this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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They tried expanding the world, it sucked and nobody liked it (also, the worldbuilding is so weak that it falls apart if you consider wider society outside of Hogwarts for five minutes, because the series started as books for grade schoolers)
The world building is weak because Rowling is a bad fantasy writer, not because it was written for grade schoolers. There are tons of series aimed at grade schoolers with incredible world building - Redwall, Warrior Cats, Earthsea, just to name a few, all have way better world building than Harry Potter.
Eh, I think it's a bit of both? The first books just generally where fairly whimsy and light-hearted and you don't really need your demographics and societal structures to make sense when you are writing a whimsical, light-hearted story for kids.
The later books become darker and more serious so the artifacts of those earlier worldbuilding decisions become more and more obvious over time.
Earthsea has some of the best world building of all time, but I'm not sure I'd say it was written for grade schoolers.
I feel like Earthsea is appropriate for middle-school-aged kids (so like 11-14ish), right? Maybe our definitions of "grade schoolers" is different, but I was trying to give examples for a wide range of ages
Actually that's totally fair. There's just some heady concepts in there, it certainly makes HP look much more childish and goofy.