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Leta Lestrange deserved better. And I would have meant only that in terms of his apparent fate at the end of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald. Great spoilers for the upcoming Grindelwald crimes. When she was introduced by Zoe Kravitz in the first movie, I fell in love with her idea, hoping that Leta Lestrange Fantastic beasts the arc of character would not end in a simple footnote in the love story of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston). But it turns out that I should have had bigger worries. Dying at the end of the second film is one thing – one thing that can still be defeated in the next three movies – but her bow leading to this death is so shocking that I would never have wanted her to be one. character at all? It's something I can not look beyond.
In the film, Leta finally appears as more than a photograph in Newt's case when he goes to the British Department of Magic earlier in the film. She works alongside her brother Theseus (Callum Turner), with whom she is engaged. The first film suggests that Leta is a tragic and complicated character; here it is revealed that she is defined by a past of neglect, pain and guilt for something she has been doing for a long time. Her background is presented to the public in a huge information dump near the end of the movie, shortly after which she sacrifices herself – but not before declaring "I love you" to one of the Scamanders, or both. One could certainly speak of a speech about the treatment of the main female characters in Fantastic beasts so far (for now, let's be true, only Tina is doing well). But the problem with Leta is a problem of intersectional feminism and, more specifically, lack of feminism. J.K. Rowling's scenario does not take into account what Leta is a black woman, and not just a woman, and so the problems she faces in her bow appear as particularly problematic.
Pictures of Warner Bros.
Leta's half-brother, Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), reveals that his father, Corvus Lestrange Sr. (Keith Chanter), has coveted his Senegalese mother, Laurena (Isaura Barbé-Brown), and that Imperius has abandoned her to leave her family and sleep with him. union or unions that would eventually produce Leta. This is not the first time the wizarding world has introduced such a thing: Voldemort was born of such a mate without love after his mother drugged his father with a love potion; Ron fell prey to a love potion intended for Harry, sent by young admirer Romilda Vane. and Ron recommends his son, Albus, to prepare one to help him get rid of him, decades later, Cursed child. The Imperius Curse replaces the love potion, presumably to give Corvus Sr. a more perverse look than your average teenager by throwing an unforgivable curse. But a white man magically taking control of a black woman and using it in part to rape her is an uncomfortable slavery narrative, which the film uses to later incarnate Leta as a "tragic mulatto."
As Clay Cane of The Root explains in "Halle Berry and the Resurgence of the Tragic Mulatto," the stereotype was a feature film invented by nineteenth-century American literature and producing quite similar emotional rhythms:
"Disturbed characters have stumbled into life in a turmoil marked by racial torture. Were they black? Were they white? Nobody accepted them. They were eternal victims, because mom and dad did not stick to themselves. Although these characters have lived tragic lives, they have at the same time been touted as an 'exotic' mix and, in a way, revered as being better than a mere old black. "
The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University also points out that, in many accounts, "the tragic mulatto found peace only in death" after a narrative life that attempted to find acceptance and acceptance. Love of those who despised it in race-based society. Leta's fight Crimes of Grindelwald is not based on race, but the rhythms of his bow are so numerous that they correspond to the harmful stereotype of the "tragic mulatto" who has discouraged me from this ignorance of the history of blacks in the representation of Leta.
And what makes the problem even worse is that the film does not understand what it's playing. Leta's words and narrative of history suggest that her life, neglect, and perhaps even slavery to her mother is due to the lack of respect of the Lestrange family for women, not their race. "My father had a very strange family tree. He only recorded the men. The women in my family have been registered as flowers. Pretty. Separate yourself, "she told Newt. The fact that, visually, we watch a white man kidnap and rape a black woman, then negligently neglect her black girl in favor of her white son, followed by that powerful black girl turned auror, reducing herself to a sacrifice her white suitors who can escape do not seem to have troubled the people involved in this movie.
Pictures of Warner Bros.
Or maybe yes. After all, in a November 2018 interview with The Los Angeles TimesKravitz said the Leta race was an intentional choice. "It's happening in the 1920s, so how was it to be a person of color in this world at that time? She was perhaps one of the only children of color at Hogwarts at that time, "she said. "It is rejected and whether we talk about it or not, I associate it of course partly with what it looks like. I think they auditioned mostly women of color for this role. I know it was an important thing for Jo. She was very conscious of what she was doing. This last point is questionable, as the history of Rowling's magic in the United States is accused of showing a simplistic and feminist approach to American history while appropriating Native American culture. At least, Rowling seems just committed to representative people of color in his new wizarding world franchise without considering that well the performance is more than just a casting. If she did, she would not have written Leta as she did.
That's why I wish she did not write it at all. The mockery of Leta's complicated story with Newt in the first film was enough to make me love. I wrote in 2017,
"All I want in the movies, is to see another black woman heroic, more competent than Seraphina Picquery before her, who separates better with the man whose heart she has clearly broken … Give -a chance to change the world, the way she changed mine. "
Although I'm glad that Leta did not prove to be diabolical, unlike everyone else, including Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), to his detriment, I would have thought so, but I would have liked not to have set my criteria for personality as low. Because Leta deserved better of me, and she certainly deserved better from this movie.
I do not think her story goes in these movies, whether she survived the fire or not. After all, reading in the spirit of Newt, Queenie (Alison Sudol) describes Leta as a "taker" when a man like Newt needs a "donor" – and we see Leta doing very little, but give in the second movie until she has nothing left to do. give but his own life. But after seeing his story in this movie, I am completed. I'm done with the part of my childhood that will always want to see me represented in the Harry Potter films, deliberately and not, as in the case of Black Hermione, as an afterthought. I am now asked to be content with characters such as the incompetent Madam President, Seraphina Picquery (Carmen Ejogo), and abused Leta Lestrange, neither of whom has been allowed to leave their identity as black women in a world dominated by Whites cross their identity as women. in a world dominated by men to create a fully realized character. I've finished consuming new additions to the wizarding world that have elevated and influenced me personally and creatively, when these additions do me little harm but hurt me in the end, all the more so that Rowling continues to be a controversial figure who refuses to acknowledge or learn from criticism. I have just finished.
For me, the tragedy of Leta Lestrange's character is not that she could not be accepted into her family because she was a woman and in her society because she was a Lestrange. The tragedy is that she has taught me that I should have been happy that her creator never tried to represent me with a black woman as a main character. It only hurts both when Rowling tries.
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