I genuinely appreciate how obsession doesn't try to frame bear as morally grey but just fully leans into how deplorable he is. a lesser movie would have tried to give him redeeming moments along the way but no, at every single crossroads bear makes the wrong choice. when the customer service rep asks him if he wants to cancel his wish, he says no, and asks to alter it. when nikki, the real one, begs him to kill her, he asks her "if it would be so bad to love him", and right at the end, backs out of killing himself and tries to throw the pills up. he is the villain, not another victim, not a confused, cowardly boy, the villain.
Bear is a cowardly boy, actually. And that is the whole problem.
In his speech in the beginning, he talks about how he has felt this way for like seven years. And Ian asks him if he has ever ONCE tried to flirt with her, not even the bad kind of flirting (nagging her about Freaky Nikki) and he hasn't. He can't tell Nikki he likes her even when directly asked, and even he is confused by that action. He doesn't wish to be able to tell her about his feelings, he wishes that SHE would love HIM more than anything in the world. He only admits that she's acting strange because of something HE did when the entity inside Nikki has already done irreparable damage—that he can't fix by just gaslighting everyone. He is told over and over again that the way to end this is to kill himself and he never does it, he backtracks at every point and only when his will is superseded does he actually die. He tries to placate the entity inside Nikki because he doesn't want to confront the situation: this ISN'T Nikki and IT IS all his fault. Because if he can make her "not be weird" (once again, a coward, not wanting to deal with the public scrutiny), then all that's left is their little romance and that's all that he cares about. But he can't make her not be weird, again because he is a coward and that would require confrontation and possibly some backlash. The entity was created to serve him, to love him, and he can't even ask her politely to not do technically innocuous things like watching him as he sleeps—specifically because he doesn't have experience in confrontation because HE IS A COWARD and his cowardice has prevented him from having very normal human interactions. Even at the end, there were 2 options to end the wish: end his life or ASK HER TO MAKE A WISH FOR HIM, because she loves him and would to anything for him. And even that he can't do, so he goes for the first and still backtracks TWICE.
Of course, if he COULD have talked the entity into doing what he wants, the movie might've been even more horrifying, specially for the real Nikki. But all the bad in the movie stems from his cowardice, it bleeds into his every decision and ruins the life of everyone around him in the process.
