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Yeah that might have been “meme of the year” for me. I saw the movie and loved it but immediately knew that feminist interpretation of it would be unbearably wrong and annoying.
It’s a horror movie about unwittingly getting exactly what you wished for in a throwaway moment with essentially no recourse to change it.
It’s a simple yet effective straightforward horror movie with minimal subtext, but of course online feminists have to find someway to make the male protagonist take all the blame for what is essentially unknown demon magic and extraordinary bad luck.
Seeing it thrown back at them is hilarious and never gets old.
My favorite tweet about it was in the same genre:
“Horror Movie ideas for 2026. Men: What if your girlfriend was insane? Women: What if you had to be kind to a man you weren’t attracted to?”
I don't think you need to be a feminist at all to see Bear as the villain of the movie and it's deeply disturbing to me how popular Bear-sympathetic interpretations have gotten. I want to say it's feminist-driven negative polarization.
Eh, I think it's wrong to think about anyone as "the villain" besides the evil possession magic. Bear is deeply flawed, most centrally he's chronically passive and indecisive. In TLP terms he wants the company to want to pay him more but not to have to ask for it. The only action he ever took to get what he wanted was something he calculated as being totally unable to help, making a throw away wish. Then he's in the relationship he knows something is wrong but chooses to basically ignore it and just go with it because he's cartoonishly incapable of acting. All of that and more is true of him, but after he made the wish that he had no way of knowing would be interpreted monkey's paw style in the worst possible way there was nothing he really could have done besides killing himself. I'm not quite willing to raise "if you don't kill yourself to right a wrong you didn't intentionally commit" to the level of villain. He's a coward, but that's a forgivable sin.
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I mean, basically once the bullshit magic trinket actually turned out to be real and he understood it to be the cause of everything, the only way bear could “do the right thing” was to kill himself or commit murder.
Casting him as the villain is an insane reach despite his personal failings or character flaws; he was 100% fucked no matter what.
The director basically just came out and said Nikki is probably going to prison for the rest of her life after the end of the film.
It’s a straight up tragedy, the need to cast either of the protagonists as “the villain” is indicative of how poisoned our gender discourse is and how abominally privileged women are in western society
I agree that he blundered his way into an extremely fucked situation and that (contra the director's statements) the One Wish Willow company bears more responsibility than he does. But he still basically impulsively asked the devil to help him rape his crush and then spent most of the movie feigning ignorance about it. Medieval peasants would have an easy time condemning him for witchcraft and I think they would actually be 100% justified in doing so. I don't think the line of thought "it is so absurd to think that the One Wish Willow is real that I have no responsibility to consider that any anomalous events might be the result of it working" can coherently coexist with Bear's decision to use it in a private emotional fit in the first place. If it's real enough to make a wish on it's real enough to keep a fucking eye on.
Ah, I see.
A couple things;
I don’t particularly like or empathize with bear, I think he’s a spineless twerp with lots of personality issues. That being said “Satan, please help me rape my crush” is the most uncharitable take on his actions possible.
He wanted her to love him more than anything in the world, without really taking the request seriously. It was in a fit of desperation he said this thing, there’s no evidence that he thought it was actually going to work otherwise even a loser like him might have worded it differently. He, unfortunately, got exactly what he asked for.
Unrequited love / lust is a pretty common, gender neutral phenomenon that just people will experience in their lifetime, we ha level just been culturally trained to find it toxic coming from a man, and really only recently.
Most people in this situation would experience extreme cognitive dissonance, man or woman. Coming to the conclusion that “I, through a magic item that I don’t and can’t understand, directly caused the torture and annihilation of someone’s else will through unknowingly careless action” is maybe one of the toughest pills anyone could ever swallow, both intellectually and emotionally, and 99% of people would only come to that conclusion until everything else was eliminated.
We know he’s in a movie and he doesn’t; if this thing worked on basically any of us it would take a long time for someone to come to the most painful and “logical” conclusion.
We see him go through every step of this process and by the time he’s finally figured it out and accepted it he’s basically forced to either kill himself or commit murder, both things most people straight up don’t have the balls to do.
He’s not a villain, he’s just a garden variety coward. There’s literally billions of people like that.
Yeah, I've been there before, to put it mildly. My adolescence was full of strife in that department. When I was younger than Bear (okay, a lot younger than Bear - I'm mostly thinking of an incident when I was ten years old), I might well have done the same thing he did. But I'd sure like to think, at least, that if I had and it had worked, I would have woken up to the situation more quickly. That doesn't even necessarily mean committing murder or suicide - getting a priest would be a decent start. At the very fucking least don't phone up the wish company and attempt to haggle your way into getting a nicer demon.
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It's not. The site has an old .reddit.com redirect in it's settings, that's broken. Just switch it to
reddit.com(withoutold.) and it will work.This is the image url: https://preview.redd.it/i-hate-memes-that-use-this-image-v0-upg3gp8rln5h1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f41ffae8bfae3bf5e37ae67f398546f7a46cc158
Mirrored here: https://i.imgur.com/nKqIi9F.jpeg
I think people should start screenshotting/mirroring reddit considering how much they like to fuck with everything. (For example, reddit now blocks people from viewing old.reddit.com without an account.)
My experience is the opposite. I can browse old Reddit all I want, but new Reddit throws up a sign-in screen about 20 seconds after the page loads.
A few days ago, the company made a post explicitly stating that access to old . reddit . com soon will be blocked for non-logged-in users.
Well that sucks. Looks like I’m about to stop browsing Reddit entirely.
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To be fair, the horror (for women) is not in being kind to an unattractive man, but in being mind-controlled by an unattractive man. Still a banger tweet, though
Yeah the joke is understated on both ends; “insane” doesn’t begin to cover the condition Nikki was subjected to.
Demonic possession more like.
Ehh, one is a difference in degree, the other a difference in kind.
She’s not being mind controlled by a man, she’s possessed by malign man-made sorcery.
If she was really under his control she wouldn’t do half the things that she did, he hated it too. He spent like half the movie utterly terrified of her.
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It works when I hit “edit” and copy the link out to paste it, but it doesn’t work for me either when I click the link from the posted comment.
It’s likely due to the old.reddit.com conversion we have under “Settings.” I don’t know if there’s a way to hardcode it so it opens the same way for everyone regardless of settings.
Just upload it to The Motte.
/images/17834438272360094.webp
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Yeah, the movie is about "love potions and love charms are bad and here's why: mind control is not a nice thing and if you call up demons, you get demons".
“Be careful what you wish for”, a tale as old as time. Well told, for sure, but very well trodden ground.
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