Ask Lemmy

Harry's character is larger-than-life strong, but that's fictional heroes for you.

This one can actually be known, since you're just talking about human nature. I do think it's possible to come out of the situation strong willed. He'd need other strong parental figures, such as teachers. It would also require a great amount of resilience, and would no doubt leave with a fair share of mental health issues. But you could totally be emboldened even after a traumatic upbringing like that.

Doesn't Hermione also have a basically infinite bag of holding? It really doesn't make sense

While I think that can be explained away with the idea that the magic is so OP they don't actually need to know science. To use the Rowlings own tidbit as an example, why bother with toilets when you can simply magic away your shit.

And that also leads to what IMO is the biggest plot point nobody really thinks about. That there's a secret society of magic users who almost exclusively use magic, and the "muggle" society has no idea of its existence.

Think about all the things we've discovered. Electromagnetism is pretty much magic, we figured that out. Atoms are pretty much magic, not only did we figure out atoms we figured out what atoms consist of. Einstein predicted black holes, something so out there that even Einstein doubted his prediction, we later discovered and modeled it. We can literally come up with absolutely insane ideas and then come up with ways to prove or disprove those ideas. There's no chance we wouldn't figure out the existence of magic and a secret society if we saw glimpses of something that makes us go "hmm, that's interesting".

You could argue that they use magic to hide magic from us, but they'd have to know about what we are doing to make sure we don't accidentally stumble into discovering magic. But Arthur Weasley makes it pretty clear wizards don't understand how our world works. They don't know what we're doing so their secret society is literally at the mercy of us not just noticing it.

So the secret of society pretty much exists on the premise that we're too stupid to figure out Magic, but smart enough to create the society we have.

I think like the vast majority of them are just dumb and some are like savants. Everyone other than like a couple people in the book are just copying magic routinely. Only Snape and a few other characters are cooking up any new magic theory.

That would explain a lot of the nonsense in their society

I mean I don't think that's a plot hole at all actually. That's just like how the world works. People change schools. There's tons of people I knew in one school and then when I moved to another I lost contact with completely. That's how life works.

As for the dursley's keeping their mouth shut, there were you know threats involved. At multiple times they're threatened by a giant who mutilated their child at one point. Plus there's the whole institutional Threat Level involving being able to make you forget who you are. Also pretty sure Harry does snap a couple times.

Who would believe him? If Dudley or his family started claiming there were wizards out to get them they would go to the Looney bin.

They can also mind wipe people. In Fantastic Beasts Newt obliviates all of New York City with the Thunderbird.