Female. I usually just reblog random things I like. Marvel, Zutara, Disney, The Chosen, Anastasia Broadway... Marvel (Not phase 4 though). Sansa Stark, no, not anyone else in ASOIAF just, like, Sansa, I love her. You could say I am reading the Wheel of Time series, at a turtle's pace though.
People who say Henry Ashton was “wasted” on Daeron 💔
Henry was the perfect Daeron. It’s a shame he got so little screentime (they literally cut some of his book scenes 😭). He played him perfectly, and from the interviews it’s clear he understood the character so well despite only having a small part.
The only thing wasted is that we only got to see him as Daeron for about four minutes. I really hope we see him again in future seasons, even if I know that’s a long shot.
It was actually GRRM who “wasted” Daeron by making him a minor character when the idea of a super haunted and flawed deadbeat brother dreamer with a heart of gold had so much potential, actually.
I agree with your reading of Obsession, as a male abuse victim the movie was actually kind of hard to watch, and like I *do* think the whole situation was Bear's fault, and he was owed most of the guilt—but we're shown that he's not a guy who can face his fears or own up to his mistakes, this is a flaw of his, and so narratively it makes sense for him to also fail to save Nikki when that's what needed to be done.
that said, he was in nowhere near a good or perfect situation to make that hard choice. it was equally terrifying for him to be subjected to Wish!Nikki's abuse. and whatever actual feelings he might have had for Real!Nikki would have made it more difficult to just kill her after not actually being able to hear from her.
Hell, I think it's even valid to read the "if you don't like me then maybe I'll just kill myself / maybe you should just kill me" as echoing actual abuse tactics (if you take the magic out of the situation)
Just as well, Ian, his so called "friend" was the one being so insistant that Bear confess to Nikki, while knowingly having slept with her. I think Sarah might be the only blameless person in this scenario, and it's after she is killed that Bear finally is able to at least muster the courage to kill himself and end the wish. Notably he is unable to use the gun, and instead opts for sleeping pills, which if you know anything about like suicide statistics between men and women, men usually prefer the more violent methods; that felt like a deliberate choice for Bear to die that way.
like I think it's perfectly valid to read this as an abusive relationship, which though many people would like there to he obvious "heroes" and "villains," those situations are rarely lacking in blame on boths sides. Like yes, all of this is Bear's fault, but that doesn't make him an all-encompasing villain, or even *not* a victim of Wish!Nikki
remaining anonymous because it's actually quite hard to engage with the fandom for this movie, becausing seeing all the shallow takes that Bear deserves all the bad things that happened to him is very triggering
I agree with you on almost everything. It sucks that it is hard for you to engage in fandom.
Omg Ian doesn’t get half the hate he deserves!
The fandom loves to talk about how awful Bear is for the consequences of him not believing in magic (aka the wish, yes most only blame him for not noticing AFTER his relationship with Nikki has gone on for a while, but there are also those who blame him for the whole thing to begin with which is insane), but they never talk about how by the same stupid logic, if we are judging people for their wishes, Ian is the reason Bear couldn’t undo the wish and get Sarah back to life and Nikki back to normal, he preferred a million dollars over helping his friend who was obviously super desperate and upset.
If anything Ian had more reasons (albeit still not enough, I grant) to believe the whole thing was real because Bear told him and begged him to do something.
But that is the magic thing I don’t actually blame him for disbelieving. Even without that he is a terrible friend and is almost as guilty for what happened as Bear. Like what do you mean Ian never sat Bear down, his supposed “friend”, and told him firmly that he had reasons to believe that Nikki would never like him? The whole movie would have never started to begin with!
Instead Ian toys with Bear and makes him believe he has a chance while keeping the fact that he hooked up with Nikki secret. Super shitty thing to do with or without the plot of the movie.
whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
I can’t find my people in the obsession fandom because I sympathize with Bear as much as I sympathize with Nikki and fake Nikki.
People project so much bullshit into him it is insane.
For starters, people criticizing him for being the “nice guy” who likes Nikki (As if feelings could be controlled), and then second blaming him for literal freaking magic being unexpectedly real in his universe. I swear I have seen comments talking about how he enslaved and raped Nikki as if he had any considerable agency and 100% knowledge of magic being real in that fucking situation.
How many of those hypocrites have made posts with # witchblr and have made their silly little spells for their crushes to like them back. Are they evil little would-be rapists too? Of course freaking not because they all know it is just a fake thing they do for fun or frustration, and if they DO believe in magic because of religion or something, they don’t think it is going to work BY enslaving their crush the way depicted in the movie, they think their actual crush is simply going to like them back due to magic but it is still going to be them on their own free will, etc. Who hasn’t prayed their crush will like them back as well? It is HUMAN. There was literally no ill intent on Bear’s part to harm Nikki, he was just a frustrated guy with a crush partaking in a silly superstition thingy as a huge percentage of the population do everyday. He didn’t freaking think it was actually going to work!!!! It was perfectly REASONABLE for him not to believe it was going to work.
Then there is the rape claims, the claims he should have known. Like, exactly why, why should he have known freaking magic is real. Explain to me like I am 5. His world is like ours when it comes to believing in magic, as shown by his friend’s reaction when he asks him to reverse the wish. Even his internet research showed inconclusive evidence, both comments saying yes it is real, and comments saying of course not. It was perfectly reasonable for him to assume that it was not magic because 99% of people would have assumed it is not magic and there is a logical explanation. I, in the audience, initially thought that the magic wasn’t going to be an actual thing in the movie, just a red herring, and that it would be revealed Nikki had some sort of mental health issue and she and Bear would be toxic for each other, but nothing supernatural involved.
Bear knew there was something off about Nikki before they began dating, sure, but that was explained away with the drug thing. When he has reason to believe she doesn’t want him, he pulls away instantly. There is an entire scene dedicated to that. He freaks out so badly.
Haters use the scene where she is not responding while they are having sex later, but the movie had already showed me that 1 Bear will pull away if he doesn’t think Nikki wants him, and 2 real Nikki can switch back at any time, out of nowhere. Who is to say she wasn’t responsive and enthusiastic literally seconds ago? Bear wasn’t even looking at her face most of the literal seconds we see them being intimate, which was presumably just a snippet of the whole sexual encounter. All the other scenes show fake Nikki acting “normal” except she is in love with him, and Bear, being a guy with a crush in a world that doesn’t believe in magic, believes he is in love and loves back instead.
The most hateable thing about Bear in the entire movie is his reaction to real Nikki telling him to kill her, thinking only of himself and what is so wrong with me and all that. Of course that was awful and selfish, but to be honest, with everything else happening in the movie and the context of all that was happening, it didn’t lessen my sympathy for him at all.
Of course Nikki is the main victim, trapped in a literal hell and denied of autonomy (And though I do not see Bear as a rapist, I do see Nikki as a rape victim by proxy, the guilty parties being of course the ones who created the curse), and so is the entity the possesses her (It is clear she was suffering, as many have already thoughtfully said, imagine coming into existence only to love one person harder than anyone has loved before, being only able to think about that and feeling so intensely, and that other person being completely unable to understand you and love you back the same way, even being freaked out by the love you can’t help but feel), but I also 100% see Bear as a victim as well. Idgaf there were warnings in the wish, as I have said before, it was 100% reasonable for him to believe that magic wasn’t actually real. I hate how there are people who by trashing Bear try to defend the creators of a dangerous and evil product that literally kidnaps people (Innocent third parties by the way, not even the actual person making the wish!!!) and takes possession of their bodies because of so called warning labels. In a society where magic is not believed in nor considered real, those labels mean nothing. Like you are straight up bootlicking fictional magical evil corporations lmao
Plus people can be victims of bad situations they create themselves through bad or naive choices and no less deserving of sympathy for that.
Victims can be flawed and downright awful people (The “what is so bad about being with me scene” plus how cowardly and slow he is the entire movie). Victims don’t have to be perfect to be deserving of sympathy.
Take away the magic for a second and Bear is clearly a domestic abuse victim for half the movie. I don’t care how shitty and pathetic he is, he didn’t deserve to be constantly terrorized, have his social life controlled, being in constant fear of violence, or fear of his girlfriend hurting herself if he didn’t show love the ways she wanted, or to witness a brutal murder and be blamed for it (I have seen people literally saying that fake Nikki was right to blame him, like, imagine siding with the straight up stereotypical cartoonishly evil argument abusers use on their victims after they do something bad just cause you can’t recognize a domestic violence victim if they are male and not the perfect victim). I literally don’t care how shitty he was or how he created the circumstances, I still have sympathy for him, just as I have sympathy for Nikki and even fake Nikki because I understand that they are all victims in this situation.
I have often wondered why the whole “what is so bad about being with me” didn’t make me hate Bear as much as it did with other people. I am not saying it is justified or not a hatable moment, but looking back imo it makes sense taking into consideration all that had happened. He just got his greatest wish come true, he had (initially) reasons to believe it was true, that the girl he liked loved him back. He had a relationship with this person, he was intimate with this person, all to discover it was never real. It would be too much to process for anyone. It makes sense his response was selfish.
Lastly, I want to defend him from those who said he wanted to keep Nikki as a slave.
First of all, he didn’t initially understand how the spell worked at all. He didn’t realize there were two literal people living in Nikki’s body, though there were clues of course, but we don’t know how much he understood. It was not until the weird things were becoming too much and he called the makers of the stick that he learned the awful truth. He asked if it was real, if the love was real (“muh muh but he didn’t care!!” Movie scene says otherwise), tried to modify the wish because he was constantly freaked out, actively tries to reverse the wish when that doesn’t work, this is clear 100% canon, and only at the end of the call, when he has no choice but to kill himself or remain in a relationship he no longer wants, does it become evident when we are shown the screams that the real Nikki is trapped somewhere and is not the person lovebombing Bear (forgot to mention that, another common abuse tactic, makes his hurt about not being wanted just slightly more understandable).
By the end of the call he has pretty much been told he has no choice but to remain in an abusive relationship or kill himself, pretty much. Forgive me if I don’t despise an abuse victim for not immediately killing himself or his girlfriend whom he believes himself to be in love with and instead trying to find another way out including making an attempt to make the relationship work because it is clear that fake Nikki will suffer without it.
To be honest, the making someone else wish he had never made the wish seemed like a pretty clever idea imho, but again, this is a world where magic is real but belief in magic is not a thing (Which again makes me sympathetic to Bear), so the plan doesn’t work. At that point, I would have sympathized with Bear if he had killed Nikki. Real Nikki herself had asked this of him and the evil magic corporation wasn’t going to let her go. She had already killed someone (Not her fault, of course) and there was no way things ended up good for her or him either way. But at no point in the movie does Bear ever consider killing her, which I think is very interesting. Very weird for a supposedly irredeemably evil character. No, he doesn’t kill himself until he is literally out of options and has lost all of his friends, but he does try to free Nikki (and himself) in another way when things spiral out of control and never once considers harming Nikki.
Anyway, yeah, I know the writer probably meant something else, and metaphors and blah blah. But I am taking about what I actually saw on the screen as if it were a real story, and if that story had actually taken place and evil curses and magic was real, no, I wouldn’t hate, Nikki, or fake, entity Nikki, or Bear, they are all victims of enslavement, dark magic, rape by proxy, and domestic abuse by proxy and I don’t care if Bear isn’t perfect or reminds you of your ex or your male friend who you didn’t like but liked you and ended the friendship after you didn’t reciprocate his feelings, or god forbid your actual rapist who actually raped you and had no reason, like Bear did, to believe you were consenting, or any other situation you project onto Bear the fictional character. I am not judging him based on what real evil men who share some similarities with him do or based on what the creator meant, I am judging Bear based on what I saw him do and based on what the context and his circumstances were in the movie, and all I saw was another victim of an evil black magic corporation.
(i'm about to wax peter drury levels of poetic, so strap the fuck in)
cabo verde is just a tiny little nation off the coast of west africa, with a population just shy of the city of detroit. they’re a nation mostly forgotten by the world, made of two volcanic islands. a people who live mostly peaceful, unremarkable lives.
when they qualified for the world cup, literally no one knew who they were, let alone where. and then they held spain to a draw.
most people said it was a fluke, a bad showing by spain and a stroke of luck for them combined, because no way in hell can a 40 year old goalie stop lamine yamal, right?
and then, lightning struck twice.
they did that with uruguay, holding them to 2-2. uruguay, former multiple world champions. over a remarkable run in an already remarkable world cup, cabo verde came in second in a group with spain, uruguay and saudi arabia.
now, they hold lionel messi’s argentina to the very edge of their sanity, making them work over 3 hours to earn this victory. three hours of relentless defense, some of the best goalkeeping i’ve ever seen from a man who did not pick up those gloves until his 20s, and a team unshaken by the giants they were facing.
they lost, yes, but they lost 3-2 to lionel messi’s argentina, the same team that won the previous world cup in a journey worthy of a fairytale of its own. they say that miracles don’t happen - and they don’t, because this isn’t a miracle.
this is the hero’s journey, and we all just experienced the incredible privilege to bear witness.
gamechangershow
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
gracieabrams
