This effect is magnified with time and numbers. All these things make it notoriously difficult to oppress someone. The mage could set their own price and then spend all that money on lawyers, PR teams, lobbyists, and private security. This mage would be in huge demand from monarchs and churches in a historical setting or presidents and CEOs in a modern one. The ability to make it rain in dry areas, or stop raining in wet areas, would increase agricultural profits by an untold margin. They can’t summon lightning strikes or storms, but they can turn a day from rainy to sunny and back again. We can all see how eye lasers and death curses can be used to prevent oppression, but noncombat powers have enormous potential as well, perhaps even more so.Ĭonsider a mage who can control the weather. However, in most stories, you don’t even have to consider the clever ways mages might use minor powers because authors love to give their heroes major powers instead. If mages can predict the outcomes of random probability, they can use casinos as their own personal ATMs.
If mages can see through the eyes of animals, they can know in advance where enemy soldiers will be and ambush them before every battle.
If the mages in your setting have weak elemental control, they can use it to trip their opponents by sloshing water under their feet or make a killing in the gemstone business by brushing useless earth off valuable ore without the need for expensive tools.
You can see this dynamic at work in competitive sports, where the difference of a few inches in height or a few pounds in weight has a huge effect on the outcome of a contest. A little supernatural power goes a long way, and humans are notoriously good at leveraging seemingly small advantages into big gains. This is a difficult issue even for low-magic stories. It’s Hard to Oppress Magesīefore we even get into the social and political problems of this trope, there’s a practical barrier that most stories fail to overcome: How do you oppress someone who can shoot fire out of their hands? Why This Trope Doesn’t Work I’d love to see some 13th-century priests try to put this lady on trial.įirst, let’s examine why this trope fails in every story that uses it. * It doesn’t matter exactly where the power comes from or how it manifests the important part is that a supernatural ability is the primary mark of oppression. X-Men is one well-known example, as are the new Fantastic Beast films.
#Hand of fate 2 mages full#
So, naturally, I decided it made sense to double down and write a full article about why this trope doesn’t work and why we should stop using it.įor the sake of brevity, I use “oppressed mages” to mean any situation in which people are systematically mistreated and marginalized specifically because of their supernatural abilities, whether they use spellbooks or mutant genes. This trope is incredibly popular, and many beloved stories employ it. I talk about stories that misunderstand power and privilege a lot here on ye olde Mythcreants, but I get by far the most pushback when it comes to the trope of oppressed mages.
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