I’m mostly in the same boat.
Hogarts was interesting to me. Clearly a lot of thought went into the primary setting and all the fantasy and non-Euclidean elements.
But the titular protagonist himself was almost surgically devoid of character. Harry Potter was not special. His parents were special. And as dysfunctional as his foster family was, they still had drives and personality.
Harry Potter, in the books I read, was not important to the plot in the slightest. The plot just happened around him.
I’ve never really thought about it like that, but have to agree with you. Harry is completely devoid of character. As someone who fell in love with reading/fantasy as a result of these books, I loved the wizarding world. I didn’t really have any care for Harry, or even much for the story that he’s a part of - just the setting, and the other characters.
I wonder if Harry’s transparency makes it easy for a young reader to project their own personality onto him, and kind of ‘roleplay’ their way through the series? I think the fact that the wizarding world is ‘bolted onto’ reality facilitates this - it feels almost tangible. May explain why nostalgia is so high among this particular group - it was an experience, not just a story.
Does this make Rowling a genius? Or do her books just benefit from the side-effect of her writing a bad MC?
I would argue that offering fans a template goes miles towards to how… sandboxy the series becomes. (For want of a better term)
For Harry Potter, it was the whole academic experience. How you got admitted, the personality tests; things that enable a safe starting point and allow the fans to go in their own direction.
With Kingdom Hearts back in the day, it was Organization OCs with powers and weapons that followed a template. Similar with Steven Universe and minerals and weapons.