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@chromacandescent -> #ignitedart art archive, sometimes reblogged with process

@solarsubtractive -> photography and edits

@cessantconcatenation -> #ignitedink writing archive, sometimes reblogged with accompanying materials, e.g. drafts, images, sideblog-only voice recordings

Highlights!

The Silt Verses fanfic

Siltober 2026

Inprnt

Ko-fi

Cara

Bluesky

Find vetted fundraisers for Gaza here

#ignitedart #ignitedink #art #writing #photography #new pinned

vullen

future archaeologists will know you were (not) a boy

vullen

i've seen countless kind and emotional replies in the year or so since i posted this comic, but this particular tag set has squeezed me unlike any other. thanks

valtsv

a lot of phm fandom sadism tends to be focused on grace and, like, i get it, he's got a lot in common with one of those stress toys with the eyes that pop out of its skull in a way that's kind of cute and kind of viciously satisfying when you squeeze it, but the amount of times i see rocky being overlooked or even being the one to lead the efforts to violate his hard-won and precarious safety - with the best of intentions, but at the end of the day, well, he's an alien with alien cultural norms and values that might affect his judgement [pause while i roll my eyes] - it does honestly make me wonder if we watched the same movie. especially the scene where rocky tears down the only thing protecting him from dying in prolonged and hideous agony with his bare hands to save grace from suffocating in adrian's gravity. yeah, he has unimaginably horrific (try to conceive of being alone, truly isolated in the most literal sense of the word, for 46 years. you can't.) abandonment trauma and outwardly lacks much sympathy for grace's boundaries (which are themselves the product of a lifetime of experiences more nuanced and not necessarily beneficial to him or anyone else than uncomplicatedly right), but he values grace; values his life and everything that entails - his comfort and safety and happiness, his desires and needs and opinions - while he values himself very little by comparison. so many of his efforts to connect with grace cost him just as much, if not more, of his comfort and safety, but he does it anyway because he loves him beyond rationality and because he would rather die than be alone again, and that isn't hyperbole. rocky would delay his return home by years if it meant that grace could make it back alive, even if he'll never be able to see it. rocky would do anything in his power to fix a problem, including die trying. grace understands that rocky isn't responsible for the deaths of 23 people, we as the audience understand because grace explains it to us, and any reasonable person would also understand if the same facts were presented to them, but rocky doesn't have that kind of faith in himself. rocky will make sure that if it has to be even one more, it won't be grace, or adrian, or any other eridian or human he could have saved if he was only good enough to fix it. because if he can't, then what's the point of him having survived, just to be left alone again when everyone else is gone?

valtsv

"ohhhhh grace doesn't love himself enough to let himself say no" he literally says no. quite firmly. it's actually pretty significant to the plot of the entire story that he says no. you're thinking of one Rocky Thee Eridian.

greensmile-thatisnotdream

@wolfythewitch saw this and thought of your comic

buffyspeak

the thing about obsession is that every single aspect of the dynamic between bear and nikki forced anything that was hard, any aspect of burden, onto her. even before the wish.

she calls him (iirc) to talk about why he wasn’t at work and their plans for the bar. instead of being honest or emotionally vulnerable with her because it would be uncomfortable for him, he doesn’t tell her why he’s not coming out until later (seemingly off-screen). for the duration of their phone call, she is the one giving up vulnerable information and throwing out the rope to express she wants to hang out with him.

when they’re at the bar and he tries to pay, he hands her the card. i don’t actually want him to have paid bc nikki didn’t want him to, but he very easily could have handed the bartender his card instead if he really had much intention. instead, it (imo) functions as a brief symbol; even when he’s trying to do something ‘nice’, he still hands that symbol of responsibility over to her to have to deal with.

when he’s too scared to tell her how he feels and instead tries to neg her, it instead forces her into the position of feeling the need to be really direct and ask if he likes her.

his wish, made in frustration, also puts all the burden on her; he could have simply wished she knew how he felt, but instead he wishes that she loved him, and emphasizes the very weighty burden of “more than any one in the fucking world” (which i don’t think was poor syntax on his part. i think he meant it like that). this wish forces wish nikki to be the one to start initiating and showing interest, even kissing him first. bc while he wants this from nikki, he never wants to have to make the first move for fear of being rejected.

when he’s confronted with reality that real nikki is suffering hearing her screams over the phone, he hears what he’s putting her through and just… does nothing. i don’t even mean that he doesn’t do anything to help her (though that too, since at this point he knows his death would free her) or that he hangs up (though how quickly he does is gross) bc he has to hang up at some point. it’s that he doesn’t even express regret or acknowledgement that it’s fault. an “i’m so sorry nikki” wouldn’t have even begun to make up for it, but the fact that he couldn’t even do that? it was just all about how it made him feel. and then he just… goes along with life. knowing the torment she’s being put through because of him, however one interprets what that torment was.

wish nikki also expends (in deeply strange ways, bc she doesn’t know how to be what he wants from her) a lot of energy trying to do things for him. she cuts his hair, makes lunch. and it’s the weirdness of the way she does those things that freaks him out, not the fact that she’s apparently trying to serve him in ways real nikki never has before and wouldn’t if she had a choice. if wish nikki had cut his hair while he was awake and had given him a normal lunch, he wouldn’t have cared—if anything, i think he’d have liked it. he’s perfectly content to eat the lunch before he knows what it is.

when wish nikki is watching him sleep and freaks out in the night because she didn’t like her dreams (presumably real nikki’s nightmares), and starts watching him sleep, he doesn’t actually do anything to comfort her. he just tells her to come back to bed. and the next morning, when he’s expressing that it freaked him out, wish nikki tries to literally perform happiness for him with that smile and ask how it is.

speaking of that lunch: real nikki is also put through the burden of trying to show him it’s not really her with the pictures and notes “you. not me.” she has to do this seemingly unaware that he already knows.

at the party, when they’re playing a drinking game, bear SO easily could have just taken a drink when the card said to kiss the person on his left. i’d have to go and check, but i’m pretty sure his bottle’s even already open. he could also choose to say he’s not kissing someone else, the game be damned, even if that one sip of a beer he was already holding was just too much. (yes i have seen the “well he doesn’t like the taste of alcohol” defense yes i hate it.) and instead he just… waits for wish nikki to freak out, make a scene, and allows her to do all this in a way i feel sure would be deeply degrading to the real nikki.

also at the party, when wish nikki freaks everyone out, it puts both her and real nikki in the position of having to defend herself to their friends. “i’m just kidding guys” vs. “it’s not me”! it’s for different reasons — real nikki is also crying out for help - but the same general prinicipal applies. bear says and does nothing to help.

they both are forced to fight each other for control while, again, bear sits there and does nothing until nikki smashes herself with a bottle (it’s unclear to me whether this is real nikki trying to hurt herself or wish nikki trying to stop her) and it’s only at the continued insistence of everyone else he eventually takes her to the hospital.

the scene of wish nikki on her knees, sobbing and insisting she can be whatever he wants her to be while knowing she can’t, happens because that is what he has shown her he wants. all of her unreciprocated effort in a task that is impossible for her to live up to. and when real nikki seems to lunge for him (rightfully so), it’s wish nikki doing the work to hold her back rather than him making any substantial move to protect himself.

and while i think it would have been horrifyingly bleak for him to kill real nikki before or even when she literally begs him, it’s also horrifying that he can’t even find it in him to put her out of her misery and put his ego aside. she is begging for him to KILL her, she has to ask him for this one bare scrap to show he cares anything at all about her or what she wants or her suffering. and not only will he not do it, he makes it all about his own feelings. “what would be so bad? what’s so bad about being with me?” in this moment she is literally begging him to KILL her because of what he’s done to her, he responds with a question that puts weight on her to emotionally soothe his ego.

when wish nikki kills sarah, she has to convince him to help her start to dispose of her body.

and even once he finally decides to die, you get the sense that it’s less because he’s trying to save her and more because he’s reached his breaking point. and even then, he can’t go through with it. he’s going to throw the pills up, and the only thing that stops him is wish nikki using her own OWW, presumably to make him love her the same way she loves him.

and the fuck of it all is that it doesn’t end when bear dies and wish nikki is gone and real nikki is in full control again. she wakes up covered in blood and with bear’s dead body in her lap, her own body forced to have killed their other two friends. her life, more than likely, is ruined, because even outside of the horrific trauma she’ll always be dealing with, bear dying, while it freed her, still left her completely alone to deal the aftermath. after all that, she’s probably going to jail for a chain of events he caused and she had no say in.

bear wanted the power to make nikki love him, but he wanted none of the actual responsibility of a relationship between equal partners (obviously.) even in a relationship bear literally forced by wishing for it, nikki still had to do and suffer the burden of literally everything.

thebowieconstrickter

Was thinking about how fitting it is that Bear wants to be a food critic while Nikki wants to be a writer.

He wants to complain about the creations of someone else, adding nothing but despair to their lives, refusing to contribute anything helpful or new.

She wants to create something original but is stuck in an imitation of herself, forced to reenact a plot she hates.

#he doesn't even actually want to be a food critic. he has no interest or respect for the skills and knowledge and experiences required #he wants the power he can wield as a food critic #he wants restaurants to bend over backwards to please him for his good word. free food and obsequious servers #it's the same way he treats wish nikki. his good opinion and criticism means everything to her and he knows it.#he gets to eat her and criticise that too

acefuruya

the longer I sit with obsession the more empathy I start to feel for entity!nikki. this creature that was created solely to love one person with this all-encompassing intensity that needed to be stronger than anything anyone felt in the entire world. entity!nikki whose entire world was just one single focal point; she'd do anything for bear to love her. she didn't know anything when she came into existence, but she was willing to do anything to get this man to fall for her.

it must have been equally terrifying for her as it was for the real nikki to have someone else fight for control over what she perceived as her body. the scene where she's sobbing in the corner, terrified of her dreams is now more sad than terrifying to me. real nikki, who has just been raped by her once best friend hurting so badly that it seeps into entity!nikki's nightmares. entity!nikki who doesn't understand why the thing she wanted so badly is causing her so much pain. why she can't bring herself to lie in bed next to the man who is the center of her world.

and the worst part is bear doesn't even seem to like her. she's trying so so hard; she made a lovely memorial for his dead cat, she waited for him to come home all day without moving an inch, she made sure to be the most doting girlfriend at the party, and he's not pleased by any of it. he seems disturbed and angry and scared and she has no idea what to do to make it better. to make it worse, he keeps asking her to behave like the original nikki but he was the one who wished for her!! she can't be like nikki because nikki was simply not capable of loving bear even a fraction of how much she does!

she can't seem to reconcile it; he wanted her so badly he conjured her into reality and now he doesn't want her anymore. she doesn't know what to do. she tries everything. she obsesses over him, she threatens to hurt herself, she gets rid of that bitch sarah who keeps distracting him and trying to steal him away, and then dresses in her clothes for good measure and he still doesn't want her.

and then finally in a fit of desperation, she makes the wish and for one beautiful moment its all perfect. he's finally looking at her the way she looks at him. and then he's dead and she's lost everything.

her entire existence, from the moment of her conception to her death was painful, and confusing, and so very sad.

kuviraissues

not your nikki

officialdietcoke

on my second viewing of obsession, i had the realization that nikki’s story at the party wasn’t the movie using incest as an easy shorthand for making the audience uncomfortable or creating a general “things are off” vibe but was another way the real nikki was crying out—a metaphor for the fact that nikki, like gretel, is being made to fuck her “little brother” (bear) under duress, at the behest of an external magic (the witch’s spell in her story; obviously, bear’s wish)

#the incest ref also made me think of Adam and Eve. a sister-wife created from himself for the sole purpose of belonging to him #especially since Eve exists because Lilith would not submit

ceruleanheaven

nikki begging bear to kill her and all he does is ask whats so bad about being with him. one of the most nauseating scenes ive ever witnessed

serendipitous-posts

Just saw the interview where Curry Barker explained that it's totally possible to get a normal wish from the One Wish Willow, and I love the way they did that so much. The reason Obsession happened isn't because it's trying to twist Bear's desires into something evil. It's not even because he phrased his want wrong. Obsession happened because Bear got his hands on a magic item that could do anything in existence, and chose to force someone to fall in love with him, which is an inherently evil thing to do.