One of the most important qualities in storytelling is believability: it might not be true, but you want to believe it. And pop fiction resonates at the large s

One of the most important qualities in storytelling is believability: it might not be true, but you want to believe it. And pop fiction resonates at the large scale that it does through its ability to reflect beliefs that people already hold. Sometimes this is a short-lived thing like the narratives of an electoral cycle. Other times it is a larger founding myth like "the land of the free" or "he died on the cross for our sins". And what people do is seek out the media that help reinforce those beliefs. They look for talk shows that are like their politics, and stories about heroes that are like them in some way. And so, for every long-lived franchise there is a subtle interplay between the fan demographic and the kind of story that they believe in so wholly that they will dwell on it and seek out every last piece of merchandise. With Star Wars, most analysis views it as an accidental Rorschach blot: it addresses multiple political beliefs in a way that lets you read into the story the things you want to see. This is an extremely delicate balance, hence every Star Wars sequel(even when the original trilogy was in its theatrical run) has been a source of enormous fan controversy. Harry Potter has a more obviously polarizing context: Harry does not seriously address the everyday issues of the wizarding world, they're just a backdrop to the elite power struggle he's thrust into. Topics like house elf slavery or mudblood discrimination are simply dropped on the floor, rather than being addressed with satire like in a Terry Pratchett novel. And so HP appeals in the sense of normalizing society as a fixed form, with unsolvable problems and nobly entitled actors within it; the longstanding HP fan, you may notice, does not self-describe as a muggle. It's an interesting thing to do, to go through and do this analysis by belief, to determine why cops like the Punisher or why battle royale games became so popular in the 2010's. I don't think it's actually that new a phenomenon, it just becomes more obvious after you get older and realize that some people never stop being fans.