Hi, as someone who has no knowledge about Yellowjackets aside from what you've posted and what I've read on TV Tropes - and has no intention of watching the show because cannibalism isn't my thing - am I supposed to find Shauna's " I was a warrior. I was a fսcking queen" speech hilariously deluded?
She was a teenager in a small group isolated in the wilderness. That's not being a queen, that's surviving.
I mean I can’t speak objectively to how we’re “supposed” to read that speech but personally I read it as both hilariously & tragically deluded in some ways, yes & also as something with a level of truth.
And I do think in my opinion that’s intentional on the part of the writers (& Melanie Lynsky who brings SO much life & complexity to a character who is, on paper, pure evil.)
Shauna is at rock bottom when she talks about how much fun she had in the wilderness & she was also pushed into the violent & dangerous person she became in the wilderness out of desperation, fear & rage built on insurmountable loss & trauma.
BUT we do also directly see Shauna experiencing sadistic glee in the wilderness (& in the adult TL tbh) as she enacts horrific violence. Like we really can’t forget how sadistic Shauna is I’m sorry I love her but girly is unhinged.
Sooo…. TLDR: Yes & no? It’s complicated. Shauna isn’t lying about having fun but she IS leaving out a LOT. See below for a ridiculously in depth analysis of one of my favorite characters of all time ever. You have scratched the Blorbo itch by asking me this thank you so much I am insane about Shauna Shipman.
Shauna is SUCH a misunderstood character. (Even if you’re not in the Yellowjackets fandom you’re in fandom spaces so I’m sure you know what it’s like when a fictional woman is complex lol.) At the start of season 3 we see Teen!Shauna digging up the corpse of her baby who died in her arms & cradling his skeleton. I feel like this often gets skated over because season 3 has so much going on but Teen!Shauna is deeply depressed & hopeless at the start of season 3.
In season 2, we see Teen!Shauna hit rock bottom when her baby dies. She is suffering delusions & hallucinations brought on by near starvation, extreme blood loss, & traumatic loss after traumatic loss & she quite literally breaks. If you don’t watch anything else of Yellowjackets, I think Sophie Nelisse’s performance at the end of season 2 episode 6 “Qui” is quite literally possibly the most effective & heart wrenching performance I’ve ever seen on television.
Shauna uses anger to cope because her grief & despair is so enormous that she needs to project it outward. She enacts the harm she perceives to have been enacted on her onto others. We see this in season 2 when she beats Lottie nearly to death because she needs someone to blame for the death of her baby & she is terrified of the supernatural forces Lottie believes in & worships. Shauna is like the poster child for a “bad” victim of trauma - the quintessential opposite of the “perfect” victim.
In the adult timeline of season 3 we see the narrative connecting with the teen timeline in a very direct way with the plot & characters existing as clear parallels & especially with Shauna.
By the end of season 3, adult!Shauna has fully reverted to the scared teenage girl who did whatever she could to survive & gain any power she could in a situation where it was very literally eat or be eaten. I don’t deny that Shauna helping orchestrate a hunt that led to the murder & cannibalism of the girl she had petty beef with was evil BUT people often glaze over the fact that Shauna by this point had absolutely NO trust in anyone around her & for good reason. She was going insane with (justified!) paranoia. Her ex-girlfriend & her friends were 100% planning a coup & her murder. Shauna also mistakenly believed that Taissa - her ONLY friend that she had previously been able to trust through everything from her botched abortion to Jackie’s death - was in on this plot.
So yes, Shauna’s rise to power in the wilderness was inexcusably cruel but it was also DESPERATE. The jokes about dictator!Shauna & how Shauna was “the only one having fun” are funny & all but they are just that - surface level fandom jokes that should be taken as such. There is SO MUCH more to it. Shauna was not simply “having so much fun.” She was completely mentally broken in the teen!TL in season 3.
And in the adult timeline - yes, due to her own paranoia & her trauma making her an abusive, volatile & dangerous person - adult!Shauna has hit a parallel rock bottom by the end of season 3 when she makes that speech.
Shauna’s ex-girlfriend has once again come into her life to try to sabotage her & possibly - in her mind - to try to kill her. (Melissa’s actual intentions are up for debate until season 4 when I’m sure we’ll get more but this is how Shauna sees it.) Shauna’s friends are once again against her - this time Taissa for real. (The fandom I think vastly underestimates what a massive betrayal it truly is when Tai turns against Shauna as she was previously the ONLY true ride or die friend Shauna ever had.)
And yes, Shauna brought all this on herself - that’s the nature of a tragic character. Maybe things could’ve been different or better if Shauna made different choices but that would require Shauna to be a completely different person. By being paranoid & angry, Shauna has brought about all of her own worst fears -&, I predict, her own destruction by the end of season 4.
Also at this point Jeff & Callie have left Shauna. Shauna’s feelings toward her family are very complicated. Adult! Shauna spells out pretty directly in season 2 that because of the loss of Jackie & her son in the wilderness, she has never been able to love again, not even - especially not - her daughter. But still. Shauna’s actions throughout season 3 were a desperate attempt to keep her husband & daughter safe from the plots & dangers she saw all around her. Committing acts of violence, plotting before people can plot against her, these are the only ways Shauna knows how to be & how to care especially when she’s scared.
By the end of season 3, Jeff has finally seen Shauna for the dangerous person that she is for their daughter to be around & even after protecting her through season 2 he leaves. Callie has fallen into the same pattern of violence & bad choices spurned by trauma & fear that Shauna has. Shauna is alone.
So - once again - Shauna reverts. In the wilderness, only the strong & ruthless survive. Making morally sound choices gets you nowhere. Even Natalie who is the closest the show has to a moral compass lets a child die in her place & eats him & that is the only reason she survives & becomes the leader. As SOON as adult!Natalie starts making good choices & wanting to protect the young & innocent, she dies. This is the world that Shauna knows & has know since she was seventeen years old in a plane crash & left her classmate to burn alive so that she (&Jackie) could live.
I think that much like everyone else in this show, Shauna is not fundamentally evil. She is a survivor who makes the necessary choices to survive. And canon consistently backs up that the second a character stops making these choices, they are killed with Van directly stating that she doesn’t want to live like this & surrendering her life choosing mercy in the adult!Timeline after manipulating the odds & choosing others to die instead of her in the teen!TL.
But it cannot be denied based on canon from the very beginning that Shauna DOES have a sadistic streak. In the adult!timeline in season ONE (1!) we see adult!Shauna frothing at the mouth horny desperate to skin a man alive. This is a foreshadowing glimpse of the out of control homicidal maniac Shauna becomes by the end of season 3. What’s interesting to me is WHY Shauna is like this.
Shauna could just make the hard decisions necessary to survive & leave it at that. But she doesn’t. She consistently takes it so much further. And that’s what makes Shauna such a deliciously complex character. She & Melissa have gleeful sex right after maiming a man & leaving him like an animal to be held captive until they eat him. She doesn’t just hunt & eat Mari - she adorns herself with her hair as a gross display of power. She doesn’t just support Lottie in murdering the frog scientist she reacts with ecstatic amusement. Yes Lottie was protecting the group because once the scientists saw Ben’s head on a pike the writing was on the wall - but Shauna could have acknowledged that without looking like THIS about it -
Shauna is someone who has been pushed down & made to feel small her ENTIRE life. Whether it was Jackie’s intention or not, she makes Shauna feel insignificant& powerless - by choosing the colors of their future dorm without consulting Shauna, by choosing Shauna’s outfits for her, by choosing the music & calling Shauna’s taste trash, by NEVER being able to give Shauna a genuine compliment without insulting her first.
Shauna tells us repeatedly that her worst fear is being boring. Because that’s how Jackie made her feel. Like a boring nothing. Shauna is terrified of feeling small or helpless or not useful or powerful. In the wilderness, she feels important & powerful - more important & powerful than Jackie - for the first time in her entire life when she thrives in the role of the butcher that no one else could stomach.
Does all this fear & trauma that led to her cruelty mean that Shauna didn’t enjoy finally feeling like she had some power? No. She very clearly DID enjoy it & I think dismissing that fact loses just as much complexity & weight in her arc as dismissing the rock bottom that led to her becoming the worst version of herself.
Yellowjackets is SUCH an interesting show in its nihilistic & bleak approach to everything from plot to character arcs. It is at its core a show about how trauma makes you worse & doing the right thing will not be rewarded. It is a show about the ugliest, cruelest parts of teenage girlhood in a world where every battle, every petty rivalry, is literally life or death. And no character embodies this more thoroughly than Shauna Shipman.
So… was Shauna completely delusional to say she enjoyed her time in the wilderness? No. But she IS leaving out a LOT & not acknowledging how thoroughly broken & hopeless she had to be to get to that point. Shauna isn’t evil but she’s not good either. She is - as the show’s thesis presents - a representation of hunger. Of desperation. Of what a person becomes when everything has been stripped away & nothing but physical, animalistic desire for dominance & survival at all costs is left.
(These themes are also represented in season 3 by Other!Tai who goes after all the things Tai wants on an animal level like food & sex but can’t be there for Van on the human scale she needs forcing her way to the surface for survival unbeknownst to the others in the adult!TL.)
been thinking a lot about melissa and van recently because there’s just something about the way they interacted right before mel killed van that felt suuuuper charged to me. i think lauren had actually said it was a conscious choice between them in that scene where just for a second it seems like they might actually be about to kiss. and i don’t even necessarily think it was in a romantic way because it almost felt like a ‘giving grace’ thing that suggests a lot of context we’ve yet to see between them in the 90s (more below)
it had me thinking particularly about their relationship post-rescue because it’s implied that melissa was excluded from the others when they got back (i’m assuming probably because she was the closest to hannah?). i saw this post recently which talked about the way adult van seemed uncharacteristically angry at melissa when she found out she was still alive, suggesting that she had been carrying a lot of guilt over not doing enough to prevent her death, and it occurred to me that maybe van actually had spent a lot of time/energy trying to look out for her when they got back from the wilderness.
it’s something that feels significant to me in a few ways, namely because they were the only two visibly lesbian survivors (both being butch/masc presenting) in a group that was utterly scrutinised and obsessed over by the public/press. that, combined with liv and jenna having discussed the notion of mel looking up to van in the 90s timeline, and the fact that van was also the only one to actually go up and help melissa when shauna had humiliated her. it makes sense to me that van might have fallen into a protective role towards melissa when they got rescued, that she was possibly even the only one who did. it would also add more weight to adult melissa’s line in that final scene between them; you’re different, van, there’s goodness in you. i think also given van’s tendency to manipulate the narrative amongst the yellowjackets in the wilderness, for better or for worse, i can imagine there was also a part of her that wanted to make sure melissa didn’t stray from the story they’d all agreed on, that she didn’t spill about what happened to hannah or her jv friends.
i can also picture a weirdly similar scene playing out between them post-rescue, where mel is feeling lost and othered and angry and in need of a vice to keep her grounded, and van is the only one around who’s still talking to her, and so in a moment of complete loneliness and vulnerability mel goes to kiss her. and i can see it being kind of reminiscent of s2 lottie/travis where it’s not exactly romantic or sexual at its core but there’s a kind of mutual understanding and connection between them that isn’t being found elsewhere. van’s need to look out for the only other young butch she knows inadvertently gets muddled up with mel’s own feelings of grief and isolation and bitterness. it feels like a kind of intimacy to have someone you look up to be on your side, and i think for mel it doesn’t really matter if it’s real or not because at least it’s something. and because van can’t reciprocate it, because she’d also been trying to get mel to keep quiet about what they did in the wilderness, at some point down the line she’s left with the guilt of feeling like she’d played a key part in melissa’s ‘suicide’.
i don’t personally believe melissa killed van out of revenge or malice exactly — i think it was more a combination of adrenaline / trauma / power — but from a writing perspective i think adding a scene like that into the 90s timeline creates so much more history between them. because now they’ve been here before. now both timelines have put one of them in a position of feeling vulnerable and wanting to get something from the other person. it’s the idea that in this moment this is the only person giving me respite from all of this, this is the only person actually grounding me right now and taking me out of the wilderness, and i don’t know what to do with that but it feels like a kindness. but then suddenly it’s not what you think it is; it’s something to be gained and something to be taken away. it’s about power and the feeling of betrayal when your vulnerability gets thrown back at you in some way. and in the end someone is left with blood on their hands. van’s death felt so jarring and unexpected when it happened but i think it could be written as such a delicious betrayal from melissa if their relationship is given just a little more context in the 90s timeline.
Your post about the book and quote about betraying yourself reminds me of the trial episode. I hate how people pin it on Shauna as if she has any authority or power over anyone. It's crazy to me how people view it as solely Shaunas wrongdoing and not the people that changed their vote only bc of how Lottie is voting (not too mention that Shauna doesn't directly influenced any of their votes with her screaming besides Lottie, and that's whole other story, she certainly doesn't intimidate anyone into voting him guilty). They don't think couch is guilty yet they vote to kill him. At least Shauna believes he tried to kill them and has personal vendetta unlike the rest.
Yeah thats pretty much what I was getting at, and I believe almost certainly what the writers were getting at by putting that particular book in the show multiple times. Not just the trial episode either, but with the other choices they've made. Or rather held back from making; letting Jackie sleep outside, letting Javi drown, everything that happened with Coach Ben, both the trial and his punishment. All because they don't have the courage to stand up and stop what's happening. That's not even really a criticism of them, because the entire point of the quote is that lot of people would be too afraid to do anything. And yet fear doesn't absolve them, inaction and silence in the face of tyranny is a violent act and a "betrayal of the self", as Fowles puts it.
And the entire point of Nat's actions, especially in season 3, is to show how ineffective you can be if you don't have allies. Nat succeeds in helping Coach Ben to die because she has Travis. He keeps guard. And she suceeds with the sat phone because she has Misty and Hannah in support of what she's doing. Cooperation as a cornerstone of resistance.
I don't think Shauna is blameless, obviously, but neither are the others. The clear implication is they could have done more. The title of the trial episode references "12 Angry Men". The show is all but telling us what the point is, because that is a film where 11 men vote to convict a teenage boy for murder, but one man dares to stand up and question the prejudices of his fellow jurors until they unanimously decide to acquit. Shauna in this context would be the final juror, who was blinded by emotion and taking out his own neuroses of the defendant. Yellowjackets basically just swings the story the opposite way, where instead of learning to question their prejudices and moral responsibilities, they succumb to the fear and dogma Shauna incites. Instead of unlearning the mob mentality, they sink deeper into it.
I often see people talking about how Lottie chooses Nat as the new Queen due to her believing Nat is the Wilderness’s “favorite.” While I do think this is partially true, I think it oversimplifies the moment and overlooks that Lottie’s decision is far less rooted in spiritual certainty than it is in a desire to escape. Handing Nat the crown is ultimately a more selfish, fear-driven act than Lottie is able to acknowledge.
The scene in which Misty reveals to Lottie that they drew cards and allowed Javi to die as a sacrifice to keep Lottie alive is extremely revealing.
Lottie is horrified by Javi’s death, but even more so by the realization that it was her influence that made it possible. The group’s idolization of her, and their desperate reliance on her beliefs about the Wilderness and sacrifice, directly shaped the conditions that led to his death. This moment forces Lottie to confront the full weight of where her leadership has taken them. They elevated her to a pedestal and absorbed her ideology so completely that they allowed an innocent boy to die and then ate him. For Lottie, this is the devastating realization that her influence over the group, and the path it has set them on, is dangerous and deadly.
It’s a realization that creates a fear strong enough to shake her out of her delusions and provide her with a very rare moment of clarity.
This is Lottie momentarily breaking through the veil of the ‘Wilderness’ and beginning to question both It and herself. Her entire belief system is shattering. She has been operating under the firm conviction that the Wilderness is here to help and protect them, and Javi’s death feels contradictory to that faith. The idea that the Wilderness could allow an innocent child to die is irreconcilable for her. This contradiction to her beliefs, partnered with the fear of having this level of influence and responsibility over the group in its darkest moment, allows her to see through her psychosis and feel real remorse for the first time since her rise to leadership.
After this, Lottie goes downstairs, sits quietly for a long time while they’re all digesting Javi, and comes to a decision.
Lottie says that she’s no longer fit to lead the group because It is no longer speaking to her and It has made its intentions clear through the card draw. According to her, the Wilderness has chosen Natalie as the new leader because the group tried to kill her and “It wouldn’t let them.” The most interesting part of this is Lottie’s admission that she “can’t hear It anymore.” This doesn’t seem true, given that Lottie is shown having visions while the hunt for Natalie is occurring.
I believe Lottie sees this as an opportunity to course-correct. She is actively questioning both the Wilderness’s intentions and whether it is even real at all. Natalie has always been the primary voice challenging both Lottie and the Wilderness, and choosing her as the new leader creates a chance to redirect the group down an entirely different path. Lottie has begun to recognize her own role in the group’s descent into darkness, and as a result, she turns to someone who represents her opposite. Natalie’s firm moral compass, pragmatism, and refusal to submit to the Wilderness offer the possibility of grounding the group and restoring some semblance of order closer to civilization. Handing the crown to Natalie also allows Lottie to relinquish the immense fear and responsibility she has been carrying, though it ultimately transfers that same burden onto Natalie. Lottie believes this is what is best for the group, but she’s also acting out of fear and self-preservation.
However, I think the moment of clarity Lottie displayed earlier is rapidly dissipating. Lottie’s coronation of Nat is still muddled by her enduring belief in the Wilderness. There’s a part of her that still recognizes a something in Natalie that aligns with the Wilderness’s will (her inner darkness, her trauma), and may be interpreting the visions she had while the card draw was happening as signs that It has chosen Natalie. And, interestingly enough, Lottie does stop hearing the Wilderness for a while after giving the crown to Natalie.
What begins as a fear-driven lie to free herself from the burden of responsibility and steer the group away darkness ends up solidifying into belief. She comes to believe Nat is the Wilderness’s favorite, a belief that is interestingly restated by Lottie when she is spiraling into delusion again in the adult timeline. She also believes the Wilderness is no longer speaking to her, until she starts to unravel again during the spring, becoming desperate to hear Its voice again, which is her central motivation in Season 3.
Ultimately, Lottie’s decision to crown Natalie is not a clear-cut act of faith or deception. It’s a moment where insight and delusion briefly exist side by side. She understands that the Wilderness is hurting the group and tries to remove herself from its center, but she cannot fully separate that realization from her belief that the Wilderness is still real and still choosing. By handing the reigns to Natalie, Lottie is both resisting and obeying the Wilderness at the same time. The outcome is unfortunately not a real course correction, but the continuation of a cycle in which leadership becomes a vessel for the group’s fear, violence, catharsis, and unmet needs, making it impossible for anyone who wears the crown to avoid the burden that comes with it.
yellowjackets pilot (2021); cormac mccarthy (1985); rej jaen; franz kafka; unknown (lmk if u can find the source); jorge luis borges; lorde (2013); arnold lobol; sylvia plath; mary lambert; flannery o'connor; divorcefemme; bilal al-shams; james baldwin; band taking back sunday; oscar wilde; tanaka mhishi; cormac mccarthy (1985)
found an old thing i said and yeah... yeah... the rabbit is the symbol forced on jackie and the butterfly is the symbol she chooses out/covets. the rabbit represents prey. the butterfly represents change which is the one thing jackie couldnt do she couldnt adapt and it literally cost her life. something something jackie wanting something she cant reach. something something the butterfly symbol fitting shauna more authentically and i dont know where you end and i begin
imagine wearing a shirt literally broadcasting the one thing you cant do that will kill you. its like wearing one of those fucking glee shirts. jackie's is just "DOOMED TO DIE"
okay so mostly just an excuse to talk abt representation in yellowjackets. also note i am white lmao so if i'm wrong on anything here feel free to clock me.
