Warning: this article contains spoilers For season 3 of “Yellowjackets”.
Shauna Sadecki (née Shipman) was originally our window on the world of “yellows” as a protagonist, but now she has become more an anti-hero. During the first season, we felt for her as if she were a character in a film of teenagers by John Hughes – rebellious, unsure, living in the shade of her best friend. Nowadays, she was a bored and muffled housewife.
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But the desert trials have wreaked havoc on Shauna, transforming it into a hollow shell of the sympathetic teenage girl that we once knew, when she becomes more angry and more violent day by day. She encompasses her teammates to the condemnation of coach Ben to death and provokes the cannibal hunt for husband with blood joy. Worse, she hinders everyone’s rescue. Sophie Nélisse gives Teen Shauna a permanent rumble and an intense look that makes her really terrifying this season. Her face seems more glove, the light in his eyes has disappeared – now flashing with a fury hardened by the brutality of wild survival.
As the adult tail tells adult Misty in the final, “the worst of what we experienced, she fueled it. She prospered on it.” The show slowly reveals that this is true in the chronology of adolescents. Now, in the chronology of adults, she not only murdered her lover, but led her yellow colleagues to a series of hijinks who have led to three of their dead. In the final, the adult Melissa said: “Shauna is the problem”, and we are starting to see this.
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All this led to many Online buzz on shaine of Shauna. Although her actions were odious, there seems to be an additional vitriol towards her. These reactions seem exaggerated in relation to how other problematic characters – especially men – have been received and are even loved in popular culture.
Shauna scares us, very scary
During the golden age of television, the anti-hero became a decisive character. They were morally ambiguous and did terrible things, but have always kept us glued to our television screens. We loved watching Tony Soprano strangles one of his enemies to death with his bare hands while sympathizing with him when he broke down in the office of Dr. Melfi. We were captivated by the transformation of Mr. Chips Walter White in Scarface, while his love for the family was twisted in a hunger of money and power. Don Draper drank like a fish and slept through Manhattan, but we have always amazed his ascent of poverty to ask the world to buy a coke.
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All these men can be ruthless, manipulative, even monstrous – but they are also formulated as tortured souls. When women like Shauna behave in the same way, they get Hundreds of Reddit’s comments complaining about what it is psychotic. Why can’t we see a female character with this same complexity? Why can’t a woman be “bad” and have her moments of vulnerability? One of the reasons is that we are used to women being the nourishing moral center for most stories. It is shocking to see her embody all the darker aspects of human nature that we generally associate with masculinity.
Although there are many imperfect television women, such as the drug thief jackie from “the nurse Jackie” and the Nancy manipulation of “Weeds”, Shauna is a sadistic in its own right. His cruelty is relentless and his violence is transgressive and disgusting; In season 3 episode 8, she bit a piece of Melissa skin and forced her to eat it. However, viewers seem to forget that just like the famous male anti -heroes of prestige television, we have an overview of its psychological motivations – as broken as they are.
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Shauna wants to reign again as a wood queen
Many seem to forget how much Shauna endured in trauma: trying a DIY abortion, the death of her best friend Jackie (and eating her later), cutting Javi’s body for their second cannibalistic party, and losing her baby. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes of “Yellowjackets” so far, Shauna has sworn that she could hear her baby’s cries and called her with overwhelming and guttural cries, terrified that her teammates have secretly ate her. Now she has left rage, perhaps aggravated by postpartum depression or even psychosis. If her child was to die, no one else deserves to be spared. In addition to all this, Shauna is still only a teenager.
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She has unfathomable pain behind her extreme actions, in the same way that we understood that Tony Soprano was threatened by her mother so that the eye was out, donation growing up in a fucking whore, and Walter White being deeply insecure to be less successful than her friends. These painful experiences do not excuse their behavior, it makes them all the more fascinating to dissect and observe.
Melissa urges Shauna to forgive herself and abandon the past, but Shauna seems to be heading in the opposite direction. In her voiceover, she declares that wilderness was a place where she felt alive and happy, where she was not in a subordinate role but a “queen f ***”. Back home, she was passive and had no power, playing the second violin of Jackie. Now, it seems that Shauna becomes even more disturbed, with her anti-hero status going to pure and simple wickedness. Will the “Yellowjackets” hive be able to kiss him as a multifaceted and captivating main character? We are not used to seeing female roles challenge us in this way, and that is why the “yellow pickers” are so fascinating to look.
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