#again ... TAISSA?!?!?!

[sentientsnakeskin]

i think the best bit that’s come out of yellowjackets is the idea that anything that was the result of like real life circumstances was just misty. Natalie stays blond for so long bc misty is redoing her roots. Van managed to shed those dd cups bc misty did their top surgery. Misty did gen’s wilderness plastic surgery and that’s why she looks totally different. Atp misty also airlifted in the extrajackets and sent everyone’s soccer cleats to the void. She probably also snuck in that fuckass yellow filter. Who knows. It’s a category five quigley event

[novelconcepts]

Van dying kind.

Van dying good.

Van dying after saving the love of her life.

Van understanding it isn’t fucking fair.

Van understanding the ending never is.

[haltandcatch]

i can’t really think too hard about the tai being trapped in her own body possibly most of this season and desperately trying to communicate with van from the other side of it all because it makes me wanna burst into tears like what do you mean van thinks she’s finally got tai back in her final months and it’s not even the version of her she fell in love with 😖😖

[nataliescatorccioapologist]

Taishauna and Taikilah friendship means everything to me and I miss these dynamics more than I can express

[taiturner]

Aren't you worried about what we're gonna have to tell people? All of the lies we will have to memorize and be on the exact same page about? Everything we've done out here? What happened to Jackie and Javi and... No matter what, we can't trust the scientists. Oh, shit. We're gonna have to kill them, Van. And even then, someone could slip up when we get home, and then everyone would know what we did and... I don't know what would happen, but it wouldn't be good for us.

YELLOWJACKETS, 3x08 "A Normal, Boring Life"

[botanicalbutch]

Just saw someone in the fandom say they want more ‘sesbian lex.’ This is tumblr!!!! LESBIAN SEX VAGINA PENIS MURDER BALLS CLITORIS ASSHOLE FUCK this is tumblr. Go on. You can say it.

[nataliesscatorccio]

okay but here's the thing I can't shut up about. they would have been these people anyway!!!! tai did everything she said she was going to. jeff reminds shauna "secrets have always been a part of us." lottie has struggled with her mental health since childhood. shaunajackie fallout was always going to be nuclear whether it happened in the woods or at college. if van and natalie weren't stuck in the woods they'd be stuck with their parents or what was left of them. and everybody knows misty was already who she is. they could have taken any route and they would have ended up at the destination of themselves anyway. say they didn't crash, say they won nationals. it doesn't matter. it doesn't fucking matter!!! fast forward twenty-five years and the class reunion plays out more or less the same. they win nationals and misty is still a nurse playing god and natalie is still in rehab or maybe not because who would be paying for it so scratch that they win nationals and natalie is still dead, and shaunajackie are still swallowing each other whole. they win nationals and nothing singularly or uniquely terrible happens to them and they still grow up to be wracked with anger and guilt anyway! they're still unsatisfied, cheating on their spouses. they're still suicidal, still schizophrenic. terrible things still happen to them but they're commonplace terrible, so who cares? get over it. all this to say the self is inescapable. all this to say this life fucks you up no matter what. there was no other way for them, there was no other fate for them. there is no ideal life where they are perfect and good. the crash isn't the tragedy. the tragedy is that they all are who they are. they are human. they win nationals, and they still have to be these people. they have to be these people, but alone. the tragedy is that they think they could have been fine if they hadn't done such terrible things to survive after the crash. but they were never fine, they were never going to be fine, and that IS fine because neither was anyone else. "we're all like this." we were always going to be. and I don't mean it's a good thing they crashed. I mean it's all a crash. there is no unscathed life.

[confusedmothboy]

I had a crazy crack idea where the YJs are Victorian era schoolgirls who are shipwrecked on a tropical island and Travis is a local merman.

The idea is is chewing on my brain

no wait ur onto something

okay so heres the altered premise: the wiskayok girls' high school soccer team was set to play chester girls' high in nova scotia. en route, they get blown north and wrecked on an uninhabited island on the eastern coast of newfoundland. after discovering a deserted innu village where they wait for rescue, they find that the art surviving in the ruins might have more truth to it than just local folklore.

sorry i kinda forgot about the tropical island part i just think it would be more interesting if they still had to deal with winters (and i needed a version of The Cabin out there so. gave em a whole village to be safe). also yes its not colored in but nat's corset is red because i said so. im a big fan of merman travis and i think its really funny they get wrecked on this spooky deserted island and the first thing they run into is an english (not french, not innu, not inuttitut) speaking merman named TRAVIS

what is yellowjackets even about bro 😭

[morganalefae]

it actually means so much to me that tai and shauna seem to hold the most anger towards coach ben. they're the most willing to believe that he burned the cabin down not because they truly think he did it, but because of the way he abandoned them and looked down on them.

tai and shauna were the only ones who took shauna's pregnancy seriously- or at least understood the reality of it. partially because tai was the first to know, she helped shauna with the attempted abortion, she was the first that shauna confided in. they treat the pregnancy with much more gravity than the other characters, because they know how fucking dangerous and terrifying it is for shauna, to give birth in the wilderness with no medical care, no doctors, a rapidly dwindling food supply.

tai and shauna (and nat) are also the ones who struggle the most after eating jackie. tai because her other self took over in that moment, so on some level she has no idea what she's done until afterwards. shauna because they ate jackie, her best friend, the person she loved, hated, and whose death she caused.

for coach ben to look down on them, treat them like uncontrollable monsters who would turn on him and eat him next, to talk as if he's better than them for abstaining... yeah. i can see why tai and shauna would be angry. does he think they wanted this? to be driven to this? does he think they liked it? and the fact that, on some level, they did like it, they dont feel as bad as they probably should.... coach ben, like jackie, is the voice of judgement that they absolutely dont need. what right does he have to judge them?

because, coming back to shauna's pregnancy, coach ben may have had no clue what to do for her, or been able to help in any way, but he was the only adult figure that they had. to him, they didnt listen to him anymore, they didnt see him as an authority figure or value his opinion, but the yellowjackets still care about him, looking to him for guidance and reassurance. theyre still just kids. scared, terrified, unsure kids, one of whom is about to go through an incredibly traumatic birth, so they look to coach for something, anything... and he walks away. to the only room with a real bed, which (in my opinion) he could have offered to shauna during her last few months of pregnancy. instead, ben separates himself from the yellowjackets almost completely. shauna gives birth with her only help being teenagers who have no idea what theyre doing, but at least theyre doing something.

its easy for tai and shauna to hate coach ben. to blame him for the fire. him disappearing right when javi dies and they eat him is obviously no coincidence. and his obvious disgust, his morally superior attitude, the fact that he didnt care enough to even try and help shauna when she was in labour, and now javi's death? why wouldn't he try and kill them? why wouldnt he try and take them all out in one go? they're monsters. thats what he thinks anyway.

i dont believe coach ben set the fire anymore. i dont believe tai did either, but thats an entirely different post. his speech in 3e04 was moving, but it was tai and shauna who really made me feel their anger, their betrayal. he didnt just fail them, he judged them, he abandoned them and then he tried to kill them.

[sunshiny-rants]

sometimes I forget that yellowjackets is a horror show and not a cute 90s high school sitcom but sapphic, where the goth loner surprises everyone by going out with the geeky theatre kid, and the uptight christian girl chills out when she starts smoking weed with her stoner girlfriend, and the mean lesbian and her butch are running the girls locker room like it’s a gay speakeasy and their exasperated health teacher/soccer coach has to keep getting them out of trouble and no one gets lost in the woods or cannibalized

[cdyssey]

Yellowjackets + Things to Never Say to Someone Who Just Came Out

wlw on wlw violence <3 [x]

[novelconcepts]

Thinking on how the surviving Yellowjackets are present for one another’s deaths and talk themselves out of culpability. Thinking on how Lottie’s distraction contributed to Travis’ death, how she continued to believe and insist she didn’t kill him. Thinking on how Misty’s injection resulted in Natalie’s death, how she continues to distance herself from fault. Thinking on how Lottie is now dead. Thinking on how Taissa might have been there, but not in control, how that might feel like she wasn’t responsible even if her hands did the pushing. Thinking, thinking, thinking on how they learned this early. We didn’t kill Jackie; the cold did. We didn’t kill Javi; the lake did. We weren’t going to shoot Ben; the Other was. Thinking thinking thinking on how impossible it is to forgive yourself for heinous actions (or inaction) if you refuse to admit to it in the first place.

Thinking thinking thinking on how Natalie was the only one to fully accept the knife in her hand, the blood on her skin, the choice resulting in a man’s death. Thinking on how she came the closest to actually healing. Thinking on how she, from the start, refused the blinders the others need to survive.

[27spoons]

Yellowjackets Official Season 3 Trailer

[baked-potatoes-rule]

I am struggling to see the teen Yellowjackets separate from the dynamics they had with their parents, and I can't help but empathise with their choices, regardless of how messed up they have been.

Are some of the things they did absolutely horrible? Yes. And I'm not just referring to the wilderness.

When Jeff tells Shauna after -celebrating dead Jackie's birthday with her parents- "We were kids Shauna" he is right. They were. Most of said kids, had dysfunctional families. Abusive parents(Natalie), parents who had dependency (Vans mother), absent parents (Shauna), parents who put too much pressure, expecting a perfect child (Jackie's mother), whatever the hell Misty's parents were like...we haven't seen any of them, dysfunctional relationship parents(Travis). Only Taissa seemed to have...okay parenthood and that's only because we haven't seen enough of them.

People seem to empathize more when a parent has shown to be abusive. For example Natalie and Lottie's father. The same doesn't really happen with Shauna's case.

Now the reason I'm bringing this one up, is not to compare the girls' struggles no. I'm bringing it up because people assume trauma can be caused only by the things that have been done to us.

But that's simply not the case. The things that haven't been done to us- the things that caregivers failed to provide us with -quality time, emotional availability, genuine connection, words of affirmation and encouragement- that can also be traumatic.

Shauna is fucked up. Yeah,she is. Why? She seemed to live an okay home life. She didn't get beaten up or had to deal with taking care of an alcoholic parent. But, we also don't know what her relationship with her parents was. But we do? Her dad abandoned her and her mother was most likely unavailable.

She'll never feel good enough,seen enough, loved enough. Jackie died and she realised Jackie hadn't been her problem. It's all the interpersonal relationships she has/going to ever have. Why? Because the relationship with our parents/care givers shapes us for life. Can people heal? Yes. But in her case, she hasn't. None of the YJ could invest into proper therapy because they'd had to come clean with what they did in the wilderness.

[1-jar-of-stars]

you can kind of tell who was bullied in the yj fandom and how resolved their trauma is by how much empathy they have for the characters

[nsuyeula]

Been reading a lot of posts being like "how could any of them forget the truth of what happened in the wilderness like that?" - so once again I'm gonna offer my two cents as someone with a dissociative disorder ✌️

First off you need to understand there are not one, but two defining traumatic events for the surviving Yellowjackets:

Crashing and Surviving in the Wilderness.

Coming home and the Tabloid Frenzy.

Since we have only seen the wilderness part so far, it's easy to forget that coming home, readjusting while also under scrutiny of the entire world through the tabloids would have been equally as traumatising to their brains.

There is also no real end point to the latter event. It's something that follows them for the entirety of their lives. We see it most evidently with Tai because of her run for senator, but it's still an active, persisting trauma that all the girls are forced to band together to try and get through. Their lives are ruled by keeping up the collective narrative they've created, ruled by the fear of the truth coming out.

In terms of a trauma event perspective, the wilderness has a defined start and end - the moment they crash to the moment they are rescued.

Now onto the dissociation from their trauma.

To understand the fundamental core of dissociation, you need to get your head around the idea that dissociation is a tool the brain uses to protect itself / a person. Dissociation itself is not inherently bad, in fact it is utilised by trained therapist to help with things like PTSD (e.g EMDR Therapy which is used to severe the link between emotions and memories).

What makes someone have a dissociative disorder is the inability to control what they dissociate from.

In the case with all the survivors - minus Tai bc her dissociation is a lot more complex because of other Tai - they are suffering from Selective Amnesia, which is when a person can recall only small parts of events that took place in a defined period of time. 

People who develop dissociative amnesia often will not even realise that they have gaps in their memory, and as with most dissociative disorders, it will affect your ability to sense and process emotions attached to those memories.

Personal example - I have no emotional link to anything that happened before the age of 14 due to dissociation. My memories are like a series of photographs that someone else took, I can look at them and see the events but feel nothing.

So with the yellowjackets, not only are they suppressing the worst of the memories but also the worst / complexities of the emotions attached to those memories. So the girls might know they were afraid of Shauna, but not the specifics as to why nor still feel that fear at all for her.

Now, I'm going back to the two traumatic events. Like I said earlier, dissociation is the brains way of protecting its owner. It would have found itself with two things it classified as dangerous, and that their person needed to be protected from. One with a defined start and end and another that is ongoing. It can't suppress or forget the memories related to returning home and the tabloids because that would put their person in more danger because that is a continuous issue, still ongoing. While with the wilderness, that's over. They're not in that situation anymore. It's also impacting their ability to deal with the second trauma. So, of course, the brain would choose to suppress the memories of the wilderness, thinking that was for the best.

Obviously each member of the Yellowjackets would vary in how successful their dissociation would be.

Nat, I would say, is the least affected, her life and being entirely ruled by the horrors of what they had done. Her dissociation wasn't particularly strong, so she was forced to have sex, do drugs etc to cover what the dissociation didn't do.

On the other side of the scale - those with existing mental health illnesses like Lottie, Shauna and Tai seem to have had the most successfully suppressed, which makes sense as dissociation is often a symtom of many mental illnesses along with being it's own disorder.

People who are confused as to how you can get from S3 teen Shauna to S1 adult Shauna, the answer is most likely dissociation amnesia combined with the trauma that came from going home.

By the end of S3, every single surviving member of the team has regained partial to all of the truth of the memories they suppressed, which is very much possible. Shauna has partially uncovered it, but only the version that fits the established narrative of her postpartum psychosis, while Misty and Tai have regained all of their memories and no longer are dealing with altered or fuzzy versions of them.