doitsushine92

[doitsushine92]

can't even lie i jumped out of my seat when shiva tackled that man and shouted WE HAVE A TIGER BITCH

i don’t think enough ppl talk about the absolutely ridiculous writing decisions in twd s7 finale THE FUCKING TIGER??? coming out of NOWHERE and THAT is what stops negan from smashing carls head in. not to mention sasha coming out of the coffin as a walker and tackling(?) negan off of the truck which was THE FUNNIEST SHIT you can’t even deny and just in general it was the most marvel avengers infinity war type ending to a season i’ve ever seen so cheesy and stupid but i loved it

[doitsushine92]

it's not just enough to kill people in brutal ways, it's important to also be insufferable about it!!

I love that it's a requirement in Fromville for evil or spooky things to also be huge dicks about it. The monsters? Total dicks. The jukeboxes? Often pretty dickish. Whatever Sara's hearing that's always laughing at them? Absolute fucking dick.

[doitsushine92]

Listen I know this is an awful time for him but wowza he was so fine here. Nat if you’re not going to take him back I can take him off your hands for you.

[doitsushine92]

the sillies

[doitsushine92]

hihi. kill me

[doitsushine92]

NAT!!!

[doitsushine92]

The Horrors of Sacrificial Love: a Reimagining of Shauna Shipman

A disclaimer before I jump into this long-ass essay: I love Shauna Shipman, I love that she’s in her villain era, and I have absolutely no problems with the main story beats of season 3. I do, however, have MANY problems with the how’s and why’s of those story beats, particularly where Shauna’s character arc is concerned.

So this is my re-imagining of how, imo, Shauna *should* have become our final Antler Queen, without compromising any of the depravity we now know she's capable of, and how s3 could have truly capitalized on the idea of these ritualistic murders as a perversion of all-consuming love.

S1 of Yellowjackets introduced a lot of heavy, complex themes: religion, fanaticism, love and loyalty, and how those exact same themes play out in the context of The Wilderness vs. Teen Girlhood. We were set up for an exploration of mob mentality vs. group survivalism by showing us some largely ordinary girls committing grotesque acts of violence because the wilderness demanded it. But because a god is nothing without anyone to worship them, the girls and the wilderness are inextricably intertwined regardless of whether there's an actual supernatural entity or if it's all group psychosis/scientifically explainable. Yet for all of the violence we've seen, most of it was actually rooted in love: Misty cutting off Ben's mangled leg, Lottie allowing Shauna to beat her to a pulp, even the girls watching Javi drown because nobody wanted Natalie to die. I think s1 planted the seeds for this by immediately linking Jackie's heart necklace to both the hunt and to protection in the pilot episode ("Here. Now nothing can hurt you."), and solidified the idea when Shauna tearfully placed it on Nat in s2. What the girls are doing is horrible and indefensible. But it was done for the good of their teammates, friends, romantic partners. On a very surface level, the necklace is shorthand for "We love you, we're sorry, we will never forget that your ‘sacrifice’ kept us alive."

Now, all of that being said, what does this have to do with Shauna's character trajectory in s3, and how do we reconcile the monster she becomes with everything I outlined up above? The answer is that the story should have leaned into Shauna's grief for her son, and the girls' subsequent worship of the baby as part of The Wilderness.

It felt like the story was starting to head in this direction at the top of s3. While planning the solstice ceremony, Lottie instructed the girls to create a special headdress for Shauna “as the child’s mother,” which Shauna aggressively rejected. She’s visibly livid that her baby is being named during the ceremony. She goes as far as to dig up her baby just to give him a secret, dignified burial in private, away from the girls’ prying eyes, and when Melissa follows her, Shauna puts a knife to her throat. No matter what she does, the group clings to her baby in a perverse mourning ritual that Shauna neither consented to or was consulted for. Much like Akilah’s clearly metaphorical vision of Ben as their bridge home, Shauna’s post-birth fever dream of the group cannibalizing her son was a metaphor for their eventual consumption of his very being (as opposed to the Jackie aftermath, in which Shauna managed to keep them from consuming her memory, if not her body, by refusing to let them take Jackie’s clothes). To the team, this is Their Child. Apart from Lottie’s attempt to “crown” Shauna as his mother, Shauna was a complete afterthought in their collective grief.

Suppose, instead, that the writers continued to show us how Lottie lead regular ceremonies deifying their dead and The Wilderness. This is where Shauna’s rage begins to come to a head - but rather than becoming the feral attack dog we see in canon, she instead embraces this ritualistic role of The Mother that the team is insisting she accept - she’s already desperate to be a leader, and this is yet another form of leadership in the eyes of the cult. Shauna would absolutely justify her increasingly unhinged behavior as a last-ditch effort to protect her son: “You all want to metaphorically cannibalize my child by claiming him as your own? Fine. But you will do it through ME, his MOTHER. You will not separate us. You will not discard me. And I’m going to lead us in hunting our friends and lovers until you, too, understand the agony of watching the world devour the person you love most.”

We can also reimagine Shauna’s ascension to Antler Queen as less of a dictatorial power grab and more of a natural consequence for Natalie defying the group’s wishes concerning Ben. During the trial, Taissa verbalizing the reality of Ben’s abandonment of Shauna (and by extension Their Child) finalized his transformation into their own Judas. Of course Shauna would be livid that Natalie granted Ben a merciful death behind their backs - not only did she disrespect the group’s wishes, but she disrespected the memory of Shauna’s son by denying him the justice that Shauna, his mother, felt they were both owed. Sentencing Natalie to become the new butcher isn’t a final twist of the knife so much as Shauna dragging Nat with her into the pain of seeing someone she loves (Jackie, Javi, the baby, and now Ben) being physically and ritualistically dehumanized. Cue the girls finally turning on Natalie and accepting Shauna as their new leader, brutality and all.

(This could also add a fascinating layer to Shauna’s actions in the Pit Girl Hunt. She’d be furious that Van was playing god, so to speak. Shauna had no control over whether Jackie or her son lived, but Van, once the most fervent of believers, thinks herself above the chaos of the Wilderness and wants to rig the cards? As far as Shauna is concerned, this is akin to spitting on her child’s grave. Of course the Antler Queen, the very personification of the savage hunger of the Wilderness, is going to insert herself and deny Van the power over life and death.)

Which, of course, brings us back to Jackie’s necklace as a final symbol of love from the team to their intended victim. The victim sustains the others physically and spiritually - her “sacrifice” is indicative of how much love and respect the team has for her (or for him, in Ben’s case). It’s brutal and horrifying, but so is the intensity of the love these girls have for each other, platonic or otherwise: JackieShauna, TaiVan, MistyNat, LottieLee, even the Martinez brothers (Travis had so much trouble expressing his love for Javi, but he also went to extreme and grotesque lengths to care for him). The deeper meaning of the necklace, however, comes in the form of Shauna commanding them to “never forget this” during the Pit Girl Feast: the implicit threat here is that nobody should forget that this meat was once their friend Mari. Consume Mari’s body, but do not, under any circumstances, consume her essence. The necklace is a final farewell to their victim, and a visual warning to the group against dehumanizing her into yet another deity for the cult without acknowledging the weight of her loss (“Here. Now nothing can hurt you”).

Not only is this SO much more in keeping with the original themes and thesis of the show re: the power of groupthink and the ferocity of girlhood, but it also serves as another facet of the story’s fascination with the perversion of love in the face of societal expectations. Shauna couldn’t comprehend, much less indulge in, her love for Jackie due to the heteronormativity of post-AIDS 90s America, so she took the next best thing in sleeping with Jeff. Shauna couldn’t properly love, nevermind mourn, her baby because he was immediately appropriated by Lottie’s cult, so she does the next best thing and accepts their fetishized worship on the condition of loyalty. In her final effort to shield her son from being devoured, Shauna becomes the Wilderness’s demented version of Mother Mary, the Queen of Heaven (“I love the saints, they’re all so tragic”).

This also brings us back to Yellowjackets’ meditations on religious fanaticism and the perversion of sacrificial love, not to mention a fabulous deconstruction of motherhood as this pure and gentle thing. Shauna’s reclamation of power in this scenario is a complete inversion of Catholicism’s Virgin Mary, who gave birth to a son free of original sin knowing that he would ultimately die for the salvation of the world. Shauna’s son was conceived in many layers of sin, and was posthumously deified by the masses as a justification for their savagery. So of course she becomes the final, most vicious Antler Queen of all. She is a mother defending her child from being totally consumed in the only way she can (“It’s you and me against the whole world, kid”). She is the embodiment of The Wilderness’s demand that the girls understand the weight of their loves and losses. And if upholding these roles means means slaughtering the girls one by one so that they, too, can comprehend all-consuming grief, then so be it.

To wrap up, I want to reiterate that I am SO here for Shauna’s downward spiral into a monstrous, villainous Antler Queen. The bones of this descent are all there, but repositioning it as Shauna reconciling her ferocious anger with that of The Wilderness, and finding a way for that anger to coexist with Lottie’s cult, would have made her transformation so much more satisfying, and ultimately a richer, more delicious exploration of how Yellowjackets conflates extreme horror and extreme devotion.

[doitsushine92]

YELLOWJACKETS SEASON 3 FINALE SPOILERS ‼️

there's something that's been on my mind regarding the girls in the teen timeline and some of the criticisms i've seen people give this renewed hunt and i wanna rant about them. i will try my best to be as concise and coherent as i can 🙏

"laura lee/jackie wouldn't let this happen" and "laura lee/jackie would only make lottie/shauna worse" were ideas i shared with a lot of the fandom until about halfway through this season. i don't think their survival would've changed how broken the girls become. lottie is a schizophrenic girl without her medication and shauna has bpd, post-partum depression and psychosis and they're both deeply suffering from PTSD. they would always land here

and in a lot of ways, the deaths of javi , laura lee and jackie are the reason we are where we are. they were the hopes, the innocence, the civility of the girls. and their losses are the catalysts for the cult.

what i liked about this hunt is that the girls aren't really happy to be doing it. and i think that in the pilot, the only reason anyone thought they were into it is because we were likely getting the version in shauna's head, in her journals. in the S3 finale she narrates how happy they all were while we're shown van break down because she killed mari, albeit inadvertently. they were only participating in the hunt in the hopes of giving nat the chance to get away.

i'm really enjoying the theory that there are alternative realities or timelines that lottie, travis and akilah can tap into. and mari, because she heard the dripping of her own blood, because she told ben she felt there was a darker, more evil world lurking in the background.

we all knew mari would be pit girl, but to have her be the decoy, the bait and switch, gives her death a new meaning. she saved them too.

and the fact that they were all not just willing to die if it meant the others could survive, but also willing to hunt each other to achieve that, is to me a clear sign that these girls are not the animals we all thought they would become. at the end of the day, they were just girls

they don't think about overpowering shauna because they know they can't.

which brings me to my next point: melissa choking shauna.

that was an interesting choice to make: have melissa, who so far had been down for shauna's cruelness, only for it to get thrown back in her face, try to kill shauna. and to have shauna look so into it (did she maybe hope melissa would kill her and free her of her suffering? did she want someone else to be as cruel and hurtful as her? was she getting off on it?) and then be upset when melissa couldn't bring herself to kill her

when we know that melissa already killed van in the adult timeline.... something something "why can't i be that?" "because you don't want to. but i do."

tai burying van by the side of the road didn't feel stupid to me. it felt like tai making the choice to keep van all to herself. she wouldn't want a coroner handling her, she wouldn't want anyone (else) to see her body and cut her open and take out her heart. tai wouldn't let anyone have van.

that being said, the scene could've been longer. and gorier.

ultimately, we still have some time left before rescue. and there's still people that have to die before they get to go home.

there is a glitch after they drag mari out of the pit that feels so intentional to make us aware things are changing in the wilderness, and i like that misty's broken glasses have the symbol of the wilderness on them. it's very symbolic

do i think the writers have had to rework a lot of things? yes, because we know things haven't gone according to plan. with recastings and production and the loss of one of their main characters (juliette lewis) ahead of time, it's obvious to me that we're not getting the story that was intended to be, but this episode felt like a return to form in some ways. there were more supernatural aspects, with lottie's vision/dream at the start, shauna hearing " adult lottie" call her name in the teen timeline (we all know ella's voice by now lol) and how the story really went full circle

i hope for season 4 we have more of those original plans and ideas, even if they have to bend in order to get it

[doitsushine92]

RIP Tomura Shigaraki you would’ve loved starting every sentence with “chat,”

[doitsushine92]

What I think is most different and most striking about Sunrise on the Reaping is how CYNICAL it is. To some extent we knew it was going to be. This is a midquel. That the reapings go on and the Hunger Games only ends 25 years later is a forgeon conclusion. We know nothing that happens here is going to work.

The book is about implicit submission, and why, with numbers on their side, the many submit to the few, even when the few are unjust. And it's because, the book seems to say, numbers aren't ENOUGH. the Newcomers alliance is much bigger than the Careers. They should be able to team up and defeat them easily. But they don't. Eighteen of them are killed outright, because the Careers have the strength, the skill and the training. And that's just that.

Plutarch asks why the tributes don't overwhelm the Peacekeepers during training, and Haymitch is rightfully outraged at the privilege of this question. Why don't they? Because they probably couldn't kill them all, and even if they could, what good would it do? It wouldn't stop the Hunger Games. It wouldn't change a thing. No one would even know about it outside that room, because the Capitol would change the narrative. Just like Katniss and the Star Squad can't REALLY take on the Capitol single handed and assassinate the president, the scrappy alliance of kids can't really do any real damage to the system the Capitol has in place. All they can do is choose if they want to die now or later. So why don't they, if there's no difference to them, as Plutarch asks. Because, as Snow puts it. Hope. The slight chance that one of them will come out of it. And, more cynically, the hope that if they are good tributes and obey, their families will be left alone. If they choose to rebel and choose to die now they guarantee retaliation against their families and perhaps their entire district. We see that even in the tributes that attack the Gamemakers in the arena. They rise up, they break that bond of implicit submission--and they die bloody for it.

Why don't they rebel? Because they don't have the privilege to lose.

Even Lenore Dove, the Joan of Arc of Twelve, fails to do any real damage or have any real effect. All she does is get herself a reputation for being a trouble maker, and eventually get herself killed. Was she killed as part of the retaliation against Haymitch, or was her punishment because she's a rebel, and that's what happens to rebels? (and Snow hates covey girls.) but she fails because she IS alone. She focuses on small, symbolic acts that do nothing, but that she hopes will rally the people to action.Unfortunately, the people of Twelve don't want their lives to get any worse, and they don't have the privilege of spending time and energy on revolution the way a teenager girl whose family doesn't need her income to survive does--sadly, Twelve will remain this way, in an uncanny valley where they're beaten down enough to need change, but not enough to have NOTHING to lose. They are not one of the districts that rise up. So acting alone does nothing, teaming up does nothing. How does one fight an enemy with better technology, better weapons, and better organization? Beetee's plan doesn't work out. Of course it doesn't. Could it ever? Was it just borne out of grief for his son? And even if it had, then what? What was the plan? Haymitch's poster gets edited away. The Newcomers fail. Lenore Dove dies. The most you can say is Haymitch himself becomes too important to kill, like Beetee, and Snow let him live to fight another day, but so destroyed that he no longer WANTS to.

So, then, what WORKS?

The answer is, quite cynically, Plutarch's version of the world. Numbers mean something, there are more of US than there are of THEM , but that isn't enough. You need weapons, you can't bring a knife to a gun fight, you need EVERYONE on your side. You need organization, not just a series of disconnected rebellions, and you need an Army, provided by Thirteen, as problematic as they are. The timing just needs to be right. And most crucially, what I think Plutarch and everyone involved here learned is that victory belongs to those who control the narrative. Those who control the flow of information and tell their story. And it's not Plutarch, for all his cameras and his propos and his idea behind The Mockingjay, who eventually does that well.

It's Haymitch.

Who learned to tell a story and sell a narrative with himself and the Newcomers. Who tried to paint his poster in the arena only to see it rewritten in front of him. Who won't make that mistake again. When it's time for the deciding factor in the revolution, it's Haymitch who creates the Mockingjay-- and is he also using Katniss and her image? Yes. but he at least sees Katniss and the human she is inside it, unlike Plutarch who hasn't changed much from the man who makes a grieving family do reshoots over and over so he can get his footage, while congratulating himself for letting Haymitch have his goodbye.

When Katniss sets off the spark twenty five years later, the world is ready. The work is in place. Plutarch, Haymitch, Beetee, everyone can say GO , and this time it'll work. So buckle in, and wait for the Long Game, even though only Plutarch really has the privilege to wait, the rest of them don't have a choice. It's cynical. It's awful. People die. The lone rebels and the plucky girls and the alliance depending on its numbers all fail. Plutarch motherfucking Heavensbee, the richest of the rich the privilegedest of the privileged, pulls off the revolution, takes the credit, and lives to see the end of it, without ever once examining his own privilege, and unpacking the fact that despite his head being on the right side of history, he's never managed to see the Districts as PEOPLE . (and you could argue, ANYONE as people. ) But it's just the only way.

But this book isn't the middle of the series. It's the end. How awful would it be to read if we didn't know that Katniss and the Mockingjay rebellion would eventually succeed. We know that despite the cynism of a failed revolution and all its players, that one day it WILL work out. This book is called sunrise on the Reaping....the sun rises on a world where this is inevitable. But one day it won't be.

[doitsushine92]

not to sound like a christian facebook mom but some of yall need to have grace in your hearts for the people in your lives or the people you pass once on the road and never see again like you literally need to stop assuming the worst of everyone and their intentions it is poisoning your brain. you can be careful and responsible without being a miserable person. it is possible i promise

[doitsushine92]

Took a last family trip before the divorce because you're sick of your husband's shit??

Crash in a crazy town and escape, but get sucked back in only to hear more of your husband's shit?

Nightly arguments waking up the town monsters?

Think you can do better with the millionaire who shares your hallucinations & is one adventure-partner away from sobering up and getting a haircut?

We're here for you!

Call 1-800-FROM-LAW.

[doitsushine92]

not tabitha and jade continually being reincarnated and finding each other in the town for centuries because their souls were trying to find and save their child who was sacrificed in some supernatural deal to make people immortal... soulmatism redefined

[doitsushine92]

Remember

[doitsushine92]

Poppy North by januarysstar on Deviantart. Posted 09/03/2003.

[doitsushine92]

reading secret vampire again after years and oh my god ash was such a menace. a next level hater. he didn't even have anything to gain from fucking with james and poppy, just doing it for the love of the game

[doitsushine92]

Que sera, sera