Speaking as a childhood Harry Potter fan, the enduring persistence of its popularity including amongst adults is 100% because it is slop without substance.
It flirts with the idea of rebellion and emancipation from slavery but ultimately discredits those notions by having the rebel leader become a lead cop in the institution that was repressing him and by making emancipation seem silly.
It reflects the chauvinisms of a British aristocrat who offers an impossible narrative of an abused child escaping abuse through the purity of their Aryan magic blood. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t even pretend to offer catharsis or self-actualization, merely hundreds of pages of occasionally racist drivel about a special little boy who joins the SS after reforming them from the inside.
That’s why it has maintained such reverence - because it doesn’t actually offer a subversive story but the aesthetic of one while reflecting the conservative biases of the author. It speaks to a certain liberal perspective that is progressive only so far as the oppressed don’t hurt their feelings.
Honestly, the worst part is that it isn't even self-aware conservative propaganda, you know? If it was, it would at least have some guiding idea and consistent themes to bind the whole thing together, there would be something of substance to criticize. But it doesn't even have that, because that would require JKR to think about her writing on a level she's completely incapable of. It's all just bits and pieces of borrowed aesthetics that don't really hold any deeper meaning beyond coding the Good Guys as good and the Bad Guys as bad, and then occasionally, in later flashbacks, also coding the Good Guys as bad, in order to create an illusion of moral complexity. It's a series of children's books written by a woman who has an idea of what a children's book is supposed to feel like, based on what she half-remembers enjoying back when she was a child, but who had put no thought whatsoever into what actually makes a children's book good, or even meaningfully different from any other children's book.
This is why it all falls apart to any scrutiny, it just keeps contradicting itself. Like, for example, it sure seems like it has something to teach the kids about the traditional British power structures, the aristocracy, the bloodlines, the racism. But what is it that it wants to tell them about all that, exactly? Fuck if I know, and it sure as hell ain't because the books' messaging is so subtle, it's just that it's all over the place. I guess if I were to take the text more seriously than it deserves, I'd say its overall message boils down to "the system is evil, unjust and rotten to the core, but trying to meaningfully change it in any way makes you a laughable idiot at best, and an unredeemably evil terrorist at worst".
But of course, I don't think JKR had actually set out to teach that (or any other) message to children. I think she just brainlessly aped a bunch of tropes, techniques and plot points from a whole bunch of better writers, whatever seemed cool to her at the moment, but those writers all had wildly different views on this and other matters, so the end result rings hollow, as if she's an LLM given flesh.
The closest thing JKR's books have to a soul is her own mean-spiritedness, which admittedly shines through quite often, but even that is nothing but aimless and confused lashing out at whatever targets she thinks she can be mean to without too much backlash, doesn't matter if it's some marginalized group, or types of neighbours she finds annoying, or cartoon racists, or generalized politicians. She couldn't even be a proper misanthropic cunt in a way that is traditional to British children's authors (eg. C. S. Lewis or Roald Dahl). The Harry Potter books are an unbearably bland product of a completely unexamined, empty and apolitical existence of an English petty bourgeois (turned into a massive bourgeois in the process). Honestly, I think this is why she fell for the TERF thing so hard - as ugly as it is, it very well may be her first time actually believing in something.
