Over at the specfic writing website Mythcreants , Oren Ashkenazi has written a number of posts about "oppressed mages" in fiction and why that concept doesn't work. He's also gotten tons of hate from people who don't like to see their favourite stories critiqued. I think he's making lots of good points in these articles, though I disagree with some of his comparisons. In any case, I'm not just gonna repeat his arguments in my blogpost, that would be pretty pointless. Instead, I'm gonna discuss crucial differences between oppressing a group which is powerful collectively, and oppressing people who are powerful individually.
Terminology
"Mages", in this context, need not refer to literal wizards in a fantasy setting. It can also be mutants with superpowers, or anyone else who's
a) individually powerful, and
b) whose power doesn't depend on social conventions and other people going along with them.
For instance, Joe Biden, the president of the United States, and Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest capitalists, are both powerful individuals. But if, hypothetically, everyone in the US decided that Biden shouldn't count as their president, or everyone working for Bezos decided not to take orders from him anymore or allow him to handle money and assets, they would lose their power. This is in contrast to a fictional character like Superman who is enormously strong, physically invulnerable, capable of flying through space at light-speed and so on regardless of what others think of him.
The term "oppressed mages" refers specifically to scenarios in which regular, non-powered people oppress mages as defined above. Scenarios in which one group of mages oppress another don't count. There are some stories in which non-powered people get the upper hand because they have superior tech, like in older X-men stories where regular people use sentinel robots to hunt superpowered mutants. But why don't mages get tech as well? Tech+powers should beat tech only. For a long time, this went unexplained in the X-men (most line-ups include some very rich members; they've even had Forge on the team sometimes, whose superpower is to build amazing tech), until the "House of X" storyline in which it was revealed that the sentinels aren't human creations but cosmic machine gods. This changes the scenario from "oppressed mages" to a "mages vs mages" conflict. (This has probably changed again since I last read the X-men - I'm too old to keep up with superhero comics anymore.)
Anyway. In this post, I focus only on regular humans who oppress mages without the aid of superior tech that the mages (usually for unexplained reasons) lack access to.
In my previous post, I said that you can enjoy flawed stories - we don't have to choose between saying that something is problematic and therefore must be rejected or enjoying it while insisting that it's perfect. Just because there are aspects of, e.g., the X-men, that don't hold up to scrutiny, doesn't mean it's wrong to enjoy the comics or movies - I read the hell out of those comics for years and years.
But lots of people do think you're only allowed to enjoy perfect things, and if they're fans of oppressed mage stories, they desperately insist that it makes sense for regular, non-powered people to oppress superpowered beings.They say that the real world is riddled with examples of small minorities who oppress much larger groups, despite the latter being more powerful in virtue of group size. Now I'm gonna explain why that isn't comparable.
The Gunman Theory of oppression
Imagine you're riding a train in the wild west. Suddenly, the engineer must stop because the rail has been blocked, and a gunman enters the train car. He waves his single revolver wich contains only a handful of bullets at the car full of passangers, and demands that you all throw over your wallets and jewelry. You do as he says, and he takes off with all your belongings. But how could this happen? After all, the whole collective of passengers could have taken him down. At most, he could have shot one or two of you before he was overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
There's no mystery here. No one wants to die. Even if he could "only" shoot one or two before being overwhelmed, it's a pretty big deal for those who end up dead (and their friends and family). If no one in the car wants to rush him first and be gunned down, everyone's gonna remain seated and do as he says.
A large group, collectively powerful enough to take out a smaller group of oppressors, might thus need at least a few members who are willing to die for the cause, or risk other serious consequences, in order to get going. In addition, they likely need to coordinate their efforts, and this may be a huge obstacle in itself.
Suppose you have a society which depends on slavery, with ten times as many slaves as there are slave-owners. If all or most of the slaves rebel at the same time, the rebellion is virtually guaranteed to succeed, even though those who are first in line are likely to be gunned down. But if only a small group rise up, everyone in that group will be killed straight away (or worse), their attempted rebellion fails, and they died for nothing. And the slaves are scattered, unable to plan a simultaneous uprising. If we imagine that they all have cellphones or similar, their prospects look a little better, but they would have to worry about fake calls and spies, or that too many people will chicken out at the last minute.
The Ideology Theory of oppression
In the philosophical literature on oppression, not everyone sticks to the Gunman Theory. Some stress ideology and indoctrination instead. Oppressed people may abstain from rebellion because they have been indoctrinated into thinking their subordinate position is just. They may think that no better society is possible, so there's no choice but to make do with what they've got. They may be so ashamed of belonging to the oppressed group that they wouldn't dream of striking back at their (perceived) betters, etc.
The Gunman theory and Ideology theory are compatible. Both factors can be in play. Moreover, oppressed people who, at some level, realize that they're in a "gunman type situation", might be motivated to adopt beliefs according to which things are okay the way they are. If they can't change the situation anyway, they might at least feel a little better if they tell themselves that everything is okay.
Now, I'm not gonna try to solve the question of whether "gunman factors" or "ideology" usually play the biggest part in preserving oppression. But I do think you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a real oppressive society that solely relies on ideology/indoctrination to keep the oppressed masses in check. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a real oppressive society in which the oppressed could communicate perfectly and transparently with each other, and the oppressors were unable to punish any individual rebels - but the oppressed still stayed in line, solely due to indoctrination.
This isn't what real-world oppression looks like. Regardless of how much indoctrination the oppressors have at their disposal, they'll also have brute force to back it up.
Mages, gunmen and ideology
If you replace a large group of people which is only collectively strong with individually powerful mages, Gunman-style oppression becomes impossible. Let's replace the group of passangers in the train, collectively strong enough to take out the gunman but one or two will probably be killed, with someone like Wolverine from the X-men, who's individually strong enough to take out the gunman. The gunman can shoot Wolverine and it'll smart a bit, but he'll heal up in seconds and can punch out the gunman without breaking a sweat. Of course he's not just gonna sit there and do as he's told. If we move over to the slave society, but replace the multitude of slaves with just Superman, he's not gonna obey the plantation owners. Sure, they might try to oppress him with ideology alone. "You must do as we say because we have decided that you're inferior and should be ashamed of yourself because your powers make you a freak! That's what we're gonna do to you if you don't obey us - we're gonna yell freak freak freak until you cry!" But how effective is this gonna be, really?
I guess we can imagine Superman swayed by the "freak" insult if he's been indoctrinated since he was a baby. Even so. Real-life oppressors can be afraid of rebellion - afraid that their victims manage to communicate even though it's hard, and afraid that they'll be willing to risk their lives and die for a better future for their children. But they know that the threshold for rebellion remains quite high, due to everything I wrote under the "Gunman Theory" heading. In the enslaved Superman scenario, all it takes is Superman's anger getting stronger than his shame for a moment, and it's game over for his oppressors. Their situation would be so much more precarious than anything any real-world oppressor has ever experienced.
Only people utterly devoid of survival instinct and self-interest would try to oppress Superman via indoctrination rather than play nice with him.
But what about sheer numbers?
I've heard the argument that a large enough number of regular people could realistically oppress a small enough number of mages. Let's use the original X-men as an example, since they're not quite as over-powered as many later line-ups. If a bunch of normies attack the X-men, Professor X can fuck with their minds, Marvel Girl telekinetically throw rocks at them, Iceman freeze them, Beast fight them with superhuman agility, Cyclops blast them with eye-lasers, and Angel stomp at their heads or something. But sure - if hundreds of angry humans rush them simultaneously, they're not gonna keep up. They could realistically be beaten to death in that situation. The idea is that this should make the X-men afraid of normies rather than the other way around.
But this is just the Gunman-on-the-train scenario all over, except the X-men are now placed in the Gunman role and the normies are the passangers. A whole bunch of regular people will be grievously injured or dead before they manage to take the X-men out. (Maybe few deaths and many injuries if the X-men try super hard not to actually kill anyone, but people are generally reluctant to be injured too.) If the X-men were evil oppressors, people might eventually be motivated to risk life and limb to put an end to this horrible oppression - but it's extremely unlikely that pure bigotry would be enough to motivate people to give up their lives.
If you look at hate-crimes in the real world, they typically play out like this: A bunch of people attack a smaller number, perhaps just one, minority person, or a big and strong hater attack a much smaller and weaker person. We don't see, say, the tiniest homophobes attack enormous muscular Tom-of-Finland-style gay men. We don't see teeny-weeny homophobes get beaten up, attacking again while yelling even more slurs, get beaten up again, fractured, concussed, but they keep yelling, they keep attacking, because their homophobia is just so much stronger than their sense of self-preservation.
To sum up: A minority may oppress a collectively strong majority. It doesn't follow that regular people would be capable of oppressing individually strong mages.
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