Re: Everyone is special in one's own way...
Originally posted by Maharlika
...that is how the HP series seem to be telling me. Almost all characters would display a seeming flaw and yet they would have their time to blossom and come through in the story.
Are we really being too paranoid by putting too much hidden meanings in Rowling's HP series... 
If you read essays by children's authors or listen to interviews with them, you quickly find out that they've laid out all sorts of ideas both on the surface and beneath it, in an effort to carefully orchestrate the effects they have on kids. Don't take my word for it; go check out Seuss on Seuss, for instance, and that's written for a considerably younger age group, which means there's a lot less going on. I'm not suggesting that you'll find a history of postmodernist structuralism in Green Eggs and Ham, but it does mean that every plot, character, background theme, emotion and action is premeditated for a certain effect.
And if you don't believe this, try looking up the author's requirements of several leading children's publication houses for the extensive list of ideas they will and won't accept in book submissions.
The way I see it, though, Rowling didn't deliberately set up the idea of a two-tier society; it's just the culture in which she was raised. It was easier to picture a wish fulfillment of a deprived, powerless kid suddenly becoming part of the powerful elite instead of discovering that everybody, including himself, had power.
