But it's not about death, Mr. James, though a lot of death happens in it. It's about making choices and living through things as well as you can. And other things. There's plenty of themes if you're willing to see them.
Dumbledore had to raise Harry to die, but he didn't settle for that. He raised him to want to live, but be willing to die.
All her virtues and faults were laid out in this book; the virtues, better
than in others, because you got the repeated satisfying "snap" as plot
points slotted into place, whereas before we were assuming that a lot of
loose ends would have payoffs and taking it on trust (or not; though why people who weren't willing to do that read the books; or people who won't read the books insist on sneering at them; are choices I don't comprehend).
What Lois McMaster Bujold says about her Star Trek fandom in "The Unsung Collaborator," an essay in *Dreamweaver's Dilemma," a collection of short pieces, is apropos here.
"So anyway, I and about six of my girlfriends would gather every Thursday evening for what my parents called 'the prayer meeting,' and we would enjoy the show vociferously. my parents were baffled, and it was only lately, watching the show in very cold blood, that I have realized why. They thought that what they were seeing on the screen, the plot and effects and dialog, was all there was. They had no conception of how much work our willing brains were doing on the initial stimulus after our senses took it all in. We took the show in and fixed it, and it was to this fixed-up version that we gave our passionate response."
All shows are watched, and all books are read, and all music is heard, in this way. It is not finished till the audience absorbs it. And many people respond, positively or negatively, not to the real work, but to the passionate response. There are fans who have no taste of their own, but like or dislike what is wildly popular because it is wildly popular.
My own response to HP is very much like my response to ST - I don't see that it merits being the phenomenon it is, but I regard the phenomenon itself as valid. Whether the HP phenomenon will continue to have any long-lasting influence and whether that influence is, on balance, for good or ill, can't be predicted. It's uncertain about ST forty years later, come to that. Nobody ever acquired this level of pop culture visibility by deserving it or by design. It just happens, or, more likely, doesn't.
The world is unfair and it doesn't make sense, so we may as well enjoy what we can and refrain from spending money on what we can't.