However, while Harry Potter's world looks like it would be full of whimsical adventures, once you stop and think about all the oppression, violence, and militant isolationism, it's more like the magical equivalent of North Korea. That's because in the Wizarding World ...

Deep down, many of us are still waiting for our Hogwarts acceptance letter to whisk us away from our dreary world of decidedly nonmagical cable bills and trips to Supercuts. And sure, it's a world full of danger in which even a child can't take a piss without fighting a giant troll. But, who wouldn't prefer that to life in a cubicle?

5 The Legal System Protects No One

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Hidden within the Harry Potter stories is another, possibly cooler story than the one we got: a magical legal drama in which dark wizards use ingenious spells to carry out an ethnic cleansing, and agents of the state try to stop them. The bad guys have invisibility, teleportation, impersonation and mind control at their disposal, while the good guys' investigative methods include mind-reading, memory searches, and the (limited) ability to detect when illicit magic is being used. Hell, there could be volumes written just about how the Wizarding World would handle the rights of the accused. What are their privacy laws? What counts as evidence?

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"Witches and wizards, I give you Exhibit A: this glove I just Accio-ed from the accused ... "

Instead, the hodgepodge of guesswork and random whims that make up the Wizarding World's legal system are about as consistent as the rules to that game your older brother used to make up as he went along ("No, my farts are worth 10 points! I have the fart stick!"). For example, when an elf magically threw a cake at his aunt, Harry Potter was almost expelled from Hogwarts for it. That's because although the Ministry Of Magic can instantly tell when an underage wizard performs magic around regular humans, they can't pinpoint the caster. That's like someone getting arrested because a gunshot was heard in his or her neighborhood.

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Let's table the fact that humans enslaved the single most powerful species in the Wizarding World.

But, OK, people get nailed based on flimsy evidence in our world, too. But then, there's Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, long considered one of wizardry's most notorious mass-murderers. In reality, Peter Pettigrew (the evil weirdo who pretended to be Ron's pet rat and who presumably saw Ron masturbate countless times) committed the crime Sirius was blamed for. But, it was far from an ingenious frame job, especially considering some of the tools available to the prosecutors.

First, there's the Priori Incantato spell, which is essentially like accessing your browser history -- it shows you the last spell a particular wand was used to cast. At one point, it gets used on Harry's wand and proves that the wand was used to cast an evil spell. But, even that wasn't considered sufficient evidence that he did it. However, the magic police don't even bother using this on Sirius -- the fact that he was present at the scene of the crime was all the evidence they needed to ship him off to prison indefinitely, because, apparently, civil liberties are right up there with human fashion on the list of things wizards don't understand.