serialwriter

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

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.

This is Bear KNOWING that he did something fucked up, and lying about it afterwards to save face. He shows this even more when he interprets another conversation with Nikki as her accusing him (guilty minds). This was before Ian brought up molly or anything, so Bear assumed Nikki was just having a crisis, and took advantage of her.

yeppp, bear knew nikki hated being called that and because he couldn’t handle the thought of her not liking him romantically and rejecting him, (yet he didn’t even have the guts to actually ask her) he called her that out of spite but played it off as playful and joking

i love how Nikki calls out the fact that Bear just threw his cat's corpse in a trashbag instead of giving her a proper burial. i feel like wish!Nikki in this version was a lot less childish, at least in the beginning.

i like to think that Bear did, at least, like his cat. but he was a shitty pet owner who irresponsibly left out pill bottles, and it's absurd that he acts like Nikki is weird for giving Sandy a proper memorial, when he just threw the body in a trashbag and kept it around the house. like dude couldn't even be bothered to get rid of it, not even after the memorial.

Moments where the real Nikki breaks through the wish OBSESSION (2026) Dir. Curry Barker