10 "Fantastic" Details You Probably Missed

I already did a post about 7 "Fantastic" Things I Can't Stop Thinking About, and I thought that would be good enough for my blog. But alas, I have caught on to more details that I had missed the first time I saw the movie. And I needed to get them out of my system. Some are very small, but some carry great significance. And by the way, don't forget to enter my blog birthday/Christmas giveaway. One of the prizes is Newt's scarf, so if you didn't win it the first time, you have another chance. I'm picking the winners in two days. ^_^

1. The Second Salemers' Banner

I feel stupid I didn't really realize it earlier, but the Second Salemers' banner. I knew it had to do with the Salem Trials, so I understood all the fire. The Salem Witches, as we know, were burned. But I just thought the other thing was wood being broken for the fire. But it's not. It's the snapping of a wand.   -_- Why I didn't get this earlier is beyond me, but glad I finally figured it out. And one of my friends who is an even bigger Harry Potter fan than I am, didn't pick up on it either, so I'm assuming many others didn't. And do you see the magic coming out of the wand? Yeah.

2. The Grindelwald Poster

When the main characters are bartering with Gnarlack, the goblin, when the camera shows the wanted posters on the wall, there is one shot with a wanted poster of Grindelwald, but his face has been scratched out (would have been mighty weird to randomly see Johnny Depp on a Wizarding Poster.) It's show when the MACUSA come, and the poster is on the right side of the screen.

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Why Rowling Rocked the Briefcase Mix-up and How You can Rock Your Own Tired Tropes

Note: Don't forget to enter my Christmas/Blog Birthday giveaway, where you can win Newt's Hufflepuff scarf, a Sherlock mug, or the Emotion Thesaurus. 

If you saw Fantastic Beasts and you were like me and probably 95% of the audience, you knew the moment you saw Jacob's briefcase that it was going to be mixed up with Newt's. Similar things have happened in dozens if not hundreds of stories--usually in film and television. It's a trope, one used so many times in such identical ways, it feels cliche.

But as I mentioned in my post Using Cliches in Your Writing: Why, When, and How, there are three ways to get away with pulling off a cliche: personalize it, put a fresh spin on it, or use it to draw your audience into a surprise.

Another way that overlaps with these is to change the temporal (meaning timing) of the trope. Rowling may have used this trope, but she understood she was using it, and decided to take advantage of that to tease her audience. (She makes a point to do that every once in a while, if you haven't noticed.) So she has Jacob run into Newt, both dropping their suitcases. This is the traditionally prime moment to have the whole mix-up happen. This is where it happens in almost all films and television shows. Rowling knows this. So she teased us with it.

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These are a few of my favorite things . . . (Giveaway)

**Now Closed**

This season is a special time of year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fantastic Beasts, Sherlock--er, I mean, New Years . . . blog birthdays.

Yes, blog birthdays! Exactly four years ago, I started my blog. And you know what this all means?

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Tips on Writing Your Own Fantastic Beasts

Give it relateable behaviors. (bonus: that doesn't mean making it a dog)

Have you guys ever noticed how many creatures are actually dogs in disguises? A dog in an alien body, a dog in a bug body, a dog in a dragon body, a dog in an alien body (because that happens so much). Everything is a dog!

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