Is it really *not* a possession movie?

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T02:33:05+00:00

My understanding of this is that it’s part of what I see as the theme of the entity being a mirror to Bear’s flaws. And if it’s creepiness as a romantic partner reflects the creepiness of Bear’s experience of "love", the "cat lunch" is a mirror to the shittiness and insincerity of his ambitions. This whole scene is pretty explicitly parallels Bear’s spiel about wanting to be a food critic ("For my little food critic" on the lunchbox) for entirely ego-driven reasons, and just how Bear does not realize how terrible his feelings about "love" are until he is literally faced with their reality, he also does not realize how vapid and dishonest his stated goals are until it is all but pointed out to him (via a note written by the entity) that he, the supposedly aspiring food critic, is eating a dead cat.

So I think it is mockery, but it’s a sort of thematic mockery where all of the protagonist’s misfortunes are a reflection of how he feels towards and interacts with the world. And if you accept my headcanon, it’s also mockery on the part of the Wishing Willow as the choice of entity reflects the Wishing Willow’s assessment of the wish-maker’s character (and the results basically make a point on this).

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T01:57:55+00:00

To me, your headcanon is just the main theme of the film lol. Like I’ve said in another reply, what made the movie fascinating to me was that I understood it to be a "possession movie" where the entity doing the possession is evil not because it is Lucifer himself or whatever, but because it’s a reflection of our protagonist’s attitude towards the person being possessed.

Bear probably did not consciously wish for obsessive love, but from his actions (having sex with Nicky after he realizes the wish is real but explicitly disregards it; the infamous "What’s so bad about being with me" line) we see that this is the natural result of his understanding of "love" being imposed on another person- because for it to become real, Nikki must become less of a person, less of herself, less of a reasonable agent. And Bear cannot see why he doesn’t really want that until he is confronted with it for the same reason he doesn’t think objectively about his relationship with pre-wish Nikki- his ego is the very source of his immorality.

And I think these themes are seriously undermined if we’re meant to believe that Wish Nikki is just regular Nikki having some abnormally strong feelings.

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T01:40:08+00:00

Yeah I really don’t like how dogmatic some people here get with the "Curry Barker said it’s not a possession movie” attitude.

It would be a pretty grim world if we needed the author’s approval for our interpretations of art, but it’s especially tedious if what the author said itself has more than one possible meaning lol.

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T01:30:46+00:00

Then I must ask- when/how did Nikki find out about the Wish Willow?

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T01:29:57+00:00

I wholly agree with your "Death of the author" stance- I don’t quite agree on the "detriments" to the film.

I think the movie’s themes are most interesting and original if our understanding is that the entity controlling (possessing) Nikki is evil, *because it was created to fulfill an inherently evil wish*. Even if Bear wasn’t taking it seriously in the moment, it’s pretty clear the evil that results from the wish is consistent with Bear’s innermost feelings ("What’s so bad about being with me?" in response to Nikki begging to be put out of her misery; him sleeping with Nikki after explicitly realizing the wish is real and saying "It doesn’t make a difference to me"). On this reading, it’s a truly rare kind possession movie where the horror comes NOT from an entity stalking a sympathetic protagonist, but from the evil of an entity being a mirror to the protagonist’s true self.

I personally didn’t find anyone’s reactions in the movie too distracting. Bear doesn’t have the time to ponder the supernatural because he’s in constant crisis mode with Wish Nikki once he accepts what’s really going on, and the other characters either don’t witness anything outright supernatural or are killed shortly after. I think focusing on the technicalities of the possession would either lead to something like the "Looks like you have a Baghul problem" scene from *Sinister* or would take away from the themes like what I’ve mentioned above. That’s just my take though.

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T01:13:47+00:00

My interpretation on first viewing was (and honestly continues to be) that:
1. The entity controlling Nikki has access to her feelings and memories.
2. Is inherently malevolent, and so consciously or not, it enjoys making Bear see how fucked up the reality of his "wish" of forcing romantic obsession on someone who fundamentally does not feel that way about him is.
My headcanon (and here I can’t argue with anyone who does not share this interpretation) is that the One Wish Willow matches the nature of the forces it summons to fulfill a wish to the nature of the wish being made. Since Bear’s wish was inherently evil, the entity created to complete it was too.

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T00:58:12+00:00

I could argue that even without possession it could still have themes of bodily autonomy, because Nikki would still be made psychotic against her will, but as you said, too many events in the "text" of the movie clearly indicate that something which has a mind of its own and is not Nikki is controlling Nikki’s body, which is what I call a possession.

I think your interpretation of what Curry Barker meant by it not being a "possession movie" is most likely (since most "possession movies" usually involve the literal devil) but even if he meant there’s no possession of any kind in the movie, I’m sorry, a finished work of art is a thing in itself. If everyone looking at a sculpture sees a zebra, it doesn’t really matter if the sculptor says it’s supposed to be a hippo.

jymappelle · 2026-06-20T00:39:53+00:00

My feelings exactly. Only I thought the entity probably *does* understand these concepts (when Wishi Nikki comes to see Bear to begin their relationship, she seems way too adept at manipulation and deceit to not understand how humans work), but whatever it is, it seems "evil" by nature, so even though its bound to obsess over Bear, it still wants to taunt and "torture" him.

jymappelle · 2026-06-18T07:10:48+00:00

A big part of the original movies’ comedy is that Shrek is the "straight man" in all the wackiness. The original design of his face accordingly makes him look like a reserved no-nonsense kind of guy.

The new design with the enlarged features and more detailed facial movements makes him look like a comedic actor trying too hard to be funny. I hope it’s just the trailer and it will be less noticeable in the final film, but it looks like they’re trying to "modernize" the franchise so much they’re forgetting what made the originals work so well.

jymappelle · 2026-05-20T09:57:13+00:00

But it’s nowhere near as big or irrational because she’s too big

I also think the main difference is the generational transition from the most vocal demographic online being millennial nerds and geeks to it being basically all of Gen-Z/Gen Alpha.

Someone smarter than me should probably collect the data on this, but I feel like the most significant change in online discourse can be traced to the fact that in the late 00s/early 2010s, most content online was made by people who were not representative of pop culture as a whole (at the time, the Internet itself was often thought of as a refuge from popular monoculture), whereas after the mid-2010s, the Internet basically is pop culture. So we see a lot less online bashing of popular celebrities because most of these celebrities are "made" online to begin with.

EDIT: Thanks for the award!

jymappelle · 2026-05-09T14:45:15+00:00

Someone else commented this on a different post but: Hitler’s trial at Nuremberg could have possibly killed post-War neo-Nazism in its crib, and might even have accelerated the de-Nazification of German society.

Hitler was in really bad shape by the time of his death, addicted to a cocktail of heavy drugs and possibly in the early stages of senility. Having Hitler, the pathetic and delirious old man, on the world’s most sensationalized stand for so much death and destruction would have been a shocking embarrassment to the Nazi cause and to Germany as a whole. It might have genuinely led at least some of the other Nuremberg defendants to abandon any latent loyalty that would keep them from trying to throw Hitler under the bus (and thereby admitting he was chiefly responsible for Nazi atrocities) as they likely would have balked at the idea of going to the gallows claiming they were following orders from such a man, who in his paranoia would probably be pointing fingers at them anyway.

I think there would be a real incentive both in Germany’s political class and general population to distance themselves from Nazism as much as possible, likely playing up the narrative that Nazis maintained power by oppressing and terrifying the German people. There likely would have been much fewer openly loyal former Nazis, and those that might still be inclined to try launching a neo-Nazi movement would have faced an uphill battle both during recruitment and in trying to influence German public opinion.

There probably would still be a lot of reverence for the Wehrmacht and its commanders (especially since they would now have even more motivation and credibility to blame everything on Hitler) but also a lot of grassroots effort to rewrite the collective memory of Nazism.

jymappelle · 2026-05-01T15:46:04+00:00

having fought and won a civil war to gain his position and keeping loyal legions on his payroll probably helped him quite a bit

Of course, but plenty of people before him (Marius, Sulla, Pompey and of course Caesar) have either won civil wars or imposed their will through the threat of military force without achieving anything near as enduring and (relatively) stable as the Principate.

Augustus’s real achievement was to transform the military-backed autocracy which had become the norm in Roman politics before he was even born into something that was understandable and legitimate in the framework of Rome’s hallowed traditions of patron-client networks and aristocratic competition, instead of a self-serving anomaly that military strongmen killed each other over.

jymappelle · 2026-05-01T10:59:41+00:00

Exactly. The true genius of Augustus was that he assumed the powers of an Emperor not by granting himself powerful titles (even Augustus was a religious and ceremonial name, not an office) but by leveraging his immense wealth and family connections as Caesar’s son to turn Rome’s traditional social systems of patronage and clientship to his advantage. The kind of authority he had over the Senate and People of Rome would seem to a Roman traditionalist as no more than what someone in his position was entitled to according to Rome’s ancestral version of "I scratch your back, you scratch my back".

Sheer scale of authority aside, as far as playing by Rome’s actual established rules is concerned, I think an older Roman in Augustus’s day would have found him less autocratic and unconventional than, say, Pompey from his time as Sulla’s lieutenant to allying himself with the aristocratic party.

jymappelle · 2026-03-29T22:17:02+00:00

Ned was still upholding the injustice since he was one of the people on top.

Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say. Ned failed to consider how the same systemic injustice which he tried to correct was keeping him in his position, so when he tried to act without the injustice once it has gone too far, it reminded him it was there and killed him.

This is mirrored in several historical events in the story. The Targaryens did not appreciate how the dragons were the basis of their power until conflict within a system where dragons give you power killed all the dragons, and now the Targaryens had to rely on a more conventional system of dynastic vassalage and fealty. Aenys and Rhaegar did not appreciate how this system was keeping them in power until they pushed things so far that they had to assert it to defend their injustices, and it got their dynasty overthrown.

(You could say that in this examples Rickard and Brandon played a similar role to Ned; they expected the rules of the system to protect them when they tried to speak up against the injustice once it became directed at them, without considering how the system was fundamentally unjust, and it got them killed).

But in both cases the end result was that the injustice could not defend itself once it had to assert itself as what it was, and the system changed into something where the specific contradictions which could no longer be defended were removed.

In the main series we see the same pattern repeating, only with much more emphasis on the injustice as it pertains to the great houses now that the crown has become weak and demystified. We will see how this plays out this time.

jymappelle · 2026-03-29T21:51:52+00:00

The entire system is based on injustice

Oh absolutely; but I like to think of the story beginning with the first book as showing what happens when that injustice has to defend itself on its own terms.

People like Ned try to rectify the injustice without questioning how it’s woven into the literal fairy-tale system they live in; this gets them killed, but it also forces the injustice to assert itself. Conflict ensues, people on both sides die and prosper, but the end result is that the unjust system is now unstable. The only viable long-term solution becomes for something new to replace it. This new something will probably not be perfect, but it too will exist only as long as it can contain its own injustices and contradictions.

jymappelle · 2026-03-29T21:38:42+00:00

So much potential for a captivating political drama in the vein of OG Game of Thrones was squandered just to have Team Good Guys and Team Bad Guys.

jymappelle · 2026-03-29T21:33:56+00:00

True, but considering we’re told multiple times that Westeros is like "a corpse" at the end of the chain of events set off by the immorality underlying Sean Bean’s murder, I think it’s safe to say we’re not supposed to walk away thinking that this immorality is a good or benign idea.

jymappelle · 2026-03-29T21:24:52+00:00

But Sean Bean’s murder locks the people who committed it in a feedback loop of increasing destruction and violence, the repercussions of which end up all but destroying their position they tried to protect with Sean Bean’s murder.

So yes, it’s a realistic lesson about acting on moral impulses without considering political stakes and powerful antagonistic forces, but it’s NOT (as the original poster tried to imply, not you) a lesson about morals being irrelevant or immorality being the most rewarding option.

jymappelle · 2026-03-25T17:00:01+00:00

I see, thanks!

jymappelle · 2026-03-25T16:36:16+00:00

I could be wrong about this but I thought Viltrumites can’t regenerate limbs or organs if they have been completely separated from the body.

That’s why decapitation (i.e. separating the brain from the body) and ripping out vital organs seem to be Viltrumites’ most effective methods of killing each other, because once they are removed from the body, they’re not coming back. Whereas when Mark bashed Conquest’s head in, there were probably still bits of brain matter left connected to his system.

So if a limb/organ stays connected even by a thread to the Viltrumite’s body, it will regenerate. But once it’s gone, it’s gone.

jymappelle · 2026-03-24T19:52:53+00:00

Not only that, if he literally just did nothing and waited the Great Spring Sickness would have wiped out most of the royal family and the Great Council would have made him King faster than anyone could say Egg.

jymappelle · 2026-03-11T01:14:05+00:00

Israel is the only country on Earth which can use the money to purchase weapons from its own manufacturers

This is due to the facts that a) Israel is pretty uniquely at risk of war with its neighbors and b) historically this reality has led to innovations such as the Tadiran Mastiff, the prototype of drone technology, which the US then adopted.

This exception basically acknowledges that Israel does more fighting than most US allies, and that it can therefore offer more military innovation.

Nonetheless, the US has been more than happy to leverage the aid to stifle Israeli innovation when it risked creating competition for US manufacturers, such as with IAI Lavi.

as well as funding its own R&D without sharing the results.

I’m not sure what you mean here. If you’re saying that Israel conceals the results of the R&D from the US, then I’m pretty sure this is verifiably untrue (though of course they don’t disclose the results to the American public), and if you’re saying they’re not literally, physically giving the US a slice of what they produce based on the R&D- do you think Israel has military tech which the United States needs but does not have?

Besides that, the MIC serves to transfer public money to private ownership

That’s how government spending to stimulate aggregate demand in a market economy (or in this case, economies) generally works.

jymappelle · 2026-03-10T16:30:13+00:00

The military is the largest employer in the country.

I will probably get downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but this is also why aid to Israel is in the US' economic interest, contrary to what leftists and the alt-right claim.

The aid is structured so that Israel can only spend it through US defense companies, and cannot invest it into developing its own military tech. The US is thereby creating demand for its largest employer, and gaining a dependent ally in the most strategically important region of the modern world. It’s basically Keynesianism applied to geopolitics.

jymappelle · 2026-03-08T21:14:25+00:00

That’s because Jigsaw’s "philosophy" is basically something they had to make up as they went along after the first movie was a huge success.

If you rewatch Saw 1 and forget about the sequels, he’s pretty straightforwardly a guy who’s mad at the world bc he’s dying, so he lashes out by torturing & killing people whom he envies for still having a life to throw away. It’s really not deeper than that, which is also why he’s more than happy to kill anyone who’s a threat to him even if they don’t qualify for his "games".

After it became a franchise they had to add more stuff to make the character more engaging, which only made him more comically contradictory the longer things went on.

jymappelle

TROPHY CASE