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Being obsessed with “blood purity” makes no sense for Grindelwald, a gentle rant

The only thing I truly object to in The Secrets of Dumbledore is the idea that Grindelwald cared about magical blood purity.

That’s just literally not part of my canon.

It doesn’t make any sense, it genuinely doesn’t fit with his ideology that magical people are born with the “gift” of power and that gives them the right to rule.

This is what I mean when I say that the FB movies are fanfiction, As far as I’m concerned that’s just part of the in-universe propaganda machine we know is working against him. This isn’t me being #Grindelwaldwasright, I just genuinely think it was in there to try and make him More Obviously Evil, because that’s a kind of magical racism we can easily understand.

And frankly, I think it came about in the movie!verse because when they wrote and filmed CoG initially, a lot of the actors/test audiences found themselves thinking that Grindelwald had a point, he was understandable, he was too sympathetic. So they had to put in way more signposts that he was Obviously Evil.

I want to see a Grindelwald where they actually ask the really hard questions, where they don’t make him kill baby animals and have his followers kill toddlers just to show the audience that He’s A Bad Guy.

My conception of it (I stole some of this from troth) is that his ideology was directly in reaction to a lot of stuff that was going on in the late 1800s - industrialization, the dwindling of wizarding villages, the way that wizards were essentially being driven farther and farther underground. Of course this would have appealed to Albus - his sister was irrevocably hurt, and his father died in prison, because of the Statute of Secrecy. Muggle boys hurt her terribly, and his father couldn’t even go to the authorities for justice because Ariana posed a threat to the Statute of Secrecy.

The vibe is very much that wizards are not safe, and industrial sprawl keeps increasing. It means more and more safe enclaves for wizards are disappearing. Now, it’s understandable that Gellert’s reaction is, “Okay, then we should be in charge so we don’t get smushed out of existence,” but obviously, this becomes intensely complicated by the fact that he sees Muggles as significantly Lesser than wizards. At best, he would see them like children who needed to be guided and helped into making better decisions. At the worst, he would see them as beasts of burden, entirely unable to fend for themselves and useless except as a wizard sees fit to use them.

This is why my conception of his ideology includes the idea that it was very easy for him to reach out to wizards who feel like they, too, are being legislated and oppressed out of existence - those with Creature blood, poor wizards, landless wizards, queer wizards, Muggleborn wizards, etc. That’s why he was able to gain so much traction for so long - not because he hoodwinked everyone, but because he was very very good at saying, “This isn’t your fault. It won’t always be like this. We can burn the whole system down, and you won’t be the one who’s hurt anymore.”

I just think the movies are afraid of making him look too sympathetic, so they’re giving him easy signposts of Villainy instead of trusting fans to engage with complicated methodology. And I’m not even saying they’re wrong, after some simplistic takes I’ve seen on this hellsite.

But yeah my conception of Grindelwald doesn’t give a shit about blood purity because it doesn’t make any sense for him, thanks for coming to my TED talk.