Obsession

I keep seeing people going "oh curry barker said that you could make a regular wish and things wouldn't go wrong, it wasn't a monkey's paw where his wish went wrong blah blah it's just that his wish was messed up" and like yes, obviously bear wishing for nikki to love him more than "anyone in the fucking world" was fucked up because it stripped her of agency.

the point is that from the very first scene we can see that bear does not know what love is. he's obsessed with her, and thinks he's in love with her, the wish that comes true is that nikki is forced to 'love' bear the way he's obsessed with her, he says "you're in every song" and he "feels like he's falling apart".

what does he do when he gets home and finds his cat's dead? he cleans it up, throws the cat in a garbage bag and throws it in the trash and then goes and cries not over his cat, but he says "why can't she...", he's clearly upset that nikki doesn't feel how he does about her, not the cat, and then he's just browsing her instagram, then he doesn't bother telling her when she calls that his cat died.

then when he goes out (because instead of grieving, she asked him to come out so he said yes like the simp bitch he is), he tells sarah his cat died, because he obviously likes her as a friend, but he's not obsessed with her.

anyway my point is that while all this is going on, he genuinely thinks he's in love with her, so when that's forced on her, she becomes an obsessed psycho because that's what he is, while if he had just wished "i wish she loved me", I can almost guarantee literally nothing would happen because she already did love him, as a brother, while if he had wished "i wish i was the kind of guy nikki would fall in love with", it would still be manipulative but there would also be no guarantee that she would fall in love with him unless he said 'yes' when she straight up asked him if he liked her, and she decided to go on a date with him (in the car before he made the wish out of incel frustration)

which is all to say that it wasn't just that it was fucked up for bear to force her to feel something she didn't, but also that bear's conception of love was fucked up from the start and that it was fucked up to force that on her.