#writing with shauna is like. she only cares about 1 person and it's tai

[lingeringscars]

All jackie wanted and thought about was shauna telling her jackie was the best friend she ever had. But it has never been jackie and has always been tai. Tai sees shauna for who she is, and shauna can tell tai anything. Jackie was her best friend, but tai is the best friend she has ever and will ever have.

[littlestarlost]

You're Probably Taking Yellowjackets too literally, and there's still time to stop.

So there's like two months until the second season premiere of Yellowjackets, and as someone who was watching the show literally from the night of the pilot premiere, I have some Thoughts about how the fandom reacted to a lot of the show's mysteries at the time of airing, how a rewatch of the full first season feels after getting all that info piecemeal week after week, and how, in my humble opinion, people are simply misunderstanding a MASSIVE part of the show's conceit. So here's that rant, because I just rewatched season 1, and very few shows make me want to write full-blown essays like this one. You should absolutely watch the show if you haven't yet, ESPECIALLY if you are AFAB or femme or were raised and socialized female. Because hooooooo boy.

One: What is Yellowjackets?

Yellowjackets is a television show that made its debut in the last few weeks of 2021. It stars Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis as four women who, as teenagers, survived a harrowing plane crash with their high school soccer team which left them stranded in the Canadian wilderness for a year and a half. The series opens with a scene that really heavily implies that the girls resorted to cannibalism to survive during their ordeal, but we still do not know the specifics of how that came to be.

The show flips between following the adult survivors in the year 2021 and flashing back to the accident in 1996. The four main survivors--Shauna (Lynskey as an adult, Sophie Nélisse as a teen), Tai (Cypress as an adult, Jasmin Savoy Brown as a teen), Misty (Ricci as an adult, Sammi Hanratty as a teen) and Natalie (Lewis as an adult, Sophie Thatcher as a teen)--are all shown suffering from various levels and types of post-traumatic stress disorder, as you might imagine one would deal with if one had survived a fucking plane crash and cannibalism as teenagers. Without going deep into spoiler territory, let's just say that some shit goes down, and the first season concludes without a single piece of eaten flesh.

Two: Why is Yellowjackets Good?

These things are obviously subjective, but in my opinion Yellowjackets is one of the best pieces of fiction ever made about female trauma, specifically. When we meet the four adult survivors, none of them are doing well: Shauna chafes against her role as a stay at home wife and mom, seeking out an affair with a mysterious younger man because her world feels far too small; Taissa is running for state senate, but the stress of the election is causing the breakdown of her marriage and massive stress to her son; Natalie is in and out of rehab, actively suicidal and incapable of self-care; and Misty is a nurse who uses her role as a caretaker to manipulate and control everyone around her. Their various issues all stem not just from the plane crash, but also from the traumas that have been sprinkled throughout their lives up to the crash as well; Misty was a bullied social outcast, Natalie came from an abusive home, Shauna was constantly in her best friend Jackie's shadow, and Tai is a gay Black woman, with more than enough generational trauma to go around.

As a high school soccer team, all of these characters had their place in the hierarchy; but the crash upends that hierarchy. The queen bee is utterly useless out in the woods; the off-putting weirdo is suddenly the closest thing they have to a medical professional (she took babysitting training twice). Being in the closet no longer matters when you have to know how to hunt and clean a deer if you don't want to starve. Being the golden girl's best friend no longer carries the leverage it once did if you're more useful to the group than the golden girl. One person's hidden mental illness becomes a massive problem because she only took enough meds to cover the few days they were supposed to be away; another girls' religiosity becomes a lifeline in a mire of confusion and fear. The adults in the room are gone, and the already complex social structures of teenage girlhood become even more confusing when lives are literally on the line.

Three: What's Wrong With the Response to the Show?

The thing about Yellowjackets is that it has the misfortune of existing in the world that JJ Abrams has made, and JJ Abrams fucking destroyed the concept of mystery for an entire generation. For this, he will never be allowed to enter the kingdom of Heaven. May God have mercy on his soul.

Yellowjackets purposefully doesn't give us all the answers we want when we want them, and the setup of its many mysteries--how did the girls get rescued? Who gets eaten and when? What's with the weird symbol carved on the trees near the crash site?--includes allusions to possible--POSSIBLE--supernatural explanations. And as a result of JJ Abrams being one of the most irresponsible storytellers on the planet, I watched the media and fan response to Yellowjackets spiral into the same kind of mystery-box-solving, "MOVIE ENDING EXPLAINED IN 10 MINUTES" youtube video type of bullshit. It's dismaying because, at least in my opinion, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what the showrunners are actually trying to explore, which is the fact that trauma does not resolve itself when given a tidy answer, and tidy answers simply do not exist anyway.

There are flashbacks inside flashbacks, pieces of the characters' childhoods that help to develop their backstories. One excellent example is the Man With No Eyes, a spectre first introduced in a flashback with Taissa as she watches her beloved grandmother die.

She sees The Man With No Eyes again in the woods, and then again as an adult spiraling into a psychotic episode. More intriguingly, Tai's son Sammy seems to imply knowledge of the Man With No Eyes too, despite the fact that Taissa has never told him about it. So, the fans wondered--how could he know? What could it mean? Is the Man a ghost? Is Sammy telepathic?

No.

The Man With No Eyes is a visual representation of generational trauma, and a really great one at that. Taissa does not come up with him; she learns of him from her grandmother, who sees him in her last terrified moments on this earth; it is a fear that is passed onto her children and grandchildren, despite having no explanation or origin. And generational trauma passes down to your kids, even when you don't vocalize it; that's what makes it generational trauma. Sammy inherits his mother's trauma, and in the absence of an answer he grasps for his own explanations for the spectre haunting him.

Another issue I take is with people trying to red-string-and-pushpin their way into a full explanation of the events we see. The crash survivors find a lake with an abandoned cabin nearby, where they can take more permanent shelter; why was there a mummified corpse in the attic? Why wasn't there a road from the cabin that they could follow to civilization? How far into the Canadian wilderness could they really be, to not be found for nineteen months?

It doesn't matter. If you're asking those questions, then you're not paying attention. You're missing the forest for the trees.

Four: Yellowjackets is a Show About Trauma

The thing about trauma is that it impacts every part of you. Nothing is ever the same, and the great agony of recovery is having to reconcile that painful truth. Another thing about trauma is that it defies logic and reason; there is no reason for why this happened to you and not to someone else. There is no tidy answer for every loose end. A lack of knowledge in the moment leads to actions which have consequences, and all the hindsight in the world can't change those decisions you made.

But one of the keenest and sharpest observations that Yellowjackets makes about trauma is the rather hilarious fact that we are all somehow supposed to just......go on living after it. Without getting help, without rending ourselves to ash and dust to be remade, without shrieking our anguish to the sky until we spit blood--we're just supposed to move on, to compartmentalize and keep going, to show up at work or school every single fucking day and just pretend that we're fine. And that doesn't just apply to major traumas like a fucking plane crash, but to all the tiny little traumas that come along with being a girl in society: the bullying, the ostracizing, the family issues, the generational trauma, the friendship breakups and emotional schisms. Yellowjackets is a show that demonstrates the absurdity of this expectation that we place on everyone in society, but especially on AFABs, to recover and continue and pretend that we aren't being eaten up from the inside. It's a show that takes great pains to reveal that nothing happens in a vacuum; every survivor of the plane crash arrived there with her own traumas already strapped to her back. It's a show that is willing to talk about how surviving something horrible will make you paranoid and anxious and insecure, even 25 years later, because trauma is continuous and healing is not linear. It's a show about reconciling the fact that answers simply aren't going to help, even if you get them someday.

Conclusion: How to Read Yellowjackets

I can't recommend Yellowjackets enough. It's a phenomenal show, especially if you are Gen X or millennial and grew up with these actresses as a major part of your adolescence. It's also a show that is proving itself to be whip-smart, far smarter than JJ Abrams ever was. It's a show that reminds us how cannibalistic teenage girlhood can be on its own, never mind the stresses of a real survival situation. It's a show that talks, openly and honestly, about how many of us simply are not okay, and shouldn't be considered okay, and probably should not be operating heavy machinery. It's a show that is willing to confront the way we need to cannibalize ourselves, consume our own trauma like Saturn devouring his son, in order to return to the world waiting impatiently for the version of us who will never exist again. It's a show not only about MILF rights, but also about MILF wrongs.

[lingeringscars]

top 5 yj pairings or top 5 canon characters 👀

top 5 yj pairings is becoming ships because @itchose is evil and made me choose dynamics so see here for that.

shauna/tai. they have an intimacy that will never be recreated by anyone ever. they understand each other better than anyone. betrayals by the other feel personal even if they aren't totally. they love each other, they hate each other, they can't live without each other. they're in love and they are not. they're everything.

mari/akilah. they've been gfs from the start. they went from not really knowing each other to clinging to each other. akilah becoming the most important person to mari, the one she can be the most vulnerable around, the one that she trusts the most. mari letting akilah cheat at choosing cards (and akilah deciding against it) because she's her person.

tai/van. they fascinate me sooo much. a casual hookup turned serious that could never be maintained once they leave the wilderness. the conflict in their views and the way tai shoots her down and van learns to speak up. the love that is this common thread between them even when that happens.

lottie/laura lee. laura lee as the only person to actually talk to lottie and make her feel heard and validated. no one in her life has ever done that, and in the wilderness she's probably overheard people talking about how weird she is acting and how she lost it and she's gone crazy, which isn't great when looking at her dad! but laura lee supported her and trusted her and had this long-lasting forever kind of impact on her.

shauna/nat. who am i if i don't force them to be included. they are real to me. they meet in person for the first time and it reeks of jealousy and love gone bad. i am entirely convinced they had an affair idc. they talk shit about each other. they love each other. shauna is jealous of nat, shauna loves nat, nat loves shauna. they cry over each other. shauna nurses nat back to warmth. nat begs and begs for people to help shauna. the hunter & the butcher. they are everything. i love reminding people that when nat picked the queen card we see shauna's reaction <3 it's not just because of what comes next <3 she's second because she's second to travis in this essay i---- they are real to me <3

bonus: shaunajackie. they compel me. they live in my mind. they're in love with each other. they're part of each other. the only reason they were bumped from this list is because they would never act on any of it. also honorable mentions go to: gen/melissa, jackie/nat, & lottie/nat. i also feel like i need to put travis/nat here because they are so deeply connected and influence each other in everything.

i immediately thought this was top 5 yj canon chars and then realized it could be 5 canon in general so you're getting both dohgs

yj:

mari

nat

tai

van

shauna

bonus: akilah, travis

canon in general:

christian ozera (vampire academy). tiffany told me to read this series and thought i'd attach to other people and then i came away with him and have been with him for 9 years now. he's my number 1 forever, really. snarky, lonely, caring, pushy, loyal love of mine.

bellamy blake (the 100). another long timer. been writing him since the season 2 finale in 2015. i've been with him through the trenches. he is a part of me at this point

layla keating (all american). i added her during or at the end of season 2 or maybe at the end of s1 it's hard to remember now and it was mostly for olivia/layla w/ cj reasons but the more we got of her, the quicker she became an actual and instant fave. her depression arc(s) is one of my favorites of all time, and it's handled really well imo. she's so complex and layered and fascinating, and i will defend and love her forever

spencer hastings (pretty little liars). at this point she is also a part of me. i don't even know if i can list the reasons why she's in my top 5, especially when all the pll girls are so important to me, but this show and char are a piece of me.

daisy johnson (agents of shield). while i think mari is making her way into All Time Favorite Chars territory, i need to go with another that I always come back to (and the one on this list that I Do Not Write). daisy's story is just so important to me. she finds a home, a place, a family, and a people. she finds a purpose. she finds love. despite everything she goes through and went through, she has so much heart. she fights for what she believes in, she hates herself despite being the best person ever, she shines like the sun and kicks ass like no other. she's a hacker with a heart of gold. she's everything to me.

ask me my top 5 anything // always accepting