yesterday i saw a post asking why taivan is so underrated.
and, while the reasons why people get attached to fictional characters and ships vary a lot, it's very likely that racism is connected to it, same as anti-butch discrimination.
that's pretty much a general agreement for taivan shippers.
however, the details of how that works don't seem to be discussed enough, and i think it's worth to expand on them a bit.
because the thing is, taivan is actually a ship that subverts people's expectations in more ways than one, and even for sapphic media standards.
it's not simply because of anti-Black racism, though it's definetely a problem not only in yellowjackets fandom, but pratically all internet fandoms that aren't formed by a majority of Black people (Black-presenting multiracial people like taissa herself as a character and the actresses that portray her are included in this definition, by the way).
it's also the dynamics between the two characters that flip the script of what audiences might expect.
because, while there is a lot of discussion on whether taivan fits a butch-femme dynamic, including whether van could be considered butch and the fact that not all fem-presenting lesbians like adult tai identify as femme (something which is complicated by the fact that s1 costume designer mary schley said in her interview for the yellowjackets buzz podcast that teen taissa dresses in a tomboy way, which gives even more nuance to tai and her relationship to gender presentation), and there's even room to discuss the definitions of these terms to begin with, we do have a dynamic, especially in adult timeline, in which we have a masc-presenting character like van and fem-presenting like taissa.
and that's when it gets interesting, because taivan both subverts expectations to what people assume both an interacial pairing and a masc-fem pairing should behave in media.
in taivan, what we constantly see is van being in some way the caretaker in their relationship, especially in teen timeline, which is the timeline when we see more of their relationship having screentime.
and that not only subverts expectations that society places on masculinity vs femininity, but also race.
we see van always playing the role of supporting taissa through her issues with sleepwalking, to the point of offering to tie herself to taissa so that she could prevent her girlfriend from walking around the woods as she was asleep and even minimizing the fact that, while asleep, tai practically hurt van when she drew blood as they kissed and other tai appeared.
in fact, van's caretaking attitude towards taissa to the point of risking her own health can even be considered a form of codependence, especially when we consider how van has a history of trauma related to that as she dealt with an alcohol-dependent mother and how codependence was first used as a concept to describe the dynamics within the families with an alcohol-dependent person.
the racial aspect is something that particularly draws my attention as a person who relates deeply to lottie matthews for many reasons (personality, temperament, the fact one of my maternal aunt has schizophrenia, the way that the logic behind so called "magical thinking" in OCD resembles lottie's strange wilderness rituals etc), because it's practically the opposite to what happens in most lottie ships.
in most lottie ships, or, at least, the most popular ones, the common factor is people usually focusing on readings about lottie's insistent (almost to the point of being overbearing) attempts to convince the other girls to accept the wilderness faith as a form of yearning and her concearns over the girls' wellbeing as her being the caretaker in the relationship -- the exception might be lottielee, because of laura lee playing a role to further's lottie's storyline, and also based on laura lee being seen as a caretaker both due to short frames showing the girls getting closer after thr baptism and also due to cast interviews saying that lottie lost track of her own self-care after laura lee died.
and the comparison with popular lottie ships is important here because of how it shows that the problem with taivan is not the fact that the dynamic is unhealthy and codependent.
because, for popular lottie ships, even with the non-believers dismissing lottie and treating her like crazy, some to the point of denying that they themselves could be considered "crazy", this type of push-and-pull with the others dismissing lottie is seen as part of the game and another reason of why it is romantic, even if they in some ways mirror how lottie was dismissed and treated like just another "crazy" person by her own emotionally neglecting father.
but, with taivan, it's not seen as a something romantic, or even as something interesting from a narrative perspective and "character study" type of way.
also, the fact that tai is one of the non-believers that lottie insists in trying to convince that the wilderness is real and yet the readings of that as something inherently romantic aren't common seems to drive the point further (and it's also something that deserves its own post).
besides, for the past couple years we have seen terms like "toxic yuri" and "toxic yaoi" become viral and being hyped for their complexity and oftenly cathartic nature of gray morality, particularly in horror media like yellowjackets.
plus, the way that light-skinned Black women are oftenly put in a similar objectifying "exotic beauty" box as Brown women of color makes both cases of taivan and popular lottie ships be relatively similar.
these similarities and parallels highlight the contrast of how taissa is oftenly in a position of being on the receiving end of emotional support on the show vs how lottie is usually the one that is the provider of emotional support without getting any support of her own in fanon.
of course, this meta doesn't intend in any way to exhaust the topic, especially because things can have various causes at the same time, and no tumblr essay -- or any essay, for that matter -- can cover every single aspect of a certain topic.
and we can't forget to mention the ways in which taissa's relationship with van on the show happens at the expense of the representation of dark-skinned Black women, with the way that taissa's ex-wife simone had her role progressively reduced and shown as the "scorned Black woman" trope that hollywood uses oftenly for interracial cis het relationships, and this understandably doesn't sit right with many Black fans in fandom, even those who ship taivan, and might influence on the way that taivan is put aside as a ship by the same Black lesbians and sapphics that were expected to feel represented by them.
but it's important to draw attention to the ways in which similar relationship dynamics and tropes can be received in fandom based on social issues in the real world, especially considering how it has been common for certain fans on social media to use the fact they ship lottie with a certain white character as "proof" that there is no racism in the fandom (particularly on former twitter, currently named X).
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