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iampikachuhearmeroar · 3 years

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y’know the wildest thing still to happen to me on this hellsite was my first experience of sexting, sans nudes, that was done in front of at least 250-500 followers because of those horny anons i had in early 2013 when i was 17. instead of being exposed to it on my phone privately with a partner at that age, it was done publicly for the internet to see lmao. i remember begging the anons to stop and “come off anon” because i was “losing followers” at the time too bc i was so insecure about my follower count lmao. and then yeah when they came off anon they were both 28 years old.

to write the responses, i just consulted cosmo mag sex pages for ideas hoping that the anons would like the options i chose. in one i detailed doing anal- a sex act i hadn’t even done yet irl- let alone every other thing i suggested in them (head, idek long, drawn out foreplay, some stupid fancy sex moves that cosmo was all like “use these moves to spice up your sex life 🔥🔥”, sex in a bath, i’m pretty sure i had some lines about tying or handcuffing them to a bed (????) etc etc etc)….

when again, i had never even done any of those above sex acts in real life. i was a naive teen who was incredibly shy in regards towards her love life because she’d “never been kissed” and had never had the “hot emo boyfriend whose in a band and is covered in tattoos” she’d always wanted, let alone even a boyfriend that she had actually fucking liked (ie clear braces boy, for like a month in year 9/2010 vs the popular boys that made fun of her, that she always had unrequited crushes on)…. hell, my blog title when i first started on here in 2011 was “the perfect epitome of being forever alone” because of these very reasons. but here she was, writing explicit sex acts to strangers like she knew what the fuck she was doing, to an audience of 250-500 people- and then to fucking grown ass men in inboxes. i was just parroting the shit i’d read in cosmo (both sex advice and sometimes excerpts of erotica/“sexy, steamy reads” they had some months) and also heard repeatedly in the porn that my high school stalker/creeper at public school loved to show (harass) me with to flirt with me, whenever we were alone together at school in 2012/2013.

like you could tell how naive i was….. because i used ridiculous lines like “like a gentleman entranced, you lead me to the bath for our next foray” and dumbass prose-y things like that. because what the fuck does that even mean 😂😅????

and this is why i think minors should be careful with their online experiences. like yeah, you could say that i wasn’t a minor anymore- more of a “young adult”- who should of made the smart decision to not engage with these anons. but i was a kid. i thought it was fun. and when the dudes came off anon, i thought to myself “it’s not like i’m ever gonna meet them if i ever go to the US or puerto rico at any point. it’s not like that they’ll ever recognise me in person or ever reach out to me again in the future. i might as well do it.” and i did eventually end up ignoring the guys in my inbox, due to my mental health kinda plummeting from the middle til the end of 2013 because of my end of high school exams and stuff… and also the puerto rican guy’s infamously inappropriate “hot PE teacher fucks HOT female high school student in the girls change room showers” fantasy which fucking disgusted me, when he full well knew that i was STILL IN high school.

and obviously again, there’s the point about using the “block” button function. but as i’ve stated several times over my years on here, back in my early days of tumblr, i never wanted to block or unfollow people (even if they were trash like these two men), because it seemed so “mean” and “final”. obvs now i have no qualms about blocking people, and actively encourage younger people on here to use the block button with reckless abandon towards creepy people or people who can hurt them in some way. but to high school teenage me, the whole “using the block button” thing seemed to go against me being a “nice girl/person” so i never used it, no matter which social media platform i was on.

this is why i’m hella scared for young teen girls on tik tok wanting to have onlyfans accounts: because it’s where they’ll be exposed to ACTUAL CREEPS AND PREDATORS incredibly quickly; all because they can make money off selling images of just their feet or eventually their body….. depending on what these creepy strangers demand from them….. and they’ll feel like they’ll have to do it…. but to do it before you even start experimenting properly with relationships and sex is even worse. like. yeah. i’ve admitted before that i originally started this tumblr to possibly post nudes, to see if i’d get the positive feedback that i so desperately wanted/craved from the boys in my year at catholic school- eg. to be called “sexy”, “hot”, “fuckable” possibly “beautiful”- like some of the so called “popular girls” got on their hella basic bikini photos back then (like i remember one girl i knew ended up with like 500 likes and a fair amount of comments on one of her bikini pics and i was INCREDIBLY BITTER because not even a pic of me with a nice outfit on, my hair done and makeup on could EVER get those numbers, let alone even break over the double digits).

but i decided posting nudes or other explicit images on here was an absolute no go, because i realised that i never wanted people that i knew digging up barely clothed/naked pics of me and sending them to me all like “hey, is this you?” and then possibly mocking me, all because i would’ve been dumb enough to put my face in them probably at the time. now when i take nudes and send them, i never show my face. because i know now, that even in relationships, your partner can use nude pics as leverage for arguments or to abuse you in such a way that they’ll upload your pics without your knowledge to god knows where on the internet probably as a way to get back at you in a horrible breakup.

this is what i sincerely hope some young girls who ever contemplate starting onlyfans accounts take some time SERIOUSLY CONSIDER. please know that if you share shit on onlyfans, it can shared and re-shared (i think idek how OF works tbh) to god knows who- and eventually end up in the hands of people you know. i don’t fucking care if it’s a “good way to make money!” or if people think that im trying to stop teen girls from being “girl bosses” and the other dumb as fuck internet memes you want to throw at me. because this shit isn’t “haha internet meme funny” material. it’s some fucking serious stuff. and also, i’m not saying “don’t become a sex worker when you’re older” or whatever either. you’re free to make that choice when you’re in your 20s (no i even mean 17-19 year olds in this post as “young teen girls”- sorry you’re basically kids to me at almost 26). just please consider where the fuck your stuff can be shared to. who it can end up being shared with or to.

this is why i was so fucking adamant with my infamous old follower mr adelaide fuckboy/MAF that i personally would NOT consider becoming a camgirl for him or just generally… because i had no idea where the fuck my images or videos would end up. and do you know the places i’d never want them to fucking be??? in the hands of my high school stalker/creeper. in the hands of those two 28yo men from 2013 (who’d now be in there late 30s or early 40s). i absolutely don’t want them in the hands the mid-to-late 20s and early 30s men that that girl i met at public school in 2012 who was pissed that i didn’t believe that were “adults” because we were finally over the legal age of consent (16) in our state of australia, and so we were apparently fine to “fuck” literal grown ass men because “just fuck them and they’ll be nice to you!!” which i knew was fucking bullshit.

i absolutely don’t fucking want explicit videos/images of me ending up in “why the fuck won’t you let me give you “sex lessons” in the back of my car as a “favour” and as payment for teaching you how to drive you stupid, stuck up & frigid, virgin bitch!?” guy’s hands from 2014 (when i was 18/19 at the time and he was 25… he ended up being the first person of many i’d EVER block on social media lol). or i don't want them in the hands of those weird early 20s dudes (one of which was trying to set me up with his friend) who hit on me at 16/17 (2012) who were angry that i didn’t like and watch porn as much as they did…. and who promptly asked me at the end of their period of harassing of me: “do you know any sluts we could add?” because i kept refusing their suggestions etc.

hell, quite frankly i don’t even want them to go to mr adelaide fuckboy/MAF either, but the very few and far between nudes that i sent on snapchat to him back in 2016 are some nudes that i’d rather forget lmao. hell. i don’t even know if MAF ever deleted my nudes or shared them somewhere else or not, after he fucking wheedled them out of me with “i’ve followed you for 4 years, don’t be a shit! you owe me nudes!” so he’d just shut the fuck up about my social life decisions and leave me the fuck alone.

i don’t want ANY ONE of the guys i mentioned above to get their hands on photos of minors either…. because i definitely know my hs stalker/creeper would… because his fave “make her jealous” tactic that he’s always used on me is that “hey…. i’m dating a *insert teenage girl’s age here*! be fucking jealous that you don’t fucking have me and feel guilty that you won’t fuck me like this girl does!!!” just like he did in 2015, when i ran into him on the home from uni… when i turned 20 the next week and he turned 20 that december. at that time it was a 14yo girl he used as an example of him “dating”/“fucking” to make me jealous. instead, i was completely and utterly fucking disgusted. like any fucking sane and normal human being would/should be at that horrible age gap. that is literally a fucking child that he was fucking grooming. and we were literal adults. back the fuck away.

just please. PLEASE CONSIDER the types of people that trawl these kinds of sites and their intentions. please consider that you are young. very fucking young. you literally DO NOT need to upload nudes to the internet because it’s apparently a “lucrative” business. fuck the jokey “boss babe” rhetoric around it all the way to fucking hell.

because if you’re a minor: i do not want you to have your first experience of sexting or sending explicit images literally in front of god knows how many total strangers for the whole world to see (okay i know only fans is like subscriber/follower based or whatever. but i don’t care)…… even when you (depending how good you are with relationships etc) haven’t reached the common supposed milestones of your “first boyfriend/girlfriend/partner” or “first kiss” or have even “lost your virginity” (which isn’t real anyway- don’t buy this fucking bullshit)…. just like i stupidly did with my exposure to sexting here on my tumblr back in 2013. these people don’t/won’t give a flying fuck about your privacy or safety. they don’t/won’t give a fuck about your boundaries either.

please don’t possibly scar yourself for life, just because you’re being told that it’s a quick & convenient way to make some money for weirdos on the depths of the internet. you will regret it in future. just like i do now with mine. it should’ve been something personal between me and and a guy i trusted and liked at the time. not to some random 250-500 random strangers on this hellsite (okay the notes on these posts were literally single digits or non-existent, but still… and also some of my irl friends who had tumblr saw these posts as well) for a show….. and then privately with two 28yo literal grown ass men…. who should’ve been fucking hitting on women their own goddamned age and in their own countries and NOT a 17yo high school KID (at the time) from australia; who, now in her 20s, needs therapy to sort this shit out lmao. mind you they both reeled me in with the “you’re so mature for your age” bullshit line…. which i fell for a little bit, even if it did make me feel kinda gross at the time, too. don’t fall for that bullshit either.

#life #about me #shut up ilona #relationships i guess #internet stuff #this went in a bigger direction that i thought it would lmao #but anyway

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thecartoonuniverse · 5 years

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The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Review

So I am uploading the script for the review here for everyone to see simply because I don't think I can get a video for this out before the show comes out. I spent all weekend at a convention and this is a huge script so I just haven't had the time/energy to make a full video. That being said, enjoy the review!

In 1982, audiences everywhere were introduced to the awe inspiring world of Thra in the Jim Henson film: The Dark Crystal. It was a beautiful tale of an alien world that begged for more development! Plans for a sequel were made, but ultimately it never got around to happening in movie form.

Now, after 37 long years, The Dark Crystal is finally returning in the form of a new series, albeit as a prequel called The Dark Crystal: Age of resistance, which is arriving on Netflix on August 30th.

I might say this a lot in this review, but I cannot believe that this show exists. I couldn’t even believe the original film existed when I first saw it. The Beauty of this world is really hard to summarize… so I won’t. You’re going to get the full story (and you’re gonna like it).

Imagine, if you will, 17-year-old me watching TV one day to see a show called Jim Henson’s creature shop challenge. Every week contestants had to face a different challenge where they made puppets based off of the given theme. The episode I happened to watch tasked the participants with making a skeksis. Of course I was like, what the heck is a skeksis? So, I googled it (not sponsored) and what I found blew. My. Mind.

The Skeksis were one of just many many many many many… many insane creatures that exist in the film ‘The Dark Crystal’. The film itself was an eerily dark children’s tale following two human-like creatures known as ‘Gelflings’ as they travel the lands of Thra with the hope of healing their world. From there I quickly invested in the expanded lore: books, comics, and pretty much anything else I could find.

The stories were amazing, but nothing ever came quite close to the beauty that the movies captured. You see, this stunning alien planet was brought to us using nothing but puppetry. From the smallest little buggy boy, to the tallest long-legged-larry, everything that dazzled our senses was done using ground breaking puppetry from the Master himself: Jim Henson.

While I enjoyed the outside material, comics and prose never quite captured the marvel of advanced puppetry. When the new show was announced, I was a bit worried. Practical effects have been replaced by Digital ones in almost every corner of the industry, and it seemed certain that a return to the screen would mean embracing 3D animation.

But then they showed us the trailer… (show flash of the amazing action in the trailer).

And I was stunned.

Everything looked so amazing. The Action was insane, the cinematography was beautiful, and the puppetry… oh my god they did the whole thing with puppets! I couldn’t wait to see it.

Literally. I couldn’t wait. But thankfully I was sent all the episodes before they aired and now, I get to tell you guys what to expect and why you should watch. Because trust me, for the sake of all things beautiful and good in this world, you need to watch this.

There is so much I want to say, but this WILL be a spoiler free review!

Now there is much more to the story of the Dark Crystal than just two little elves saving the world! The story at its core are about the Urskeks, a group of higher dimensional beings sent to thra through the power of the dark crystal. When trying to return home, the Urskeks accidentally divide themselves in half, with each one becoming two new creatures, the Skeksis, and the Mystics. The skeksis are essentially pure evil and want to live forever. They increase their lifespan by draining the Crystal of its power and then using it to drain the life essence of other creatures. When a prophecy foretells of their downfall at the hand of gelflings, they set out to annihilate the entire species, but miss two infant gelflings who manage to find safety. These two gelflings, Jen and Kira, grow up, discover one another, and heal the crystal, which allows for the skeksis and mytics to merge into their true forms once again, and bring peace to thra.

That was basically the Spark Notes version of the Dark Crystal, but Gizmodo has an article that does a good job of summarizing the rest of the lore… though you can also just watch the movie!

Now if you are wondering what happens next then this show… ISNT going to be helpful. Instead, the age of resistance is a ‘prequel’ which flashes back to the time when the Skeksis could no longer rely on the crystal alone for life energy, and turn to sucking the life out of other creatures instead. This prompts the gelflings to fight back against the skeksis, forming, as the title suggest, the resistance!

The choice to make to make this a prequel series is something I was always ecstatic about. Unlike with any sequels, a prequel would allow us to get a view into what Gelfling were actually like as a species, and let me tell you the show does not disappoint on this front.

As we learn, 7 different clans existed, each with their own customs and unique physical appearance. In particular, the Vapra, Stonewood, and Grottan clans are featured the most in the series, although we do meet members from the other clans as well.

our three main characters each hail from one of these clans. Brea is a Vapran princess, Rian is a Stonewood guard to the skeksis, and Deet is the most adorable Grottan to ever exist.

I learned about all the clans in the recent Dark Crystal novels, but it was still amazing to see what they officially looked like.

And as for the main characters themselves, they are all pretty great.

It is pretty clear that Rian is supposed to be our Jen stand-in, but his personality is very distinct, so I do not have a huge problem with this.

On the other hand we have Brea, who does have a resemblance to Kira but only because they likely hail from the same clan. Otherwise Brea is very studious and loves reading and drawing.

That brings me to the odd one out, Deet. She has never been on the surface of Thra before, meaning that her positive and cheerful way of thinking will be tested when she faces the challenges set before her.

However, there is one other character that has a huge role in the series that I have yet to mention. That is of course Aughra, who is more or less the personification of Thra. That being said, she is basically an old grumpy woman. Personally, I was not a huge fan of her in the original movie. She seemed very unhelpful and too cryptic in her responses. Yet, she is definitely a more proactive character in the series, and I actually really grew to like her. As a being born from the ground of Thra, she of course does not want to see the world become corrupted, so her actions in this season make sense.

But those are just the humanoid characters, which are really not what I’m here for.

Where the real excitement begins is looking at all the Skeksis. Look at them! They’re hideous! Just as they’re meant to be. And unlike in the movie they are younger and not quite on the edge of death. It’s just really nice to see the Emperor ruling the Skeksis as he was meant to. Chamerlain is up to no good as usual, and the rest of the skeksis are pretty terrible as well. I just need to take a moment to appreciate SkekMal. He is the only one who is not already decrepit, and he makes use of all four of his arms to hunt gelflings. He’s terrifying, but terrifyingly beautiful (don’t judge me).

Their counterparts the urRu don’t play the biggest part this time around, which is hard for me to forgive since they were my favorite creatures from the movie. But they have purposely hidden themselves from the outside world so their lack of presence makes sense.

And the rest of the animals in Thra are adorable. Llike with the original film, there are plenty of moments that will have you pausing your screen to get a better look at the amazing creatures inhabiting this world.

It really is indicative of the most important thing of all: The puppetry

For the most part, it is extremely well done. The Skeksis in particular have the best range of emotions, despite having just eyes and a beak to work with, and the other animals are really neat to look at, as I said.

I wish I could say the same for the gelfling, but the puppets are not quite there yet. In particular, their mouths just can’t provide the range of motion that human mouths can. This is due to their faces being made of latex, so their movement is limited. The eyes however are perfect.

That brings me to something many of you may be wondering about. Yes, CGI is used, and you can for the most part tell when it is because any of those elements move better than the rest of the world around them. For example, often the skeksis’s tongues were animated, and it is clear that some creatures are computer generated in their entirety. I mean I do understand, since making things fly or move in very precise ways is difficult with puppetry. Overall the show is beautiful and the CG is not that big of a deal.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about the story. While it was never like the reason to watch the Dark Crystal, the prequel really dives deep into the lore and expands on it. However, it also attempts to re-explain everything that was previously learned, meaning that there are occasionally long sequences of just explaining things. I enjoyed them, but this may not be the case for everyone.

With that there is also a boat load of characters. For more dedicated fans they may see a lot of familiar faces from the novels that have been releasing for the past few years. However I did feel like the introduction of some of these characters, such as Naia and Kylan, was rushed and kind of went unexplained as to how they got to meeting up with the main characters unless you have read the books. Not that they have the biggest roles in the show, I just feel like for more casual fans them being in the story will feel pointless.

But that being said, holy crap this show is dark. Ha ha, dark crystal, yeah of course it’s dark. But I mean this show is gruesome. Yes, the movie was pretty dark, but imagine that but brought to a whole new level. Both kids and adults alike are sure to get nightmares after this.

However, as someone who loves anything animated and hopes for more story-based shows, Age of Resistance is everything I could’ve hoped for and more. It doesn’t really pander to old fans in the way that some series revivals do. Some people may be mad at any small change, but I for one welcome them as they allow the new series to become something much greater than the movie could ever be.

And looking at the marketing for the show, it seems like both Netflix and the Jim Henson company want this to be a huge success. I’m talking funko pops, action figures, an extensive social media campaign, tie in books, a video game, a panel at the biggest stage at SDCC plus a whole booth, and even a comic which is a prequel to this prequel series.

And I don’t blame them. It took YEARS to get this made. There are so many different puppets that had to be made, I cannot believe this was actually pulled off. I’m talking dozens of gelflings, almost every skeksis, mystics, podling, other creatures, plus the environments had to be made by hand and be unique to each location.

Even if you aren’t a big fan of the story, I urge you to watch this show for the visuals alone. Trust me, it is worth it.

I also want to quickly mention, for the ten people that actually watch this that have gone head first into anything to do with the Dark Crystal, that I don’t really know if the books fit in perfectly with the series. This timeline released by Gizmodo does not include the novels at all despite what I heard about them being canon. Plus, from what I saw, unless I am totally wrong, certain things are retconned. This was kind of disappointing since I have been loving the novels, but it would definitely be hard to make everything work out since the main characters from the books are more like side characters in the series.

But still seriously read the books they’re amazing.

So that is pretty much what I thought about Age of Resistance without spoiling too much. I love this show a ton, so I hope everyone that watches this review gives it a chance, and then tells all their friends about it as well.

In an article, the creators said they have two more seasons planned, so we need to make sure they happen! I don’t want this to be another instance of a great show on Netflix being cancelled because not enough people watched it.

Do it for the puppets.

#dark crystal #the dark crystal #the dark crystal age of resistance #rian #deet #brea #dark crystal spoilers #tdc #skeksis #mystics #urru #gelfling #aughra #she ra netflix #puppetry #review

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narwhallove · 5 years

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Behind the Curtain: Interview with Romy Writer Ludi-Ling

House of Cards actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more.

@ludi-ling goes meta in our final interview about her writing process; how the Romy fandom’s changed over the years; alternate universes (AU); and the role of smut for Romy fans. (Spoiler alert, our heroes are hot.)

No surprise that it’s a pleasure interviewing Ludi. I kept sending her more questions (25 total!) because her responses fascinated me and inspired me to ask more. It’s a rare person who writes visceral, startling prose and can also talk about her work with clarity, intelligence, and an affection for her characters that doesn’t occlude good writerly judgment.

The superlatives don’t end there. Anyone who knows the community knows that Ludi is a friend to her readers and to her fellow writers. As we all enter a heady 2019, reading Mr. and Mrs. X together, Ludi is someone to cherish.

If you haven’t read our other interviews, please check out: Part 1 of interviews: X-men Origins Part 2 of interviews: Going Dark

As a scholar of fan studies, do you believe Romy fanfiction fulfills needs that Marvel never can? What needs might those be, for Romy fans?

Certainly I think that fanfic is built on the premise of filling in the gaps, scribbling in the margins (to quote the seminal fan studies scholar, Henry Jenkins!) and fixing perceived wrongs. Comics are unique in that regard because the characters and stories within them continue for years and even decades. Comics continuities are convoluted and complicated, and there is a constant churn of writers working on them. Many fans have followed characters for far longer than the writers, and may know the characters more intimately than the professionals. Comics are full of retcons and contradictory takes on the characters. And I think fanfic is an important medium for allowing fans to “fix” that, to negotiate it. Because of the ongoing nature of comics, and because the futures of the characters are always going to be nebulous and subject to the whims of Marvel and the writers indefinitely, I think it’s going to continue to be important. Romy may be married in the comics, but there will still be plenty to write about—kids, divorce, a reconciliation . . . who knows? ;)

What do you think Romy readers seek out when they read fanfiction? If it’s wish fulfillment, what kinds of wishes are being fulfilled? If it’s looking for “gaps” that the comics skip over, what have you found to be the most common sorts of gaps?

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine.

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

But I also think that it’s interesting to write their individual perspectives on their sexual encounters, because of that tension between their characters. Rogue is the quintessential virginal Southern Baptist gal who’s inexperienced; whereas Gambit is the sexually aggressive alpha male who’s probably never had a woman turn him down in his life. That makes for a very combustive love affair between the two, and makes it fun to write that love affair (and all the smut in-between) from both their points of view.

#ludi-ling #fanfic #fanfiction #romy #rogue and gambit #house of cards #interview with author #interview with fanfic writer #fanfiction studies

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squadron-leader-farrier · 5 years

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Let's spice things up a bit; ANSWER ALL OF THE QUESTIONS

oh baby, you answered m prayers lol this is gonna be long so buckle up ?

1. favourite place in your country? my hill station, because of the weather, and because i haven’t been to many places, and the ones that i have been to were extremely hot and i never want to go there again,

2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad? depends on the holidays tbh. what the festivals the holidays fall near and that. i’d stay here for some, but for the ones that we don’t celebrate in my country like Halloween, i’d like to go abroad.

3. does your country have access to sea? peninsula, babey!

4. favourite dish specific for your country? chicken biryani. boy, oh boy, just thinking about it makes my mouth water. it’s that good. gosh, the flavour, the spice. the way they cook it,,,, the colours ahhhh

5. favourite song in your native language? ones made before the 60s. and the patriotic songs. there are too many to name, but two (non patriotic) ones are this and this (because they’re sad love songs and give me flyboys feels ya kno?)

6. most hated song in your native language? like, as a nation? idk. but personally, i hate, absolutely loathe any songs made after the 60s. they lack originality and creativity. all they did was rip off popular english songs, and changed the lyrics. that’s literally all they did. and they are super proud of it. i hate it. the music industry had gone to complete shit. even today they don’t know what good music is and ow to make it. they’re remixing all the old ones because they lack creativity. i hate it.

7. three words from your native language that you like the most? i don’t like any three words, because they’re not that appealing on their own (not the ones i can think of right at this moment) but rather, phrases. when you string those words and make poetry or prose. it’s really beautiful, and really poetic. perhaps the best ones are in those two songs, and others like them.

8. do you get confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom? i haven’t been in a situation like that so i can’t say.

9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best? probably Russia because the ones right next to me are exactly the same in topographical, cultural and architectural respects. there’s literally nothing new to see there, so i’d like to go to Russia.

10. most enjoyable swear word in your native language? so it’s basically three: bhenchod/madarchod/chutiya. all of them mean motherfucker in their basic essence, but are used to describe people, cuss out people, call your pal, so basically, the hindi equivalent of fuck. can be used as adjectives, prepositions, verbs, nouns, whatnot. can be used individually or all together. perhaps splash one of them in a conversation to make the group giggle a bit more while telling a funny story.

11. favourite native writer/poet? the ones who wrote nationalistic literature during the freedom struggle. so, to say, i like Sarojni Naidu, and Tagore. they’re perhaps the most famous ones of the time, and i like their work.

12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem? i don’t have any, because they’re already written in english by the authors. i read a poem or two lying around somewhere, but the thing about hindi is that the translations don’t bear the same feelings as the originals.

13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders? oh there are too many. too many by far. most of them are the usual black cat and others, oh, one i heard when i was in like 4th grade was that you shouldn’t go out with open wet hair at night because a spirit can get caught in em and come home with you. so that was strange. my family doesn’t have any, we’re rather realistic.

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV? no not in the least. you know why? because of this. i swear to fuck, the person who uploaded this compilation didn’t edit a single thing in. how do i know? because i’ve watched these on actual television. when i was young. in my neighbour’s tv.

15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get? remember when some of you motherfuckers got offended by bitch lasagna because you lack basic understanding what a fucking joke is? you don’t know what satire is? you are the reason why people think indians have no sense of humour because you DON’T it was a fucking JOKE holy shit i’m so triggered by this

16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with? haven’t heard of many stereotypes about us, but the laziest one i can think of is that we can do math and are good at science. we’re not. i’m shit at all of that. so are my 34 other classmates.

17. are you interested in your country’s history? not really, tbh. maybe the period just before independence, and some post-independence stuff, because i got dirt on those politicians and i want more of that so that i have a reasonable justification for hating politicians.

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language? i don’t know, maybe i’m so used to it i don’t even realise lol. but i guess so.

19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem? YES. YES. YES. i love them. i absolutely adore them. the flag is so symbolic and so beautiful i love her (orange on top for sacrifice, white in the middle for purity, green at the bottom for prosperity, the blue circle in the middle for resolution and justice, just ahhhh). the national anthem always gives me the chills. everytime i hear it playing somewhere, or when we sing it sometimes after assembly, or during days like today (independence day) or republic day, when we finish singing the last line it just always makes me a bit emotional and proud? yeah. today i almost started crying because i love it so much.

20. which sport is The Sport in your country? Cricket. even though the national sport is hockey. no one cares about hockey :(

21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be? the memers who think they’re very funny, (which they are not in the least), and the anti nationalists and separatists. i do not want them here. get lost. fuck off. shooo.

22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed? what makes me proud, is the freedom struggle of the revolutionaries, and the progress we’re making in every field, the hospitality of the people, and the unity in diversity. what makes me ashamed is that there’s still so much corruption in the government, can’t help it, the law’s delay, gosh the people who think they’’re better than everybody else, the entertainment industry, the music industry, some of the people, most of the politicians, etc.

23. which alcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country? bold of you to assume we have a single favourite beverage for the entire country. i think it varies from state to state. for mine i think it may be something apple related, because we have lots of apples here. the season is also coming lol and also, it’s very confusing because some states have completely banned alcohol and in some the legal drinking age is 18.

24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country? canada and ‘murica mostly because so many people immigrate there

25. would you like to come from another place, be born in another country? i’d like to be British, because i like the aesthetic and weather.

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal? i don’t watch many movies, but i think it’s not much/a small amount and neither do i mind nor do i care.

27. favourite national celebrity? no one. i hate all of them.

28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites? yep!! she’s not called a subcontinent for nothing, babey! i live near the Himalayas, so i like that.

29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country? oooooh yes. ooooooooooh boy. with Pakistan lol. mainly because of the union territory of jammu and kashmir. because pakistan wants it, we want it, and it legally also belongs to us. there’s separatists there, anti nationalists, and there’s poverty there, so it’s easy to instigate the people against the government. there were wars fought for it, most of them ended in our favour, but the other side is still making so many ceasefire violations, it is insane. it has been years, and every other day there’s a new violation. there’s lots of unrest in the valley, which is a shame, because it is a truly beautiful place.

30. do you have people of different nationalities in your family? my uncle is British, my cousin’s husband is also a Brit. a great-grand relative of mine was also British. there are none on my mother’s side.

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becquerelcaps · 6 years

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Love is Over, part 2

read the first part here: https://becquerelcaps.tumblr.com/post/178973389704/fiction-love-is-over-pt-1

Even when I go for interviews for 'normal' jobs, I inevitably end up feeling like a child playing dress-up in his parent's clothes. My sleeves are the wrong length. Ties have never worked on me. And why didn't I shave properly this morning? Perhaps porn was the wrong career for someone so neurotic. But I was already standing outside the girl's house, and the rain wasn't letting up, so I thought I might as well wait for the bus home somewhere dry. I knocked and soon found myself in her living room.

Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it an office, since every available surface was covered in loose sheets of paper, consumer electronics and mangled notepads. The curtains were drawn. A sofa, clearly never sat on, was crammed in a corner beneath a large landscape painting of a burning tree at night in a field of wheat. And gliding through this mess was the girl from the café, leaving me standing awkwardly in the doorway to lean against the far wall. We exchanged formalities in a way that I think amused her. This was when I first learned her name. But while it'd make my prose flow better, I can't bring myself to use it online, so I'm just going to refer to her as Love. If nothing else, I think she wouldn't hate that.

"So your hours are flexible," she said. We had been talking for only a few minutes, about experience, confidentiality, logistics and other topics that wouldn't be out of place at an office job. Her attitude was businesslike and uninterested, while I was just trying not to let on how much I wanted this.

"I don't have much of a social life. Give me half an hour to get the bus here and I can go whenever you like."

"I shoot through the week, process and upload on the weekend – that schedule doesn't change for you. Now, about payment. I believe in fair wages, but I'm taking more risk here than you, so you'll get a forty percent cut. That's $150 for an hour of content, give or take."

She must have seen me literally double-take. I could make more in an hour here than in a week of working minimum wage back at the laundromat. No more bulk unseasoned ramen. Shit, maybe I could actually start paying off some of my debts.

"Don't get so excited," she said. "You're cute. But I don't know if I can trust you, let alone use you. We'll shoot a scene, see how you do, then sign you off. Let's get you downstairs to the studio to see how you handle things."

The studio turned out to be a compact, oblong cellar with a low ceiling. At one end, a laptop sat in a nest of plugs, wires and video equipment on a desk surrounded by bare concrete walls. The other end had a few modest gestures towards decoration: heavy, dark red fur linings hung over the walls, complemented by ambient purple light radiating from small mood lamps subtly cached in the corners. A startling omission was the lack of a bed of any kind. In its place stood a chair sat in the dead centre of the room, upholstered with black leather. I would later learn that she had bought it from a dentist's office and refurbished it herself, liking the flexibility it gave her, and there was still a system of trays and little medicinal-looking boxes attached to one of the arms.

"Phones off in the studio," said Love, gesturing to the table. Evidently she didn't have hers on her.

"I'll leave it on," I said as I put it down. "I have some stuff on there to look at if I need to get back in the mood."

She responded with an honest-to-God roll of the eyes. "Oh, no. No, no, no. I think you really don't understand what kind of porn this is. My viewers, they don't care if the guy is hard or not."

"...what kind of porn is that, then? Softcore?"

"Sit down," she said, fiddling with a camera, "and I'll show you. If you're a real newcomer to this then I want to catch your first reaction. Virgins get the most buys." A dim green light indicated that I was now on tape.

With a slight jolt of discomfort, I settled into the recliner. It leant back farther than I expected, and when I saw Love coming towards me she towered tall, like an Amazonian giant. But rather than crush me beneath her heel, she reached into a box on one of the trays besides me and pulled out some kind of long metal rod, about half as thick as my little finger.

"You're luckier than you know," she murmured. "I sterilised this for you just this morning." Then, a little louder, for the camera: "In case you haven't figured it out yet, today we're going to... play doctor."

"Is that... something for taking my pulse?" I wasn't sure if she wanted me to speak, but the curiosity was genuine. The rod seemed too formless, too devoid of any notches or insignias or apparent function to look anything other than alien. It wasn't even sharp.

Her lips curled into a smile. Black lipstick, I noticed. Dressing up for the shoot. I felt like a slob. "Not quite," she said. "I've acquired my fanbase for indulging a few very select and particular kinds of content." Held between a finger and a thumb, she angled the rod towards me. "And it so happens that most of them include doing things to people like you." The tip, cold through my T-shirt, pushed against my chest. "Things like inserting a long, smooth piece of stainless steel..." It trailed down my body, coming to rest on a bulge in my jeans. "...into a particular part of the male anatomy."

Every nerve and fibre in my body recoiled at once. This was wrong. This was seriously wrong. I was trapped in a basement with a mad woman who wanted to hurt me, not make porn. "I, I need to really fucking go, like uh, right NOW, so --"

But just before I was about to bolt out of the chair and far away from this strange place, her hand snapped to my wrist. With the tiniest bit of pressure she kept me glued in place as she leant in close, and calmly spoke: "Calm down. I am not going to hurt you."

"Y-yeah that's nice and all," I sputtered, my voice quiet, "but I seriously, seriously cannot do this."

"I understand," she said. "But think about it. You didn't really come here thinking you were going to have sex with me, did you? We met on a kink forum. You can handle this." Her breath was hot against my face. Her voice dark, seductive. "And besides, think of the money. Video like this... you could pull in half a grand, when all's said and done."

Some deep psychological machinery in my brain whirred and forced me to take a gasp of air. I took a long, deep breath, and then another. "Money..."

"Of course, I would never force you to do something you really didn't want to." Her hand, still grasping the rod, was gently gripping my leg as she leaned over me. "But..." She pulled in even closer and whispered directly into my ear. "I know you're hard right now."

Call it adrenaline, if you like. I know I did that night. But the truth was feeling that metal rod tap against my groin sent a shiver through me that felt like a cudgel to the spine. The primal, gasping fear made my blood flow hot and my muscles tense into a raging erection that bulged and sagged inside my boxers. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't pull my eyes from her fingernails, black as night, tapping against the cool, strong steel.

"Show me," she said, loud and clear. "Show the camera how excited you are, and I'll put that thing of yours to use."

My hands trembling, I pulled at my belt until it slid to the floor with a heavy clunk. My boxers soon followed, and as they came down my cock sprang up, glistening at the tip. I had shaved before heading to Love's house, thinking it would matter, and I distinctly remember how the lack of hair made my penis seem so small next to the sheer length of the rod.

"Good boy," she said with a little chuckle. "You can follow instructions." When I wasn't looking, she had slathered the tip of the rod in some kind of sticky, colourless lube. "Now hold it steady it for me."

All I can remember of the sounding rod actually entering my cock is how dry my mouth was - full of cotton, it felt like. But that's a cop-out for a description, so I went back and looked at my copy of the video Love sent me after the fact. As the tip of the rod pushed up against the slit of my glans, my eyes visibly dilated, and when she firmly slid it an inch into my urethra, every part of my body trembled and I fell back against the chair like a doll with cut strings. It was as if I had been killed stone dead. But to Love's credit, she didn't miss a beat. Using one hand to keep the sounding rod stable, she grabbed the cuff of my shirt and gave me a brusque tug that pulled me back into the realm of the living. My head felt fuzzy and waterlogged, like I'd been dredged up from the bottom of the sea. "Guh..."

"Don't you make me call an ambulance just because you can't handle a girl using your dick better than you can," she said with a bemused air. "The paramedics always wreck the place." With that, she slid the rod another inch deeper into my dick. The sensation still felt utterly alien and wrong, but the sight of it disappearing into me was almost hypnotic. A pulse of precum surged up from somewhere deep inside me, welling up around the metal and flowing over my glans as I whimpered something meaningless. There was nothing else. The world had shrunk down to this basement, to me in this chair and Love standing over it. I wanted to squirm, but I was pinned down, staked through the heart. Hot tears were flowing over my cheeks.

"Shh, it's alright. What you're feeling... it's your masculinity leaving you." Love smiled at me like a caring mother. "It's like being castrated. It feels like I'm breaking your cock, and that's all you think you are. But I'm not breaking it. Just your mind." With that, she planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. "You're cute when you're fucked."

As my vision began to fade once more, I dimly felt the bulge of the rod pull up and slide out of my dick, which fell limp against my stomach without its support. My glans felt like it was burning. My entire cock was burning, actually. Or was it just where she had kissed me? No matter, now. I was broken. My mind was broken. Everything was nice and gentle and hot and calm and broken and my cock and her hand and the wet towel of the feeling and heavying gentle hot tired, ohhhh...

Everything was soft and only my cock hurt. A dull aching burn, an itch I couldn't scratch. Mmf. Where was my phone? I groped around my bedside table looking for it, only to realise that the table wasn't there and I wasn't in my own bed. Gargling and smacking my lips like I'd woken up from a night of binge-drinking, I realised Love must've moved me up into what looked like a guest room. I was naked under the covers - had she...? - but my clothes were in a neat pile on a chair besides the bed. Ah, and my phone was in one of my jeans' pockets. Considerate. But before I could check it there was a tap at the door and Love entered, bearing a tall glass of water and a bar of chocolate in her hands.

"You're awake, that's good. How are you feeling?"

"I... I have no idea how I'm feeling. Weird."

"That's normal; you're crashing. Eat this, it'll help." She pressed the chocolate into my hands. "You did pretty good for your first scene."

I opened the wrapper as she moved my clothes to the floor and sat down, perching the water on a windowsill. "Thanks, I guess. It all happened so quickly."

"You think? I got a good half hour of footage from that."

Jesus. The experience was already fluttering out of my mind like a dream. If it wasn't for the ache between my legs, I would have almost thought it didn't happen. "Will my... you know, my cock, will it be alright? It's hurting."

"Like I said, you're a virgin. It always hurts the first time. C'mon, let's get you downstairs if you're feeling alright."

A few minutes later I was fully dressed and standing in Love's living room once more. Though only a few hours had passed, everything looked and felt different. The room seemed less chaotic and more freeform, unrestrained. Or maybe it was something within me. The two of us chatted for a little while about business technicalities that are boring to recount - I had to sign a form permitting her to use the video of me - but the upshot was that I was now a formal employee of Love's media company. The only one, as it happened. It seemed that most applicants didn't get this far. I opted to have my portion of the revenue go directly to my bank account via standing order, and thinking that was everything, headed for the door. But something stopped me at the last moment.

"You mentioned something, just before I passed out. That putting that thing inside me was like getting castrated."

"Was I wrong?"

"No, it described it perfectly. How many guys have you done this to before?"

"None. ...well, that's not the full story." For the first time she actually looked somewhat bashful. "I don't usually tell people this so quickly, but you seem pretty trustworthy. I've done it to myself. I'm trans."

"Oh! Like..."

"Transgender. I've got a dick, in other words. Not a problem, I hope."

I paused for a moment, a little surprised, then grinned. "Shit, it makes me feel better about you putting that thing in me. You know how it feels too."

Love just rolled her eyes, smiled sardonically and wished me a pleasant night. "Go on, get. I've got editing to do."

As I stepped out from her house, I was bathed in the deep red light of a glorious evening. I'd spent more time with her than I'd expected to, and I could tell that my thoughts would be swimming with images of what'd happened here for the rest of the night. As I made my way to the busstop, I found myself wondering how long it might be till she called me back for another shoot. The thought of going through it all again still made me a little weak at the knees, but something about her presence brought it back down to reality, made it manageable. I just hoped that in the meantime, it wouldn't burn too much when I went to piss.

#becquerel #fiction #love is over

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tinymixtapes · 5 years

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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

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crxssart · 6 years

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What’s The Purpose of Romance?

What’s The Purpose of Romance? Husband and wife Edition.

When asked to describe the purpose of romance, a woman will use words such as friendship, relationship, endearment, and tenderness. Given the same question, a man will answer with one of the shortest words in the English language

“sex!!!”

For him, physical oneness and affirmation of his manhood equal romance.

Can two people with such different perspectives have their expectations met? Absolutely! But creating adventurous romance requires planning and enthusiastic effort. The relationship has to be a top priority. One reason so many marriage beds are frozen over or boring is that couples just don’t have time for romance and sex. Too many husbands and wives try to work sex in between the evening news and late night talk shows.

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Let’s face it. Many of our activities and other important things get the best of our resources and energy. Jobs get our best. Children get our best. Friends gets our best. But are we saving any of our best for romance in marriage?

How do you incorporate romance when you have children at home? Incorporating Mom and Dad need time too in their every day lives. Letting the kid/s understand that Mom and Dad often need quiet evenings alone.

Roleplaying is also a big factor as turning the kitchen into a famous restaurant and let each child order a special meal from a special menu. Not only does this help the kids to understand what the chefs and waiters job is it also help the kid/s learning a little bit about how to behave when eating out.

Enforcing bedtime to the Kid/s in the beginning can be rough but after a while the kid/s will get it as it become a day to day routine.

Depending on the age, understanding that when mom, dad or mom and dad put me to bed you stay in your rooms and no coming out for anything except for bathroom runs. With this you don’t have to worry about a babysitter and didn’t have to leave the house to get to be alone.

This is when the adult roleplaying begins. I can only imagine that many men hate this part as some female’s claims they love to turn their bedroom into their own romantic café. It can really get complex depending on how romantic the female is. Some females do a complete reinvention of dinner with a small table, candles, and flowers. At times preparing for this process can take incorporating bits and pieces in your day like cooking trough out the day, remembering to get flowers, candy and many more. I would assume many just do take out because cooking a special dinner at times can be time consuming. Once all prep is done you now sit and eat, talk, laugh and relax.

I would say this might be something that might take getting use to as some people would say this is very weird and the Idea of eating late is not healthy. Some will also say that if this is the only romantic dinner they can get due to their busy lives they would take it over anything. Many say its more intimate as actually going out to eat. The intimate communicating can at time reminded them of what attracted them to each other, and romance can have an opportunity to ignite. To make anything like this work, you must schedule it and then take the time to follow through. Romance, relationship, and sex take time and the time and efforts is always deserved.

Below is a summary of a woman’s romantic needs. The list was developed through observations, questions, conversations with women, resources from romance, passion, sex books and many more.

Married Romantic Needs

Romantic Need #1: To be spiritually ministered

Are you surprised that something to do with candy and flowers isn’t number one? A woman wants a man eager to be her protector, someone who cares not just about her security and physical needs but also (and even more importantly) about her spirituality, the well-being of her very soul.

A husband can be a spiritual protector and advocate for his wife by praying with and for her daily, putting his arms around her, and saying, “I want to ask God to bless you. I want to take any needs you have in your life right now to the Lord. And I’m going to pray for you throughout this day.” A wise husband takes the lead in sharing Scripture and eagerly initiating conversation on spiritual issues.

A husband can contribute to his wife’s spiritual well being by giving her some time to pursue her spiritual growth. For example, he might take care of the kids by himself for the evening while she establishes a spiritual relationship with her lord.

Romantic Need #2: To feel safe and secure with her husband

A woman needs to feel her husband’s covenantal commitment to stay married and to love her and accept her. Then she feels safe to give him the gift of who she is in the marriage relationship.

A wife needs to know that romantic intimacy is just between her and her husband, that he will not share any personal details with his friends. She should not feel pressured or fearful, experiencing the love that casts out all fear

Romantic Need #3: To share intimate conversation

According to something I read recently, the typical couple spends only four minutes a day in meaningful conversation with each other. Husbands don’t realize that for their wives to consider us romantic, we first of all have to be a great friend and a conversationalist.

Grunts and one-word answers to questions just don’t cut it! Too many women don’t feel that their husbands really need them, and bare-bones conversation confirms their sense of low personal value.

Many men who were accomplished at romantic, deep conversation during courtship seem to lose this talent later. You can rediscover the groove! Make a commitment to learn to make intimate conversation a priority with your wife. You need to talk and fill her in on the details of your life—not just facts, but feelings.

When a husband sincerely shows his desire for conversation and a deepening relationship—emotional intimacy—he will find that his wife is much more interested in sexual intimacy. Her dreams, hopes, desires, and disappointments then are not divorced from the marriage bed but are a part of it.

Romantic Need #4: To receive a tender touch and hear gentle words

Before marriage, two people in love can hardly keep their hands off each other because they find the touch of their beloved thrilling. What happens after the wedding? Some couples married for a while would find a firm handshake a wildly intimate encounter. This should not be the case in a marriage.

There is great power in tender touch, even if it’s just a long, full-body hug or a lingering kiss. Or the touch may be a gentle caress of her face that has no motive to make sexual demands but communicates, “I love you, Sweetheart, and I care for you tenderly.”

Gentle words have similar power. I have made a partial list of some things that I think any husband could use in complimenting and praising his wife: charm; femininity; faithfulness to God, you, your children; hard work; beauty; personality; her love, including her receptivity and responsiveness to you as a man; her advice and counsel; character; desirability; friendship—and that’s just a start. What wife won’t respond to a husband who praises her regularly with gentle words for all these qualities?

Romantic Need #5: To be pursued and set apart by her man

A wife wants a husband who will sweep her off her feet, carry her away to the castle, and say, “Let’s spend time together.” Focused attention is like precious gold in a relationship.

Handle unresolved argument over a weekend on a customary weekly date. Put aside a time in a great environment to fully discuss and resolve your differences. What it took was several hours away from phones, papers and bills, and the needs of our children. Your wife craves this focused attention from you.

To build a strong marriage where you and your wife are experiencing oneness, you must be committed to satisfying her physical, emotional, and spiritual needs

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