At this point I think some fantasy author should just bite the bullet and write a novel where a teenager protagonist lives as a secret magic-user in our world and tries to master their skills in a magic school, but it is explicitly not an English or American protagonist, and the more they start to understand the world they live in, they more they realise that globally magic practicioners are being heavily scrutinisied and supressed by an anglo-american hegemony, which was established during England’s imperial years and has survived to this day as the “global magical hegemony” where England has an unfair advantage over all others because they stole almost all powerful magical artefacts and now refuse to give them back.
And as the protagonist gets more involved in the ways magic outside of anglo-saxon cultural sphere is being supressed, the more the reader will realise that we are referencing Harry Potter here. People will talk about “That English school” where most hegemony enforcers are alumni from. People will share urban legends that they still allow segrecation and slavery in England, and no one will believe them “because come one, we live in the 21st century” but that one character who worked with the English keeps unnervingly quiet. And there are references to a dangerous high-level enforcer with green eyes who is also a war veteran, who isn’t an evil guy, but from the point of view of the story is very much an antagonist.
And the world is built in such a way that it slots seamlessly into Rowling’s canon, but at the same time not a single Harry Potter related thing is actually named. And obviously there should be a lot of friction regarding the fact that a lot of magic traditions around the world are built around the assumption that Gender-noncomformity and crossdressing and gender-identities outside from the “mundane” two sex system are signs of magical identity, expect for the Anglo-saxon hegemony which very agressively will stamp down on those traditions.
And now that I’m stream-of-consciousness writing all this down, I realise that the story should obviously climax with a heist, where a group misfits try to break into the hidden magical floor of the British Museum and steal back some artefacts.
And the story should be an anthology between several different writers from different countries, all disillusioned HP fans.