Hi there! I'm happy to talk about Fantastic Beasts! There's a lot of cool stuff in there :)
I hadn't even thought of Percival Graves/Tina Goldstein until I saw it mentioned in that post, but I am very much here for it!
I mainly prefer to talk about the stuff I liked rather than the stuff i didn't, but to address my thoughts in this post re: the world building- you made some really good points, and so have a lot of people I've talked to since I saw the movie, and if I could make this post again I would say less 'the wizard/muggle relations in the movie don't make sense' and more 'I wish the movie had spent more time making the wizard/muggle relations make sense.' I think that's the crux of it.
For instance, it's totally reasonable to assume as you say that a lot of wizards might not have been able to do the wandless magic required to save themselves during the witch trials. Someone else pointed out to me that they might have forgotten how to do said spells in the moment, or that wizards might even have actually been just as (or even more) worried about wrongly accused muggles dying than about their own kind. I buy that, but the movie never showed it to me. Likewise, wizards being more concerned about secrecy in the 1920s than in the modern-ish era works- but since it directly goes against the original books, it just needed a stronger foundation to really work for me.
At the end of the day, the things I wanted with Fantastic Beasts were cool new characters and some cute magical creature shenanigans, and that was absolutely what I got. And I definitely enjoyed the period setting- it's just that this particular part of the backdrop felt unearned to me, and since it was so important to the story on an emotional level, particularly with Jacob (Jakob?) near the end, I wish they had spent more time earning it.
Again, it's not that you don't make good points- I just wish the movie had made them, you know?
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I hadn't even thought of Percival Graves/Tina Goldstein until I saw it mentioned in that post, but I am very much here for it!
I mainly prefer to talk about the stuff I liked rather than the stuff i didn't, but to address my thoughts in this post re: the world building- you made some really good points, and so have a lot of people I've talked to since I saw the movie, and if I could make this post again I would say less 'the wizard/muggle relations in the movie don't make sense' and more 'I wish the movie had spent more time making the wizard/muggle relations make sense.' I think that's the crux of it.
For instance, it's totally reasonable to assume as you say that a lot of wizards might not have been able to do the wandless magic required to save themselves during the witch trials. Someone else pointed out to me that they might have forgotten how to do said spells in the moment, or that wizards might even have actually been just as (or even more) worried about wrongly accused muggles dying than about their own kind. I buy that, but the movie never showed it to me. Likewise, wizards being more concerned about secrecy in the 1920s than in the modern-ish era works- but since it directly goes against the original books, it just needed a stronger foundation to really work for me.
At the end of the day, the things I wanted with Fantastic Beasts were cool new characters and some cute magical creature shenanigans, and that was absolutely what I got. And I definitely enjoyed the period setting- it's just that this particular part of the backdrop felt unearned to me, and since it was so important to the story on an emotional level, particularly with Jacob (Jakob?) near the end, I wish they had spent more time earning it.
Again, it's not that you don't make good points- I just wish the movie had made them, you know?