jeff as a proxy for her true feelings for Jackie. There's also no lack of subtext between Nat and Misty, or particularly Misty and Jessica (having a woman chained up in your bed for days will do that).
    • Misty and Crystal hit it off so quickly that viewers could be forgiven for thinking that they were going to become a couple.
    • Despite their past conflicts, Natalie and Lottie share some intimate moments and Held Gazes throughout season 2, culminating in them getting very touchy-feely during the reunited Yellowjackets' impromptu party in "Burial."
  • Love to Hate:
    • There's no denying that Misty is a despicable person. But there's also no denying that Christina Ricci's charisma in the role makes her one of the favourite characters. Reviewers agree, some calling it her best work in years.
    • Shauna hides a selfish, ruthless nature under her suburban housewife exterior, but both Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nelisse deliver such good performances that she's an incredibly compelling character to watch.
    • Mari is a mean girl whose Pet the Dog moments you can count on one hand, but she is entertainingly mean at the very least, and anyone sassing her often becomes satisfying.
    • Upon Van crossing the Moral Event Horizon in Season 2, some have admitted to finding her even more compelling as The Dragon to the Antler Queen.
    • Adult Lottie is a cult leader who has done some very shady things in the name of continuing to serve whatever supernatural force they encountered. But Simone Kessell plays her with the perfect level of sinister charisma, genuine charm and sheer commitment that she is a delight to watch whenever she is on screen.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Jeff Comically Missing the Point while Shauna is explaining her affair with Adam: "There's no book club?!"
    • The events of "Edible Complex" where Jackie's body gets cannibalized by her teammates has lead to Jackie being affectionately nicknamed "Snackie" by the fandom.
    • Similarly, behind the scenes, much of the fake body was made of jackfruit since some cast members were vegan, which led to the cast calling it, of course, "Jackie fruit."
    • On Liv Hewson getting top surgery between Seasons 2 and 3, fans joked that Van had Misty perform it on her.
    • Melissa’s hats. One particularly popular running joke in the fandom has one or more of the adult timeline characters— typically Shauna— completely unable to recognize an adult Melissa until she puts on a hat, à la Perry the Platypus.
    • Melissa is thought of as a Nightmare Fetishist who was turned on by and even fantasises about Shauna's violent actions.
    • "Deep Friend Love."
    • Referring to Jackie as the Wilderness Baby and/or Callie’s biological father. Coupled with this, Lottie is frequently nicknamed either "The Father that Stepped-Up" or "The Father that Overstepped." After Lottie is found dead at the bottom of stairway, "The Father That Fell Off The Steps" caught on.
    • "Mari Sinapellido"/"Mari Nolastname"— fans joking about the fact that after two full seasons, Mari’s last name still hadn’t been revealed. This actually became an Ascended Meme in Season Three, with it casually being revealed that her last name is Ibarra.
      • This quickly expanded into other characters not yet given a last name, with them also jokingly being give the surname "Nolastname" or one related to their character’s quirks or background—for example, "Melissa Hat."
    • In "Croak", when Lottie and Shauna refuse to leave during the ending, Natalie is depicted in summaries as sweetly and often overtly romantically coaxing Lottie but snapping and shouting at Shauna.
    • "Were you outside last night eating dirt?"
    • 'Melissa realizing who the problem was.' After Melissa remarked that Jackie "kind of treated [Shauna] like shit" many fans of Jackie (mostly in jest) took offense to that idea. After Shauna becomes increasingly cruel to Melissa, climaxing in Shauna publicly humiliated Melissa and pointing a gun at her, it became a common joke to say that Melissa would walk back her earlier statement and side with Jackie.
    • Similarly to the previous entry, the Yellowjackets realizing that rather than being useless dead weight, Jackie was essentially the only one capable of reigning in Shauna’s sadistic and domineering tendencies.
  • Moe: Akilah becomes this in Season 2, with her Odd Friendship where she finds a mouse in the cabin, names him Nugget and starts affectionately taking care of him. The fact that she was hallucinating him just makes her all the more huggable.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • Misty is well and truly on the other side of this line, having committed many deeds that render her irredeemable. Take your pick: molesting Coach Scott in his sleep, poisoning him, destroying the flight recorder, setting a spy camera in Natalie's hotel room, abducting Jessica Roberts and keeping her captive in her basement, allowing the whole group to be poisoned without their knowledge...
    • All of the girls, except maybe Natalie, cross it when they allow Javi to drown so they can eat him, and had been prepared to hunt and kill Natalie beforehand. Bonus points go to Shauna, who was going to cut Natalie's throat, Van who led the charge, and Misty, who forced Natalie to stop helping him.
    • Just when Shauna crossed it is up for debate. Already sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend and blackmailing her teenage daughter to keep an affair secret is low. Murdering the innocent Adam could be excused by mistakenly thinking he was the blackmailer, but then roping Natalie, Taissa and Misty into the scheme as accomplices by lying that he was the blackmailer. Then in Season 3, she mauls Melissa, her ex-girlfriend, and forces her to eat her own flesh by threatening to expose Melissa's identity to Melissa's family.
    • The cops in the second season. Matt Saracusa seduces the underage daughter of his suspect (though he is careful not to cross any lines) just because she could serve as a character witness.
    • Melissa was mostly in the background, but she officially crosses it in Season 3 by slicing Coach Ben's Achilles tendon to prevent him from potentially escaping the camp. Then when she's revealed to be alive in the present day, she's married the daughter of a woman whose death she was an accomplice in. And to cap that off, she murders Van after the latter had decided to let her live.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Jeff starts off the show as a Hate Sink: a negligent and philandering husband. However, most of his flaws turn out to be misunderstandings, and he's revealed to be a much sympathetic and selfless person than he first appeared. His hilarious reaction to Shauna's cheating and the lack of book club also endeared him to fans.
    • Mari was something of a Flat Character in the first two seasons, merely being a ditzy bully, and only getting the odd humanising moment. Season 3 gave her an expanded role as a rival to Shauna, shone a light on a tragic event in her past, and showed her in a much more complex fashion - where she votes not guilty for Coach Ben, and reassures Natalie after she performs a Mercy Kill. Her turning against Lottie and plotting against Shauna also earned her more respect, to the point that when the finale revealed her to be Pit Girl, many fans commented that they were actively rooting for her to survive.
  • Ron the Death Eater:
    • Jackie is often painted as an outright Alpha Bitch and Asshole Victim, particularly by the pro-Shauna or Natalie side of the fandom. This camp paints her as a controlling busybody who micromanages Shauna's life and thus justifies Shauna sleeping with her boyfriend - when pre-crash, she's never more than a little superficial, and she actually tries to keep her teammates together in the initial days. About the only outright mean thing she does is slut shame Natalie, but that hardly sets her apart from the others - Taissa trying to freeze Allie out, Shauna accusing the latter of deliberately injuring her, Lottie complaining about Travis when they literally just buried his father, everything out of Mari's mouth and the metric tonne of horrible things Misty has done. She even does sincerely try to apologize to Nat but is rebuffed before she can.
    • Coach Ben got painted as crossing the Moral Event Horizon in the Season 2 finale for apparently trying to burn down the cabin with the girls inside it. Since all the girls, except Lottie had taken part in allowing Javi, who can't be older than thirteen, to drown and then carved him up for food, and Misty had effectively killed Crystal, as well as attempting to molest him and forced him to depend on her, and he'd also seen Shauna deliver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Lottie after having also forced Jackie out of the cabin - it's safe to say that had it been successful, it would have been a Karmic Death for sure. Admittedly, Travis (and to a less extent Nat who tried to save Javi) was also inside. Season 3 implies he didn't do it and although Steven Krueger opted to play the scenes as if he did, he saw it as an attempt to get the girls to come to their senses. He also gets this for lying to Misty that he does return her feelings, ignoring that he does so after Misty had literally poisoned him, tried to sexually assault him in his sleep and was doing things like kicking his cane out from under him to force him to be dependant on her, so he was hardly dealing with someone sane and rational. And even then, he tells her the truth two episodes later, while under the influence of shrooms that were the result of yet another attempt to drug him.
  • The Scrappy: Melissa, particularly older Melissa, though younger Melissa is not popular, either. An extra since Season 2, Melissa abruptly ascended in Season 3. Her behavior largely involves encouraging Shauna, who has herself become less popular as she has become more unhinged, but even those viewers who strongly dislike Shauna admit she had her reasons for going off at the deep end. Melissa, on the other hand, is a Flat Character about whom little is known but she is given an extreme amount of focus by the plot and gets in a relationship with the de facto lead character (Shauna). Melissa is even more unpopular in her adult form. Issues with her range from thinking that either Jenna Burgess or Hillary Swank do not look enough alike to be playing the same character and the view that adults Van and Lottie (themselves much more popular character) were killed off to make room for Hillary Swank, whether in the show itself or in their finances.
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • Natalie is pretty clearly wearing a wig in 1996, as her dyed blonde hair never regrows to brunette past a certain point until season 3.
    • When Javi's heart is first seen on a plate it's way too large to belong to an actual human, and was probably a cow's. Conversely, when Travis is holding it it's much more realistically sized, and that was probably a large gummi because the actor had to actually bite into it.
    • In Season 3, the adjusted makeup to show Van's facial scars healing after several months actually overshoots the makeup used on present day Van as established last season, giving the impression that they somehow got worse again.
  • Spiritual Successor:
    • It's very easy to see Shauna as Rose.
    • The 1996 storyline is essentially an all-female, 50/50 combination of two works: Alive (in which a soccer team's plane crashes and the survivors are reduced to cannibalism) and Lord of the Flies (in which marooned classmates degenerate into warring cults). The 2021 storyline also functions as a Spiritual Sequel, showing what would happen when the traumatized characters return to civilization.
  • Squick:
    • In "The Dollhouse", when they first find the cabin, Jackie runs up to the pantry, excited at finding cans of food and opening one without thinking. The contents of the cans are black and slimy.
    • In "Blood Hive", when all the girls are having their period at the same time, Akilah points out which pot is for what: "Bloody soldiersnote  on the left and breakfast on the right. Okay? Don't mess them up like Travis did." We are not told what happened or how but we can imagine...
    • Travis and Natalie go out hunting and bring home a deer with antlers covered in bloody guts. The others are dubious, but they are also very hungry. When Shauna cuts it open to gut it, its belly is full of maggots. The audience even gets a Gross-Up Close-Up of the squirmy little maggots.
    • Misty’s unrequited crush on Coach Scott is quite nausea-inducing, due to the former's pushiness and the fact that Misty is a teenage girl and Coach Scott is an adult man well into his 30snote . At one point, Misty catches the man with a boner and nearly molests him in his sleep before he wakes up and orders her away. The disgust the coach feels toward her attempts is clearly felt by the audience as well.
    • After Akilah discovers that the mouse she found in the pantry and kept as a pet is nothing but a dried-out carcass, she comes very close to popping it in her mouth.
    • Melissa, prompted by Shauna, slashes Coach Scott's Achilles's tendon. The next episode, we get a Gross-Up Close-Up of the festering wound.
    • Shauna bites a chunk of flesh from Melissa's arm and forces her to eat it.
    • Taissa eats Van's heart in the Season 3 finale without even bothering to wash her hands first, having only cut it out with a regular shovel.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • While her death drives the plot forward, Laura Lee would have been an interesting character to spare, even just for a little while. Her innocence and devotion to her faith would have been engaging to be seen challenged, or even broken, as she becomes a cannibal with the rest of the Yellowjackets and either puts on a facade or spirals when she is rescued.
    • Travis is killed off basically immediately in the adult storyline and never has the opportunity to really reconnect with the Yellowjackets and bond over disposing Adam’s body or doing weird cult rituals. There's also no time for him to discuss the vast amount of weird and/or awful stuff that happened to him in the wilderness.
    • Lottie in Season 2, but more prominently in Season 3. Season 1 establishes young Lottie as a leader of whatever spirit she imagines (or actually exists) in the wilderness. Come Season 2, she's mostly trying to help others in the woods and in the present. Season 3 makes this even more prominent: after Lottie descends back into hallucinating and delusion as an adult, she tries to kill herself via the hunt, except that it ends up killing Natalie instead. Her response to this in Season 3 is to become fixated on Callie to some degree, which is also a promising plotline that is brought down by her anticlimactic death in the middle of Season 3. Her coming Back for the Finale and getting proper closure on the death and why she was fixated on Callie was at least seen as a worthy send-off however.
      • It's been reported that Lottie was originally intended to have a smaller role in season 2, but the writers needed to rework the season when Juliette Lewis wanted out of her contract, so they beefed up Lottie's role to help build to Nat's death. This means that Lottie's sudden death was likely always part of the plan rather than Dropped a Bridge on Him, but it had a different feel with her expanded role.
    • The death of Natalie at the end of Season 2 was immediately suspected to be far more due to her actress wanting to leave the show than anything served the story. note  This is borne out in Season 3 as the flashback story features some major developments for her that we already know can't lead to anything in the present since she's already dead. e.g. Natalie and Shauna becoming foils in the 1990s timeline, and the clearest hero and villain of the story respectively, can't amount to anything in the present even though logically there should be narrative parallels. That was indeed supposedly the original plan before the actress's departure.
  • Trapped by Mountain Lions:
    • Natalie's plot in Charlotte's hippie commune. It's built up as ominous and Natalie hates and distrusts it, but it turns out that it really wasn't sinister at all...until it is, just in time for the finale. While there are some nice moments such as Natalie bonding with Lisa (a new character), it separates her entirely from all of the preexisting characters. This only finally stops being the case right at the end of Season 2, when all the other surviving Yellowjackets come back to join her. It's been rumored that this was a last minute shift from the original plans; when Juliette Lewis decided to leave, the writers decided they needed to structure Natalie's season 2 story to build to her death, and they used Lottie's cult as the vehicle to do that.
    • Adult Misty's plot in Season 2 involves following Natalie around for a solid chunk of episodes only to be rebuffed, ditched, and told nothing is wrong almost immediately, rendering the whole thing (except meeting Walter) as total Filler.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
    • Shauna is intended to come across as a complicated, flawed protagonist. But in contrast to Natalie and Taissa, whose Freudian Excuse or Trauma Conga Lines more than justify their worse moments, Shauna is introduced sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend. When she's finally called on it by Jackie, her response is shamelessly manipulative. As an adult, she suspects her husband is cheating and, rather than do the mature thing and confront him on it, she opts to have an affair of her own. And when she's exposed for her affair, it turns out that Jeff wasn't cheating (though he was blackmailing the Yellowjackets) and when he freely offers to take the fall for her, she rejects it due to worries the Yellowjackets' secrets will come out and never once apologises for cheating on him. The narrative almost seems to ignore Shauna's worse moments or treat them as lesser, whereas the others are repeatedly called on them.
    • Natalie in "Flight of the Bumblebee". She acts as though she's being unfairly judged for her sexual history and, while she didn't know a previous sex partner was Travis's bully when they got together - she did by the time she and Travis were becoming a couple. She specifically withheld that detail so that Travis would sleep with her, and her response when she's called on it is to taunt him about his mechanical failure. What's intended as both of them being at fault falls flat since Travis has every right to be furious at Natalie for lying; especially since she had previously insisted that sex "means something to me". Not to mention that she tricks him into thinking Javi is dead, supposedly for his own good, but it can come across as another form of using him.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: Ironic for a show where half of it is an intentional period piece but during the adult timeline, which takes place in 2021, Misty makes a reference to shopping at Tuesday Morning. Two years later Tuesday Morning would close down all their stores.
  • The Woobie:
    • Lottie. She has a lonely home life and is made to take antipsychoticsnote  for hallucinations (which may be of supernatural origin instead of neurological). Once her medication runs out, her hallucinations return spooking her. She is aware of something wrong with the cabin where they are staying but the others don't take her seriously, even after she hurts herself at the séance. Either they mock her or they treat her behavior as yet another inconvenience. Only Laura Lee treats her kindly in her own way, conducting a baptism after she asks her to help her connect with God. While she is running a cult in the present day, and had been implied to be the Antler Queen in the woods, flashbacks elaborate that the others killed Javi for food in her name and she is horrified at the thought. She also spent time in a mental institution after returning from the wilderness, and begins having visions again in the present day.
    • Taissa's son Sammy. He doesn't seem this way at first, but it quickly becomes clear that his bad and at times bizarre behavior is down to Taissa and the stress caused by her Senate campaign and other events. As all of that weren't enough, in "Flight of the Bumblebee," Taissa reveals to Shauna that the family dog, Biscuit, is missing, apparently because she left a gate open when she was sleepwalking and Sammy dotes on the dog. When Taissa returns home, she finds Sammy and her wife Simone at a table making lost dog posters. It later turns out that the dog is dead, his head cut off, possibly by Taissa during one of her sleepwalking episodes. Though he doesn't know this yet.
    • Crystal. She’s just as ostracized as Misty, but unlike Misty, she isn’t manipulative, selfish or violent, just annoying. Otherwise she's just as kind as Laura Lee and she's rewarded with mean snipes by the other girls, especially Mari, leaving her with only Misty to be friends with. Unfortunately that doesn’t go well for her.
    • Travis, considering he loses his dad in the plane crash, has been a victim of bullying at school and in the present is introduced having just hanged himself. He's also a victim of grey rape by Jackienote  and spends months worrying about his missing little brother (and thanks to Natalie, spends some of that time believing him to be dead), only to lose him later in the wilderness. Season 2 elaborates that he and Natalie continued their unhealthy relationship throughout life, and Natalie herself feels that she ruined his life.
    • Kevyn as a teenager was the uncool nerd, with Natalie being one of his only friends, and as an adult he's going through a divorce with a young son to raise. Natalie ends up using him, and he's killed by Walter, and framed for several crimes he didn't commit.
    • In Season 2, Akilah finds a mouse in the pantry and turns him into a pet, naming him Nugget and making plans for their future. "It Chooses" reveals that she's been carrying a dried-out carcass instead of an adorable live mouse. And for a disgusting second, she contemplates eating the carcass.
    • And then there's Javi. No older than twelve or thirteen, and he has to deal with his father's death on top of the trauma that comes with the accident. He miraculously survives on his own in the wilderness, even attempting to save Natalie from being hunted down and cannibalised by the other girls, and is then left to drown so that they can eat him.

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