#YJ meta

[novelconcepts]

One of the most fundamentally interesting things to me about YJ and writing fic, specifically, is how the blame changes hands depending on the story. On whose perspective you're writing from. On whose story it is at a given moment. The very thing I dislike about viewers missing the point becomes so fascinating to me from within the narrative. Who are these characters when seen through the eyes of their peers?

Who does Jackie become? If you're Shauna, she's the love of your life, and your greatest rival, and the other half of your soul, and the person you blame for your dead dreams. If you're Van, she's the respected captain who earns none of your respect in the woods, the one who left you to die without blinking, the easiest target for teenage malice. If you're Natalie, she's competition for affection, the blabbermouth who can't leave well enough alone, the hands putting themselves to no good use. If you're Jackie? You're just a girl. You're so tired. You're so scared. You're losing face a little more every day, and you're made of despair, and you can't even trust your best friend. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.

Who does Lottie become? If you're Natalie, she's your direct foil, the splinter under the edge of your thumbnail, the smart mouth to match your own, the confusing amalgamation of normal friend and mad ritual. If you're Misty, she's the first shred of obvious power in months, a leader who might need to be nudged back into line, a fascinating exercise in hitching your wagon to the right star early on. If you're Taissa, she's flat-nuts and endlessly frustrating, she's got your girlfriend's full attention, she's incredibly dangerous. If you're Lottie? You're just a girl. You're so tired. You're so scared. You've built a pedestal you can't keep your balance on, and you're not sure if you're right or going crazy, and you didn't want this. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.

From outside the narrative, there is no bad guy. There is no blame. It is no one's fault. It is Man v. Nature, they are doing the best they can with an impossible situation. They're all trying to contribute what they can to the story, for better or worse.

From inside the narrative, you are a teenager trapped in a society constructed entirely of bare-bones-survival with the wildest assortment of girls. From inside the narrative, to stay human, you have to love and fight, respect and judge. Every story changes the game. Every story shifts the blame. A hero in one has the bloodiest hands in the next. And that, to me, is such a thrilling sandbox to play in.

[lesbianjackies]

Thoughts on elaborate Period Rituals

oiugugjghrhfhfghgh

Okay.

so we’ve talked about this in travnation obviously but for those who do not know (literally everyone else) i really want periods to become a significant part of the wilderness cult and the rituals the yellowjackets partake in — specifically in the sense of their periods syncing up: shared blood and shared womanhood.

now. i want to talk about how this pertains to travis.

we’re going to analyze this from the assumption that travis is becoming a woman through her integration into the cult. i will give a full analysis on transfem travis if people are interested but for this we’re just gonna go off that assumption so i can delve deeper into the period aspect of it specifically.

travis has always had this sort of fixation on periods. i noticed this recently — in blood hive she plays it off as disgust but it’s not, really, if you examine the way she talks about it.

her response to nat’s teasing “are you scared of our menses?” remark is anxiety — she replies with a nervous “well i didn’t say that.”

the truth is — or, at least, how i read it is — that she is. but it’s not in the way you might think. she’s not disturbed, or disgusted, or intimidated by the girls’ menstrual cycles. she’s fascinated. she’s intrigued. she’s, in some way, jealous of this bond the other girls have, this connection they have with each other through the blood of their womanhood.

i think she wants in on it.

fast forward to qui, when shauna’s having her baby — who is the first to suggest the ritual to keep her safe? who is the first to spill blood, the first to bleed upon the altar of shauna’s womanhood and say, “we hear the wilderness and it hears us”? travis.

travis is the one who slices a knife across her palm, spilling her own blood as shauna bleeds next to her. i think shauna and travis are very connected in an often overlooked way — and i can talk about this, too, if anyone would like to hear it — and i think it is very apparent in this moment, in the intersection of their coming of ages, of their coming into womanhood.

shauna is giving birth. this is what is culturally and societally seen as the peak of womanhood, the fulfillment of a woman’s true purpose. next to her, travis is willfully shedding the first of her blood, the first step a girl takes into becoming a woman.

i would argue this moment is travis’s metaphorical first period.

now, there’s a subversion of the expectations of a woman going into labor here. shauna loses her baby. she doesn’t give birth to life, but to death. shauna is losing her cultural womanhood in this moment. she’s losing her connections to her life before the wilderness; she’s becoming less of a person dependent on others (on jackie, on jeff, on her baby) and more of a woman who belongs to the wilderness.

travis is going through a similar event. she has lost her father. she believes herself to have lost javi (though really that comes later). her only significant relationships now are nat and lottie — two opposing female forces in her life. she’s already given herself to them (edible complex sex scene — check out this analysis by @the-lonelyshepherd), but now she must fully give herself to womanhood, to the wilderness, to shauna.

that’s what’s going on in that scene.

now, to conclude, i believe this spilling-of-blood-as-travis’s-period thing is going to continue into season three and get more intense as it goes on — or, at least, i would like for it to. i think the spilling of specifically travis’s blood is important to the way these rituals are structured — she gives blood when shauna is giving birth. javi’s blood is hers and he’s the one the wilderness chooses. i think the other girls are going to become aware of this. i think travis’s blood is going to keep getting spilt.

and she’s going to spill it herself.

[jilyandbambi]

yeah, if 6 teenage girls and 1 teenage boy had emerged from the Canadian wilderness after 19 months with a 1 year old baby in tow, there would've been no escaping the media hellstorm. They would've been on 20/20 within 3 months. One group interview and a few candids of Shauna holding the baby would've been the price they'd all have had to pay in order to be left tf alone because while in 2023 society pretends to care about trauma, PTSD, and teens' mental health, this was the 90s--when Nicole Brown Simpson was blamed for her own murder, Lorena Bobbit was a late-night punchline, R. Kelly marrying 15 y/o Aalyiah was an open secret, grown men were calling into radio stations to speculate on 16 y/o Britney Spears' virginity, and Monica Lewinsky was doxxed and getting death threats for sucking off Bill Clinton.

What I'm saying is:

Seven teens (the girls + Travis) surviving against the odds for 19 months is the epilogue to a tragedy with enough unanswered questions to keep true crime nerds speculating & reporters digging.

But them being found with an infant? Had it come out that one of the girls was pregnant and gave birth during the ordeal? That's mainstream tabloid fodder. The kind that not even "papers of repute" would turn their noses up at. Barbara Walters, Lesley Stahl, and Mike Wallace would be beating each other and TMZ down to get the first interview, the first photo of the baby. NBC would've backed a U-Haul full of money onto the Shipman's, the Martinez', and the Sadecki's front yard (because speculation as to who the actual father really was would be kept going until it came directly from the source). Did she know she was pregnant when she got on the plane? Who else knew? What was it like giving birth? Did any of the other girls get pregnant? How many of the girls did Travis do it with? Weren't any of them afraid of the same thing happening to them? Did doing it help them cope?

And it wouldn't just be the media. Doctors, child development specialists, psychologists, sociologists, and academics would be calling non-stop to get Shauna and the baby to participate in clinical trials and studies.

The only way they'd have been left alone is if they'd done a televised interview and ended it by pleading to be allowed to go on with their lives in peace

[juniperhillpatient]

I have a lot to say about the Yellowjackets season 2 finale not much of it positive but oh my goddd this interaction:

Shauna: “You know there’s no it, right? IT was just us!”

Lottie: “…is there a difference?”

DOES give me chills every-time.

The butcher who says “you guys should leave” as she carves up the child so the others don’t have to see his flesh carved & his blood drained vs. the unwilling Christlike savior who never asked for this who only wanted to sacrifice herself but who is made responsible for all of it anyway, who leads because she has no choice. The girl who looks Travis in the eyes as she offers him his brother’s heart to eat vs. the girl who lets Misty tell everyone this is what she wanted (while telling Misty that it never was). The girl who ate human flesh first, who took the first bold bites of Jackie, vs. the girl who never wanted to be the antler queen & immediately surrenders the title to Natalie at the first opportunity, as if it is a gift & not a burden.

*this is not intended as hate on either character but an expression of a fascination with their dichotomy. they’re both victims & villains & I love them both*

[dirhwangdaseul-archived]

not to be that guy but i don't doubt there are too many y*llowjackets fans that are just cryptoterfs, hope they kill themselves but gets me they're passing their text posts as normal things to say about womanhood like it's not bioessentialism lol, and then ignorant fans go on and rewrite the same bullshit, only now in their own words, girl it was rotten and not in a useful way before you shat it out..... think please... think....

[thechosenthree]

(via @riccissance)

something something shauna being most in-touch with her teen self during an act of violence and natalie being most in-touch with her teen self during a moment of vulnerability

[pintsofguinnesmakeyoustrong]

and to think that this all happened because laura lee called her piano teacher a cunt

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[lesbianjackies]

“callie shipman” “callie taylor” “callie taylor-shipman” well no actually because the tragedy of callie sadecki is that she is not a taylor, and she is not a shipman, and she will never be either. she will always live in the shadow of a girl she never met and a baby she never knew, she will always be a reminder to her mother of the things she lost and the mistakes she made and the life she’ll never get to have.

her name is callie sadecki. because no matter how hard she tries, she will never be anything more to shauna than the unwanted child of a man she never loved.

[thechosenthree]

(via @shadowhaert)

laura lee bringing a stuffed bear in her suitcase and never going far without it. laura lee desperate to fly the plane to get them help and food and medicine and take care of everyone. laura lee taking leonard with her in the plane and him aiding her death.

lottie not having any food for weeks. lottie who is bowed to by a bear and who is offered life saving food. lottie who survives on only bear meat for weeks after being provided for. lottie who revisits the plane in her mind and the first thing she sees is leonard, the bear. laura lee’s bear.

[moonagedaydreamsofrhiannon]

Perhaps the wilderness in Yellowjackets is not just a symbol of death. Perhaps it is also—in its own way—freedom.

In the wilderness, Lottie didn’t have to hide her visions for fear of being called crazy. She was exalted as a leader and a prophet. But when she returned, they called her crazy and locked her up.

In the wilderness, Misty didn’t have to be ashamed of her intensity and eccentricity. She was helpful, she was needed, she was important. But when she returned, they called her a freak and exiled her once again.

In the wilderness, Tai didn’t have to pretend to be something she’s not. Her other self was not a weakness but a strength, it gave her power, and kept her alive. But when she returned she had to suppress her urges and hide her other self, or lose everything.

In the wilderness, Shauna didn’t have to be small, and hide the fire inside her. She was angry, and violent, and powerful. But when she returned, she was forced back into a supporting role, forced to contain her darkness and her drive in order to fit a role she never wanted to play.

In the wilderness, Travis didn’t have to put on an act to fit the societal expectations of masculinity. He was feminine, and emotional, and soft—not the man of the group, but just another Yellowjacket in the hive. But when he returned, he was forced back into the cage—back into the closet—isolated, hardened, closed off and separated from the girls once more.

In the wilderness, Natalie didn’t have to feel guilty for surviving. She was the hunter, the provider, and the gun in her hands made her a savior, and a leader, not a killer. But when she returned, she was a killer once again, haunted by guilt, and outcast by society for the things she did to stay alive.

The wilderness gave them the freedom to be their truest and most authentic selves, but the cost was the blood spilled. The cost was their old selves. The cost was a place in the world upon their return.

Maybe the wilderness did not destroy them; it simply changed them into something new, something irrevocably different, something that would never—could never—fit back inside the narrow box of their old lives, and because they could no longer fit, society called them broken.

The wilderness freed them, but it never let them go. Because once you’ve tasted flesh and blood, once you’ve stared death in the face and overcame, once you’ve been to the very brink and seen the true depth of your own capacity for violence, once all the former markers of morality and success have become meaningless, in a world where survival at all costs is the only law, how can you ever go back to a world ruled by pointless, hollow, conventions? Once you’ve shed every remnant of your humanity, once you’ve run with the wolves, and howled at the moon, and become one with the ancient wild gods, how can you ever be a human again? Once you’ve had a taste of complete freedom, how can you ever be satisfied with a fake, insignificant, half-life, made up entirely of half-truths and haunting?

[dirhwangdaseul-archived]

btw what is with everyone in the tags going like "let women do-" as if the show isnt working as a critic of these fully grown women refusing to fucking ask for help for shit to the point they break their families and get cancer and die from it because they couldn't have cared for themselves earlier or burden others with the task of loving them and caring for them so either.... like... girls... they're already doing everything and anyone they want to lmfao, we don't have to let them do shit they're disgusting without anyone's aid.... so with that in mind i think it'd serve more as an audience to talk about why and how some of the things presented onscreen are truly fucked up because too many are not grasping the gravity of the things onscreen while trying to play barbies with them and yes i am zeroing in:

specially if you're white in a cast with girls of color, ignoring the very real differences of the effect of the violence being experienced in the wildnerness is not something you get to do

just because race as a separate issue isn't textually very explicit, doesn't mean you get ignore it, the writers have actually integrated a lot with visual storytelling and the way the teenage yellowjackets dress and care for themselves out there in the wilderness, as well as what that has meant for their treatment in society and with themselves and other girls of color, it is sadly in the subtleties a lot, too much, because the writers indeed went too implicit for my liking but it is there and white fandom refuses to engage with that when it's fully part of the text, it is a thing here, race is a component in this horror, if you're white it is your responsibility to not put these onto others and look inside as to why you won't touch that part of the show when it allows for a complete understanding of characters like lottie and taissa, like even with the fragmented bts, there's a lot to critic already both good and bad when you take that into account for them, and it permeates a lot of what they do, because its a story, everything is magnified, of courses in their race matters and if the writers truly didn't give a fuck, then it would matter because it means, we, the audience, have to care, yes, it is a responsibility, with that word, but it's about truly holding a mirror to. ourselves when looking at them, you're basically failing at this im sorry when you refuse the full parts of their identities, cause i bet you do that irl too, always remember, fiction is reality for is a part of it, don't be so quick to dismiss the lives of these women, im sorry but there's very little safe way to engage with a show entrenched so deeply in a culture of trauma, be aware of your own attitudes toward if because it does reflect you, that's all

on god you arent watching this shit uncritically specially if you're white, you don't get to do so

[thechosenthree]

(via @girlsinthestars)

theres something to be said about how when shauna shipman hallucinates jackie taylor when shauna's an adult (at least when she's at the bridge with adam before they skinny dip into the river), she sees her in her soccer uniform. when she was a teen, she saw jackie in what she died wearing, but when she's an adult, her subconscious seems to cling to jackie from before the crash even happened

[4-the-tainted-sorrow-21]

ALSO something I put on the yj server but I want to share, I’ve never really understood why it’s so upsetting to people that Bernard isn’t upset about Tim not telling him he’s Robin. Like I get it theoretically, they think it makes them boring, but I can’t see it that way. Because being a hero—being Robin—is so important to Tim, and it’s such a huge part of who he is (he doesn’t really know who he is outside of Robin) that isn’t it kinda amazing he found someone who understands that? I think it’s telling, actually, that Bernard still loves and trusts Tim wholeheartedly despite knowing he’s keeping that secret. Because he understands that yeah, sometimes the city has to come first, and yeah, it’s dangerous. He gets that better than any other civilian because he’s already had fucked up things happen to him because Tim is Robin even BEFORE they were together (Darla coming back and using him to find Tim, for example) and he’s been through enough to understand the severity of it. And he also knows Tim doesn’t want to leave him when he has to do Robin Things, but they both understand that there isn’t a choice. THATS SO INSANE TO ME because Tim found someone who understands it’s an obligation, not necessarily a choice. Tim can’t look away when people are getting hurt, and Bernard doesn’t even consider it an option. LIKE DAMN LET THE TWO LOSERS UNDERSTAND AND CARE ABOUT EACH OTHER god forbid Bernard trusts, respects, and understands his boyfriend 😭😭😭

[suzukiblu]

goddammit I DON'T have time to write a Young Justice magical girl AU but also who even am I as a person if I don't write a Young Justice magical girl AU??

( yes this would absolutely end in sparkly sun princess Kon trying to figure out how to get some black leather into this pastel lolita ensemble and his magic dog who hates him. I regret nothing, you all knew what you signed up for by following this blog.

fml what do I even theme them all as tho.

. . . . . . can I make Match the dark magical girl and stick Tim in a very fancy tux? can I do those things? )

[forgotten-daydreamer]

Can we stop for a second and think about how, in s1, Dick tells Wally "I didn't want my best pal questioning my objectivity", only for Wally to remind him "Dude, that's what a best pal is for..."

And then, in s3, Will confronts Dick, and says "[I'm talking about] Your need for a Wally West substitute. [...] You needed someone who knows you. [...] I get it, you needed someone to give you a reality check, to keep you honest, to tell you what no one else will tell the boss."

Because despite Dick being so secretive, everyone, and I mean everyone knows the impact that Wally had on Dick. Even after Wally's death, which might I remind you is what definitely pushed Dick over the edge (taking a break from the life, hallucinating his dead best friend after saying he was alright, neglecting the kids he rescued, letting Wally's name slip, etc), nobody forgot what Wally meant to Dick.

In the YJ comics, you can even see Dick in tears at Wally's funeral. Dick, the reliable, strong-willed, military-trained one, lets himself cry in front of everyone else. Wally was Dick's only anchor to reality. Not Bruce, not the others, not even being Robin - just Wally. He kept Dick humble, grounded, even in s2 after their argument, which would've hurt less if neither the two of them nor the others were aware on their symbiotic bond.

Wally's trust in Dick's plan wavering for that moment is enough for Dick to actually question his own choices, to make him question his own grip on reality, the control he has over the situation - just for a moment, but the crushing doubt is there.

And, I say symbiotic, but I must admit that in YJ we don't really get to see Dick being supportive of Wally, not as much as we see Wally being supportive of Dick, but it's heavily implied anyway.

The chemistry between Wally and Dick is undeniable. Some ship them, some don't - but what I think everyone can agree on is that, were Wally to ever return, chaos would ensue, and Dick's control would inevitably slip.