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psyga315 · 5 years ago

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Fixing RWBY Volume 7

Much like my Volume 6 Tweak, this Volume 7 Tweak doesn’t change a lot of things, but the things that do change will be to be centered around a theme: Who Can You Trust? With the amount of the word “trust” being thrown around, it helps to add more than just characters parroting “I trust you, do you trust me” and “can we reeeeaaaaally trust you” ad nauseum.

Now, normally, I’d begin with Episode 1, but for the most part, Episodes 1 & 2 do a great job setting up the conflict for the Volume. The only thing that would be changed is an earlier introduction to Robyn. Either through a character short style random fight or have the group bump into her during their trip to Mantle.

Also, probably change up how Weiss handles the drunkard because… Yeah, you don’t just fling a guy into the trash bin for being racist after you spend the past six volumes having a villain faction of murderous terrorists motivated by racists attacking their kind. The problem is that I don’t know how. The best I can say is that Weiss tries to do something about it, the dude’s like “wait, aren’t you a Schnee?” and then Weiss realizes “Oh shit, we should be incognito.”

Episode 3

Now here’s where things start to change up. Have a split in the group over whether Ruby was in the right to omit Salem’s immortality to Ironwood. A clear 50/50 split or as close to one as possible. If I was deciding who was on who’s side, Weiss, Blake and Nora would be on Ruby’s side and Jaune, Ren, and Yang would be on Ironwood’s side. Over the course of the Volume, they give their reasons, but I’ll explain their reasons now.

Weiss and Blake’s reasons are virtually the same, with Weiss’s added caveat being that she overheard Ironwood going “OZPIN SHOULD HAVE TRUSTED ME!” bit. Nora would be too pissed at Ironwood to care what he wants and anything to fuck him over is a win in her book, even egging on the other side to join by saying how he disqualified RWBY from the Vytal Tournament and how this would be good payback.

Ren’s reason was implied, but it’d be more pronounced that he wants Salem dealt with now. Not out of apathy or tiredness, but because he knows the Grimm now have a mistress and that the only person who has an actual plan to deal with her is being lied to. Yang and Jaune share their reason, but in different ways. Yang isn’t too keen on Ruby omitting information to Ironwood after they had just spent an entire two Volumes distrusting Ozpin for the same thing and Jaune especially doesn’t like that Ironwood is going to go into an unwinnable battle without knowing all the details, much like how Pyrrha never found out about Salem.

Oscar, Qrow, and Maria would be the middle of the fence. Maria doesn’t care too much about the situation and is just there to help out Pietro, Qrow has known Ironwood more than anyone but recent events had him uneasy, and Oscar just doesn’t want to be hurt because that tends to happen whenever people find out about Ozpin’s many, many skeletons. However, they all have faith that Ruby is doing something right…

The only other thing I’d change with this is giving the outright confirmation that these are the mines that Ilia’s parents died in. Maybe even have Marrow allude to how it was a major turning point in making the White Fang what they are now.

Episode 4

Not much changes, except for Ironwood showing genuine remorse for what’s going on with Mantle and trying to make amends by making the group Huntsmen and having them broker peace to Mantle by helping them out.

The other major change is Qrow not telling Ruby that she’s done nothing wrong. Instead, he warns that Ironwood, while he’s a very valuable ally, is also one whose trust is hard to earn and easy to break. He reveals to Ruby about how Ozpin was put on thin ice in Volume 2 and how Ironwood became the head of security for Vytal. Because the Tweaking Volume 6 showed Summer in the flashback to Ruby, I don’t think we’ll get that here.

A minor bit would be Penny and Jaune talking about Pyrrha, because what’s Jaune’s character arc without bringing Pyrrha into it?

Episode 5

Nothing really changes that much except for a training montage between the Ace Ops and RWBY so that we get that out of the way. Maybe even have Nora note the hole in the wall and get more furious at Ironwood for just leaving that out in the open when a simple patch would fix it. Ironwood would then give a rebuttal that it wouldn’t fix the Manticore problem.

There’s a small change in Robyn’s demeanour in which she doesn’t like Penny. “Just because you’re the protector of Mantle doesn’t mean you’re not another one of Ironwood’s machines. Once I get in power, you’re the first bot to enter the scrapyard!” Like, the world knows Penny is a robot, right? Speaking of, we have Ruby talk to Penny about how depressed she was when she died. Because remember when she broke down into tears over that and had Penny’s death be a major impact to her psyche?

The biggest change would be that whole scene with Winter and Fria. Weiss is appalled that Fria is locked up in a room before Winter tells her that it’s to secure her, explaining how Maidens end up having their powers taken from them through murder instead of the natural way and using the Fall Maiden’s death as an example. Weiss then asks “isn’t that what you’re going to do to her? Why don’t you just do Ironwood a favor and stab her right now?” Winter is silent.

Oh, and there’s no scene of Jacques inciting a riot. You’ll understand why later, but this will eliminate the stupid “riot happens off screen” bit. Instead, we get a scene where a plane flies towards the blockade. They demand to know who’s on the plane, only for Cinder to come out, smirk, and her Maiden eye flares as a snowstorm kicks off.

Episode 6

Not a lot changes here save for the obvious minor detail of a snowstorm hitting Atlas and Mantle (as well as Ironwood receiving reports about his blockade being taken out, thus he tells the group to take the night off while he looks into getting replacement planes) and one major detail: Tyrian’s attack during the rally would be him busting in during a power outage (engineered by either Watts’s hacking or Cinder’s snowstorm) and slaughtering people as they try to whip out their phones to try and illuminate the area. We’d even have an earlier scene where we could see Tyrian sneak in the background as Nora kisses Ren, giving the notion that, had Nora not macked on Ren, they would have seen Tyrian.

Penny tries to fight Tyrian because of her night vision, but Tyrian gets the better of her, even dancing through her slashes and have other people get hurt and possibly killed by her blades, blood being on her swords once the lights go back on. Robyn instantly attacks Penny, leading to Ruby to try and defend her and prove her innocence. Marrow gets the angry mob to “STAY!”, but it’s pretty clear that Robyn was out of the radius when that happened. As Ruby and Penny run off, Robyn gives chase, the Grimm invade, a plane lands without any problem on Mantle, and we get perhaps the largest change in the entire volume: An entire episode gets shafted in favor of one we were promised.

Episode 7

We see Blake and Yang with FNKI when they hear the Grimm siren go off and they go to investigate. Meanwhile, Weiss, Jaune, and Oscar exit the theater only to get attacked by Grimm. The majority of this episode would be them fighting the Grimm until Ruby, Penny and Robyn come in to Blake and Yang’s perspective.

Not sure what’s going on, Blake and Yang fight Robyn while Penny runs away. It isn’t until Robyn rants about Ironwood does Blake stops fighting her, tells her about Ironwood’s plan, and the whole truth Semblance thing happens. Yang confronts Blake on this, to which she gives her rant about how she distanced herself from the White Fang and that what RWBY is doing is exactly like the White Fang. It doesn’t help that, when Yang reassures Blake that they did what they had to do, she sounds exactly like Adam, right down to her saying “It's good to know I've still got you...”

Weiss, Jaune, and Oscar find Ruby and Penny and have a brief moment to reconvene before a mob comes after Penny, demanding her head. In the middle of this, Cinder and Neo look on. Neo nonverbally asks if they should get Ruby while they have the chance, but Cinder smirks upon seeing her scroll and says she has a plan. During a stand off where Ruby tries to proclaim Penny’s innocence, Cinder sneaks into the mob and, with the help of Neo disguising her as an old lady (because what’s RWBY without making characters into two different fairy tale references at once?), tell the group how Penny had been going out and murdering people for Ironwood, showing the group the doctored footage of Penny murdering Forrest and Cinder lying about how Forrest is her (grand)son.

Now in an even bigger frenzy, the crowd swarm Ruby as Cinder slinks into the background. Despite all their best efforts, the people of Mantle get their hands-on Penny and dismember her from limb to limb. The despair of Penny dying again followed by several more Grimm coming in causes Ruby’s Silver Eyes to go off, turning the Manticores to stone (and, if you want some instant karma, one of them could be in midflight and fall on top of some of the more ruder Mantleans, crushing them in the process) before she gets weak and Weiss carries her away, with Jaune and Oscar carrying Penny’s remains from the blinded crowd.

In the middle of all this, Ren and Nora fight Grimm on their own, getting into an argument about how Mantle is being treated. This is where Nora’s rant comes in, not to Ironwood, but to Ren. Ren tells her his reason why Ironwood is their best bet and because of his words, it upsets Nora enough to go her separate way. We end the episode with Nora coming across Robyn.

Episode 8

It’s been a week since the battle and we reconvene on Penny being rebuilt. Ruby and Jaune converse about how coincidental it is, with Ruby being clearly upset that she had to watch Penny die twice now. Jaune, however, elates that at least she’s alive, awkwardly bringing up his dead girlfriend again. Pietro comes in and tells them that it is not as coincidental as they believe and demonstrates by using his Semblance, the ability to be a make shift deliberator.

Basically, this is where I reinvent how Pietro’s relation to Penny works. I’m keeping the disturbing aspect that he slowly dies a little each time he uses this power while taking out the unintentionally disturbing aspect of Penny really being just Pietro in the robotic shell of a young girl. As for who Penny is… You saw this coming and if RT wanted to really make those fairy tale references, it just makes sense for them to pay homage to the very first anime that just so happens to also reference Pinocchio, or at least is compared to Pinocchio.

We have a flashback to Pietro and Watts working on the Paladin project together before Pietro gets a call. We don’t hear what it is, but we can definitely tell from how he reacts and how it’s framed exactly what happened. We cut to Pietro in the morgue grieving over a dead girl who looks similar to Penny and get that hard confirmation that Penny was Pietro’s daughter… or rather was the basis of Pietro’s daughter.

He uses his Semblance, which he says allows him to jumpstart people’s aura and save them from the brink of death. While normally an Aura technique in of itself to awaken another’s aura, it’s another thing to awaken another’s aura and save their life in the process. However, he tried that on a long dead Human Penny and all it did was put her in a comatose state, needing to be put on constant life support or else she’d die. Not wanting to let go of Penny, Pietro invented a means to transfer her aura over to something else: The Aura Transfer Machine. He places Penny into the shell of V1!Penny and jumpstarts her. She opens her eyes and says “Salutations!”

As the flashback ends, he explains how what he did was unnatural and, as a consequence, whenever he jumpstarts Penny with his Semblance, his Aura completely depletes and it damages him. It’s how he became crippled. Normally, the Aura would return slowly and he’d be recovered, but because he had to do it so many times in a short amount of time, it damages him. Jaune says he’ll use his Semblance to save Penny next time, but Pietro brings up the contrast between their Semblances: Jaune just dumps aura into other people, but Pietro is bringing the dead back to life. Even if Jaune were to use his Semblance, all it would do is put Aura into a robotic shell and not Penny. A sad reminder that, no matter what he did, Penny will never be a real girl again. Especially since, as one last flashback shows, Ironwood was more than pleased with Penny and convinced Pietro to turn Penny into a living weapon, something he was very hesitant about.

I’d add that Pietro would die right there to show that Penny has no ‘extra lives’ left, but I feel like RT would do that already… So I’ll say he’s written out of the volume by going into a coma.

Interspersed with this is the dinner scene. Because there’s fewer people going with Ironwood, RT might splurge a bit and give characters different outfits for the scene, like Weiss having an all-white version of her Mistral dress or having Qrow’s new outfit be the outfit he wears to the dinner. Obviously, not everyone gets new dresses, as the Ace Ops still have their uniforms. Only Weiss, Blake, Yang, Ren, and Oscar attend for obvious reasons.

Weiss investigates Jacques like usual, but she gets quite a few encounters, such as running into Harry Marigold (who gets in a heated argument with May and establishes who she is right there and then instead of doing Twitter) and even the Trophy Wife who she tried to kill. They’re brief, but show the consequences of Weiss’s actions. Maybe have the Trophy Wife flee in terror. She then comes across Willow, who, for the first time in Weiss’s life, is not drunk. In fact, she is elated to see Weiss return, but understands why she doesn’t share the same notion. She reveals to have sobered up since Weiss ran away and had done a lot of contemplation. She doesn’t say too much, but she does leave Weiss with the video and guilt trips her about Whitley.

While Watts turning off the heating grid is still in, it’s not the final scene. Instead, it’s during the dinner with Ironwood and the others, in which Robyn, as part of the “get Ironwood impeached” party, brings in someone who had been “tormented by Atlas’s boot on Mantle’s face for far too long…”: Nora.

Nora’s Backstory

Okay, granted, this is something that is operating on information we don’t know yet, so there’s a lot of speculation to go on here. I’ll probably make an update to this once we get a proper backstory for Nora, but for now, this is what I think would be Nora’s backstory:

Mantle had been scapegoated as the cause of the Great War and while they had a hand in it, the real cause of it, the nobles, decided to take their ball and go home by using the Relic to lift their Kingdom high into the clouds, leaving the rest of Mantle to take the fall. The Oz at the time allowed this to happen knowing exactly why they did it, but instead tried to cite it as creating a beacon of hope instead of what it truly was.

As a result, Mantle hit an unstable depression and unable to even be on the same level as the other Kingdoms, essentially being Menagerie before they made Menagerie. This resulted in people starving and dying. Of the few people who remained hopeful was Fria Valkyrie, who proposed life living out in the lands of thriving kingdoms rather than be ruled over by Atlas. She went to Mistral and got a few people into pooling their resources to make a new Kingdom, one that would exist outside the four and be by the people, for the people.

Unfortunately, not everyone shared her vision and some even took her resources to create Menagerie for the purpose of dumping the Faunus there. After she gained the Maiden powers by chance, she was forced to give up her dream by Oz. Her child grew up and inherited that vision, getting a child of their own, moving to Mistral, wooing someone to birth Nora, tell her about how Mantle became a shithole thanks to Atlas, and then head to make Oniyuri with the others. The Nuck came, killed Nora’s parents and left her an orphan, only for her to bring the Nuck with her to Kuroyuri and the rest is history.

Of course, this wouldn’t all be shown and is a rough idea, but the core idea is: Mantle suffered long ago because the people who caused the Great War refused to take blame and went into their floating castle while Oz just looked at it and said “hey, look at this shiny beacon!”

With that in mind, let’s return to the story:

Episode 9

Nora lays down Mantle’s grievances to Ironwood in front of everyone before she includes the two members of the council and Jacques into the shit pile, saying how they’re not blameless. When called out on going all “sins of the father” on the group, she says how they should have thought of that before doing that to Mantle. Robyn attempts to expose Ironwood before Weiss drops in and tries to expose Jacques…

And here’s where major change #2 comes into play. As the video plays of Jacques and Watts having their conversation, it takes a turn for the weird as Jacques just throws Watts out of his house and refusing to hear any further of his offer. This is one of the major scenes that convey the theme of trust. Throughout the Volume, we’re built up to not trust Jacques and trust Ironwood before the tables turn around this exact moment. Now, with the revelation that Jacques refused to work with Watts and Ironwood turning Penny into a weapon against her and Pietro’s will, Jacques is the trustworthy one and Ironwood is the deceitful.

Though, before any consequences play out, it’s all put on hold as news of the heating grid had been turned off. And yes, before you ask, in this tweak, the heating grid is in Mantle and thus is just as easy to hack. The reason why Watts decided to do this now is to make it look like Ironwood is doing it in retaliation for what happened to Penny. As a result, riots and Grimm naturally come. Robyn asks Ironwood why he’s working so hard to hide Amity Arena and this gives Oscar the (unintended) signal that now’s the time to tell him the truth. He covers for Ironwood, then gets him to a secure room to tell him all he knows about Salem.

Especially how she boned Ozpin.

Okay, joking aside… The rest of the episode (as well as Episode 10) play out like normal, but with Ruby and Jaune arriving to help from the ground instead of from the plane for obvious reasons.

Episode 10

The only big change is the reveal that Tyrian is a serial killer here because we retconned the original Episode 7. The only sight twist I can add to this is that he was part of the White Fang, had a hand in some of Weiss’s family members being killed, and that’s why Salem knew of them.

Episode 11

Okay, this is the best episode of Volume 7 so there’s not a lot to change. The only major changes are as follows.

Ironwood confronts the group over Robyn knowing about Amity. When confronted on why he had to keep that a secret, he explains that it was to prevent the enemy from learning about it, like what happened with Watts. When Yang calls him out for lying, he snaps and calls her out for lying.

“Oscar told me the truth. About Salem.”

“What!? He wasn’t supposed to!”

“Then who would have? And when? When everyone threw their lives away for nothing? You’re just like Ozpin.”

And then Salem shows up, gloats a bit, goes yo mama, and Ironwood decides to use the Relic of Creation to send Atlas somewhere else. He’s not doing the stupid thing of yeeting it into space, though. Instead, he’s going to use it to move them away from the continent and towards another Kingdom. When Blake says that they’re leaving Mantle to die, he just coldly remarks that “they did this to themselves”.

Naturally, RWBY protests about this. The funny thing is, The Ace Ops are almost able to convince the girls to leave Mantle… But then Ironwood says this to Ruby:

“After what they’ve done to poor Penny… Surely, you’d agree that they don’t deserve our protection.”

This causes Ruby to quietly turn that comment around:

“Yeah… But after I heard about what you’ve done to Penny… The only thing I agree about is that you don’t deserve my trust.” Before she calls the others and says how Ironwood had gone mad. This leads to the confrontation with the Ace Ops and the end of our episode.

Episode 12

Well… How do we make the worst episode of V7 better? Well, we begin with showing what happened to Oscar. Robots come to take the Relic from him, Ruby comes in and Oscar saves her. They have some romantic tension, but uh oh! It’s Neo! And she took the Relic!

We then cut to the airplane. I should bring up that the arrest warrant has been changed a bit, excluding Qrow, Oscar, Jaune and Ren from the list. Qrow and Oscar because they gave Ironwood their trust and vice versa, Jaune because Ironwood overlooking Jaune would be hilarious, and Ren because of the kids, he was the most trustful of Ironwood. Nora, however, is still on the list due to her standing against Ironwood. As well as Robyn.

This leads to a more natural reason for Robyn to pick a fight: She’s resisting arrest. They crash and Clover calls for a medical team. Qrow and Clover have a conversation about what’s going on. Qrow insists they talk to Ironwood about this, only for Clover to insist he arrests Ruby. This leads to a natural conclusion as to why Qrow fights Clover: He wants to protect Ruby.

Tyrian joins in and the fight isn’t a 2v1 like the original, but instead Qrow vs. Clover but with Tyrian running interference against both sides. This leads to Qrow and Clover teaming up against Tyrian, but Qrow, at the last minute, knocks Clover aura out so as to disable him. Tyrian is kinda shocked at the betrayal but stays around to let it play out, especially since he knows something Qrow doesn’t.

Clover asks Qrow why he did that and Qrow told Clover that sometimes, you have to do the right thing instead of doing what you’re told to. Clover remarks that the right thing is often the hardest and stands firm with his belief that Ironwood will do the right thing, even if the cost is people’s lives. Qrow then says “then he will take the fall.” Clover chuckles, says good luck, then dies because it’s freezing out on Solitas.

Tyrian laughs at this, Qrow gets pissed, he runs off, and the aircraft comes.

RWBY vs. Ace Ops goes about as well as the best of the best of the best going up against a bunch of college drop outs who only had a week or so of training with said best. Very poorly. In fact, the group takes advantage of the team’s insistence of fighting in the White Rose and Bumblebee pairs, curbstomping them by exploiting their weaknesses. However, just as they’re about to be arrested, Marrow takes a look at Ruby.

“You know, I never wanted to actually arrest you guys…” He breathes in. “And I don’t want to.” Turns around and shouts “STAY!” to the rest of the Ace Ops and tells Ruby and her friends to run. As soon as they do, he gets out his weapon and glares at his ‘friends’. Harriet asks why he did this, only for him to reply:

“Well, maybe we were just tired of being pushed around.” He says before he tosses a volatile Dust crystal on the ground and hurts the group, making a getaway.

And the JNPR bit stays the same.

Episode 13

Because this will be setting up Volume 8, this is mostly speculative at this point. But then again, I did the same with Volume 6’s Tweaking before Volume 7 premiered… That said, Volume 6 was more conclusive than Volume 7 so…

Bottom line, this will most likely get disconfirmed by the time Volume 8 rolls around.

JNPR vs Neo stays the same, but Nora and Ren bicker about whether to stay on Mantle and help the others, causing Neo to give them the slip with the Relic and further sever the ties between Nora and Ren.

Cinder vs Winter, Penny and Fria is also a little changed. Namely, Penny takes a blow for Winter that destroys most of her body. Despite this, she struggles to go through the whirlwind that Fria makes and saves her from Cinder. Penny is dying as a result of putting herself through the extreme and with no Pietro to save her, this will basically be her final death.

Fria knows this. She also knows that Ironwood had sent only one person to see her to make it easier for her Alzheimer’s and that Penny is not that person. Despite this, she is moved by Penny’s dedication, asks for her name, and passes on her powers to Penny, saving her life. Ruby flashes Cinder and secures Penny. On the ship during Ozpin’s speech on fear, Pietro wakes up, checks up on Penny to see if she’s alright. Upon seeing that there’s blood on a cut from Penny, he’s at first afraid, but then cries in joy as she had become a real girl. However, if RT decides to do a plot point like this in a future volume where they make Penny a real girl, then disregard this bit.

The final bit (don’t worry, I’m going to the Ironwood vs Oscar bit later) is that Maria explicitly says that they’re leaving Atlas. As soon as she says that, Nora and Blake object. Nora because they’re leaving Mantle as well and Blake because they just had an entire fight where they wanted to stay and fight. Yang tries to reason with Blake, but she just comments about how she’s not going to run. Likewise, Nora is tired of sacrifices after losing Pyrrha. They both leave and go to Mantle just as the plane leaves.

Ironwood and Oscar’s Conversation

Okay, no amount of summary is going to do this justice, so I’m going to include this as a subsection like with Nora’s backstory. This would take place roughly in the same spot(s) as the original. It starts out roughly the same until Oscar pleads to work this out.

Ironwood: There is no working anything out. People have been demanding me to do things their way, to make things easier for them, and every time I try to bend to their whims, Salem and her forces go two steps ahead. The easiest solution is for me to do everything myself.

Oscar: Including leaving people to die?

Ironwood: That’s what Ozpin had been doing for most of his life. You don’t hear people complain about that. Because he kept it all to himself and never told others the bigger picture. Just like Ruby.

Oscar: Ruby only hid the truth because she was afraid of what you’d become if you found out.

Ironwood: That’d I’d become another Lionheart? I’m not that weak-willed a coward.

Oscar: Then why abandon Mantle?

Ironwood: Because Salem’s forces are on our doorstep. If we don’t do anything, then we will fall!

Oscar: No… If you divide us, then we will fall… It’s what she wants, James.

Ironwood: … James is what my friends call me. To you… it’s General.

And the rest of the scene plays out like normal, including the ending of Salem’s forces arriving.

Stinger

This is less fix and more wish.

Marrow stumbles onto a rooftop, the top portion of his face heavily burned from the explosion, and sees Salem’s forces arriving. A recovering Fiona approaches Marrow and tells him how protecting Mantle had just become more complex. Marrow shakes his head and takes out something from his pocket before he fixes it to his face.

“It was never about protecting Mantle, Fiona… It’s about making Atlas pay for what they’ve done.” He turns around, wearing a White Fang mask.

And that was Tweaking V7, perhaps the most intense tweaking I’ve done with five thousand words.

#RWDE #RWBY #Rewrite #RWBY Rewrite

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mermaidsirennikita · 7 years ago

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Have you seen the movie Jackie? What did you think of it?

This is about to get REAL nerdy up in here anon. I had such a painfully obvious boner for Kennedy!history and legends for like... my last year of high school and most of freshman year of college that my mom gifted me with a first edition copy of Profiles in Courage by (but not rlly, he was too busy politicking to write a whole book) JFK for my birthday. And like, that wasn’t even the only Kennedy-related birthday present I got that year.

I have seen it! I think it could have been better as a story about Jackie and a Kennedy-oriented history fan (I hate myself for identifying with that) but as a movie it is a Work, imo. And I mean that in a good way, there were bits of the movie where I was like yeah I’m watching something really intentionally artistic here and it’s pulling it off.

The thing is that while the movie is OVERALL accurate (I’ll expand on my criticisms of accuracy later lol) the history isn’t the point, aside from when it relates directly to our perception of Jackie vs. the Real Jackie, and though obviously I don’t know the woman and I wouldn’t say this movie covers her entire personality (it spans over just a few days, it can’t) it nails certain aspects of her that we don’t discuss often, imo.

Jackie is as iconic as Marilyn Monroe, exactly because she was the antithesis, or so it seemed, of Marilyn. Marilyn was sex; Jackie was love (romantic love, maternal love, patriotic love). Marilyn was dirty, but in a touchable way that made you want to touch her; Jackie was clean, but in a way that made you want to put her behind a pedestal and maybe never even get to know her because that might ruin the image you have in your head. You don’t want her to be human. You don’t want to fuck her. You want to love her.

The thing is that just as with Marilyn, the image was really, mostly, a lie. Jackie actually had a lot in common with Marilyn--she probably wasn’t faithful to Jack, though he started it, I’m sure. She struggled with loving a man who could never really open himself fully to her (Marilyn chased these types like craaaazy). Hell, they both even had fertility issues (Jackie had multiple miscarriages and actually lost a two-day-old son less than a year before Jack died). She was saddled with legacy, and like Marilyn she really couldn’t be herself. Even their interviews, ESPECIALLY if you listen to them (as a MASSIVE DORK I really recommend listening to those, like, 18 hours of interviews with Jackie done after Jack died, which this movie definitely pulls from). She was never as raw, imo, as she even is to the interviewer in the movie. More vulnerable than usual, maybe, but never Raw. Like, the movie has her saw really honest shit and it’s probably what she was thinking but then she’s like--strike that from the record. Imo, the real Jackie slipped up and struck things from the record, but she never slipped up and was as honest with a reporter as she is in the movie.

Listen, I’ve got issues with Natalie Portman, but she NAILS those aspects of Jackie Kennedy that the movie is interested in, and I don’t like her as a person but she was robbed of a second oscar tbh. She wiped the floor with Emma Stone. There is more nuance to a single scene of her in this movie (the one where she’s sort of drunkenly dancing about the white house, as one example) than Emma conveys in all of La La Land, case closed.

The Jackie in this movie is an inner part of Jackie that I am certain existed. She’s constructing a legacy for Jack as soon as he dies, because he never got a chance to make that legacy for herself. She understand the myth of this family, of her, and she’s making sure that the myth lives on because that’s all they’ll have. He’ll never get to his second term, which some historians opine would have been much more groundbreaking than the first, as is often the case (first term presidents don’t want to offend because they’re thinking about reelection; second term presidents can lay it all out on the table). She’s been indoctrinated into this myth of this family (and the movie never covers this, but she was apparently Joseph Kennedy Senior’s favorite daughter-in-law, and maybe he was just being a creep and thought she was hot but I think he recognized in her a similar ability to go along and play for the cameras that his wife possessed, except better--she elevated the family, the Bouvier blood was much bluer than that of the Kennedys at that time) but she’s also making it what she wants it to be, because this is her greatest act as First Lady. As much as Jack and Joe Sr. and Bobby and Ted adored Jackie, she didn’t get along with the women of the family because I think tbh there was some intimidation going on within both sides and she never fit in, but damn, in this moment, she gets to MAKE the family.

The movie also both embraces and shies away from Sentimental Jackie, which we so often see. Jackie is usually either a bitch who didn’t really love her husband but is annoyed with his embarrassing infidelities and is in it for the glory, or a weepy messy who’s always on prescription drugs to dull the pain and going “Jaaaaaaack” whenever he comes home after fucking some lady. This Jackie is ABSOLUTELY played as deeply in love with her husband, and in some ways more sure of his love for her than I think most fictionalized Jackies are, in a very period-appropriate way. Sure, her husband has mistresses. But he’s also a brilliant man in her opinion, and he puts her on a pedestal and she’s the one he comes home to, she’s the First Lady, she’s the mother of his children, so... The infidelities are painful, but not the end of the world. There’s a line she says to a priest in possibly my favorite part of the movie where he sort of broaches another part of her pain they’ve only alluded to--the affairs. And she fucking SNAPS, it’s one of the only times she really loses control, being like “I was the goddamn First Lady of the United States, don’t you dare pity me” and it’s GREAT.

Now. If you’re looking for a biopic, this isn’t it. It’s a study in grief (grief for a beloved husband, trauma over how he died which is very graphically portrayed, grief for everything that will never be) and a character study of Jackie. The entire Kennedy story isn’t as delved into as it should have been. And to be honest, the biggest gap here is Bobby Kennedy. If you’re going to tell a story of Jackie Kennedy’s grief, you gotta feature more Bobby. I mean lbr I’m fascinated with the relationship anyway, but they completely turned to each other immediately after Jack died. Literally nobody else understood how they were feeling. Jackie devoted her life to this man, giving up so much to make his dreams come true... and so did Bobby. Shit, Bobby and Jackie could finish each other’s sentences, and both professionally and personally they were hugely codependent in the last years of Jack’s life. And Bobby, like I said before, worshiped Jackie at one point in his life. They were both into literature and poems (especially after Jack died, she got him into poetry to help him grieve) and they’d visit the graveside just them two. Bobby’s first concern after Jack died was Jackie; he immediately took up a more paternal role with Caroline and JFK Jr. But this wasn’t just because Jack died, they were genuinely best friends--when JFK was away on a yacht or something after Jackie’s first miscarriage, Bobby was in the hospital with her. Whether they ever crossed that line is irrelevant; if you’re doing a good “Jackie grieves Jack” moment you have to have a good Bobby and vice versa. This guy... has none of the literally insane grief Bobby had (people thought he was gonna lose it for real, including Jackie). He isn’t as acquiescing to Jackie as he reportedly was irl after the shooting, and yes he did resist the massive funeral she wanted from what I’ve read, but this is played a bit less like Bobby Is Going Into Guilt-Driven Paranoia and Is Worried His Niece And Nephew Are Gonna Be Assassinated and more like... ooh, this man is trying to put Jackie down, but she’s gonna have a Feminist Moment and fight him on it.

It’s the one big weak point of the movie, ESPECIALLY SINCE HE ISN’T DOING THE ACCENT AAAAAGH THE ACCENT EMBODIES THE FAMILY LINGUISTS HAVE STUDIED IT AND IT’S SO INDIVIDUALIZED THAT NOBODY ELSE REALLY EVER HAD IT THAT’S HOW RICH AND “YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US” THEY WERE. This is especially glaring because JFK doesn’t have an accent for his little speaking role either which could be fine bc he’s barely alive in the movie but theeeeeen Natalie is WRECKING the Jackie voice, she got it just right. Like fuck, I know this is a Portman Project but you’d think someone would want to not phone it in and maybe get some best supporting actor noms because Bobby Kennedy is a meaty role. Look at Barry Pepper, he was in a legit not great at all miniseries but he killed the role of Bobby and did the accent so well (and I admit Bobby’s is apparently harder to do bc his voice was also super distinct without the accent) and the awards just came rushing in.

Basically: this is a very, very good movie that should have won Natalie Portman an oscar, I think it got so much right about Jackie but it wasn’t quiiiiiite as fucking nerdy as I’d like. Also, I say this as someone whose favorite Kennedy is very obviously RFK (he was shady AF like all of them but he had good ideas and was viciously effective when he wanted to be, tbh his assassination is one of the great “what could have beens” of American history imo). But yeah, I think this is a really impressive, well-directed movie if not necessarily the movie I would have made about the family.

#jackie kennedy #i will... affectionately call her jackie o sometimes but aristotle was a waaaay bigger jerk than jfk by all accounts #so i think of her as a kennedy #Anonymous

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jcoin7 · 8 years ago

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And You Look The Other Way

A friend of mine posed the following question: “Who would trust Trump to be alone with their young adult daughter?”

Hmmmm....Obviously this is someone who doesn’t trust Trump in general, and knowing him I can say with certainty that he is firmly on the Liberal side of the political spectrum. Which I am not. Well, not until recent events caused me to find myself labeled a Liberal by people whose leanings I realized were so far right that they can’t go fishing for fear of capsizing every boat they are in. But then something interesting happened, and by interesting I mean something that caused my hair to catch fire I was so mad at the jackass who responded with the following: “In the White House with Trump, yes. In the White House with Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, no.”

See what happened there? The respondent (Let’s call him “Jack”) somehow decided that not only is Trump trustworthy enough to be left with a young woman alone, but that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are NOT. And when he was questioned on his statement he went even further, stating, “Only 2 presidents have a history of grabbing the pussy or letting sperm fly in the White House, and they are Kennedy (D) and Clinton (D).” That’s an exact quote so don’t blame me for the shitty writing, I do well enough with that on my own.

With that comment Jack has done two things. First he has implied that Presidents Clinton and Kennedy’s affairs make them LESS trustworthy for young women to be around than a man who has been caught on tape admitting to grabbing women’s genitalia and getting away with it because he’s famous, and admitting to walking in on underage girls in beauty competitions he funds while these underage girls are in various stages of undress. Second he has implied, by including the aforementioned Presidents’ political affiliation, that Democrats are somehow less trustworthy around women than a man who between 1987 and 2012 changed his Party affiliation FIVE TIMES (1987 Republican, 1999 Independence Party, 2001 Democrat, 2009 Republican, 2011 No Party Affiliation AKA Independent, 2012 Republican). And that’s just since he moved to Manhattan back in 1987).

So I decided to tell him that no, he wasn’t correct. And a LOT of “NO” wound up coming out.

No, other Presidents have had numerous liaisons both in and outside of the White House.

No, they were not all Democrats. Like Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican (the ideological predecessor to the modern Republican Party), who had an affair with a slave and fathered five children with her. Can you imagine if he’d have been a Democrat? NO ONE would have let their slaves near him knowing how lecherous those pesky Dems could be! Or Warren Harding, a Republican, who allegedly had TWO affairs, and whose second mistress was actually paid $50,000 BY THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE so that she would not come forward and expose their affair as Harding had just won the Republican nomination to run for President. Boy, if he’d have been a Democrat I’m sure that he’d have dies much sooner from his untrustworthy ways than the manner in which he allegedly DID go - poisoned by his wife for cheating on him just three years into his Presidency! Whew! Good thing he was a Republican!

No, you were not asked to elaborate on the question so as to draw attention away from President-elect Trump's proclivity for physically assaulting women. You may (and I’d venture a guess WILL) continue the current Trumpist strategy of “Defense By Distraction,” but I would also venture a guess that such a tactic will eventually blow up in your collective faces.

No, it is not okay to state that "Only 2 presidents have a history of grabbing the pussy," since it completely ignores the fact that President-elect Trump has a history of doing just that, which is known because HE HIMSELF SAID SO. That’s right, you remember don’t you? He actually said that himself, it wasn’t someone claiming that he heard it, or some “11th hour victim” as you and others have called them, who you claim only came forward to try to hurt Trump’s chance of being elected. Even though a number of those women have been either attempting to get their story out for years or had previously told their story only to have it ignored because, well, the man wasn’t running for President at the time. Excuse me for a moment.

Okay, I’m back. I felt the need to wipe the feeling of disgust off of myself, for having to explain such things to a fellow human being who is apparently fine with slandering possible assault victims as well as blatantly making things up to suit his guy’s case. It’s sickening. And now to continue....

Yes, you can and probably will spend the next four years defending a man who, before he has even taken the Oath of Office, has reneged on many of the campaign promises that you voted him into office because of. A few quotes, and their current state of being: “I WILL build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it!” NOPE. “I will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton.” NAH. “I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much much better.” SORRY. “I will drain the swamp.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHANOOOOOOPE!

Yes, other Presidents have made mistakes.Clinton slashed both military spending and Intel spending to the point that the Agencies that collected Intel hoarded it and kept things from each other in order to make themselves look important, which indirectly led to the failure of Intel that was 9-11. But I’m sure his affair with an intern was MUCH worse since that is ALL YOU EVER TALK ABOUT when Trump’s sexual misadventures are brought up. And Obama spent so much time trying to get social programs through Congress that he ignored a large swath of the American public who were also hurting but felt that they had no voice anymore, which indirectly led to Secretary Clinton losing votes and helping Trump get elected. But hey, HILLARY STOOD BY BILL EVEN AFTER HE HAD AN AFFAIR! WHAT A BAD PERSON! That’s way more important, since you remember THAT but not that Trump is on his third marriage after cheating on his first two wives, while Bill and Hillary are still together even AFTER all that they went through. Family values, only Trump understands them.

No, you will not actually be able to point to the mistakes of these and other Presidents for the next four years in order to distract from the dumpster fire on top of a train wreck that is ALREADY becoming the Trump Presidency.

So there are my nos, along with some yeses just to keep it positive. But you may ask at this point, “Preacher, exactly WHY do you feel that the impending Presidency of Trump will be suck a massive clusterfuck?” Well, here are just a FEW things that I told good ol’ Jack when he continued to try defending the sweet potato with legs that is about to take charge. Mind you, ALL of these are FACTS unless I otherwise mention, and I DO mention it if it’s simply speculation or opinion for the sake of fairness:

The man admitted to grabbing female genitalia and getting away with it because he's famous and to intentionally walking in on young women while they were getting dressed. It’s him, on tape. And you looked the other way.

The man berated and belittled women. He called a former beauty queen “Miss Piggy,” he alluded to Megan Kelly having her period to explain why she, in his words, treated him “unfairly.” And you looked the other way.

This man mocked a reporter with a disability on national television. And to DEFEND HIM, right-leaning news outlets showed videos of him mocking OTHER PEOPLE. So the argument was that he wasn't mocking the disabled (which the video actually shows that he WAS), he just MOCKS LOTS OF PEOPLE. Which is unconscionable in a Presidential candidate, let alone the actual President. And you looked the other way.

The man pointed to completely fake news stories in order to besmirch the names of his political opponents. He actually cited an article in the Enquirer to explain how Ted Cruz’s father may have tried to kill Kennedy. On television. And you looked the other way.

This man got the news that the last true Socialist dictator, Fidel Castro, had died the same time the rest of the world did. And while the sitting President released an eloquent letter on what Castro's death and the ongoing normalization of relations between our two countries meant for Cuba and for the world, YOUR man tweeted, "Fidel Castro is dead!" That's it. From the next leader of the free world. And you looked the other way.

The man used hatred in order to incite violence among his followers. He once told a crowd at a rally that he loved “the old days” because a protester who was interrupting him would be “carried out on a stretcher, folks,” and told another crowd in reference to a man who was punched and kicked for protesting that “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” The man was protesting. Nothing else. And you looked the other way.

The man showed on national television that he was unaware of some of the key aspects of our national defense strategy. When asked about our nuclear triad, the man SIMPLY HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL THAT WAS. HE flailed about speaking on various topics from his opposition to the Iraq war (sigh - you’re on tape with an opposite statement there too guy), President Obama being wrong about global warming being important, and, oh yeah, his commitment that nuclear proliferation should be halted. And if that last one sounds great, it would except that shortly after this interview he went on record saying first of all that OTHER NATIONS SHOULD HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS, and that he himself was not opposed to A NUCLEAR STRIKE IN EUROPE in order to win a war. Which. I’m sorry, is as terrifying as it is absolutely fucking insane. And you looked the other way.

The man stated numerous times during his campaign that he would release his tax returns after the election. Then after the audit was completed. And most recently that it doesn't matter if he releases them because only the media cares. Which is completely false as well as a smack in the face to people, like Jack, who ACTUALLY DEFENDED TRUMP by saying that after he WON, the tax records would come out and then “boy will you Liberals look stupid!” And yet here we are. And you continue to look the other way.

The man stated, in clear language and in NO uncertain terms, that he would build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico, and that he would make Mexico pay for that wall. Unequivocally, without any reservation, with no room for gray area, he told the American people that Mexico would pay for the wall. And within a month of his being elected he stated that the United States would build the wall and that Mexico would "reimburse us," which is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than what he said would happen. And the SAME DAY that he announced this, the President of Mexico reiterated AGAIN in a statement that Mexico will NOT PAY FOR A WALL. And you looked the other way.

The man said that if he won the Presidency that he would put his businesses into a blind trust run by his children. Which is NOT A BLIND TRUST. Not by the business definition and CERTAINLY not by the legal definition. These are holdings that CAN and in fact already HAVE caused ethical issues stemming from the fact that foreign nations could show preferential treatment to his businesses in order to get preferential treatment from OUR NATION. And you looked the other way. But wait, this one gets worse. Because now that you have elected him, he has gone back on the promise to divest himself from his business holdings or come even CLOSE to putting them into a blind trust, instead openly stating in his first press conference that the day-to-day running of his businesses will be done by his sons, and that he and his daughter will have nothing to do with the running of said businesses. He will STILL OWN THE BUSINESSES THOUGH. Which, yes, is actually against the United States Constitution. That, in case you forgot, is the document that you and others like you were afraid that President Obama and Secretary Clinton if she were elected would tear to pieces, the same document that YOUR GUY is about to violate. And his daughter is as of today still in talks with a Chinese company about a Trump project in China, a company that is majority owned BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. Neither she nor her father have made any move to cut her out of these negotiations. And you continue to look the other way.

The man stated that he would repeal Obamacare and replace it with "something much better." his own words. He also stated that no one would be left without coverage when Obamacare was repealed because he had "so many ideas" (again, his own words) for what to replace Obamacare with. And Congress has just moved to begin the repeal of Obamacare, something of which Trump approved, with NO REPLACEMENT AT ALL. AT ALL. Let me say that again, NO REPLACEMENT AT ALL. Because of this, over TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE will at least temporarily and over half of them permanently LOSE THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE. This is tantamount to murder, as one of the biggest provisos of Obamacare has always been the inability to be turned down due to preexisting conditions, which is ALSO coincidentally one of the FIRST things that Congress JUST VOTED THE OTHER DAY TO END. And you continue to look the other way.

The man, AND the sitting President, were briefed on CREDIBLE INTELLIGENCE that members of President-elect Trump's campaign had DIRECT CONTACT with the Russian government during the election. This is not the bed-pissing nonsense, I could not care less about whatever deviancy he practices or does not practice in his bedroom or in a Russian hotel room, for that matter. This is a detailed report based on real Intel that has caused the FBI to begin an investigation into whether members of the Trump election team colluded with the Russian government to sway a United States Presidential election. And you continue to look the other way.

But hey, at least he’s surrounding himself with “good people, smart people.” Once again, his words. How’s that going....

The man said that he would "drain the swamp," and that he would begine to rid Washington of lobbyists, insiders and big-business types who were only there for their own good and not the good of the people. And once he was elected he proceeded to nominate two Goldman Sachs executives, the CEO of the largest corporate entity in the world (Exxon-Mobil), and a handful of lobbyists to Cabinet and leadership positions. And you CONTINUE to look the other way.

The man appointed Stephen Bannon, who is responsible for articles such as “There’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews” (totally misogynistic and written in such a gender-biased way as to be laughable), “Trump 100% vindicated: CBS reports ‘swarm’ on rooftops celebrating 9/11″ (completely debunked to the point that CBS ran a story just to let people know that this was false news), and “Racist, pro-Nazi roots of Planned Parenthood revealed” (a hit piece written with such a slant that there is not an ounce of verifiable factual information in it). And when the man had his first press conference, he berated a CNN reporter and called the network “fake news” for reporting NOT that Trump likes to pay Russian prostitutes to pee the bed (that was Uproxx and others after that), but that he and President Obama had been briefed on “unverified intelligence from a credible source” that the Russian government might have information that could be used to blackmail the President-elect. That’s what CNN reported. NOT the pee-pee diaries. And your man conflated them with Uproxx. And then Trump took a question from Breitbart News. I shit you not. And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man who has a questionable track record regarding civil rights, who opposed repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to give people of all sexual orientations the right to serve their country and who supported a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage to head our nation's largest law enforcement body. Senator Sessions lost a bid to be a Federal Judge due to racist comments, and led his State’s defense of a school funding bill that was eventually found to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL due to its favoring of wealthy, mostly white schools over poor, mostly black ones. And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man to run the Office of Housing and Urban Development who has publicly stated that he DOESN'T THINK HE KNOWS HOW TO RUN SUCH AN ORGANIZATION. Ben Carson has ZERO experience running such an Agency, and has just as little experience in government. Oh yeah, and you and your friends AND TRUMP made Carson out to be a complete idiot during the Primaries who couldn’t run a Burger King. And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man to run the Department of Energy who has publicly stated that he would DO AWAY WITH IT, though he COULDN'T REMEMBER THE AGENCY'S NAME WHEN HE WAS ASKED IT. Former Governor Perry is a climate change denier, and is STILL ON THE BOARD of the company that is trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. And you continue to look the other way.

The man nominated a woman to run the Department of Education who has a long and vociferous history of OPPOSING PUBLIC EDUCATION. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire who advocated for charter schools and the privatization of the public education system, something that has been repeatedly proven to favor the wealthy and to disproportionally affect the poor. And you continue to look the other way.

In a few days this man will take the Presidential Oath of Office under a cloud of possible ethics violations, under a cloud of question over his leveraging of national power to make money for his businesses, under a cloud of suspicion over whether he will keep ANY of his campaign promises, most of which he’s already broken, and under a cloud of doubt as to his ability to actually do the job of President. The United States will have a possible Constitutional crisis on its hands from day one.

The fact that he has admitted to inappropriately touching women without their permission and to walking in on underage young ladies in various stages of undress are only two of MANY reasons that I would not trust the man alone with ANYONE, least of all my daughter. And she’s not even a year old yet. Which is good, because at least I can hope that by the time she understands stuff like politics, the Trump era will have become just an extremely embarrassing memory.

- Preacher

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courtneytincher · 5 years ago

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The Sleazeball Peddling Russian Girls to Billionaires

Photo Illustation by The Daily Beast/Photos Getty; AlamyODESSA, Ukraine—Disgust flashed across Kristina Goncharova’s delicate features when she heard the name Peter Listerman. In Odessa, Ukraine’s graceful Black Sea resort, every local fashion agency and beauty contest organizer knows Listerman, a man always looking to hire Russian and Ukrainian models for his VIP escort agencies. And to 24-year-old Goncharova, Listerman’s name brings a whole storm of associations with dubious big-money characters treating teenage girls as if they were animals at a pet store. Even back in 2016, sources familiar with the beauty business were not surprised to see a report on the New York Post’s gossipy Page Six site connecting Listerman to Jeffrey Epstein: “Instead of having his assistants troll local high schools, the billionaire money manager—and registered sex offender—is importing his playmates from Russia.” The article suggested Listerman had been seen visiting Epstein’s apartment and noted a TV interview in which Listerman said he introduced many oligarchs to Russian models, but insisted: “I’m not a pimp, just [a] matchmaker.”Now Epstein is held in a federal lockup in Manhattan, facing up to 45 years in prison for molesting and trafficking minors. And Listerman appeared to be running scared as soon as we started asking questions.Jeffrey Epstein Arrested for Sex Trafficking of MinorsEarlier this month, celebrities arrived here from all over the world for the 10th annual Odesa International Film Festival. Young Ukrainian models took part in the Fashion Weekend events, with photo shoots on the beach. And sure enough, Listerman showed up as well. We found him drinking in the company of some young women by the pool at the Palace Del Mar hotel. (He was easy to track: he kept posting bawdy videos of himself at the Del Mar or the Dacha restaurant talking about... sex.) When asked about his dealings with Epstein, Listerman tried to turn his activities into a joke: “I invented myths and fairy tales to entertain people,” Listerman told The Daily Beast. But when pressed to explain the details about the alleged traffic of teen models, he declined to answer and subsequently blocked a reporter on his Instagram and Facebook pages. What’s certain is that Listerman’s pursuit of potential “matchmaking” talent is notorious, and for decades the activities of Listerman, a Russian citizen, were an open book. He often bragged about his business on Russian TV, referring to the women he hooked up with rich men as “chickens” or “tyolki,” which means heifers, young cows that have never been bred. He also called women his “shaggy gold,” alluding to pubic hair.Here is how he described the type he is searching for in an interview with a Russian tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda, during his visit to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk in 2009: “My Hollywood clients and oligarchs are sick of emancipated Muscovites, European and American women, who resemble robots. Everybody is sick of these evil women, they want gentle and romantic!”Russian and Ukrainian organizers of beauty contests try to distance themselves from Listerman as if from a contagious infection. Earlier this year Listerman was noticed outside the luxurious Borvikha concert hall in Moscow right before the Miss Russia 2019 beauty contest. “The scandalous matchmaker was not allowed even to cross the threshold,” Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.In the early 2000s, Moscow’s glamorous world of wild oil money embraced the cynical philosophy of “Uncle Petia,” as Listerman is sometimes called: “God created 50 percent of people who are ready to sell their guts and 50 percent of those who just pretend they cannot but secretly they are ready for anything,” he said in one of his interviews. In a 2007 movie, Gloss, by Andrei Konchalovsky, a procurer seemingly modeled on Listerman is named Petia. He checks if young women’s feet are gentle and agile enough before sending them off for consideration as mistresses for “a very serious client in Sardinia.” One of the models Petia sells to an English lord is a virgin.* * *The Beauty Queen Machine* * *For years, Tatiana Savchenko, the founder of Odessa’s first modeling school, has seen the real-life Listerman cruising for her students at fashion shows and beauty contests. “I have heard him approach women at our agency with his usual, ‘Hey, beautiful, I have a client for you!’” Savchenko told The Daily Beast. “It took a lot of work to keep him from tricking our teen models in his traps.”Goncharova, who was one of Savchenko’s students, actually trained from the time she was five to become a beauty queen. She attended ballet, singing, painting and chess classes; she learned to speak French and English, to move gracefully, and answer questions about her ambitions. In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Goncharova said that “the world’s famous seller of young models to oligarchs”—Listerman—had been writing “What’s up, Bride-to-Be?” messages to her for years. The young model won the Miss Teen Ukraine contest in 2010 and her dream came true: she was invited to take part in Miss Teen World in Houston. That was when she received the first, “Hey, Beautiful,” message from Listerman, who wanted to meet with her. She was 14 years old. Goncharova, a tall, long-limbed Ukrainian model with big doe eyes is gentle, romantic—and horrified to hear about Epstein’s case with such details as the “orgy island” and the alleged connection to Listerman. “I had enough of a brain to turn him down when I was a minor but many girls look for a chance to meet with him, say yes to his offers, as he is paying them much more than €300 [$334], the average of what we make per day working as professional models in Europe,” she said. And Listerman is relentless. In 2016, he sent her private messages on Facebook every few months. “Hi, Mama, how is Odessa?”; “Is Leonardo DiCaprio with you now?” and then four months later: “Hi, Bride-to-Be, have you been successful?” He knew that as a beauty queen she was. In 2017 Goncharova won Miss Tourism International, a contest of models from 20 countries. But clearly Listerman had another notion of success—hooking up with someone very rich.Today, Goncharova says, she realizes that she has been surrounded with girls obsessed with dreams of American wealth and luxury since her childhood. The daughter of a model, when she came to Savchenko’s school, Savrox Models, at the age of five her first teacher was none other than Oleksandra Nikolayenko, who won Miss Ukraine in 2001.Later that same Nikolayenko met Donald Trump’s friend, casino and hotel owner Phil Ruffin. “Ukrainian models and American billionaires found their way to each other at beauty contests,” Savchenko, who had met Trump and Ruffin at several international competitions, told The Daily Beast. “Not everybody needed Listerman’s services.”Made Desperate by War, Odessa's Women Look to Model's Cinderella StorySavchenko went to the Nikolayenko-Ruffin wedding at Mar-a-Lago and remembers vividly her encounter with the future U.S. president: “Donald grabbed me by my waist and whispered compliments that made me blush.”Teenagers from poor Ukrainian regions, where five years of war and economic crises have wrought widespread devastation, imagine themselves escaping to a modeling career, maybe marrying a political leader, a rich businessman, or a foreign sugar daddy.On a recent scouting trip in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the managing organizer of Miss Ukraine Universe, Aleksey Diveyev-Tserkovny, announced the organizers could turn any woman into a model. “When 2,000 beauties showed up, we decided to just let them quickly go past us so we could pull the most beautiful ones from the crowd,” Diveyev-Tserkovny said last week. “But there were so many beautiful girls that my head was spinning.” When asked about Listerman and Epstein, Diveyev-Tserkovny shook his head in disapproval. “To speak to me about Listerman’s hunt for girls is the same as to speak about porn films to an expert in art-house film festivals,” he said. “Listerman has been chasing me, trying to make friends for a long time, since the beauty contest we organize is No. 1 in Ukraine.” * * *The Instagram Pageant* * *Awareness of the role procurers play in Russia and Ukraine is slowly on the rise. Some young women have spoken out about sexual abuse and suffering. But others are posting their nude and semi-nude pictures on Instagram. “I am not sure how to stop girls flocking into escort agencies—just search for love in Odessa or in Ukraine and you will see tons of young women revealing their bodies,” said Savchenko. “The number of girls interested in beauty contests is shrinking, replaced by an Instagram race for popularity.” Modeling schools organizing beauty contests check every participant’s page on social media. “We play the role of a filter: if some girl posts her nude pictures on Instagram we immediately reject her,” Savchenko added.Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician and critic of Vladimir Putin assassinated in 2015, wrote about Listerman in his book Confession of a Rebel. Soon after Putin’s first election in 2000, Nemtsov, a Russian parliament member at the time, stayed in the same hotel as Putin and businessman Vladimir Potanin in the French ski resort of Courchevel. “We come downstairs and see around 10 long-legged girls. Potanin and I were in shock. It turns out Petia Listerman, a famous ‘promoter’ brought them.” Nemtsov asked Listerman why he brought the women to the hotel: “But you are also men, after all,” Listerman said, assuming that explained everything.The “promoter” has bragged in multiple interviews about finding Russian model wives for big name stars, claiming soccer champion Cristiano Ronaldo and NHL star Alex Ovechkin met their spouses through him. He claimed he had a contract with Tatiana Akhmadova for half of all her divorce proceedings after introducing her to billionaire Farkhad Akhmadov. None of those claims have been substantiated in any detail.In any case, there’s more—or less—than matrimony on offer for a prospective "bride-to-be."“Listerman’s business is surely not just about marriage—we are aware that there is an international market of models supplied to escorts around casinos, yachts and resorts,” Savchenko told The Daily Beast. It’s doubtful that any of the Russians or Ukrainians that Page Six noticed around Epstein were there to be life partners.The problem of human trafficking from and through Ukraine is huge, and not limited to would-be models. According to the International Organization for Migration, 230,000 Ukrainian women, men and children have become victims since 1991. But Goncharova, for one, thinks that Ukraine’s new first lady Olena Zelenskaya could do great service leading the anti-sex-traffic campaign and increasing awareness among young people. As for Goncharova herself, after a lifetime of modeling, at 24 she is disillusioned and says she is planning to quit the business.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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pamphletstoinspire · 7 years ago

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Catholic Prophecy - Part 13

30 Catholic Prophecy

Tn the days of peace that are to come after the desolation of revolutions and wars — before the end of the world — Christians will become so lax in their religion that they will refuse the sacrament of Confirmation, saying that it is unnecessary. And when the false prophet, the precursor of Anti-Christ, comes, all who are not confirmed will apostatize, while those who are confirmed will stand fast in their faith, and only a few will renounce Christ."

Comment: From a complete study of prophecies it is almost certain that there will be two distinct periods of wars: one to come soon, which will be followed by a period of peace and prosperity; and another to follow the period of peace, and which will be that of Antichrist. The latter period will in turn be followed by the triumph of the Church and by another period of peace of unknown duration. The Gospel, too, seems to confirm that there will be two different periods: the beginning of the end, and the end proper, with an intervening respite.

|f 33. Nicholas of Fluh ( 15th century). k The Church will be punished because the majority of her members, high and low, will become so perverted. The Church will sink deeper and deeper until she will at last seem to be extinguished, and the succession of Peter and the other Apostles to have expired. But, after this, she will be victoriously exalted in the sight of all doubters."

Comment: According to many prophecies, the Church will be without a Pope for some time, and most of the hierarchy will have been martyred. It will seem that the Church has been destroyed. But she will miraculously rise again and be more powerful than ever.

The perversion alluded to in the opening sentence of the above passage (as I said six years ago in World Trends) seems to be the perversion of the mind — an intellectual perversion, that of humanism and secularism which is influencing much of the thinking in the Church of today. I gave evidence of this by quoting the very words of the Council Fathers while the Council was still in session, but I added that the possibility of a moral perversion was hardly to be considered.

This was six years ago, however, and the same cannot be said in 1970. Moral perversion now exists within the Church, and this is not surprising since the philosophical concepts of one's intellect are bound to be reflected sooner or later in one's patterns of behaviour. Apart from the many priests who have

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sought dispensations before getting married, many others in Europe and America have felt that dispensations were not necessary after all. They felt in conscience — so they said — that the dispensation existed in the very circumstances of their lives, and since they were "adult and responsible," it was quite superfluous for them to seek a humiliating formal dispensation from Rome's "autocratic" power. More recently, a news item picked up in a Belgian newspaper reported that one of the "prophets" of the new wave, the author of many theological best-sellers, had been convicted of offensive behaviour for sunbathing nude in the sand dunes of his native country. A fine example for a priest to give!

1f 34. Telesphorus of Cozensa (16th century). "A powerful French Monarch and French Pope will regain the Holy Land after terrible wars in Europe. They will convert the world and bring universal peace. They will overcome the German ruler."

Comment: This is a repeat, or confirmation, of what we have already seen in previous prophecies. The identity of the German ruler, however, is not clear at this stage. One point worthy of note is the absence of references to a general invasion of Western Europe by Soviet Russia. On the other hand, many prophecies lay stress on the chaos and anarchy that will prevail in every country. We can only infer that Communism will triumph from within. At the same time, however, a revolution in Russia will shake the foundations of the Communist regime there. Another possibility is that Soviet Russia will be so involved in an Asian conflict that it will be unable to interfere with Western Europe.

|[ 35. David Poreaus (17th century). "The Great Monarch will be of French descent, large forehead, large dark eyes, light brown wavy hair and an eagle nose. He will crush the enemies of the Pope and will conquer the East."

Comment: As said before, the great king will be of French descent, but not necessarily French in the narrow sense. Other prophecies mention his having German and Austrian blood as well. One thing seems certain; France will be the cradle of the counter-revolution, as it was the cradle of the revolution in the 18th century.

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jj 36. Fr. Balthassar Mas ( 17th century). "I saw a land swallowed up by the sea and covered with water. But, afterwards, I saw that the sea receded little by little and the land could be seen again. The tops of the towers in the city rose again above the water and appeared more beautiful than before, and I was told that this land was England."

Comment: I think this prophecy must be correlated with that of St. Hildegard, quoted earlier. There exist one or two more mentioning the low-lying lands of England being destroyed by a tidal wave. Many of the capital cities of the world will be destroyed during the coming upheaval, and the destruction seems to have some relationship with the role of each of these cities; thus, London will be destroyed by the sea (England used to rule the seas), Paris by fire (France spread the fire of her false political doctrines throughout the whole world), Rome by an earthquake (the "Rock" of Peter has been split by Paul VI himself).

ff 37. St. Margaret Mary ( 17th century). "I understand that the devotion of the Sacred Heart is a last effort of His Love towards the Christians of these latter days, by offering to them an object and means so calculated to persuade them to love Him."

Comment: Salvation is in the Sacred Heart, not in some pragmatic ''updating," and not in some humanistic rewording of the Holy Mass. Recently, a priest wrote in a Catholic paper: "Our people do not go much to Benediction these Jays; devotion, generally, is decreasing." And a few lines below, he went on to say: "People are becoming more and more social; they increasingly realize the necessity of living in the modern world . . ." The context of this article made it obvious that the parallel was not intentional, but the relation of cause and effect is inescapable: the world seems more important than the Eucharist. This is surely not the way to salvation. As a matter of fact, it is quite untrue to say that the Catholic people as a whole are becoming "more social" in the sense understood by this priest. We are all aware, of course, that interdependence is increasing, and that we are living in the modern world, but this is no justification for the frantic efforts of the Progressives to make us live like the modern world; still less for the

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unpardonable sacrilege of making the Mass a sort of social gathering. The agitation for a reform of the Mass did not come from the Catholic people; it came from a handful of intellectuals obsessed with Teilhardian concepts. One clear result, however, is the decline in devotional practices in general, and in the devotion of the Sacred Heart in particular.

|f 38. Bl. Mary of Agreda ( 1 7th century) . "It was revealed to me that through the intercession of the Mother of God all heresies will disappear. The victory over heresies has been reserved by Christ for His Blessed Mother. In the latter days, the Lord will in a special manner spread the renown of His Mother. Mary began salvation, and by her intercession it will be completed. Before the second coming of Christ, Mary, more than ever, must shine in mercy, might, and grace in order to bring unbelievers into the Catholic faith. The power of Mary in the latter days will be very conspicuous. Mary will extend the reign of Christ over the heathens and the Mohammedans, and it will be a time of great joy when Mary is enthroned as Mistress and Queen of Hearts.

"An unusual chastisement of the human race will take place towards the end of the world/'

Comment: Many prophecies speak of the special role of Mary in the latter days. Her mercy, power, and grace have indeed been shining with increasing intensity since 1830 in many apparitions: Rue du Bac, La Salette, Lourdes, Pontmain, Knock, Fatima, Banneux, Beauraing, Heede, Marienfried, Garabandal, San Domiano, etc. In spite of this, the Council Fathers deemed it "inopportune" to proclaim Mary as Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix.

If 39. St. Louis-Marie Grignion De Mont fort (18th century) "The power of Mary over all devils will be particularly outstanding in the last period of time. She will extend the Kingdom of Christ over the idolaters and Moslems, and there will come a glorious era when Mary is the Ruler and Queen of Hearts."

Comment: Here again we have confirmation that the Mohammedans will be converted. This will take place under the reign of the Great King (see previous prophecies), after the invasion of Western Europe and the Arabs' defeat at the

34 Catholic Prophecy

hands of the Great Christian King. The following prophecy says the same thing again.

|f 40. Capuchin Friar ( 1 8th century) . "All priests, both secular and regular, shall be stripped of their possessions and of every kind of property. They will have to beg from lay people their food and everything necessary for their support and for the worship of God.

"The Pope shall die during these calamities, and the Church will be reduced to the most painful anarchy as a result. Much human blood will be shed in Italy; many cities, towns and castles shall be brought to ruins, causing the death of many thousands of people. By the Catholic clergy and people the true and lawful Pope will be elected who shall be a man of great holiness and goodness of life.

"A scion of the Carolingian race, by all considered extinct, will come to Rome and behold and admire the piety and clemency of this Pontiff, who will crown him, and declare him to be the legitimate Emperor of the Romans. He shall destroy the Ottoman Empire and all heresies. With the assistance of God and of the Pope, he will cooperate in the reformation of abuses; he will assume the direction of temporal governments; he will assign a decent pension to the Pope and also the bishops and clergy. And they all will live in peace which shall last till the End of Time."

Comment: Just one remark here: the death of the Pope will bring about a schism and an anti-pope. The reference to the "true and lawful Pope" in itself justifies this interpretation, but other prophecies are quite explicit about the election of an anti-pope.

|f 41. Bernhardt Rembordt (18th century). "Cologne will be the site of a terrible battle. Many foreigners will be slaughtered there; both men and women will fight for their Faith. It will be impossible to prevent this horrible devastation. People will wade up to their ankles in blood. At last, a foreign King will appear and win a victory for the cause of the righteous. The remaining enemy will retreat to the Birchtree country. There, the last battle will be fought for the just cause.

"At that time France will be divided. The German Empire will choose a simple man as the Emperor, who will rule for a

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short time. His successor will be the man for whom the world has longed. He will be called a ''Roman Emperor," and he will give peace to the world. A good and happy era will follow. God will be praised on earth, and war will be no more."

Comment: A number of prophecies mention a great battle in the Birchtree country, which is probably in Westphalia. It will be the determining battle between the Christian forces under the Great King and the last armies of the Communist block. This prophecy must be correlated with that of Telesphorus of Cozensa, which referred to a ''German Ruler" who will precede the Great King. All these prophecies confirm and complete each other.

j| 42. Elizabeth Canori-Mora (19th century). "Countless le gions of demons shall overrun the earth — the instrument of divine justice — and causing [sic] terrible calamities and disasters. Nothing on earth shall be spared. After the frightful punishment I saw a great light appear upon the earth which was the sign of reconciliation of God with men. All men shall become Catholics, and they shall acknowledge the Pope as Vicar of Jesus Christ."

Comment: There exist a few other prophecies announcing the unchaining of demons in the second part of the 20th century. Elizabeth Canori-Mora did not indicate the period, but Anne Catherine Emmerich did. Demons are now roaming the earth, and this accounts for the aberrations to be found even within the Church. The modern world is completely corrupt — intellectually, philosophically and morally. Technology and Democracy were supposed to bring about happiness on earth, but it has brought about such misery that people everywhere are taking to liquor and drugs. Moral corruption is such that its presence is now to be seen — and tolerated — even within the walls of a church; priests now give communion to half- naked girls as a matter of course. The chastisement is inevitable. In this vein read the following. It was said by Bishop Fulton Sheen long before he took over the See of Rochester, which seems to have brought about a complete change in his thinking, but at that time he often had truly prophetic insights:

#catholic prophecy

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