And now for the final film, and I can hopefully put this to rest. This series truly can't survive when it's not aiming for child-level stories contained with an environment she's already familiar with.


Fantastic Beasts and the Secrets of Dumbledore: Now Actually Gay!



The first 15 or so minutes of this are better than almost anything before it. Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen start by putting on a convincingly tense meet-up that this movie likely doesn't deserve. It finally breaks the annoying CCP/MAGA censorship and states their relationship outright, but so much has been said by others about that that I don't want to focus on their relationship much for this.

Then, we switch to seeing Newt actually doing his job for once by helping deliver twin baby Qilins, a rare magical creature that in actual mythology has been linked to the birth of Chinese emperors or sages. However, he's then attacked by Sasuke and Grindelwald's goons, who steal one of them. One of his bird creatures rescue him, and it's one of the more creative sequences that this series has done considering the concept.

But then the title rolls and it's all downhill from here.

Wizard Hitler clearly plans to use the Qilin for something. They decide to assemble the whole team to take a train into 1930s Germany and solve this problem! That team consists of:

- Newt, whose actor has stated he played him thinking him as autistic, regardless of what Rowling's intent was.
- Kama, the Senegalese-French man who existed as a conflict in the last movie.
- Cinnamon Roll, a Polish-American Muggle with a Jewish surname
- Newt's brother, who I keep on forgetting exists. He was in the last movie, but he is of 0 importance. Leta was dating him as a rebound or something, idk.
- Newt's assistant who has only a handful of lines, because sure, why not.
- A random American black woman who is suddenly introduced just for this. After how poor the last movie was received, WB did assert more influence for this one, so I wonder if this was to address issues with how white America was in the first movie. She at least has more pretense than Newt's brother or assistant.

I'd personally have some ethical safety concerns about sending some of these people into 1930s Germany, but hey, that's just me.

Their plan is to... have no plan. No, really. Wizard Hitler can see the future, so they decide to try to mess things up by revealing nothing, despite how his future-sight seems incredibly limited. He seems to need a secondary source, such as a magical skull or various liquid pools, to even use it, and we don't know if he even has any control over what is shown to him.

As you can expect with the grand plan of... no plan, stupidity ensues.

I'm not even going to describe all of it in detail, but the most brain-breaking scene in any of these movies happens at a dinner where Cinnamon Roll - again, a muggle - points a fake wand at Wizard Hitler. The head of magic of Norway yells "assassin!" and everyone runs out.

The next day, the paper reads "Muggle attempts to assassinate Grindelwald!" Dumbledore declares that the plan failed, and they're in a worse position than when they started.

I was originally assuming that Dumbledore was just being some master manipulator and was banking on Cinnamon Roll doing that, but clearly, that was not the case. I was also under the impression that they were trying to pass Cinnamon Roll off as a wizard because not many would know who he is to begin with to make a judgment one way or the other. I assumed that mainly because, prior to the above scene, it was just the explanation that made the most sense for this absurdity. ... but then /that/ happens and basically declares all of my assumptions wrong.

*deep breath*

1. Who let a known muggle into a wizard banquet? They're not even supposed to know of your existence!
2. How can a muggle holding a stick be an assassin?
3. Why did a large group of some of the most powerful wizards in the world get up and run away?! No one even used that disarming spell they teach young children?
4. Grindelwald never uses this to his advantage like he should. This would make for excellent propaganda, he could've accused his political enemies of mind-controlling an innocent muggle - as clearly no sane person would do this out of their own volition - and planning to assassinate him because they're too cowardly to do so themselves.

Every time it tries to address anything serious, it feels like it goes more off the rails.

Curiously, there is at least one good moment at the end of the last movie showing how fascists gain power, as Grindelwald manipulates the emotional tension until someone on the other side snaps and attacks one of his listeners first, causing chaos. It felt particularly timely as I saw this the same time Trump was sending marines to LA, and honestly, good on the people of LA for not falling for the bait.

However, everything since then... One of the biggest problems is how it tries to isolate his evil as more about him and a few misguided people rather than an underlying movement. He has base supporters - all German because there's not a single good German in this - but is far from popular overall, nor does he do anything to try to win others over. There's no mass of desperate people eager to try anything for a change, no manipulating the media, no lying about his intentions or telling some people one thing or telling others another. There's simply bad people like Wizard Hitler and Voldemort, alongside a bunch of random (often) Slytherins or Germans. He doesn't even try that hard to paint muggles as bad people aside from emphasizing WWI in his speech. Hammering how non-magical humans invented mustard gas, and have recently only been increasing their technology to murder their own with, would have been a good angle for him to run with.

Sasuke and Temu Roxie are presumably meant to reflect the people who join due to propaganda, but that falls flat when Sasuke joined for personal reasons and Temu Roxie's mentality beyond just being a dumbass - or just naive as it's present - is never explored. While the angle of "naive follower" is realistic on paper, it doesn't work when we never see why not being able to marry Cinnamon Roll upsets her so to begin with. We never see her tormented over it, she just whines about it, decides to effectively drug and kidnap him, and then whines some more when it doesn't work. The law doesn't determine love, just ask Dumbledore about this!

Which, at long last, brings me back to point 2 from the previous post. Rowling's complete lack of curiosity. A better author would've done a deep dive into fascism, German history, and how such movements grow and function. These movies are meant to have global reach, yet she doesn't integrate anything about the areas she's writing about. You also see this in every single issue she comes under fire for: the issue with how she portrayed Natives when she tried to add American lore before this movie, the way she portrays autistic people in her detective novels, and her confusion over a number of gender-related subjects. "I was told sex and gender are the same thing back in grade school, why are you now acting like there's more to this? Scorn!"

I'd even say this explains issues like the goblins. She has spoken out against antisemitism, and she didn't invent their appearance. Yet, she made the active choice to, somewhere in her subconscious, put them in charge of banking as their only role. Had she any curiosity, she might have asked "but where do these depictions originate, and why do I think they go with banks?"

One of the clearest examples of this happened on Asexuality Awareness day. Ironically, this was not a day I was aware even existed until she got involved, just like I didn't know the day I'm writing this is "Fresh Breath Day" and tomorrow is "Lighthouse Day." Nonetheless, JK Rowling decided to immediately take issue with Asexuality Awareness Day, as it apparently deserves to exist less than Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day.

Her reaction started as the generic nonsense you see from right-wing backlash to the LGBT+ acronym when they don't immediately understand something, basically... well, you can see it all here. As some of the comments it quotes rightly point out, asexual people can experience corrective rape and conversion therapy, especially since people can assume it's a sign of being broken in some way. That broken aspect has also shown to lead to higher levels of suicidal thoughts in teens, especially teen boys because there's increased societal pressure on them to be sexual. She could've found this herself by an internet search, but no, she jumps straight to assumptions.

Her comments then get confused over how someone could be gay or straight and asexual - again, something easily found out through a search engine - and that is something that amazing illustrates both of these core points: having 0 curiosity and hurting herself in confusion the moment something doesn't fit into a neat box. Maybe, had she just used google, or hell, an AI chatbot or anything else, she would've found out about people like Andy Warhol, who was a gay asexual long before she started regressively mocking anything after LGB.

Although she's long been transphobe, I don't know if this stuck in my mind more clearly because I had only semi-recently realized I'm asexual, or if because her transphobia seemed to be explained in her manifesto by her own trauma with men causing her to become cautious and eventually paranoid of anyone who might have or had a penis. That doesn't excuse or justify her behavior, but it's something that is more worthy of a "she needs help" response. This, however, is just needlessly cruel and mocking and... for what? People who are probably among the least likely to sexually assault someone since... well... they "don't fancy a shag"?

People often act as if she broke at some point, or is being controlled by black mold in her house, but I don't know if it's more that her fame and fortune have caused her to become unafraid of saying whatever random thought comes into her head while previously she had more restraint as she needed to maintain a fanbase. I mentioned Hagrid and Dudley in the beginning, and this reminds me of that level of "it's okay if I'm cruel and mocking, so long as the person on the other end deserves it." Although, I'm not sure what asexuals did to deserve it, I'm sure there's some conspiracy to take proper oppression recognition away from women or something in there somewhere.

The emotional core of this movie revolves around Dumbledore and his relationship with Grindelwald. As I'm sure most of the internet is aware, the news that Dumbledore is gay was dropped randomly by her one day, surprising many people. A lot of the fans would've suspected Sirius and/or Lupin, to the point that randomly pairing up Lupin with Tonks generated criticism at the time-- and, to be fair, not just for that, but because it did seem completely random and a poorly written relationship that degraded them both. What's more, Dumbledore's only lover has been... Wizard Hitler? Much has already been written about that, so I'll refrain here.

This isn't in the books unless you really squint, and even the 2nd movie does a CCP/Alabama approved type of keep away around it. As implied above, the previous movie was received poorly enough that WB did step in and manage to force at least one other writer into this one. As a result, it's better than the 2nd movie, but I suspect this is also why you get major whiplash between scenes. I am genuinely curious what went on behind the scenes here, as I don't know if this movie being so much more open about the Dumbledore thing is the work of WB's desperation or genuine. The fact her penname is the man who invented conversion therapy, and the way she's always handled any mention of homosexuality, make me raise an eyebrow.

Additionally, I suspect they gave Redmayne, Newt's actor, more leeway, as he seems to playing up Newt's possible neurodivergence a lot more in this movie. Again, curious.

There's one scene between him and Dumbledore where Newt beings to attempt to comfort him, but Dumbledore just goes "No, I respect your honesty, even though it's not always easy to hear," which kind of put a smile on my face since it mirrored almost exactly a real discussion I had with a supervisor. I've been told almost those exact same words! I don't know when Newt was particularly blunt, but then, I also don't realize when I'm being so...

Dumbledore is, interestingly, the only character who gets any emotional moments or development in this. Law is also trying way too hard for what this script is. The vast majority of the dialog is a weird mix of filler comedy and exposition which doesn't actually explain much of anything. For how wide the cast list is mentioned above, there's a reason I can't describe most of them by personality in any way.

This is likely because most of the plot, like the last movie, is nonsense for attempted suspense about things that ultimately go nowhere. Sasuke? Still brooding, barely says a word, but always there. He confronts Dumbledore once, instantly gets sent into an unexplained space, and then pops out and decides to, predictably, turn on Wizard Hitler. Also, he's actually the son of Dumbledore's brother, something that is given weight but is ultimately meaningless.

"There's two magical ruler-picking deer, because she had twins!" is somehow treated as a plot hook. Deer most commonly have twins, it's their default, so knowing that from the start made everyone's shock hilarious.

Because yes, it turns out Wizard Hitler's actual evil plot is to become ruler of the wizarding world by killing a magic deer, using necromancy on it, and then controlling it to point to him as the pure of heart leader the wizarding world needs!

Forget trying to actually gain supporters or utilize propaganda or target minorities within the wizarding community as easy scapegoats or anything else actual fascists do, all you need is a magic deer and a little necromancy.

Although this mythical creature is Chinese, this part takes place in Bhutan, which at least doesn't look like London paint-over pt 4 like all the western countries, but ends up being unintentionally hilarious as there's wizards in fedoras running through the streets and attacking each other while locals just continue folding their laundry or counting vegetables. I have no clue what was going on with the filming here; I kept on sputtering imagining them going "the Europeans are jumping on rooftops again, it must be Thursday. Look busy and maybe they'll go away faster!"

Despite all that going on, no one objects to Wizard Hitler being declared the ruler of the wizards because of the deer. Now, this is a man known for criminal actions and trying to start a war. Mind control spells are well known in this universe. Not one person, not even his opponents, point out the glaringly obvious? And this all while he didn't even try to cater to them! They should be immediately crying foul!

But, as you can expect, his plan is foiled and the day is saved. Hurray! Maybe now Newt can take a long break and go play with a drago--

Or we can have a wedding. A wedding between Temu Roxie and Cinnamon Roll. You do have to appreciate it when an attempted mind rapist who was a top ranking member of the wizard nazis gets a happy ending!

Because yes, she faces no consequences at all for her actions. She is constantly forgiven and even rewarded for them. We do see her vaguely be conflicted while working with Wizard Hitler, as well as not always telling him everything she can glean from her mind reading, but at no point does she actively opposite him or try to sabotage from within. Instead of a happy wedding, her ending should take place in The Hague. Or, at the very least, a cheap cell block in Chicago.

... and I'm not even going to ask how she fell for all of this when she has mind reading powers.


- We never do know anything about Newt's backstory that doesn't involve Leta. What were his parents like? What got him into magical beasts? Does his brother have any personality traits? I guess the world will never know.
- Speaking of Leta... Kama is the only person who remembers her? And he was antagonistic towards her and knew her maybe all of two minutes in the last film? Neither Newt nor his brother even mention her. They sure rebound quickly!
- Why are we meant to believe Wizard Hitler is the only person who could love Dumbledore? The real magic deer just declared him the most pure leader of you all! Surely, he could get any man he wants!
- I took one glance at her twitter account today and she retweeted an article that I did not click the link to, as the site url looked fake. I searched for it, and found this: "Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) criticizes Reduxx for using tactics akin to white nationalist sites, emphasizing criminal cases involving transgender individuals to suggest inherent criminality. The SPLC labels Reduxx’s content as “rabidly transphobic,” noting its focus on “transgender criminality.” "

Maybe if she did do actual research into fascism, she'd recognize propaganda and know to fall for such things!

To repeat: this is why she can not write Ravenclaw.

There is one positive to all of this: Somehow, this has inspired me to start writing more. I got inspired to create my own world with both kelpies and technology, and somehow find it much easier to write than the material I've wanted to write before.