u/GearsofTed14

This is not mine, I just found this online and am sharing it with you

🎉

*chuckles nervously* “you know I do…”

“Do you………..remem……………………….ber…………stuff?”

“No….why….? ……do you like me?”

1. Her comment that she needs a lover. Who knows from how far back this is in relation to the story date, but it’s just kind of an interesting thing I’m sure wasn’t coincidental, especially when you pair that with the “quitting the job because I’m not feeling love to write” thing.

2. If she’s getting that much attention and reaction on her photos, then she’s probably gotta have upwards of 10K followers. If that’s the case, Bear likely has almost zero shot with her, and probably the one little sliver he does have is just because they work together all the time and know each other, so he has more social proof with her than he would in a normal circumstance. But even then, despite me believing that she does have feelings for him, I think they are very minor, and he maybe had a chance for a single date where she gets weird and distant after. (Yes, we do have the cooper Tomlinson like. I’m not making that a main thing because it’s already been mentioned here before. But if you’re unfamiliar, that’s Ian’s actor)

3. The location being Ohio despite there being an obvious palm tree there. I think this is just a goof/oversight. It’s kept vague where the story takes place, but it’s well known the movie was filmed in Southern California, but made to kind of look like Anywhere, USA. The only other giveaway is the palm bush in front of the hospital. I wonder if it is supposed to be Ohio or what. It’ll be interesting when the digital release happens, and we can pause and zoom in on the address on Sarah’s bloody acceptance letter, just to see if it says Ohio or someplace else (and if it’s someplace else, then maybe the two “Ohio” photos are from Nikki taking a trip or something)

It allows the audience to feel the same sense of dreamlike limerence Bear was experiencing, through limited exposure and allowing our minds to fill in the gaps with our own imagination. Getting to know her too well beforehand would’ve…I won’t say made it worse, but would’ve changed the experience for sure. Kind of like if we were the fifth person of that group and had just been introduced to her that night and felt drawn in by her energy and became curious to get to know her better. It adds a subtle layer of extra tragedy feeling the lost potential

Bonus points if it’s multiple days, weeks, or months. Double bonus points if you respond immediately after they’re done ghosting

And I think that’s why it’s popped as much as it has. I’m sure there are other films in the past few years that technically fall into this category, but none were anywhere near as big as this. Not saying people of older age can’t enjoy this, many do, it’s just people of our generation might have the deepest appreciation for it, because it feels like it was made by people that just “get it” on a very intuitive level without having to pretend. Even if there were ostensibly Gen Z stories coming out recently, with actors of the generation, you could tell there was still some older millennial, X-er, and even boomer coding to it. Not that that’s bad, it just doesn’t connect 100%

(The only inconsistency being them affording their own houses on a music store salary, but I’m perfectly okay overlooking that bc everything else is so good)

It makes the most sense to me if we view it like a drunken, inebriated state. Just functioning differently from what it would be were alcohol or drugs, which I’ll get into in a sec. Under this particular circumstance, you can say with a straight face that there is no separate being controlling her. It is just like when you get drunk, you are still you, but heavily altered from the sober rendition of you. You are different while still being the same. You are not really being controlled so much as being suppressed by something that itself isn’t possessing sentience.

Typically, with being drunk, suppression is the name of the game, more than any additives. Im no scientist, doctor, or neurologist, so please keep that in mind as I explain this. A lot of what gets suppressed in that state is your judgment. Hence, your decisions seem more reckless because the thing saying “no” is turned off. Because alcohol is something a lot more encompassing and indifferent, this typically affects motor functions as well (the big reason why drunk driving is so dangerous). However, with Wish Nikki, whatever the cocktail is, at the whims of the wish, is much more targeted and precise. So it manages to shut off and heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) suppress her ability for judgment, while at the same time, nuclearizing her affection for Bear, turning what had been like a 2/10 to a 50/10. All of this while at the same time keeping the motor functions in a “sober” state. This could explain why we get the weirdness like the creepy movements and other stuff, because there’s no silent voice in her head telling her to not do it. From this framework here, there is no second Nikki in the sense we typically think. It is all just one Nikki, but heavily “under the influence” of the love wish. It just seems like it is manifesting as multiple personas to an outside viewer

Now, I think in order for this to make full sense, this would basically require us to accept that the actual Nikki *did* in fact have some amount of romantic feelings towards Bear. Still not very much in my opinion, but clearly more than zero, because you can’t totally amp up what isn’t there. If 2/10 is still high to you, fine. But it would still have to be 1/10, or .5/10 or something higher than 0.

So, regarding when OG Nikki surfaces, this is again where this flavor of inebriation differs from how alcohol would typically work. Usually, that takes a little bit of time to fade in, and to fade out. But under the love wish, it is all instantaneous. When Bear casts the wish, she is immediately sent into this love-drunk state, and this may provide us a reason for why she is at her most confused at the very beginning, because this entire experience is brand new to her, and she is still working through it, and as time goes on, she is more “used” to it, so a baseline is formed, one that isn’t there at the very start. Anyway, when OG Nikki surfaces, she is essentially “sobering up” in an instant. Much faster than what she would do were she on alcohol. And then when she returns to Wish Nikki, she’s been instantly flooded with the love-sickness again. Viewing it like this might give us insight into why OG Nikki usually seems caught off guard whenever a resurfacing happens. She is not necessarily “seeing” what happens, or is at least not processing it from a fully conscious state of mind. The other thing to keep in mind here is that “blackout drunk” doesn’t mean you pass out. It just means things are not being recorded into your memory and conscious mind. You can still participate in human activity, despite not really “being there” upstairs. So if it’s all just one Nikki, then the Wish Nikki persona is essentially operating as any human would when they are blackout drunk. Which could also make it more understandable why she doesn’t really “listen” to Bear when he talks about “no weird stuff” because a) there’s almost no memory of that being said, and b) she doesn’t possess the faculties to implement it even if she does remember.

The one other thing this framework does is it makes sense how Wish Nikki is seemingly able to retain what OG Nikki already knows without having to learn it all from scratch. Because it’s all still “Nikki.” She’s able to retain a semi-passable degree of continuity across states. The last thing this framework is able to do is it makes it clearer how OG Nikki is able to surface in that moment when she’s seemingly asleep. Perhaps being at a certain level of restfulness powers down the love-wish toxins so she can sleep, but it doesn’t require full unconsciousness. There might be a little daylight there where if she’s really tired, she’s able to be her more sober self without activating the drunken state. So therefore, when OG Nikki says “she’s asleep right now” in reference to Wish Nikki, she’s not actually talking about a legit, second consciousness, she’s really meaning that the neurochemical toxins that produce what we know as Wish Nikki are “asleep” or currently off. But that if she’s brought to a certain level of wakefulness, they will kick back on.

Like I said, this is how I am best able to accept this framework if we take Curry Barker at his literal word on that and eliminate all possible forms of there being a second entity, whether newly born, or otherwise, that is possessing her.

However, even under this particular theory, there are still a couple of squares I’m having trouble circling; ones which I don’t have a clean answer for. The first one is the telephone call with the OWW person, and specifically, when he puts on “real” Nikki and we hear her screaming. This would indicate that OG Nikki’s consciousness is disembodied, and present somewhere else (whether outside or inside her body). In typical inebriation, this is not really the case, barring some other crazy psychological thing layered on top of it. The sober you is completely gone while the drunk you is driving, and vice versa. It doesn’t even know it’s not there. I suppose the only way I can kind of conceptualize this, is the times when I’ve been drunk, and have been behaving or speaking more recklessly, and I’m still hearing that more sober voice in my head advising me against it, it’s just that voice is a lot smaller and quieter. But even then I don’t feel like two separate minds. I don’t know, this is one I still need help with.

The second tripping point is simply the fact that whatever is altering Nikki’s brain chemistry to produce this love-drunk persona is doing so in a highly calibrated and fine tuned way that is just entirely absent from any liquor or drugs, which we would all agree are non-entities. The precision on that would seemingly indicate some degree of sentience on *something* that’s controlling her, whatever we want to say that is, the wish itself, OWW, whatever has landed in her, etc. That’s where it gets a little tricky IMO, because it comes down to what your line is on sentience/intelligence, and if crossing that creates what you’d term an “entity” or not. Some kind of hand is clearly on the dial. If you want to tell me that it’s Bear’s wish creating the exact shape and movement of that invisible hand, I’m willing to turn that over in my mind to see if it works or not. Otherwise, at least on this aspect, it seems the writing has invented a force that behaves exactly like a sentient, possessing entity, while just altering the vocabulary to avoid the label.

Overall though, this parallel of a quasi-inebriation has allowed me to take the “no entity, no possession” position more seriously than I had been previously, with only those couple of snags. It’s all about framing it the right way. And any time I hear it mentioned in the future, I’ll keep this version of it in mind for my own understanding of that interpretation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether it’s adding something on top, pointing out something I missed, providing more clarity on something I was too abstract about, debating the actual steelman, whatever. I welcome the discussion on this

This of course assumes he’d know exactly right away the extent of what has happened. Perhaps you could stretch it out to the date, but no further (we know what happens after. That’s the rubicon). I’m just trying to think what could he have said to wish Nikki, if anything. If he could’ve tried to find ways to get real Nikki to surface and tell her what happened. Tried, in a time of less dire straights, to have someone else make a wish to counteract it. Or if he’d just have to kill himself. I guess I’m trying to imagine what the path of good and correct and responsible behavior would be in the immediate wake of the wish, considering the near irreversibility of it, and how wish Nikki can get very dangerous once her interpretation of “perfect” is no longer happening

I hesitate to outright say “infant” or “child” because that’s not exactly what I mean. Not like a human infant. I just mean that it’s brand new. It is something that is born right as Bear makes the wish, and did not exist prior. So like any baby creature, it is incredibly confused and not entirely sure what is going on. It is overwhelmed by its sudden existence (with it following its hardwiring like any creature does, but without really knowing the “why”). This explains the confusion right at the outset, and almost speaking as if it/she is Bear (“my cat just died”) because it is a Bear fathered entity. It takes time to settle in, but even by the end of the film, it has only been alive several weeks, and has just been guessing and figuring everything out on the fly. It’s something very “wild” and raw and untamed. This could also explain all of the very weird and uncanny behaviors and movements, and the inability to “stay in character” as a functioning human for very long (like an LLM losing the context window and getting loopy), plus all of the more childlike mood swings, which go above and beyond simple obsessive jealousy. Babies are notoriously temperamental, and crying is their only method of real communication. Under this theory, I would presume that, if things somehow managed to not go off the rails as they did, and willow Nikki were to survive for 5-10+ years, she would eventually settle in and be able to “pass” better as a human for 99.9% of the time, even in Bear’s presence. Not that she would become indistinguishable from the OG Nikki, just that a lot of the overtly creepy shit would fade out as the entity matured into whatever its version of “adulthood” was. Which is honestly an even scarier possibility IMO.

I know it’s been said it’s not an actual outside entity, but clearly it’s something. It’s not just some hidden part of Nikki that was unlocked. It is either that, or some version of an outside force occupying her, and I believe the latter is the most coherent. I posited this “childlike entity” theory in a comment, and realized it could be its own post.

My last year of coach pitch, we were the A’s, and we had that black hat with the green logo (I think our uniforms themselves were the regular green). 9 year old me loved that hat, and I’d get a 59Fifty in that exact style. But as an actual set, these definitely have that “mid-2000s everyone has to have a black uniform” vibe to them

That literally is my line. I don’t really grade movies on a scale of 1-10. It’s “would I watch it again?” And that answer is almost always “no.” This crossed that threshold. I went to a 10:30pm showing on a WEDNESDAY night and every seat in the theatre was full

I think one of the lesser talked about aspects of this film, understandably eclipsed by the more prominent topics and themes, is how very destructive an inability to be forward and say what you mean can really be. This made Bear’s character even more chilling to me because it’s something that parallels a problem in my own life. I’ve had many instances where my inability to be direct with someone caused infinitely more damage and drama and hurt down the line than would’ve ever happened otherwise. Being this way is not a neutral, nor positive trait. If you grow up in a situation where conflict avoidance and damage control and shrinking yourself is deemed a virtue, or at least the safest path, it can create many problems later in life and get a lot of people hurt. I believe this is also what keeps Bear in the situation with Nikki despite shit going off the rails. In fact, I’d go as far as to say this is an equally coherent explanation for that in addition to “he doesn’t want to lose her/he’s fine with even this brainwashed version of her.” It’s that her extremely erratic and frightening behavior is actually perfectly designed to keep someone with that type of a trauma response and overall demeanor in check. It slots right into that weak spot like a glove. This is also why his behavior seems weirdly irrational and passive. I never once caught myself questioning why he doesn’t call the cops, or run away or hide at Ian’s, or not return home, or anything else, because that’s not consistent with that personality type. You hope it just sort of passes, because usually it does.

A final note on why he might be like this: in the film, we hear nothing at all about Bear’s parents, only his recently deceased grandmother (whose house he inherited). I believe this indicates that she probably raised him, or was at least his legal guardian for a long time. That gives us two possibilities of where this behavior might’ve originated. Either from a very dysfunctional situation with his actual parents (necessitating his living with his grandmother), and or the grandmother herself. One or more of these authority figures likely possessed a similar unpredictability that the brainwashed version of Nikki did (obviously to a different extent). The fact that that little thread is even there to be pulled on in a way that’s congruous with the character’s personality is a sign of impeccable writing. And it would also explain why he’s only ever honest and forthright when nobody’s around; making the wish. Which could also be why we barely see it again, because he got instantly punished for that honesty, likely how he was punished for it as a kid (and this is not me hand waving away the sheer selfishness of the wish, I’m just saying that’s where we saw his mask fully off). Therefore, the constant hedging and lying in every situation afterwards makes even more sense.

I could write ten more pages about this movie as a whole, and I’m eager to see it again. It’s very rare a film this good comes along

I sure hope so. Him and Bo seem to click pretty well, and we will need to be firing on all cylinders right away considering how hard the first 6 weeks are