Masculinity in Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

In the movie Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, the traditional views on gender roles are broken by almost all main characters. Let's focus first on the main character: Newt Scamander, a Hufflepuff wizard from England. There is a big difference between him and Harry Potter, the hero in the earlier books by J.K. Rowling, and subsequent films, about the wizarding world. Part of this difference can be explained by age, era or surroundings, but part of it is because of a shift in how a male hero behaves. Part of the plot is that Newt comes to New York with a case full of magical creatures, one of which he is intending to set free in its homeland. Through a series of events (part of which has to do with the fact that our hero is rather clumsy) some of them escape, and Newt and his newfound wizard and no-maj (non-wizard) friends set upon a quest to find them back. The way that Newt is portrayed is not traditionally masculine. First of all, he is a caretaker; he tears up when a young creature hatches out of its egg, he is shown to be very gentle with his creatures, and when his beasts are upset, he says 'Don't worry, Mum's here', affirming that the caretaking role is coded to be feminine. When his mind gets read, he reacts with a polite request to stop, rather than lashing out. And in the interrogation scene he looks away almost the entire time: he does not display anger, the usual reaction men are shown to have when they are put in a vulnerable situation. Secondly, while he has a (beginning of) a romance with one of the female characters, he doesn't 'conquer' her. His heroics have nothing to do with wanting to win her love, and she is not there to be his damsel in distress or sidekick; she is in distress sometimes and then he saves her, but the opposite is also true. She is a rounded character with her own motivations and reasoning. A third main character, the baker Jacob Kowalski, is also not put in a traditionally male heroic role. He is not very intelligent, he is not very suave, and his heroics mainly come from his heart. That is the overarching theme of this movie: the heroes are heroes because they care. They appeal to emotion when they try to save the creatures, not only to reason. Their friendship makes them work together and eventually save the day. Two more things are worth mentioning: the leader of the Magical Congress of the United States (MACUSA) is a black woman, who wears traditional clothing and is very much respected throughout the movie. She is depicted as a fair leader who makes rational decisions; she does not follow the myth about black women as being overemotional. The only sad thing about the movie, which was already decided in the source text, is that the villain, Grindelwald, who emotionally abuses a receptive young man in a way that could be read as seductive, is coded as queer. This perpetuates the myth of the evil homosexual, and I really wish this would not be the case.