Headscratchers / The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter

• If the AURYN allows Bastian to wish for anything, why doesn't he just wish for his memories back? Or wish Xayide would disappear? He does wish she would "have a heart", but why does it take until the end for him to think of this?
  • At the beginning of the movie, he doesn't know enough about the threat to Fantasia to come up with an appropriate wish, and in the middle Xayide has convinced him she's on his side.
• At the end, Bastian is reduced to only having two memories (and two only two wishes) left, those of his mother and father. How does that work? I mean, in that scene he at least knows who Falkor, Atreyu and Xayide are, hasn't forgotten his own identity (as he still responds to the name Bastian), is still aware of the problem with the wishes and Xayide, and he is still able to speak english, so obviously his head wasn't really emptied.
  • This is something of a simplification of the events of the book, wherein Bastian really does forget almost everything, and is maybe meant a bit more poetically than literally (Bastian only has two meaningful memories left, in other words). But in any case, a name isn't a memory, it's just a mark of identification. He knows he's called Bastian, but he knows nothing else about who "Bastian" is beyond that — where Bastian comes from, who Bastian knows and loves, the countless experiences and habits and quirks that make Bastian who he was. He talks in that language not because he has a meaningful recollection of talking in that language, but because his neural pathways are still firing sufficiently to form a kind of muscle memory to enable him to communicate.
  • The movie kind of messed up the entire "memory loss" thing from the book, where the AURYN doesn't take away Bastian's memories because some curse has been placed on it; it's just its natural effect: The more Bastian wishes in Fantastica, the more he loses of himself. It's made pretty blatant that he still remembers everything that's happened to him in Fantastica, it's the memories of his life in the human world that vanish. Early during Bastian's adventures in Fantastica he still remembers his human life and tells Atreyu quite a bit about what things were like for him back in his own world — but later on, when Atreyu asks him to repeat or elaborate upon some of the things they talked about, Bastian can't remember them anymore. He remembers the conversation he had with Atreyu, and when prompted can even recall his exact words, but he no longer remembers what he meant by those words and now when he tries to repeat them it all just sounds like nonsense to him.
  • The movie also omits the visit to the City of Old Emperors, where we see what exactly happens to people who have used up all their memories and are trapped in Fantastica. Having lost all their memories, they're unable to do much apart from wandering around in a stupor and feebly attempt their hands at things that don't make any sense because they don't remember how to make sense. None of them are able to talk, so this would indicate that if Bastian had truly lost himself he would also have lost the ability to speak. Luckily for him, it never got that far.
• Bastian has to give a name to the new evil. While he eventually settles on "The Emptiness", due to how Xayide makes everything empty, it was never stated it had to be a Meaningful Name, so why did he just name it "Bob" or something if naming it was so important?
  • Because Bastian is a ten year old kid who takes stories very seriously. Why wouldn't he give it a Meaningful Name?
• Bastian has the Auryn from the start, so why doesn't he just wish for Fantasia to be saved? Even if given that he doesn't know about Xayide yet, he could just say something like "I wish the new evil threatening Fantasia was gone", or something like that? He was able to just wish the Nothing out of existence in the first movie, so why would it be any different here?
  • Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole. In the book, Bastian gets into Fantasia immediately after he saves it, and in the book he doesn't just instantly restore it to exactly the way it was like in the movie; he travels around Fantasia and recreates it gradually through his wishes, making it bigger and better than ever before. Xyaide doesn't come into the story until he's been in Fantasia for a while, and while she's every bit the Manipulative Bitch, she's not even remotely a threat to Fantasia and doesn't even try to be; her entire goal is to manipulate Bastian and make him do her bidding. The movie upped her to another world ending threat, but her character was never intended to be one.
• Why is the Auryn's name written in all caps (i.e AURYN), as if it was an acronym for something? Does the book explain this better?
  • The book always spells the name in all caps. It's not explained but it's never deviated from either, so that's just how its name is written. (The book also says that many Fantasians revere the AURYN so much they refuse to speak its name, just calling it things like "the Gem" or "the Glory.")