major yellowjackets spoilers under the cut. long post ahead.
let’s talk about the yellowjackets season three finale. this episode is titled full circle and after sitting on the episode for some time, i’d say it lives up to that salutation. i’ve got a lot of opinions about this season overall but this particular think piece is about shauna shipman, and by extension, mari ibarra (our confirmed pit girl).
i want to start by highlighting that empathy ≠ sympathy. if you’re like me, you’re neutral about shauna shipman, and this finale has either assassinated her character or taken her in a direction that you can support. in my opinion, shauna is a self-hating, jealous, and spiteful person pre-crash. she laments over how she’s perceived compared to jackie taylor from the very beginning and refuses to set boundaries, ultimately enabling a feedback loop that drives her spite, and leads to the cabin fight preceding the death of her best friend.
the finale inadvertently confirms through travis that deeper, sapphic feelings were very much present in this friendship, but i’m not veering off into ship rhetoric. i’m pointing this out because a string of shauna’s actions not only isolated her from her best friend, but from the parts of herself that were able to feel that deeply in general. refer to the death of javi martinez, which begins as the murder of natalie scatorccio after she draws the queen card. shauna is not happy that this is happening. now, remember the feedback loop. shauna is aware of her flaws and those same flaws cause her to inadvertently manifest her worst fears, repress the parts of herself that felt vindicated in the wilderness, and ultimately encapsulate why she sees herself as a warrior.
she knows she was the only one having fun in the wilderness. she knows that after losing jackie, losing her son, and losing javi, the only way to reclaim that pain (and those losses by extension) is to project and decimate. hold a knife to the throat of javi’s older brother and speak as if you wanted the boy to die. remember the feedback loop and remember that, as early as season one when shauna nearly consumed the blood of the deer that she was butchering, she had the capacity for that darkness. she rejects her inner fears (being boring, obsolete, a secondary character in her life) and embraces her power. i. e, being their butcher, being their queen.
i pointed out some of shauna’s negative traits pre-crash because her pregnancy and eventual loss of her son exacerbates these flaws, but remember the feedback loop. at this point, shauna is too far gone. shauna is too entitled. after what she’s lost, the wilderness goes from something she innately rejects to something she embraces for its viciousness (that mirrors hers). this is how shauna reclaims her power. this is how she’s acknowledged just once.
what does any of this have to do with mari ibarra though? from the glimpses we see pre-season 3, most of mari’s interactions with shauna are pleasant; however, as mari is developed in season 3, we notice something very crucial (circling back to my point about sympathy and empathy being inequitable). mari pities shauna. she isn’t particularly afraid of her although shauna is shown to be stronger than her at multiple points, she doesn’t walk on eggshells around her. mari still sees the parts of shauna that won’t die, no matter how much is taken from her. mari sees the insecure, unstable teenage girl stuck in the feedback loop.
i’d like to make an external connection between the viewers and mari here. for many, understanding and acknowledging shauna’s thematic presence isn’t synonymous with liking/defending her actions. that’s empathetic. the point here is that shauna is not meant to be anything but empathetic. sympathy aligns more with exoneration, but the treatment of mari ibarra’s corpse under her rule (stripped, skinned, and presumably scalped seeing as shauna requested her hair) further alienates shauna from that exoneration because she never desired it. she’s the antithesis of a survivor coming out better from their trauma.
shauna is worse. not because she chose it, but because she is. her hatred for mari was heavily bracketed by anyone daring to treat shauna as if she were still secondary after everything. for all of this season’s faults, i can say this intimate piece of storytelling is very impactful, and very divisive because of it. it all depends on the tastes of the viewer. i find that while i’m refreshed by shauna’s perspective and engaged by her villainy, rooting for her is impossible when rooting for her was never the point.
additionally, expecting people not to react negatively to shauna defeats the purpose of her character. as i’ve stated before, in my subjective opinion, there are few ways to receive these characters incorrectly. a string of intricacies and nuances such as this were bound to trigger reactions of the same volition. all in all, while my feelings regarding her being the antler queen are not the most positive, i can see the thematic weight and drastic contrast between the shauna who watched jackie’s corpse burn and the shauna who used mari as an example. to ask for a wholly positive reaction to that aside from the narrative culmination is essentially requesting that our sympathy for shauna bypass an innate ability to sympathize/empathize with those either impacted by her actions directly or perpetrating cycles of their own. the wilderness was shauna’s aggressor so she became everyone else’s, which should be understood, but never pardoned.
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