Who is the queen of the horns in yellow jackets?

Image source: paramount images

The opening scene of Netflix’s “Yellowjackets” begins with one of the most disturbing television sequences in recent memory. A dark-haired girl in a nightgown runs through a frozen forest, fearing for her life, and for good reason. As she runs, she opens a hole under her feet and she falls. Subsequent frames show her limbs being pinned to the ground with sticks, and then dangled by her feet and skinned as a group of people dressed in animal skins search her. Finally, after the girl’s remains are placed in front of a horn-clad figure, the group devours her.

The specter of that scene haunts everyone in “Yellowjackets,” which tells the story of a women’s soccer team that crashes in a forest and is forced to survive there for 19 months. Intercutting that story with scenes set 25 years later, when the surviving girls are struggling adults, the series is primarily about trauma and its lingering effects. By season two, the wilderness has begun to wreak havoc on the team’s minds, making their descent into ritual murder increasingly understandable.

Since the beginning of the show, one of the most pressing questions from viewers concerns the identity of the horned-clad leader from the first scene, who has been dubbed by fans as the Queen of Horns. While the figure’s identity seemed obvious at first, the horned queen may be a bit more complicated than she, or she, appears to be at first. Here’s what we know below.

Is Lottie the queen of cuckolds?

Dealing with mental illness and beginning to have visions of the forest as soon as she runs out of her meds, Lottie (played by Courtney Eaton as a teenager and Simone Kessell as an adult) was initially the leading contender for queen of the horns. . In an episode of the first season, she is shown in front of some antlers hanging on the wall, which frame her face as if she were wearing them as a headdress. She also sees a deer in her vision of her when Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) christens her and gives Van (Liv Hewson as a teenager and Lauren Ambrose as an adult) a deer bone as a talisman to keep her safe.

Image source: paramount images

Then, at the ill-fated distorted psychedelic party in season one’s “Doomcoming,” Lottie dons horns and a shawl resembling that of the Queen of Horns. By season two, young Lottie has already begun leading the stranded Yellowjackets and company in morning rituals and superstitious rites. She also seems to have some sort of ability to communicate with what she sees as the forest spirit. For all these reasons, it was easy to assume that she is the driving force behind the violent acts the team commits during the first season.

In season two, we find out that Lottie becomes a cult leader (played by Simone Kessell) as an adult, and interestingly enough, the mysterious symbol What the team sees throughout the forest seems to play a critical role in their organization. The adult Lottie also frequently references an independent force that existed in the desert while the girls were stranded and that, combined with some of Kessell’s comments, casts doubt on Antler Queen’s identity. However, during season two, episode nine, another surprising Antler Queen contender emerges when we learn that Lottie actually crowned Nat (Sophie Thatcher as a teenager and Juliette Lewis as an adult) as leader of the remaining Yellowjackets.

Is Nat the queen of horns?

Nat was always an unlikely choice for the horned queen, given her dislike of Lottie and all things supernatural. But during the last episode of the second season, Lottie decides that the desert has chosen Nat as the new leader of the group. The rest of the team ends up formally acknowledging Nat’s leadership, making Nat a surprise favorite for the face behind Antler Queen’s mesh veil. Unfortunately, the adult Nat dies at the end of season two, which means we won’t get to see Lewis dealing with memories of him being the Queen of Horns (if she is) in the present day.

Is the queen of the horns a spirit or a force?

As it turns out, Kessell had the same questions we all ask about the identity of the Antler Queen. In an April interview with the hollywood reporterprovided an insight that managed to make things even less transparent.

“I remember saying, ‘What is the queen of the horns? Is it a symbol, is it a metaphor, is it real?’ and remember [the creators] going [no answer]she said. “It can be anything we consider,” she continued. “There was a lot about Lottie being the queen of the horns. But really now, we’ve distilled it into the fact that the Horned Queen is a part of all of us, and she really was something that kept these women surviving in the wild. That was my interpretation of it. She had so many questions, but she was trying to act cool.”

There is a fair amount of evidence to support this theory. Throughout the second season, the adults Lottie and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) frequently make reference to a force or entity they call “it”, which they both seem to believe returned home with them from the wild. This indicates that the Antler Queen in the show’s opening scene could be a hallucination, or possibly an actual entity shown to the team in the form of the shrouded being.

Judging by all of this, it’s safe to say that the Antler Queen isn’t just one person. She is also clearly some kind of force, energy, or spirit. this raises other However, the central question is: Is the Antler Queen a real entity that exists independently of the minds of the team, or is it something that exists in the heads of the plane crash survivors, conjured up by hunger and fear? Lottie actually answers this question in season two, episode nine, after Shauna tells her that the Antler Queen was always just the Yellowjackets, not something supernatural. “There is a difference?” Lottie says, reminding everyone that whether they were possessed by a supernatural force or just fell prey to human nature, it doesn’t change what they did or how it still haunts them.

Are there other contenders for the queen of the horns?

In terms of the horned figure in the first scene, if it’s not a hallucination, an actual spirit, Nat, or Lottie, it’s possible “Yellowjackets” could take a turn, particularly if someone dethrones Nat and takes control of him. cluster. Always comfortable with gore and violence, Shauna (Sophie Nelisse as a teen and Melanie Lynskey as an adult) has become increasingly erratic, and it’s possible she could be possessed with enough anger to become Queen. of the Horns The same goes for Taissa (Jasmine Savoy Brown as a teen and Tawny Cypress as an adult), who certainly suffers from hour-long fugue states, though the Antler Queen ritual seems to have required a lot of planning, which means Taissa probably wouldn’t. she could have done it while she was sleepwalking, though she seems increasingly convinced that Lottie has some kind of special power.

We also know that Misty (Samantha Hanratty as a teenager and Cristina Ricci as an adult) she’s volatile and attention-hungry enough to do something like lead blood rites, but we know she’s definitely not the Queen of Horns; she’s actually the only person in the original scene to remove her mask, revealing that she’s the face behind that creepy bear costume.

Meanwhile, Travis (Kevin Alves as a teenager and Andrés Soto as an adult) has shown signs of infatuation with Lottie, so it’s not impossible that Lottie may have manipulated him or another of his teammates into leading the sacrifice. . Even so, since Nat becomes the leader of the group at the end of the second season, she is still her favorite.

Knowing “Yellowjackets,” anything could happen, and given the show’s slow first and second seasons, we may have to wait a while to know anything for sure. But regardless of who is the queen of the horns, one thing is clear: what happened in that forest will not stop haunting those who survived.

The second season of “Yellowjackets” is now airing on Showtime.