#ok it took me 30 minutes of looking through my screenshots of peoms but i have it

[lheautontimoroumenos]

more thoughts on jackie,shauna .

oooh now you're asking for trouble anon. this is kinda wide so i'll swing wide (this starts and end with codependency though) and go with no plan. if you want something specific pls send another ask.

so. jackie. shauna. or rather jackieshauna. no space between them right? (that's probably the only thing that makes me accept this as the ship name instead of shaunackie).

(i have to put a read more because this is long as fuck believe me)

we know shauna and jackie have been friends for years, probably since they got into school.

we didn't get to see much about jackie's parents when she was still a kid but jackie doesn't seem to hold her mom or her dad in her heart. and yet when she's gone it seems all they can talk about is her.

they're a mirror of shauna's reaction in that they can't seem to let go. even if they probably didn't tell her they loved her, or said it but didn't show it in a way that jackie could receive it (or maybe jackie's mom was too worried about her valium problems), they have to fill the void. they have to believe she'll come back and everything will be the same. that's why her room is left untouched, that's why they make her gifts that she wouldn't even have liked when they celebrate her birthday every year with a picture from when she was 17.

and shauna can't bear to go see them, she suffers every year at jackie's birthday, first because of the guilt she still has regarding jackie's death, and then because she has to go to the taylor's house. they show her just what she's been doing this whole time.

in 101, shauna masturbates while looking at her daughter's boyfriend's picture because she's stuck in the past. in her world jackie's still alive, and in a way callie is jackie to her. because she's a part of jeff and jeff was a part of jackie (which is why shauna went after him). and in this scene, callie's boyfriend is jeff in shauna's head, even unconsciously (interesting to note that callie ends up dumping him and makes you think about what could have been).

and at the end of the episode, where her control kind of slipped because of the "journalist" looking into her past, she immediately went to read her journals. and not the end of it, when jackie's gone, but the very beginning, right after the crash. and not any part either, but the part where she shares and doubts jackie's hopeful sentiment. they have to find us right? they're gonna go get us? why haven't they found us?

so she's right back in it, really she never left. when nat dies, young nat tells her she never even left the plane, lottie says they brought "it" back with them, but there was no "it", "it" was just us. they brought themselves back, teenage them that was still happy and fine (none of them were fine).

so shauna's back in new jersey, she brought her teenage self back, and with her, teenage jackie. jackie's still here with her all the time, in her journals and her hallucinations and in jackie's parents house. because they're a single being, a unit. they're inseparable, a bit of jackie is part of shauna, she ate her, jackie kept shauna alive and now shauna's keeping jackie alive.

and if she's teenage shauna then she's fine, right? she doesn’t have a single problem. but she also feels guilty all the time. if jackie's alive and shauna's married to jeff then she's just betraying her again and again. and callie is the walking talking manifestation of that. she's both the proof that jackie's alive and dead. that she's still there all the time but gone forever. exhibit: callie in jackie's uniform. (and she falls back in her pattern of lying and hiding things in her affair with adam, that starts because of jeff in shauna's mind, the same way she slept with jeff because of jackie).

and honestly? she can make people believe she's fine as long as jackie stays in her. as long as jackie's hers really. but as soon as she's torn away from her insides, jackie becomes dangerous, she hurts and she tears something away from shauna, she takes her away from herself. when she's dating jeff she alienates shauna from herself. when she's put in front of jackie at her birthday she drops her filter, she says she doesn't even like callie (but she can't help loving her), when callie wears jackie's uniform at the party shauna's forced to open up and in spite of her efforts the façade falls.

if jackie isn't hers and hers only then shauna's falling apart. codependency at its finest and at its worst.

and it's not like jackie exempt of that either, we just get less time to see it. but shauna throws it all in her face when they fight in 110, she made her play soccer so they'd stay together, she tells her what to wear so that shauna will stay hers in a way, she assumes shauna's going to rutgers with her and that they'll be best friends forever and that nothing will ever go wrong because her life is perfect (not touching on heteronormativity here but it sure is present imo). she feels left out as soon as shauna starts hanging out with tai in the wilderness, she doesn't want anything to do with the thing that's taking shauna away from her and into the group's good graces (her butchering skills).

that's, I think, the fundamental difference in the way they deal with their codependency. shauna runs toward what's breaking it because she thinks that looking at it up close will either make it disappear or will spontaneously provide a solution to her problem (exhibit: fucking jeff, going to jackie's room at the taylor's, opening up to callie at the party). she grasps blindly at the last of what she thought was a constant in her life, she tries to keep the control and often ends up making things worse (though if holding on fails, shauna's solution is to kill and destroy so she can keep this control).

whereas jackie runs away from it. she keeps an order about things and the relationship but if it looks like it's about to blow then she's gone (exhibit: leaving the cabin after the fight, going buddy buddy with mari at the lake when she feels shauna pulling away from her, not investing herself in any "useful" activity at the camp). where shauna tries hard as she can to hold on to what is slipping away, jackie just lets it go.

they're like deers that get too close to each other and get their antlers tangled (i think there's a poem about this that i'll try to find) and caught in each other and trying to pull away just ends up killing them. it's not that they got too close for comfort, it's that they got so close, getting away from each other even for an inch or a second would kill them. they couldn't live without each other.

but they also got so close they couldn't see each other as a whole. they have to take each other at face value because it's all they can see at this point. jackie died because she couldn't live without the image she made of shauna in her head, the image of an even younger shauna that followed jackie around without a care in the world because this jackie was hers, and hers only.

and shauna is still alive, only because she carries with her an image of a teenage jackie that both forgave her (which allows her to keep carrying jackie with her) and holds her accountable (being cruel though honest justifies shauna's outburst during the fight, if jackie was mean to her then she kind of deserved it right?) which in turn absolves shauna.

they couldn't keep living together the way they were so they had to tear themselves away from each other.

yet even physically apart, there is no way to think one without feeling the other.