// KOTAKU — GAMING
Nikki From Obsession Coming To Fortnite Is The Endgame Of People Not Getting It
I feel like I’ve been bracing for this moment since seeing Obsession back in May. After the staggering, viral success of the horror movie over the past year, Obsession has undergone the same memetic distortion that every popular thing does. The more its scenes are riffed on in memes, its imagery ripped out of context, and its themes whittled down into the easiest shorthand, the more its iconography and characters become marketable packages to be distributed to the highest bidder. Fortnite, the gaping maw devouring pop culture as we know it so it can feed it into an AI-driven pipeline that cannot resist another skin to sell to its millions of players, is finally bringing Nikki, the titular obsessor, to its battle royale so she can snipe Sabrina Carpenter and a robot who looks like Sonic the Hedgehog and then dance on their corpses. Almost like she’s a puppet with no control over her body.
For those that haven’t seen Obsession yet, Nikki is a young woman with big dreams of becoming a writer and escaping the local music store where she works. Here, she meets a guy named Bear, who is infatuated with her but unable to ask her out because he’s an idiot who barely sees her as a person, and then he breaks a toy called a One Wish Willow and wishes in frustration that she loved him “more than anyone in the world,” only to find out that this isn’t just some toy, it actually works. Nikki’s obsession turns into violent rage that can only be soothed by Bear’s affection, and though Bear is portrayed as the “protagonist,” it’s very obvious to anyone with a brain that the dude who continues to have sex with a woman he has essentially brainwashed, who tries to “alter” his wish when it becomes inconvenient, and who, when the real Nikki breaks through and asks Bear to kill her, can only ask what would be so bad about being with him, is The Bad Guy of the movie.
Obsession is one of those movies you kinda wish you could see and only discuss with close, trusted people who you know are actually going to engage with it. Instead, it blew up, largely propelled by Inde Navarrette’s excellent, unnerving performance as Nikki. The movie touches on themes of personhood, rape culture, abusive relationships, and the ways in which men sometimes view those they’re pursuing as ideas more than people, but the way it frames certain things opens it up to stupid men walking away from it saying “she reminds me of my crazy ex,” when that ex was probably just asking for the bare minimum of consistency and communication from them. The question of whether or not Obsession is effective at interrogating the issues it sets out to interrogate is a valid one, but the movie has now gone past the point where those conversations can happen without being drowned out by dollar signs.
Now we have people who manufacture viral moments by dancing to her brainwashed pleas, corporate executives signing off on hiring actors to cosplay as a bloody sexual assault victim at Universal Studios to recite lines from the film at people passing by, and to top it all off, Nikki’s about to be diving from the Battle Bus with a self-inflcited wound she gave herself in an effort to kill herself and escape the mind-controlled horror show she’s stuck in, but instead of blood, in Fortnite she seems to be bleeding black goop.
Nikki (Inde Navarrette), Dropping Tomorrow pic.twitter.com/EiKu2IzIJH
A lot of the cosmetics that are being released alongside the skin are also kind of gross in context. She has cue cards with her line from the scene in which the reality of her brainwashing is made clear written on them; she can carry the One Wish Willow that took away her free will on her back; and since she’s already broken the bottle she used to try to kill herself, she might as well try to slice up Freddy Fazbear with it, right? Horror is often made silly out of context to remind us that it isn’t real and that even characters like Jason Voorhees can be babygirlified in Fortnite and made to dance over a banan