Work Text:
she starts the paper the way she starts most things that scare her, carefully, with distance, with the pretense that if she can name something precisely enough it won’t touch her back.
the show is paused on her laptop as she writes the title of the paper, the glow turning her bedroom walls blue. yellowjackets, recommended by her best friend weeks ago with a casual you’ll like it, it’s fucked up but smart. she smiles wryly, she remembers nodding, pretending she didn’t already want to like anything her friend put in her hands, pretending this was about taste and not the need to be close
she presses play.
it becomes background at first. girls yelling over each other, the noise of adolescence, the comfort of an ensemble where no one has to be alone for long. it’s fun, lighthearted and for a little while she wonders what’ll happen to make this seemingly wholesome show ‘fucked up’.
that changes quickly after the end of the first episode. her finger hovers over the space bar as the second episode starts to play through and for a second she considers turning it off and basing the paper on some other show.
how will i write an emotionally charged paper on a show like this?
she gives it another chance, maybe the second episode will change her mind, give her more insight into the characters and their headspace.
that’s when she notices it, the things she’s missed; the longing stares, lingering glances, the way jackie and shauna orbit each other in opposing ways, unable to name the one thing they both feel so deeply.
she sighs and opens a new document, typing a title that sounds impressively empty: repression and identity formation in contemporary television narratives. she tells herself she’s being clever. she tells herself she’s safe.
she’s drawn to jackie quickly.
it’s not the obvious things at first. not the blonde hair or the confidence or the way the room seems to tilt toward her. it’s the assumption. the quiet certainty that love is a given, that it has already been secured and therefore doesn’t need to be named, it’s the way she reaches for shauna without looking, like gravity will do the work for her.
her fingers still over the keyboard.
she glances at her phone beside her, face down on her bed, and thinks of her friend’s laugh, the same kind of unthinking warmth, the same way she seems to move through rooms as if they were built with her in mind. she shakes her head, annoyed with herself, annoyed that she’s even thinking of her right now, and keeps watching.
being drawn to shauna hurts more.
it’s subtler. the way she stands half a step behind, the way she listens, the way her wanting feels compressed like it’s folded inward, translated into usefulness and loyalty and silence. the girl watching feels it in her chest with a deep aching pulse, almost like a bruise being pressed. she knows this posture. she lives in it. she has perfected it.
shauna’s desire is structured around lack, she types, faster now. she loves by erasing herself.
she stops. rereads it. doesn’t delete it.
the episode where everything comes falling down starts playing, and she watches through her fingers. the betrayal isn’t shocking. it makes sense in the way bad decisions always do when you understand the hunger underneath them. wanting something sideways because wanting it directly feels like asking to be destroyed.
she thinks of the night her friend kissed someone else at a party and laughed it off, how she told herself the hollow feeling in her ribs was just jealousy, just ego, just friendship being childish. she thinks of how relieved she’d been to have an explanation that didn’t ask anything of her.
displacement, she writes, her hands shaking now. transgression as proof of unworthiness.
she realises, suddenly and terribly, that this paper is not about television. it’s a mirror she didn’t consent to. like she’s looking outwards but gaining perspective as well.
when the wilderness strips everything away, she leans closer to the screen. jackie’s confusion, her desperation to be seen, to be needed, feels intimate in a way that makes her uncomfortable. she has always thought of herself as the shauna in every story, but watching jackie unravel hurts in a way she didn’t expect. she understands her too. the fear of not being loved anymore. the terror of saying look at me and hearing silence back.
she pauses the episode before the last argument. her heart is pounding. she can feel the shape of the truth forming, slow and inevitable, like ice forming, it feels like burning fire at first but the cold settles in quickly and she feels sick.
her phone pings and the vibrations pull her out of the trance she’d dug herself into. it’s a text, from her friend. ‘did you get to it yet?’
’yeah,’ she types back. ‘watching now’.
’wait till the end, her friend replies. it ruins you.’
she almost laughs but the feeling deep in her chest is anything but amusement, her throat is dry and hoarse like she’d spent the last hour on the verge of tears, and her heart pulsed violently.
the final scenes play. the cold. the choice. the quiet violence of someone stepping outside because staying feels worse in the moment, she watches jackie disappear from the cabin with a familiar look plastered on her face as she closes the door behind her. she feels something inside her give way completely. she presses her hand to her mouth, breath hitching, because she understands now with horrifying clarity what this story has been trying to tell her all along.
you don’t get to love like this and survive unchanged.
the screen flickers.
adult shauna is there, too sharp, too real, like she’s stepped through the screen. she looks straight at her, not the camera. at her.
“don’t do this,” shauna says, voice flat, tone that represented a lifetime of knowing. “don’t turn love into homework.”
the girl shakes her head, whispering, “this isn’t—”
“it is,” shauna interrupts. “i thought if i stayed quiet i’d be good. i thought if i survived, that would be enough.” she swallows. “it isn’t.”
“what if i ruin it?” the girl asks, tears spilling now, because that’s the fear she’s been circling for years. naming it, admitting it.
shauna’s expression softens, just a little. “you ruin it by not speaking. you ruin it slowly. you call it loyalty.” she leans forward, eyes burning. “tell her. or you’ll carry her forever and call that a life.”
the screen goes dark.
the room is silent except for her breathing.
she turns back to the document. the academic title feels obscene now. she deletes it. she scrolls to the end and lets herself write what she’s been circling the entire time, the paper spilling out not as theory but confession, disguised only by citations and careful language.
•excerpt from the final paper•
’what makes yellowjackets devastating is not the presence of love, but its repression. jackie and shauna do not fail because they do not care enough; they fail because they care in ways that cannot be spoken within the structures available to them. jackie’s love depends on recognition and permanence, while shauna’s is organised around lack and self-erasure, creating a bond that is emotionally total and structurally impossible. the wilderness does not invent this tragedy, but exposes it by removing the social frameworks that once allowed silence to masquerade as safety. in this sense, yellowjackets functions as a cautionary text: love that remains unarticulated does not remain harmless. it freezes, it haunts, it repeats. the cost of not speaking is not neutrality, but loss.
what makes the story so heartbreaking is not simply that they never say “i love you” but that the series shows us again and again that the words are right there, hovering at the edge of speech, and that had either girl been able to claim desire openly or accept being chosen, this love might have saved them. yet, instead it freezes one in the snow and condemns the other to live carrying her voice forever’
she closes the document with shaking hands.
then she opens her messages.
’can i tell you something?’ she types, before she can change her mind.
somewhere, in another timeline, the snow is still falling and love that went unnamed is still mourned but here, now, she chooses to stay inside and speak.