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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 and the fact that Ella is dating Max Bennett Kelly. 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.
- Alternate Character Interpretation:
- Laura Lee declares that the accident is God punishing her for thinking the C-word about her music teacher. Does she genuinely think that, especially since the worst of the curse words would be especially offensive to a super-religious young woman? Or was she just joking in the hopes of lightening the mood?
- The Yellowjackets that we have seen are still alive in the present —Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, and Misty—: whatever they did to survive during those 19 months in the wilderness, it has left them scarred and traumatized and they are determined to never speak about it or let it come out. Were they just teens who did what they had to stay alive, like the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571note , or something much darker and truly unspeakable?
- Laura Lee deciding to take a decrepit plane and fly out to seek help: was she being too arrogant or a complete fool to think her plan would work? Or was she aware of the risks but still figured it was better than just sitting back and waiting to starve?
- After a fight with Shauna and feeling alienated, Jackie goes outside where she struggles to keep a fire going and ends up freezing to death. Did she let pride overcome common sense (if she wanted to pout by herself, she could have claimed the attic)? Or did she truly feel like she was so isolated from the group that she would not be allowed back in? And if so, was she right?
- In the Season 1 finale, Simone finds a grisly altar with the dog's head and the Arc Symbol scrawled in blood/red paint. That, plus Taissa's Psychotic Smirk when it is announced that she won the election, puts Taissa's claims of Sleepwalking into question. Was she really aware of what she was doing? Did she have malicious intent? Is she connected to Lottie's cult?
- Are Shauna's actions a result of the trauma she suffered, or was she already a budding sociopath? Even before the accident, she's sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend, and when she's caught out for it, her response is that of a textbook emotional manipulator; blaming Jackie for her own insecurities and being completely shameless. She emotionally abuses her daughter who, for all her brattiness, is still a child (and it's likely Shauna Callie picked up those habits from), and is particularly crafty when revealing her murder of Adam to Jeff; again blaming him for her affair as opposed to taking responsibility. Shauna bludgeoning to death the rabbits destroying her garden: A sign of Bad People Abuse Animals (there are plenty of non-violent ways to deal with garden pests), the result of her survival experience, or a pragmatic if unorthodox approach (she butchers and cooks the rabbit she kills)?
- Is Natalie's decision to fake Javi's death as selfless as she tells herself - is she just desperately trying to help Travis, or is she jealous of his deepening relationship with Lottie?
- A great many viewers believe that Jackie was a deeply closeted/in denial lesbian.
- Jackie's Dying Dream in the Season 1 finale shows Shauna being the one to reach out to her and invite her back into the cabin. Taking that as a reflection of her subconscious, does that mean that Jackie's anger at Shauna's betrayal was not so much about Jeff, and more about the lying and going behind her back? And does the dream indicate that Jackie would have been willing to forgive Shauna had she accepted responsibility? And does that mean Jackie doesn't go back into the cabin because she thinks she's been completely shunned by the others?
- Shauna claims that she's always in Jackie's shadow, and that she feels invisible, and indeed her parents seem to think this is the case. Except, Jackie's boyfriend was interested in her, and in fact declares Shauna's brilliance to the parents, stating how he likes the life they've built together. Outside of that, Randy was also interested in her, suggesting that Shauna was considered beautiful and desirable in school. Was she once the 'ugly duckling' who then blossomed and didn't realise it? Or has she always been driven by envy and just convinced herself of this to justify her worse actions?
- Angst? What Angst?:
- Travis doesn't appear to have any issues with the girls, even though they tied him up, sexually assaulted him, and almost killed him on Doomcoming (except Natalie). He's distracted by Javi's disappearance, but even so. 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. 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.
- 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, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Fandom-Specific Plot: Following the end of season one, which saw the death of both Laura Lee and Jackie, there were created a large number of fanfics that undid this. For Laura Lee, it simply meant having her not take the plane that exploded. However, for Jackie, it often involves Shauna waking up earlier in the night and saving her before she freezes to death.
- Fan Nickname:
- The veiled leader figure with antlers seen in the cannibalism scenes in the "Pilot" has been dubbed the Antler Queen, aka Lottie. Though there are those who still theorize that these things alone aren't enough to say it's her for sure and it could still be someone else.
- 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".
- 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 200 as of this writing, 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.
- 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, Natalie/Jackie, and Natalie/Travis. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I-W
- Informed Wrongness: Jackie having sex with Travis is seen as a massive sin by the rest of the girls, even though she had no intention of starting a relationship with him and he and Natalie had been broken up and not on speaking terms for weeks. Jackie even points out that it's unfair to act as though Natalie called dibs on him, only to be shouted down. Sleeping with him while he was under the influence of shrooms would be considered 'grey rape', but since Jackie didn't know about the drugs, that would be the fault of Misty and not her.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- Moment of Awesome:
- Natalie's absolutely badass reveal in Episode 2, where she's in Misty's living room pointing a shotgun with "Hello, Misty, you crazy fucking bitch".
- Pretty much any time someone sasses Mari.
- The cabin's previous occupant had a Porn Stash. She teases Travis with his Embarrassing Nickname (Flex) when she notices a man in the porn magazine looks a little like him (let us remind ourselves that his father died saving her three days ago). His response?
Travis: If only any of you looked like her [the woman in the magazine].- Later, as they scavenge for food, Lottie brings up that some animals live off their own vomit. Mari mocks Lottie for getting possessed the other night during the séance.
Mari: Did dead Cabin Guy tell you that or do you guys just chat about blood and stuff?
Lottie: No, we mostly talk about how Danny Myers dumped you for his own cousin. - Lottie killing a bear by herself single-handedly.
- While it turns sour for her afterwards, it's very satisfying when Jackie finally lets Shauna have it for sleeping with Jeff and getting pregnant by him when they were supposed to be best friends.
- The winter has made everyone resort to drawing cards to see who will be killed for the others to eat. Natalie draws the card, and Shauna prepares to slit her throat from behind, but Natalie tells Shauna to "look me in the fucking eye" when she does it. Travis, deciding that this is wrong, tackles Shauna to the ground and allows Natalie to escape. And when the remaining girls hold a knife threateningly to his throat, he just smirks.
- 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 emergency signal transmitter, setting a spy camera on 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 told 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. And then in the Season 1 finale, she's the instigator of Jackie being evicted from the cabin and freezing to death.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sophomore Slump: Season 2 is very unpopular. Common complaints include splitting up the present-day survivors for far too long, the descent into cannibalism and cult madness not being well-thought-out and seeming to go from zero to one hundred in a couple of episodes, Lottie's character being entirely retconned, dropped plot threads that lead nowhere, and the universally-despised plot line where Matt Saracusa seduces Callie is perhaps the most hated of all.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.note
- 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.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Throughout Season 1 Mari never gets any characterization or focus outside of sometimes being mean or ditzy. Lottie and Laura Lee at least get brief flashbacks to their childhoods, and Van gets some prominence as Taissa's girlfriend. Ditto for Akilah, whose only moment of focus is when she identifies poison berries. She at least gets more screen time in Season 2, including a Running Gag of her befriending a mouse in the cabin.
- Young Taissa is not very present throughout Season 2. Likely due to filming conflicts, but it still leaves her as little more than an Advertised Extra without any of the driving force or character focuses that she showed in Season 1.
- People are already beginning to say this about Natalie, as the conscience of the group in many ways, the person who struggled the most with her deeds in the past, as opposed to the other survivors who mostly pushed their trauma down and/or ignored it. Especially since the Season 2 finale seemingly has her become the Antler Queen and it may be difficult for audiences to invest in her past storyline when we already know how it ends in the present. And while she does get screen time in Season 2, it's often as a Satellite Character to others, and she can feel increasingly Out of Focus.
- 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.
- 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, and she conspicuously avoids any comeuppance for it. 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 and he freely offers to take the fall for her, meaning she dodges consequences yet again. The narrative almost seems to ignore Shauna's worse moments or treat them as lesser, whereas the others are repeatedly called on them. Not to mention that just when it seems as though her Karma Houdini Warranty is about to run out, she'll find a way to dodge consequences yet again.
- 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 Sides Have a Point 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 intention 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.
