Fantastic Beasts 2s Professor McGonagall Plot Hole Cant Be Fixed

Fantastic Beasts 2’s Professor McGonagall Plot Hole Can’t Be Fixed

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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald introduces a young Minerva McGonagall… before she was born. It’s a problem that Harry Potter can’t fix.

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Fantastic Beasts 2s Professor McGonagall Plot Hole Cant Be Fixed

WARNING: Spoilers for Fantastic Beasts 2.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald’s Professor McGonagall plot hole can’t be fixed. From the Elder Wand (which no longer follows the rules of allegiance established) to the use of Polyjuice Potion (which seemingly lasts different amounts of time depending on how much you drink), Fantastic Beasts 2 is playing it fast and loose with the rules of the Wizarding World. But there’s one that’s frustrating Harry Potter fans more than any other – because it’s just so impossible to explain away.

That is the inclusion of a young Minerva McGonagall in Fantstic Beasts 2, who is teaching at Hogwarts in 1927 (and a flashback to the 1910s) when Dumbledore was teaching Defense Against The Dark Arts as a young man. McGonagall appears in only a couple of scenes, herding a group of Hogwarts students around and (presumably) already a Professor at the school. On the surface, this is a nice way to include a beloved character from the original franchise (and this film is all about connecting characters to those we already know), but there’s a huge Harry Potter timeline problem: in 1927, Minerva McGonagall hadn’t even been born.

Related: Fantastic Beasts 2’s Biggest Harry Potter Retcons (And Plot Holes)

In the original Harry Potter films, Professor McGonagall is significantly younger than Dumbledore, at least a couple of decades his junior. However, even if fans wanted to believe that perhaps the strain of being one of the world’s greatest wizards simply aged Dumbledore horribly, J.K. Rowling’s canon has made that impossible.

That Can’t Be Professor McGonagall In Fantastic Beasts 2

Fantastic Beasts 2s Professor McGonagall Plot Hole Cant Be Fixed

In her original Pottermore biography, McGonagall’s date of birth was October 4, 1935, eight years after the events of Fantastic Beasts 2. That entry was removed when Pottermore was revamped a few years ago, but the current entry still states that McGonagall was a student under Dumbledore (“under the guidance of her inspirational Transfiguration teacher, Albus Dumbledore, she had managed to become an Animagus”).

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also puts a date on McGonagall’s career as a Hogwarts teacher; she is asked by Dolores Umbridge how long she had been teaching at the school, and replies ‘ thirty-nine years this December’. Given that the book is set in the mid-nineties, that would place her starting her career in the mid-fifties.

So how, exactly, is it possible that Professor McGonagall was running around Hogwarts telling off students in the early 20th century, if she was born in 1935 and started teaching there in the 1950s?

Related: Fantastic Beasts 2 IMPROVED Harry Potter Canon

There Is No Explanation For Professor McGonagall In Fantastic Beasts 2

Unfortunately, it’s simply not. Time travel does exist in the Harry Potter universe, of course, thanks to the Time-Turners… but these do not allow for people to wander back in time and take up teaching posts.

Another possibility is that this McGonagall isn’t Minerva at all – but a relative of hers. This would go a long way to explaining the presence of a McGonagall nearly a decade before Minerva’s birth, but that’s not what is going on here. The published screenplay confirms that this is, indeed, Minerva herself. On top of that, Minerva’s father (who gave her the McGonagall name) was a Muggle – so it’s not as though there is a large wizarding family with the same name. Her mother’s name (confirmed by Pottermore) was also Isobel, so this isn’t a Gilmore Girls style situation where mother and daughter could be confused. This is a retcon of Professor McGonagall’s age, plain and simple.

Her’s is not the only age that is twisted, either. As fans have pointed out, Dumbledore is meant to be in his 80s at the time of Fantastic Beasts, having been 150 at the time of his death – yet Jude Law is a stunningly attractive young Dumbledore (in a suit, which means that wizards also forgot how to wear muggle clothing somewhere between the 20s and the 90s, but that’s a whole other plot point). The simple, and disappointing, answer is that this isn’t a carefully chosen plot twist, journey through time, or relative of Professor McGonagall’s. Instead, it is an attempt to shoehorn a fan-favorite character into a few scenes in order to pander to fans of the original franchise. This is a retcon of Professor McGonagall, plain and simple.

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Of course, what Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald forgot is that Harry Potter fans are devoted to the details, and this casual disregard for the lore of the Wizarding World is hardly going to endear them to the new franchise. Instead, we’re left wanting to obliviate these particular scenes from our collective memories. Hopefully Fantastic Beasts 3 sheds some light on the matter.

Next: Fixing Fantastic Beasts With Just 4 Changes

Rose Graceling-Moore has been writing about film, TV and comics since 2013, when she began writing for a local print magazine in Vancouver, BC. Since then, Rose has written for Horror Honeys, Moviepilot and Quirkbooks as well as Screenrant, increasingly focusing on comic books and live-action comic adaptations, as well as diversity and representation on screen. Rose also co-hosted the DC Movies Podcast, and has guested on other nerd and entertainment podcasts over the past five years. Rose’s love of comics began all the way back in the early ‘90s, when she discovered the X-Men while living in Africa (where there wasn’t a whole lot to do but read!), and since then has had an on-again, off-again love affair with not just Marvel, but DC and indie comics as well. You can follow her on Twitter: RoseMooreWrites for tweets about comics, movies, and more.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/fantastic-beasts-mcgonagall-plot-hole-solution/

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