Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald ended with a huge revelation about the true identity of Credence Barebone, as Ezra Miller’s Obscurial was unveiled to actually be Albus Dumbledore’s secret younger brother, Aurelius. It’s a major twist for fans to wrap their heads around as it flies in the face of what we knew about Credence and the Dumbledore family tree.
As it turns out, though, writer J.K. Rowling has secretly been preparing hardcore Wizarding World lovers for this for a while. On Rowling’s official website, if you go to the “Answers” page, the header image features a copy of Loeb Classical Library’s Marcus Aurelius. This seemed harmless enough before we saw the Fantastic Beasts sequel, but now the placement of the book – no doubt chosen for the second word of the title – featured on a page called “Answers” suggests that Rowling was playing a sneaky joke on her fans and leaving the big twist in plain sight.
The really impressive thing about this though is how long the writer’s been playing her little game. Hypable first spotted the hidden meaning behind the header and did some digging into the page’s source code, discovering that the image had been uploaded in early 2016 – which is before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was even released. No doubt Rowling had the story for the second film already planned out at that stage and decided to have some fun on her website.
This might not be the only time Rowling has done something like this, either. Last year, when replying to a fan asking how many Fantastic Beasts movies there will be, she tweeted “five” in five different languages. Interestingly, the first two were English and French – reflecting the New York and Parisian settings of the first two movies. The next three were German, Spanish and Italian, so maybe we can infer that Fantastic Beasts 3-5 will be set in either those countries or nations that speak those languages.
We’ll have to wait and see if that turns out to be the case, but tell us, what did you think of the big Credence twist in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald? Has Rowling’s neat bit of foreshadowing made you more impressed by it? Have your say in the comments section down below.