Showtime’s Yellowjackets represents the insanity of teen girls… deliciously.

If you know me, you know that I never shut up about what I like, and recently that’s included the Showtime series Yellowjackets. The show follows a high school girls’ soccer team after they are stranded in the Canadian wilderness and, well… chaos ensues.

We all remember being in high school; for me, it was less than a year ago and remains all too fresh. An odd sort of anger sits under your skin when you’re that age (especially if you’re female). We hate our parents, we hate each other, and everything just kind of sucks. You want to do something, shout, scream, cry, but you can’t, so you just seethe. Yellowjackets plays on adolescent anger and violence throughout the series. This concept has been explored in the past – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes to mind – but this series is much more explicit about what we are willing to do to survive. I’m sure if the characters weren’t mentally unstable teenage girls who all secretly hate each other, there wouldn’t be two seasons’ worth of drama and violence to milk. If I’d been stranded in the forest with my high school classmates, I’d probably kill them too.

Teenage girls are a special kind of evil – I say that as an eighteen-year-old. We’re expected to keep that inside, of course, and many of us do a decent job of it. In Yellowjackets, however, there’s nobody there to control the chaos, and man, do they go wild. The series represents the teenage experience in its rawest form, with its most violent parts as a metaphor. Most of us do not face the Antler Queen (a shadowy leader who chooses the next to die) in our teen years, but we do usually face a lowercase-q queen. My personal Antler Queen determined it was my turn to be cast out, and I’m sure a lot of the women can relate. That underlying anger and hunger for power come out when there’s little or no way to rein it in. Let’s be real – teenage girls are insane, and the show doesn’t shy away from that fact. The survival stakes mirror what we all go through in high school, and okay, most of those situations aren’t life or death, but they sure feel like it.

The Yellowjackets plot might be extreme, but it explores the grey area between right and wrong that teenagers often inhabit. It also suggests that insanity might be innate – lurking just beneath the surface, restrained by varying degrees of control. A lot of us probably did things, or knew people who did things, that were extremely morally questionable in the name of popularity. Perhaps we are not so different from the teen cannibals I binge-watch; perhaps, put in the same situation, we too would hear the wilderness and let it hear us. The show explores common group dynamics in teenage girlhood in this context. I’ve already mentioned the Antler Queen, but there are others: the followers, the weirdos, those who stand out and choose not to follow the groupthink (though they usually end up dead). Isolation amplifies these dynamics in the series as the girls have nothing better to do than let their insanity fester and grow from normal teen girl levels to the creatures we see by the end of the second season.

Many adolescents also have a strong (and skewed) sense of loyalty and betrayal, which Yellowjackets plays on with increased dramatics. If I betrayed a friend, I likely wouldn’t have been subjected to ritual sacrifice, but there would have been some serious consequences that doubtlessly would have been a bit overdramatic. In high school, conformity often feels like survival, and standing out can mean social death. In the wilderness, it means actual death. That’s part of what makes the show so compelling – it intensifies what already feels like life or death at that age.

Why am I and so many others obsessed with Yellowjackets? Why are we so drawn to such a gruesome and upsetting narrative? Maybe it’s catharsis for the trauma we endured during teenhood, maybe it validates our more insane desires, or maybe it’s just a compelling narrative. Perhaps it’s all of those things at once. I’d implore you to find out for yourself – Yellowjackets is available on Showtime, or, if you have a VPN, the first season is available on U.S. Netflix. Season 3 begins on February 14th. Join me in the Doomcoming.