Why I find it hard to hate the characters in Yellowjackets

Typically, in various forms of media, there’s always a character that everyone seems to hate. Whether it’s due to their actions or a silly reason such as “getting in the way” of a certain ship, one way or another there always seems to be a character that’s disliked.

For me with Yellowjackets, it’s different, no matter what they do in the past or the present, I cannot seem to hate them. Do they do some messed up things in the past AND present? Absolutely. But do I think they should die for it? No, I do not.

But why?

Right now, we’re about halfway through season 3, and the character I’m seeing the most hate for is Shauna. People are finding it very hard to like her especially with how she acted during the trial and basically bullied the jury into getting her way. Now was that the best thing to do? No, it wasn’t. But I think that Shauna had her own reasons for wanting Ben dead, and it wasn’t because of the fire, it was because in her eyes, he, as their coach, abandoned her in her time of need, when she was having a very traumatic birth. We often forget that the girls were literally just kids going through this shit. Not to mention Shauna is going through post-partum and grieving the loss of two important people in her life, so she is carrying a lot of emotion, and while I don’t think Ben deserved his current circumstances, I can see why Shauna acted the way she did. As she said in season 2, she didn’t start out a bad person but the stuff she went through changed her, and to be honest, why wouldn’t it? No one should be going through that loss at such a young age.

The same can be said for Travis, although more people seem to be liking him more this season. Again, like the rest of them, he is a teenager stranded in the wilderness trying to survive, while dealing with the loss of his dad, and later his brother and while he copes with this differently to Shauna, he still had his bad moments, which led to a lot of people to dislike him. But, personally, I just couldn’t bring myself to dislike him especially knowinh what he went through.

Finally, the adult survivors in general are all severely messed up because of what they endured out there, which explains a lot of their actions later in life, and how they interact with those around them, e.g Callie, Simone, Sammy. The show literally explains why they act the way they do and for that, I just can’t hate any of them.