Remake Harry Potter- OK OK OK before you murder me just hear me out. HEAR. ME. OUT!
Remake Harry Potter and make it super queer. Think about it, The Harry Potter universe is about a magic society so make it so that the wizarding world doesn't give a fuck about sex and/or gender because they can change it so easily with magic that worrying about what's in peoples pants or how they present themselves became trivial to them centuries ago. Make Harry trans. Do it.
Now, because in this version of Harry Potter wizard society isn't awful, magic has pretty much freed everyone from scarcity and forced labor
That's right, I'm going to turn Harry Potter into fully automated luxury gay wizard communism
This, of course, requires a full rewrite of the story. Instead of being some boring chosen one story its just going to be shit like "Harry creates a golem with magic and has to deal with the philosophical and ethical implications of bringing life into the world" and stuff like that.
Yeah so basically Star Trek TNG but Fantasy instead of SciFi
Yes, yes, I'm a genius. I just de-libbed your wizardslop. Thank you! You don't all have to clap at once
This also reflects a deeper problem with how magic works in Harry Potter: by reducing it to rules you can learn, spells you can recite, and potions anyone can make if they just follow the instructions well enough, it ceases to be magical. It's just another technology, albeit one you need a certain gene to able to fully use.
To be appropriately magical, magic should have large elements of the unknown (maybe even the unknowable!), and use should come with risks and uncertainties. You're peeking behind the veil, you're tapping powers you don't fully understand. Make it too legible and it not only loses its luster, but invites the audience to endlessly ask "why didn't they just _______?"
you can systematically study any repeatable phenomena, and such studying is one of the few things i'm willing to claim is human nature. A story where magic only works sometimes, not under the control of the users, would just be god from the machine over and over and we'd find it rather boring.
But we don't fully understand the natural world either. Magic should have multiple competing schools of thought just like how science has multiple competing schools of thought. Like, there should be 4-elementists engaged in a bitter struggle with 5-elementists with a 5-elementism schism between true 5-elementism and 4+1-elementism.
If magic is totally random or up to the whims of some obscure power, I'm with you. I'm envisioning something more like taming a wild animal. You can be more or less skilled at it, but there's always some level of uncertainty and danger. There are parts of the interaction you don't (and probably never will) fully understand. Results are never routine or guaranteed.