Newt's Rival

from here

So, Jacob is Newt's rival... This is an odd one and I didn't notice much of a ruckus about his reveal but I think we missed over something important.

According to the news story on Hypable, announcing the actor who will play him, we are given the interesting situation where... Jacob is said to be a Muggle. And Newt's Rival. Now, debatably more important than a series where Slytherins are not shown as evil, is that we now have a muggle, or squib, that is a "rival" to a magical character.

Dan Fogel, our new Jacob

So we're given a few interesting situations here. Why, first, would he be Newt's rival? Well the best answers to this are the simplest ones. He could be a romantic rival, and interested in dating one of the two female leads, or he could be a muggle zoologist, or a cryptozoologist. While there are certainly is an international statute of secrecy, wizards and witches can't control everything. Yetis chief among them.  So it could be, that with a strange creature, Jacob seeks to expose it and put it on a show, while Newt seeks to conserve and protect it.

To me, this makes total sense. Jacob would be set up as an antagonist and it sets the stage to befriend him which Newt is rumored to do. As such, if we want to play shipping wars, He ends up with Queenie and Newt with Tina, as well as helping due to contacts he may have.

In addition to this little issue, of him being a rival, there's the question of how he could even get involved in the adventure to begin with. While cryptozoology might be close enough to magizoology to get him involved without somehow having him trip the international statute of secrecy or be a sort of privileged muggle with some knowledge of magic. Well this goes to something I've always thought about Americans with magic. I think they would be horrible at keeping it secret. Now some of you may laugh at that, but given the witch hunts that occured during the colonial era, I wouldn't be surprised if a few more witches and wizards may have been sloppy about hiding their magic for a time, and if, given that there were indiginous people that seemed to be in tune with magic and with magic being a bit more accepted, that would probably be something that took some time to properly get under wraps, and even then it may just be accepted that a few slips here and there are nothing to be concerned about, as the muggles that do take that seriously and realize what's going on may be seen as crazy by the other muggles. This could explain a bit of Jacob.

Further supporting this somewhat insane thoery is how Josh Gad was rumored for the part. Having seen Pixels (someone had to see it) Gad can play utterly insane conspiracy theorist fairly well, and with the addition to the magical world, if he was a sort of occultist-obsessed muggle, that managed to piece together who Newt was, and what he was doing to become a sort of rival and seek to expose it all, that would work fairly well.

So what do you all think? How could Jacob be Newt's rival? Do you think he's a romantic rival? A cryptozoologist? An occult-obsessed muggle? Or perhaps, a hapless muggle that trips into an adventure he has no idea about. Leave your comments below!