Thank you, minervas_eule, for taking the trouble to post this! Please feel free to send my email address to your daughter for further correspondence; Minerva's Owl you may be, but that doesn't mean you have to go on delivering letters.
(ETA: I have set this post to public and for the time being allowed anonymous comments, so you can send your daughter the link if she wants to comment directly.)
My dear (I won't use your real name in this space, so please allow me to call you this),
Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write all this and start up such a fascinating debate.
Your review had to be posted in four comments, and your mother carefully separated them by theme, so I'll answer in separate sections, too.
First of all, thank you for pointing out the US laws on interracial marriages and their dates. I was clearly insufficiently aware of this, and your point is an excellent one.
Then there is the Pottermore backstory, and I'll use this comment to go into my ideas on that aspect.
Now, you did mention that as an aspiring writer and a teacher of literature you find the comment on bad writing offensive. My dear, both as a teacher and as an author you will have to be able to look critically at texts, even if they are texts that are very dear to your heart as a reader or that you wrote yourself.
What JKR does here is a mistake ever writer has made - I have often made it myself and so will you when you write. When one writes fiction, one has one's own head-canon of people's backstories and the world you created for them.
And occasionally, one forgets that readers cannot look into your head and see that backstory.
Which is why ever writer needs a good beta-writer who will point this out. At which point my first response is usually, 'but what I write makes perfect sense because [insert headcanon information]. And the second response should be: true, my readers had no way of knowing this. I must find a way of informing them.
Someone should have pointed out to JKR that, while she may expect the movie-going audience to be familiar with the books and/or the movies (I think it unlikely that large groups of people who never took any interest in the Potterverse will now flock to Fantastic Beasts), she must not expect complete familiarity with Pottermore.
No, she doesn't have to explain who Grindelwald is, and yes, she may refer to Dumbledore the teacher or to Letta Lestrange (very nice touch, I thought), because all this is in the books/movies. Also, it's fun for the true Potterhead to pick up the references, but it doesn't affect one's understanding of the story to miss them.
But she should have explained vital points of the Pottermore backstory.
She could have done this easily, for Newt Scamander is the perfect vehicle for this information.
"Don't you know what happened here? Didn't you learn about the Salem Trials at school?" Tina might well ask this foreign young man.
And if Newt would say that History of Magic wasn't really his favourite subject and that he didn't really pay attention, he would not be a bad student, merely one of generations of Cuthbert Binns' old boys and girls to feel that way. It fits the book/movie canon beautifully.
And any bit of contemporary information Newt and the audience don't know, could be explained to Newt, who has just spent a long time doing research in Africa, so he hasn't seen all the papers. And he only just arrived in the US.
If the 'mayhem with beasts' scenes would have been slightly shortened, something that could be done, imho, one could easily gain three or four minutes overall movie time, to be used for these explanations at various moment.
Re: my daughter's answering review:
(ETA: I have set this post to public and for the time being allowed anonymous comments, so you can send your daughter the link if she wants to comment directly.)
My dear (I won't use your real name in this space, so please allow me to call you this),
Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write all this and start up such a fascinating debate.
Your review had to be posted in four comments, and your mother carefully separated them by theme, so I'll answer in separate sections, too.
First of all, thank you for pointing out the US laws on interracial marriages and their dates. I was clearly insufficiently aware of this, and your point is an excellent one.
Then there is the Pottermore backstory, and I'll use this comment to go into my ideas on that aspect.
Now, you did mention that as an aspiring writer and a teacher of literature you find the comment on bad writing offensive. My dear, both as a teacher and as an author you will have to be able to look critically at texts, even if they are texts that are very dear to your heart as a reader or that you wrote yourself.
What JKR does here is a mistake ever writer has made - I have often made it myself and so will you when you write. When one writes fiction, one has one's own head-canon of people's backstories and the world you created for them.
And occasionally, one forgets that readers cannot look into your head and see that backstory.
Which is why ever writer needs a good beta-writer who will point this out. At which point my first response is usually, 'but what I write makes perfect sense because [insert headcanon information]. And the second response should be: true, my readers had no way of knowing this. I must find a way of informing them.
Someone should have pointed out to JKR that, while she may expect the movie-going audience to be familiar with the books and/or the movies (I think it unlikely that large groups of people who never took any interest in the Potterverse will now flock to Fantastic Beasts), she must not expect complete familiarity with Pottermore.
No, she doesn't have to explain who Grindelwald is, and yes, she may refer to Dumbledore the teacher or to Letta Lestrange (very nice touch, I thought), because all this is in the books/movies. Also, it's fun for the true Potterhead to pick up the references, but it doesn't affect one's understanding of the story to miss them.
But she should have explained vital points of the Pottermore backstory.
She could have done this easily, for Newt Scamander is the perfect vehicle for this information.
"Don't you know what happened here? Didn't you learn about the Salem Trials at school?" Tina might well ask this foreign young man.
And if Newt would say that History of Magic wasn't really his favourite subject and that he didn't really pay attention, he would not be a bad student, merely one of generations of Cuthbert Binns' old boys and girls to feel that way. It fits the book/movie canon beautifully.
And any bit of contemporary information Newt and the audience don't know, could be explained to Newt, who has just spent a long time doing research in Africa, so he hasn't seen all the papers. And he only just arrived in the US.
If the 'mayhem with beasts' scenes would have been slightly shortened, something that could be done, imho, one could easily gain three or four minutes overall movie time, to be used for these explanations at various moment.