Harry Potter was a smash hit about a boy discovering he’s a wizard and going to school in a magical world full of wonder and adventure. Twilight didn’t hit quite that high a note, but the story of a teenage girl who learns her classmate is a vampire and falls in love with him did quite well. The Hunger Games popularized the dystopian genre with a bow wielding teenager stepping up to survive death games, have angsty romances, and fight the power.
As far as I can tell, nothing has quite hit that same kind of high since and it may be awhile until the next truly big wave. But if it were up to you, what would the next big thing be about?
I could see the wrong writer really horribly dropping the ball on that too. Just nonchalantly explaining it away with some convenient excuse (not unlike Rowling) for why the non-magical folks didn’t get it.
“Luckily for Thom the blacksmith his daughter was a witch, and she’d enchanted his forge to always keep the perfect temperature so long as he was the one using it. He missed her while she was away at school, and things could sometimes get confusing for him. It was a challenge, not talking about her for the months that she was away, but she’d clearly explained to him that the magical charm that kept the rest of the village from remembering her while she was away could be disrupted if anything pushed them to remember. So it was that Thom spent 9 months of the year pretending he never had a daughter, and the remaining 3 months attempting to hide his joy at her return lest someone in the village suspect her of witchcraft”
Now all of a sudden something that could be an interesting and nuanced problem to overcome is just a “teehee they did a memory charm on the silly muggles”