As I write this, the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I stormed the box office with a 125 million dollar domestic gross. This is the seventh film in a franchise, and it's still making bank. There is something about this whole "Harry Potter" thing.
For one, this is the book series that got Generation Y/The Millennials reading. Books can seem a fairly intimidating thing: long, no pictures, characters you have to memorize, and so forth. Sometimes it takes just one book to make you realize that reading is enjoyable. The Young Adult Supernatural Romance genre does this for giddy girls, Fight Club did this for Nihlistic stoners, the works of Michael Crichton did this for people that wanted to believe dinosaurs could roam the earth again.For me, it was the obscure philosophical/social satire Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. But we all liked Harry Potter.
Also, Harry Potter is the biggest cultural phenomenon since the Beatles that did not come from America. I enjoyed reading a different prospective on the world, and especially seeing the films made with a British cast. I used to wonder if the rest of the world ever got annoyed with how America sends all of its movies overseas, but Americans rarely ever see foreign films. Harry Potter is one time when Americans ate up a different country's production.
Having written all that, there are some things about the Harry Potter franchise that still don't make any sense to me.
-One of the most original concepts from HP was the idea that Wizards seem to live together, or at least in close contact and affiliation. This raises the question, how would a Wizard/Witch economy work? The existence of magic as a way to manipulate production would eliminate any physical labor jobs. The only jobs detailed involve working for the government, retail, and print media, this seems pretty limiting. Do Witches and Wizards ever work at muggle companies? Usually Witches and Wizards in fiction fill a niche in their community, but don't form the community itself. This is like if everybody in the world was educated exclusively in chemical engineering, how could society work? Which brings up my next question...
-Why doesn't Hogwarts teach anything not directly magic related? How do the students understand non-magic history, math, English composition, and other traditional liberal arts fields if all they ever seem to learn about is magic? Hogwarts sounds like a tech school more than anything. Wouldn't it be much more efficient for young witches and wizards to apprentice under a professional than run a giant school for only about 800 students, or can things like heating and plumbing be solved purely with magic?
-How does tuition at Hogwarts work? Is it a public or a private institution? Do they have scholarship funds?
-Imagine for one moment that you are 11 years old. You have friends and a school and whatnot. You receive a letter in the mail telling you that not only do witches and wizards exist, but you are one of them, but the rest of your family are muggles. You are all excited to leave, but you have one problem, what do you tell your friends? You are going to a boarding school, but you can't tell them any of the details, much less what you've learned. Do you just stop being friends with them or what? What do your parents tell their co-workers?
-Did anybody laugh the way I did when Dumbledore died in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Specifically, it was that Dumbledore was shot and fell out of a window almost exactly like how Snape was shot and fell out of a window in Die Hard. Yippie-Kii-Eh, Mudblood!
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