#so shauna is more likely!

[miamignonette]

i want to talk about the cult members in the yj pilot and which characters i think are which. this post is going to have some major spoilers from leaked bts pictures, but some of these theories are just speculation! beware!

so we have two confirmed identities, misty (she’s the only one we’ve seen taking off her mask) and taissa judging by this bts picture (also thanks to sukisslove on tiktok for making the comparison!)

the rest are going to be my personal theories!

we have this picture of three of the costumes in more detail, which i think is going to be from s3? so while the feast scene in ep1 was filmed with extras and we can’t determine who they are based on any visible facial features, this picture is probably of the actors in costume.

the girl in the middle HAS to be lottie. look at her face!!

we can’t see much, but those have to be lottie’s eyes and eyebrows. plus, courtney eaton is pretty tall and this girl is much taller than the rabbit. so aside from lottie and tai, the only one i can’t really guess with any confidence is the rabbit (who, by the way, is so extra scary to me for some reason 😭). it could very well be shauna, who was the closest to jackie, who is associated with rabbits (her mom says she loved rabbits and gives shauna a little porcelain rabbit for jackie’s birthday), but i think there’s a good chance that shauna is actually someone else. we’ll put a pin in that. so, who IS the rabbit? idk. we don’t have enough information on that, aside from the fact that she’s shorter than lottie and tai. for now i’m going to guess that it’s melissa, because she’s firmly in shauna’s corner and people are speculating that shauna is kind of using her as a stand-in for jackie.

anyways, if the girl with the raccoon pelt is lottie, who is this girl with long, dark hair?

it’s looking like melissa is going to be the eighth survivor (assuming shauna’s stalker is the eighth, and we saw that they had blonde hair) so let’s eliminate her, gen, mari, and one of the new girls who i think is named robin because the last three would be dead by this point. this could be a stretch but i’m going to say for now that it’s natalie and her roots have fully grown out. this might be unrealistic because she still has a decent amount of blonde hair left in the summer and it may not grow out completely by the winter, but her hair would probably be roughly the same length. she could be shauna, but shauna’s hair is a bit lighter, and i still think that shauna might be someone else.

everyone sitting on the antler queen’s other side has most, if not all, of their faces covered, so these are assumptions based on basically nothing. i’ll just guess for now that van is the one with their entire face covered and travis is the one sitting next to her. i know i said that the extra’s features can’t really be used as an indicator of the character they’re playing, but i think it’s fair enough to say that if those are the last two we’re left with then the one with darker skin has to be travis. i don’t think they would have someone with darker skin play van especially since that’s the one with part of their face exposed. i think what we can see of the face looks more feminine, but we already know who taissa is.

soooooo let’s talk about the antler queen!! as you may have guessed via the process of elimination, i think she may be shauna, and i feel like it makes sense. shauna is arguably the main character since we definitely follow her the most particularly in the adult timeline, and we know that she wants to take natalie’s place as the leader. i believe wholeheartedly that the position of the queen is something that’s either taken or passed around, and shauna wants to take it. i think that when the survivors split off into two groups, shauna will be leading one of those groups and eventually when they come back together she’ll become THE leader. and it just makes a lot of sense to me thematically! but the main reason that i think it could be shauna is this picture (courtesy of mattvews on twitter!)

look at the costume sophie is wearing!! that’s a horn/bone attached to the shoulder, exactly like the antler queen’s outfit. now, i guess it’s possible that the costume is also passed to whoever takes the title. i could buy that. but idk, this feels big. so based on all that, here’s the lineup (excluding misty who isn’t in the shot)

i know i’m making A LOT of big assumptions. melissa may not be the eighth survivor, and she might not be shauna’s blonde stalker. mari could be in the place i assigned to natalie, since her hair would match much better and it’s possible that gen is the pit girl instead (during the game of capture the bone mari was the decoy when gen was the one who actually had the bone). honestly as i’ve been writing the post i’ve started to convince myself that this is mari because i’m just not sure that a character who JUST became important would be part of the plan the writers clearly had from the beginning. so here’s the other option i’ll propose

this one probably makes more logical sense, and this is the outcome i’d prefer. in the adult timeline taissa says something about how she continues to support natalie because of what she did for them out there, which might mean that she did something to save them that cemented herself as their rightful leader. shauna is the rabbit, tying her to jackie, and mari is the pit girl decoy, but this doesn’t explain shauna’s antler queen-esque outfit in the bts pic. that’s really the only discrepancy i can think of, but it’s kind of a big one imo, unless the costume really is passed on and natalie is the last girl to wear it. i want to hear people’s thoughts though!! thanks for reading my unnecessarily long essay

[missmarreynolds]

Yellowjackets as The Onion Articles :3

[jpg-of-dorian-slay]

no bc jackie wanted to be loved so badly and she cared so much for everyone on her team, she did their face paint and misty's makeup and tried to boost morale and she loves shauna so fucking much and they exiled her and they left her outside and she froze to death. they literally froze her out. i'm genuinely never getting over her death bc she did not deserve that and all they would have had to do was ask her to come inside and if shauna was just like "hey i love you i'm sorry" she would have come inside. SHE WOULD HAVE COME INSIDE GUYS.

[grayintogreen]

“Shauna tries so hard to be a good person but sucks at it” vs “Natalie tries so hard to be an awful person but sucks at it.”

Shauna is fully capable and willing to kill and lie and cheat while maintaining this perfect apple pie illusion of a wholesome life and her family stays by her but even they’re starting to see the cracks in the veneer.

Natalie believes she destroys everything she touches, is constantly on a downward spiral of self-destruction, and hates herself for everything she did and yet she can’t even kill a goldfish on purpose and despite being openly antagonistic to everyone in the wellness center, they all seem to really like her.

FASCINATING dichotomy here.

[jilyandbambi]

I really wish the Yellowjackets fandom could accept Shauna is mentally ill in the same way Lottie is.

Obviously, yes, all of the Yellowjackets have severe PTSD. But it's like people get that Lottie is schizophrenic and that Tai suffers from some unspecified/undiagnosed dissociative disorder on top of having PTSD while Shauna's postpartum psychosis--the symptoms of which include but aren't limited to:

hallucinations

increased agitation/irritability

paranoia

persecutory delusions/feeling that others are out to get you

disruptive or aggressive behavior

withdrawing from loved ones & social activities

--is largely overlooked and instead her actions are treated as the result of her grief over losing Jackie and her baby.

Although it's understood that Shauna's labor and resulting stillbirth were uniquely damaging experiences that compounded her trauma in ways the others were spared from, she still gets lumped in with the other Yellowjackets as "only" suffering from PTSD. She just has *extra* PTSD. She suffered the most and it turned her into The Most Deranged and Bloodthirsty Yellowjacket.

But how would discussion of Shauna's season 3 arc look if her lashing out at Nat, her fixation on Ben as the culprit behind the cabin fire, her withdrawing socially from the group, and, yes, her extremely (often disproportionate) violent behavior were seen as being driven by her postpartum psychosis the way Lottie's faith in the wilderness is understood to be driven by her schizophrenia?

I don't know where I'm going with this, to be honest. I guess my point is that I think the fandom views the loss of wilderness baby as just a tragic event that compounded Shauna's grief and trauma when what we're actually seeing is the effects of an untreated severe mental health emergency not unlike Lottie's deterioration since running out of her meds.

[sukibenders]

When other Yellowjackets fans, majority who are poc themselves, talk about how weird and frustrating it is that the writers introduced a random yte character and gave them a storyline when there were two (technically three but they killed off Lottie even when there was an opportunity for more) woc, who have been around since s1, that could've fit the mold instead (like Mari) and have actual personalities outside of building up/being the lapdog for another character. Or how often times many of the, limited, poc characters are often either treated poorly and killed off, or pushed to the side (Simone, reduced to the disposable black girlfriend trope and is nearly killed by her partner because she's in the way of a ship; Travis, since s1, had his trauma dismissed or ignored and was overly hated but no one talks about how he was SA'd by the girls he's now stuck with on top of having to eat his brother and not be able to grieve over it). How Taissa's whole storyline is just revolving around Van even with all the potential, especially given she's fighting to be free from her own mind, how Lottie's mental illness is treated so poorly as if it's not the butt of a joke then it's met with heavy criticism (and the only time she is met with sympathy for it, it's through the lens of a yte character embodying her and having an emotional conversation with her father). How you can have all of these reasons (and more) for being annoyed by Melissa's character or the direction of the show, and be met with #those fans downplaying these concerns, or just being overly antagonistic just because they find yte character #243 entertaining so obviously these conversations don't have merit. But this fandom has always had an...."interesting" way in which it discussed the poc characters on the show, so I'm not surprised.

[evie-doesnt-write]

Obsessed with how Lottie is one of the only Yellowjackets who is not mean to or annoyed by Misty. I’m not saying she’s exactly friendly to her but at the very least she’s polite and non-judgemental. Even when she’s dismissive or exasperated it doesn’t come off as an aversion to Misty herself (like when faced with Misty’s aggressiveness towards her in s2). In s3 ep2, Lottie even awkwardly hugs her and attempts to comfort her about Nat’s death and her own guilt. It’s even funnier because Misty is often annoyed, suspicious of and weirded out by Lottie,

[bellamysgriffin]

ULTIMATE SHIPS CHALLENGE - Deaths  [3/4]

[furuhonya]

that episode

[enidtendo64]

The Tragedy of Saint Jacqueline

[novelconcepts]

The more the show progresses, the more I want to see the 90s cast infiltrating the modern timeline. We've gotten hints of it with Shauna and her younger self, her Jackie hauntings. We've gotten a little more with adult Lottie seeing teenage Nat (and Laura Lee), and with Natalie getting teenage Lottie in her final moments. I want more. I want the teen cast to be absolutely invasive on pivotal adult moments, infecting their adult counterparts when least expected. I want Taissa's argument with Van to dissolve into their teenage selves, their bond endless and timeless and inescapable. I want Misty absolutely wrecked by young Natalie lurking around corners, watching from mirrors. I want to see these women unable to navigate adulthood without the specters of their teenage selves cropping up absolutely everywhere, more and more as they let the memories in, as they stop being able to repress the trauma. They didn't grow up. They never could. You are always doomed to regress around your high school teammates. You are haunted by the phantom elements of your misspent youth. It is a comfort, and it is a gift, and it is a trial, and it is a curse. I would love to see that reflected with greater intensity, until the lines blur, until the timelines have no choice but to intersect. They haven't escaped themselves at all. They didn't grow up. They just got older.

[demadogs]

its so funny thinking about the people who dont watch yj seeing all my yj shit cuz theyre probably like "oh wow op moved on from jackishauna shes kissing someone else and op loves it" no this is very much still about jackieshauna. shauna kissing this rando proves jackieshauna thats why im losing my shit

[lukaskyle-moved]

i just don't think anyone - shauna included - ever actually spared a thought towards ben after the labor/believed he was in any way at fault, because, as has been made clear multiple times, they did not see him as an authority figure. tai brings it up solely because she knows it's a surefire way to a) get shauna to go off, and b) it's an easy way to question his character and make him seem like a villain. you can see the look of surprise on shauna's face, very briefly, and then she sees what tai is doing - weaponizing her trauma - and offers her approval of it because it gets her closer to her goal of killing ben. you could almost think it's coordinated between them because shauna being able to recall the exact words ben used while she's in the middle of a traumatic labor is just a little difficult to believe but i don't think it was. anyway the point is i really don't know why people keep acting like THAT'S the reason she hates ben when it's not. she did not think of it until that moment. personally i don't think she even really cares about him burning the cabin. her issue really is that he not only represents a link to Civilization and Authority (like jackie), but he also represents the possibility that they could maybe have survived another way, since ben did (and so did javi).* she says, very clearly, "he's not one of us." THAT'S why she hates him.

*and i think this is a very important point, because while the cannibalism they've committed is technically survival cannibalism, they do turn it into ritualistic cannibalism. they made an active choice to do that. taking away their agency in the matter makes the narrative far less compelling imo

[butchcaseyjones]

“something must have warped you when you were little” but i feel like the more interesting option (and this is what i think is probably canon) would be if nothing super huge and traumatizing happened to misty as a child. it would make sense, of course, for a character like her to have been abused or something similar, but it would be infinitely more interesting if she was always Like This to some degree. of course she was canonically bullied and excluded, and i believe she was probably neglected/ignored/whatever by her parents (or else they probably would’ve done something about her being Like This), but that Something that makes her Like This has always been present. we’ll never know what is wrong with her, and neither will she, but it’s inherent and it will never go away. it’s scarier and more tragic to think that the Something that has marked you as different, isolated you, and meant you will be perceived as evil and broken for your whole life was always part of you. it’s not something that can be cured or even explained. it’s you. there was never any hope. 

[aingeal98]

I say this with love for Shauna as a character because she's so fun, but Nat is better than me because I would have shot her kneecaps the second she said we're not leaving. Imagine being forced to be a single teen parent to a soccer team of other teenage girls and then they fire you for the crime of having an undefeated moral compass and when you finally get a way home some of them are like hm no I want to stay I like biting people actually.

Sometimes in shows when the dialogue is full of cursing it can sound excessive and unnatural but every single time Nat curses it feels like the most understandable response possible to the situation and also like. Her life in general. She earned those fucks, saying them in every second sentence is like the most normal and reasonable response to all the bullshit she's up against.

[flints-silver]

ok on a serious note tho i can't BELIEVE they made shauna a canon girl kisser this is CRAZY.