#yj s2

[sparkthespork]

Honestly my one of my favorite things about Yellowjackets is that it’s like the “high-school-stereotype turns out to be more than that” trope, but turned up to such a grotesque and horrifying degree. Like-

“Turns out the popular girl has her own weaknesses/insecurities!” Yeah and she literally freaking dies for them.

“Wow! The rebellious punk girl we were all afraid of is actually really nice!” So let’s turn her into this borderline divine figure, entrust her with our lives and follow her deep into the wilderness as she’s the last one to hold onto a sliver of humanity and not turn into some primal, depraved animal.

“Oh! So the weird childish kid is actually capable of things!” Mm hmm, capable of MURDER. Capable of holding the cards of life and death itself in her little hands and becoming so needed yet so feared.

“That strange quiet kid finally finds her voice!” AND STARTS A CULT.

I could keep going but just- Y’all that retro 90’s energy of exploring the high school trope coupled with the utter gruesome obscenity that is their situation… It so does it for me. Everyone’s become so suffocated in their little boxes that the only way to break out is in a dramatic frenzy where they start killing each other. Glorious.

[pintsofguinnesmakeyoustrong]

you don't see a person as a person when you see them do something bad.

[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

[lottiesacolyte]

yes, the lesbian representation in yellowjackets is very important to me, but what’s even more special is the representation of girls with debilitating mommy issues

[andromeda-observer]

Yellowjackets Season 2, Episode 3: Disgestif 

That diner waitress was the MVP of the episode. Just turns right back around, absolutely brilliant 🙌

also did Shauna get her purse back??

also also, can we discuss that teen!Misty 100000% has a girlfriend now??

[sunny-rants]

some of you are not recognizing Tai for the initiator that she is. it’s clear from the beginning that she’s a leader but it’s more than that. she’s the one that calls for the first vote, all the way back in episode 3, when she finds the lake (and now that I’m thinking about it, that’s a very interesting tie to her future career as a politician) and that’s a recurring thing: she doesn’t influence the decisions of the group like Lottie, or manipulate them like Misty, but she was the one that really initiated The Hunt. “We need to find a way to stay alive. and it can’t be her.”

[jilyandbambi]

#if you don’t understand why she didn’t want a second baby #after losing her first one in such a horrible way and than NEVER got any help for that trauma #you don’t understand her #it’s not that she didn’t want to me a mom #it’s that she was so hurt after losing her first #and in her eyes having a second baby in a hospital with modern medicine and all the things a baby would need #getting to nest for her second baby it would feel like a betrayal to her first #the one she lost and couldn’t protect or save #I 100% called it shauna is kind of a shit mom because of what happened to her firstborn via @epiphanygreaves 

SHAUNA SHIPMAN in YELLOWJACKETS 2.06 “Qui”

[lottieurl]

hyperfixations are so scary like yeah this could be a month long thing or i might be thinking of it everyday seven months from now. no way to tell

[elizabeth-mitchells]

RIP Laura Lee, you would've loved that there were twelve disciples yellowjackets eating the body of Christ Jackie

[sparkthespork]

Okay but this is a huge reason why Misty is my favorite character.

As mentioned in the above post, for the rest of the cast, the big question surrounding them is how their time in the wilderness made them who they are as adults. Their past is integral to understanding them now. But for Misty, it was more that the wilderness gave her a chance to authentically be who she always was, rather than changing her. This is evidenced even before the flight recorder, when we’re given that scene of her watching the rat drowning in the pool.

Now the way Yellowjackets tells its story has really grown on me. I used to not like it when a series I was watching spent too long delving into a character’s traumatic backstory. I thought “Why can’t they just be the way they are without needing an explanation?” I wanted to focus on who they are now. But here, that “explanation” is like half the show, and it really works for me! It wouldn’t be enough to just know that they cannibalized each other in the woods with a little flashback or two. We have to see the whole thing because every little detail matters. It all affects them, and each one differently.

And of course it affects Misty too, but I still gravitate towards the character with whom no amount of backstory will ever fully explain why she is this way. Part of it is that she was just like that. And the best part is that the fact that she was always like that is an equally important part of her character as the backstories are to everyone else.

In the present, Misty is outwardly the most accepting of herself, and that’s likely because she’s still who she’s always been. But then we see in the therapy episode that she is actually a little afraid of herself, afraid of realizing she’s a bad person. Because if she is, how is she supposed to change that when she can’t pinpoint a certain trauma that made her that way? Was she just born doomed to be bad?

Lucky for her, she comes to the conclusion that she’s actually a “closer,” that she can’t be bad because everything she does is ultimately what’s best for those she loves. Although I wonder if that mentality is going to change now that her most recent plan failed in the most catastrophic way it could. I wonder if she ends up asking the same question all over again, if she’s just a hopeless villain of the story with no redemption at the end, because redemption means knowing why you’re so bad. And this time there’s no therapy around to help.

Heck, I wonder if she’s actually envious of the traumas that the wilderness caused the others, their explanations, their memories that they can work on understanding. I wonder if she envies Shauna, who never did anything wrong (unless under Misty’s hallucinogenic influence) until her best friend died. Envies Taissa, who can blame most if not all of her actions on sleepwalking or protecting others from it. Envies her adored Natalie, who had serious trauma even before the wilderness and still had to be held down on the ice lest she make another selfless decision. And on the opposite side of things, I wonder if the other characters are afraid they’re more like Misty, that unbeknownst to her, they also can’t explain themselves because it was part of their nature too.

Anyway, I really hope this gets explored farther because as I said, it really is a huge part of why I like Misty and my favorite lens to analyze her from.

Weird take but to me as an audience member misty is…the most narratively reliable of the cast??? Like she’s insane and unhinged but she’s been like that from DAY ONE (destroying the flight recorder). Everyone else is normal (enough) as teens, and then stuff in the woods happens to make them completely lose it in their adult lives. There’s this big sense of fear and mystery around what actually *happened* to everyone else to make their midlife crisis moments so scary. But Misty? She’s just like that.

[jilyandbambi]

labels like psychopathy and sociopathy are too hastily ascribed to Shauna Shipman not least of all because, A) all of the #unhinged behaviors & actions we've seen from her are more accurately attributable to a combination of 1) PTSD, 2) post-partum depression, 3) grief, 4) arrested development

AND-- more importantly insofar as it concerns definitions:

B) the key hallmarks of antisocial personality disorder (the clinical term for sociopathy/psychopathy) distinguishing it from mere jerkass behavior are 1) lack of remorse/regret or guilt for past actions, 2) inability to feel empathy* for others.

*empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another

two things Shauna is not are unempathetic and unable to feel remorse.

From the moment we meet Shauna as a kid she's writhing in guilt, and--I would argue--empathy. The whole reason she can't bring herself to tell Jackie she's planning on going to Brown is that she knows the disappointment will devastate Jackie and she doesn't want to hurt her best friend's feelings. Yes, she resents herself and especially Jackie for this but Shauna's empathy is what paralyzes her and keeps her from being honest.

Adult Shauna is just as capable of remorse/guilt and empathy:

When Tai shows up at her house and confides in her that she's started sleepwalking again, without Tai even having to ask, Shauna invites her to spend the night and promises to watch over her

after Callie shares with her how Shauna's unwillingness to discuss her past has deeply hurt Callie, Shauna acknowledges how her inability to confront her trauma has hurt her child and immediately tries to make amends by giving Callie what she needs and opening up.

And this is without getting into how Shauna's immense guilt and shame over her actions in the wilderness compelled her to punish herself post-rescue by not going to Brown (her dream school) and instead transforming her life into a living memorial to her dead friend.

Even adult Shauna's most violent action--killing Adam--wasn't an act of cold-blooded murder but rather happened as a result of PTSD-induced psychosis, as evidenced by her hallucinating that her journals are missing from the safe in the first place, and the flash to teen Shauna right after she guts him. She wasn't in her right mind. Does that excuse her? No. But killing someone during a bout of psychosis brought on by untreated PTSD is not the same as intentionally killing someone to solve a problem or in a fit of rage.

Is Shauna a violent person? Yes. Is she a selfish person? Yes. Is she self-destructive? Yes. Does she often behave irresponsibly and inappropriately? Yes. Is she dangerous? YES. But these qualities don't make her a psychopath. She's got too much empathy and is too burdened by guilt to have APD.

Shauna Shipman is what 2 1/2 decades of untreated PTSD & PPD + unresolved grief does to a person

[lottiesacolyte]

i can’t listen to this without thinking about nat (and lottienat) (x)

[andromeda-observer]

Yellowjackets Season 2, Episode 4: Old Wounds

The moose drama was heartbreaking. RIP that moose 🦌🌊🧊⚰️

Also it would have been nice to have more of adult!Van in this episode. Evidently we will see her next week but I am OBSESSED with her and her shop and I need more content gay straight away please and thank you!!

teen and adult Tai need to get their shit together jfc & dear fuck Shauna the amount of therapy Callie is going to need because of you is HUGE

ahem

[purpleplaid17]

#OH FUCKING STOP #it's the way when shauna in the dream wakes up alone and afraid the first person she calls for is tai…. #also jesus fuck tai holding shauna when she couldnt abort bc she was too scared to die…. #tai holding shauna when the baby dies anyway…… #IM THROWING UP

#it's the way theyre the only two yellowjackets to have children #and they may turn out to be awful mothers but they are so good at taking care of each other specifically… (via @chasingfictions)

SHAUNA SHIPMAN & TAISSA TURNER Yellowjackets ◆ 1x06 "Saints" | 2x06 "Qui"

[sunny-rants]

ok tell me why I haven’t seen a single Yellowjackets edit to Baba O’Riley by The Who???

[milf-lover42]

I’ll never be over how Shauna sees the group’s faces in her dream after they’ve eaten the baby. It’s such a fascinating insight into Shauna’s mind to me. Lottie looks practically childlike. She makes an attempt to wipe her face but not in an ashamed way, it’s simply a casual motion to wipe her lip, as if the actual amount of blood on her face doesn’t exist to her and it’s simply a crumb that rests on her lip. It seems like she has orchestrated this, but she’s unaware what they are really doing, as if she doesn’t understand this is Shauna’s BABY.

Akilah looks terrified, she’s sorry she’s doing this but she can’t help it. She’s almost about to throw up thinking about what she’s doing but she’s just so hungry she can’t help but eat what’s been given.

Van nearly snarls like a fucking wolf which I find FASCINATING. Van has never been aggressive toward Shauna, but she IS a strong ally to Lottie, and that seems to be enough of a threat to Shauna.

Taissa is very clearly being seen as her sleepwalking self, with the quick movements, sloppy chewing, and animalistic stare. Natalie is desperately ashamed of what she has done, trying to wipe away the evidence and so sorry that she has betrayed Shauna in such a way but she just couldn’t stop herself. It’s as if Shauna knows neither of them could be consciously capable of this, even in her dream. These two have been her strongest allies and Shauna doesn’t believe they would willingly hurt her in this way, but it could still happen somehow. Natalie also has the least amount of blood on her, like she was the last to dig in, or ate the least and most carefully. Being as respectful as possible until the last second.

And Misty. Misty looks at Shauna as if she wants to worship her. She looks for a moment like “ah shit, listen Shauna I know this looks bad” but the most prominent message from her expression is as if she is grateful to Shauna for feeding them again. Shauna has been the one keeping them fed for so long. First with Jackie, and now her baby.