Fridge / Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Fridge pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• Grindelwald dresses like the front-man of an 80s punk-rock band. Everyone else is trying to blend in for protection of themselves and the Statute Of Secrecy. Grindelwald wants to get rid of it, so he actively tries to look out-of-the-ordinary so as to cause a commotion, and MACUSA evidently can't do much to stop him; it took The Swooping Evil to subdue him last time, something he probably never saw coming.
• Person A loves Person B. Person B isn't completely oblivious to Person A's feelings, but does not have the wish or capacity to return those feelings and instead uses them to manipulate Person A. Are we talking about Dumbledore and Grindelwald... or Newt Scamander and Leta Lestrange? Or, for that matter, Theseus Scamander and Leta Lestrange? This parallel will probably be important and/or commented on at some point.
• The way Jacob is brought back to the fold: the Swooping Evil potion obliviated the No-Maj of New York by stripping them of their bad memories of Credence and Grindelwald rampage. Jacob was the only No-Maj to get mostly happy memories of the time spent with Newt, as he got to find a true friend, the love of his life and live an amazing adventure in a world that couldn't even dare to dream of. He was just dazed because the spell drilled out from his mind the scarce moments in which he felt scared or demotivated, and he just needed Queenie to fill in the details.
• In having Leta sacrifice herself to save Newt and Theseus, JKR manages to answer one of the biggest questions about the series in general - that being of what effect Voldemort being conceived non-consensually under a love potion had on his ability to love. The implication that Voldemort was incapable of love due to the nature of his conception stuck in the craw of a lot of HP fans, because it edged too close to You Can't Fight Fate, which flew in the face of the overarching theme in the series of one's choices determining their ultimate destiny. Leta, too, was a product of a loveless union with one parent not being truly consenting, and while this may have affected in some degree her ability to understand love and probably messed her up in ways that exhibited themselves in her behavior, to the point that she even believed herself to be a monster, ultimately, where Riddle chose power and domination, Leta chose to love and be loved. And though she died, she died fighting the evil instead of being the evil (that even most fans assumed she would be going into the movie because of her name and the few things the first movie revealed about her). So Dumbledore was right - in the end, it is our choices that make us who we are.
• Grindelwald shows an image of an atomic bomb detonating to his audience. The atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, coincidentally the same year Dumbledore and Grindelwald dueled and Grindelwald was defeated.
  • When Grindelwald shows the images of World War II, Jacob is the one who has the strongest reaction of horror. Figures; as a veteran of World War I, he can't be too happy to learn that everything he fought and bled for was for nothing, and that there's going to be another war even worse than the first one. For that matter, in a deleted scene from the first movie, Queenie read his mind and noted out loud that he lost his brother in the war.
    • While most of the crowd would be the right age to have been through the War as well, all of them are pureblood wizards. The more supremacist ones would probably think it beneath them to fight a muggle war, and even in the case of the others, it's doubtful how involved they were.
    • That said, war tends to not be picky, and the first world war was especially not known for being so. Even if they were not active combatants, it's unlikely they all got away unscathed just because they were magical and thus may be absent from the army roles.
    • Indeed, when Jacob and Newt discussed their roles in the War to End All Wars in the first movie, Newt said he worked with Ukrainian Iron-bellies, likely the Wizarding version of an Army Air Service, and his brother Theseus is later described as a war hero. While not evidence that all wizards got involved, it does imply that the Wizarding World, including at least one old pure-blood family, did indeed get involved in the war in some sort of official way.
    • Unfortunately for the above, it's likely Newt was talking about the dragon species Ukranian Ironbellies, which are actually brought up in his book.
    • The implication and context of that line imply pretty strongly that he was talking about his contribution to the war, so it sounds like wizards use dragons in their wars, and Newt worked with some in a support role, which plays to his strengths.
    • Supplementary material states outright that Theseus Scamander and others lent their aid to muggle Britain in World War I despite the Minister of Magic at the time, Archer Evermonde, making it illegal for wizards to get involved.
• Queenie has never before shown signs of her Legilimens powers causing her problems. Why, then, does she get a sensory overload at that precise moment? Well, only a little while previously, she heard Jacob and she was trying to find him- this means she was in a heightened nervous state and she was conceivably concentrating on those powers to see if she can spot his thoughts. Trouble was this happened in a huge crowd and the whole cacophony of it all was just too much, plus her not even really spotting him afterwards might have made her think she was imagining his voice, making her all the more wretched.
  • She also notes in the first film that she has trouble with Newt, just because of his English accent. Now she's in France, where everyone's going to be thinking in a completely different language. Not only is her head filled with babble she can't understand, the more she tries to focus on her power to pick out Jacob, the more gibberish cacophony she'll let into her brain.
• The end of the film, where all the characters arrive at Hogwarts, and Jacob is in the background looking very confused as to why they are here. This makes sense since Hogwarts has an enchantment on it so that Muggles only see it as a scary, dangerous ruin. Alternatively, it may be that they are allowing Jacob to see it as it really is, and he is utterly stunned. Such a spectacular castle would be world famous among Muggles if they knew about it.
• Linked to the previous movie, why did this film portray Leta as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, even though Queenie's description of her (All Take and No Give), and Newt's regret at being expelled from Hogwarts due to her actions, can easily qualify her as a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk? It isn't just because she changed in personality as she grew up, it was also because Queenie was reading Newt's memories. As in, occasionally one-sided thoughts that serve to paint a particular character in either a positive or negative light. All Newt believed was that she used to be his romantic interest, who decided to not take any responsibility for the incident that got Newt kicked out of Hogwarts. However, that was all he knew about Leta, as we see in this film that she didn't want to talk about the Boggart she faced, and to an extension, her Dark and Troubled Past. In other words, Newt couldn't see the real kind of person Leta was, as his expulsion and resulting heartbreak overwhelmed anything else.
  • Or, perhaps Queenie was only reading Newt's current/surface thoughts, and thus was unaware of the whole story. She could see they'd been close friends, but not why. She saw that Newt took the heat for her and was expelled, but not what Newt had gotten out of the relationship before that, nor what the relative consequences would have been for Newt versus Leta. Assuming the expulsion happened in between O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s, Newt already had what he needed for his future plans, and was already a social outcast (and likely preferred to get away from people), while Leta likely would have had a very hard time indeed from her family if she'd embarrassed them like that.
  • Another factor is that Leta's love-starved childhood home life left her in great need of affection and attention, without teaching her how to express love to others. She hadn't been brought up in the sort of loving home Queenie and Tina had, that would show her how to give, but she was practically a bottomless pit of need for love, so would be a taker for as much as Newt could offer. Newt, on the spectrum, wasn't the best as showing love and affection, so his levels of give didn't match her need to take, but at the time she was so unused to any positive interactions that she probably would have been scared off by anything stronger, while he may have had the common inability to deal with too-intense sensory input, so her low level of giving worked for him at the time. Now that he's grown and gained more social skills, Tina is a much better match for him.
• Why do Newt and Tina find the idea of being compared to a salamander romantic but Jacob doesn't? To Jacob, a salamander is a small, slimy thing found in algae covered ponds. To Newt and Tina, it is a creature born in flames and is constantly glowing.
• Of course Queenie is a little bit distrustful of Vinda Rosier's attempts to offer her tea. She's well aware the drink could be spiked with something, probably because that's exactly what she's been doing to Jacob.
• Dumbledore's certainty that Credence can be saved by a sibling's love? He's speaking from experience: his sister Ariana's condition after being assaulted strongly hints she too was an Obscurial. And just as Credence, her lifespan was unusually long since she died at fourteen instead of ten. That's because her mother and brother Aberforth loved and cared for her so much, they did their best to mitigate the Obscurus's gradual poisoning of her mind and body.
• Newt figures out that Dumbledore deliberately used the trafficked thunderbird to get him to New York at the right time to help Credence and thwart Grindelwald. So, how did Newt end up encountering the Obscurial he tried to save in the Sudan? Could Dumbledore have arranged that encounter, as well? Has Dumbledore been keeping an eye out for any sign of Obscurials who might fulfill Grindelwald's vision, and directing Newt and other pawns to find them first to prevent it coming true? How many other Obscurials have Grindelwald and Dumbledore competed to find through the years?
• When they find the young boy still alive in the flat they took over, Grindelwald gives him a close inspection before allowing him to be killed. He was checking to make sure the boy wasn't a Muggle-born Wizard! Unlike Voldemort, Grindelwald has shown no bias against Muggle-born or half-blood wizards and witches, all he cares about is whether a person has magic or not. If the boy had magic, he would have been saved and given a home, probably with a follower who desperately wanted a child but couldn't have one otherwise, to cement their loyalty. Or, perhaps he would have given him to a magic-hating family who would turn him into an Obscurial he could use as a back-up....
• Dumbledore's line, that he and Grindelwald were "closer than brothers," makes a lot of sense when one considers his incredibly strained relationship with Aberforth.
• Leta switching Corvus for the quieter baby in the cabin across the hall can seem horrible (and she herself sees it that way). But by her own account Corvus had not stopped crying while they were aboard ship. It is pretty well-known that prolonged sleep deprivation has a negative affect on sanity and also that children need more sleep than adults. This is why nobody blames her when she recounts what happened. She was literally not in her right mind when she did it, and has had to cope with the consequences of a decision that she made while psychologically compromised.
  • At the same time, she remembers disliking her half-brother and being deprived of the affection from her father after he was born simply for being a girl. Nobody that hears the story believes that she subconsciously wanted her brother to die as a child. But she might - and it would explain a lot about her. Suffering trauma at an age where you can't even process it is rough even at the best of times and with no one to love her, it would be easy for her to grow up thinking that Corvus's death was out of a subconscious desire on her part to have him out of the way instead of what it was - a child's mostly harmless, if a tiny bit selfish, decision compounded by a large helping of awful luck.
• Unlike Voldemort, Grindelwald seems largely indifferent to blood purity, instead focusing on the divide between magical and non-magical people. Yet Grindelwald does actively court the purebloods for support. This is actually logical. Purebloods have the fewest familial and social connections with muggles out of any wizarding demographic group and are thus the least likely to have problems with the idea of conquering and enslaving the non-magical population.
• The further establishment of the relationship between Newt and Dumbledore may also explain why he trusts Hagrid so completely, despite how others see him. A young man expelled from Hogwarts who has an affinity for animals. That description could easily be for either of them. It is likely that when Hagrid was expelled Dumbledore remembered Newt and kept him around because he new that Newt and his creatures had still done a lot of good, so perhaps Hagrid had the potential to do the same.
• Overlaps with Fridge Horror, but the revelation that Nagini was once a human shapechanger may account for how, in Deathly Hallows, she was able to pose as Bathilda Bagshot so well. Merely stitching a snake up into the shell of a woman's skin wouldn't allow it to control four human limbs at once - at most, it could slip its tail into one limb and its head into another - yet Nagini manages somehow. Possibly (here's the Horror part) Nagini still has some tiny residue of her capacity to transform between snake and human forms, only the latter form is so difficult to achieve that, by the time she becomes Voldemort's pet, she can only adopt a human form for a matter of minutes ... and only if she has a genuine human husk to shape herself to fit. Those few minutes she spent luring Harry and Hermione into a trap at Godric's Hollow were probably the last time in her life Nagini ever assumed a human form, and it came at a terrible and repulsive cost.
• Grindelwald using Queenies love for Jacob, he shows no actual scorn towards it, 1) he knows a thing or two about forbidden love, he probably had a touch of Empathy at that moment that Queenie latched onto being a Legilimens, and 2) he knows that he needs muggleborn magic users, there aren't enough purebloods left to sustain the magical population, and that muggleborn witches/wizards won't commit to his cause if their husbands/wives are enslaved, he will probably make "exceptions" for those cases in order to produce more magic users.
• Leta and Newt had a strong relationship as children/students, and in some ways Leta knows him and his work well; for example at the French ministry, she recognizes Pickett and realizes that Newt must not be far behind. But then she immediately Stuns the Matagots just before Newt can tell her that that's probably the worst thing they can do. In the scene right afterward, Tina lures the Zouwu back into its case using exactly the same method Newt did. Tina's better suited to Newt now, even though Leta was very well-suited to him when they were younger, and some aspects of that have hung on.

Fridge Horror

• The fact that we learn the origin of Nagini in this film... that she used to be a woman who was cursed to turn into a snake. Given that Transfiguration removes all traces of personality until it's undone, does this mean that Nagini for all intents and purposes was dead, and thus Neville's beheading was a Mercy Kill?
  • For that matter, could it even be considered a Mercy Kill? What if Nagini's original personality was still intact or even worse - returned only to be corrupted by Voldemort's influence?
• We don't even know how Nagini came to serve Voldemort. Did Voldemort promise her to be restored to her human form, meaning she willingly killed and devoured how many people? Did Voldy even know what Nagini was when he made her into one of his horcruxes? How did having a piece of his soul affect her, given how we see the effects of a smaller fragment on Harry?
• Let's not forget one fairly important detail that hasn't been discussed at length in the movies.^* Although the symbol of the Deathly Hallows featuring in the background of promotional posters signals that it's certainly not being ignored. Grindelwald has the Elder Wand. Safe to say, if Newt's mission as stated in the trailers is to track him down and kill him (and for bonus Oh, Crap! points, let's keep in mind that, Newt, though much more experienced, certainly doesn't seem to have the raw talent for fighting Dark wizards possessed and then developed as a necessity by Harry when he fought Voldemort and the Death Eaters), this will present a major snag. Was Dumbledore unaware of this? Or did he knowingly send a favorite pupil of his, and his friends, into a meat grinder hoping they would come out on top somehow? Wouldn't be the only time it's happened.
  • As Newt himself stated, Grindelwald is known to ignore anything beneath him. That already costed him, and in the moment of his greatest triumph, the blood oath necklace that prevented Dumbledore from coming at him. If Grindelwald was too proud of himself to perceive a lowly Niffler as a plausible cause of his later downfall, what could think at the silly fool of a man armed only with optimism and a suitcase full of dangerous beasts?
• The revelation that Credence is in fact Aurelius Dumbledore. Since he was never mentioned in any of the Harry Potter books, it doesn't bode well for him. He will probably end up being "the brother no one talks about" for a good reason.
• Queenie and Jacob could have turned into the next Tom Riddle and Merope Gaunt, if it weren't for the fact that Jacob actually did love Queenie and wasn't refusing to marry her because of that, but because it was illegal in America.
• Grindelwald is not leading a Dark magic movement. This, combined with the scope of his vision, is going to make him significantly more dangerous than Voldemort ever was. Grindelwald himself is a dark wizard, but he isn't just attracting the type of people that simply have an affinity for dark magic. His rally attracted wizards from all classes, heritages, and walks of life. The young woman that the Auror killed at the rally was cast as a redhead simply so she could stand out. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to tell her apart from anyone else. Grindelwald is leading a political revolution that's meant to have a worldwide scope. He attracts followers from all corners of the world, and can even prey on the fears and insecurities of people who aren't Always Chaotic Evil to sway them to his side - no Imperius Curse necessary. Grindelwald's followers can be anywhere, from anywhere, and look like anyone. We don't know (yet) the specifics of how Dumbledore eventually brings him down, but we're quickly starting to figure out why it was such a big deal when he did.
  • Don't forget his motto: "For the Greater Good." Voldemort was Obviously Evil, but Grindelwald is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
  • Related to this, it took Voldemort decades to successfully subvert the British Ministry of Magic, only achieving this goal during the Second Wizarding War. In just one rally Grindelwald has managed to turn wizarding public opinion against the magical governments of the U.S., U.K. and France at the very least! He gains an influx of new followers, and then slaughters a large number of Aurors. So he is going into his war with a major advantage thanks to better strategy.
  • All of this aside, the way that the prisoners in the MACUSA jail were chanting his name as he was being moved for transfer to Europe strongly suggests that Grindelwald would have a large number of wizarding criminals willing to fight for him should he see fit to break them all out.
• Perhaps the scariest thing about Grindelwald is that he rather pointedly mirrors a certain muggle leader who emerged during World War II. It's not his magic that's truly scary, though it's certainly intimidating, it's the way he can manipulate otherwise good and reasonable people. Take a act that's abhorrent and put it in a context where it sounds downright reasonable. All the same skills that brought the infamous Adolf Hitler himself into power with much the same rhetoric just aimed at a slightly different group.
  • Although most fans of the franchise (correctly) draw parallels between said muggle leader and Voldemort, Rowling's also record from years ago as saying that Grindelwald's defeat taking place in 1945 wasn't random, but an intentional choice on her part.
  • Given his incredible charisma, the way he gathers followers and the fact that he plunges all of Europe into open war — Grindelwald is Wizard Hitler. Being more local, tending to attract hateful people as followers and with a more specific racial purity agenda — Voldemort is closer to being a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, .
• As a veteran of World War 1, Jacob seeing the vision of World War 2 is this. Keep in mind that in those days the first world war was often simply called "The Great War" with the hope being there would never be another war on such a scale. Jacob can only watch in disbelief that even greater destruction is fated to come.
  Jacob: Not another war!?
• The existence of half elves in this universe. It's not because they're visually unappealing (eye of the beholder and all that) but because elves in this universe cannot consent. As unappealing as some people may find goblins, they at least have free will and if one gets into a relationship with a human witch/wizard, only the most narrow minded would care. A house elf has to do whatever they're told. It also seems unlikely a female house elf would survive such a pregnancy.
  • Indeed, it's only the fact that Irma looks much older than Corvus, together with his pure-blood bigotry, that averts the implication that she might be yet another of his offspring by various mothers.
• When Queenie says that she and Jacob could be together in the future Grindelwald seeks, she's not really wrong — they could be together, it would just be a very unequal relationship. Somewhere between Master/slave relationships in the pre-Civil War South, and the days when women were seen as chattle and property of their husbands. There might be genuine love there, but it can never escape the taint of coercion. Which leaves us with the question, does Queenie realize that is what she's supporting, and accept it? So many Wizards and Witches seem to see Muggles as inferior — even Mr. Weasley gives an indulgent chuckle and marvels at how clever the Muggles can be, getting by without magic, in a rather condescending way. It would be believable for Queenie to have at least some degree of that attitude, despite being a nice person and in love with Jacob. Grindelwald would probably refer to Jacob as her "pet" or similar.
• What do you think the rest of the Dumbledore family's reactions were when they believed they'd lost a baby family member, and possibly his mother too?
  • The screenplay confirms the woman travelling with the baby was his aunt. Probably no less horrifying for the family, though.
• The little boy in the Paris flat. Young children often get told Fairy Tales about Wicked Witches. That little boy had some literally come into his room and murder him!
  • Not helped by the shot being similar to one of the early flashbacks showing the moment of Voldemort trying to kill Harry.
• Many familiar names appear in the film/script: Carrow, Rosier, Lestrange as Grindelwald's followers, probably the (great) grandparents of Voldemort's Death Eaters. As with the Barebones' hatred of magic, passed down through the generations, after seeing and experiencing World Wars I and II, and being indoctrinated by Grindelwald, they would have passed down their hatred of Muggles. No wonder so many of their descendants followed Voldemort.
• One other reason Queenie is so quick to join with Grindelwald, he showed them a vision of World War 2, what is Queenie's surname? Goldstein
• The circus foreman seems to be awfully possessive of Nagini; he keeps her in a caged room, which he has access to, is clearly threatened by her closeness with Credence, and he invades her personal space quite easily (and to her apparent discomfort). Perhaps Nagini's situation in the circus is even worse than it seems.