Follow TV Tropes

Following

Headscratchers / Disney Fairies

Go To

  • Humans don't age in Neverland. How did James age between the events of The Pirate Fairy and Peter and Wendy?
  • Since Zarina mentioned it...just why does Pixie Dust only make things float/fly when it's sprinkled (or, in a few cases, suggestively rubbed) on something? It pours from the tree into the pouch or the reservoir on the boat's masthead, but nothing floats until the sprinkling commences. The writers did a good job of maintaining Magic A Is Magic A,note  but no explanation other than "That's just how Pixie Dust works." Seems the entire Dust Keepers' Guild runs on Apathy Killed the Cat.
  • There are several pieces of art on Lizzie's wall that are clearly beyond her skill as an artist. Where'd those come from?
    • Books, maybe.
    • There are actually professional artists who draw fairies. I have several books that have some really good flower fairy art from when I was younger but the artist had put a lot of thought into each drawing. She could have gotten some of fictional fairy books as a gift or something.
    • Alternatively, other fairies who are also artists could have made them, and she was a fan who got them.
    • Perhaps Lizzy and Tink aren't the first fairy-human friendship. There could be a conspiracy involving fairy-friendly humans churning out fairy "fiction" to maintain the masquerade and to avoid, for example, curious adults from going out to try to catch fairy specimens to display in museums and zoos.
  • In Fairy Dust & The Quest For The Egg, Captain Hook cannot see the fairies because he is an adult. (According to Gail Carson Levine adults cannot see fairies.) What? A major plot point in Disney's continuity depended on adults being able to see fairies - it was Tinker Bell who betrayed the location of Peter Pan's hideout to Captain Hook, and he obviously had no trouble seeing her.
    • Neverland is a magical island, therefore, it has it's own logic. The broken egg had something to do with it, maybe? After all, without the egg, Neverland's magic is failing in certain places. One could be the fact that adults can't see fairies.
  • In Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure, when Tink doesn't get her daily ration of dust, she's stuck with walking. In Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, not only is she still able to fly after a day without her ration, she has enough to spare to let Lizzie fly.
    • Isn't it said/implied at the end of Lost Treasure that this is one of the largest amounts of pixie dust to be made at one time? "Over a million smidges IIRC". Maybe because there's a little extra, the fairies going to the mainland get extra pixie dust since they're going to be leaving Pixie Hollow.
  • What is the explanation for the ice fairies being at Tink's birthing ceremony? Did they just not think of that plot point yet?
    • Considering Tink, Bobble, and Clank fly over the Winter section of the Hollow before Tink is ever shown where the Tinker Fairies live, no, they had not thought of it yet. They have no problem other than getting a little chilled, and the overseer of Winter is allowed to go to Pixie Hollow without repercussions, even though she's in the spring area most of the time where we see her. This should have been bad for her, since she's so adept and presumably reliant on the cold. It's also possible that sometimes fairies get sent to the wrong places in the Hollow, so fairies with Winter talents attend the birthing ceremony just in case of such an event.
  • Why can't they fly with wet wings? The dust that they use has lifted things much heavier than them before, some added moisture shouldn't effect it that much.
    • Maybe it's not about weight, but about aerodynamics. Like the way airplanes have trouble flying with ice on their wings because it messes up the shape of the surface and therefore the airflow.
    • Not to mention that maybe they're simply harder to move when they're wet, which makes it almost impossible to fly.
    • A lot of the "no flying when wet" and "you can't fly with damaged wings" (like Midori the Frost Fairy King guy, who lost a wing and is now basically crippled) stuff doesn't make sense when you consider humans, cats and inanimate objects flying just fine with no wings or even any sort of aerodynamics. Considering that "no flying when wet" and "but humans can" appear as plot points in the same movie, perhaps they have no real explanation for this and we're just supposed to accept it.
    • Their wings are always shown wilted whenever they get wet, so it's possible weight really is an issue- because fairies and sparrowmen spend their lives covered in fairy dust, but they still have weight (meaning pixie dust simply enables something to defy gravity, not remove its weight). My guess would be that they're too heavy to use without strain to the wing muscles, but the dust stops them from being too heavy to walk with. They can still try, as Vidia does in Fairy Rescue, but it seemed to take a lot of effort and energy. Another option is there's something about how the wings (or simply fairies) are structured that renders it impossible for the dust to stick and thus disables their flight ability, or else renders the dust inert but just on their wings (as they can still use their talents when wet). A third option is that it's their bodies' natural defence mechanism against the rain- a single water droplet took Vidia out when she was trying to tell the others Tink was fairynapped, but the way she went down made it look like it was the force and weight of the water, not that she was hit with water (which is odd, as she's supposed to be around six inches tall). Fourth, it could be that water causes their wings to be too soft to fly and stay airborne with, similar to how it works for a winter fairy to get too warm, but there's no actual damage risk like with wings getting too warm or too cold.
      • My guess is that while fairy wings always have fairy dust on them, if they're washed off then there's just not enough dust to fly with.
    • In "Fairy Dust and The Quest For The Egg" it's directly stated that fairies can't fly with wet wings because it makes them too heavy.

  • If humans who are much larger than fairies and have no wings can fly if they have pixie dust, and fairies' wings are basically useless since they can't fly without pixie dust, why can't Rani fly?
    • Humans are more used to walking and running and generally getting around on two feet, so they can push off of things with less difficulty (they're more floating than flying). Rani might not have the strength to push herself around. Or nobody even thought of that. It could have to do with the fact that Rani is made from a laugh, and humans, well, aren't. Or maybe Neverland's messing with physics, and Rani can't, and doesn't necessarily want to leave, and she would be able to fly on the mainland.
    • Wingless things and individuals float, fairies fly? I mean, in the movies, there's a difference between how the fairies move, and how humans (and Peter) move in the air- fairies have a lot more options for what they can do- speed, sudden direction changes, etc. It might fall under the same principles of why fairies can't just use pixie dust like a human if their wings get wet- fairies cannot float, they can only fly with their wings. If something happens to their wings, and they can't fly, that's the end. They either fly, or they're on foot. There is no controlled floating for fairies.
  • Assuming every human baby laughs at least once, the fairy birth rate would match the human birth rate. Which would, if the movies take place sometime around the 1950's, be roughly one fairy per second. All (or at least three quarters) concentrated at the Fairy Dust Tree? Something's not adding up...
    • It does seem like the laughs have a bit of a journey to get to Neverland. It is possible a great deal of them get lost, destroyed or are otherwise unable to make the trip. Which is why everyone gets so excited when they do arrive, like 'Hey look, one of them made it.'. The fact that they are probably split fairly evenly between winter fairies and warm fairies (summer fairies?) probably helps.
    • The book Fairy Dust and The Quest For The Egg directly states that while every baby's first laugh turns into a fairy, most of them are "Mainland fairies," i.e. they live in other parts of the world. (Types of Mainland fairies mentions are Great or Lesser Wanded fairies, Spell-casting fairies and Shimmering fairies.) Only occasionally does a laugh find its way to Neverland and become a "Never fairy," and this is rare enough that the arrival/birth of every new Never fairy is considered a big event.
  • In The Pirate Fairy, the main group steal back the blue dust. Then Hook sees them and threatens to throw Zarina into the ocean, trapped inside a lantern, unless they return it to him. The main group does this (without really even seeming to think that much about it, but that's beside the point), and...Zarina gets thrown into the ocean anyway. And the main group saves her. So why didn't they just let him throw her in in the first place?
    • Would you allow your friend to be thrown into the ocean while locked in a box?
      • Who ever said Zarina was their friend?
      • Pretty much all of them did. She wasn't banished for tampering with the dust, she was just fired, and she was friendly with everyone she passed in the opening scene of the film; her departure was a Self-Imposed Exile. The scene before she hit the Core Six with the power swapping dust had strong "we used to be friends" overtones, and they never stopped trying to bring her back around to their side.
    • Well, if I could save her...Granted, it's not the nicest or most selfless thing they would've done, but if they had managed to save her while still keeping the dust, I think she would have understood, and been grateful, anyway.
      • ...Put simply, if you look at it in hindsight, Hook may as well have said, "If you don't give me the dust, I'll throw her into the ocean. If you do give me the dust, I'll throw her into the ocean anyway," and he still would've been speaking truthfully. It poses kind of a problem when you look at it like that.
    • On top of all that, no one ever considered that Zarina and Hook were faking the whole thing in order to get the dust back. They're lucky Hook had pulled an actual betrayal that got Zarina back on their side for the climax, when for all they knew, she was in on the plan to begin with.
  • While we're at it, when the main group are chasing Zarina, Vidia says "Whoa, she's moving fast." Kinda ironic coming from a fairy who can fly faster then the speed of sound. Why doesn't Vid just catch Zarina? Then, she could tell the other five to head back and bring the blue dust back herself no problems.
    • Zarina was probably using purple fast-flying dust for a quick getaway. Since her alchemized pixie dust not only changed talents but also seemed to enhance them, this made her faster than Vidia.
    • Perhaps, but did she make any Dust Keeper pixie dust to change her back?
  • In Secret of the Wings, how does a single ice-grater made by tinker fairies lodging itself against an ice flow somehow create a giant blizzard that ends up throwing the seasons out of balance?
    • Possibly because in the Winter Woods (or at least the border of it), has an endless amount of ice. The more ice is rubbed against the machine, the more snow is created. It would get out of hand and therefore, create an Endless Winter.
  • If spring-animal fairies wake the animals up and winter-animal fairies by logic take them to sleep, then what do summer and autumn fairies do with them?
    • The autumn fairies could help them store food and prepare for the winter months. Not sure about the summer ones, though...Maybe just supervise them? Check up on them? Make sure no one slept late?
  • In the books, it's explicitly stated that every fairy could randomly die of disbelief at any given time. What if one of these fairies happens to be Ree/Clarion? In the books, she does so much intensely dangerous stuff all the time she's bound to die at some point anyway, and who would replace her? She singlehandedly runs absolutely everything in Pixie Hollow with some help from Mother Dove, but is effectively their sole leader, keeping track of the entire government, including foreign relations, diplomacy, the judicial system, celebrations and parties, and leading the faries in battles against anything in their way (like Kyto the dragon.) She seems like the only person able to do this. If she died, who would replace her? Would they just all be leaderless until another queen-talent fairy shows up? A quote from Quest for Never Land says the queen before her captured Kyto in the first place, so Ree obviously isn't the first one, but given the amount everyone else relies on her, her death would have massive consequences. What is the inheritance pattern? How does this monarchy even work?
  • In Legend of the Neverbeast, Fawn writes a few pages on Gruff in modern Fairish. Sure, fine, that's great if language doesn't significantly change over a millennium...oh wait, it does. Is it not entirely likely that the parchment from the previous storm had a caption along the lines of "Savior of Pixie Hollow" and no fairy alive could read it? Isn't it also likely that no fairy alive 972 years later would be able to read Fawn's writing? You can Fling a Light into the Future, but will anyone know what that light means?
    • Maybe, maybe not. But it's better than writing nothing down at all. And besides, even as old languages have evolved, we've still been able to translate them - it's worth noting that the picture Nyx found didn't have any writing on it at all.
  • Relating to the above about the Neverbeast, wouldn't Queen Clarion have known that Nyx's interpretation of the parchment was incorrect? I know a lot of details about certain things are bound to be lost as time passes, but surely, the fairies would've known if their world had been wiped out 1,000 years ago. If they think that's the ultimate goal of the Neverbeast, why wouldn't they have records of it happening before?
    • In The Secret of the Wings, Queen Clarion says that Pixie Hollow "was very young" when she and Milori fell in love. Perhaps Gruff isn't always successful and failed to protect Pixie Hollow the last time the comet came and they had to rebuild. Human societies are replete with periods of lost knowledge; for example, Aristarchus postulated a heliocentric model of the solar system that was forgotten until the time of Copernicus. Is it such a stretch to imagine that Fairy society may face similar setbacks?
  • In The Legend of the NeverBeast, how do the fairies know about hippos (Nyx mentions them to Fawn) and monkeys (Fawn mimicks one)?
    • They may have seen them in the London Zoo, which opened in 1847 - four decades before the events of the original book. Alternatively, it's possible that every star visible from Neverland is a portal to a different part of the human world; the Second Star to the Right is just their favorite because Creator Provincialism.
  • In The Pirate Fairy, where did Zarina's pirate outfit come from? It doesn't seem like the pirates would have enough skill to make a fairy-sized piece of clothing so elaborate.
    • Zarina probably made some Sewing or Tinker Talent dust and made the outfit herself; looks like some of the stuff she packed before leaving could have been ingredients for that. She's clearly quite resourceful; as Fairy Gary said, she's "The Tinker Bell of Dust Keepers." Or maybe she stole it from somebody's doll; James says fairies are 6" tall, which is conveniently the same 1:12 scale to humans as many dolls.
  • The Scout fairies' wooden spears in NeverBeast look quite impressive at scale, but they're essentially no larger, and therefore no more sturdy, than toothpicks. How effective is a toothpick going to be in fending off a full-grown hawk?
  • When exactly do the Tinker Bell films take place? Wendy appeared in the first film (albeit much younger than in Peter Pan), yet Peter Pan never appears despite (presumably) being older than Wendy. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Tinker Bell films are meant to be prequels to Peter Pan and take place before Tink met Peter. So in the original Peter Pan, Peter hadn't been living in Never Land for very long?

Top