The only reason to watch the two videos below? So you can say you did, a marker of your thorough research into all things Fantastic Beasts.
The first one with Miller and Fogler also serves the purpose of reaffirming your conviction that actors must be the last people you ask about anything of importance (see The Apology of Socrates for more — and, yes, I know Socrates didn’t even talk to actors in his search for wisdom or why he was the wisest man in Greece). This performance is an ugly throwback to Cheech and Chong videos in which the audience is supposed to be amused by two stoners who think they are funny.
But the Q&A does have Miller almost answer the question about whether Ariana Dumbledore was an Obscurial. Maybe he did answer it and then realized he’d be in big trouble if he reported what Rowling had told him. Anyway, it’s a non-answer. How does Ariana as Obscurial qualify as an “absurd fan theory”?
This conversation is much more enjoyable, if only because the actresses are relatively modest and take the silly situation in which they find themselves (and for which they are being paid) seriously enough to try and answer the questions posed. Back to the screenplay and real conversation about the story and future possibilities tomorrow!
Crimes of Grindelwald: Queenie’s Quest by Jan Voetberg
I do not remember any sign of Tina opposing a Magic-No Maj relationship between Queenie and Jacob in the first Fantastic Beasts film. Queenie’s reaction when Newt tells her that not he but Theseus is engaged, is not: “Oh, but that’s wonderful! I will inform Tina as soon as possible!” but “Oh! Oh dear….” She tells the disappointed Magizoologist that Tina is now dating an auror by the high-powered name of Achilles Tolliver (scene 36, p 66). That name is a macho push because in the Iliad 
Queenie was counting on Newt’s doing the right thing per Jacob, because, as Dumbledore tells him, that is what Newt does as an unbreakable reflex. She has only brought Jacob to London to be sure these two come to Paris to help her and Tina in their missions to defeat Grindelwald. Newt’s “discovering” that she has bewitched Jacob quite literally and freeing him from that charm gives her the excuse she needs to dump him at Newt’s home and go by herself on her secret mission to Paris.
Rowling is a writer who writes about the experience of reading. 
I think it hard to overstate how important this is to grasping Rowling’s artistry and meaning; the goal of her story-telling is to foster greater reader ‘penetration,’ not only, not even especially while reading but in how we see and think after what we’ve experienced as serious readers. We are meant to learn from our decoding and deciphering the dueling narratives and to realize again and again that like the characters we were deceived and need to be more attentive and less gullible in future. She achieves this transformed vision in her readers through a variety of fascinating traditional tools, from literary alchemy to ring composition, but always by providing us with a mirror within the story we are reading both of characters trying to understand a text and white and black hats writing a story to deceive them.
Crimes of Grindelwald, the second Fantastic Beasts franchise film, is no exception to this rule. If anything, the movie suffers from too many interior texts and manipulative story tellers so we’re never quite sure whose narrative we’re in, Newt’s, Dumbledore’s, or Grindelwald’s. Join me after the jump for a list of the various texts characters are trying to read and understand in Crimes of Grindelwald as well as of the narrative strands that others are writing for someone else to follow. 
J. K. Rowling is a big fan and serious reader of Vladimir Nabokov. For all the times she has said he is — with Austen and Collette — one of her three favorite writers, “the writer I really love,” and to read about his influence on her work (e.g., cryptonyms, literary alchemy, ring composition, the-dead-who-never-leave-us, etc.) read
Nabokov is a big deal in Rowling studies and, with the exception of Collette, the most neglected author among Rowling’s essential influences. Just as a ‘for instance’ of this, go ahead and seach the internet for possible meanings of Credence’s supposedly ‘real name, ‘Aurelius.’ You won’t find a single reference to the author from whom Rowling almost certainly found the name ‘Grindelwald’ (read Pale Fire, my favorite Nabokov novel and many say his best, and you’ll find it, trust me). But Nabokov wrote a short story called 
Although once or twice he had had the chance to switch to a more profitable business—selling cloth, for instance, instead of moths—he stubbornly held on to his shop as the symbolic link between his dreary existence and the phantom of perfect happiness. What he craved for, with a fierce, almost morbid intensity, was to net himself the rarest butterflies of distant countries, to see them in flight with his own eyes, to stand waist-deep in lush grass and feel the follow-through of the swishing net and then the furious throbbing of wings through a clutched fold of the gauze.
[Paul] Pilgram belonged, or rather was meant to belong (something—the place, the time, the man—had been ill-chosen), to a special breed of dreamers, such dreamers as used to be called in the old days ‘Aurelians’—perhaps on account of those chrysalids, those ‘jewels of Nature,’ which they loved to find hanging on fences above the dusty nettles of country lanes.
What possible meaning could this have for Credence Barebone, the man Gellert Grindelwald tells us is really ‘Aurelius Dumbledore’? I think we’re meant to think of chrysalis, the transformation of pupa to butterfly here, a completely natural and wonderfully miraculous metamorphosis akin to alchemical magic of lead being changed into gold. Paul Pilgram’s sad fate, though, as well as his name, suggests that Credence’s end will not be majestic if his heart is not right.
Recent Conversation