dissecting shauna's trip in "purgatory" with her son in 2x06
okay so shauna's "hallucinations" with her son are devastating. the fact she'll never be sure whether she truly held him is already a lot, but 2x06 is even worse to rewatch if you believe in three theories**:
there's a purgatory, and what the person who's between life and death experiences depends on whether "it" wants them to survive
eating/drinking in purgatory condemns you
blood has value in the wilderness
just like with jackie, purgatory for shauna and her son is sweet and believable at first. everyone is there, everything is fine. purgatory is giving shauna everything she hoped for.
except it's not. because whenever shauna tries to feed her baby, it doesn't work. why? there were food/drinks available in jackie's and lottie's purgatories. whether shauna's body could realistically produce milk doesn't matter, as she does eventually manage to breastfeed him. and her son is hungry, he's so hungry he can't stop crying.
why isn't he eating? why isn't it working? maybe her son instinctively knows he shouldn't. maybe milk is not what he's hungry for, and she's offering the wrong thing. maybe she can't produce what he needs just yet.
meanwhile the wilderness is starving, "it" needs to be fed. "it" picks the people shauna trusts the most, and portrays them as annoyed by the kid's cries (tai) or as already condemning him to death (natalie). a clever way to goad shauna into trying to feed him more insistently.
frustrated none of it works, "it" starts to break the sweet illusion, creating more shocking situations appealing to shauna's fears. lottie taking her child away, becoming the child's mother. she'll feed him (physically and psychologically), unless shauna does it first.
from that moment on, "it" makes tea available to shauna. "we need to feed": it's going to be her or the baby. the tea or the milk. however, ideally, "it" would rather have the baby: the tea is easy to miss in this scene, just sitting there, undiscussed. probably because shauna would be more useful to the wilderness.
eventually, shauna sits with her son. for the first time, she tells him that she loves him, that she's sorry she used not to. as soon as she starts speaking to him, his "hunger-induced" crying stops.
(it might be another "physical hunger as the expression of psychological hunger, of longing for love and connection" yellowjackets moment. the baby hadn't been crying for milk, in this reality, but for love. and when hunger is psychological, you can only be fed by the people whom you're connected to. jackie was given tea by the group, after shauna brought her inside. lottie was given food by laura lee. love is "psychological food", and it's portrayed as literal food in these scenes.)
so, the only one who can feed the baby is someone who loves him. shauna explicitely does, now, and she asks him to drink for her. she says it's how they'll stay together. so he does. she kills him while trying to do the opposite.
""natalie"" comes in just a few seconds later, bringing shauna tea. the kid kept refusing to drink, so it was time to make the mother truly notice the tea. but then "nat" realizes the baby is drinking: it's finally happening. it's a miracle.
"she" directly wants to "tell the others", which probably is code for informing the trapper/hunter. it echoes with "so glad you're joining us, we've been waiting for you" in jackie's purgatory, or "i think we need to get you out of here" in lottie's.
shauna is so fcused on her son that she doesn't even acknowledge the tea. in every way, her son's death saves her life. loving him, feeding him, being awed by him, saves her life.
she asks for a bit more time alone with the baby, she has no way of knowing what she's truly asking for. the attention of "nat" has completely switched, though. "she" avoids looking at shauna and is focusing on the baby, a bit shocked, a bit hungry. and though "she" protests a little, eventually "she" accepts the request. it's not evil, just hungry?
then, she wakes up next to an empty crib, the tea and the group's offerings. and the group is eating her baby: all of them, including ben, who didn't eat jackie. the baby's dead, and "it" is eating him in front of her.
blood had been spilled in this world, all over the symbol, by eating the baby. and in real life, it's been spilled through the group's blood offerings and shauna's body. "it" isn't hungry anymore. shauna wakes up in real life.
-> we're not sure whether these death sequences are "real", if there truly are "wilderness entities" manipulating them towards life or death or if their minds are making it up depending on their own wishes/fears. but if it's real, then 2x06 shows us shauna being manipulated into killing her own child right in front of us. and just like her, we'll probably never know for sure if she truly held him. if it was all just hallucinations or something else, something both better and worse.
ps: severe placenta praevia kills both the baby and the mother during childbirth if you don't do a cesarian. from a medical point of view, shauna totally should have died. either the writers didn't look it up, either the wilderness heard them ♥
(**of course, said "purgatory" or "wilderness" don't have to be real things that exist within the show's universe. these death sequences can just be a way to explore further the themes of psychological hunger and consumption, though i personally find that hard to believe. why is food what kills them in these death sequences, offered by the people they love? perhaps the idea is that hunger means you're alive. you're not meant to have everything you want, complete comfort. only death will offer you that. didn't explore that much in this post, it's a super large theme, and there are parts of shauna's "hallucinations" which i struggle to explain without supernatural elements, such as the tea or ben also eating the baby.)
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I think I cried harder today over my dad's jackets than I did at his deathbed. That was a miserable time of course, a memory that will likely be seared into my brain until I die, but I cried... I think a normal amount, all things considered. More than I ever usually do of course, but I typically don't cry At All. All this free crying is certainly surreal.
The jackets, though. I was put in charge of doing his laundry, because we don't want to pack up dirty clothes. I was expecting it to be unpleasant bc my dad's dirty clothes - gross. But really, it was much more unpleasant in that... those were his. It felt wrong to touch them. Felt wrong to treat his jackets as gross. Because they were just his jackets. They weren't even in the hamper. And then I was remembering him wearing them, and then I was crying. Again. And again. Weeping over these damn jackets.
Then I found a shirt on his bed that still smelled like him. It smelled like a Hug From Dad. And that set me off crying even harder.
In total, I think I cried like 6 times within 40 minutes. It took me that long to finish sorting the damn clothes bc I just. Was a wreck. Like, what are you supposed to do when you're living life like normal, vaguely hopeful bc you're taking steps to secure your own happiness, and then 4 days later you're sorting your dad's laundry because he fucking died. Suddenly. Without a goodbye.
And you have to worry about his lack of a will (even under an ideal situation, only 2 heirs and no conflicts between us, probate's a fucking Bitch), and arranging the funeral, and prepping his obituary, and picking out pictures, and writing a speech bc you want to talk at his funeral, of Course you want to talk at his funeral, but even just thinking about anecdotes you could share has you crying yet again.
I've cried more times in the past 3 days than likely the entirety of last YEAR. And that's WITH my cat, and uncle, and family friend dying. Those all hurt, my uncle most of all, & I was real fucked up over it. But this? This was my Dad. Likely the person I'd have named 2nd closest to me in my life, second only to my sister. He wasn't perfect, but he did so much for me throughout my entire life. All he wanted was to raise us to be happy and independent. And he accomplished it, we're getting by without him, but we still wanted several more decades with him. He was only 57. We should've gotten several more decades with him.
But here we are now. Playing investigators to his life, digging into all his shit, trying to find documents and take inventory of all his things, and learning Many things about him in the process. In his lockbox of sensitive documents, like his SSN and birth certificate and all that stuff, we found an old letter. About a decade old now, written in my hand. Right at the very top, we found that he'd kept the letter I wrote to him telling him frankly about my struggles and the things I wanted him to do better. He kept it. He tried to take it to heart. He looked at it again, sometime more recently than all the rest of the documents. That was on top.
His love for us is evident everywhere. The pictures he has hanging up all over the place, majority of them with us in them. The old fathers day cards placed on display in his bedroom bookshelf. The gifts we gave him, even stupid little knick knacks, placed around his apartment with pride. I wish we'd taken more videos of him. I don't want to forget the sound of his voice. I don't want to forget his smell either, the smell of a Hug From Dad, but I still tossed that shirt into the wash even though it felt like saying yet another goodbye.
It's the suddenness that hurts the most, I think. We were planning on having him help me finally get my license this year. My final words to him, the last thing he would've seen from me, were messages asking up on whether he'd called his car insurance company to make sure there wouldn't be problems. I should've called him more. I don't know if I'm going to learn from this.
I cut my 2 weeks off early to have time to grieve and to work on things for the funeral and settling the estate. The last thing I'd wanna do right now is selling fucking bubble tea in a job I already decided to leave. So here I am without a job, though with potentially two life insurance policy payouts to come. Inheriting half his 401k. Inheriting couches, knickknacks, keepsakes, paintings, art pieces, maybe even his guitar and other furniture if we can figure out what to do about space (I don't have room for this furniture, I don't know if I even have room for the couches, but God do I want to keep so much of this furniture). It has me even considering keeping one of his guns, just one. A tiny little revolver, it sits so comfortably in my hand. I don't even want to use it for anything. I just want to have it, keep it stored in a drawer with its ammo kept separate. I don't like guns, but this is a part of him. He loved collecting guns. He was about as responsible with them as someone can be, keeping them locked in a lockbox and impressing upon his children the importance of gun safety (I've known the basic gun safety rules ever since I was a little kid. Of course, of course, of course.) It reminds me of him. It's horrifically easy to have a gun in Indiana. I apparently don't even need a permit to carry anymore. (I have no intention to ever carry this in public.)
It's all a cycle. Business, grief, thoughts about my future. Round and round, like the most nauseating carousel in existence. I don't know how I'm still so functional. My skills with compartmentalization have been my lifesaver.
And im just thinking about the story my dad's best friend shared today. About a friend of theirs who lost her father. She reached out after hearing about my dad to share his words with her: "it's okay to grieve, but don't make his death your life".
He explicitly referenced himself in this, saying if he were to die suddenly that he wouldn't want us to define ourselves by it. Grief is expected, but he wants us to be able to move on. He's always wanted us to establish ourselves and make ourselves happy. He wouldn't want to be a weight holding us back from that.
So every time I start to feel guilty for thinking about having nicer furniture or using his life insurance payout to fund the rest of my college, I remind myself of that. Thinking about the material isn't a bad thing. I'm only human. And in the end, he'd Want me to be thinking about it. He never intended to die, certainly not without warning like this, so he would've only encouraged me being pragmatic about it all.
He only ever wanted us to be happy. So I need to do what I can to live up to that.
I love him. I miss him already.
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and J and T 👀
J - Name a fandom you didn’t think about until you saw it all over Tumblr. (You don’t have to care about it or follow it; it just has to be something that Tumblr made you aware of.)
OK so you know these guys
Tim and Moby from Brainpop. I didn't know they had a fandom until I saw someone making a dating sim and there was a good amount of people hyped and i was like
Wait
Yeah! HELL yeah!!
I get it now. I wonder how that fandom is doing. Hope they're well.
T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?
Not really strong headcanons 🤔 maybe it is actually
Hmmmmm
- wwx is close to jiang siblings but still only adopted into the clan (despite everything jfm wanted)
- lsz is not adopted by lwj, just taken in to be adopted into the clan
Anything that's approximately those kind of cases, I have the same ideas about
WAIT JUST KIDDING
I HAVE ONE
I cannot believe at all
That nmj didn't die a virgin. In Canon. I badly want him to be a virgin and not only that. The type that never learned because he wasn't told to do it and by the time the elders wanted him to marry and reproduce, he has too much of a backlog with nhs to focus on that. He'll do it after nhs becomes independent
This one
Come on. Please. Someone who became sect leader young and in an environment like the nie clan? Duty must be at his core. Also it's funny. Nmj learn sex Ed with nhs. I'm saying a lot of words but saying nothing. But you gotta hear me. Call it too much projection but when you're the first born son, right? AND the heir to the sect? AND an older brother. You've got all these roles to fulfill. And then you're now upgraded to SECT LEADER? HELP-- now you've got like 600 new main quests added and they're all time bound. Like no way there's nobody trying to usurp a wholeass child. So he gotta stop all these crackass adults from finessing him while running a sect finances, social instability, political instability. He's got a baby brother at home. He himself has to develop for like 5 different roles too and uphold sect image and keep relations with other sects. It's like taking a college entrance exam in 5th grade suddenly.
I'm not able to explain what I mean. But you feel the vibes?
Ehhhh I'm lying I don't have any die hard headcanons. I don't think so. This is the strongest one tho.
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