#that stupid trope where inhuman creatures have a really long name -- we could do that too lol | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

braverytaught · 5 years

Text

anyway i promised i’d talk about my reaction to cog and like, idk who cares, but i’m here on my soapbox anyway

obviously don’t fuckin read any farther if u haven’t seen it, i’m going in hard with the spoilers

i’ve talked about the mcg cameo and we’re ignoring that

they did dumbledore so fuckin dirty

they did queenie so fuckin dirty

the whole plot was a confusing and kind of pointless-in-and-of-itself setup for the next three movies, which i understand is necessary in some sense for a very long story like this, but if you can’t make a movie’s plot enjoyable and understandable as its own being, then you haven’t done a good job. cog’s primary function cannot be to lay the groundwork for movies that haven’t come out yet; it has to stand on its own, and i’m not sure it does

grindelwald’s kind of a joke

if you’re going to make nagini a character (and we all know the issues with that in the first place), you could at least bother to give her a personality

they did leta dirty too, she deserved more than a one-movie character arc

i don’t think tina’s characterization was badly done, but i do think she deserved more time, and they did a really bad job of showing the status of tina and newt’s relationship in the intervening nine months imo

i don’t think credence joining grindelwald is a bad story choice, but i do think it was handled incorrectly. they should have played into the “i’m being persecuted and i feel alone and scared and he may have used me but so has everyone else in my life and he seems to care about me so i’m going to go with him because i think he can keep me safe” aspect instead of reducing it to “he can tell me my real name”

on the bright side i continue to adore newt and his creatures, and i think eddie redmayne’s acting is fucking fantastic

credence being dumbledore’s secret long-lost much-younger brother is about as farcical as voldemort having a secret daughter with bellatrix lestrange

more under the cut. i’m about to go into highkey analysis mode.

queenie

yeah i’m fucking mad about this. the closest i came to crying in the entire movie was because i was so upset about what they did to her character. not bc it moved me but bc it pissed me off. queenie goldstein is smart, capable, and empathetic. i was so happy to see her again -- for about five seconds, until we found out she’s enchanted jacob so she can marry him without his consent? what the fuck? and then she spends the rest of the movie with no other motivation than to be with a man? she’s apparently so stupid and blind that she would join grindelwald, genuinely thinking grindelwald’s going to create a world where muggles are allowed to marry witches no problem? grindelwald’s manipulative tactics are blindingly obvious, and yet the woman who has spent her life learning how to read people and manipulate them in turn for her own protection can’t see that she’s being played?

fuck that. that’s not the queenie goldstein i know. and i’m not cool with her being turned into the “woman who makes bad, stupid, blind choices out of her desire to be with a man, because that’s all women really want, i guess” trope.

the only way i can see her joining grindelwald is if she followed credence, to protect him, and was a double agent from the start.

grindelwald

not even getting into johnny depp as a person, he’s clearly the wrong person for this part. it would’ve been better to keep the percival graves persona going than to turn grindelwald into a bleached rat who has apparently never seen the light of day. colin farrell was the perfect example of a seductive villain. grindelwald as graves was confident, persuasive, compelling even after you realized he was the bad guy.

grindelwald should have stayed that way even after he showed his true self or whatever. they kept telling us that he was seductive, that he couldn’t even be trusted with a tongue or he’d turn every guard to his side, and yet? i saw nothing of the sort? johnny depp’s grindelwald, both his acting and the character design, screams “i’m the big villain and you should hate me because i’m sleazy and creepy.” but that’s not how you gain followers. tom riddle was charming and handsome and persuasive; it was only after he gained power that he slowly became the inhuman creature we think of as voldemort, and that was after everyone was too scared of him to defect. grindelwald should have been smooth, should have been charming, should have showed a real ability to connect with the people he wanted to convert. and, you know what? he should have been handsome. he should have stayed jamie campbell bower tbfh. people follow a pretty face.

the point is he seemed like a caricature, an obvious villain. not somebody i can believe could genuinely win so many people over to his cause. you can’t just tell me he’s seductive and then make me watch pasty johnny depp make vague, empty speeches the whole time. not good enough.

dumbledore

i mean, i don’t have a problem with jude law. i think he did a pretty good job. so there’s that going for him.

too bad they were off with.....pretty much everything else.

i’ll stick with my two biggest complaints, i guess. the first is that it makes no sense for dumbledore to be out here talking to anyone who asks about his sister and his relationship with grindelwald. the whole thing in dh was that nobody knew he’d ever been affiliated with grindelwald -- his oldest friends refused to believe it. it happened over the course of one summer, they kept their plans secret, and it ended in disaster. and we know dumbledore never talked about that shit, not till he fuckin died. so why would some ministry dude be able to waltz in and say, yeah, we know u and grindelwald were close as brothers, and why would dumbledore respond that they were closer?? why would he ever disclose that??? that was secret fuckin information my dudes

same with ariana. i get the spin on empathy, but i don’t see him just casually bringing up his sister to leta. maybe i’m wrong on this one, idfk, maybe he would use ariana as an example to relate to a hurting student -- but i have a hard time imagining him bringing it up like that. it’s his shame. seems to me like another one of those things he’d avoid mentioning unless he absolutely had to.

and then. then there’s the whole fuckin grindelwald relationship thing in the first place.

i get that they’re trying to correct themselves. “you calling dumbledore gay without making any real references to it in canon does not count as representation,” we said, so now they’re making it real clear. but, really? really? you think dumbledore would look into the mirror of erised and see the current grindelwald? you think grindelwald is the deepest and greatest desire of his heart, and not, idk, his family, whole and unharmed? you think his love for grindelwald defines him more than any of his other motivations? no. bullshit.

as far as i can tell, they made dumbledore’s gayness central to his character in this story -- which is just as bad as not acknowledging it at all. because his relationship with grindelwald doesn’t define him, it certainly isn’t more important to him than his grief for his family, and he has plenty of motivation and character that doesn’t stem directly from his encounter with grindelwald, so (as tempting as it might be for mediocre storytellers) to spin his entire characterization in the fantastic beasts arc around the fact that he was gay for grindelwald when he was 17 is not only a disservice to his character, it’s also just shallow writing.

#cog spoilers //#there's more i could say but i mainly wanted to talk about queenie / grindelwald / dumbledore #so there we go #that's my piece #i'm gonna stop myself from rambling more in the tags #also most of this is negative but let me say that there /were/ things i enjoyed about the movie #there totally were #but it's more fun to analyze where i think they went wrong #and hoo boy were there plenty of places they went wrong #; wandless ( ooc. )

14 notes · View notes