A better question would be, for any world building detail that’s good in HP, what’s the better story she ripped it from?

I think people liked it because the early books are kinda evocative of something really whimsical and Dahl-esque. The house system, the castle, the owls, etc. it has a very flushed out initial setting that you (especially as a little kid with limited capacity to critically analyze it) can imagine fitting into and that adds a lot of character to what’s happening.

It struggles as it goes on because it becomes more and more clear that JK is not capable of critical analysis either and that all the evocative stuff is going to basically amount to nothing. She never really builds on top of any of the foundations she sets down, she would rather bring up a new evocative thing instead. Quidditch is a great example: it sucks, the rules are insane, you cannot understand the stakes and it’s impossible to care about, but she never really does anything with the funny premise that the wizards are all bent out of shape over something so silly.

A huge issue with this is that Rowling is, at her core, an uncritical Br*tish person who is not capable of recognizing the problems with the tropes she trafficked in or the very obvious subtext to the world she created: the wizards ARE a supremacist closed society that subjugates every sapient magical being to wizards, that have no regard for the well-being of other humans, and are committed to defending a clearly dysfunctional status quo that Rowling cannot countenance any criticism of. So as the books go on they become less whimsical and more horrific without her noticing. The book series literally ends with the protagonist wondering whether the chattel slave he inherited will bring him food, and you are not supposed to think that says anything negative about Harry.

I think she also succumbed to movie brain, a lot of stuff aligns more with the movie depictions of things over time, and her writing also starts to seem like she’s writing with an eye to how a movie would look. Given her weakness as a writer pivoting into a different craft she is even worse at was a bad idea.

Edit: the TL;DR is that the strength of the series’ world building is almost entirely evocative imagery and tropes that are easy to imagine fitting in with. Which is to say you can imagine buying and filling your room with Harry Potter objects because you have a clear idea what that would mean.

Good points: magic+school=fantasy kids can easily relate to

Bad points: the rest

There are no real good points. The setting is exciting because of the aesthetics. It’s a world of possibility with no execution or forethought.

None that I can think of. One of the funniest things though is wizards remaining in hiding instead of fighting nazis during the holocaust.

I’ve had this discussion a lot over the years since the early Potter fans grew up and reread the stuff they first read as kids.

Let me start out by saying I actually love the books and movies, despite the unbelievable twat that wrote them.

And that’s possible nectar her world building does have good parts. We all know the plot holes and contradictions, and a lot of that comes from the world building coming during the writing.

So, what’s good about it?

The biggest thing is that it feels complex and saturated without much actual on paper effort. Rowling world built in sketches that gave an impressionistic sense of there being more than what’s actually described. I hesitate to say she did it intentionally, but look at how Neville’s family history works out. His parents alone give a sense of danger and menace to all of the death eaters in a way that Harry’s parents didn’t. Death is a weak world building tool.

But breaking the minds with torture spells? That’s terrifying. And then they’re in a wizard hospital. Which, along with the Hogwarts infirmary implies an entire branch of wizardry dedicated to healing and also a culture of wizards taking care of each other.

See? Broad brush strokes that allow you to almost subconsciously absorb a background world without much exposition in writing, or much in the way of on screen effects.

And that’s pretty much where the Potter world building is a huge success. It allows/forces each reader to fill in the gaps. Even up to the end of the series where she’s kinda caught up with the runaway train of its popularity and makes attempts at serious world building via the Deathly Hallows and the forces behind them, there’s still more hints than outright revelations. Some of that is just her sucking at writing, some is that she made the wise choice of not pretending to know how to make things meatier, and some is that she did know that half the battle with children’s and YA fiction is giving the audience characters they can identify with, then letting their imagination run.

One example of that is the incantations for spells. Wingardium leviosa. Avada kedavra. Sectum sempra, crucio (one of the nastiest spells and it only needs one word), expeliarmus.

She’s just making up things that sound like what a kid might yell while playing wizards in the back yard. And, frankly, she was fucking excellent at it. Every incantation in the books is simple and childishly repeatable.

And that is world building. It’s just building for an audience that isn’t exactly into intricate magical systems and complex cultures. She was going for Narnia, not Middle Earth. Mind you, I don’t think she rose to the quality of Narnia, but there are similarities in how the world building is basically pastiches and implications rather than well crafted edifices of thought.

Her world building is more akin to finger paints than the watercolors of narnia, but it’s got the same vagueness and blur to it.