Give me magic and give me danger. My favorite fiction is all science fiction and fantasy, and I've only been reading books with real stakes since shortly after I learned to read.

 

Boarding School + Magic (No Real Danger) has kind of been done in Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I got bored and dropped it.

 

Magic + Real Danger. I"m fine with an 11 year old protagonist. I think the story would work really well as a survival story of Harry on the run with different mentors over the years. Running from death eaters and Voldemort.

 

Magic and Real Danger. Without the danger the stakes will always be artificial and come across without meaning. Magic breaths life into the setting in a way that without is it really still Harry Potter at that point? We can work around the boarding school and still craft great stories.

 

Pretty much what those two said re: danger.

 

My least favourite parts of Harry Potter are the 'ordinary' bits. The sections where the kids are portrayed as just kids at a boarding school, who happen to be witches and wizards.

While I can't stand stories with child protagonists these days, I could imagine a story where an adult rescues Harry from the Dursleys and it goes a route not tied with traditional schooling.

 

I guess boarding school + magic could be a very interesting slice of life story, exploring magical society and what it means to grow up in one.

 

To me boarding school feels like an excuse to leave the kids without adult supervision, which then leads to real danger. But then, boarding schools are also like magic to me, as I live in a country where those are a totally foreign concept in the first place.

I remember reading these adventure books when I was younger about boys just doing crazy stuff (=real danger) on their own on summer vacation, but they were set in the 1950's when I guess it was more ok for parents to let their kids run about the city and go boating on their own. Having similar situation in modern days would feel like abandonment.

But yeah, magic and real danger is the answer for me, too.

 

I went with Boarding School + Magic, because Boarding School is one of the few contexts I can think of where I'd be ok reading a book with such a young protagonist these days. When I was younger I would probably have enjoyed the real world 11 year old celebrity being targeted by an international terrorist who killed the kids parents type of thing, but I can't see myself getting into that now.

 

I voted Boarding School + Magic, possibly against my better judgment, but, well, I thought of it this way. Prisoner of Azkaban is the traditional answer for people's favorite Harry Potter book, and yet it's the one with the least Voldemort in it. Why is that? I remember a thread asking about the question a while back, and I tended to agree with the answers, about it expanding the world and magic, while also featuring Harry putting in steady work and being rewarded for his diligence. Granted, that book still had plenty of (perceived) danger from Sirius, but I think that at least stands as evidence that we don't need Voldemort for Harry Potter to be good.

And on the other hand, sacrificing Hogwarts means sacrificing the setting, and having to create a new centerpoint of the story mostly from scratch. And, well, I don't have a ton of confidence that Rowling would have been able to handle that tightrope particularly well. Voldemort himself is two-dimensional, Wizarding government is useless whenever it's not impeding the protagonists, Wizarding mainstream media lampoons the protagonists under any circumstance - in fawning deference to the government when it's at odds with the heroes, and gleefully defiant of the government when it's on good terms with the main characters. Well, Half-Blood Prince is an exception, but only because the Prophet figured out that calling Harry the messiah would bug him a lot more than calling him crazy ever could. And I get the sense I'm in the minority on this, but as far as I'm concerned the Fantastic Beasts series has been an unfocused waste so far. So set adrift from the school, I expect the story would suffer a lot since Rowling isn't great at worldbuilding. The boarding school thing enabled her to keep that to a minimum and get away with it.

So bottom line, Voldemort is more dispensable than Hogwarts is in my eyes. And really, when you put it like that, I don't see how there's a contest.

 

Hogwarts and Magic are really what makes the Harry Potter series unique. With those two you can have coming of age stories, teen comedies, even a good mystery stories.

Without those two it's just not the same. It may be good but it would feel less 'Harry Potter-ish'.

 

I changed my vote to boarding school + magic after reading the comments in the thread, in particular TRH's thoughts on Prisoner of Azkaban. I initially voted magic + real danger, as that makes sense for a better plot as Ched draws attention to at the beginning of this thread. As I child I read Harry Potter and hoped for that world to be real, and while I hoped to be as brave as Harry against the Death Eaters and Voldemort, what I really was hoping for was not the danger so much as a Hogwarts letter.

I don't think I would want to go to a British public school such as Eton though, but as a kid I didn't really know about the real world antecedents of Hogwarts.

Someone mentioned Grossman's The Magicians above as failing as a book because it is only comprised of boarding school + magic and not real danger. I am not sure I agree with that, but that's not why I mention it here. I really like The Magicians trilogy (I know this is a minority view on DLP), and part of the reason for that is because I can recognize in the protagonist Quentin the same desire for magic and fantasy to be real that I and many readers of HP feel.

 

It's interesting that when I found this thread the votes were roughly 2:1 in favor of Magic+ Real Danger, and now it's pulling close to even with Boarding School + Magic. Obviously this is entirely attributable to my incredible analytical abilities and charisma and wasn't already happening while I was typing out my piece.

 

Magic + Real Danger.

Most of things that piss me off about the series are related to how shittily that school is run and how incompetent the staff are.

 

For me, Magic is the only must. I don't care if it's a slice of life with boarding school antics. Or a dangerous romp in the wild. So long as it has magic and fantasy and the wonder inherent than that's enough for me.

Yeah, when I was younger I read books with mystery+danger with child protags but I also read mystery+danger+magic with child protags and while I liked them both, for any type of Harry Potter I can't stand no magic au's. I think just by putting it as a rewritten HP you've biased everyone into not voting for the no magic option lol.