Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a book mentioned in Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone which was later Defictionalized as a real book written by J. K. Rowling Newt Scamander, whose grandson married Luna Lovegood. The book was published in 2001.

The book is, of course, a guide to the magical beasts which exist in the Potter Verse. It is supposedly a copy of the edition owned by Harry Potter, complete with lots of amusing graffiti written in it by Harry and Ron, and a bit from Hermione.

A companion piece to Quidditch Through the Ages.

A very, very loose film adaptation was released in 2016, with a sequel released in 2018.


 * All There in the Manual: This is the manual.
 * Basilitrice: The first basilisk is reported to have been birthed by Herpo the Foul, a Greek Dark wizard and Parselmouth (able to communicate with snakes) who hatched a chicken egg under a toad. Basilisks are said to be uncontrollable except by Parselmouths, and are the mortal enemy of spiders (who flee from their presence). Their venom and stare are differentiated, but no less deadly than the original folklore, and the male basilisk's head has a distinct scarlet plume. The cockatrice is present in the books' universe, but is not mentioned here.
 * Brown Note:
 * Fwooper song, if listened to too much.
 * The eyes of a basilisk.
 * Cassandra Did It: Augries are feared because their cries are said to cause death. In reality, they're just predicting rain.
 * Continuity Nod: The entry for the Kappa, a Japanese creature that Snape claimed was more commonly found in Mongolia during Prisoner of Azkaban. "Snape hasn't read this."
 * Cool Horse: Winged horses.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Have you read Harry and Ron's commentary?
 * Defictionalization
 * Early-Bird Cameo: Many creatures first appeared here before being mentioned in the books. Even Thestrals are included, albeit as a minor reference under "Winged Horse".
 * Exact Words: Early definitions of "Beings" were done with human centrism in mind, leading to definitions like "creatures who walk on two legs" or "who speak the human language." This would leave out obvious beings like centaurs and merfolk, but accidentally include a lot of creatures, such as trolls, augries, fwoopers, or vampires. Havoc ensues.
 * Feuding Families: The McCliverts and the MacBoons (the former, possibly, transformed the latter into five legged, hairy monsters; the latter proceeded to eat them).
 * Fictional Document
 * Footnote Fever
 * Heli Critter: The Billywig
 * Kicked Upstairs: "Sent to the Centaur Office" is a euphemism for being fired in the Ministry of Magic, as centaurs are so isolationist that the office doesn't actually do anything.
 * Literary Agent Hypothesis
 * Muggle Power: Some extreme factions favor classifying muggles as "beasts".
 * Multiple Head Case: Runespoors
 * Multiple-Tailed Beast: The Crup, which resembles a Jacky Russel apart from its forked tail. They normally have the ends clipped in order to preserve The Masquerade.
 * Never Sleep Again: The Lethifold kills its victims in their sleep.
 * Our Dragons Are Different: The book obviously depicts every single species of dragons in the Potterverse. Most seem for some reason to be European (even the South American and Australasian species), with only one species based on Chinese dragons, and even so being more akin to European forms as it breathes fire and is malevolent (allthough all of them are more animalistic than anything, harkening back to the pre-Tolkien versions of the myths).
 * Our Gryphons Are Different: Classical gryphons and hippogriffs (note that hippogriffs were a part of mythology, but mostly as a figurativly unlikely creature, since horses and griffins were enemies).
 * Promethean Punishment: See Feuding Families above.
 * Red Herring: The Demiguise is mentioned as a huge, gorilla-like creature whose silky hair is used to create invisibility cloaks. However,.
 * Also, the Nundu is described as the most dangerous beast in the world. You would guess Harry has to fight one later in the series.
 * Ditto with the Lethifold, which requires a Patronus Charm to repel. Around the time this book came out, we'd only seen Patronuses used on Dementors.
 * What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A serious issue, given the wizarding world's partially-human hybrid creatures and talking animals of various levels of intelligence.
 * Even the final version of this is so offensively human-centric and arbitrary that the Centaurs, who are of at least human intelligence, insist on being labeled as Beasts.
 * Your Vampires Suck: A footnote addresses Muggle notions about fairies, and how wrong they are.