JK Rowling wrote books for those needing to escape from the real world.
Oh...I think a great deal more can be said about the books she wrote, and fiction in general. It's not just an escape--just as you apparently derive lessons from movies, we can derive lessons from fiction. But of course, her books, like those of many fiction writers, do provide an escape from the real world for a little while.
Sort of like the world in which tens of millions of people believed Biden was mentally fit to take on Trump last November. And then, in that same world where tens of millions believe a DEI-hired substitute was equipped to take on the most powerful politician in the entire world. You know, the one critics enjoy calling him "stupid".
We are going through a fundamental realignment politically speaking. I don't know if you remember the whole "Peak Oil" craze from the early 2000's, but by 2012 people had forgotten it, despite the fundamental science and data behind it remaining the same. The thing that captured people's imaginations for a time about it was a quick collapse scenario, in which society just implodes. They were wrong. Society did not implode by 2012. There were other voices in the Peak Oil movement that everyone ignored because what they were saying was boring compared to the
Inferno-like doom and imminent gloom that the quick collapse folks were saying. Those other voices were telling us that we would go through a decades-long process of rewinding, a slow collapse back to a very different technological and social situation, parts of which are necessarily conservative.
They predicted Trump and MAGA almost to a "T." Now,
some of what Trump is doing is actually good--something you'll find few on the left will ever admit, I'm afraid (and I'm to the left of Bernie Sanders on a lot of issues).
Anyway, the point is that with energy costs rising thanks to us having drained all the "low-hanging fruits," the political units we can have will be smaller, because a central political organ will be less able to project power at range. So we have to go back to smaller political units. Our society will either find common purpose and transcend these limitations, or it will follow them. In the latter instance, we will cease to be a superpower and it is likely that China will extend significant power over the world.
Now here's the nightmare: Xi Xinping is interested in the Han Fei, which is a foundational work in Chinese philosophy. It is a philosophy of extreme legalism, in which whatever the Emperor commands is morally just, and in fact, the Emperor's word defines justice. So, for example, if the Emperor decides that anyone with freckles on their nose should be executed, it becomes morally right for people with freckles on their nose to be executed. Next time you want to feel really bad after reading something, just read the Han Fei. That's what China means to bring to the world as a means of organization. So political movements that fracture society in the name of freedom or whatever other desirable thing are, ironically, making it a little more likely that whatever virtue they're expounding will be extinguished.
OMG! You mean Jack the Ripper was Polish!
That changes everything. Did he have a British accent?
Yes, he was a Polish Jew. The evidence against him is probably about as solid as we're likely to get, but it is pretty damning IMO. In particular, his DNA found on the Eddowes shawl.