I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it’s pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.

The series goes from “magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully,” to machine gun wands.

Eliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic