Your connection with Harry Potter is actually a very good one.

Harry Potter is a completely implausible book about a magical wizard with talking animals, mythical creatures, a car that flies, giant snakes, time travel, evil monsters come to steal your soul, the whole thing is highly ridiculous.

Not really. Harry Potter is a book about believing in yourself, about doing what is right when it is very hard, about standing up to authority, about the importance of quality friends, about how the power to overcome evil arises from unlikely places, about hope, about standing up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, about believing in something enough to give your life for it.

Reading Harry Potter as if it is an expose of a real wizarding society is perhaps the dumbest possible way to read it. It is full of obvious plot holes, the description of magic is completely impractical, and yet continuing along this path we will find no explanation for its massive popularity, other than perhaps nearly everyone in the whole world is suffering from mass delusion.

But there is more to our world than the mere accumulation of all facts, Pokedex-style, of the mindless and mechanical separation of claims into piles marked "true" and "false". Harry Potter is not a real wizard, but there is a real wizard inside each of us, a wizard that wants to believe that we too can make the world a magical place if we are willing to fight for what is right. For some of us, that wizard has awoken. Others are still waiting for Hagrid to come and show us our Hogwarts Letter that will at last demonstrate that we have been wizards all along.

Harry Potter is not a true story, but it is a True story. It is a story that tells us something True about ourselves, something shocking, and unexpected, but at the same time familiar, and that we really understood all along. To set all that aside and instead focus on why Platforms 9 and 10 are literal but Platform 9¾ isn't, is so incredibly far removed from how I read the book that I have no idea how to answer that question. If you want to navigate the London Underground, you are in the wrong place. Harry Potter is a book about navigating life.