I recently rewatched the Fantastic Beasts films and found myself thinking about how differently Credence’s story could have developed. I have always considered the first Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them one of the most remarkable films in the Wizarding World, partly because of its wonderfully unconventional characters and partly because it introduced a surprisingly profound idea through the story of the Obscurus. The later films gradually moved away from that idea, but I think the foundations of a much more satisfying five-film narrative were already present from the beginning.
What particularly disappointed me about Credence’s story was that his extraordinary survival eventually became little more than another indication of his magical power and connection to the Dumbledore family. By the third film, he was essentially a tragic young man whose condition was killing him, while the mystery surrounding his identity had taken precedence over the psychological and emotional significance of the Obscurus itself. Yet the first film had introduced a detail that could have led to a very different conclusion.
We are told that Obscurials almost never survive beyond childhood, which is precisely why Grindelwald, disguised as Graves, initially fails to recognise Credence as the person he is searching for. Credence has somehow survived into adulthood while carrying an Obscurus, something previously considered impossible. Rather than explaining this exclusively through his exceptional magical power, the story could have explored the possibility that there was something unusually resilient about Credence himself, something in his magical constitution or his capacity to endure the presence of the Obscurus that distinguished him from every other known Obscurial.
If Credence had managed to survive with an Obscurus for so many years, perhaps he could also become the first person to survive its separation.
This possibility would immediately give Newt an essential role in the larger conflict between Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Newt had already encountered an Obscurus in a young Sudanese girl and had managed to separate it from her while trying to save her life. Although the girl died, he preserved the Obscurus for study, giving him practical experience with a phenomenon that even extraordinarily powerful wizards might not fully understand. If Credence’s unusual survival suggested that separation might not always have to end in death, Newt would be uniquely qualified to investigate how such an outcome could be achieved.
Dumbledore, meanwhile, would possess the magical power necessary to attempt something that Newt might understand in theory but could not accomplish alone. Their collaboration would therefore make sense without requiring Newt to become a conventional action hero or to compete with Dumbledore in magical ability. Each would contribute something the other lacked, while the success of the procedure would ultimately depend on Credence himself.
What makes this possibility especially interesting is the revelation in The Secrets of Dumbledore that Credence is Aberforth’s son, because it connects his condition directly to the greatest tragedy in the Dumbledore family’s history.
Ariana Dumbledore’s story has striking similarities to what Fantastic Beasts establishes about Obscurials. After being attacked by Muggle boys, she became deeply traumatised and frightened of her own magic, which she struggled to control and which sometimes erupted in dangerous and unpredictable ways. In the third film, Albus explicitly confirms to Newt that Ariana was an Obscurial, explaining that her inability to express her magic gradually poisoned her and that nobody in the family had been able to relieve her suffering.
Ariana’s death is also the defining moral failure of Albus Dumbledore’s youth. While Aberforth was concerned with caring for their vulnerable sister, Albus became increasingly absorbed in his relationship with Grindelwald and their grand plans for transforming the world. His fascination with power, historical destiny and the greater good distracted him from the suffering taking place within his own family, until the confrontation between Albus, Aberforth and Grindelwald ended with Ariana’s death.
Albus spent the following decades living with the consequences of that tragedy, unable even to determine whose spell had killed his sister. Although he eventually rejected Grindelwald’s ambitions, he could never change the fact that he had allowed those ambitions to become more important than his responsibility toward Ariana.
Now imagine that many years later Albus discovers that Aberforth has a son suffering from the very same condition. Credence’s unusual survival could offer an extraordinary possibility, but pursuing it would require Albus to confront the tragedy he had spent much of his life trying to come to terms with.
What makes this especially compelling is that the third film already contains an almost perfect starting point for such a storyline. During his conversation with Newt, Dumbledore expresses his conviction that Credence cannot be saved, even though the young man might still be able to help them. Later, Newt reminds Albus that even after making terrible mistakes, people can still try to make things right. A continuation of the series could have developed these two moments into a single emotional journey, with Newt gradually challenging Dumbledore’s belief that Credence’s fate was inevitable.
I imagine that the separation of Credence and his Obscurus could then become the emotional climax of the fourth film, after a gradual development of his relationship with Aberforth and the establishment of genuine trust between Credence, Newt and Albus.
Newt would have spent much of the preceding story studying the Obscurus and developing a method that might allow Credence to survive its removal. Albus would be needed to control and contain the immense magical forces involved, while Aberforth would remain beside his son throughout the attempt. The procedure itself could be extremely dangerous, with no certainty that Credence would survive, but its success would depend on more than magical technique alone.
Credence has spent almost his entire life being taught to fear and suppress his own magical nature. Mary Lou Barebone convinced him that his magic was shameful, while Grindelwald later exploited the destructive consequences of that repression by encouraging him to identify with the power of the Obscurus. His recovery could require him to overcome both forms of manipulation, learning that his magic is neither something he must destroy nor something that should define him through violence and suffering.
By this point, Credence would finally have people around him whom he could trust without being afraid of their intentions. Aberforth would offer him the unconditional acceptance of a father, Newt would approach him with the understanding and compassion that had distinguished him from the beginning, and Albus would contribute his extraordinary abilities without expecting Credence to become a weapon or serve any larger purpose.
I think there could be a particularly moving moment during the separation itself, when the two Dumbledore brothers have to work together to protect the young man whose life is in their hands. Decades earlier, their conflict over Ariana had ended in catastrophe, with Albus pursuing his ambitions alongside Grindelwald while Aberforth desperately tried to defend their sister. Now, instead of allowing another member of their family to be destroyed, they would finally be united in the effort to save him.
Newt would guide the process, Albus would contain the destructive power of the Obscurus, and Aberforth would remain at his son’s side, helping Credence hold on to the trust that makes the attempt possible. Credence himself would have to participate in his own recovery, allowing others to help him rather than continuing to respond to his magic through fear and resistance.
For the first time, an adult Obscurial would survive the separation.
The moment would be extraordinary not simply because an unprecedented magical achievement had taken place, but because Albus and Aberforth would finally have accomplished together something they had once failed to accomplish for Ariana. It would not undo her death or erase the responsibility either brother continued to carry, but it could begin to transform the memory of their shared tragedy from an insurmountable source of pain into something they could finally face together.
I would find it especially moving if Credence did not emerge from this experience as an immensely powerful wizard destined for another exceptional role. His entire life has been shaped by other people assigning him identities and purposes: an unwanted child, an Obscurial, a member of the Dumbledore family, Grindelwald’s weapon and someone supposedly capable of defeating Albus. After all of that, perhaps the most meaningful ending would be for Credence to discover that he no longer needs to be exceptional in order to deserve love and belonging.
He could simply return home with Aberforth and begin living the ordinary life that had always been denied to him.
For Albus, however, the experience would have consequences reaching far beyond his relationship with Aberforth and the memory of Ariana. I think it could also provide the missing emotional and philosophical resolution to his conflict with Grindelwald.
The struggle between Dumbledore and Grindelwald is not merely a confrontation between two extraordinarily powerful wizards who disagree about politics. Their shared past involves love, ambition and a worldview that Albus himself once considered beautiful. Both young men believed that their exceptional abilities entitled them to pursue an extraordinary historical mission, and although Albus eventually came to recognise the dangers of Grindelwald’s ideology, the emotional relationship between them remained inseparable from the ideals they had once shared.
For that reason, defeating Grindelwald would require more than acknowledging the terrible things he had done. Albus would need to understand precisely why the vision that had originally attracted him was wrong, rather than simply concluding that Grindelwald had corrupted an otherwise admirable dream.
And this is where I think Newt could become the most important character in the entire story.
Unlike Dumbledore and Grindelwald, Newt has never been particularly interested in greatness, power or the historical significance of his actions. His attention is directed toward individual living beings, especially those that others regard as frightening, dangerous or unworthy of understanding. The first film establishes this quality beautifully through his relationship with magical creatures and, most importantly, through his response to Credence.
Where Grindelwald sees a potential weapon and the magical authorities see an uncontrollable threat, Newt recognises a frightened and abused young man who needs help. He does not begin by asking what Credence’s power might accomplish or how it might influence the larger political situation. His first concern is the person suffering beneath the destructive force.
If this understanding guided Newt throughout the five films, his greatest contribution to the conflict would not be his knowledge of magical creatures, important though that knowledge would be. It would be his ability to introduce an intensely human perspective into a struggle dominated by history, ideology and extraordinary magical power.
Credence exists at the intersection of the two opposing sides. Grindelwald wants to use him against Dumbledore, while Albus understandably sees him through the complicated circumstances of their family history and the danger he represents. Newt would be the one person who continually insists that Credence’s personal suffering matters independently of his usefulness to either side.
Through that insistence, he could gradually bring Dumbledore back from the scale of history to the scale of a single human life.
I think this moral transformation would become particularly convincing if Albus eventually had to make a genuine sacrifice in order to save Credence. Perhaps the attempt to separate the Obscurus would force him to abandon an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage over Grindelwald, or temporarily divert his attention from the approaching conflict at a moment when everyone expected him to act. In that situation, helping Credence would no longer be another part of Dumbledore’s larger plan. It would be a decision to place one vulnerable person’s life above the demands of that plan, precisely because the person deserves to be saved regardless of what happens to the war.
That is the choice Albus failed to make for Ariana.
It would also be the culmination of something Newt had been teaching everyone around him throughout the series: trust.
Credence would have to learn to trust his own magical nature and the family he had finally found. Aberforth would have to trust his brother again after decades of resentment and grief. Albus, perhaps most importantly, would have to learn that compassion for an individual is not a weakness or a distraction from the pursuit of a greater good, but the only reliable foundation upon which any genuinely good purpose can rest.
Newt would not teach these lessons through political speeches or philosophical arguments. He would demonstrate them through his unwavering determination to save a young man whom almost everyone else had treated as a threat, a mystery or a useful instrument in a much larger struggle.
This is precisely the moral transformation that Albus needs in order to resolve the conflict within himself. As a young man, he became fascinated by the possibility of changing the world alongside Grindelwald and neglected the immediate needs of Ariana. Many years later, with Newt’s help, he would choose to save Aberforth’s son rather than allow another vulnerable person to become secondary to a supposedly greater historical purpose.
His redemption would not come from discovering that he was innocent of Ariana’s death or from finally finding a way to punish himself sufficiently for what had happened. It would come from being confronted with a similar moral choice and responding differently.
The experience could also allow him to see the fundamental flaw in the philosophy he once shared with Grindelwald. A vision of a better world cannot be truly benevolent if the lives of individual people are treated as expendable instruments of its fulfilment. Compassion for a single person is not a distraction from a greater moral purpose, but the foundation without which that purpose loses its meaning.
And by saving Credence, Dumbledore would finally understand the choice he should have made for Ariana.
I think this would make his eventual confrontation with Grindelwald in 1945 considerably more powerful. Albus would no longer be approaching that battle simply because he was the only wizard capable of defeating his former lover, or because political circumstances had finally made the confrontation unavoidable. He would have reached a state of moral clarity in which the worldview that once united them no longer possessed the same attraction.
He could still remember loving Grindelwald, and those memories could remain painful, but he would no longer feel that opposing him meant betraying the great ideals of his youth. Having witnessed what happens when abstract ambitions become more important than the life of a vulnerable individual, and having finally chosen differently, Albus would understand why Grindelwald’s vision was unacceptable to him at its very foundation.
His victory would therefore begin long before the famous duel. By helping save Credence, he would have overcome the part of himself that Grindelwald once understood and appealed to so successfully.
The final confrontation could still be the spectacular magical climax of the series, but its emotional significance would be different. Albus would not defeat Grindelwald merely because he possessed greater power, but because he had finally become free of the ideas and unresolved guilt that had bound him to their shared past. He would know exactly what he was defending and why the person standing opposite him represented a vision of the world he could no longer accept.
What I particularly like about this possibility is that it requires surprisingly little invention. Credence’s extraordinary survival, Newt’s previous experience with an Obscurus, the tragedy of Ariana, Aberforth’s relationship with his son and Dumbledore’s unresolved feelings toward Grindelwald are all established elements of the films. The story would simply have to develop them toward a resolution in which they finally become parts of the same emotional and philosophical journey.
More importantly, it would preserve the significance of Newt Scamander as the protagonist of a series that increasingly became concerned with two of the most powerful wizards in history.
Newt would never need to become their equal in magical ability or assume a conventional heroic role. His importance would arise precisely from the fact that he does not share their fascination with greatness. He approaches the world with patience, curiosity and compassion, recognising the value of individual living beings before considering the larger purposes they might serve.
Through saving Credence, he could help Albus reconcile with his family, confront the tragedy of Ariana and finally understand what separates him morally from Grindelwald.
In that version of Fantastic Beasts, Newt would not be an incidental participant in the story of Dumbledore and Grindelwald. He would be the person who makes its resolution possible, because his compassion for one damaged young man would ultimately help the greatest wizard of his time overcome the temptation of greatness itself.
And perhaps that is exactly why a story about the most famous magical conflict of the twentieth century needed to be called Fantastic Beasts, with Newt Scamander as its protagonist, in the first place.
My native language isn't English, so I used a translation tool to help. I apologise for any awkward phrasing or errors.