Harry Potter was a smash hit about a boy discovering he’s a wizard and going to school in a magical world full of wonder and adventure. Twilight didn’t hit quite that high a note, but the story of a teenage girl who learns her classmate is a vampire and falls in love with him did quite well. The Hunger Games popularized the dystopian genre with a bow wielding teenager stepping up to survive death games, have angsty romances, and fight the power.
As far as I can tell, nothing has quite hit that same kind of high since and it may be awhile until the next truly big wave. But if it were up to you, what would the next big thing be about?
School settings are really popular for YA media. You give kids the familiarity - they relate to mean teachers, school bullies, that bond of friendship you make with people you see every day, boring stuff like homework. You put the characters in a setting that’s comfortable - school, where bad things have a hard time getting in - while still giving them independence (since it’s a boarding school so they can do stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do at an American public school). So then you can throw in the whatever to make readers be like “wow this is so relatable yet I’m enthralled by the fantasy aspects!”
The trouble is I can’t think of a lot of school-set stories that were successful in utilizing the setting, except Degrassi which was a little magical since people just kept disappearing off the face of the planet there. But that wasn’t a book series. Except when it was.
Like someone else said the problem with a magic school these days is it’s inevitably going to draw “Oh, like Harry Potter?” comparisons, and just like Rowling got accused of ripping stuff off just for doing totally normal school tropes, you would get accused of ripping her off for having the mean teacher, the friendly teacher, the weird teacher everyone but the bully liked, stealing from classrooms, whatever.
BUT I think there’s some potential in having a magic school that’s just… not modern. I mean I’ve been super interested to know how the fuck Hogwarts worked when it was built, when you could be executed if people thought you were a witch, and people living in the south of England wouldn’t have the funds or means to travel to Scotland and would have no good way of explaining where Ivy the blacksmith’s daughter was for 9 months of the year for 7 years.
So like, if someone wanted to do a magic school series and not feel super Harry Pottery, you could just… set it in medieval times. Since obviously Rowling cares more about other things than explaining any of that stuff.
I could see the wrong writer really horribly dropping the ball on that too. Just nonchalantly explaining it away with some convenient excuse (not unlike Rowling) for why the non-magical folks didn’t get it.
“Luckily for Thom the blacksmith his daughter was a witch, and she’d enchanted his forge to always keep the perfect temperature so long as he was the one using it. He missed her while she was away at school, and things could sometimes get confusing for him. It was a challenge, not talking about her for the months that she was away, but she’d clearly explained to him that the magical charm that kept the rest of the village from remembering her while she was away could be disrupted if anything pushed them to remember. So it was that Thom spent 9 months of the year pretending he never had a daughter, and the remaining 3 months attempting to hide his joy at her return lest someone in the village suspect her of witchcraft”
Now all of a sudden something that could be an interesting and nuanced problem to overcome is just a “teehee they did a memory charm on the silly muggles”