Diversify Yourself: Fantastic Beasts is a wonderful addition to wizarding world

Serena Bettis • December 17, 2016

J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, both the original screenplay and the movie, captures a fantastical story that launches you back into the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter. Full of many new, adorable magical creatures and a mysterious dark force that haunts the streets of New York, Fantastic Beasts is fun and fast-paced, with plenty of humor and all the little nuances that make people fall in love with Rowling’s imagined world. Whether you see the movie, read the screenplay, or both, Fantastic Beasts is not something any Harry Potter fan will want to miss out on.

While I did not enjoy reading the screenplay very much, I absolutely love this story, and I think the movie is wonderfully put together. I read the screenplay shortly after I saw the movie, so when I read it I already knew exactly what would happen when, and I simply pictured the scenes from the movie over again. I usually enjoy books more than the movie in adaptations, because you can get inside the character’s head and typically find more details, emotions, and overall quality. That’s not the case with a screenplay, because even though it describes the scene and what the characters are supposed to do, you don’t get the body language, the expressions, or the true wonder of magic that the movie provides. In my opinion (and I never thought I would say this), seeing the movie is much more worthwhile than reading the screenplay, and there is no need to do both.

Fantastic Beasts is a whirlwind of an adventure, though I wished it had more connections to the Harry Potter world that we know in the main series. The story takes you back to New York City in the 1920s, following Newt Scamander and his adventures with magical creatures. Newt is best known in the Harry Potter series for writing a textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, that the students study at Hogwarts. There were only about three other names mentioned that you know about prior to Fantastic Beasts, and even though it is set in a drastically different time, I think it would have been more fun and nerd-out-able if there had been more of a connection between the generations of wizards we know and love and the ones we are introduced to (like Cassandra Clare’s connections between her two series, The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices). You do, however, learn a good deal about wizarding history, and it’s very fun to see how events at this time relate to real-world history, with many muggles (or “no-majs” as they’re apparently called in America) afraid of potential witches, and everyone talking about how they fought in World War I.

Some of my favorite parts of the movie are all the little aspects of it, the small, humorous comments and goofy, awkward actions the characters make. I love all the details and intricacies of the set design that manage to make the movie appropriate to the period but also relatable to the wizarding world and the customs and inventions that they have. I enjoyed Fantastic Beasts so much that I really, really hope Rowling will give fans even more Harry Potter spinoffs in the future, whether that’s more adventures with Newt, other back stories, some set in the future, or the marauders era stories we’ve all been waiting for.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.