Part 1 is correct and Part 2 is incorrect.

You have made no arguments to this effect.

Part 2 is wrong not because Harry Potter doesn't have authoritarian themes but because no kids are reading or watching those films and getting the takeaway that "authority is cool" and applying it to their personal lives. You're reading too much into it. You're doing literary criticism that 94% of the population isn't.

We're here arguing in a thread about the 700 bands who have decided to make Harry Potter music. Again, you are denying the gradient: GTA didn't cause kids to go on a murder spree therefore pop culture is utterly without influence on children.

"“Momma! There’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!“

What's interesting to me is that you're arguing against introspection: "You're doing literary criticism that 94% of the population isn't. " One need not be conscious of the symbolism in order for it to have an effect; exactly the opposite in fact. Being consciously aware of something allows one to consider it and embrace it or disarm it as one chooses. being unaware of the symbolism simply gives you a pattern. And patterns matter.

Take your student council example. What would have happened if your fellow students stuck up for you? What would have happened if they collectively walked out? What would have happened if they made themselves ungovernable? My sister's boyfriend didn't want to take his chemistry midterm so he called in bomb threats every day for three weeks. The administration decided we'd make those days up by staying until 5 every day. And at 3, we all got up and walked out. Now - had I gotten up and walked out all by myself, it would have been detention. But everyone? The administration made the prudent choice that the discipline was overshadowing the education and dropped it. In 7th grade there was a beloved teacher who was being let go. 50 students walked 8 miles to the administration (including across a gas pipeline over a canyon that's closed to foot traffic) to demand a reconsideration. They still let the teacher go... but one kid on that pipeline would have been arrested. 50 kids? It made the paper. More than that, it taught the administration not to fuck with us. You tried to run for president of the student council. Me? I declared myself the antichrist. Put handbills up all over the school. When the vice principal sent a minion to summon me to his office, I told the minion that if he had a problem with my freedom of expression he needed to come see me. In the end, the only rule he could get me on was failure to seek pre-approval of a "religious organization" so I had to take them all down. I taped one on my back and added a legal defense fund line and made $28.

Because by that point, they'd been trying to stick it to us at least once a year for five years. And they knew that we weren't going to take it. We. The collective. As a group.

You want to pin this on parents as if somehow parents decided to fuck up childhood. As if they wanted to encourage a culture of acquiescence. As if they wanted to make sure that kids were perpetually under the thumb. As if their kids' heroes should only display token resistance and always do whatever grownups tell them to do.

Red Dawn came out when I was in 6th grade. The Bachman Books were published when I was in 5th. I graduated from a parking lot full of loaded gun racks; Columbine changed the world forever when I was a junior in college.

Adults weren't really afraid of kids until then. But they are now. And a nice, cozy hero story in which the anointed, predestined aristocracy restores order through patience and obedience definitely aligns with the goals.

The difference between my story and your story is Harry Potter. Not Harry Potter exclusively, but a culture that has identified Harry Potter as a "punk rock" rebel rather than a passive simp who lets his stepbrother beat him up on the reg despite being the most bitchin' wizard kid in the history of Hogwart's.

Ask yourself: would Encyclopedia Fucking Brown put up with Dudley Dursley? The authoritarian paradigm is you do what your wicked stepsisters tell you to do until your fairy godmother swoops in to punish their cruelty as a deus ex machina and whisk you to the aristocracy. That's the kind of tale you tell when you want the peasants to be comfortable with their lot. The 20th century, however, was full of Tom Sawyers and Pippi Longstockings.

Katniss Everdeen wouldn't put up with Delores Umbridge. Neither would Tris Prior. And I think that's a good thing.