Saturday, 10 October 2026
A separate shelf
The companion bestiary and the three films share a title and then do different work. This shelf says which is which. Film plot is labeled film. A clash with the seven novels is labeled contested. Nothing here is a studio synopsis.
In the 1920s of this fiction, wizard governments still pretend the statute holds. MACUSA, the American congress, polices a city that has already seen too much. The British ministry is the body the school novels will later sit under. The films are interested in the years when Grindelwald is gathering a crowd and Dumbledore will not yet meet him in the open.
Book canon The seven novels know Grindelwald as Dumbledore’s old friend and a defeated prisoner. They know a textbook with this title as a school book. They do not narrate New York, an obscurus, or a qilin election.
Film canon The pictures add a case of beasts, a no-maj baker, and a political serial. Those are the films. Enjoy them as films.
Field notes live in the encyclopedia. These are the ones this shelf leans on.
Film canon
A magizoologist who trusts animals more than committees.
Newt is the films’ way into the bestiary. He travels with a case, apologizes to creatures, and is awkward with people until the people are in danger. The companion book uses his name as the author of a school textbook. The films turn that byline into a man who would rather rehabilitate a beast than attend a rally. Film canon, built on a book that was mostly a joke textbook.
Film canon
An American auror demoted for caring about the wrong case.
Tina is MACUSA’s conscience with a badge she keeps losing. She arrests Newt, then helps him, then becomes the person in the serial who still believes a statute can be enforced without cruelty. That arc is the films’. The school novels do not contain her.
Film canon
A legilimens who can hear the room, and who wants a life the statute forbids.
Queenie reads minds the way other people read faces. Her love for Jacob, a man without magic, is illegal in her country. The films follow that pressure until she walks toward Grindelwald and, later, walks back. The departure is a second-film turn. The return is a third-film turn. Both are film story.
Film canon
A baker with no magic who becomes the serial’s ordinary witness.
Jacob wants a shop and a life. He gets a suitcase, a love story, and a memory the congress tries to take. The films use him as the audience: wonder, then fear, then a refusal to be edited. He is not in the seven novels. He is the picture’s best argument that the statute has a cost.
Contested
A wizard revolutionary the novels mention and the films put on a stage.
In the school books Grindelwald is a shadow over Dumbledore’s youth: a friend, a duel, a defeat, a prison. The films give him speeches, followers, and a plot to win an election. Those scenes are film canon. Where a film’s detail about his war argues with a memory in the last school book, this journal calls the clash contested instead of picking a studio cut as the novel.
Film canon
Newt’s old friend, carrying a childhood the second film treats as fate.
Leta is a school memory that becomes a Paris tragedy. The second film gives her a brother, a mistake on a ship, and a last choice in a rally. That life is film story. The Lestrange name echoes a family the school books use for a vault and a curse. Sharing a surname is not the same plot.
Dumbledore’s school-years portrait is on his character page. The films use a younger man. Do not paste one onto the other.
A magizoologist, a case that will not stay closed, and a city that is not supposed to see any of it.
A rally, a family argument, and a bloodline the films kept rewriting.
A pact, a qilin, and a vote that was never going to be clean.
Bestiary and novels. The companion Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a slim bestiary: short creature entries, a schoolboy’s doodles in the margins of some editions, and jokes. It does not tell the New York story.
Films. The films borrow the title and the author, then tell a thriller about Grindelwald, an obscurus, and an election. Creatures become set pieces inside that thriller.
Bestiary and novels. The seven novels do not contain Credence. They do contain a Dumbledore family with its own graves and its own secrets, told in the last book.
Films. The second film offers one bloodline. The third film replaces it. The serial corrected itself in public.
Bestiary and novels. The novels show a youthful friendship, a disastrous ideology, a duel, and a prison. A memory in a later book is the closest the text comes to the fight.
Films. The films stage the years between, add a pact that prevents a duel, and give Grindelwald a political campaign the books never run.