fandom brainrot

she/they | minor | in my psych era | used to be @girlthatlikestotalk

[themortifyingordealofbeingloved]

closeted t4t ladynoir who can't recognize each other outside of costume bc they're stuck pretending to be cis in their everyday lives

[wanderingcoasties]

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post. (via 360degreesasthecrowflies)

[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.

[selfvirtue]

i've been trying to understand why the director said that nikki wasn't possessed but your explanation of an entity being created, which is very different than demonic possession, makes complete sense. a life created solely to fufill bears wish, fighting for control over a body she shares with the real nikki. literally learning as she goes and the center of her life constantly meets her with discomfort or anger. reminds me a lot of frankenstein and the creature.

[dellscape]

a long ass yap

****SPOILERS AHEAD DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED OBSESSION!!!!****

____________________________________________________________

The more I think about Obsession, the more convinced I become that it functions as an allegory for rape and coercion. (to be fair i thought this the moment he made that wish lol)

Not because it contains a traditional assault scene. Quite the opposite.

The horror comes from the fact that Nikki appears to consent.

That is what makes it so disturbing.

The wish does not chain her to a wall. It does not physically force her body to move. Instead, it takes control of the thing that allows consent to exist in the first place: her ability to choose.

The moment Bear wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone else in the world, Nikki's autonomy begins disappearing piece by piece. We watch her recognize that something is wrong almost immediately. She repeatedly asks what she is doing. She mirrors conversations instead of participating in them. She argues with herself. She seems confused by her own actions. At one point she outright says, "Wait, what the fuck am I doing?"

That is not the reaction of a woman freely choosing a relationship.

That is the reaction of someone realizing she no longer has control over herself.

What makes Bear so unsettling is that he knows this.

The film goes out of its way to show us that he knows.

He keeps asking if she is okay. He keeps commenting on how strange she is acting. He repeatedly looks uncomfortable and confused by her behavior. Yet every time he is presented with evidence that Nikki is not acting like herself, he chooses to benefit from it anyway.

That is why the bedroom scene is so important.

When Nikki kisses him and then immediately recoils in horror, screaming and panicking, Bear's response is not concern.

His response is, "You kissed me."

Technically true.

Morally meaningless.

Because the film has already established that Nikki is not operating with normal judgment. Bear knows something has fundamentally altered her behavior, yet he immediately removes responsibility from himself and frames the situation as something that simply happened to him.

From that point forward, Nikki becomes less and less like a person and more like a prisoner trapped inside her own body.

The film repeatedly visualizes this loss of autonomy. She stares at him for hours. She follows him compulsively. She structures her entire existence around him. She becomes physically unable to separate herself from him. Even when she appears happy, the audience is constantly shown flashes of terror underneath the performance.

And then the movie does something brilliant.

It shows us the consequences of being trapped inside a body that no longer belongs to you.

Nikki's body begins breaking down.

She stands for hours without moving. She soils herself. She vomits. She deteriorates physically and mentally.

Many viewers interpret this simply as obsession taken to an extreme.

I don't.

I see a body rejecting a reality that the mind cannot accept.

The real Nikki knows something is wrong.

The real Nikki knows she does not want this.

The real Nikki knows she cannot escape.

And her body begins expressing that distress in ways her mind no longer can.

The most heartbreaking part of the movie is that every time Nikki briefly resurfaces, nobody helps her.

Ian notices something is wrong.

Sarah notices something is wrong.

Bear definitely notices something is wrong.

The audience notices something is wrong.

Yet nobody saves her.

Instead, people continually return her to the man benefiting from her condition.

Even the hotline scene reinforces this reading. When Bear calls asking to modify the wish, he never asks how to free Nikki. He never asks how to restore her autonomy. He never asks how to undo the harm.

He asks how to make the situation more manageable.

The focus remains on his discomfort rather than her suffering.

That is what ultimately convinced me that the film is not about romance gone wrong.

It is about entitlement.

It is about what happens when someone's desire becomes more important than another person's agency.

The horror is not that Nikki loves Bear.

The horror is that she doesn't, and is forced to love him/be raped by him constantly.

i don't know... i can't stop thinking about it...

[yurimom]

obsession was great. the themes are especially great when viewed thru a feminist lens. i think you could even go so far as to view it as a metaphor for reactive abuse (the way bear makes a wish for nikki to love him more than anything in the world / be obsessed with him, then lets everyone believe she’s just gone crazy put of nowhere, all while still not wanting to end his relationship with her. of course it’s not one to one but the subtle themes are there.)

i also enjoyed how the film showed what everyday violations of consent can look like…media often shows the most obvious, often-dramatized occurrences of it, but this depicted a more common way of it showing up.

bear did indeed take advantage of nikki while she was in a mentally unstable state. he was well aware her consent was compromised. all the while he is very insecure about it, knows what he is doing, becomes aware even that nikki is aware and it is hurting her, continues doing it. i love that this film names this. it even critiques “not like the other girls” anti-feminism through sarah, who sees it as nikki taking advantage of bear…then she ironically tries to take advantage of bear’s vulnerable state herself by coming onto him.

also on a smaller note nikki’s batshit incestuous gorey hansel and gretel story had great prose i enjoyed it. my partner pointed out that before the wish, nikki saw bear as a little brother figure. meaning the hansel and gretel thing very well could have come from real feelings of disgust, like it nearly feels like an incestuous relationship to her.

and the ENDING. a lesser film would have insisted that, in these circumstances where the wish can only be broken if one of them dies, the male lead must survive between the two. but there was no self sacrifice from nikki out of “love”, there was no moment of lucidity or jealousy or rage where she kills herself, bear is forced by the narrative to take full responsibility for what he has done to nikki. what’s more— he reaches for a gun, almost uses it, ultimately decides on overdosing on pills. my partner and i personally think this was intentional commentary on masculinity, by having bear consider, then reject, the way men typically choose suicide in favor of the way women typically choose it. just a fun detail and maybe we’re both batshit.

good movie. all of that said though i’m sure a lot of people will boil it down to “haha women are soooo crazy…”

[ashortcuttomushrooms]

Some thoughts I have on Obsession that I haven't yet seen discussed too much in the tags (or I have, but I just want to express them in my own words):

While it's somewhat played up for comedic purposes, the scenes in which Bear asks Not Nikki to stop doing something and she just goes "Okay! :D" stick out to me so much. She was very willing to hear him out when he complained about her behavior (at least sometimes) but it was never going to be enough anyway. When he was telling her that hiding in the corner and watching him sleep made him uncomfortable, she seemed genuinely worried about having made him feel bad, something he never once did for her or the real Nikki (made even more heartbreaking by the "I can be anything you want me to be!" line)

A lot of people are focusing on how Bear first asks to alter his wish and only asks to cancel it once he's told it can't be altered (understandably, it's a great and very important scene), but do not forget that after he buys more One Wish Willows, the first thing he tries to do is wish for Nikki to "only love him as a friend." Even when he's trying to revert things back to "normal" he still feels entitled to having her in his life. And at first I thought "well that's still not good but it's a little better" but then I thought about it for more than five seconds and no, that's not a little better, because after everything he put her through she would never want to have anything to do with him ever again. To try to ask for her to still be in his life is also extremely selfish of him

Still on the previous point, when he asks Ian to wish for him to have never made a wish. There's a lot to say about this scene, but one of the things that sticks out to me is that phrasing. Don't wish for Nikki to have her autonomy back, just make a wish that will make me feel like I fixed my mistake and might turn things back to how they were before my wish (aka, with Nikki still liking me, even if just as a friend)

One more thing about that scene, when he tells Ian that "he can be with Nikki". Of course he says that he "didn't mean it that way", and I sort of believe him, but it's impossible to ignore that he immediately thinks bringing up Ian's attraction to Nikki will make him agree to go along with his plan, the same way his own attraction to Nikki made him make his wish

Maybe this is just me, but when he's in the car with Sarah and he questions her on whether she thinks he should be with someone "like you?", he doesn't seem upset like I assume someone would be if they're in a committed relationship and another person suddenly suggests they should be with them instead. He seems very open to the idea, despite never once having been shown to have feelings for Sarah (in fact at the beginning of the movie he outright tells Nikki he doesn't like her like that), like he just wants to be loved by a woman and now that a "normal" one is showing interest in him he's very willing to abandon Not Nikki despite literally wishing for her, just because she's not exactly what he hoped for and is causing him problems

This is more so just praising Inde Navarrette's acting skills, and I know the point is that Not Nikki is the exact opposite of Nikki, but one notable difference between the two is their crying, and now that I think about it their screaming too. Not Nikki cries and screams in a sort of childish way, and it reminds me of the way some men want their girlfriends to act, like a child that needs them for comfort (maybe minus the screaming). It doesn't work with Bear, it comes off as a bit of a tantrum and just annoys and freaks him out, but despite obviously being how she really feels, with the fact that he literally wished her into existence, I can't help but feel that even the way she expresses pain is geared towards making him like her. But Nikki screams like a regular, horrified adult woman. When she cries in the final scene, there's no high-pitched whining to it, just pure horror and despair. Man I hope Inde Navarrette gets tons of awards for her performance

I really want to rewatch this movie, it's been 24 hours and I can't stop thinking about it

[starvariety]

the party scene in Obsession is objectively very tense and awkward and uncomfortable. but to me, it’s made so much more upsetting by the fact that Nikki was clearly popular and well-loved. when Bear looks at her social media towards the start of the film, we see she has 2k+ likes on a post. in general, she seems to have a very sociable personality and is fun to be around. so for her to have to experience a different version of herself completing sabotaging the connections she’s built - and embarrassing her in front of all these people - must be so harrowing. even if she did regain control of her body before things got fatal, she still wouldn’t be able to return to a normal life. at the very least, not the same life she’d had. not knowing that so many people witnessed such an unnatural outburst - unaware that it was out of her control - that almost definitely altered their perception of her, permanently

[smilesbag]

i feel like people are overlooking the moment at the beginning of obsession where nikki straight up asks "do you like me?" and once bear lies and says no she replies "ok, good." for starters, it was a chilling moment to me because this is such a classic experience of having a close guy friend, only to realize that he wants more from you. girls aren't dumb! nikki isn't dumb! of course she knows that bear is into her, she has eyes! she can see his stuttering and sheepishness and she's just dreading the moment she has to turn him down, to tell him that he's like a brother to her. just before she had told him that she doesn't feel real love in her life, and i don't think it would be a leap to attribute a small part of that feeling to her fear that her friendship with bear isn't as simple as she wants it to be.

it's also a chilling question from nikki because once she walks away bear knows that she doesn't feel the same way about him, and he makes the wish anyway. he is incapable or unwilling to take a hint and see that she doesn't feel the same way. and that question is the last thing she says to him before he ruins her life forever. it's unfair.

[vampireistic]

i absolutely love how nikki is nearly always bathed in shadow (whether it’s fully in the dark or with a single light behind her with her as the faceless darkness). she’s quite literally become a shadow of her former self. no autonomy, no personal thoughts or emotions, just a carved image of what bear desired.

[themortifyingordealofbeingloved]

eddy burback harvey fancast is the best thing i've ever seen

[imposterogers]

matt constantly flailing around saying things like like “you’re not going to kiss me” and “sounds like we’re getting married” out of the blue is so funny bc like why you trying to pin this on foggy? why you trying to make him the hopeless romantic when it’s YOUR mind going there and YOUR mouth saying it out loud??

[themortifyingordealofbeingloved]

artpatrick the summer hiraku died au do we get the vision y n

[amaideniwilldee]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THIS GUY

[mycroftrh]

I could write a dissertation about this and instead only have time for a few paragraphs but. Looking back on Psych with more knowledge about neurodiversity and how people feel about actually being around folks with neurodiversity-related traits…

I have a LOT of feelings about how Gus has so many of the autistic (and some ADHD) traits that people find annoying and grating and get pissed off about (correcting people, infodumping, dropping special interests into unrelated conversations, rigidity in folllowing rules, etc) and Shawn has so many of the ADHD (and some autistic) traits that people find annoying etc (physical and verbal hyperactivity, jumping between tasks and jobs and so forth, habitual lying, interrupting in conversation, etc), BUT

With each other they sort of… build their relationship around those things, instead of treating them as Problems. Gus corrects incorrect things and Shawn forgets correct things (or habitually lies or etc) so they build an entire recurring bit around the situation where those traits intersect (“I’ve heard it both ways”) that turns it from a source of conflict into a shared in-joke ritual. When Shawn starts up one of his elaborate lies Gus immediately swings into commit to the bit back-up mode. Shawn treats Gus’s infodumping as a social strategy.

They balance each others’ extremes without genuinely resenting each other for needing that. Gus is overly rigid about rule-following, Shawn is overly impulsive about rule-breaking, and they pull each other towards a more sustainable middle ground. Gus is overly fond of routine and risks stagnation, Shawn is overly prone to starting and then abandoning things, between them they’re able to form a life that’s interesting and includes novelty but isn’t unlivably chaotic. (We see what happens with that one when they’re not together to balance each other out! During the time they were apart, Shawn had a jillion jobs and quit all of them, while Gus became a dead-eyed pharmaceutical salesman with zero, like, Upward Mobility.)

And then of course there are the traits they share! They both clearly have echolalia and a drive to stim, for instance, and instead of policing each other they just periodically break into random dances and vocal exercises and “singing” and general sensory-seeking nonsense together, matched to each other.

I just??? The fact that they visibly display all those autistic and ADHD traits that drive other people crazy but instead of being a wedge between them that’s exactly why they’re perfect for each other… and how it’s not that it doesn’t ever cause them annoyance because they’re just like naturally soulmates who never get annoyed by anything about each other, but that they’ve worked out rituals and strategies so that what maybe bothered them in the past now instead is a shared bonding activity, or acts to balance their weaknesses against each other…

Just. Got Dam, that’s the dream

[ad-astra-per-aspera-1389]

psych is so funny. shawn pulls gus out of his day job, they walk into a crime scene uninvited, then shawn goes "hi jules! <3", pisses off lassie, looks at stuff for five minutes, touches things in an active crime scene with no gloves, says "bye jules! <3" pisses off lassie again, breaks into someone's home, lies to people, gives gus a stupid name, bothers his dad, lies to the police, solves the entire case, and gets paid, meanwhile gus hasn't been at work for three days because he's been making sure no one punches out shawn's lights

[spltlvlhous]

[ad-astra-per-aspera-1389]

shawn and gus being "Shawn (Work)" and "Gus B." in each others phones is so funny. they've known each other their whole lives. shawn switched gus's initials