how could anyone ever say natalie didn’t love misty when she knew misty broke the transponder on purpose, kept it a secret to protect misty until her last breath, drove across the state with misty despite knowing that misty tampered with her car, forgives her again and again and again, and ends up laughing about every insane thing misty does to her in the end (*cough cough* playfully teasing misty about the hidden camera and smiling about it when misty eventually finds natalie and refuses to leave her…) oh! and she looks at her like THIS.
in BOTH timelines.
it’s actually crazy to me that people think mistynat is unrequited. like…have you seen nat’s face when she looks at misty????
cw: detailed discussion of stillbirth with respect to the show! descriptive language around death, dying, bodies, & meat.
i am not sure that i have the words for this but i am going to try! so shauna and dead things...
as the butcher, shauna has the most proximity to dead things, right? to a certain extent, travis & nat share this burden. akilah & mari also share it as the cooks. but all of that is different than shauna's task... working with the squelching innards of something that was once living is a lot. it's visceral. it's bloody. it's gored out!! in this sense, shauna acts as a necessary bridge between "what was once alive" and "what is now food" & between "what was horrifying" and "what is now palatable."
butchering dead things is not for the faint of heart! there is a psychological component to touching something that was once alive & accepting that it isn't anymore. there's something eerie about doing things to a once-living body that would be wretched if it was still alive. with it comes a natural kind of dissonance, and humans are very fucky about death & bodies & the "when we're no longer us" of it all... the book when breath becomes air by paul kalanithi is very famous for its meditations on a life ending but it's also famous for its title-- what is that point? when is a body no longer a being? when does breath become air??
it gets more personal when we're discussing shauna butchering humans because we're anthropocentric creatures, you know?? that's a big bridge for the bridge! all the same, shauna does butcher humans. of course, she stays in the meat shed with jackie because jackie was her best friend. but there's something very interesting to me about shauna, the butcher, being the one who can best hold that proximity with "deadass jackie." she's able to look at her... to talk to her... to touch her... not everyone on the team would be able to do so-- in fact, most people probably don't want to be anywhere near a corpse.
being with jackie in this way demonstrates (to me) an underlying fascination that shauna has with disembodiment. as she sits with jackie, she's avoiding processing that this was her friend but no longer is. the finality of them burning jackie's body is distressing to shauna because she's still working through that separation of life from the body. as the butcher, she knows that jackie is gone but the part of her that's still clinging to the humanness of humans--separate (but not really) from the animals she's been butchering--is struggling. to that end, i would argue that jackie's ear coming off is a shatter-glass moment for shauna... this ear is not her friend anymore... it came loose... it fell off... shauna isn't completely there yet, but she's getting there.
and then the ear becomes another fixture of disembodiment... personally, i think it's fascinating that the first part of jackie that shauna eats is the part that is no longer attached to her. it's like the excision of the ear from jackie's body breaks through & gets shauna to that place of... "meat? nothing more than meat?" it's such an excellent transition that speaks to her perspective as butcher & how she's moving into reckoning with personhood, death, and what that means for bodies.
but yeah, disembodiment. shauna's harshest confrontation with disembodiment is her baby. not only did she have a stillbirth but she had an immersive dream that convinced her she didn't have a stillbirth... to come out of that & the fervor of almost dying and to look at what's in your arms and realize he's not alive... it's quite extreme.
the fact that shauna can't accept that her baby's not alive is another example of how she is struggling with disembodiment. shauna knows what death is. she's held it. she's sliced through it. she knows what a body is-- after jackie, she knows what meat can be. but her baby... how could that ever be him too? even after all they've been through, she's still struggling with the "when breath becomes air" part of it.
and then javi-- fuck, javi. here we go again with disembodiment. and shauna's struggling with the weight of disembodiment alone! just as everyone leaves her when she has her breakdown over her delivery, everyone leaves her again when she has to butcher javi. in a way, javi is even worse than jackie (& possibly even the baby) because they did this to him. this is a true and intentional butchering-- we've finally passed the point of no return. humans and animals? no in between. it's all just fucking meat... and the concept of that? well, it's too much for shauna. she has to cover her eyes... even as the butcher, she needs the protection. she never meant to become this: the bridge between humans and meat...
all of shauna's experiences with death and meat set up a framework imo of understanding why she latches onto hannah's hair in season 3. now, i am by no means claiming that my perspective on this is right, and there's a thousand ways to interpret why shauna becomes so fixated with hair. but when you run with her feelings toward disembodiment... god, it is interesting!
because fundamentally, hannah's hair breaks the rules that shauna has learned about bodies, personhood, and meat...
and yeah okay-- weird girl, creepy girl, dommy mommy collecting trophies jokes aside-- let's talk about it: shauna is fascinated with hannah's hair. she's almost as fascinated as she was with jackie's ear. but the thing of it is that hannah's hair is different... because hannah's hair was a part of hannah, but it's not meat. it's not meat and hannah's not dead. and god, the way shauna keeps that hair with her and looks at it? i'm sorry but it's like a baby noticing its goddamn hand for the first time... you can almost see her coming to a realization about the world: "a part of someone? a part of someone apart from someone? and it's not meat? huh..."
shauna, i think, is having a crisis about personhood... imo, the reason that she teeters so horrifically in her empathy toward others in season 3 is due to this very dilemma. what makes other people other people if we're all just meat? because for shauna, she's lost so fucking much. she's lost so many people because the wilderness treated them like fucking meat. from jackie to her baby to javi, and the proximity to each and every one of them... in a nihilistic way, i can see shauna's coldness toward ben, mari, and even melissa as being a reflection of that-- "if my baby was meat, then you're just fucking meat too." but then hannah... hannah and the bits that fall off her that are like the bits that fell off jackie but somehow aren't meat... this hair is hannah's and she's not dead... when does breath become air?
and i don't think shauna ever comes to a conclusion about this. from dicing up adam with natalie to biting a hunk of flesh off melissa's goddamn arm, she's still struggling with this concept & to a certain extent experimenting with it... humans and meat, humans and meat, humans and meat. what the fuck are we? which are we?
AGAIN, i'm not trying to come to any ultimate conclusions about shauna and her character or why she does the things that she does, but i think this tension--this dissonance of what the fuck is the body--when does breath become air???--is something so important to her psyche. out of necessity, shauna became the bridge between humans and food for the others... as the butcher, these are the questions that i think haunt her.
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