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Notes -
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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