@pagesandposeidon / pagesandposeidon.tumblr.com
Okay forget grindelwald the gayest thing Dumbledore has done so far is sitting on his own desk like this:
so whats this whole thing with Nagini??
(warning: spoilers for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)
(I’m going to explain the matter factually before I get into any of the problematic discourse)
Basically, the final Crimes of Grindelwald trailer just came out (you can watch it on Youtube), and in the trailer, Claudia Kim was shown transforming into a snake–specifically, Nagini, Voldemort’s beloved horcrux. On her Twitter, JK Rowling said that, no, Nagini is not an animagus, but rather something called a “maledictus,” which apparently means she has a blood curse that’s passed down female familial lines. For now, she is able to turn into a snake at will, but later she’s doomed to become stuck in the snake’s form permanently, as Nagini is in the books.
Claudia Kim has been keeping her role as Nagini a secret until the release of the trailer, but she’s now said about the role in an interview: “It will be so interesting to see another side of Nagini. You’ve only seen her as a Horcrux. In this, she’s a wonderful and vulnerable woman who wants to live. She wants to stay a human being and I think that’s a wonderful contrast for the character.”
From this we learn that Nagini didn’t want to become a snake; she wanted to stay human and live. (Which to me adds a whole new layer to Nagini’s role in the books; by that time Nagini was no longer self-aware and human enough to understand her terrible role under Voldemort; Nagini has now been added to my list of HP characters that are interesting to analyze)
Claudia Kim also said, “She does feel sometimes it’s not controllable. She is bound to [permanently] transform at some point to a beast so she feels this pressure that the clock is ticking.”
it’s also been revealed that Nagini is Credence’s only friend, making them a ragtag duo of human beings who have a magical curse of some sort inside them.
In regards to the choice of casting and the problematic low number of woc in Harry Potter casts, I’m white, so it’d be better if you turned to Korean fans and to Claudia Kim herself about that.
I recommend you do heavy research from Korean perspectives about it before you listen to the rumors, gossip, and bitter posts. They may have some truth to them but things are never that simple. It’s been a problem before that exotic and tragedy, even evil, roles have been given to poc, and it’s even more concerning when there aren’t many other poc in the cast; I would like to look to the hope that Kim knows what she is doing and will play Nagini as an interesting and complex character.
A common bitter remark people have made about JK Rowling relates to something she tweeted earlier, that she’s been sitting on the Nagini secret for about 20 years. A lot of people are critical about this, usually the same people who are critical about Dumbledore, but having studied JK Rowling’s writing process and planning, I actually think it’s quite likely that she had Nagini’s backstory fleshed out in the original series; though the details and how they fit into Fantastic Beasts have likely become more thorough as she’s worked on it. JK Rowling has shown before in her writing that she plans out a lot of things that she doesn’t always expect to put into text or out into the world, and considering Nagini always seemed slightly less snakelike than she should have been, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those things.
Really most of the issues have stemmed from the fact that the character and actress is woc, and that there are a lot of problematic things surrounding Nagini as a character that could easily turn this into bad representation for women of color.
