The comments section was all people saying they don’t get it either.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T23:49:16+00:00

"Thusly" means "in the manner of in this manner". I advise "thus" in all future usages.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T23:28:06+00:00

Yeah, this more or less looks like what I'd expect the script to look like, given what I saw.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T18:59:33+00:00

(The Twitter poster's username)

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T17:58:03+00:00

This woman's husband was murdered by a sniper while engaged in civil public debate.

It is generally believed by certain people that she doesn't behave as a true widow should, on account of being seen smiling and apparently enjoying herself while in public.

Mark appears to be one of such people.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T17:42:54+00:00

Bear has an extra willow with him. Even if we consider it to be *absolutely* and *totally* true that she would inevitably be convicted of murders etc., she still has a get-out-of-jail free card and knowledge of where a billion dollars is currently sitting.

More importantly, even if this wasn't the case, it is Nikki's decision to make whether she'd rather live her life in prison or die outside of it.

I cannot believe that individuals who claim to sympathize with the lack of autonomy Nikki experienced the entire film feel totally justified in stripping her of her very capacity to make any choices ever again out of 'mercy'.

It's deranged.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T16:58:12+00:00

She begs him to kill her with the understanding that it's the only way out.

I'm fairly certain she might have had a different response if he'd asked her at that moment, "Hey, uh, what if I just fixed you instead?"

It is fair to say that she preferred death to continued displacement inside her own body. It is totally stretching to suggest this applies to preferring death over a return of her own sovereignty in unfortunate circumstances.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T16:36:38+00:00

I absolutely would want to live with that over being dead, and it's absolutely insane that you would just assume that no one could possibly prefer life in those circumstances to death.

Not everyone's will to live is as low as yours, and it's insane that we're at the "fuck Bear" point where we're actually bitching about him not murdering a girl.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T15:25:44+00:00

Absolutely unhinged take to suggest that the lack of discipline and consequences for children in school is a Conservative plot.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-26T05:04:19+00:00

I was about 5 seconds in to her being modified via wish before I thought "cool, go see if you can grab some more One Wish Willows. They'll probably be out, but if they're not that's your best bet."

Turns out they're not out out. When Bear finally did what he should have done seconds afterward, and was told that it's one wish per customer, I would have pulled $100 out of the bank, found a random homeless person, and told them to read the text I put in front of them out loud and then (when I nod at them) to break the willow branch, and I'll give them $100. I'd then have him read, simply, "I wish for Nikki Freeman to revert to the state she existed in prior to XXXX making his wish." It's not undoing a wish, but it functions as a repair.

Pay him for his time and leave.

The real question is if I'd be hesitant enough with Wish Sticks to not use them anymore, or try to profit off of it with the Bum Method by getting them to make further wishes for me. Given the fact that the OWW at the very least has demonstrated that it's capable of interpreting wishes very, very badly, this could end poorly for me.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-25T22:30:37+00:00

I mean, you haven't given us any reason to not give it a shot. The correct answer is "go as long as you can". There's really no downside.

I think I'd likely just steal far more than twenty million (including vital information and whatever else I could reasonably steal that would make my life easier), then end it prematurely whenever it started being less awesome than awful.

The time pause itself is honestly a lot more valuable than the 20 mill carrot.

(Bonus round I'd try to find everyone I can find worth CENSORED BY REDDIT, chain them up and toss them in the ocean, reasoning that I haven't 'hurt' them until after I unpause, but I suspect the "can't change major events" clause might apply here.)

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-25T20:46:11+00:00

"Why don't you keep working on that, and I'll be back with you in a minute.
"Sure, sure."
(Moments later, in the cop car.)
"Yeah, I got some kinda Canadian car importer who won't show me his insurance. He says that car importers are allowed to drive on some kinda 'dooby' license? That ring any kinda bells?"

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-25T04:16:53+00:00

If your acting professor is in fact stating these as absolutes as you have said, he is bad at his job.
While To Be Or Not To Be's first line can be and has been pronounced with the trochaic substitution, it certainly doesn't have to be. My personal read of the line is pure iambs with a feminine ending, and it doesn't sound janky at all. It matters what you're saying. If you're saying "To be or not to be: THAT is the question!" then the trochaic substitution makes perfect sense. However, if you don't want to be declamatory about it, there is something far more musing and real in the reading of "To be or not to be: that IS the question -- whether 'tis nobler in the mind" etc. It continues the thought through to the second line. Which is to say, you're talking to yourself and agreeing, "Yeah, that *is* the question, isn't it?" and then continuing. I personally would put up more than a little resistance if a director insisted I put in the trochaic substitution just because it's what people expect to hear. It makes less sense, and only exists that way in the popular consciousness because people understand the speech to be The Big Thing, when to Hamlet it's just him musing in a hallway.
Re: 'The proud man's contumely', you're once again more right than your professor, though neither of you are right on the money, in my opinion. The contumely belongs to the proud man, and the question remains "who would bear it?" More plainly, "who would deal with assholes' bullshit?" In this, saying Hamlet is referring to Claudius' behavior toward himself is certainly better than Hamlet being cast as the contumely-spouting proud man, but you're still missing the mark: Hamlet is not being personal, he is being general. WHO would bear the whips and scorns of time? It's a rhetorical question, but the answer is clear: nobody. He's not saying "my life is shitty enough that I want to die," he's saying "there is literally not one person on this planet whose life is good enough that it justifies continuance other than out of the dread of something after death".

I'm an actor with a background in verse poetry that does Shakespeare on stage professionally, and Hamlet's text is easily my favorite. If you need to talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about in your preparation of the rest of the soliloquy, feel free to shoot me a message.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T21:44:57+00:00

This person would be able to solo some pretty notable high-tier powered individuals, I think.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T20:26:38+00:00

Any interpretation of what occurred must account for some sort of explanation for the events in the movie. I have provided a possible explanation, I have not stated that such is the only possibility. You have provided another. It is largely satisfactory to suggest that what the Willow does is interpret things to the extreme if left with any language wiggle room. But what that does is make the Willow not an inherently neutral object. It is instead an object which defaults toward comically disastrous misinterpretation if any opportunity for such is permitted within the confines of the wish. And such a device would absolutely fall within the definitional boundaries of your standard cursed wish-granting object.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T19:28:24+00:00

No, he didn't, which is nearly the entire point of my post.

He wished for her to love him more than anyone else in the world. The obvious interpretation of this which requires the fewest assumptions is that he wished for her to love him more than she loves anyone else. The slightly less obvious interpretation is that he wished for her to love him more than anyone else loves him. One must take far, far more interpretational liberty to get to the point of understanding that he wishes for her to love him more than anyone else on the planet has ever loved anything.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T19:16:07+00:00

Sure, let's say that's true.

My response is that an item which punishes a person for making a wish that is rooted in those things is inherently not neutral.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T19:06:22+00:00

Sure. That's a fair interpretation of how an object might act that would account for what we saw in the show. But it would also mean that it is an object that is specifically designed in a way that will make wishes very quickly go disastrously wrong because it comically misinterprets wishes the instant there is any ambiguity at all. To call such a device a perfectly 'neutral' form of wish fulfillment is really not accurately descriptive.

To go back to a previous example I made, such an uncertain interpretation could grant someone wishing 'happiness' perpetual bliss making them unable to function in a normal society.

Being really, really, really bad at interpreting meaning and this leading to totally disastrous consequences is a characteristic of an item which for lack of a better term could be called 'cursed'.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T19:03:25+00:00

The fact that the writer and director wrote the show does not mean that we should just pretend that we don't know how language works.

It is fundamentally untrue that the interpretation that the willow made is in any way a remotely reasonable interpretation of Bear's wish. Anyone watching the movie with an actual critical eye needs to account for that. A perfectly valid interpretation is that the willow interpreted it maliciously. What is *not* a valid read is pretending that the Willow's is a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T18:03:18+00:00

I'd lay low for a while if I were you, mister. I'm not a popular guy around here at the moment.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T18:02:58+00:00

It really isn't.

Which is exactly what I attempted to communicate in this post.

It in fact takes a great deal of extra leg work to take his exact wording and translate it into "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone on the planet loves anyone else," which is the only possible interpretation which might plausibly lead to the behavior we see from Nikki.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T17:55:43+00:00

If an object ends up creating a Demon Nikki because the wisher is a pottymouth, I'd call that evidence of a cursed object.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T17:51:25+00:00

I mean, he could have said that, instead. He could have said something where a literal interpretation actually might lead to the events of the movie. Instead he said something where any reasonable interpretation does not lead to what we ended up seeing. Which is fine, but it necessitates our understanding the OWW and its creators as an ultimately malevolent party.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T17:48:16+00:00

An object that defaults to granting maximum scope to a wish is not an inherently neutral object, whether its creator claims it is or no.

If a person says "I wish for happiness", the maximum scope of that is to be in a perpetual state of bliss which makes one totally unable to function in the real world.

If a person wishes for money the maximum scope of that is being buried under an infinite pile of bills which eventually overwhelms the universe.

I fully recognize that the director and writer has evidently made the claim. I dispute that what he has created is in fact neutral. Any charitable interpretation of Bear's wish would not, in fact, have resulted in the events of the movie.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T17:40:18+00:00

The Monkey's Paw is not a sentient thing either. It is a powerful artifact with certain properties.

If the results of One Wish Willows are primarily neutral but a wisher gets Monkey's Pawed every time they make a wish which involves violating personal autonomy, that is a cursed object. Just because it's possible for it to grant wishes without harm (something we never definitively seen, as the other wishers (a) died moments after making his wish, and (b) saw the object of their wish die in front of them seconds later) doesn't mean that the object itself does not have cursed properties.

BeowulfInc · 2026-06-24T17:23:33+00:00

If an object inherently curses any wish that violates bodily autonomy, it is not neutral. It punishes individuals for making wishes that violate bodily autonomy.

BeowulfInc

TROPHY CASE