It doesn’t matter how fantastical your fictional worlds are. They have to have a consistency and logic to them. Some of them become more captivating than the real world. And Rowling’s world of wizards is one. Harry Potter is more inspiring than most real life heroes. He battled for what can be termed the quintessence of good.
Let us re-cap. In Rowling’s world, wizards and witches still roam. They are a kind of underground mafia, hidden from ordinary humans. They are mortals, but they are not ordinary humans. Not by a long shot. They can fly on brooms and travel instantaneously from one place to another. They can become invisible. They can kill people by pointing their wands at them and saying “Avda Kedavra”. They can control another person by thought, if they so wish. They are immensely powerful.
A group of evil Wizards led by Lord Voldemort wants to take over the earth and kill all ordinary humans. We are the pure race- he insists. Harry Potter and friends, backed by most ordinary Wizards and Witches are on the other side. They insist that all humans deserve dignity and freedom, irrespective of whether they knew magic or not. Finally, they win and Voldemort and his ideas are destroyed.
When agriculture started 10000 years ago, settlements became big. Specialist armies became powerful. They had weapons and the kind of power that was magical when you compare the surrounding hunter-gatherers with their pathetic stone tools. They could all but wipe them out- and they did.
Again in human history, about 4000 years back, a small group of blonde people from the Russian steppes domesticated the horse. They perfected the art of horse mounted warfare. This gave them a magical advantage over other peoples.
Today, almost half of humanity speaks in tongues that are related to their original mother tongue. But their conquests are buried in the mists of the past.
But we know exactly what happened when technology and power gave magical powers to some European nations. Did they spare anybody?
No, they didn’t. American Indians were killed in millions and an entire culture wiped out. Australian aboriginals were hunted like pigs to extinction. Africans were captures and sold as slaves. They had no equal rights till the 1960s.
In India, some had imagined magical powers by birth. Just that belief was enough for a majority of ordinary people to be treated worse than animals for centuries.
True, the world conscience has come very far. But just imagine some group like the ISIS getting a powerful weapon like mind control. One can easily imagine what will happen.
So, the idea that Wizards and witches would rally behind Harry Potter and chose to hide their powers and let ordinary humans be is a laughably preposterous idea. This is the one fatal flaw with the world of Harry Potter. It is good that Rowling chose to ignore this fact, so we got a great story.
It is pure fiction.
