#example a. younger newt in crimes of grindlewald

[whatarewedoingdude]

It always absolutely fascinates me when casting manages to get someone who ABSOLUTELY looks like a younger version of a character. Like holy shit how did you match features and sound so well??

[darkspellmaster]

Dumbledore, Grindlewald, David Yates, JK Rowling and the issue with the use of words. Part 4

(To save people from the issue of reading this on Mobile I’ll break it up.)

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here) 

Now, I’m going to go into part 4 of this, and I really want people to listen.

Fantastic Beasts is a movie series written in the way one would write a book series, that connects the idea of a mystery and possible suspence period piece, with the idea of the Hero’s journey for Newt Scamander. JKR is writing this, and probably the rest of the series of movies, as she would a book, save for the fact that it’s in script form and you have it played out on screen over having to wait years to read it.

Now for some this idea is horrible, because a book can give you time to cover a lot of story beats and really dig into the meat of a character. However, visually a movie can show an audience what sort of creature she’s thinking of as well as allow people to connect emotionally to the character, and, on top of all of this, make it easier to tell this sort of story.

Newt is not Harry, and will never be. He is an adult with a lot of confidence issues and some social issues. He’s nervous, shy, and unsure of himself. And Yes Harry was a lot of that too, however, as a boy growing through his teen years into an adult we saw him change and gain confidence through friends that he gained. Newt clearly didn’t have those till he met Tina, Jacob, and Queenie. He was, like Ron, pushed to the back and overshadowed by his brave and brilliant wartime hero brother, Rolf, and, as such, he’s built himself up to be, not worthless, but rather inept at believing in himself. It takes getting to know Jacob and seeing someone who finds his world so fascinating and impressed by what he loves that finally starts to pull him out of the blanket he’s wrapped himself in so long.

Newt is a different sort of hero, as many articles have suggested, and to not give him the time to experience his own journey would be a slap in the face to the character. In Newt’s case you have the start of his journey from Dumbledore going to him and offering him a simple quest to go to the states. Once there he’s met allies that help him to conquer his own fears and prove to be a heroic type of person, even though he doesn’t look like it.

Newt is not the good looking Harry, he’s a gangly young man that has no clue what he’s doing in a lot of cases and prefers to hang out with his animals then go off on adventures.

This is why I honestly think she’s making sure that Dumbledore stays a mentor. His presence can overwhelm a scene, as we’ve seen in the other movies and books. We know he’s powerful and time taken away from Newt can, in fact, make it harder to sell this sort of character as a hero. An example of a movie that screwed this up, but was still a good movie in it’s own right, was Tales of Earthsea. In this case the main hero of the story, an older man who was a magic user, was pushed to the back of the story while the young Heroic prince became the hero of the movie. Problem, the prince is a one time character (I think I haven’t read very far in the series yet) and pretty much doesn’t play a role outside of this book. The side characters though, do, and are characters that continue through the stories and play significant roles in many books.

The issue here is that a lot of people went to get the series and came to a rude awakening when they realized that “Hey Prince guy is not the lead, what the hell is this?”

Now if you think about that, why would the author want to put a mentor character above the lead? It would make no sense, especially given the mystery laid out for us to try to piece together.

Credence is a LeStrange, Leta is his brother through their father. We know that her Uncle on her mother’s side is looking for him, and we know, thanks to the trailers’ that there’s hints of Leta working with Grindelwald. We also know that Rolf is going to marry her, that Newt once was in love with her enough to still have her picture, and that there’s probably a triangle brewing there. We are hinted that Grindelwald wants Credence for something, and that the title hints at his actions being devastating. We also know that, because of the title, the Hallows are involved, and that Dumbledore is sending Newt out to do work for him, possible to find the location of the mirror. We also know that he comes to France to talk with him, and that Tina and Jacob, and Queenie end up there as well.

Given that this is a mystery, and again the likelihood is that Credence and Ariana share the same problem, we’re not going to get those pieces right away.

So how does that all connect to what Rowling said?

Well as an author you can’t give away you’re whole story in one go. Showing the tension between Dumbledore and Grindelwald early on in a mystery gives a way a LOT of what is going to make up the plot. We, the readers, already have some knowledge of their history, but we don’t have it all, and the only one that we can rely on for that info is a slightly bitter younger brother who may be placing blame upon his brother.

So it’s probable that she’s holding back a lot in this story to give more time for us to learn as Newt is. We’re at least a few steps ahead of him due to our knowledge, but we have to remember as viewers that we’re learning as he learns. Newt is our PoV in this story and because he knows nothing about Dumbledore and Grindelwald, we know nothing about those two. Even if we think we do.

The authors role, even in a screenplay, especially one that will feed into the next, is not to give everything away in one go. You have to build when you’re going to have an epic battle between two people, and while the tension between the two will be low, it probably will still be there and it will start Newt looking into things. Can he trust his mentor, what is he hiding from him, etc. Newt’s going to go through the same thing Harry went through, and it’s going to hurt. Maybe more so than Harry, as Harry had others to lean on, Newt…is only starting to have those. So in the end it makes sense for her to point out that she’s got plans and not to freak out over what Yates says. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get to their relationship. It just means that it’s going to have to take time to get there and build on things going on in the story that affect Newt and how Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald and Leta and Newt’s are going to be paralleling one another. We’re probably going to see Leta use the same sort of tactics on Newt that Grindelwald used on Dumbledore at some point and having that shown, you’ll get the idea of what sort of man Grindelwald truly is. Or we’ll see him do it to Newt, making him question who he can trust.

If we expect to see everything laid out before us, it will just crash and burn and make the journey weaker and less engaging because we’ll know both endings then. We already know how Dumbledore and Grindelwald end up, we just don’t know how they get there. Rushing a mystery destroys that tension, and honestly, who wants the ending to a story before we even get clues about how it began?

I hope this helps people gain a better understanding of things and possibly makes people pause before lambasting the crew of Fantastic Beasts the crimes of Grindelwald.