Lfcforevers

One of the main appeals of Nat and Shauna’s roles on the show is how they contrast in the ways they express trauma and anger. They both have a deep sense of self-hatred and a core belief that they poison the people they love and are therefore undeserving of closeness, but they embody it through completely different survival mechanisms. Shauna externalizes and lashes out until she has destroyed everything she could possibly risk caring about and allowing herself to love. Nat internalizes and drowns in her guilt until she has destroyed herself to the point that no one will come near her. Shauna cannot tolerate her grief and self-blame sitting inside her, so she projects it outward onto everyone around her. Nat turns it inward and lets it consume her. And in doing so, both of them continually recreate the very conditions that traumatized them in the first place. Shauna’s externalization manifests as violence, continually reinforcing her belief that she is dangerous and undeserving of love, while Nat’s internalization leaves her frozen and passive, complicit in harms she can never forgive herself for, trapping her in a relentless cycle of guilt and self-punishment.

That’s why they understand each other so deeply while also constantly clashing. Shauna sees Nat’s moral posturing as hypocrisy because she recognizes the same guilt inside her. Nat sees Shauna’s brutality and rejects it because Shauna externalizes what Nat spends her entire life trying to contain ("Keep the tiger in the cage").

I don’t want to see Nat become outwardly abusive and aggressive in the way Season 3 Shauna was. That trauma response is unique to Shauna, in the same way that Lottie’s religious fanaticism is unique, Tai’s compartmentalization and dissociation are unique, Van’s escapism, Misty’s obsession, Travis’ submission, ETC. Each character represents the many different, complex faces of trauma. The brilliance of Nat’s dark side is that it comes out through manipulation, playing the moral high ground, and remaining complicit. She has brief, fleeting moments when her anger breaks through the surface, and we see her lash out, but she almost always retreats afterward, collapsing inward and resuming her state of passivity and paralysis in the face of her guilt. Nat’s pathology has always been quieter than Shauna's, but it can be equally as destructive.

ELEKTRA: I am the shape you made me. Filth teaches filth.

the beauty of life

I walked with you once upon a dream...