It's fitting that Harry Potter grew up at the same age as the most typical of us millennials: like him, we grew tired of the superficiality around us and felt that there was something deeper inside us that made our lives "special", and entitlement is the very kind of thing that his antagonists would taunt him with: what, you think you're entitled to survive, to survive a greater power before you've proven anything, just because you were loved? because, magic? as if the author had written in the script that you should for no reason at all?
Such deus ex machina was typical of the Romantics, but not in Modernist society where everyone must do their due to earn their share in the story. Yet we could not shake the feeling inside us that something more was waiting for us than to be consumed by that very evil. We no longer believed in an author, and yet something revived of a sense of predestination, not that of God, but that of nature. As far as we were concerned, the Modernist quest for humans to prevail over nature, as exemplified in the Nazi eugenics symbolized by Voldemort's, had failed, and we reconnected with something inexplicable within our nature that told us that's what was meant to be. An inborn force within us drove us onwards to fight it, even if its heritage left its mark on us like a scar and we had to fight it within ourselves.
The series drove the individualism of the 90s through into the emotionalism of the 00s, which just goes to show that whether or not a manuscript gets published mostly depends on whether it falls in favor with the prevailing culture: JK Rowling probably took so many years to get published because it took that long for her to get read by a millennial employee.
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