“My life is in your hands.”

I don't think any outside entity is piloting Nikki's body. I think it's more like mind control. The "entity" is the feelings themselves. (This is a response to this post, but it got too long and shifted focus.)

The OWW granted the wish directly. It didn't read into Bear's true intentions. The wish was to remove Nikki's ability to decide how she felt about Bear for herself and force her to love him more than anyone, including herself due to the wording, and it did that. Nikki genuinely loves Bear more than anyone else in the world, including herself. A love that is unreciprocated, because Bear doesn't love her back. He has always loved himself more than her, which is why he's incapable of letting her walk away from him, even if it would have led to her having a happier life.

It's like the help desk guy tells Bear -- Nikki didn't choose these feelings, but they are very real to her. And probably confusing as hell. She does love Bear, but it's a very sudden and dramatic shift in how she saw him previously.

Removing someone's autonomy is going to backfire, because when people are forced to live in opposition to their actual desires, values, and beliefs, they experience cognitive dissonance. It's an extremely uncomfortable feeling, and it has to be resolved. For Nikki to resolve it, she either needs to internally justify to herself that she does love Bear and has been falling in love with him for a while, or she needs to course-correct her behavior and break up with him.

We see her trying both. First, when she returns to his house the second night. Bear asks her when she first started having feelings for him, and she haltingly answers "sometime around Christmas, I think." Her hesitance could be her searching her memory, trying to find a starting point for feelings that are unnatural and alien to her. I think if Nikki didn't fight the wish, we probably wouldn't have gotten "Freaky Nikki" and things would have continued to play out as they did in the beginning of their "relationship" exactly as Bear wanted.

But Nikki is not pacified into being this shell of herself, and she tries to break out. She hurts herself and lashes out, does outrages things, and screams "NOT ME" because she is trying to cling to what little control she has and send a message to anyone that might be out there that this is not her.

I think also the scene where she pleads with Bear, saying that "I'll be anything you want me to be," is Nikki's real feelings in that moment. She loves him desperately, to the point that she cannot function without him. And as he tries to pull away from her, she can only cling tighter to him. She needs him to love her back, because he has wrecked her ability to put her own dreams and ambitions and identity before her relationship with him. He is her lifeboat, and he's slipping out of her reach. This makes his demand for her to "be Nikki" all the more cruel.

"Being Nikki" means quitting her dead end job that she hates, moving to a new city, and writing her book. It means leaving Bear, because he isn't brave enough to follow her into the unknown like that. So of course she can't "be Nikki," not because she isn't Nikki, but because she has to be "Bear's girlfriend" first.

I also don't think that Bear "wanted Nikki's body but not her mind." Don't get me wrong -- he's the villain here. But I do think he genuinely admired Nikki, enjoyed her company, and even loved her (though I don't believe he is in love with her).

The problem is that he put way too much on her. Think about his confession at the beginning -- she has been an intrinsic part of his life through a lot of turmoil. Losing his parents, moving to a new school, losing his grandmother, etc. Bear at the beginning of the film is deeply unhappy. He doesn't seem to care about his job, his friendships are primarily motivated by proximity rather than shared interests or values, he's possibly still grieving his grandmother, he's implied to be self-medicating, and his main hobby is hanging out at a bar when he doesn't like to drink. And his cat just died. He probably isn't feeling super loved. So Bear is putting all his hopes for happiness on Nikki.

This is where his desire to date her comes from. When they are in the car, they talk about love and romance. Bear thinks they are the same, while Nikki says they are different. Nikki has a healthier view on love and friendship, and I think when she says she wants to feel loved, she means she wants to feel known. She wants her relationships not to just be about proximity and limited to people she went to high school with. I think she thinks of Bear as family and believes that even if proximity is gone, they will still be in each other's lives. She expects to leave Ian and Sarah behind, but not Bear. I listed the reasons Bear is unhappy. I think Nikki is also in a similar boat. Her mother is implied to be dead and she has no relationship with her father, she doesn't like her job, her friendships are based on proximity, she uses substances. But Nikki doesn't stagnate like Bear does. She recognizes that she is unhappy and wants to get out. So she does. She hands in her two weeks and plans to make changes to her life to feel loved.

Bear can't picture that future. Bear is dependent on her, which as Sarah points out later, isn't fair. But he still does it, and when she threatens to pull away, he clings tighter. I don't think he's in love with her; I think he thinks being in a romantic relationship with her is the only way he keeps her in his life. And when he gets it, it's great! For about two weeks or so. And then it starts to become clear that this isn't what he wanted.

Nikki is Change. Bear is Stagnation. For him to be happy, he needed to find the courage to change. Instead he chases after someone who is changing. When he gets her, he learns that she can't actually fix him. Worse, she isn't even the woman he knew when she's with him, because to be with him she had to give up her own core beliefs, ambitions, and values. And now that he's brought her down to his level rather than rising to hers, he doesn't love her anymore because she's not the same person. What makes him the villain is that he did this to her, then abandoned her to drown like it was her fault. It makes sense for his character because he is at heart selfish and cowardly and fears the pain of rejection far more than he ever loved her.

She could have been a writer. A free-spirited, imaginative, author. The world was her oyster. She was happy and confident and outgoing.

And then, because one man - ONE man - couldn’t let go of his toxic, all-consuming obsession, all of that is ruined. Her friends are dead, and their blood is on her, but were they really even ever her friends, if they couldn’t even notice that she had changed so drastically ? If one of them could do something so vile to her ?

She could have been a writer. Now she’ll always be nothing more a murderer. Anything else she could be will forever be prefaced by conjunction. Murderer and writer. Murderer and murdered.

Even if, by some miracle, she remains in any fit state to go on after the movie’s climax - if the authorities know of the One Wish Willow and believe her story - she’ll forever be haunted by Bear’s actions. Forever be looking over her shoulder. Forever be doubting every word that comes out of her mouth, every thought that crosses her mind, because what if it isn’t her ? Forever wary of getting too close to another person, lest they take it upon themselves to misinterpret her closeness. Forever afraid of attracting too much attention, for the same.

She could have been a writer, now she’ll always be a victim.

And her friends ? We know she was a popular, well-loved person before the Incident. We know she went out of her way to help others. We know she was charismatic, and confident, and so many other things. Now, she has to live with the fact that none of her friends so much as lifted a finger to return the favour, despite her clearly needing help.

She has to live with the fact that the twisted power of the Willow - of Bear’s obsession - burned all the bridges she had made, embarrassed her in front of so many of her associates. Because even if they accept that the Willow caused everything, every time they look at her, they’ll never again see her.

Grace, however, already has these qualities. He doesn't need to change fundamentally because he already has the qualities needed to complete his mission. He just needs to form into the best version of himself. He needs to start believing in himself and learn to navigate through fear.

Grace doesn't need to become a tough guy to complete his mission. He just needs to get over his coward nature in order to reach his full potential. To let his already pre-existing qualities shine brightest. It was essential for the mission to have a character with great compassion and curiosity and patience at the hem. I'm sure if it was somebody else, they might not have been able to work together with an alien as efficiently.

Because at the end of the day what saves all of humanity isn't being tough, it is being kind and gentle and compassionate.

A navy tie would look better than this one.

It's so peaceful.

I knew all along that this would happen from the very moment we met again.