I Am Completely Serious

My opinion is that the overwhelming incompetence of adult authority throughout most of Harry Potter tends to outweigh the fact that some of that authority is evil. Granted that the kids are often pretty stupid, too, the Hogwarts faculty's complete inability to stop their students from doing pretty much whatever they feel like strikes me as an important part of the series' appeal.

It's not that the kids don't get in trouble when they break the rules, because they obviously do - in fact, they get in serious, unpleasant, life-threatening trouble, of a kind that's unusual in YA fiction. When Rowling wants there to be consequences for stupidity or disobedience, then those consequences (even when, if you think about them, they don't seem very big) hit you hard; she's incredibly good at evoking a sense of cruelty. Roald Dahl, George RR Martin, PC Hodgell, and Ysabeau Wilce are other writers who can do this.*

The thing that I think unites all these writers is that their heroes, when they do bend to authority, don't do it because it's authority and that's what you do. They do it because they've weighed the risks and found them to be too heavy. And the reason that they know they're too heavy - and the reason that the readers know - is because there've been times they chose not to bend, and have had to pay. And that's exactly what you do if you want to make readers believe that your characters are making their own choices, and not just running down the rails to some predetermined The End.

The key concept here is, I guess, the difference between an uncertain risk and a certain threat. To present the hero with a threat that he/she has no choice but to face is soft writing. To present the hero with a risk that they have to choose to assume - and also with a visible, viable, and easier alternative - is hardcore writing. This isn't a value judgment, because both kinds of stories have their place, but choosing one over the other tells us something about the character you're writing. Both kinds of hero may both end up facing off with something terrible, but we care more viscerally about the latter, because we can see that they've given something up, and we respect them more (even if we think they're stupid because the risk is a really stupid one - see: like half of what Harry does), because we can see that they've made a choice.

(The predictability of the danger you face when you assume a risk is also important - specifically, the less sense the reader has that the character can accurately predict what they're getting into, the scarier it is, regardless of how much actual danger we're looking at. I've never been anxious about how things were going to turn out in a Nobuyuki Anzai manga, even though people die and go crazy and get maimed and the fate of the world is always at stake - but even on re-reads, I worry about Harry getting in trouble with the teachers, or Jame's innkeeper friends (from PC Hodgell's Kencyrath series) losing business.)

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* Writers who used to be able to do it at least intermittently but can't anymore include Lois McMaster Bujold, which is part of why I can't read her anymore. She still keeps trying to write stories that are only interesting if we believe the characters to be genuinely threatened and making genuinely difficult choices, but they don't work because there are no longer any risks - there's danger, but there's no way to avoid it, and the choices the characters make are always easy. You can always tell which way the story's pointing.