That’s another thing that HPMOR covers. It says that wizards and witches are just generally sturdier than normal humans, and that medical magic makes things even less dangerous.
Not Quidditch shows up much. Nor dueling. Those still occur, but the focus is on the mock battles between the three generals Harry, Hermione, and Draco.
I was trying to make a larger point, and may have been inappropriately specific there. Mea culpa. I thought Rowling actually did quite a good job of illustrating how fascists take control of democratic governments, and that the details of the complaint actually pointed out how well she had done it.
She did post an official answer to that sort of question:
Oh, indeed. There’s a lot of official content added post-book, Pottermore, the side books, etc; I just don’t care about anything besides the first 7 books. Thanks for the quote though. 
Or then there’s the way that the Dresden Files books handle the “Muggle” ignorance of the magical world: There are no laws at all against wizards or magical creatures revealing themselves. Most of the wizards consider it distasteful and low-class for Dresden to openly advertise himself as a wizard, but there are no repercussions for it. Ignorance of magic is entirely enforced by the ignorant: It turns out that humans are naturally very good at believing what we want to believe, and conveniently ignoring what we don’t want to believe. But those few who do genuinely develop an interest in the supernatural world find it surprisingly easy to find information about it.
That sort of solution turns up in more than a few urban fantasy works, and a lot of horror or horror-adjacent works. I’ve always thought it didn’t make any sense. In the real world, a lot of people believe in ghosts and angels and cryptids and UFOs and psychic abilities and all sorts of other supernatural stuff. Wicca and magick and other sorts of spellcasting aren’t as common, but there are still quite a few people that very clearly believe they can cast spells. In a lot of areas of the world outside of the U.S. and the UK, magic is a pretty well-accepted, mainstream part of life. There are multiple “reality” TV shows about most of these topics.
Most people don’t deny the reality of the supernatural.
I think Dead Like Me, a series about grim reapers living - well, undeading, I guess - among mortals, did have an episode where they dealt with this. One of the Reapers reveals his real nature to a goth girl he’s interested in, and she promptly freaks out. Then there’s some handwaving about how a lot people think they believe in weird, dark stuff, but when they’re confronted by the actual physical reality of it, they can’t handle it. Which sort of worked for that series, but they also had the dodge that most mortals simply can’t perceive most of the supernatural world.
Even if it requires some handwaving and involves some internal contradictions, “veil” solutions like the ones in the Percy Jackson series mentioned upthread allow me to suspend my disbelief a lot more effectively. Especially since the “people see what they want to see” solution is effectively telling me I’m personally stupid, dull, incurious, and willfully blind.
Well, in the Dresden books, there’s a fair amount of chaff to sort through, at least: Early on in the series, when he was spending more time working for hire than saving the world, a large chunk of his cases were investigating a haunted house or ancient curse or whatever, and he says that about 90% of them aren’t actually supernatural. So someone who’s casually into the occult is probably still mostly off-base, especially if they don’t have the magical senses to tell at a glance when there’s genuine magic present.
And yet, no matter how many people insist that such things are real, there’s always some person like James Randi who makes a highly-successful career out of debunking their claims. The main-stream media is unanimous in quietly snickering at claims of “little green men,” etc. The government, to the extent that official notice is taken at all, steadfastly claims there’s nothing to it. No matter how wide-spread belief in such things is, there’s always a low-level but pervasive feeling in society that no rational person would believe in such things. And anybody who makes specific claims, such as seeing a UFO up close, is always mocked and scorned.
James “The Amazing” Randi made a highly successful career out of being a magician. He had a sideline in debunking paranormal claims, which cost him money. The only skeptic I can think of off-hand who actually has made a true career out of it, as his primary source of income, is Michael Shermer. The number of “professional” skeptics is vastly outnumbered by the number of professional psychics, ghost hunters, paranormal writers, and others on the “woo” side.
Have you been following the media coverage of “UAPs” at all over the last couple of years? The reporting, including at such bastions of the mainstream media as The New York Times, has been largely credulous. It’s only been in the last few weeks that’s there’s been any sort of push-back in the mainstream media. And any number of U.S. Senators and other prominent politicians and commentators have pushed for “disclosure” and investigation into the “phenomenon”. The official Pentagon UAP report that was just released hardly amounted to a steadfast claim that “there’s nothing to it” - it explicitly recommended significantly more resources to study “it”. It’s true the report wasn’t the “disclosure” the Ufology community has been demanding and/or anticipating for decades, but it’s been spun by many of them as an official admission.
I don’t think that feeling is anything like as widespread and pervasive as you’re making it out to be. Take a look at this survey from Chapman University of Americans in 2018:
And this sort of idea is also extremely American/Eurocentric. Astrology is part of mainstream discourse in India. Feng shui is a mainstream element of architecture in much of East Asia. “Witches” are being murdered in some areas of Africa.
Or given a book contract and a publicity tour.
But beyond all that, in the context of the fictional worlds we’re discussing, this stuff is provably real. Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge would have been collected within days. Paranormal Activity and it’s ilk wouldn’t be low-budget movies, they’d be high-profile documentaries.
As many, many others have pointed out, as high-resolution digital cameras have become ubiquitous, we’ve gotten definitive evidence of police brutality and casual racism in the U.S., but not of ghosts, UFOs, and bigfoot. In a world where ghosts are demonstrably real, and 58% of Americans already believe in them, how can “people see what they want to see” possibly be a reasonable explanation for why the existence of ghosts isn’t just an accepted element of the world?
If you haven’t read it yet, you probably will enjoy reading the fanfic “The Muggle Way” by justaguy aka imjustaguy. It touches on a lot of the same points you outlined in your post, with the addition of it also being a crossover with BtVS.
I’d be interested in reading more good fanfic that shows smart muggles using the power and resources available to governments to go after Voldemort.
It’s been a long time since I read the books and then watched the movies; which Dursley neighbor was identified as a squib? And which novel was this in?
Arabella Figg, as mentioned in DRPK’s post up a few replies.
She appears briefly in Order of the Phoenix.
Another name mentioned very briefly is Marius Black, who was also a squib and was disowned by the Black family.
The authorities blamed it on a unexpected swaying resonance caused by footsteps of the people crossing the bridge, which caused it to shake and twist and collapse.
There is a lot of urban fantasy that plays with this trope - Dresden Files, Pax Arcana, The Rivers Of London, Alex Verus.
The end result of putting modern weapons on an equal footing with magic spells is that you end up with overwhelming military force being a critical part of any magical event, and subsequent firefights and piles of expendable mercenary bodies that need just as much covering up as the use of magic itself.
People might not believe in magic or monsters, but they are going to a little worked up about black-clad mercenaries in tactical gear lighting up central London or waterside Chicago …
The scoring in tennis is just four points a game, or whomever is up by two. The “40-30-15-love” thing is an odd little terminology quirk but it’s really just up to four points as long as you win by two, no more complex than that. You could just count zero-one-two-three-win and change nothing. Tennis scoring is perfectly sensible.
J.K. Rowling is actually quite a good writer at what the original book was supposed to be. The explosion of the Harry Potter universe was, obviously, not part of any well scoped out plan; it just took off and she understandably kept writing stuff as they kept handing her increasingly gigantic bags of money.
If you go back and read “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” it’s an excellent kids’ book and a fine standalone story with room for sequels. The book is perfectly written for its intended audience - children. If you’re ten years old, it’s absolutely first rate not because ten year olds aren’t smart, but because Rowling concentrates on what ten year olds identify with. Look all good stories, it’s about how you feel.
In a re-read you might be surprised how much of the book is preoccupied with Harry’s fear of rejection and failing to belong. He is a kid who belongs nowhere, an outsider, a feeling all kids go through. He is unwanted and powerless. He seems to have no friends and until he learns he is a wizard, he is forgettable, without any interesting skills. Adults either don’t like him or they are mysterious and don’t tell him the full truth about anything. All kids feel that way sometimes. Hogwarts is a fantasy of both power (“you’re a wizard, Harry!”) and belonging; suddenly, out of nowhere, someone wants him around. Then he is faced with the periodic possibility that they won’t want him around anymore, and his fear of that is positively palpable. He longs for acceptance and companionship, and ultimately his big decision is whether to do the right thing in going after the macguffin, which risks expulsion, which he seems to fear more than physical harm. The book ticks all the boxes of the ten-year-old kid who feels like they don’t have friends and they’re different and rejected, which at some point is ALL ten-year-olds. Rowling just absolutely hits that right in the bullseye, again and again.
Then after that book suddenly it’s about having to build the world exponentially and it becomes about making it appeal to adults. No one who ever lived could have pulled it off with anywhere near the skills with which the first book was pulled off.
I don’t think we’re really disagreeing. I agree, the first book especially caught on for all the reasons you said. All I’m saying is that a lot of the “funny parts” of the world building–the weird primary number monetary system, the cluelessness of wizards regarding muggles, even the tiny amount of students at Hogwarts–is fine when it’s a book about a lonely boy and his new, somewhat misfit friends. You’re right, Philosopher’s Stone is a fine children’s book. Heck, I totally thought she nailed book five with Harry as an angry fifteen year old. His frustrations with the adults in the world were right on and readers easily sympathized because we knew he was right. But between the change in readers (it’s not the first YA book series to be picked up later by adults, but it might be the biggest phenomenon I can think of) and the increase in scope, the cracks show. You’re right, there might not be an author alive who could have handled that transition, especially with the strictures placed on the series.
She went big, with implications for all of Britain, at least magical Britain (and one wonders what the interaction between Europe, the US, and the UK would be like if Voldemort had won) and the bigger the society got and the more “sophisticated” the readers got the more questions that could be asked about the society. Nobody asks questions about the effects of having a specie based monetary system with no known equivalent of our modern economic system when the scene is Harry in a massive vault with the equivalent of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin left for him. These all get asked later by jackasses like me, trying to poke holes in the world building. But to me, even the things she actually wrote tend to feel flat as the world expands.