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More Skies of Arcadia! Vyse saves Aika from Vigoro - but at what cost-

Kizuna is a very easy movie to misunderstand, and it’s not helped by the fact that the official translation kind of sucks. (Seriously, I highly recommend you check out the translation of one of the novels – the Dash X or the Shueisha Mirai version – because of how badly the official one sucks.) On top of that, a lot of its information is packed in the subtleties of a lot of its lines, which means that, without paying very close attention, you can walk off with a completely misleading interpretation of what the movie is trying to say. A lot of times I see people talking about how the movie’s message is about adulthood sucking, or partnership dissolution being an inevitable thing…when the movie actually makes multiple indications that this is not the case.

(The rest of the post contains major spoilers for the movie, so be warned.)

A non-exhaustive list:

Mega Evolution comes from a meteor. The impact of that meteor literally split the dimensions apart and made it canonical that different versions of the same game are parallel dimensions (Alpha Ruby is a different world from Ruby, for instance). This is later confirmed by the presence of Anabel in Sun and Moon, who fell through dimensions from a world without Mega Evolution.

Speaking of Sun and Moon, wormholes are opening up all over Alola, letting in extradimensional beings that Pokéballs don't catch properly. There are silver-skinned humans from one of these portals that live in a giant prismatic city.

Also in Sun/Moon, you can pass through to a mirror world where day is night and night is day. When this happens, you can catch the mirror world version of your box legendary friend.

There's a giant space alien in Sword and Shield who's leaking particles that cause Pokémon to briefly turn massive, which sometimes rearranges their genetic makeup.

In Scarlet and Violet, reality is splintering. There's a hole to the future/past that generates paradox Pokémon which are heavily implied to have been materialized out of a researcher's desire to see them rather than actually from their future/past. The same energy that supposedly made them enables Pokémon to become any type they want and caused a robot to gain human sentience.

In the hole you find the paradox Pokémon in, you find buried monoliths that nobody knows where they came from. The very material they're made of is canonically unidentifiable.

Time and space were briefly unraveled in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum as a maniac tried to overwrite the current world and make a new universe out of it, and in the Platinum universe, this opened a hole to another dimension where a banished god lives. The banished god was pissed off about this and abducted the guy that messed with time and space.

People sometimes slip through the cracks and become Pokémon in Pokémon-only worlds (the Mystery Dungeon series) or drop through time to different eras (Legends Arceus's protagonist and Ingo).

BARBIE (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig +⭐letterboxd reviews by men