Latest writing:
When the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was released in November 2016, I spent the next month writing essays about it: the questions raised, the theories going forward, and commentary on the film in general.
The Mystery of Leta Lestrange discusses who Leta could be, and what her relationship with Newt was and will be. Crackpot theories abound!
The Big Bads: Grindelwald vs. Voldemort contrasts the chief antagonists of the wizarding world, both in terms of their ideology and in how they operate.
The Magizoology of Fantastic Beasts talks about the magical creatures in the film - which ones are there, what that tells us about Newt's past and the creatures' future.
The 7 Biggest Problems of Fantastic Beasts enumerates the issues I had with the film - which, though solid, definitely left room for improvement.
7 Things to Ponder About Grindelwald dives into everything we know and don't know about Grindelwald from the first movie - and if we're being honest, there are more questions than answers at the moment.
Some months later, I continued theorizing about the film series.
Where Newt Got His Memory-Wiping Idea delves deep into the Potter apocrypha to find a clue Jo may have dropped on Pottermore about what happened in the climax of the movie. Written July 2017.
Hippolytus... Lestrange? builds on the theories in "The Mystery of Leta Lestrange" by furthering John Granger's idea of the myth of Theseus providing "scaffolding" for the new film series. It lays out some major events that I believe will come to pass in the rest of the films. Written October 2017.
Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Repeating the Potter Series, written in November 2017 just as information began coming out about the second FB movie, lays out some concerns about the direction the new series is taking.
Fantastic Beasts! Here We Go Again, written in August 2018, lays out my case for why Crimes of Grindelwald will mirror the Mamma Mia! movies and be filled with ABBA music.
Unfortunately, Crimes of Grindelwald turned out to be an abomination the likes of which we had never seen in the Potter fandom. Immediately upon seeing it in November 2018, I began furiously writing, churning out four articles for MuggleNet in under a week. These are the first two; the latter are more appropriately found under Fandom.
The Real “Crimes of Grindelwald” Is the Movie is my overall review of the film.
It Is No Longer Our Choices: The Mediocrity of “Crimes of Grindelwald” zeroes in on my biggest problem: the film is so caught up in prophecies and genealogies and magical doodads, it completely loses the most important theme of the Potterverse.
Years later, when Secrets of Dumbledore was released in 2022, it was to an audience that had clearly given up on it. I went to see it opening night, was wholly unimpressed, and wrote up my review: The Real Secret Is… No One Cares.