#calli taylor

[lesbianforlottie]

age accurate yellowjackets cast is making me feel rly depressed rn

[consume-me-you-coward]

YELLOWJACKETS THEORY: (pretty much unconfirmed canon tbh)

JACKIE FAKED HER DEATH TO GET OUT OF PAYING CHILD SUPPORT FOR CALLIE AFTER THEY DID IT RAW

My evidence: >>>

She is clearly JackieShauna’s love child, the casting department honestly made it a little too obvious if I'm being honest, like she has Shauna’s colouring but that’s Jackie’s face

[cryptid-catnip]

my favorite part of Worm was when Taylor Worm said "it's worming time" and then murdered a toddler

[nataliesscatorccio]

YELLOWJACKETS + shauna being sentimental

[kangarooqueen]

Callie is something else

[shaunashpmn]

i find shauna and callie’s relationship so fascinating because i don’t entirely think shauna DOES see callie as jackie. i think she does a little, but more in the sense that she feels like she should be responsible for callie, but she can never quite do it right - same as with jackie. i think the main cause of their relationship being so tough is the wilderness baby. shauna physically can’t let herself get attached to callie because she doesn’t trust that she’s sticking around. it’s partly mental but also partly physical (ppd, ptsd etc). shauna never fully recovered from jackie, never really removed her from life in the way you usually do with someone who’s passed and so when she had callie, to shauna that was under the exact same circumstances as wb because she was still taking jeff from jackie and having a baby with her best friend+’s boyfriend.

as for the party scene, there’s definitely two factors - callie bears some physical resemblance to jackie (teenage girl, thin, midlength hair, big eyes) and is also wearing jackie’s uniform. shauna KNOWS it’s jackie’s uniform she’s seeing, and she KNOWS she hallucinates jackie, so the obvious presumption is (as she says) “jackie?”. we see her get angry with callie when she realises that she’s not jackie, which is think pretty much sums up their relationship.

shauna doesn’t see callie as jackie - she sees callie as the version of jackie that she could have been, the version of her firstborn that he could have been, except that the capacity of love and trust she had for both of them is gone and callie is just too late and just not the real thing.

[rotating-hyperfixations]

Do yall ever think Shauna talked about Jackie and Callie had the unfortunate realization that her mother was in love with her dead best friend, and worse doesn’t know it and thinks they were just normal besties. Or did she inherit her mothers’ obliviousness.

[vanpalmr]

YELLOWJACKETS APPRECIATION WEEK 2023 day four: favorite quotes

[enidtendo64]

Family matters 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

[wowzashipman]

even more (??) Yellowjackets text posts

[ink-5oul]

"I'm over it" says woman who has never gotten over anything in her life

[alicenthighstower]

could I change it if I wanted? can I rise above the flood? will it wash out in the water or is it always in the blood?

[jackiietaylor]

I sure as hell don’t wanna hook up with Randy fucking Walsh.

YELLOWJACKETS 1.01 “Pilot” 2.05 “Two Truths and a Lie”

[tabithatwo]

are we ready to talk about shauna's barely hidden but somehow very ignored psychosis and how it, like a ton of her other qualities, is brushed aside by both those around her and the audience? like, i think its clear that a central focus of the show is the way lottie is the only one who got stuck in a facility (and natalie in and out of rehab being the next closest to reckoning with her shit) when the rest of them are very clearly not okay. as a certified Crazy Girl, i've been weary of how they'll handle lottie's story line (blurring psychosis and the supernatural is a very delicate and tricky thing and thus far i've been sort of just waiting to see where it goes). our data on and understanding of mental health is incredibly limited for a lot of reasons (but that's a rant for another time) but there is a large mainstream misconception of when hallucinations and delusions can happen. psychosis isn't just something that happens in schizophrenia and its very complex, so if you want to learn more there's plenty of info out there i'm not going to get into it here, but it happens in a lot of other cases. psychosis is, most simply put, a loss of contact with external reality. ptsd can cause psychosis, especially auditory and visual hallucinations.

so shauna is shown to have these experiences and i didn't realize that they were being so heavily overlooked by a large amount of people until the reaction to the scene where she beats lottie nearly to death. shauna is introduced in s1 as having hallucinations of jackie 25 years later. she is shown to disassociate. in 207, she both holds the baby's body and believes the delusion that they ate the baby. the episode shows her fighting the delusion until she can't anymore. meanwhile, adult shauna tells lottie she keeps callie at arms length out of "fear that she would die...i guess? or maybe that she was never even...real to begin with." then she adds "i think something is broken, lottie." implied: she's broken. something is wrong with her. this is the is the most honest about her mental state we've ever seen shauna be.

why? because lottie has always been and likely will always be perceived as crazier. lottie is the one they pin it on, lottie is the cult leader both then and now, lottie is the scapegoat, lottie is the one who got sent to switzerland. i think there's something to be said for the effect lottie has on people (again, a whole other post) but honestly, that alone is enough. shauna is feeling vulnerable for a lot of reasons and she can tell lottie that she thinks she's crazy, that she's never quite sure her daughter exists, that she's constantly afraid she'll die to the degree that she doesn't let herself interact with her in a real, tangible way, because it's always safer to tell the crazy girl you're crazy, too.

and lottie knows. shauna knows that. lottie clocked her psychosis almost immediately, when she was in the meat shed for all hours. the other girls were shocked by the makeup, and their shock was so fucking strange to me when i watched it, but now on reflecting i'm realizing maybe its the lottie effect. like, have i done the shit shauna has? abso-fucking-lutely not lol. but does my mind work in a way where i immediately would assume shauna was doing something along the lines of the shit she was doing out there, because to me its like...what else would it be? yeah. like sees like, in a way. lottie knows what this looks like at baseline, even if its coming out way different in shauna. even if in shauna it looks like aggression and violence a lot of the time. lottie gets it.

jeff doesn't get it, he thinks strawberry lube is too wild. taissa gets it to a degree, and we see shauna be the second most open with her, but tai suppresses and hides it a degree that she wouldn't dare step foot in a therapist's office (this is yet another thing that makes me crazy but is a whole other post lol). shauna's main goal in this life she's created is pretending to be normal. and she's like, impressively bad at it. but people let her, because what else are they going to do? addressing the clear issues is taboo, because we categorize people so heavily. she masks better than lottie, but it's fucking wafer thin. you see this when she interacts with people who aren't her family or the other yjs. the way she speaks to the taylors? to adam? shauna is only sometimes masking passably when she's in her set world, where she has a routine, and is surrounded by people she only has to half-convince of her sanity.

if shauna is honest about the level of psychosis she experiences, she knows she'll end up like lottie. and i think there's an argument to be made that the people around her (which at this point in her life is pretty much just jeff because she's done another common thing and insulated herself from other people, re: the way she behaves being clockably off to others who won't overlook certain things or can't relate) understand that too. it can't be addressed, because then in their minds there must be action of some kind if it is. (taissa yelling you're acting crazy, shauna is one of the most purely terrified moments we see of her in relation to shauna, because she knows she's admitting something. jeff yelling something to the same effect after the carjacking, same thing.)

the person we see try to get shauna to open up about it is callie. her teenage daughter, who bares the brunt of her difficulty maintaining reality, (who knows that shauna has never accepted her fully as her child, and seems to actually sense that there is a deeper reason for that), asks her to open up. she tells her after the club scene that she knows something is wrong. she even mentions jackie directly. she spends all of s2 trying to relate to shauna, to get her to be open with her about everything. there's no way shauna's trauma and psychosis and general issues have gone unnoticed by callie. daughters always know. they see it in their mothers before they even have a concept of the world. so we're watching a 16 year old try to get her mom to open up, because she doesn't understand fully why that's so dangerous to shauna. to callie, it may even be a secret she thinks other people are in on that she's being left out of. i think maybe she's realizing that it isn't personal and that shauna is guarded like this in general, and we're watching that happen.

callie is learning to care for and relate to her mother and she doesn't see why shauna won't let her in, because to her it's an innate truth that she'll be by her side no matter what (if only she'd let her be). she has unconditional love for her mother and that is the scariest thing in the world to shauna, because the last person who had unconditional love for shauna died because shauna didn't know what to do with it. a baby she never got a chance to meet in reality could've replaced the love that jackie gave her, and shauna was maybe starting to look forward to that, but that ended before it began. so twice shauna has killed that figure in her life. the one who loves her wholly and for who she is, which is terrifying to shauna in it's own right (she tried to take that away from jackie in their last moments, maybe you never really knew me, because that would be easier. shauna can't handle someone really knowing her because she can't handle really knowing herself because, again, that means addressing things that go unaddressed). and she doesn't plan on killing that figure again.

(if callie's even real, because the baby wasn't real when she met him and jackie wasn't real every time she's talked to her in the last twenty-five years, so who the fuck is to say callie is real?)

[levitatingbiscuits]

something so fucked up about shauna shipman is that she is still so obsessed with jackie taylor that she will recreate that toxic, one-sided jealousy and resentment with her own daughter. our introduction to shauna is a scene of her masturbating in callie's bed while staring at a picture of callie's boyfriend. the immediate parallels are unmistakable, because we also see her teen self fuck jeff later that episode. we both know that it was always more about taking something from jackie than any real love for jeff; now she's lusting after her daughter's underage boyfriend and secretly resenting callie in much the same way she secretly resented jackie and lusted after her boyfriend. she even mistook callie for jackie when she wore the same uniform a few episodes later.

as the first season progressed, we saw a lot of shauna's pretty chilling dislike of her own child. sure, callie's a little shit, but she's also a teen girl with deep-seated mommy issues. shauna is a woman in her 40s acting like the catty mean girl she never had the courage to be in high school. she talks shit about how much she doesn't like callie, she relishes in holding one over on her, she shows off the affair she's having with a hot younger man, she threatens callie's future, she manipulates her, and so on and so forth. she treats callie like she might have treated jackie, if the power dynamic were reversed.

and what's really heartbreaking is that callie, much like jackie, had no idea about this deep-seated jealousy and resentment. neither of them have the callousness nor the mean streak that shauna does. for jackie, shauna always mattered most; and we see how callie blooms under the attention and approval her mother gives her when she helps cover up her crimes in season two.

then shauna had the goat breakdown, and i realized that this is the closest thing to love she can give callie. she can't love her daughter the way she loved wilderness baby, can't open herself up to that kind of pain again. but she also can't help but love her child, so she recreated the only other comparable form of love she'd ever felt: her love for jackie, which is much more complicated and messy and cruel than a mother's love for her child.

[staghunters]

Baggage? You mean Jackie.

(sometimes i entertain myself by making fanart of my own fics teehee)