TV

Yellowjackets fans go wild for sapphic moment in season three: ‘I’m already rating it 5 stars’

Yellowjackets season three premiered on 14 February. (Paramount+)

Yellowjackets is finally back on our screens and fans are collectively losing it over one unexpected sapphic moment in season three, episode two.

Warning this article contains spoilers for Yellowjackets season 3.

The Emmy-nominated survival series follows a New Jersey high school girls’ football team who, when travelling for a national tournament in Seattle, crash in the Canadian wilderness and must work together to survive – some even turning to cannibalism. The show is set in dual timelines, chronicling the team’s time in the wild in the 1990s as well as the impact their time in isolation continues to have on their older selves in the present.

The new season picks up a few weeks after the series two final, with the show’s synopsis for its third season teasing: “Distrust in leadership and tension within the team jeopardise their chances of being rescued. In the present, long-buried secrets from their pasts begin to surface.”

Yellowjackets has been popular with WLW audiences since it first premiered back in 2021 thanks to its majority female cast of characters, LGBTQ+ stars including Jasmin Savoy Brown, Liv Hewson and Nicole Maines and unadulterated, absolutely-no-heterosexual-explanation-possible subtext of repressed desire.

I’m sorry, you can’t isolate a bunch of teenage girls – a football team no less – in the wilderness, make them vie for power of the group and physically devour each other (RIP Jackie Taylor) and us NOT think it is at least a little bit gay?

Yellowjackets fans have the admirable ability to ship any of the girls in combination with each other – I mean, just look at the AO3 relationship tags – with fully justified lists of reasons why Misty is gay for Nat, or Nat is gay for Lottie or Lottie is gay for Shauna, or– well, you get the point.

Most popular amongst the fandom though is the idea that Shauna’s apparently jealously of her best friend Jackie – which saw her sleep with Jackie’s boyfriend Jeff – coupled with their close knit bond, all of those longing looks and the fact Shauna hallucinates Jackie’s ghost after she literally eats her dead body is actually a huge case of repressed sapphic desire and compulsory heterosexuality.

Cannibalism has often been spoken of in academic circles as a metaphor for desire, love and homoeroticism, consuming someone else’s body being an extremely intimate – if totally depraved – act.

You may like to watch

Cut to episode two of season three and Shauna gets what many see as a very long overdue reveal that she is not straight.

During one exchange, Shauna pushes fellow Yellowjacket Melissa up against a tree whilst pushing a knife against her neck and threatening to “f**king kill” and “gut” her.

Melissa unexpectedly kisses Shauna and – in what seems like surprise to Shauna herself – she kisses back and the pair furiously make out against the tree.

Fans, unsurprisingly, were thrilled at the scene and its confirmation that Shauna Shipman – who they have dubbed Shauna Strapman – is certainly part of the girlkissers club.

“yellowjackets is only 2 episodes in and i’m already rating it 5 stars all because shauna has kissed a woman,” one fan wrote.

Fans immediately noted that in the new revealed context that Shauna is queer, it changes how we look at her relationship with Jackie.

“do u realize how much more tragic this makes jackieshauna? the longing stares, tension, shauna asking jeff to repeat i love yous during sex when jackie wouldn’t say it back, jackie feeling betrayal when she read her diary, both of them forever thinking their love was unrequited,” one person wrote on X.

“no bc this retroactively confirms jackieshauna canon like do u get that every relationship shauna has and will ever have lead back to her love for jackie,” another wrote.

Yellowjackets season 3 release schedule: new episodes air every Friday on Paramount+.

More:

How did this story make you feel?

Sending reaction...
Thanks for your feedback!

Please login or register to comment on this story.

Register to save articles and more. It'll only take a minute and it's free.
JOIN US TODAY!