more's the pity

TESTIMONIALS

"She's in every universe. She saved the multiverse. All by learning to accept her daughter, husband, and herself. She's everything. Everywhere. All at once. And she's played by Michelle Yeoh."

when ur mutual crush walks into the headmaster's office and she thinks you're both really cute

KILLJOYS S03E03 - The Hullen Have Eyes

but like, we never see shauna with a living baby in the real world, trying to feed him in the freezing woods, knowing she cannibalized her best friend’s corpse for the chance that he would live. we also haven’t seen her recovering from the first birth—she could very well still get postpartum depression. in-between scenes of the dream world, however, we do see shauna as a parent to a living child; she’s resentful, she’s full of guilt all the time, she loves callie but never wanted to be a mother. it comes down to that.

shauna is an 18 year old who just had a traumatic birth of a stillborn. there’s some fucky supernatural shit afoot. she also never really processed the fact that she’s giving birth to an entire human child. i think it’s perfectly aligned with what we know about shauna—and like, birth hormones—for shauna to be devastated when taissa hands her a dead baby. she didn’t want him, but he’s dead and she almost died, and she feels like not wanting this baby literally killed him. she would have likely had a real abortion back home. this is literally traumatic.

i feel like i’m repeating myself, but i keep seeing posts that deride yellowjackets for having shauna express any love for that baby, as if they’re promoting tradcath motherhood, when they’re literally showing the fucked up ramifications of forced birth. i do wish there was slightly more body horror (side note: if you’re craving a body horror take on pregnancy, i highly recommend the new show dead ringers), but tl;dr the show is definitely not trying to promote a narrative that seeing her baby would have made shauna stop feeling resentful or any other negative emotions. the supernatural elements + the adult shauna scenes work in tandem to create a pretty nuanced depiction of birth and motherhood.

and I am coming home to you if it's the last thing that I do

FARSCAPE S01E07 I, E.T.

There is a light, I feel it in me But only, it seems, when the dark surrounds me There is a dream and it sleeps in me To awake in the night, crying, "Set me free" And I awake every night, crying "Set me free" -Mitski, "Abbey"

NO RETURN NO RETURN NO REASON

"My dad is dead and I feel old."