Magical Mondays: Magic is Illegal

In fantasy worlds where the whole population knows magic exists, but only some minority of people are magic users, things tend to go one of two ways. The first is that those with magic use their power to become something of a separate, usually higher, class, like the Aes Sedai in the Wheel of Time series. Even the Avatar universe implies that there’s at least social if not legal inequality between benders and non-benders. The other is that magic is criminalized, because how dare that threatening minority have the same freedoms as regular folk? As a story device, I don’t deny that this is believable; after all, the majority does tend to react with fear and suspicion toward those who are different. However, this concept is often used as an allegorical stand-in for other minorities who have historically been denied human rights, which doesn’t always work out narratively.