Inevitability Calls.

Yeah, we criticize Harry Potter for its racial stereotyping, problematic names, plot holes, and the fact that the author is a raging TERF but have we discussed the fact that Harry Potter is a children's book that takes itself way too seriously?

Think about it: what made Harry Potter "great" was that it was set in a whimsical world which you wanted to inhabit. You could care less about the overarching plot of Harry vs Voldy, but you wanted to be in that world. You wanted your Hogwarts admittance letter. You wanted to write the Hogwarts Express. You wanted to be sorted by the Sorting Hat. The plot was just window dressing and not really what got you hooked. Remember how much backfilling you had to do when you were writing your fanfiction: how much detail you had to invent wholesale or ask the author about, and you'll see what I mean. Anything you can think of, like a curse on a doorway that will marry the next two people that would pass through it, or a door that will only open once you profess love honestly make sense in the world because they're silly little things that slot in very nicely. Anything silly will work in the Wizarding World because the Wizarding World is silly. And that's not a bad thing.

See, the world was whimsical and did not make sense and that was fine. It took old-timey british-isms like currency that wasn't decimal, or owl post, or a game played on broomsticks; and made a world out of it and it was wacky and you wanted to know all the intricate details of it. Details which JKR was way too happy to provide. And that's the Wizarding World's ultimate undoing: by providing details about how the world worked, it revealed what was behind the curtain.

JKR wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted a silly world but she probably heard from better authors that better works took their worlds seriously. People wanted sillyness and lore. The problem was in her quest to fill in the details, she tried to make the nonsense make sense. And it was kind of... well, shit. So you get gems no one asked for, like how do wizards use the toilet before toilets were invented, or that Quidditch is named after a marsh where it was first played. Everything has serious lore when it's supposed to be silly. The mood whiplash is jarring.

And this leaks into the problematic stuff too. Needed a Jewish student? Just use the most Jewish-sounding name you got. Did Dumble ever love anyone? Not the question being asked, but Dumble was gay all along! No one needed those answers, and yet we got them because JK needed people to take her silly world seriously. Harry Potter doesn't suffer from bad worldbuilding, it suffers from bad lorebuilding.