A Guest Post today from Valerie Frankel with her thoughts about the Dickensian Cryptonyms of characters in J. K. Rowling’s Crimes of Grindelwald. Enjoy!

Name Meanings in Crimes of Grindelwald

Leta Lestrange’s refusal to join the forces of darkness must have surprised many, given her shadowed past and Death Eater descendants. Further, her insistence that she is the last of the family line, followed by her death, suggests more will have to follow on this, since two generations after, Rodolphus Lestrange will marry Bellatrix and serve Voldemort. Leta’s name is suggestive, a derivation of the Greek Leda. Originally, Leda was a mother goddess in her own right, who chased down and devoured the sacrificed god-king as a true all-encompassing night goddess (Tymieniecka 213). However, she was co-opted into Greek mythology as a lovely queen raped by Zeus, who was forced to give birth to a generation of heroes including Helen of Troy. While she could have been a mighty goddess, she was quickly reimagined as a pawn by a patriarchal culture. Leta Lestrange’s story appears over (a pity, as she had a complex backstory and much of her engagement and possible penance for her crime was never fully explored) but Greek Leda and her daughter’s status as pawns battled over by heroes (including Theseus!) continues to echo.  

Her fiancé Theseus Scamander is also named from Greek mythology. He is the valiant warrior-hero with whom humble Newt always compares himself. In myth, he famously carries off Helen of Troy, alluded to in the modern Theseus’s sweeping Leta away from his brother.  Also in contrast with his brother, Theseus is most famous for killing a legendary beast, the minotaur. If Newt is savior of the helpless, his brother is its somewhat brutish destroyer. In a scenario that inspired The Hunger Games, in which a dozen Athenian youths were selected to die in a seven-year tribute, mythological Theseus trained them all in warfare and united them against their stronger foe, much as his namesake is doing in this film. At the same time, the Athenian could be insensitive and disapproving of family. He forgot to raise a white sail on returning and his father, on thinking he was dead, leapt into the sea. He abandoned the lover Ariadne who guided him through the labyrinth and later wed her sister Phedre, then murdered his own son when Phedre jealously framed him. The wizard Theseus’s authoritative, wrongheaded cruel approach to family starts off in his failure to connect with Leta and bossy interactions with Newt and may continue in the next films.

French-African wizard Yusuf Kama establishes that there can indeed be pure-blood families from lands like Senegal. His name comes from Joseph (the Bible and Koran contain the same characters and stories). Joseph’s famous story is of being trapped in a foreign land, plagued by prophecies he must interpret. Biblical Joseph succeeds and is promoted to second in the land. Yusuf quotes the prophecy of Tycho Dodonus: “A son cruelly banished, despair of the daughter, return great avenger with wings from the water.” However, he has enough of his beliefs wrong that he is set on murdering an innocent (and the wrong one!) showing he’s as misguided as his enemies.

[Jacob, Tina, Newt, Aurelius, and more after the jump!]

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J. K. Rowling has said that her Fantastic Beasts films are about “how Dumbledore became Dumbledore.” Whatever you make of that, I think the obvious point too easily neglected is that this film franchise will lead, not just to the 1945 battle between Gellert Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore, but, more importantly, to a bridge connecting this series with the Hogwarts Saga. A key piece of that bridge building is going to be the three Deathly Hallows and, specifically, the Elder Wand.

I want to briefly discuss here why we know this is the case and what happened in Crimes of Grindelwald to build the Scamander-Potter Bridge and reveal mastery of the Elder Wand. [Read more…]

Today’s Crimes of Grindelwald thoughts are from a Potter Pundit who looks at the story from the perspective of a writer and editor concerned with the tension and play between a story’s surface narrative and various undercurrents. Did Crimes of Grindelwald succeed in delivering both satisfactorily and with the proper proportion and interfacing? Enjoy!

Crimes of Grindelwald: Thoughts from a Fan and Fiction Editor

I had heard mixed and even disappointed reactions about this movie before I saw it. I had also heard that something somewhat shocking was in it, and I kept getting the vibe that it broke canon. So I didn’t go in with super high expectations. Mind you, I didn’t go in with super high expectations for the last one (though I loved it), simply because this series will never be Harry Potter, and they are prequels, and if you’ve read the books, you already know how the story ends. That’s not to say that I didn’t go in with tons of excitement. Because I did. Any chance to get more from the Wizarding World is always a mega plus to my muggle mortal existence.

But because of what I’d heard, I kept waiting for something really awful to happen. I kept waiting for really bad writing or a ridiculous rule change that ruined what had come before. Like I mean really ridiculous. If you don’t believe me, here are some things that were passing thoughts: Did Dumbledore and Grindelwald somehow magically have a kid? Will someone be brought back from the dead (which would be a huge no-no and would really break canon)? Did Dumbledore make a Horcrux? Is there a fourth Deathly Hallow?
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Leta Lestrange was robbed. And so were viewers of Crimes of Grindelwald.

A big challenge, perhaps the biggest challenge, in reading J. K. Rowling’s new film Crimes of Grindelwald is getting at what she wrote versus what wound up in the film we see and in the ‘Original Screenplay’ that is published. That screenplay, once again, is anything but ‘original;’ it is — with notable differences here and there –just a printed version of the final director’s cut. We know we do not have the original screenplay Rowling wrote or even the approved shooting script that Yates used because of (1) the number of deleted scenes that actors mention in their junket interviews before and after the premiere, (2) the scenes we saw in the movie trailers that are not in the released version, and (3) notes in the final script that was published.

The first task of a serious reader of the script, consequently, is hunting down as many of the deleted scenes as have been revealed and to try to figure out where they fit in the movie as edited by Yates (to conform to blockbuster formula and theater time constraints). As we saw in the first Fantastic Beasts franchise film, a reader making this effort is rewarded with key insights about the structure and focus of what Rowling wrote (cf., The Six Scenes You Missed in Fantastic Beasts (and a Seventh) and Fantastic Beasts Revelations from the Far Side Sources). A tragedy with the second film is that we do not have a LEGO movie as we did the first time, a version that used the shooting script rather than the director’s cut so it could be made for the LEGO set’s release simultaneously with the movie. No such luck this time…

I have not been following the interviews with Crimes of Grindelwald actors as I did for the first film and I failed, too, to keep up with all the trailers and movie-still-photography releases from Warner Brothers in the year of pump-priming before we could watch the final version. Kelly Loomis, our HogPro All-Pro on the spot, however, has had her fingers on this film’s media pulse from the very beginning so I asked, begged really, if she could put together a guide to the deleted scenes we know are out there that puts them in sequence with respect to the ‘Original Screenplay’ published scene numbers. You’ll find this invaluable resource — and three notes I’ve made about what the deleted scenes tell us we miss in the Leta, Credence-Nagini, and Queenie stories — after the jump! Thank you, Kelly! [Read more…]