How would you imagine a gritty hp world would be? I think it would be like the Dresden world.

 

HP world is actually pretty hardcore if you ask me.

Also be careful on making new threads. There are other threads that probably cover stuff you want to know, such as the 'Questions that dont deserve their own thread' thread.

 

In later books, like Rep said, the world is pretty gritty already.

Easy "grittier" imaginations imo would be a competent and ruthless leadership (Fudge was a joke), wars between countries or against magical creatures, not just Death Eaters vs. the Order.

There's also a ridiculous abuse potential with all the mind control potions (love potions), spells (Imperius, Obliviation, mind reading), binding contracts and the like. But that's rather distasteful.

Magic can be incredibly dangerous. Make a point about that, especially the control and binding of beings part, instead of a group of kids triumphing against a dark and scary villains.

 

Agreed with the above. It's not that HP isn't gritty so much as it is that the potentially gritty elements don't get all that much focus. I mean over the course of the books we get quite a bit of torture, mutilation, mind control, and murder.

 

This is true. This is also why I like the Alexandra Quick series so much. It's less glossed-over than HP.

 

This is something I've often wondered about myself, and when I consider this question, I always end up contemplating Horcruxes. There's a lot of potential for nastiness there.

It's a nice nuance to the idea of a phylactery.

 

The basic issue is that we see it largely from a child's point of view and so the gritty-ness doesn't get brought up as much or isn't as explicit. Underlying most of the HP world it is in many ways just as gritty as Dresden's just without the adult perspective (and with a different magic system).

 

Arthur weasley job looks like a jokes job but actualy quite nasty you know. The only reason its not discuss much by arthur in front of kids and maybe glossed over is because, well, its quite gritty if you know what his job is.

 

Hagrid's dealings in the first book with obtaining Fluffy and Norbert are implied to be pretty shady too. I mean, I figure the Dragon Egg for knowledge of Fluffly situation was Quirrelmort, but it showed that Hagrid has done this sort of deal numerous times.

There were also the Skrewts. So we have, at the very least (also looking somewhat at Knockturn Alley), what seems to be a thriving black market in the wizarding world.

 

Yeah, the whole concept of wizards going "muggle-baiting" is only mentioned in passing once or twice, but all kinds of horrible if you really think about what it means. I mean, there's folks in the wizarding world that consider abusing the nonmagical populace a form of entertainment, and the Ministry doesn't do much more than a bare minimum token effort to stop them.

 

There are some rather frightening and really difficult to discover/prosecute forms of muggle baiting. Just hit a Muggle with a Confundus and/or dose them up with a basic love potion, do the deed, Obliviate them on the way out. I'm willing to bet something like that happens way more often than people are willing to discuss.

How would you even discover something like that? How would you realistically be able to prosecute? And chances are, the DMLE either doesn't have the resources or the motivation to go after something like that, which probably occurs all the time.

The materials for a "gritty" HP world already exist in canon.

 

HP has always been a children's story so it never delved in its most darkest aspects even when this are brought in the readers attention.Concepts like memory modifications,mind reading are pretty terrifying.

 

I think the incompetence of the MoM can contribute to 'grittiness'. The judicial system is a joke. There seems to be no standard of proof. It should be easy for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to determine the truth via Veritaserum or Pensieves, but innocent people still end up in Azkaban.

There is a lot of potential for 'grittiness'. I agree that it only doesn't seem so because we experience the world from Harry's point of view.

 

Veritaserum and Pensieves are not completely reliable methods to determine truth. While Veritaserum is the most powerful truth potion, it can be resisted by Occlumency. Also, it only reveals what the victim thinks is true, so if the victim is delusional or insane, it isn't going to work. Similarly, Pensieves also can't provide definitive proof because memories can be altered, deleted, confounded, or downright inaccurate. After all, there are various ways in the Wizarding World to disguise yourself as another person (polyjuice, animagus, etc).

 

Would you guys then consider the older books to be more "grittier" in the sense that because the books were told by a child's perspective in the beginning, it glossed over a lot of the nastier and shady aspects of the wizarding world and as the series continued, it got darker and darker?

 

Well, the first book concludes with the murder of a professor by an 11 year old child after the former attempted to kill him, first.

I'd say that's pretty dark. Ignoring all the stuff going on earlier, like the Durleys, Quidditch, Snape, the Stone's defenses, the Forbidden Forest, etc.

 

Ironically, perhaps, I'd say books 2, 4, and 6 are the darkest, in terms of how much we learn about truly fucked up things that can be done with magic. Book 1 is already pretty bad though, with the whole two grown men sharing a grotesque body where one is a parasite and the other is doomed, and you have Hagrid in there trading on the black market for dragon eggs and cerberi.

 

Wasn't murder, actually; it was self defense, and it does make a big difference. An eleven year old killing with intent (=murder in British law) is much, much darker than an eleven year old taking a life in self defense.

Yeah, in both cases, someone dies. But the psychological profile of Harry for the former is much, much darker than the profile of Harry for the latter.

 

The Firebird Trilogy does a good job at making the HP wordl gritty. It's an AU so many concepts can't be directly applied to canon, but many ideas can.
One example is that (accidental) magic is highly dangerous. As a consequence, muggleborn children don't have the option of refusing to attend Hogwarts. If the parents try to refuse, they will be oblivated and the child given to a foster family. Horrifying as that is, the idea is not far off.

 

Displaying just a fraction of all the potential abuse of muggles by wizards would make the world far grittier