HMY IP

I kid, but you are correct. Characters in movies don't know they're in movies. Why would Bear assume a kitschy toy from a crystal shop would do anything, let alone possess Nikki? Has anyone ever broken a wishbone? Did your wish come true? From his perspective, he made one dumb joke then one of his best friends seemingly has a psychotic break and makes him the object of her psychosis. The rest of the film is Bear reacting to someone he cares for becoming increasingly violent, unpredictable, and controlling and him trying to protect/appease her.

Nikki feeds him his cat, she threatens suicide if he tries to leave, she murders his other two best friends (under the guise of possession but we're talking about what's on screen). The dialogue says it's his fault but the visual language frames him as the victim for most of the film (I don't think Barker has a great handle on the visual language or the gender dynamics of the film, but that's a different conversation).

And importantly, Bear even tries to fix it! It's not as if he learns Nikki is possessed and just shrugs. When he can no longer ignore this impossible thing that is happening, he goes to get another wish stick and Ian makes the same mistake when he breaks the One-Wish Willow, flippantly assuming it won't work because why would it? The horror is he's trapped in a situation with no solution besides suicide or accepting his abuse. And when he makes the only decision that could solve the situation, people call him a coward. There's no acceptable way to be an abuse victim as a man. If he stays with her, he's taking advantage of her, if he leaves, he caused her suicide. Because nuance is bad for box office.

I've been meaning to answer this one since I got it and while everyone was mad at me for talking about this movie as though it is a movie. But you make an EXTREMELY important point about Barker's absence of gender analysis. I was fucking blown away by that interview excerpt I was sent where he talks about the decision to make Bear order a pinã colada because it was "girly" and how it was originally a Shirley Temple but they didn't want to make him a total "loser." There's a lot that can be interpreted from this narrative about Bear being unmanly and cowardly, and his more malevolent moments being a shadow cast by his failure of masculinity. Barker has stated that Bear is pretty unequivocally the "bad guy" but I think he doesn't really understand everything he said, or how the film kind of contradicts itself at points. This ultimately lands in "he deserved it" territory, which is interesting for a character whose terror is derived from intimate partner abuse at the hands of his girlfriend, and who the director has implied he views as a failure of masculinity.

But you articulated everything I was attempting to, far better than I was doing. The logic of the plot is about some form of possession derived from a toy that cost, what, $7? Even the people selling them don't take it seriously, it's like a weird nightmare. This draws a bold line between the physical and the metaphysical actions of the plot. With the way horror is always intensely symbolic, is always about something, the metaphysical is clearly a representation of an idea. And that's probably the least clear aspect of the whole narrative. The whole reason Bear got the willow is because he's thoughtful and wanted to do something nice for Nikki. I've said several times that his darker expressions feel very incongruent with the rest of his character because of things like that. The first act of the movie pivots on his genuine, well-intentioned affection for his friend, and also GENERATING FUCKING SYMPATHY FOR HIM. HIS FUCKING CAT DIES. IT WRECKS HIM. THE BULK OF THE MOVIE PIVOTS ON HIM BEING SYMPATHETIC. The proportion of demanded audience sympathy to him actually being a bad guy is really strange.

And, most importantly: the physical action of the plot, beneath the symbolic metaphysical, is literally a guy going through an abusive relationship! These are symbols you absolutely need to be sympathetic to! You need to be able to identify them and sympathize with them, because this is the shit that actually happens to people! You will see people experiencing similar patterns, and they will never deserve it! The hyperbole of the story expressed so many specific feelings that are familiar to me because I was terribly abused by somebody, and because people I love went through the same things. For the sake of anyone who is in a controlling, abusive relationship, you need to recognize the truth of the horror. Coming back to a discussion of gender, a lot of this movie is an illustration of how femininity can color the expression of control and abuse towards a masculinized person. Much of her abusive behavior leverages what Bear is supposed to do as a Man who is the partner of a Woman. It's why he just sort of absorbs it. Because there is a gendered script for this kind of abuse. Were the genders reversed in this film, I think people would be taking very different conclusions from it, because of the way gender biases social interactions. It would undoubtedly make the same actions represent different things, simply because of the context of respective genders. I think that's really interesting! And really worth discussing! But people were getting angry at me for attempting to discuss it. Sadly, I get the feeling that a lot of these same people would be very insensitive to the abuse of men, which, interestingly, is an angle the plot approaches! Immediately after Bear finds that Nikki tried to feed him his cat, and he hides it from Sarah, Ian then leaves that very location with Bear and tells him everyone thinks he's taking advantage of Nikki going through a mental health crisis (which, also, can be called into question, given the revelation that Ian had slept with Nikki prior and can be interpreted as sabotaging Bear in the opening scene.) But what that scene functions to do, is show that Bear is going through truly nightmarish things that the people around him don't understand, and the assumptions of the people around him are both judgemental and lacking an understanding of what's actually going on. Especially because, if I recall correctly, by that point, he was already told she'd kill herself if he left her! So, like, what the fuck is he supposed to do aside from just kill himself? Basically everyone says he was selfish for not simply doing that, but with the amount of finely-crafted empathy-farming that goes into the first act, and just how fatalistic the dynamic of the situation is, I really feel like much of the reaction to the movie is rooted in a callous lack of empathy, launched particularly by the "what's so bad about being with me?" scene, which itself is just inconsistent with everything else the audience is INSTRUCTED to feel about this character.

And you just.

Said no????

i wanted to try traditional animation for a while and heres a cute little guy inspod by sonnyelim ; 3 and here are the seperate frames as well