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.

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