#and i just can't stop thinking about it after binging yellowjackets

[peach-and-bugs]

would you be comfortable writing headcanons for how the yellowjackets girls take care of nonbinary!reader after they got top surgery? :)

I'm saying this is in a modern teen Au just for accuracy reasons and the girls are all taking shifts/working together in looking after the reader

(please note that I know very little about top surgery mechanics, so this is pretty general and could be read as post-any surgery)

Yellowjackets looking after reader after top surgery (modern au)

Jackie

✰ I feel like Jackie would kind of just update you on everything you're missing out in the world while you're recovering, like all the local drama. she'll stop by during your lunch, bringing over anything you might need, but mostly stopping by to gossip

Laura Lee

✰ Laura Lee practically lives in your kitchen and is making all kinds of comfort food for you, because food is the best medicine! she's making you practically every meal every day as well as meal prepping for when she's not gonna be around the house to cook

Lottie

✰ Lottie's gonna be the one changing your bandages as needed and giving you your meds. She becomes your little at-home nurse of sorts

Misty

✰ Misty is doing a little bit of everything. She'll help Lottie when needed, but she can also be found in the kitchen cooking with Laura Lee sometimes.

✰ I can also see. her running around with Natalie

Natalie

✰ Nat isn't the best when it comes to comfort or care, but she can run errands!

✰ any time you need something, she's jumping in her car and driving out to go and get it for you, whether it a food your craving or you need someone to pick up more of your pain prescription

Shauna

✰ I think Shauna would just sit with you for hours so you aren't alone. Like yeah, you've been napping for the past three hours, but there's no way she'd leave your side. she can occupy herself with reading or writing while she waits for you to wake up again because she doesn't want you waking up needing something only to be left alone

Taissa

✰ Taissa is completely in charge of keeping you on schedule in your recovery

✰ She's gonna be the one driving you to and from surgery and making sure you get home safe. She's also gonna be the don't in charge of keeping your meds organized and making sure your bandages are changed regularly

✰ some of the other girls call her bossy for how rigorous she is with your schedule, but it's out of care and wants you to make a fast and easy recovery

Van

✰ Van is showing you all of her favorite movies as a distraction, but also because you can't get up and change the tv so you're stuck watching with her regardless

✰ but of course, she'll binge-watch whatever you want with you. Watching tv and movies is her favorite thing, and if sharing something you love with her will distract you a little, she'll gladly hang out with you

[kinetic-elaboration]

April 16: Some Shauna and Jackie Thoughts

Okay, finished Yellowjackets Season 1 and now I just need to CHILL OUT and not think about it too obsessively because I need to go to work and accomplish things and, like, move on with my life. Start trying to get back to doing the stuff I was going to do this weekend but whatever.

Two thoughts about the show after having just binged S1 once, and then read a couple long reddit threads:

First: I think Jackie's death was really well done. I knew she died and was really dead from S2 spoilers but I also thought it was pretty obvious from the first season itself. Like it's weird to think that people were actively theorizing ways she could still be alive and stuff--that just didn't seem to be in the cards in any way from the text, either on a plot level (the way her parents treat Shauna) or on a thematic level (Jackie as the civilized world dying etc.). So then it's just a question of if her death is satisfying or not. I definitely think it was.

On the one hand, it was totally stupid and could have easily been avoided--something frustrating and random and chaotic--and on the other hand, it immediately followed an obviously climactic moment for Jackie and Shauna specifically, and the group as a whole to a lesser extent--something fitting and well-timed to the plot. This is the moment when Shauna and Jackie confront each other and stop being passive aggressive. It's the moment when the cult starts forming, and one person tries to stop it, and cannot. It's the moment that was foreshadowed: "cold as in you fall asleep and don't wake up," the inevitable coming winter. It's the team disintegrating and reforming: "freezing out" another member, this time the captain, this time their most obvious tie to the old world and the old ways. It's the moment that Jackie devised for herself: she's so ill-adapted to the wilderness that she can't even start a fire. It's also perfectly devised to create the most guilt possible for Shauna, coming after their fight, and because that fight created a situation where only one of them could stay, and she determined that Jackie would be the one who left.

I read some reactions along the lines of, it was unconscionable for them not to bring Jackie back in, or stupid for Jackie not to come in to save herself. I don't think so. This is late September/early October at the earliest. It's fall. That's a very early and unpredictable (supernatural?) snow, even for that area probably but especially from the POV of Jersey girls. I mean a bunch of them slept outside in flimsy dresses just the night before! They could not see this coming. Further, as others mentioned, this is THE most appropriate petty-high-school-fight way for a teenager to die, thus believable for that reason.

The final fight was also so satisfying because you could see both of their sides. I definitely think Jackie was misunderstood to an extent. I think she was a selfish mean girl more because she was 17 than because she was actively, consciously, trying to be selfish and mean. Had she lived, she would have grown out of it, imo. She had moments of real kindness, like doing Misty's makeup, and most of her mean behavior in the wilderness came from being just so terribly unsuited to it and also a bit naive, and a bit...unaware of her appearance to others. I don't think she was aware of the deep fissures in her relationship with Shauna. She was really hearing them for the first time in that argument, and that's partly because SHAUNA never shared them. Jackie saw her as "the sidekick" but she also deeply loved her, and time and again looked out for her and put her safety and well being first. She was also objectively right about the recent behavior of the girls: she must have felt really gaslit, being the only person who both knew about the bacchanal and didn't condone it. On the other hand, Shauna's long-term simmering resentments were fair. And I can't blame her for not saying them aloud before. She's only a kid, too, and that's hard stuff to say, especially in the context of that kind of lifelong attached-at-the-hip girl-friendship. The way that she and Jackie are is something she's known her whole life.

In other words, I think Jackie was right in that moment and about the more specific stuff, though she phrased her opinions badly, or chose a bad time to talk about them (re: Jeff) and Shauna was right or at least had understandable grief with Jackie in the long term, but she also picked a bad time to bring up all of this, like, 17 years' worth of slow-simmer interpersonal issues.

Second: I'm intrigued by the debate over the anachronistic journals. There were people getting big mad about the mistakes on reddit. And yet to hear the creators say so simply, no, they were never intended to be written by Jackie, really made me so much more curious abut them than I'd been either while watching or while reading the reddit debates. When I watched the ep myself, and saw the journal, my first thought was 'Jackie kept a journal? LOL OOC.' and my second was 'oh it's blank, that makes sense' and my third was 'oh it's not blank, okay, cute girl journal whatever.' And then I just took it as Shauna looking at her friend's stuff and feeling her frozen in time. Then when I read about the inaccuracies I just figured it was a prop error whatever.

But if they were not at all intended to be Jackie's...and of course, they're not, they have a lot of late 90s and early 2000s stuff in them... My assumption is it had to be Shauna who wrote them. That Shauna keeps a journal is one of my favorite things about her because I think there is always something mysterious and intriguing about a person's private thoughts written down (I say as someone who does a lot of that lol). We also know that she writes creatively, and that at some point, at least, this writing (both fiction and non-) was a big part of her self-identity. It figures prominently in her fantasies about Brown: she'd date the editor of the literary magazine, he'd fall in love with her over her stories, etc. And finally, we know that Jackie is a part of her, that she's been trying to connect with her, be her, be close to her, consume her since even before the crash.

It does not surprise me at all, then, that she tried to keep Jackie alive after returning home by writing in her voice, taking on the persona of her to create artifacts in her name--artifacts that she doesn't keep with her but deposits like museum items in the bubble-wrapped, well-preserved Teen Girl Room where Jackie used to live. It's not just the grieving parents who treat Shauna as a surrogate-daughter. It's Shauna herself who, at least at one time, inhabits Jackie to keep her alive in at least this one sense: a personality who can create objects reflecting her thoughts and feelings. A process of creation that Shauna does all the time as herself, that is a Shauna-thing, now distorted to match Jackie: her voice, her thoughts, her opinions. Then the artifact remains, 20 years later, as if Jackie had lived longer than she had. It's not evidence of her friend frozen in time, it's evidence of her own grief, and of their once-entwined selves, frozen in time.

[ladystoneboobs]

incomplete list of girly girls often hated as spoiled, selfish brats but i love them and just wanna give them a hug, wrap ‘em in a blanket, and drink hot chocolate together

jackie taylor from yellowjackets

lyla garrity from friday night lights

sansa stark from asoiaf/early got

quinn fabray from glee

sam fraser from the netflix fear street trilogy (whose alleged selfishness is surviving and not trying to sacrifice herself until being pressured to do so)

ann walker from gentleman jack (people who watch it and for some reason don’t ship have such bad faith interpretations)

girly girl characters who fit the fandom hate criteria but with less of the broken bird in need of soothing and caretaking vibe

early seasons kelly taylor from bh90210 before the writers ruined her

beth harmon from the queen’s gambit (which you’d think wouldn’t apply bc the whole thing is about her but the hate is definitely there)

buffy summers from btvs (see above parentheses)

also cordelia from buffy tho, esp post-s1 (this is maybe less fandom as the narrative itself/joss whedon seeming to hate her)

nancy wheeler from stranger things

mary crawley from downton abbey

this is obviously not all the female characters i love or all those who get unfair hate, nor is it all the queen bee or soft femme types, but only those with hatebases. and then there are also those characters who could fit the category except i don’t care about them like julie taylor from fnl or marissa cooper from the oc.