#insecure attachment

Right from the start, I do want to clarify that I am not going to be snooty about why people experience Obsession as a demonic possession story.

"Wish Nikki" behaves in such a way that one could quickly make assumptions that this is demonic. The rapid escalation from love bombing to feeding Bear his cat, to creating a shrine with the rest of the cat's remains, to the creepy walking, and the rest of her bizarre behavior creates confusion because this doesn't seem like how someone would behave if they love someone more than anyone else in the world. This just seems unnecessary, willfully cruel even.

Then when you throw in the phone call with customer support where Nikki is screaming as if in agony, it sure seems like she might be experiencing some sort of supernatural torture.

I get it! The idea that Nikki's body has been infested with a demon feels apt for the genre.

However, we have it directly from the director in multiple statements that this is not possession.

So then what is it?

If not possession, why possession shaped?

A more helpful reference point might be Dissociative Identity Disorder. Now contrary to the way its normally presented in pop culture, as its understood clinically* different personalities aren't always completely isolated, they can experience varying degrees of awareness of what is happening even if they aren't operating the meat mech right now.

What I propose is that at the moment Bear makes his wish, what happens is that a new personality emerges that is largely unaware of the original personality and is mostly in control of Nikki's body. Like DID, this is something that looks and acts a lot like possession but this isn't something you can fix with an old priest and a young priest.

Critically, this new personality seems to have Nikki's memories but doesn't seem to act as if it has experienced those memories first hand. It has an intellectual understanding of how to be a person but no real context for any of it to steer its behavior going forward. In some sense, this is a being who was "born" in the moment of Bear's wish, has some vague notes on being a person, an overriding compulsion to love Bear more than anyone in the world, and crucially: no real sense of self except in reference to Bear.

The increasingly "demonic" behavior I attribute to Wish Nikki's mental integrity rapidly breaking under the strain of violently needing to please Bear while not not having a clear understanding of what actually pleases him. Wish Nikki loves Bear more than anyone else in the universe, including herself, and also clearly needs for him to show love back. When he is put off by the duct taped door and enraged by the cat sandwich, these are devastating experiences for Wish Nikki because she's only days old with an extremely unsophisticated understanding of love and the only thing that matters to her is Bear being happy. If he's not happy, she's not fulfilling her purpose: to love Bear more than anyone else in the universe.

When Bear yells at her to be normal, Wish Nikki experiences a momentary break where she begins sobbing because she's failed again and Bear has asked her to do something she clearly does not understand how to do: be normal. Even when you have the average degree of socialization you ought to have as a person in your 20s, "be normal" is an ambiguous command. When you're days old and your only reference point for anything is whether it makes Bear happy, its practically cruel.

Which brings me to my grand theory of why Wish Nikki presents as demonic: she is ALSO suffering.

Her suffering is different from Nikki Prime** who is watching helplessly as her body is used to violate her will in increasingly disturbing ways, but Wish Nikki IS suffering. She is suffering because she is existing and trying to make do with a life that has one overriding purpose: love Bear. And it starts becoming more and more obvious that she is failing, the more she tries to fix things the worse it gets, and if she doesn't have Bear she quite literally has nothing. No purpose, no reason to live. Nothing matters except loving Bear.

And on some level, the firewall between Nikki Prime and Wish Nikki is not absolute. When she is watching Bear sleep, Wish Nikki comments that her dreams make her uncomfortable. Its implicit then that when she's asleep, Wish Nikki is confronted with thoughts and feelings she cannot reconcile with who she is as a person who is defined only by loving Bear: what if part of her, a VERY angry part of her does not love Bear? I think we pretty much get confirmation of this later on when Nikki Prime is able to speak when Wish Nikki is asleep.

I could be mistaken, but I think its also strongly implied that Wish Nikki is conscious when Nikki Prime is able to take control for brief moments and is terrified, if not by the sudden and inexplicable loss of control, then by the idea that something is causing her to take drastic actions that displease Bear - not even mistakes like cooking the cat, but full blown incidents that Wish Nikki is not responsible for.

For her part, I think Nikki Prime's primal scream when on the phone with Bear is perfectly explainable by means other than having been consigned to some sort of Hell where she is actively being tortured. Her present existence of having no control over her body and being witness to her body being used to do things she vehemently does not consent to IS the torture.

So I read this scene as Prime Nikki not having the bandwidth to speak to Bear. This experience is still fairly new and she is likely still very confused and very angry. By the time she is talking to Bear while Wish Nikki is asleep, Prime Nikki seems to understand what has happened in supernatural terms and that it can't be undone except through her death, but as of the phone call, it seems like Prime Nikki hasn't had anyone explain what has happened. Customer Service can have her "speak" to Bear, but hasn't really bothered to try talking to her it seems, or if they did, she wasn't in a receptive mood.

Later, Prime Nikki seems to have been quietly building her strength and working to understand what is happening and thus figures out she can speak to Bear when Wish Nikki is sleeping and is able to marshal some potency to break through and self harm at a moment when there are the most witnesses and thus the most consequences. I understand this as Prime Nikki having acclimated to her new reality up to a point, perhaps you could say she's moved through the stages of grief from anger to bargaining to a kind of acceptance that is actually more like a cold fury capable of some calculation rather than an uncontrolled rage.

And that's basically it. Not a capital P Possession, but a split personality where both are actually experiencing suffering, and the one you probably assume is being driven insane is actually slowly pulling herself back together to wage war for her body and the one you think is "stable" but evil is being driven insane by the impossibility of ever truly fulfilling her only and most important command: to love Bear more than anyone in the universe - and in every sense of the word.

In the end, Wish Nikki can't allow others to compete for his affection, and she must also love him more than anyone else as a verb, but also seems to have a deficit of reference points for what is "normal" and the more her behavior frightens and disgusts Bear, the more her sense of self crumbles. Its not active, conscious cruelty, its violent jealousy born of a profoundly insecure attachment style and an implicit interpretation that Bear can have no others before her.

*And even the clinical understanding of DID is a giant kettle of fish with a lot of consternation and accusations of misleading data and professional malpractice flying both ways across the proverbial battle line. However, this is not the essay for adjudicating between the different sides when it comes to the science and the pros and cons of encouraging or scolding self diagnosis. I do think its important that people know these conflicts exist though and engage with them thoughtfully and without unnecessary venom for whichever side you think is "wrong."