Hello everyone, and welcome to Pop Culture Sociologist, the show where I analyze books, movies and TV shows for your enjoyment. I’m Marina Berlin, I’ve been a media and culture critic since 2011, and today I’ll talk to you about a phenomenon called “the x men problem”, which is very common in all kinds of genre media, and how the book “the fifth season” by nk jemisin offers one of the best solutions to it that I’ve ever seen. 

So, today I’ll talk to you about “The X-Men Problem”, a trope that wasn’t invented by the X-Men franchise, nor is it exclusive to it, but the X-Men comics and movies and so on helped popularize it, and present some of the most prominent examples of it.

The X-Men, for those who might not be familiar, broadly exist in a universe where some people are born with mutations, that they can’t control and did not choose, that in some cases give them superpowers, like controlling metal with their mind, creating fire or ice, or even reading other people’s thoughts. 

Another thing that’s intrinsic to that worldbuilding is oppression. X-Men stories, in every media, generally focus on what happens when the world fears or despises people who were born different, and who have superpowers because of it, and how those individuals navigate a world that’s hostile towards them.

Unlike characters like  Captain America or Iron Man, or Batman or Superman, who don’t have to deal with a world that intrinsically hates and fears them because of who they are. If people dislike them, it’s because of specific actions they’ve taken, not because they were born into a group of people that society as a whole disapproves of. 

Of course, the set up of the X-Men is perfect for talking about real social oppression. it’s very easy, and arguably baked into the design of the X-Men stories, to talk about homophobia and racism through the metaphor of people having superpowers. 

So far I’ve been speaking very generally, but the X-Men stories are a vast canon of works that spans decades. There’s comics, cartoons, movies, TV shows, and lots of other things. Of course there are stories within that canon that don’t fit into anything I’ve said. But broadly, x-men popularized this form of worldbuilding, and told a lot of really amazing stories through it, but it does present some issues, which have come to be known as the x-men problem when it comes to storytelling and portraying social issues.  

The first  aspect of this is that there are no quote-unquote perks that come with being part of a marginalized group, aside from perhaps a greater sense of community with others who are also oppressed. Being born different from the majority of the population doesn’t give you secret superpowers, doesn’t let you lift cars in the air or fly. In the X-Men stories the downside to being a mutant is that you’re hated, but the upside is that you can control people’s thoughts. It creates a false equivalency where instead of human traits like sexual orientation or skin color being overall the same as any other trait, which is what happens in reality, the story is teaching the viewer that these marginalized traits really are magical and have benefits that people on the socially privileged side don’t have. 

in reality, marginalized people just get the oppression part, not the cool superpowers part. And it can be an issue, to teach a massive audience that marginalized people have secret perks that this socially privileged audience doesn’t have access to. It can glamorize oppression, and create the impression that it’s maybe not that bad, because it comes with cool benefits as well as downsides. 

The second part of the X-Men problem is that the X-Men really are dangerous. Unlike real people who deal with systemic oppression, who are just ordinary people living their lives, the mutants in the X-Men stories really do have the power to blow up buildings and set things on fire with their minds. They really can cause much, much more damage than any ordinary person. And it isn’t only the bad guys that do this, even Charles Xavier, AKA Professor X, one of the most peace-loving, moderate mutant leaders, can talk about how mutants are not dangerous and don’t deserve to be put under special restrictions one moment, and in the next use his telepathy to break into the white house and mind control the US president. 

Because of this, the more the X-Men stories draw from reality, and the more the debate over whether mutants deserve equal rights and so on resembles real social struggles, the more it gives credence to the opinion that actually, marginalized people should be controlled. Or at least, the idea that they should be treated differently becomes a valid opinion. Because in the world of the X-Men, you can understand why someone would want people with superpowers to live under special rules where they can’t burn a city down with the blink of an eye. 

Finally, the third and last aspect of the X-Men problem is in borrowing oppression directed against a certain group, and then pretending it applies to a far more privileged group. For example, a lot of the hatred towards the X-Men is similar to how homophobia is manifested in the real world, but almost all the X-Men characters, certainly the most well known and popular ones, are straight. 

You could say that it puts the privileged reader or viewer in the position of identifying with oppression that they’re not exposed to in real life, but if all the characters in the story are straight, does the audience ever make the connection that this sort of treatment is bad when it’s directed towards queer people, not just straight people? It’s tough to say, and over time it can create the effect of erasing the victims of oppression from their own stories. Keeping the drama and high stakes of systemic oppression, but making it about characters who in our world are already at the top of the social hierarchy. 

So, to summarize the X-Men problem: it’s when real oppression from our world is borrowed into a fictional story, in a way that glamorizes that oppression, potentially justifies it, and doesn’t portray any people who actually experience said oppression in real life. 

Just to be clear, I think the various writers and creators of the X-Men have also been aware of this issue, to varying degrees over the years. And there are stories in the X-Men canon that try to mitigate or minimize this problem, if not outright resolve it, by focusing on characters and storylines that deal more directly with real world oppression, or attempt to not glamorize the experience of being marginalized. So, this isn’t so much a problem of the X-men canon specifically, as it’s that the X-Men popularized this trope arguably more than any other mainstream property. 

Of course, the X-men didn’t invent this trope, and there are lots and lots of examples of it all throughout science fiction and fantasy. For example the Witcher series, including the books, the video game and the recent TV show, has the same basic set-up. A world in which people who are born with various magical skills, or a propensity towards magic, are hated by default, and where magic gives you cool powers ordinary people don’t have, for example a much longer lifespan. And if we take the most recent offering in this universe, where Henry Cavil plays the Witcher, his character is portrayed as straight in the show and coded as a white British man, in as much as the fantasy setting allows, so again he’s part of a group that doesn’t experience systemic oppression solely based on identity, in real life. 

Again, if you start looking for this pattern you see it in lots of stories, which will sometimes be described as “like x-men but…” with some difference, because of how associated with the x-men this treatment of oppression is. I’ve seen lots and lots and lots of variations on this, but I’ve never seen a work that managed to engage with the x-men problem like NK Jemisin’s book “The Fifth Season”, so let’s talk about that. 

The basic premise of “The Fifth Season” is that it takes place in a world where there are 4 regular seasons, and then occasionally there’s a period of devastating natural disasters that very few humans survive, and that period is called the fifth season. I’ll let author NK Jemisin explain the basic premise of the book in her own words:

The Fifth season is part of a trilogy, and we could talk about all three books as a whole, but I think for the sake of what I’m trying to demonstrate the first book is enough, and I think it’ll be easier and simpler to explain everything if I focus on just the first story. 

Plus, while I’m going to be giving you spoilers for the first book, I’ll hardly say anything about the rest of the trilogy, which is just as excellent and award winning as the The Fifth Season, so I’m also happy to leave those two other books for you to discover and enjoy, if you haven’t already. 

So, like you heard the author herself say, the book is about Essun, a woman who has the power to control seismic activity, which basically means to either cause or stop earthquakes, and who lives in a world where people are persecuted for being born with that power.

The book actually has three narrators, one of them a young girl, one a woman in her twenties, and then Essun, who’s in her forties. By the time you get to the end of the book you realize that all three of these narrators are Essun, at different stages of her life. 

So, through Essun’s childhood we see how her powers are discovered, when she almost kills someone by accident, how her parents keep her away from her siblings but also keep her safe from the rage of their commune, until someone can come and pick her up. 

We see Essun’s Guardian arrive, a kind of guide or teacher, who’s supposed to take her to the academy where she’ll be taught how to use her powers responsibly and be useful. And we see some of what life at that academy is like. 

Through Essun as a young woman we see her life as a professional mage, if you will, someone who has full control of her powers, and who is sent by the academy on various jobs around the continent, and who’s very much a social climber who wants to advance and gain various advantage within the world she’s found herself in. 

Finally, through the eyes of adult, present day Essun, who lives in a commune and hides her powers even from her husband, we see daily life in this world where an apocalypse nearly wipes out humanity every once in a while. We see Essun’s family, and how she raises her children under these circumstances. In this section of the book there’s a new apocalypse brewing, where the continent is yet again entering a fifth season and Essun has to find her daughter and also find a place for herself before everything gets really bad. 

So, does The Fifth Season have an x-men problem? Absolutely, it’s a classic example of that set-up. 

Essun deals with an enormous amount of prejudice and oppression. People like her are feared and hated and are basically only tolerated if they’re controlled their entire lives, locked away at their academy, if they use their powers to be useful to others, such as clearing a harbor of rocks, for a fee. 

Basically the only way people like Essun are allowed to live their lives is if they’re marked as separate at all times. Even though they look like everyone else, they have to be accounted for and controlled. In the academy, which they call the Fulcrum, they’re raised by people called Guardians. These Guardians have the ability to neutralize the powers of people like Essun, and are authorized to injure or even kill them if any of them ever step out of line. So, that’s a very high level of control and oppression that’s very hard to escape. 

On the other hand, Essun’s powers also come with benefits. She can literally kill people with her mind, she can cause earthquakes and bring down entire villages, she’s definitely not as powerless against the natural disasters that happen on the continent as most people are. 

If we look at the second criteria of the x-men problem, there’s also the argument that people like Essun SHOULD be controlled. We hear several stories about children with powers killing someone before they’re even aware of it, and powers aren’t always passed down the genetic line. So sometimes children with powers are born to non-powered parents, who have no idea how to handle a child with those abilities and teach them to be safe. 

We’ll get into the mechanics of this later, but the bottom line is, this aspect definitely exists within the fifth season. 

Finally, if we look at the identity of the characters, the two main characters we spend time with in the book, who are not villains, are Essun and Alabaster, who also has powers. Both of these characters would be considered part of racial minorities in the US, where the book was written, and Alabaster is primarily attracted to other men, so he’s not straight. 

In that sense, I think the book avoids the x-men problem simply by choosing characters who would be part of marginalized groups in our world as well. But let’s talk about the first two aspects: the fact that marginalization comes with powers, and the fact that those powers are genuinely dangerous. 

The primary way that the book counters these issues is by making every single plotline and every single aspect of the story be about the intimate, intricate realities of living under sustained, systemic oppression. 

The thing that happens in stories like the x-men, or witcher, or countless others, is that the oppression is background noise. It adds stakes, it adds drama, but it’s not what the story is ABOUT. The story is usually about action and adventure, about fighting monsters, about creating a chosen family, about defeating a supervillain. And coupled with all the other things, it makes the oppression feel like a background prop. 

But in the fifth season, the oppression is front and center. 

Let’s start with the fact that Essun has a different name in each part of the story. So, when she’s a child she has the name her parents gave her, which the Fulcrum then takes away and gives her a different name, based on a stone, like all the other children. And finally, when she’s in hiding, she chooses her own name, Essun, but it’s because she wants to create an entirely new identity. 

So, as a child not only is Essun pushed away by her parents, who are worried about their other children, her parents are willing to hand her over to the Fulcrum and never see or hear from her again. At first, this seems like it might be a positive thing – at the fulcrum she won’t be hated, and the man who comes to pick her up treats her pretty well and seems genuinely concerned for her.

But then on the way, the Guardian starts to indoctrinate her with stories about her true place in the world. All Essun hears from him is how people like her are dangerous, and therefore have to be controlled at all times. If they ever escape that control, that will be the end of civilization. 

To drive home this point, the Guardian, who is now her surrogate parent, remember, breaks Essun’s hand. It’s a test to say, if she’s been able to tolerate this pain without activating her powers it means she has enough control that she can be trained. But it’s also a reminder, that if she ever steps out of line, it’s the job of this man to find her and kill her, and no matter how much he loves her that’s what he’s going to do.

In fact, the fact that he’s willing to kill her for disobedience is an important facet of his love, and the reason he’s fit to raise her instead of her parents. 

Essun’s time at the school is again, remarkable for how relatively normal it is. The Fulcrum isn’t Hogwarts, where everything is full of magic and kids do whatever they want, but it’s not a draconian place where there are beatings every day, either. For the most part it’s a strict, competitive school, where teachers keep their distance, and terrible things can happen to some students, but the goal overall is to let children learn and progress in their studies, not torture or kill them. 

Again, this aspect of things is important. The system of oppression here isn’t in outright violence or cruelty, but in the fact that Essun is treated by the school, and is taught to see herself and her fellow students, as assets, weapons or tools, and not fully fledged humans. 

And then, of course, when we see her all grown up, she’s bought into this completely. Adult Essun has 4 rings, which is a mark of her magic skills. Alabaster, at the top of the power hierarchy for magic users, has 10 rings. He was bred into existence, both of his parents were raised in the Fulcrum and selected for their ability to produce other magical children. 

When Essun meets him, she’s actually there as part of the same breeding program. But supposedly no one is forcing her to sleep with Alabaster. She volunteers to do it, because producing magical children will give her more power in the internal structure of the Fulcrum, and she has career ambitions. She wants to climb the corporate ladder, if you will, and producing a child with a 10 ringer is part of it. 

Alabaster, for his part, is also free to refuse to sleep with her. No one is forcing him to choose Essun specifically. There’s pressure that’s being applied to get him to produce children, but he can delay, he can pick from a certain pool of partners if he wants.

And so, when Essun and Alabaster sleep together, over and over and over, during the course of a long journey they go on to complete a paying job for the Fulcrum, what is really happening? Is anyone forcing them to have sex? Most of the time they do it they’re completely alone, in the woods or in a bedroom, no one is asking for a progress report on how it’s going, and again they can both stop at any time. 

And yet, they’re not actually attracted to each other, and are only doing it out of a sense that this is their best choice from an array of terrible choices. 

It’s such an intimate portrait of oppression, where if you do it in a prolonged, sustained way, if you start applying it from the time someone is born, then by the time they’re an adult they can’t even untangle the effects of oppression from their own personal choices, because those choices have been informed by the world telling them they’re inferior. 

Supposedly, Essun is an active career minded woman with agency. Supposedly, Alabaster chose her from all the other possible women he could have slept with. Supposedly, they are both freely choosing what to do in any given moment. But in practice, they’ve both been taught from a young age that there are limits to who they can be and what they can achieve and how they’re allowed to live, and those limits dictate their choices. 

In the later part of this arc, Alabaster starts telling Essun more and more of what the world is really like. What he’s learned, all the secrets the Fulcrum is keeping from them, like the fact that children who are born from unions like theirs who have just a little bit of magic are drugged and used as unconscious earthquake preventers until they die. He tells her all the history that the fulcrum doesn’t teach, he bursts the bubble that she’s built for herself, where if she just does everything right and follows the rules and works hard then one day she can be a 10 ringer too and have the same freedom Alabaster has, which is no freedom at all. 

By the end of their time together, Alabaster and Essun manage to live together freely for a brief time. They live on the edge of the continent, in the most dangerous territory that exists in this world, where their lives could be over at any moment, but in that so called wilderness, they’re left alone for a while. They live in a community, there are other people with magic skills around them, who have never seen the inside of the fulcrum, Alabaster and Essun start a real family, with a man they’re both in love with, and all three of them raise a child together. 

But eventually, the fulcrum comes to claim them, and of course punish them for their disobedience. For Essun, the moment when the book tells her she is most free, most aware of how things really work, most in control and clear eyed and sensible, is when she murders her own child to prevent him from falling into the hands of the fulcrum. 

I think this is probably the most powerful message the book has about oppression. That once she learned the truth of how warped her thinking had become, from being raised in the fulcrum, and once she’d lived free of it for a while, Essun realized that the best thing she could do for her son was kill him, rather than give him to the guardians. Which echoes real cases in which parents chose to kill their own children in similar situations, such as the famous 19th century case of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her young daughter rather than allow slave catchers to capture her. 

And of course, in the present day plot, Essun, who after that entire disaster runs away and reinvents herself and settles down in a commune, marries a good man and has children with him, after all of that it turns out that Essun’s husband hates people with powers so much that he murders his own son when he realizes who Essun really is and the children are like her, and kidnaps their daughter. 

You could ask – why did Essun marry someone who had such a violent hatred of people like her? But the answer in the book is – because you can never really tell. No one likes people with powers, and you never know how someone is going to react to discovering that their own child is like that. So Essun gambled, and it turned out to be a bad call. 

Of course this isn’t the entire plot of the book, but I hope it’s clear from everything I’ve described how at every point the story is about the intimate nature of systemic oppression, and how different that sort of oppression is from simply encountering someone who hates you, or even there being a group of people who hate you, if we take certain plots from Superman or Batman.

The fight season is about SYSTEMIC oppression, where every institution you come in contact with has your marginalization baked into it. That sort of oppression, applied from a young age, can bend someone’s entire personality and view of the world. And most of the time, it can even feel like love – like Essun’s guardian who truly loves her and takes care of her, and then comes to murder her with the same gentle smile, once she steps out of line. 

So, yes, Essun’s powers are still really cool and are not things that marginalized people in reality can do, but did I feel like the story glamorized the oppression Essun went through? Did it use it as a prop in the background while Essun was busy fighting aliens or robots? No. And there are actually non-human creatures in the story, and there’s mythology and magic, but the realities of oppression here were also front and center.

The fifth season used the trope of magic users who are oppressed and hated to… actually talk about oppression! To illuminate the intimate nature of it, the insidiousness, the invisible strings of it, that can easily be seen in the real world as well.

And as a result, if watching the X-Men movies makes you kind of wish you could fly, or read minds, or bend metal, despite the social cost of being part of a hated minority, reading the Fifth Season, it’s very clear that oppression takes a far, far heavier toll than can be offset by the ability to cause earthquakes. 

Finally, the last aspect of the x-men problem I mentioned, was the fact that magic powers are truly dangerous, whereas in reality marginalized people are just living their lives. The world of the fifth season addresses this to some degree, though not entirely. We discover that magic users in this world only become super powerful because they’re trained to be so. Without that training, they would be able to affect very little, so in fact if the fulcrum and the guardians disappeared, there just wouldn’t be people who can really stop or cause the kind of impressive things the fulcrum teaches you to do. 

This is a partial solution to that problem, to me, since even a weak magic user can still cause some damage, and children have been known to kill or injure people accidentally, but it’s still a better amelioration of that issue than I’ve ever seen in a story.

In short, I wanted to talk about the fifth season because reading it opened my eyes to the fact that the solution to the x-men problem can be simply writing about the realities of the oppression so many stories borrow for background drama. I think so many stories about magical marginalization would be improved by trying to show the real effects of marginalization, not just a few minutes or a few chapters of the characters being sad, or being kicked out of their homes, before starting a grand adventure, but a real acknowledged of the psychological toll of growing up in a society that thinks you’re dangerous or inferior. 

Of course, part of the fun of these stories is escaping, and a power fantasy, especially when they’re written by marginalized creators. But I think the fifth season is unique combining lots of magic, mythology, a grand adventure, and at the same time exposing and detailing the most intimate aspects of being marginalized by an innate trait you didn’t choose. 

Personally, I want more stories like that. I’m sure the publishing industry does too, since the book was hugely successful. So, I hope we all get what we want.

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You can subscribe to Pop Culture Sociologist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other platform, and if you want to talk to me about the episode I’m on twitter at berlin_marina or popsocpodcast. In addition to being a media critic I’m also a published author and poet of science fiction and fantasy, so if you’re interested in that you can read about it on my website, marinaberlin.org. Thank you for listening, thank you for letting me tell you my thoughts, I’m Marina Berlin and I’ll see you on the next episode of Pop Culture Sociologist.