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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1374 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The creator of the film Obsession, Curry Barker, claims that the One Wish Willow is not a monkey's paw, but I feel like this doesn't make sense, or, if it is true, it undermines the point of the film.

Bear wishes for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world." An aligned One Wish Willow should not have made her obsessive to the point of murder and cat-cooking. Even if you follow the logic that the real Nikki would never fall in love with him, so it has to create a Freaky Nikki persona who would, that also just isn't what he asked for.

Even if he was more in love with the idea of Nikki, than in her in her full personhood, Freaky Nikki is not Nikki, and not just in the minimal way that his wish should have implied.

I feel like Barker's statement implies that a more evil wish, like, "I wish for Nikki's personality to be completely erased and replaced with a robot persona that carries out my orders exactly as I intend them" would have had better results than Bear's comparatively less evil wish. But since the film is a classic "be careful what you wish for" horror movie, I find it easier to believe that the wish granter is actively malevolent in how it interprets any wish that impacts human agency, and even a wish like that will have a bad outcome somehow.

Like, is the take away really supposed to be that Bear simply should have waited to get a better sense of the limitations and proclivities of his wish-granting artifact, by watching other people use theirs, and then make his wish after running it by a lawyer? Surely not.

Barker doesn't strikes me as someone who very concerned with rigorous logical world building. He does seem to think a lot about producing an interesting and entertaining product. I don't think the movie is trying to make a point or even trying to explore any themes very deeply. I think the simplest explanation for the things he's said is that he doesn't want to be constrained in how the world works. Is it a monkey's paw? If he says yes that restricts in-world stories where the wish didn't have bad consequences. He's also said it's not a demon possession movie, but not really clarified beyond that. It's very clearly a monkey-paw-demon-possession-like movie, but there's no benefit in actually committing to this. I imagine coming from a sketch comedy background his instinct is to avoid boxing himself in, especially with an idea that turned out to be such a success.

Barker’s commentary is just post hoc rationalization to appease feminist seethe following the movie.

From a lipstick feminist perspective, the takeaway is that Bear—as a low status male—had no right to wish for anything, much less be deserved of having a wish of his come true (even if accidental and mangled).

Bear should have read the One Wish Willow’s mind and known what would have happened. Failing that and after making the wish, he should have immediately recognized his wrongdoing and should have been hyperagentic and competent enough to just Figure It Out and undo whatever the One Wish Willow did. No, instead the clueless “Nice Guy” chose to rape Nikki with the One Wish Willow’s help.

Just have the emotional intelligence to recognize when a supernatural, possibly omnipotent force is up to no good and Do the Bear Minimum in defeating it to go back to accepting your fate as a low status male. Ugh, it’s that easy—why can’t men just get it? The bar is on the floor. This is why women choose the animal bear.

The wish itself is just window-dressing.
James Bond or Jason Bourne are an idealized, fantasized version of real spies/special forces soldiers. They are a convenient vehicle to show action scenes and maybe share some ideas about terrorism, conspiracies, state secrets, geopolitical issues etc.
In the same manner, having a man 'cause' a woman to be crazy allows to show what a crazy woman looks like, and give some words of caution about it.
Notice how in this real life setting you have a woman having multiple meltdowns in public and nobody really reacts whatsoever? Notice how the friend group is at best cursorily inquiring if the man is taking advantage of the crazy woman?

The message of the movie is possibly that a crazy woman will ruin your life, perhaps drive you to suicide and nobody will save you. The director is pretty clever for finding something that resonates with viewers and getting away with it.

This is the same bullshit way of thinking about the movie that your opponents use; they dismiss One Wish Willow as an agentic force that deserves part of the blame for the film's events because it's "just an allegory for" men controlling women. You've gotta handle stories at least a little bit literally.

I mean I don't claim to know what the director had in mind making the movie, but if I were a director trying to sell a movie showing a crazy BPD girlfriend and graphic physical violence against a woman, I'd try to give the impression that there's some kind of feminist message.
I'm not a horror fan as I can't make myself vulnerable enough to be scared on behalf of fictional characters, but I liked the story and appreciated the dark comedy throughout.
I think it'd have been interesting if there was a plausible doubt that the magic worked at all. Story would have been more subtle and maybe not worked as well as it did.

For many reasons, I'm inclined to say that Barker is simply lying about this, which is unfortunate because it's a great movie; fortunately, the lie doesn’t survive contact with the film itself. It's a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, and also a classic deal-with-the-devil story; these archetypes classically go together and the film telegraphs both of them hard. Bear makes an evil wish and it is granted by an evil power; its interpretation of his wish is malicious, but the whole point of that malice is to damn him, and it can't do that with a cheap trick unrelated to his intent in making the wish. So Nikki is possessed by another personality (a demon, because this is basically the devil granting the wish) because Bear wouldn’t actually mind his wish being granted that way in principle; that personality is fucking crazy because that's the level of intensity Bear initially envisioned. And the Willow made its way into Bear's hands in the first place because he was the sort of person to do that, because he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.

TBH I think a large part of Barker's motivation in making these implausible claims about his film is just that he's scared of Hollywood reading it as religious. Which gets lost in a lot of the normie social media discourse on it, which thinks of demonic possession as a stock horror movie trope like vampires or zombies and not as a phenomenon a lot of the world believes in as part of their faith.

he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.

Wait, the guy literally finds the wish-granting thingee in a creepy shop? That seems like a pretty strong monkey's paw callout in and of itself...

I kept reading this infuriating take about demonic possession or something.

'anyone in the world' clearly includes psychotic, insane people that do crazy things like killing themselves to further political or religious causes. The magic is entirely about non-consensually shifting the behavior of a regular woman into the most insane possible woman infatuated with main character. You can probably find evidence of separate insane women doing all of the insane things Nikki does in the movie.

The Bear -the one they chose, get it?- essentially chose to have the worst possible BPD girlfriend.

Like, is the take away really supposed to be that Bear simply should have waited to get a better sense of the limitations and proclivities of his wish-granting artifact, by watching other people use theirs, and then make his wish after running it by a lawyer? Surely not.

The take-away is that you should pick carefully who you associate with, and pay attention to who you're spending time with. The wishing willow was only necessary to get the movie classified as 'horror' and maybe not straight up have the movie branded as a 'b# be crazy yo' movie.

The filmmaker was doing comedy/horror videos before. This is essentially a dark comedy about domestic violence. There's definitely something comedic about the pretty taboo ultra-violent scene unnecessarily lasting 30s too long 'look I get to show this on a screen, and I'm making millions too'.

'anyone in the world' clearly includes psychotic, insane people that do crazy things like killing themselves to further political or religious causes. The magic is entirely about non-consensually shifting the behavior of a regular woman into the most insane possible woman infatuated with main character. You can probably find evidence of separate insane women doing all of the insane things Nikki does in the movie.

While I think there is ambiguity in Bear's wording, I actually interpreted the wish to be for "Nikki to love [him] more than [she loves] anyone [else] in the fucking world" as opposed to for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world [loves anyone else]."

This is part of why I say it is a monkey's paw, or some other flavor of asshole genie. Almost any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.) The sign of a "good" genie, is that you make a wish in plain English, and they interpret in a way you would endorse via coherent extrapolated volition, or they at least make a good faith effort to give you what you asked for with no nasty gotchas.

If the One Wish Willow will just give you a million dollars in a pretty straightforward way, but it creates a demonic persona when you make a love potion wish, that's an entity that is out to get you in some way.

One interpretation means loving more than the most loving psycho out there, the other interpretation means loving somebody more than you love yourself, which might be even worse and explain most of the behaviors in the movie.
In that case of love, one can imagine it may be physically painful to be significantly apart from the loved one, like a junkie missing a dose.
Junkies are known to do crazy things for their drug, so that's also an explanation that does not require a demon.

The sign of a "good" genie, is that you make a wish in plain English, and they interpret in a way you would endorse via coherent extrapolated volition, or they at least make a good faith effort to give you what you asked for with no nasty gotchas.

I mean we have 'good genies' right now trying to give people what they want, without any magic, and we still end up with supposedly educated/smart people getting AI psychosis and thinking that they are the Chosen one who figured out some secret of the universe. Allegedly.

If the One Wish Willow will just give you a million dollars in a pretty straightforward way

One million dollars falling from the sky might still cause plenty of issues, from simple tax problems to the paranoia of losing it all. This already happens to people who win the lottery.

any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.)

You know, I generally agree with you, but in fact Bear's buddy wishes for a million dollars and it comes in stacks of hundreds falling harmlessly from the ceiling, which complicates the monkey's paw claim.

I would chalk it to either an angler fish strategy, or the OWW having a sense of dramatic irony.

Since there are enough OWWs in the word that you can see other people's wishes granted, maybe the OWW lures people in by granting a subset of wishes not touching on human agency in a completely straightforward way. That way, it generates positive word of mouth and gets more people to use it for the kinds of wishes it likes to corrupt.

Alternatively, maybe the OWW just knew with high probability that the guy would never get to use the money because of Nikki, so it was happy to grant the wish for the dramatic irony his death would produce.

I may be misremembering the movie, but didn’t Bear’s friend go to Bear’s house to brag about the money then immediately get shot by Nikki? That sequence of events was caused by the money, and would be a monkey’s paw.

That sequence of events was caused by the money

Difficult to say. Certainly I'd say that it wasn't "caused" in the same way that Bear's wish caused Nikki to become possessed. If we're stipulating that there's no free will in the Obsession universe and Ian could not have chosen otherwise but to go brag about the money when Nikki was home and therefore get shot then that has some significant implications on Bear's culpability and questions about monkey's paws and what caused what become somewhat moot - the whole sequence of events was predetermined anyway.

Im a believer in compatibilism, so I don’t think there is a contradiction between determinism and free will. My personal headcanon is that any wish from the one-wish-willow either directly causes something bad, like Nikki’s possession, or indirectly causes something bad like the above sequence Friend gets money -> Friend goes to brag about it -> Friend gets shot by Nikki.

We are getting into death of the author territory at this point, so this is just a personal rationalization of the mechanics of the movie.

My personal interpretation is that the One Wish Willow cared more about screwing over Bear than Ian, because he had more to work with psychologically, but also it knew that Ian was doomed anyway because he'd wander into Bear's house minutes later. But it wouldn't be in-character for the One Wish Willow to kill Ian by dropping money on his head, anyway, because it's demonic, it cares about corrupting the soul; if it's going to corrupt a wish for money, it's going to do it by provoking further doubling-down on avarice.

but also it knew that Ian was doomed anyway because he'd wander into Bear's house minutes later.

So no free will in the Obsession cinematic universe? Difficult to assign blame then, or discuss whether the genie is an asshole.

This btw seemed a very weak part of the movie - Bear has already seen the money, wtf is Ian barging into Bear's house for?

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