I’m sorry but, I have never been as excited about ML as I am at the thought of being capable of literal magic. You give me Harry Potter world magic, a wand, and a room of requirement and I’ll be damned if anyone sees me for years.

In reality we don’t really see much of what goes on outside of the trio, and we know Hermione sure as shit wasn’t just sitting around gossiping and sipping pumpkin juice.

Snape’s not a great example, but he was spending his free time (at least part of it) developing better ways to brew potions and inventing spells.

From what we know of Lily she was pretty similar to Hermione in that she was really engaged with all the magic stuff.

Maybe the good students just weren’t the interesting ones because, no matter how cool the magic, doing it in the confines of the classroom or workshopping new spells in their free time doesn’t sell the action and the drama.

But maybe you’re better at this than I am

If I had to choose one, I’d hesitantly say The Hunger Games, as it’s easy to read but also has a lot to say about challenging a Communist regime

I think its fairly safe to say that a lot of people would be better at this than you are, if your takeaway from the Hunger Games was “challenging a communist regime”.

Bartimaeus the Djinn from the Bartimaeus sequence by Jonathan Stroud. I feel like those stories wrapped up too nicely for there to be more sequels but lord would I LOVE to have other books with that character as the narrator.

I swear to god reading your description I thought to myself “There is no way that the movie Blended is anyone’s favorite movie” and then I reached the end and thought “well at least I got the same general category”

The first book definitely gives off YA vibes in the vein of something like Hunger Games, or even (to a somewhat lesser extent) Ender’s Game. Without getting too far into the weeds, you have an MC from an oppressed class (a la Katniss) who, through no fault of their own, becomes the “chosen one” of a movement and gets shipped off into a contest where MC along with other “kids” are grouped together into teams and compete for victory (again, Katniss, but also battleschool from Ender’s).

Just from that, someone could easily go “Oh this is YA”

But on the other hand, a LOT happens in this series that I don’t feel like pairs with a YA branding, but a lot of it also exists within something like Hunger Games. Torture, terrorism, etc. The Red Rising series just gets a bit more descriptive about it I suppose.

Kinda like the difference between PG-13 and R sometimes being “you used fuck too many times”

It’s not a romance series by any stretch. The fact that it includes a relationship between the MC and someone else doesn’t make it a romance. Its a YA dystopian novel, it primarily highlights class disparity and dehumanization. The central conflict is not a question of “will their romance work out” it is “will MC survive this grotesque game”.

I picked up a copy of Dante’s Inferno as an adult because I remembered bits of it from school and it was in vogue because of the video game, so I was curious about the actual work. I liked the inferno, but then I forced myself to read purgatario and paradiso even though it felt like a slog to me because ol’ boy was just depressed so even paradise sucked. I feel like, looking back, the only reason to push through those last two was to be a pretentious twit who had read it. It hasn’t come up in my life since, except for this comment.

Not for nothing but, at least in the law & order vein, they are actually legitimately police propaganda. People who routinely watch those shows will skew towards a positive opinion of the police because they’ll imagine that any interaction with the policy is actually them working with Olivia Benson, SVU detective-extraordinaire.

Ok lets workshop this. The bad dinos are carnivores (so that they’re scarier/more threatening/more powerful) and their riders are cruel bullies.

The good dinos are scared, because they don’t have the sharp claws and big teeth of the bad dinos, and only through MainKid’s ingenuity are they able to make plans to deal with the bad dinos, because MainKid is smart, and special, and its just that nobody paid enough attention to see it before. Just like the good dinos, MainKid suffers from low self-confidence but in the process of encouraging the good dinos recognizes their own self-worth and in the final battle, main kid bravely stands up to the bullies which gives the good dinos the last spark of encouragement they needed to fight off the bad dinos.

Then in the sequel you just have another portal open with something else spilling through. Dragons, aliens, whatever. Maybe theres 2 main kids, siblings named Trip and Sara Topp.

Oh my god a Roman sherlock holmes with just a touch of magic (because that mythos is too good to not use) would be so much fun to read.

First mystery could be solving a whodunnit, the killer could be a dr jekyl mr hyde spin, but make it Romulus and Remus. As one he’s just a mild mannered, low level aristocrat. As the other he’s a brutal gladiator with a love for carnage.

I feel like something in the Solarpunk vein would be really solid for that.

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”

I forget what its called exactly, but there’s a few version floating around about how there are only 7 story structures or what have you, and at their most stripped down it could be argued as true. There’s little novelty to things at their most basic. For example, if you reduce them down to their frame both Star Wars and Harry Potter are telling basically the same story. The heroes journey. In fact, take it further than that, both of those are mostly the same as The Belgariad.

All are a boy/young man, orphaned, with a secret origin. Guided by their magical father/grandfather figure, they learn about their past and forge new friendships. There is a prophecy about them specifically, and they are destined to battle a “great evil” with their wits and magic. They’re surrounded by: the big burly one, the comedic relief, the sarcastic hardcase with the heart of gold, etc.

Just like with people, its not the bones that bring the novelty, but the dressing on them.