More thought than goes into most stories of the genre, that's for sure. JKR was undoubtedly lucky to get picked up by such a broad demographic of readers, but as far as I can tell her worldbuilding is pretty good, and in line with the other good works of a similar genre.

Yeah, worldbuilding fails under close inspection, but that's not new to YA, or to sci fi and fantasy in general. I think she's doing pretty well with what she's put forward to convey emotion and adventure and excitement and horror, since I'm sure that was her major goal, not putting all the building blocks of a functional society in place.

That's wandwork, not actual cooking.

Nope: the house elfs do the cooking in the kitchens, and the magic just transports it to the hall. Apparently they also do all the cleaning in the castle, and probably transport the kids' luggage about, as well.

So even if they don't pay salaries to the house elfs, they do have to buy supplies, and pay the teachers and whatnot.

What ita said, more or less. I don't think the actual target audience of the books would care about how Hogwarts was funded, and explaining it without having that information relevant to the plot would have been a lot of boring backstory.

It doesn't bother me either, though. I read the books for the emotional touchpoints of Harry's journey, not the details.

But isn't a lot of it taken care of magically? Those big feasts, for instance. That's wandwork, not actual cooking.

They say in the last book that you can't magically produce food -- even if there's magic used for going from raw ingredients to final plate, they still have to get the raw ingredients from somewhere.

explaining it without having that information relevant to the plot would have been a lot of boring backstory.

See the Girl w/ a Dragon Tattoo books and the structure of the Swedish government amongst many, many other things.

I would love to see her tackle her world from an adult perspective. AT least in a short story. Politics and economics and and class conflict outside of emergency situations.

I do have the sense that she has gobs and gobs of material she's written down to backstop the universe, even if she hasn't published it.

I think this is true of the characters - it's been widely reported that even very minor background characters have unpublished storylines and family trees, etc. But I never got the impression that she cared much about practical matters unless it was directly relevant to the plot (House elfs, Gringotts, etc)

Anyone remember a fanfic story that came out shortly after Deathly Hallows was published, beginning just after the epilogue, where Harry's son gets sorted into Slytherin and becomes best friends with Malfoy's son, and then there's something with them getting lost in some caves or tunnels? I remember thinking it took an interesting perspective on some of the issues with Slytherin, but I can't remember enough details to google it. Scorpius has the nickname Scops in that story, I'm pretty sure.

Oh, that sounds familiar, Hil. And don't Malfoy and Harry have to go looking for the kids together?

Yes, I know that one. I think we have a link to it on PolyRecs.