And in general wizards and warlocks and witches are depicted as evil or fraudulent, in L. Frank Baum, for example; the classic film adaptation of the Wizard of Oz manages to depict them as both, in that you have diabolical, yet incompetent, witches, and a fraudulent wizard who is actually an illusionist using smoke and mirrors and a giant projection system.
That's Glinda erasure, and I won't stand for it.
ROFL! You got me Arachne; I forgot about her. How, I can’t imagine. Although she falls into the category of a fairy godmother type ala Sleeping Beauty, but she is indeed referred to as a witch.
And this is another glorious instance of the infantilisation of fairy tales: only evil magical women are witches - nice magical women have to be fairies. Heh, in traditional folklore, fairies are terrifying; amoral at best, actively malevolent at worst. Calling them Fair Folk is the western equivalent of calling the Furies the Kindly Ones in an attempt to deflect their wrath.
In folk tales of the British Isles, with which Rowling is likely to have been familiar growing up, witches (and wizards) are people with knowledge that the common folk don't have, and they can use that knowledge to help or harm the common folk, depending on their character and the circumstances. They are often seen doing both; after all, a witch who cannot hex cannot heal. 
Good points.
In Ameirca witch craft has been characterized exactly opposite, satanic instead of gnostic or esoteric knowledge. And in typical American fashion, we only see things through our eyes and not the eyes of the creator.
Harry potter is just another in a long line of Good vs Evil stories.
People will take anything ans try to bend it to their beliefs.
You'll probably like this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/why-the-british-tell-better-childrens-stories/422859/
That is a good article. To sum it up in one sentence, Americans tell stories with moral social issues, while the brits tell stories in a fantasy folklore way.
Personally i love the first 3 star wars more than potter, or lotr. Theres notning like space. But i grew up back then, so maybe im a little biased.
If Star Wars isn't a fairytale, I don't know what is. 'A long time ago in a galaxy far far away' is literally 'Once upon a time'.
Indeed so. It even has magic via the force. It is a Space Opera, to be sure, but one which leans towards what some people call “Science Fantasy.” On that note, Arthur C. Clarke famously said any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, and the greatest living critic of science fiction and fantasy after the tragic death of his collaborator Peter Norman, that being the Canadian critic John Clute, has, in frustration with the grey area betwixt fantasy and science fiction, advocated the use of “Fantastika” to refer to the two genres in a unified sense, as a meta-genre.
This works because in many of the best cases, it can be really hard to tell the two apart. Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett and EE “Doc” Smith are obvious examples, the Space Trilogy of CS Lewis even more so, but people forget that even allegedly “hard sci fi” authors like Robert A. Heinlein, wrote, in addition to very technical stories such as The Roads Must Roll or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, flamboyant space operas like Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, fantastic fiction about Mars, such as Stranger in a Strange Land, and straight-up fantasy ranging from “And he built a crooked house” to Waldo, Magic Inc., Job, a Comedy of Justice, and The Number of the Beast, to name just a few.
And conversely, in writers like HP Lovecraft, whose works of supernatural horror are obvious fantasy, there is also a persistant science fiction element as well.
For that matter, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, by its own admission in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, that series, all are fantasies as much as they are works of science fiction. Science fiction which is devoid of a fantastic element tends to be dry and boring; the only author who accomplished it was Heinlein, and he was quite gifted (The Roads Must Roll is literally a story about a network of escalators and moving sidewalks, but it is also thrilling; how does one make escalators and moving walkways exciting? That in itself comes across as magical, almost).
I have to confess Arachne I greatly admire your appreciation for the genre of fantastic literature.
