I'm high key in love with this syntax. It's-o Freida! She's extreamly 👿lovely! She's awaitingg...

If the World Was Ending 

I reached 500 followers today!!! 🤯 To celebrate here’s a one-shot I recently wrote inspired by the song If the World Was Ending by JP Saxe and Julia Michaels. It’s a Zutara song if I ever heard one -I simply could not get the idea out of my head to write a little something on it. Hope you enjoy, thank you so much for being here💙 (and if you’re not here for the Zutara, let me know what content you’re looking for and maybe I can rustle something up ✨).

P.S. There should also be another chapter of Element of Change posted this weekend!!! --- Best wishes, B 

The sun was rising over the Fire Nation capital, its light gradually gracing slanted rooftops, empty streets, and the face of the newly crowned Fire Lord.

Zuko breathed in the cool air of a new day and exhaled the stress of yet another night of meetings and paperwork. He set his hands on the stone of the balcony railing and surveyed the tranquil scene, still not quite able to believe it.

“How are you feeling, Fire Lord Zuko?” a voice called teasingly from behind him.

Just as the dawn warmed the land before him, so too, did the sound stir a similar reaction in his chest. As Katara came to stand beside him he turned to greet her with a weary smile. “I’m surprised to see you up,” he commented, well aware of her nocturnal propensities.  

She shrugged in reply. “Lots to do before we leave tomorrow. Including,” she bumped her shoulder against his playfully, “checking in on my patient. How are you feeling?”

“I’m exhausted,” he admitted, “but that has nothing to do with my injury.”

Katara frowned. “You should really be taking it easy. Getting lots of rest.”

“I can’t. Not yet. There’s too much to be done. Too many things that need to be set right.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that... Will you still have time to come to our farewell gathering later today?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Zuko promised. He gestured to the room behind them. “Uncle has already set his tsungi horn inside and picked out the finest tea to serve.”

Her eyes crinkled in amusement as she laughed. “It’ll be nice to have some time, just us, to say good-bye…”

He knew what she meant, but he silently corrected her in his head anyways: not just us… The others would be there too. It wasn’t that Zuko didn’t want to see them, but it was dawning on him that this might be his last real moment alone with Katara before she returned to the Southern Water Tribe. And who knows when I’ll see her again… His weariness dissolved rapidly, the heaviness in his body replaced by apprehension that ran up and down his spine and tied knots in his stomach.

“Hellooooo, Zuko?” Katara waved a hand in front of his face and his attention returned to the present --though his heart still sank at the thought that tomorrow she would be waving at him for a different reason.

I thought I had more time… “I just --I can’t believe you leave tomorrow…”

The same melancholy that crept into his tone found its way to her words too as she said, “I can’t either…”

They stood in a heavy silence, listening to the faint echoes of a city coming to life below them, attempting to savor a bit of the peace they had fought so hard for. Zuko found it was more difficult than it had been a few moments ago. The weight of her impending departure was impossible to deny and the once dreamy picture of the city before him now seemed incomplete.

“I should get going…” Katara murmured, her eyes tracing the path of a bird in flight overhead.

‘No, you shouldn’t. Please don’t.’ Zuko wanted to say. His heart seemed to chant with each beat: Now or never, now or never, now or never…

He reached for her hand, then stared at it for a moment in surprise, unused to the impulsiveness he suddenly found guiding him --but what else was there to do when it felt there was no time left to waste? She was going to sail away... He couldn’t let her go without her knowing.

Katara carefully intertwined her fingers with his own. Her gaze lingered there before she lifted her head. There was longing in her expression and pain too. “Zuko…”

“Wait,” he said in a strained voice. “Just wait… Don’t. Don’t say it.” Because it felt like she had been about to say good-bye and he didn’t want that. He wanted… he wanted…

He wanted to kiss her, had wanted to for a while, but the moment had never seemed right, he had always let the inclination pass. They had just ended a war. He had nearly died. Then he had become Fire Lord, and there were so many duties for them both to attend to, and now… Now she was standing right in front of him as she had so many times before, and might not again for he didn’t know how long, and he wanted, more than anything, to kiss her.  

Zuko leaned closer till his nose touched hers, till her exhales became his inhales, and he could smell the warmth of her skin, see the flutter of her eyelashes as she hesitated before finally shutting her eyes and sinking into his touch.

She tasted salty and sweet all at once and her lips were soft, but insistent as they pressed against his own. He wrapped his arms around her and gathered her closer, closer, till he could feel her heart hammering in time with his own, till it felt like they shared one body, one ridiculously happy soul.

Her hands rose to his chest and tangled in the silk of his crimson robes for one desperate moment, before she pulled away, breathless and… shaking her head.

“Katara, what’s wrong?” Zuko cupped her cheek in his hand. His palm grew damp from her tears.

When she looked up he could see them streaming down her face turned gold by the morning light. “Zuko, we can’t do this. I know you know that.”

He did know. He had thought about it all before, everytime the urge to act on his feelings had risen he had resisted only because he was aware of the consequences of them. Of all the impossible things Zuko had done: finding the Avatar, facing his father, ending a war, the path that lay before him seemed the most insurmountable, because yes, she was right, but he didn’t want her to be…

The politics of it would be complicated -- several of his advisors would take issue with the Fire Lord being romantically connected to a Southern Water Tribe ambassador. No matter that he couldn’t care less what they thought, it would still get in the way of the work that needed to be done. They would accuse him of being partial when negotiating, of clouded judgement. Time would be wasted arguing the dynamics of his relationship instead of focusing on the way forward to a better world.

She spoke again, as though reading his mind. “My people need me and so do yours…”

One specific person came to mind, who Zuko knew relied on and loved her very much. “Aang… He’s forgiven me for a lot, but… I don’t think he’d forgive me for this.” Zuko looked down at where her fingertips stuck loosely to his own, not yet ready to separate. He lamented the loss of what was right in front of him.

“We just weren’t-” Katara’s voice broke and she inhaled shakily before continuing. “We weren’t meant for each other.” Her face told a story that contradicted her words. Her face said she felt the same as he did --that they were connected in ways that were indescribable, as deep and powerful as the love between moon and sun.

Still, she pulled her hand away from his and stepped backwards and Zuko felt a piece of himself fall away with her...

Later that day the sky would be pink and purple where it had been blue and gold. He would turn away from the friends gathered to seek fresh air, and he would see her standing where they had stood that morning, receiving a kiss from the Avatar --the sun setting behind them.

***

There were letters exchanged over the next few years, but writing them felt like playing a part in a play. It was make-believe, a well-practiced lie.

Zuko found that the white spaces on a page were blinding. For every word he wrote there were infinitely more he wanted to add -- shattered, wish, missing, love…

He thought he might develop a tolerance for the pain of exchanging such mundane and careful sentences with her, instead, he eventually figured out it was simpler to say nothing at all than to bear the burden of holding back what went unspoken.

It was easier then, when the communication at last died out, to let her go…

***

It was sometime in his third year as Fire Lord that an assassin nearly succeeded in ending his reign.

The poison raced through his veins like lava, setting his skin on fire from the inside out, pulling at his muscles like strings of a puppet, but it was not the physical agony that tortured him the most.

It was the closest he had come to death since the Agni Kai and he had not spoken to Katara in nearly a year. The last time the world had been ending she had been by his side, facing it with him…

All the reasons not to be together, all the fear… They were irrelevant when paired with the regret he had for everything that could have been. He was dying --and what did it matter now what might have gone wrong, when in the final hour the only mistake that mattered was that they had said good-bye.

***

Zuko opened his eyes to blue.

He was certain that the spirit world had chosen the color most calming to him to help ease his transition into the afterlife.

Then the blur began to draw into focus…

He sat up so fast the room spun and her form became distorted again.

“Hey, take it easy… How are you feeling, Fire Lord Zuko?” Katara’s face had lost some of the roundness of youth, but her voice remained the same and Zuko marveled at the wonder of hearing it again after so many years.

He gave her cheek a gentle stroke to ensure it was not a dream. She smiled at the touch and his heart hiccuped at the sight. “I’m so happy to see you,” he breathed.

“Your uncle said you gave him quite the scare…”

“Uncle?… You mean you didn’t know?”

She shook her head. “No, I just got here. I didn’t realize you had been sick…”

“I assumed someone sent for a healer --the Fire Lord deserves the best, right?”

Katara rolled her eyes at his teasing, but when she spoke again her voice was serious, “That’s not why I came here.”

“Then why?”

She shut her eyes, took a deep breath and slowly released it. When she opened them again her hand had reached for his. “I almost died... I was traveling with Aang and Toph and one day I decided to go for supplies while they made camp. I was surprised by some bandits. Not a big deal for a waterbender normally --except the only scratch they managed to land on me came from a poisoned arrow. By the time I realized what was happening it was almost too late… I got lucky.”

“It was the same for me…”

“Right,” she nodded, glancing at the damp rag on his bedside table --a remnant from the battle he had fought against the poison’s fever.

“So, you came here for help? We need to track down the bandits? Do they have Aang and Toph?!” The questions tumbled one after the other until Zuko had worked himself into such a state of concern he was preparing to leave the bed right that moment and gather all the resources at his disposal to assist.

“Zuko, no, no, it’s not that. Aang and Toph are fine.” She steadied him with a hand to his shoulder.

“Katara… I don’t…” He searched her eyes for answers, but the years had not erased the pain of the day on the balcony. “Why are you here?”

“Zuko… The world was about to end, I was going to die, and…” The words tumbled out. “And the only thing I thought of was that morning before I left. I thought I had figured out how to think about you --living your life- without it ripping my heart out, but I thought of you and I thought of dying without seeing you again and it hurt more than anything. We were wrong, we…”

He didn’t let her finish the sentence. He leaned back and pulled her on top of him, held her tightly and kissed her for all the times he hadn’t in the years since their good-bye --like the world was ending, and nothing else mattered.

Dr. Éric Denécé: “The Americans, the British and the French, Through Their Special Services, Supported Terrorists Who, Moreover, Organized Attacks on Our Soil”

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Why does France tolerate on its soil the presence of different jihadist movements and terrorists? Dr. Éric Denécé: You are asking an essential question for which I am unable to find a valid answer. Indeed, France officially fights against extremists and Islamist terrorists... but lets them develop their activities on our soil. There are probably several explanations. First of all, the poor knowledge of Islam among the vast majority of our political leaders, who do not know the difference between its different tendencies, those that are respectable and those that represent a danger. Then, one should not neglect the strategy of entryism and skillful propaganda which the Muslim Brotherhood leads and which partly shows results, in particular because of the naivety of our elites, who think that by allying themselves with them they will have "peace" in our suburbs. Finally, post-colonial guilt is another element that is increasingly holding back a society that doubts its values and no longer knows how to react to some developments that threaten its national cohesion and its future. In one of your editorials, you referred to Turkey as a rogue State. How do you explain the Western alliance with this rogue State, when Turkey has armed and financed terrorist groups that have destroyed Syria and Iraq? Don't you think that the Westerners have played with fire by allying themselves with Erdogan, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has only one objective: to establish a caliphate? And how do you explain the troubled game Erdogan is playing in Libya? Turkey, not just Erdogan's - which is certainly by far the worst - is a State that has flouted international law since 1974, when it invaded part of the island of Cyprus. At the time, the Turks should have been expelled from NATO for invading another member State. But we were in the middle of the Cold War and we did nothing because the Atlantic Alliance, under American leadership, focused on the Soviet threat. This first cowardice was a real betrayal to our Greek friends and began to make the Turks think that anything was possible. Since the arrival of Erdogan, a totally megalomaniac leader and member of the international bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ankara has not ceased to pursue an aggressive and neo-Ottoman policy: erasing all traces of the Kemalist legacy, attacking non-Muslims in Turkey, illegally invading - without any protest from the international community - part of Syrian territory, support ultra-radical jihadist and terrorist groups, supplying arms to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (whose accession to power was undemocratic, contrary to what is still believed in the West) and now supporting and arming a Libyan regime linked to the terrorist brotherhood and intervening militarily at its side, by sending it, in particular, jihadist mercenaries who have already worked under its control in Syria. Turkey today is an evil State and constitutes a real risk to peace and stability in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. But once again, Westerners are refusing to take the necessary decisions, still under the influence of the Americans and the British, who continue to see Moscow as a threat and fear that if Turkey were ostracized from the West - which must be done - it might throw itself into the arms of Russia. Some of our sources mention a movement of jihadists from Syria and Iraq to Libya, which has become a terrorist sanctuary. Do not you think that what is happening in Libya threatens the stability of the entire Mediterranean basin, if not the world? Wasn't the intervention in Libya by Sarkozy and his ally Cameron under the aegis of NATO a serious political mistake for which we are currently suffering the consequences? Obviously, the current situation has its origins in the Western intervention of 2011, which is totally unjustified, unproductive and in some aspects illegal (exceeding UN Resolution 1973). Sarkozy, Cameron but also Obama bear full responsibility of it. They all three have played sorcerers' apprentices and have destabilized North Africa and the Sahel... and now the Mediterranean. The destruction of Libya has created a real terrorist and criminal hotbed (smugglers and migrants) which is growing steadily and which we will take years to eliminate. And more worryingly, it could become a theatre of confrontation between regional powers: Egypt and the Emirates, Turkey and Qatar... As early as spring 2011, back from Libya where we had visited both camps (Tripoli and the NTC), we never stopped warning about the irresponsible and deplorable policy that the West was conducting and about its foreseeable effects. Unfortunately, we were right… I saw one of your interviews where you talked about a group you formed after the Arab springs and I read your collective book "La face cachée des révolutions arabes" (The Hidden Face of the Arab Revolutions) published by the CF2R and dedicated to the Arab spring, which became an Islamist winter. You mentioned names such as those of our friend the late Anne-Marie Lizin, whom I interviewed several times, and Madame Saïda Benhabylès. This latter was attacked and accused of being an agent of the French and the name of the Benhabylès family was dragged through the mud on social media by Islamist organizations activating in Europe and by individuals linked to terrorism and to the "Who Kills Whom" thesis, thesis which targets the Algerian army and the Algerian intelligence services. How do you explain that dubious individuals can afford to attack a personality of your group and distort your words, knowing that these dubious individuals themselves have links with Western, Saudi, Moroccan, Qatari and Turkish intelligence services? Madame Saïda Benhabylès is a woman for whom I have great respect and a friend whom I appreciate very much. In recent weeks she has been the victim of destabilizing actions orchestrated by individuals who are members or close to the Muslim Brotherhood, with an objective that I do not yet fully perceive. Naturally, this is all slander and lies. I was able to observe how these Islamists falsified some of my interviews, translating them into Arabic with totally false or fanciful statements. I confess that I do not measure the links between these individuals and the "promoters" of "Who Kills Whom". But they remain active in France, after having managed to give a totally distorted view of the Algerian reality of the "black decade". It is, of course, obvious that the most radical Islamists, seeking to impose their stupid and unfounded "values" on other Muslims, have always sought to seize power and thus to attack all those who were an obstacle to their strategy. Fortunately, Algeria did not fall, neither did Syria, and Egypt, thanks to Marshal Sissi, was able to drive them out of power. But they are in power in Turkey and in the Gulf monarchies - despite their doctrinal differences - and continue to spread their deadly ideology throughout the world. Elements of the Rachad organization, an organization affiliated to the Ummah congress linked to the Muslim Brotherhood of Erdogan and based in Istanbul, did not hesitate to incite the Algerians to take up arms against their army and their State. And Mohamed Larbi Zitout, one of Rachad's leaders, calls the terrorist groups active in the Sahel "national liberation groups". These individuals live in countries such as Great Britain and France. How do you explain the fact that they are not prosecuted, despite their proselytizing for the benefit of Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood? Are not these individuals linked to terrorism using your "democratic" system to spread their terrorist ideas? You give a very clear example of their strategy: proselytism, propaganda and deception, calls for armed struggle and murder, all with the support of the above-mentioned Islamist States... and the total passivity of the West. The European "elites" - and this is particularly true in France - are without reaction for several reasons: - they do not know how to act in the face of this phenomenon, as they are characterized by their lack of vision, culture, courage and mediocrity - they are "asleep" by the money, promises and lies of the Gulf monarchies... and the Americans who persist in supporting them. - they want to stay in power and tell themselves that if they get the "Muslim vote" (5 to 10 % on average in Europe), they are likely to succeed. Thus, they turn a blind eye or accept behavior that contravenes our rules, values and laws. - they are obsessed with the risk of the extreme right, which in reality has much less foundation than one might imagine, because the parties that embody it would be incapable of governing. But on the other hand, at each election, they attract more votes from all those who are outraged by the authorities' inaction. These are the ingredients of an explosive situation. Didn't the individuals who sold the “who kills whom” thesis to Western intelligence services concerning Algeria have several strategic objectives including, among other things, using Taqiya and hiding the true nuisance potential of jihadists in the West, knowing that afterwards we have seen the attacks in Brussels, Paris, London, Berlin, etc., which contradict the theses of "Who kills whom"? Is it not time to reveal the truth to your peoples that jihadism and its ideology exist in your society and that they are fed by different countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey? For at least a decade, more and more voices have been raised to denounce these dangers and the true ideology of these sectarian and harmful movements. But the politicians, for the reasons I have just mentioned, do not want to hear it. I will give you two edifying examples: in the summer of 2016, François Fillon, the future presidential candidate of the right, opposed, during a vote in the National Assembly, the taking of measures against the Muslim Brotherhood in France. And also in 2016, Jean-Yves Le Drian, then Minister of Defense in a Left-wing government, published a book entitled “Qui est l’ennemi?” (Who is the Enemy?), in which he wonders if France is at war but does not denounce radical Islamism or the archaic monarchies of the Gulf... he doesn't even talk about it!  Is it blindness, complicity, stupidity? That's where France is today... Don't the intelligence services, whether French, Algerian or other, have the same enemy, namely Jihadism and its deadly ideology, whether it comes from the Salafists or the Muslim Brotherhood? Don't you think that cooperation between intelligence services needs to be improved on a win-win basis? Of course, I do. Moreover, they cooperate closely on this matter... but not in all areas or on all subjects. This is normal because national interests remain different. Counter-terrorism is the area in which cooperation is most advanced, not only between Western countries, but also with Arab countries, including the Gulf States. This may mean that some of the information exchanged is biased. Indeed, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey will never give any information about "their" terrorists, given that these regimes themselves adhere to Salafism or the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood. They will only provide information on groups that threaten their regime. You are an intelligence expert and a geopolitical connoisseur. Weren't Western governments wrong in their handling of the Syrian file? Totally. There's been a major misjudgment of the situation: thinking that Bashar was going to fall quickly in 2011 showed a lack of knowledge of the Syrian reality. There has also been a major influence from the Gulf States wanting to bring down "secular" Syria, a country in which the cohabitation of religions was intolerable for the radical Islamist regimes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Thus, the Americans, the British and the French, through their special services, supported terrorists who, moreover, organized attacks on our soil or fought against our forces in Mali. A good example of political coherence... Fortunately, the Russian intervention made it possible to defeat this delusional strategy. Don't you think that the solution in Libya must be political and that if there is ever a war, everyone will lose? That would of course be ideal, but I hardly see us going down that road. This would require the belligerents to agree to negotiate... as well as their external supports. However, neither the Libyan Islamists nor Turkey which supports these latter, want this, and the militias and criminal networks in Misrata and elsewhere have a vested interest in keeping the situation chaotic, allowing their "business" to flourish. And Egypt cannot accept that an Islamist regime, a refuge for terrorists and criminals, should settle on its borders... any more than Algeria, of course. Shouldn't the West, led by the United States, reconsider its alliance with the Saudis, Qataris and Turks? Absolutely, our foreign policy and our alliances need to be totally reconsidered. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Turkey are all States whose values and politics are diametrically opposed to those of France. They are neither our friends nor our allies, contrary to what a part of our leaders persist in believing, hoping for big contracts for our defense industry... Fortunately, Turkey has not been able to join the European Union and everything must be done to ensure that this never happens. If it remains in NATO, I think it is essential that we question the usefulness of this alliance ... which no longer has anything Atlantic ... nor Pacific! Don't you think that Europeans should stop aligning with American policy? In your opinion, hasn't NATO become an empty shell that no longer serves any purpose? NATO has no longer had a reason to exist since the end of the Cold War and should have been disbanded, that is obvious. For the Americans, however, this remains an essential means of influence, control and pressure on Europeans who do not want to bear the cost of their own defense. Above all, it is a godsend for the American defense industry, which can impose its armaments on its allies and kill off any European competition in this area. But this would not be possible without the complicity of Europeans, who have, for the most part, accepted major losses of political and economic sovereignty. For several decades, France was the only "itchy" nation in this alliance. But Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to join NATO's integrated military organization sounded the death knell for true independence. But today, NATO should either be dissolved or France should withdraw from it. As an intelligence professional, what is your analysis of Operation Rubicon where the CIA and the BND spied on the whole world, including their European allies? In your opinion, is mass espionage useful in the fight against terrorism, or is it rather, as Snowden revealed, a tool for mass control? There are two aspects to consider. On the one hand, the external espionage practiced by all States. I would dare to say that it remains legitimate, in any case that it will never disappear because it allows one to read the game of others (friends, allies, opponents) to conduct its international policy and defend national interests (political, economic, military). That's the way it is. On the other hand, there are the "alliances". The fact that the United States spies so relentlessly on its own allies, and that the European States themselves agree to cooperate with Washington in intercepting their neighbors’ communications, is a contradiction that shows that Europe does not exist, that there's no awareness of a common interest. Let us remember in this respect the attitude of the Europeans during the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Americans. France, which has opposed to this operation - and Germany, which did not support it - have been betrayed by all their other European partners. Finally, there is the myth of global data control. I speak of myth because today, the growth of data is infinitely faster than the progress of processing methods, which are already extremely efficient. The Americans are spending considerable sums of money, have achieved undeniable results, but are only able to process a tiny part of the information they have gathered. But that doesn't mean there's no danger. This is where we cannot thank Edward Snowden enough for what he did. Moreover, the obsession of the American authorities with him illustrates perfectly the embarrassment of Washington with regard to the electronic espionage practices which Snowden has not yet all revealed … Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen Who is Dr. Éric Denécé? Éric Denécé, PhD in Political Science, authorized to direct research, is director of the French Intelligence Research Center (CF2R) and its Risk Management consulting firm (CF2R Services). Previously, he was successively: Officer-analyst at the Directorate of Evaluation and Strategic Documentation of the General Secretariat of National Defense (SGDN); Export sales engineer at Matra Defense; In charge of communications for NAVFCO, a subsidiary of the DCI (Defense Council International) group; Director of Studies at the Centre for Strategic Studies and Prospective (CEPS); Founder and managing director of the economic intelligence firm ARGOS; Creator and Director of the Business Intelligence Department of the GEOS Group. Éric Denécé has long taught intelligence or economic intelligence in several French and foreign business schools and universities (ENA, War School,) University of Bordeaux IV-Montesquieu, University of Picardy-Jules Vernes, Bordeaux School of Management). He is the author of numerous books, articles and reports on intelligence, economic intelligence, terrorism and special operations. His work has earned him the 1996 Prize of the Foundation for Defense Studies (FED) and the 2009 Akropolis Prize (Institute for Advanced Studies in Internal Security).

Interlude: The People of the Crossing

A/N: I've been hinting at some mythology/worldbuilding in the story so far that this interlude chapter may make more clear. You are totally in the right if you read this and think "god damn Keleri go write some original fiction already", but I think it also helps answer the question in canon of 1) where did humans come from? and 2) why does the pokémon world have such a long history but basic facts about pokémon seem to be poorly understood?

Sometimes it seems like humans (or pokémon?) have just arrived in the pokémon world, and other times people are said to have been there for millennia. (The DPPt games even claim, memorably, that humans and pokémon used to be the same.) Like most competing theories, I propose the answer, Por que no los dos?

Ancient pokémon (or daikaiju, "great strange beasts") are based on the giant pokémon from the first season of the anime.

x.x.x.x.x

Gaia and Terra are two planets connected by an incredible distance and none at all. An enormous amount of power is needed to break through to cross between them, but all around us are, overlaid like pages of a book, other Gaias and other Terras, and other earths yet unnamed by explorers. Humanity has always explored, looking out at land and sea and sky and the stars, and finally our gaze turned toward a new frontier, of new and unexplored planets only a breath away.

But like our ancestors striking out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so too was there danger and deadly forces we could not imagine. The loss of the First Crossing, that deserted Roanoake of those early days, told us as much, and so too were the incredible discoveries of the fractured Second Crossing obtained at great cost. But the people who stayed discovered even more, who we thought were going to their doom, but instead survived in a strange land with new and indispensable allies.

And when we, the Third Crossing, arrived, they showed us how to survive and how to thrive, and how to do more than thrive: to create, for the first time in human history, a society where the vast majority are cared for and do not suffer under food or economic insecurity, where clean water, autonomy, security, and education are human rights, and freely available to everyone under the aegis of a cooperative elected government.

We had a rough start. We vowed not to repeat the sins of the past, but pain and fear got the better of us, as it always does, and as it will again—but we will always fight, and hope, that one day it will not. And the strange life forms of Gaia, these elementals with great and terrible and wonderful powers, who helped the Second Crossing survive and shortly the Third Crossing too, and all the people of Gaia united at last, protected and cared for, they showed us the way, and they will again.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Saffron City, I thank pokémon once again for putting up with humanity, and I look toward this year's crop of new trainers to learn from the past and to look toward the future, and to put your skills to the test so that they can continue to protect and serve everyone in our beautiful new world. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you. Let's go!

—Speech by Professor Maggie Druyan (Spruce I) at the Saffron City Golden Jubilee, 51 CR

x.x.x.x.x

Partial transcript of HIST202 lecture by Professor Aaron Singh (Holly III)

"The initial assays were done by drones, and the temporal anomalies weren't noticed until much later—they were smaller in magnitude—the drones would go through the breach for an hour and come back with 70 minutes of data, for instance. The First Crossing was a group of about two dozen people, survivalists and wilderness experts who would set up a base camp for the next group, due to arrive in about six months. Six months passed. Then nine. After a year, someone went back—crossing meant opening the breach, which depleted fuel that they used day-to-day, but eventually they decided to risk it—and that person, returning, found that barely a month had passed on the Terra side.

"When they returned through the breach with a rescue party, the First Crossing camp was entirely gone, with only a few scattered items long-disused and overgrown, and no trace was found of the people left there.

"The Second Crossing was better prepared: with the temporal anomalies clear, they set out with more technology and resources to fall back on, and a clearer understanding of what it meant to cross. One could come back, to resource-depleted, climate-changed Terra fairly easily, but years would pass on the Gaia side. And it still wasn't clear what had happened to the First Crossing. They were wary. But months turned into years, and they founded towns on the rich shores and rivers and scarcely had to farm, and the animals were nearly tame and unafraid of them, in a world untouched by humans since its beginning.

"But soon they found that there were more than animals on Gaia: there were monsters, lizards with fire breath and walking plants. Even as they sought to understand these wonders, the first daikaiju appeared, living hurricanes and forest fires that nearly obliterated all they had worked for, and they could guess at last what had happened to the First Crossing.

"Some returned to Terra, but others discovered the secret of befriending monsters instead of fighting them. Some learned to command armies of elementals and people, to tame the aggressive ones, and finally, to subdue the kaiju instead of running. And the Second Crossing made them their war-leaders in a world perpetually at war, their dukes and caesars.

"Centuries later, from their perspective, we arrived—the people of the Third Crossing.

"We were different. The survivors of the Second Crossing had returned a year or two ago, from our perspective, and they told us about monsters. We were people desperate enough for land and skies unmarred by pollution, landless people, people without citizenship, people who didn't exist.

"We came prepared, of course. The best weaponry of modern Terra: guns, drones, cybernetic implants, combat enhancements; doctors filled us with augmentations, the better to survive in a hostile world."

x.x.x.x.x

Excerpt from We Are Explorers by E. Mordvinova and C. Muomelu (Linden II)

The temporal distortion was well-known by the time the Third Crossing was organized, and a new breach was established with stabilizing factors that would allow a large number of colonists, soldiers, supply vehicles, agricultural vehicles, animals, etc. to pass through over the course of about a week without significant disjoint, and option for a quick abort if the same problems with destructive entities arose.

The analogy of dimensional travel is thus: a pencil pierces two sheets of paper to form a path between them; so too does the breach link the sheaves of two worlds. The problem of temporal distortion might be analogous to both those papers rotating out of sync, and so initially the pencil length that joins the papers is very small, but it grows as they twist away from each other. Although the time spent in this "throat" is instantaneous, the "length" of it growing as the dimensions fall out of sync creates dangers that are still poorly understood. "Old" breaches have been used successfully to travel backward to Terra, but they expose the user to what is hypothesized to be a hostile extradimensional environment that is wholly unexplored and uncharacterized.

The Third Crossing was aware that the Second Crossing had survived and that they had established towns and cities. It was not until communications were established that the real extent of the temporal distortion was realized, and how disparate the people were from the original settlers.

The Third Crossing arrived at a time when the people of the Second Crossing were in a period of expansion. The construction of large ocean-going vessels had been forgotten for hundreds of years after the initial destruction, and a long history played out while restricted to a single landmass. However, with the help of pokémon, eventually this technology was rediscovered and the Second Crossing made more and more distant journeys, sparsely colonizing new continents, or returning to bring word of barren, elemental-less lands, or not at all.

The emergence site of the Third Crossing was the Kansai continent. They found a country with only a few Second Crossing villages already established and a generous people living on what came to be called Vermillion Bay. There the inhabitants survived on rich seasonal seafood, and only engaged in a little hunting and farming to add variety.

The Third Crossing had overprepared, ready for disaster and death: they had expected the tougher soils of Terra that required reinvigoration to grow anything, collapsed fisheries, extinct animals, hardship, famine. The richness of the new world caught them off-guard. They did their best to integrate with and learn from the people of the Second Crossing. One of the stated goals of the colonization effort was to avoid the kind of environmental abuse and unsustainable exploitation that had ruined Terra, and their harmony with nature appealed to the Third Crossing's leaders. It was a hopeful attitude, but also a practical one: the people of the Second Crossing had survived for millennia in the face of all the legendary dangers that the original refugees had reported, and so it was vital to learn how they might protect themselves.

Children and adults of the Third Crossing were bonded to pokémon for the first time. In the days before pokéballs, most people could only bond with one or two, if at all, and the search for a compatible monster could be arduous. People who could support four or more were considered "adepts". Traditionally anyone with such abilities was scouted and sent to a master in the capital of Nalea, the main Second Crossing region, but that order had broken down in the distant colonies. Further, the Third Crossing governing body rightly judged that they would be seen as a threat by the lords in Nalea, not as allies and bringers of otherworldly comforts as the Kantonian people did.

The Third Crossing built dense cities in ecologically insignificant areas and preserved vast tracts of virgin wilderness. They were able to survive a handful of ancient pokémon incidents with the help of the Second Crossing and pokémon, as well as modern technology, and became confident that their preparation had been sufficient. The development of nearly-modern pokémon training and the wide adoption of apricorn balls were also progressing at this time. Overall this was an idyllic period, where it seemed that the fears regarding Gaia's "monsters" and the potential for the Third Crossing's arrival to be violent or even genocidal had been assuaged.

The ancient ho-oh that destroyed Saffron Town was a kaiju of kaiju.

Although there existed records of encounters with other ancient legendaries and Primal legendaries that were often fatal, none of them had ever threatened a major human settlement. And not just any easily-evacuated village, but the center of the Third Crossing's activity on Gaia, and the repository of the modern technology and knowledge they had brought from Terra.

The Third Crossing's primary residential, commercial, and industrial areas suffered catastrophic damage. It severely damaged critical infrastructure and left thousands without running water, electrical power, etc. for months. The ho-oh emitted extreme heat that caused marine life die-offs in Vermillion Bay and sterilized the soil along its path, and the water vapor and ash it generated was lifted high into the atmosphere and caused unusual weather all over the globe.

If it had appeared earlier, the operation would have been abandoned, but the damage was severe but recoverable. However, it was immediately obvious that the Third Crossing had been far too centralized. A number of important data backups were lost or almost lost due to their proximity to one another. The Third Crossing governing body immediately began developing plans to spread out throughout Kanto and Johto, so that a similar attack could not again be so decisive. (Unfortunately, Saffron City eventually grew into Gaia's largest and densest metropolis, and it could see severe casualties today if its defenses were to fail.)

This expansion brought the Third Crossing into conflict with the Second Crossing in Kanto, and notably with the powerful steel- and dragon-cults in Johto, leading to decades of back-and-forth aggression. Technological development focused on the rapid evolution of anti-pokémon devices, as well as black-market distribution of modern ordinances to Second Crossing groups, and the militarization of pokémon usage among the Third Crossing. The biological manipulation of pokémon was also explored and led to the creation of the first human-designed pokémon, Mewtwo. Ironically it was this pokémon, designed to be a weapon, who was able to end the conflict through diplomacy.

Feature: Favorite 25 Films of 2018

Once upon a time, Derek Smith wrote: “2017 was a year endured rather than lived.” But all due respect to the past, because here we are creeping into this new 2019 and things are so much better than we thought they’d be! True, the year probably felt like 37 years or whatever removed from Rick Deckard’s squared-off tie and malfunctioning memory. And truth be told, the political crisis unfolding in the gray hallways might seem more honest if it resembled the light-starved, gnarled noir of Blade Runner. At least Schwarzenegger and The Running Man promised that 2019’s only choice would be “hard time or prime time,” even if its presentation of a neon capital, corporate-owned world seemed, you know, subtle. And for all the (dead) kids in cages and bodies bleeding out on street corners here and abroad, Michael Bay and The Island had a perfectly-drooped Buscemi diagnosing our humanist crisis: “I mean, you’re not human. I mean, you’re human, but you’re not real. You’re not a real person, like me.” A lot of people were told they weren’t humans in 2018. This isn’t a writerly evasion or poetic epithet designed to elicit righteous ire/compel you to read another year-end list. Because what else could you call the concentrated attempt by some humans to discourage the freedoms of other humans? Our narrative didn’t turn science-fiction to let us off the hook: these non-humans weren’t clones or replicants or estranged Atlantean denizens returning to claim their kingly right. They just weren’t human enough (or the right kind of human) to matter in the eyes of louder, more powerful humans. All of our past’s proposed images of our worst futures pale in comparison to this denial of basic humanity that we see out our windows. It is unsurprising, then, that cinema, our most volatile cultural mirror, began to show the stretch and strain in its images of our species. But what is surprising is that cinema in 2018 retained nuance and compassion as it mediated the cruelties and depravities of its age. Unlike this slab of prose, movies in 2018 moved beyond mediating good and evil in simple, monolithic terms. They attempted to sketch the boundaries of real freedom in an unjust world (BlaKkKlansman). They investigated, more acutely than ever before, the responsibilities of what it meant to keep (Shirkers) and tell (Madeline’s Madeline) another human’s story (If Beale Street Could Talk), especially in remembrance (Roma). They presented distorted genealogies (Hereditary) and fisheye-lens histories (The Favourite) to track the human body’s motion (Suspiria) in and out of comradeship (Support the Girls) and trauma (Burning). In 2018, we hurled our betrayed humanities up against foreign corpses (Zama), scorched country (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), alien twins (Annihilation), and incongruent voices (Sorry to Bother You). We began to see, in everything, something like a way through the darkness. Why else keep watching the past (The Other Side of the Wind) if not to plot something we’d never imagined before (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)? Our moving images in 2018 proposed that real love (Eighth Grade) and genuine care (Lazzaro Felice) could stretch impossibly across time to add up to a life steeped in both nuance and compassion (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). Our love would not look the same (Leave No Trace) nor could it resound in strictly-feasible tones (Mandy), but we would recognize its absence; we could see that sometimes humanness looks like something we’ve never seen before (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). More than anything, as one derelict theory proposed, “Through the negative you could see the real, inner, demonic quality of the light.” In laying the responsibilities of the filmmaker and artist at the feet of a murderer, The House That Jack Built came perilously close to endorsing our worst demons. Those demons shook and raged and hissed at us, urging us to give in to despair and make a world in their image. How did we let it stand? Thomas Merton was a central figure in a figurative, feral lens for our year, and he wrote that “despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.” To levy our humanity so close to inhumanness, suggesting that our better angels are distortions, is dangerous. To know, as these 25 films know, that there can be nothing without despair until there is love is to actually be human. To look, as we did, through our ruinous year and resist the despairs of all our oppressors and lowest urges, to shout, in image and montage and light and shadow, that this is how I deny you is to attain, beyond our humanity and into the future, a new kind of prayer. –Frank Falisi --- 25 Roma Dir. Alfonso Cuarón [Netflix] Roma was Alfonso Cuarón’s excursion into simplicity, a self-imposed challenge that drew back from his earlier, more extravagant films. Cuarón told his simple allegory in a monochrome treatment, but while wearing multiple hats — he also produced, shot, and edited the film. The choice to go black and white not only focused the elements of filmmaking to its barest essentials, but it also emphasized its nostalgic underpinnings. Though it made use of elaborate staging for its more chaotic events, Roma paradoxically found fascination in the quotidian and the mundane. The film was dedicated to the maid that the Cuarón’s family employed when he was a child — realized as the previously unknown Yalitza Aparicio, who brought an indelible humanity to her role — but the story itself was secondary. It was presented more as a series of tableaus, culminating in a climactic sequence at the beach. Here, Cuarón’s camera lingered, unedited, in a harrowing scene that illustrated Aparicio’s undying devotion to the family and revealed the film’s true heart. –Tristan Kneschke --- 24 Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Dir. Morgan Neville [Focus Features] With no dirt to dig up on his subject, director Morgan Neville tended to accent the blue-tinged notes heard throughout the Neighborhood in his Fred Rogers documentary. The director’s seamless cardigan scene-weaving stitched together instances of cluster chords and doubting puppets into a portrait of vulnerability that reinforced one of Rogers’s core motifs: It takes a person, not a hero, to protect children. Not a pie-in-the-face kind of guy, we watched Fred McFeely Rogers ponder in the tall grass in between changing shoes and tackling hard topics like grief, death, and terrorism. Demonstrations of his honesty, inclusivity, kindness, patience, listening skills, and unconditional love revealed the subject as the archetype for a timeless paternal figure. Although his ministry athwart sensationalism took place in the era of broadcast television, we imagined that any younger generation in the history of the world could connect with and feel empowered by his carefully worded and well-tempered mission. –Rick Weaver --- 23 Leave No Trace Dir. Debra Granik [Bleecker Street] Few directors are as curious about or sensitive to alternative modes of existence as Debra Granik, who followed Winter’s Bone and the documentary Stray Dog with this tale of a father and daughter willfully attempting to live off the grid in the present-day Pacific Northwest. Leave No Trace was quiet and deliberate, but not remotely uneventful: Granik showed Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) moving through a handful of makeshift, scrappy, and industrialized communities. With minimal embellishments, Granik made each change of scenery feel at once seismic and utterly authentic. Moreover, she guided her two lead actors through agonizing psychological arcs without a whiff of cliché, as a daughter gradually discovered that her life and well-being will be enriched by community, while her PTSD-afflicted father confronted the fact that he can’t abide by the obligations and niceties of modern civilization. Granik’s film had a Bressonian bleakness, but it was entirely heartfelt and so convincing in its particulars that it couldn’t help but realign our sense of the world. –Christopher Gray --- 22 Support the Girls Dir. Andrew Bujalski [Magnolia Pictures] Your workdays don’t end with you back home ready to decompress; they are your back-home and your decompress. Maybe you slept or something like that (scrolled? drank? had a crisis?), but you aren’t really awake till the first table is seated, and you better leave everything else at the door (lol). Your customers are guests, your wage is nil, and your smile is forced by uninvisible hands. Your coworkers are either No Face or your own flesh and blood, the only ones keeping your head from falling off and bursting into flame at the foot of the heat lamp. They get it! They get you. Or they get the gist, which is about as much of you as you get anyway. Because if you actually stopped to think about… No need to pretend: You hate this place, and you find yourself doing anything for it, for each other, because you all know the conditions are absolutely fucked and fuck that. Your favorite regular is here; you’re in a good mood for some reason. You act certifiable, you scream, you screw your head back on. The POS is down. You’re short. You make it. Your coworker says, “[That manager] can suck my dick.” Or, “I am going to murder this couple.” Or, “Y’all come back now!” You loved her for that. This movie loved her for that, through all of it, and it loved you too. A double whammy: Regina Hall et al. returned the workday to life itself and transformed working class unity into grace (laughter), something we could use. You have nothing to lose. –Pat Beane --- 21 Eighth Grade Dir. Bo Burnham [A24] In an interview with NPR, former YouTube star Bo Burnham said he wanted to make a story about the internet and how it feels to be alive right now. OK, sure, he succeeded in doing that by having 13-year-old Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) create and upload vlog entries on how to best navigate the social anxieties of being a young teen. However, by the end of the film, what this angle really emphasized with great nuance (perhaps unintentionally?) is that children of every generation — regardless of the gap — suffer from the same anxieties, sexual insecurities, and self-blame. Identity has always been a fluid performance; the internet has simply made it more permanent. To star a young girl currently living the same age IRL that she portrays brilliantly in the film is in large part what made Eighth Grade not only one of our favorite films of 2018, but also one of the most genuine coming-of-age films, period. This casting decision made it impossible for Burnham to project his experiences and memories onto the story, which fortunately meant it was not biographical or about nostalgia. Rather, Eighth Grade was simply a present-day story about a complex experience that has always transcended the outlets through which they’ve been mediated. –NB [pagebreak] 20 Suspiria Dir. Luca Guadagnino [Produzioni Atlas Consorziate] In 1980, during Italy’s “years of lead,” Bologna Station, built in neoclassical style during the Fascist era, was bombed by neofascist terrorists — 85 died. Today, despite the coffee-drinking herds pouring through it, the station retains a bleak and melancholy atmosphere. Luca Guadagnino captured something of this in his remake of Suspiria. Set in the German Autumn of 1977 (the release date of the original), the poisonous and paranoid atmosphere of Cold War Berlin, when Leftists turned to violence in the face of failed denazification and a conservative establishment, bubbled in the background. To its cold occult decadence, the film added stylized and unforgettable body horror. The whole built to an over-the-top conclusion, which was perfect both as a nod to the campiness of the original (and the giallo genre) and because Guadagnino’s deft melding of physical and emotional horror was a slow-burn that demanded combustion. It was a wyrd companion piece to surreal works grappling and playing with similar legacies, from Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (a.k.a. The Revolution Is My Boyfriend) to Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany. The personal was also political: the original was a masterpiece of style and ambiance marred by subtle misogyny, but in Guadagnino’s vision, this became an exploration of the fraught heat and darkness of dynamics between women in their exercise of power and community. Dakota Johnson lacked fire in the belly, as did Thom Yorke’s anaemic soundtrack, but a subplot some thought needless served up the film’s most appalling moment: a sickening portrayal of the pain of lost love regained, then once more ripped away with casual malice. This was more than a memorial suspiria; it was a wholly worthy rebirth of the Mater Suspiriorum. –Rowan Savage --- 19 Lazzaro Felice Dir. Alice Rohrwacher [Netflix] Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature, the Cannes-celebrated Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro), was built on the many tensions it engendered &mdash namely, between a humanistic premise and the layers of dejection it was buried underneath, the timeless aspirations of a fable and a cynically bitter view of modernity, and the rustic realism of its form and the story’s fantastic detours. The film followed the threadline that, like the wolf, men will exploit men in all spaces, times, levels, and situations: A Marquise keeps a group of peasants working for her in near slavery; they in turn abuse and overwork the titular Lazzaro, a young peasant whose innocence and goodness paint him into the archetype of the “holy fool.” He roams through the story in a perplexity recalling the Christ-like dispossessed of classic Italian cinema. His mission on this earth, it would seem, is to prove that even the lowest of the low, the wicked and the perverse, are capable of gestures of kindness. How enduring, truthful, and integral these were to their characters, to the essence of their humanity, was something Lazzaro must discover at his own expense, paying ever higher costs in this beguiling yet disturbingly recognizable modern parable. –jrodriguez6 --- 18 Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Dir. Masaaki Yuasa [Toho] You wake up after a long night out. You aren’t hungover at all — it’s a miracle, truly a miracle. What do you remember from last night? Not names, certainly. Maybe not even places. It’s all like a strange fairytale, one of glowing neon and drinks that tasted better because you didn’t pay for them, of hilarious characters and absurd triumphs. Did that bouncer really let you in, even though you were $9 short of cover? You feel fantastic. This feeling was alive in Night Is Short, Walk On Girl: an insensible, overwhelmingly jubilant, and optimistic perspective on “a night on the town.” Pulling trade tactics from films like Amélie, El Futuro, and A Town Called Panic, the movie was full of humor, bliss, and no pulled punches (friendship punches or not) when it came to devilish winks. With not a single frame lacking in humor or joy, the film left us feeling like hangovers are something we’ve never experienced, like each night is full of mystery and romance, like our next big moment is waiting just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll make this a big weekend — go out on Friday and Saturday? — who knows… –Lijah Fosl --- 17 If Beale Street Could Talk Dir. Barry Jenkins [Annapurna] Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel was perhaps the most aesthetically accomplished and jaw-droppingly beautiful American film in years. It’s difficult to avoid hyperbole or rampant name-checking when confronted with an opening crane shot and a sumptuous autumnal wardrobe straight out of Douglas Sirk, or with a bracingly musical, time-shifting sense of montage that conjured numerous titans of contemporary Asian cinema, or with a swelling score by Nicholas Britell that exquisitely captured the film’s oscillating currents of unabashed romanticism and great melancholy. Despite the film’s sweeping, sexy, earnest depiction of the bond between pregnant teenage shopgirl Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a sculptor in jail accused of rape, Jenkins’s adaptation was clear-eyed and anguished about how they have to navigate lives of subjugation, a theme brought to the fore in alternately haunted and agonized performances by Brian Tyree Henry and Regina King. As such, Jenkins remade Baldwin in his image, trying with all his might to conquer fury with love. –Christopher Gray --- 16 Burning Dir. Lee Chang-dong [CGV] Deep under the delicate melodrama of a love triangle, the noir-ish mystery of a disappearing woman, and the moody male rivalry that plays out in its final act, Burning was charged with the same currents that power our defining social divisions: rural against urban, men against women, working class against dubious wealth, connected against isolated. Director Lee Chang-dong’s comeback thriller was a Trojan horse stocked heavy with political anguish, a dense, angular ballet of themes erupting just out of sight under a sensitive character drama that forced three young people of clashing identity and privilege into a pressured environment of overlapping interests and dark secrets. What stood out about Burning was how it probed not these ideological struggles themselves, but the existential uncertainty they inspire, as well as the insidious psychological toll they take on the individual. In all its discomfort and beauty — aided by subtle performances and distinctive cinematography — Burning served as both a careful portrait of a quietly revolutionizing South Korea and an uneasy study of the antagonisms and paranoia gradually tyrannizing the youth of today’s globally tainted age. –Colin Fitzgerald --- 15 Madeline’s Madeline Dir. Josephine Decker [Oscilloscope] From the very start, Madeline, and by extension the audience, was told that performance is not identity, that the emotions an actor renders are borrowed from someone else. This warning was not heeded. We met the eponymous 16-year-old (Helena Howard) as she shuffled through roles: a cat, an actress, a daughter, a sea turtle, an assailant, a pig on the run, a prisoner, a confused young woman of mixed race. Some of these identities played out on the stage of her experimental performance troupe, managed by maternal — and directorial — surrogate Evangeline (Molly Parker), though they inevitably bled through to her “real” life and back onto the stage, forming a tight, indiscernible tangle as this feedback loop began to dominate the production. Driven by the tension between the neurotic, controlling impulses of her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the haphazard psychic excavation spearheaded by Evangeline, the film, cut to the rhythms of a psychological thriller and as improvised as the troupe’s performances, unreeled with disorienting, balletic, colorful, and oftentimes invasive cinematography. Madeline’s Madeline was a complex film of blurred and appropriated identities, one concerned, reflexively (as it is in some sense a retelling of how Decker and Howard came to collaborate and make this very film), with self-authorship, self-ownership, and the power dynamics inherent in representation. “I’m really interested in people who are out of control of their circumstances,” stated Evangeline at a dinner party. But what do we owe these lenders of emotion and what does it mean to tell a story that is not ours? As we move through psychic strata leaving our own fingerprints everywhere, inhabit or direct bodies that look and experience differently than our own, what are our responsibilities? Where is the ethic of storytelling? Of course, no film could satisfactorily answer such questions, but Madeline’s Madeline grappled with them in a dense, dizzying, hyper-expressive, sometimes frustrating, and self-castigating manner that spoke to the immense trust between actor and director. –Cynocephalus --- 14 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman [Sony Pictures Releasing] In an arena that seems to be getting more overstuffed with each passing year, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse surprised us just by being the most fun superhero movie we’ve seen in ages. From the second it revved its engines, Into the Spider-Verse hit a breakneck speed as exhilarating as a web-slinging joyride through the city, its mesmerizing 2D/3D graphics illustrating each thought, sound effect, and surreal set piece with an eye-popping neon panache. Each character was sketched with just the right mix of sympathy and self-awareness, whether it was our immediately relatable hero Miles Morales, the cynical, sweatpant-clad Peter B. Parker, or the wounded, monstrously gargantuan Kingpin. Even down to the music, Into the Spider-Verse kept its pace relentlessly fresh, washing us in waves of Swae Lee and Juice WRLD as we journeyed across alternate Spider-Man histories and dimensions in search of a way to once again save the world from destruction. It all somehow added up to a movie as unexpected and experimental as it was unabashedly pop — a classic, trope-skidding superhero tale that you’ve got to see to believe. –Sam Goldner --- 13 BlacKkKlansman Dir. Spike Lee [Focus Features] In BlacKkKlansman, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) was a man caught between two worlds. Too black to be taken seriously as a police officer, too loyal to his duties as a police officer to be taken seriously as a proponent of Black Power. Naturally, Stallworth did what anyone would do in this situation: become the first black detective in Colorado Springs, infiltrate his local Ku Klux Klan chapter by posing as a disgruntled white supremacist on the phone, enlist his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) to pose as him at Klan meetings, catfish David Duke himself, and foil a deadly bomb plot. The KKK, as portrayed in this Spike Lee Joint, could be best described as a gang of bumbling idiots. Just literal morons who blow themselves up. If the events of the film weren’t based on a true story, they would seem almost too absurd to be true. As racism today threatens to tear the country apart from the inside, BlacKkKlansman did all it could to call out white supremacists and serve them a modicum of justice. But the film also recognized just how dangerous the ideas of these people can be and how imperative it is to keep fighting to bring them down. –Jeremy Klein --- 12 Annihilation Dir. Alex Garland [Paramount/Netflix] There is a common fundamental misconception that Nirvana is either a place, like Heaven, or a state or period, like Peace. In reality, Nirvana means something like “blowing out” or “extinguishing.” Attaining Nirvana, then, isn’t an attainment at all, because it isn’t a summit or a destination or really even a “thing.” It is not, however, synonymous with Annihilation, but just as Gravity housed symbols that could be appreciated as “Buddhist,” Annihilation beckoned us into life’s terrifying glimmer of impartial consequence so that we could assess our way out of it. In The Shimmer, karma accrued, leaving behind not moral threads, but matter in forms as disparate as flowering corpses and a bear made of screams. Locating Buddhist imagery in film is often a sign of clumsy analysis, but witnessing these women worn by this violence of culmination grapple with their own threads of being was like witnessing a hierophany, a horrifying refraction of sacred DNA in a profane plane. It’s enough of a reminder of why we even started making existential art. Awfulness irrupted through Annihilation in that old-school religious studies sense, because it refracted what many of us associate with being human: self-destruction. And whether or not we could explain what we saw when we faced ourselves in that lighthouse, we left changed in a way that only prayer or film could catalyze. –Jazz Scott --- 11 You Were Never Really Here Dir. Lynne Ramsay [Amazon] Adapting a book by Jonathan Ames, writer/director Lynne Ramsay upends the thriller/character study by making a brilliant film about violence without showing the actual violence onscreen. It was a choice born of necessity — the filmmaker didn’t feel comfortable shooting action sequences — but it was completely within the spirit of this bold and haunting look at a man (Joaquin Phoenix) whose sole gift of violence and pain followed him like a heavy shadow. By focusing more on the consequences of violence that weighed deeply on him as he navigated a path of righteousness, Ramsay depicted a compromised world, shattered long ago by a trauma that reverberated louder with every new transgression. The film was angry, mournful, and frightening, but it also pierced through the oppressive darkness without sugarcoating the ordeal. Propelled by Jonny Greenwood’s incredible score, You Were Never Really Here was a gorgeous movie that waded into bleak territory without feeling like tragedy porn, a beautiful tale — even amongst the grotesque — about the inherent need for salvation that drives us forward. –Neurotic Monkey [pagebreak] 10 Hereditary Dir. Ari Aster [A24] Hereditary, the first feature from writer-director Ari Aster was more than just the spiritual descendant of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho. It was not just the latest addition to the A24 family of slow-building, well-crafted horror films. Hereditary was about the unavoidable legacies that our families leave us, and for this it bore an uncanny resemblance to the bleak family dramas of Bergman or Haneke. Annie (played by Toni Collette in a career performance) said and did unforgivable things to her son and husband (Alex Wolff and Gabriel Byrne), and we squirmed. First out of angst, then disgust, and finally fear. And after being emotionally worn down with 90 minutes of this, the film fully committed to its supernatural heritage and delivered some of the best frights of the year. We loved it because it was an assured first step from a new director and a further commitment to excellence from an exciting young distribution company. We loved it because if the first two-thirds were painful to watch, then the last third offered us the voyeuristic release of a horror film. But most of all, we loved it because it married the visceral and the cerebral, giving birth to an unholy experience that stuck with us, like a tick. –Jeff Miller --- 09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen [Annapurna] The last two decades have had their share, but 2018 was a proper trifecta of spirited, inventive Westerns. Audiard’s Sister’s Brothers was the bitter pill rendered unexpectedly sweeter; Damsel was a triumphant anti-romance (a nice thematic companion piece to 2015’s Slow West); and this anthology gave us a perfectly-blended fun, dark, and heartbreaking (namely the beautiful, merciless “Meal Ticket” segment) genre classic. The tone shifted wildly, well heralded by the eponymous opening tale (cartoonishly musical and silly, but cleverly undermined with graphic violence and grim meta-commentary). We had our requisite rich characterization native to a Coen Bros. film, with strong turns from Zoe Kazan, Stephen Root (natch), Harry Melling, Grainger (“DOG HOLES!”) Hines, and Chelcie Ross, for a start (Brendan Gleeson almost does “The Unfortunate Rake” as well as Ian McShane, but not quite). But there was also a curious, world-weary current fusing the episodes, one of exhausted sadness and a dread-dodging sort of hindsight. Life and its lore as a turgid tangle we’re a little too anxious to leave behind. A long goodbye to the “the meanness in the used to be.” –Willcoma --- 08 The Other Side of the Wind Dir. Orson Welles [Netflix] For all the excitement that it stirred, there was a fear among cinephiles that Orson Welles’s final film, completed 33 years after his death, wouldn’t live up to the story of its own production. These fears were unfounded. Suffused with moments of staggering brilliance, The Other Side of the Wind was a dense, multivalent, sometimes maddening film, one that we are lucky to have in any form. Much like Henri-George’s Clouzot’s Le Prisonniere (and its ill-fated precursor Inferno), The Other Side of the Wind evidenced a master filmmaker pushing himself in his late period to fully explore the visual representation of aberrant psychology through abstraction, deconstruction, and exaggeration. Both Clouzot and Welles amplified color to impressionistic, oversaturated heights, but whereas Clouzot’s experimentation was primarily formal, Welles upended narrative, creating a mise en abyme that was at once hagiography and self-assassination. Even what was clearly intended as pastiche (Hannaford’s film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, was essentially the De Düva of Antonioni’s then-recent work) was utterly riveting, with balletic mise-en-scène that presaged and rivaled the best of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. Most impressive, however, was the juxtaposition of the aggressively stylized film-within-the-film and the faux-vérité surrounding it — Hannaford’s film was all propulsive jump-cuts on action in a self-consciously auteurist mode, while the frame story comprised a messy collage of film stocks, focal lengths, and framing styles meant to suggest a polyphony of perspectives, or perhaps a fracturing of one’s psyche; editor Bob Murawski, working from Welles’s extensive notes and workprint, sutured it all into a kinetic rhythm both jarring and cohesive. This was absolutely essential viewing, an invigorating testament to the medium itself and a reminder of how much further it can still go. –Christopher Bruno --- 07 Shirkers Dir. Sandi Tan [Netflix] Shirkers was, among other things, a portrait of young creativity, folklore, fragile egos, self-discovery, DIY practices, and the cultural impact that a film can have on a country. The documentary told the story of Sandi Tan, a Singaporean teenager who set out to make the country’s first notable road movie in 1992. With the help of the “established” Western director Georges Cardona, a gang of dreamy-eyed college kids put their lives on hold for the film (also named Shrikers) in an attempt to write their country’s film history. However, in the final stages of the process, the footage disappeared with Cardona. What followed was a decades-long search for a rebellious movie that was supposed to blow Singapore wide open, its creator, and the man plagued with an imperialistic obsession for fame. It was a real-life story that could only happen in a movie. –Sam Tornow --- 06 Zama Dir. Lucrecia Martel [Strand Releasing] Look: Don Diego de Zama has come unstitched in time. He stands at the edge of earth and sea. Waves are undertow, proof that the future is unfolding somewhere. But time has ripped itself up and away from him. He turns from the waves and walks up the shore, still in frame. He pauses, walks back, trapped. He is not entitled to languish; his days are spent running ruined bureaucracies. He appeals to a succession of fat governors to be sent away or home or anywhere else. But he is here. He is casually cruel and pathetically hopeful that he will be rendered reverence. He will not be. Lucrecia Martel, the master, adapted the fevered anti-history of Antonio Di Benedetto’s prose into transformative euphoria. Her cinematography was for freeing bodies. Zama didn’t represent colonialism so much as it canceled the notion that belonging has a place anymore. By pinning her hero to the same useless hope as he decayed through the years, Martel created a world of unwavering indigenous bodies and mocking llamas. She papered over Zama like an unmoved fungus, reducing him back to ephemera to be fertilized. She said no to his hopes. The corregidor, the man who can’t be king, remained in frame. –Frank Falisi --- 05 The House That Jack Built Dir. Lars von Trier [IFC] Lars von Trier’s movies are not easy to watch, but past the gruesome violence, the fucked-up interpersonal relationships, and the heady themes, there’s always something there. Case in point: The House That Jack Built, a pitch-black film in which a serial killer explains five “incidents” from his life to a mysterious companion. And unsurprisingly, with its aggressive depictions of the macabre, the film enjoyed about as divisive a public response as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring did at its riotous 1913 premiere. At Cannes, von Trier’s film reportedly moved over 100 people to walk out; yet, when it ended, it was met with thunderous applause and, indeed, a standing ovation from those who remained. Yes, it was shockingly violent, but it was also incredibly funny, and as its protagonists traveled through their Dantean hellscape, they offered profound and unique meditations on art, time, and history. In other words, the film’s brutality was in service of something, not just an end in itself. Today, people are obsessed with talking about how everyone should and should not behave, what people should and should not think and say. But they’re far less interested in examining the pathological reasons why we have those urges to say or do the “wrong” thing in the first place. Some would argue that this is the exact reason art exists, to examine ourselves at a deeper level. And this film asked big questions: Can destruction be art? Can murder? Is depicting something the same as validating it? If you don’t want to subject yourself to this movie, my opinion is that that’s exactly why you should watch it. If you get through it, you may learn something about yourself. I did. Lars von Trier isn’t afraid to channel and complicate humankind’s darkest, most sadistic desires, and that’s a good thing. In fact, isn’t that one of the essential roles of the artist? –Adam Rothbarth --- 04 Mandy Dir. Panos Cosmatos [RLJE] Words like psychedelic, hallucinogenic, revenge, rage, and insane got tossed around liberally by those attempting to summarize Mandy, the sophomore directorial effort by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) starring Nicolas Cage in all his nouveau-shamanic glory and then some. But those were understatements. Mandy was a maximalist assault, a new death yarn whose title screen didn’t even arrive until an hour and 15 minutes in, when protagonist Red went hunting for Lysergicenobites and Jesus freaks. Like antagonist Jeremiah Sand, Cosmatos, Cage, cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and late scorer Jóhann Jóhannsson all weaponized complete sensory overload to mesmerize and capture their audience. But unlike the Mandy character, we could hardly muster a laugh past “Erik Estrada from CHiPs” — we merely watched in wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe at the un(adulte)rated, undefinable phantasmagoria — the bathroom scene, the chainsaw scene. OK, so maybe that wasn’t what Roger Ebert had in mind when he rightly called Nicolas Cage one of the greatest actors of his generation, but then Ebert probably also wouldn’t have imagined the actor spending two nights in his underwear, tied to a fence in a Belgian forest to prep for a scene (apparently, yes, that happened). That’s the point, though. The hype was realer than real. Mandy was a masterpiece beyond what any of us could ever have imagined. –Samuel Diamond --- 03 Sorry to Bother You Dir. Boots Riley [Annapurna] Every day, they take a little bit more. For months, we’ve heard about how Amazon runs its warehouses like sweatshops. A couple weeks ago, it was Facebook selling your private messages. If WorryFree were to step forward tomorrow with a unique, 21st-century approach to living debt-free, would any of us be surprised? For all its detours into the surreal and the absurd, Sorry to Bother You never felt that far removed from the world we inhabit. The questions it asked and dilemmas it presented touched on everything from the changing face of corporate power in the age of tech startups, the challenges of navigating predominantly white spaces for non-whites, and the complicity of individuals in larger systems of oppression. Moving through the world today is an act of gliding from one outrage to the next, and Riley shares our outrage, but he coupled it here with a sense of playfulness and hope that rendered Sorry to Bother You one of the most important films of 2018. –Joe Hemmerling --- 02 The Favourite Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos [Fox Searchlight] Early on, Duchess Sarah admonished her lover, Queen Anne, that love has its limits — to which the queen replied, “Well it shouldn’t.” The story proceeded through a delicious series of political and bedroom maneuvers to prove the queen utterly and tragically wrong. Yorgos Lanthimos has always taken a perverse glee in sticking his movie knife into the banal, received wisdom of Western right-thinking. His trajectory from Dogtooth forward had increasingly tightened the thumbscrews on his audience; The Killing of a Sacred Deer was as muscle-bound and torturous to watch as it was incisive. But The Favourite turned that sensibility inside out, exploding with bright and colorful production design, brilliantly mining 18th-century courtly fashions for visual comedy. Rouged, powdered, and highly wiggy men ponced about like overbred poodles through all the absurd ornamentation, as a raging battle of wills played out among the film’s three towering female protagonists. The script was nastier than Dynasty and invented a patois of 18th-century Queen’s English and contemporary colloquialisms that somehow felt organic, but it had a Shakespearean heft at its core that played out in a perfectly odd and dissonant finale. –Water --- 01 First Reformed Dir. Paul Schrader [A24] 2018 was filled with days when hopping from one social media platform or news network to the next resembled a modern-day Stations of the Cross, with each subsequent click offering something that was somehow more terrifying, depressing, and enraging than the last. With the massive sprawl of readily available information, staying informed was more effortless than ever, yet it could easily, almost imperceptibly, transform from a desire to remain dutifully cognizant of our ever-shifting global landscape into a form of unabated and isolating self-flagellation. In Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, it was this hyper-awareness of earthly perils that plagued Michael (Philip Ettinger), a young environmental activist who believed it immoral for his pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) to bring a child into this crumbling world, when he desperately met with Ethan Hawke’s already jaded, world-weary Reverend Toller for counsel. Despite telltale signs of suicidal thinking, Toller found their discussion not troubling, but “invigorating.” And when Michael blew off his head with a shotgun, the good reverend reacted not with sorrow or regret, but by taking on Michael’s all-too-real concerns of potential global disaster, bearing them like a cross upon his shoulders as he confronted the duplicitous evils that have infiltrated both his tiny, sparsely attended church and the superchurch that funds the relic he was keeping alive after 250 years. In this year’s cinema, there was perhaps no greater metaphor for the failure of American institutions to serve the public in any meaningful way (as many have slowly been reduced to thinly veiled money-laundering schemes for the wealthy) than the fact that Toller was stuck in a historically famous church with a broken organ, forced to hawk cheap souvenirs merely to keep the doors open. First Reformed deftly tackled this notion of the individual vs. implacable global forces, with an acute focus on the unsettling merging of ecclesiastical forces with those of an unbridled and amoral capitalist system. Schrader’s ascetic vision, informed most explicitly by Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Yasujiro Ozu, offered the perfect aesthetic framework through which traditional systems of belief could collide haphazardly with the ruthlessly unfeeling, profit-hungry, hyper-modern business models that dominate both corporate and institutional cultures. Schrader’s camera was almost exclusively immobile, yet this stillness presented a deeply perceptive gaze and compositions as stark as the cold New England winter. It was a vision of the world as unwavering as that of Toller, who lived a life virtually sealed off from the real world, indulging himself with the sort of small rituals we all tend to hold onto to provide a semblance of order and meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. But for all of Toller’s pain (often self-inflicted), First Reformed offered a vision of grace and tenderness in the heavily symbolic Mary, who prevented the film from tipping into the complete and utter despair that Toller found himself in. In one of the year’s most remarkable sequences, Mary arrived at Toller’s office and together performed a ritual that she often did with her now-deceased husband. As she laid on top of the priest, making as much body-to-body contact as possible and matching his breathing patterns, the two achieved a temporary sense of communal transcendence, slowly rising from the floor as they began to travel over vast mountains and beautiful oceanside vistas. But Toller’s thoughts couldn’t remain fixed on utopic ideals for long before visions of city life and landfills of untold sizes took over. Such incessant and uneasy wavering between hope and despair, sensuality and violence, love and rage, faith in the future and the fatalistic acceptance of our environment’s demise filled First Reformed, which stands as the most eloquent yet soul-shattering microcosm of the world that we saw all year. –Derek Smith http://j.mp/2H7Z1Nd