The Fair Folk - Television Tropes & Idioms

This trope is a bit of an odd duck as, technically speaking, it's one of The Oldest Ones In The Book that was forgotten for a while, and is now starting to come back with a vengeance.

Modern society has lived with the Disneyfied vision of Fairies for so long -- the Fairy Godmothers of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Tinkerbell in Peter Pan -- that it seems hard to imagine that some would consider Fairies evil.

And yet, some of them were. The Fairies of old weren't all cute little bewinged Pixies who fluttered happily around humans. At best, they would interact with humans with either no thought to the consequences of their actions (the Little People who end up putting Rip van Winkle to sleep) or delighting in the mess they're making of mortal lives (Oberon, Puck, and the rest in A Midsummer's Night's Dream). At worst, they're otherworldly horrors who abduct humans and send them to a horrible fate (Tam Lin). The original terms for these (at least, in Scottish lore) were the Seelie (vaguely goodish) and the Unseelie (Always Chaotic Evil). Then came Victorian Bowdlerisation, and suddenly, all Fairies got a lot more cute.

A reemerging theme in fiction these days, however, is that Fairies may present themselves as amazing, beautiful, graceful, and magical-- but underneath all the glamour, they're creepy little buggers for whom empathy is a concept as alien as the idea of blue as a number. They might take a shine to humans, but at best, it's the love a human feels for a pet... and you really don't want to see what it's like at its worst.

Their society and customs, if they even have the inclination to associate, are often extravagant and elegant but amoral and inscrutable, sometimes even for some unfortunate Fairies themselves. It's by far not certain what degree of loyalty or compassion they feel for their conspecifics.

The return of this trope to popular awareness can be traced back to at least 1988, when The Sandman, a Comic Book penned by Neil Gaiman, featured a number of Fairy characters who were often either outright malicious or self-centred to the point of sociopathy. Gaiman also used traditional Fairies in his novels and short stories as well as other comic books, and directly inspired authors such as Terry Pratchett (a friend of Gaiman's in long standing) and Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

These Fairies can sometimes share a world with Tolkienesque Elves, who, depending on the setting, may not themselves officially be part of Faerie. The principal distinction between the two, if there is one, is that Elves are a mildly superhuman longlived race living in the mortal world, whereas Fairies are much more intensely magical, and live in a Fairyland outside the mortal world.

Incidentally, ever wonder why Fairies are called "the Fair Folk" or "the Good Folk"? It's because calling them an unkind name is just cause for their wrath. Especially The Wild Hunt.

Oh, and if a Fairy leader is named, theres a 90% chance its name will be one of the following: Oberon, Titania or Mab. Other fairies are just as likely to have names drawn from A Midsummer Night's dream. Yes, I'm looking at you, Puck.

Almost always found in concert with Grimmification. Compare and contrast Fairy Companion, Our Elves Are Better, and Our Mermaids Are Different.

Examples of this trope include:

ComicBooks

As mentioned above, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman pretty much reinvigorated this trope for the modern era. The Sandman directly crosses over with a number of other comics, meaning that nasty elves also play a part in The Books of Magic, Hellblazer and several other DC Universe series.
The female fairies in Proof look like cute little green people, but act like ferocious predators with huge appetites (e.g. after mating, the butterfly-sized female eats the male, who's about as tall as a house). Fortunately, these fairies are non-magical and an endangered species.
Hellboy. "The Corpse" has Hellboy exposing a changeling and performing a number of difficult tasks for it so that The Fair Folk will return the baby he replaced. The story ends with the fairies discussing how few children have been born to them lately and how they may eventually fade away, which likely inspired in part The Golden Army.
In Marvel Comics, the fairy residents of Otherworld are similar to the DC versions. In particular Wisdom and Captain Britain and MI-13 feature Oberon's daughter Tinkabelinos (yes...), who resembles a foul-mouthed cross between Boudicea and a punk rocker.
The Sheeda from the DC miniseries Seven Soldiers -- fairies who live at the ass-end of time and who travel back to raze human civilization and plunder its profits whenever humanity reaches a certain tech level.

Film

Film Example: Labyrinth (the David Bowie movie, not to be confused with the recent ''Pans Labyrinth'). When Sarah reaches the outer wall of the Labyrinth, she finds a gardener killing Fairies with a bug sprayer. She calls him a brute, and picks up one of the not-quite-dead Fairies, who rewards her actions by attempting to bite off her finger. When she expresses her amazement and that she thought Fairies did "nice things, like granting wishes", the gardener simply scoffs and says "Shows what you know."
- Not to mention Jareth himself and his Goblins.
Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth wasn't short of creepy magical beings either. Even the nice ones were patently eerie.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army, also directed by del Toro, features an Evil Albino elven prince and a whole host of creepy fey creatures, including Tooth Fairies, carnivorous, insect-like things whose swarms can devour a person whole...starting with their teeth, of course.
Even though she's usually called a witch these days, Maleficent, of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, is actually a "wicked fairy". Disney's Sadly Mythtaken portrayal of all other fairies as kindness incarnate just makes the king look stupid for slighting Maleficent instead of one of them.
- Maleficent wasn't invited because they were hoping she wouldn't show up at all - they knew darn well she was evil.
- Contrasting the "only have 12 golden plates" reason she was snubbed originally. I'm not sure which is worse...
Let's not forget the grouchy, scheming Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2, who is willing to go to any lengths to make the Happily Ever After ending she wants (her son Prince Charming married to the princess of Far Far Away) happen.
In Ridley Scott's Legend, the Gump and Oona are essentially friendly to Jack, but are still quite pre-Victorian in behavior. Mercurial, occasionally vindictive, and more than willing to bring punishment down on a foolish mortal like Jack (who's only spared because his misdeed was done out of love, possibly also because he's a "Faerie Friend").

Literature

Certainly, Brian Froud belongs at the top here. Modern audiences must have had a shock when his collaboration with Alan Lee, Faeries, hit the shelves. It was one of the first books to include as many scary Fairy stories as nice stories. Froud has vocally emphasized that, while there are indeed evil Fairies and good Fairies in mythology, the vast majority of them are neutral. He actually apologizes, in the introduction, for the self-contradictory title of his follow-up book, Bad Faeries/Good Faeries.
The Fair Folk in The Bitterbynde trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton for the most part are masters of gramarye (magic), beautiful, arrogant, and cruel. Several Faeran characters appeal to the idea that their moral code is merely different to that of mortals, and that they cannot be considered evil. It's not entirely convincing when you hear tales of their awful retribution for meaningless and unmeant "crimes" perpetrated by mortals.
- In a twist to this portrayal of the Fair Folk, (the following is a freakin' HUGE spoiler, so don't read this if you wish to enjoy the books) the main character falls in love with the Faeran High King, who is anything but cruel, yet still adheres to the "Our morals are different" mantra when the mortal maiden questions the actions of his kindred
- There are other magical beings in the books, collectively called Wights. These fall into the Seelie (benevolent to mankind) and Unseelie (malevolent to mankind) categories, but the Faeran have no such distinction.
Raymond Feist's 1988 book, Fairie Tale, where the good elves are dangerous and the evil ones are planning a genocidal war.
The Elves of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, as seen in Lords and Ladies and The Wee Free Men, are callous, even sadistic, sociopaths of the worst kind. In addition, Gnomes are not evil but can channel six feet worth of cynicism and violence into six inches of height, while their cousins the Pictsies -- well, shrink a battlefield full of extras from ''Braveheart'', strip off most of the civility, replace it with larcenous intent and moonshine whiskey, and you'll have the Nac Mac Feegle, at which point you should run away very fast.
- Winged fairies seem to be fairly mindless and vicious creatures, somewhere between insects and the more agressive kinds of songbird.
The Fairy Servants in Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, particularly "The Gentleman With Thistledown Hair." A footnote in the book explains that there are two faculties in both men and fairies: a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. Men possess a greater share of reason than magic, and the fairies are the exact opposite.
The Merry Gentry books by Laurell K. Hamilton, in between the sex scenes, makes clear how cruel and capricious fairies are. The scenes involve mostly the Unseelie Court, but the Seelie court adds to those "virtues" conceit and hyprocrisy.
The way the Winter Fairies and Elves act in The Dresden Files; the Summer Fairies generally adhere to a morality that generally includes being nice to humans, but it's by no means defined by that. Dresden even has a godmother who happens to be a Fairy, and that is not a good thing. There's also the Erlking, a Fae who claims allegiance to no court and heads up The Wild Hunt, which either kills or assumes anything it runs into. Winter and Summer are established as being Unseelie and Seelie, respectively.
The Harry Potter universe cuts this concept right to the bone. Its various Fairy Creatures (Gnomes, Doxies, Pixies, and so forth) are more like household and garden pests than anything else. The Erlking, who likes to kidnap children, and Veelas, who appear beautiful and bewitching unless they are angry -- at which point, they pull a One Winged Angel act, are closer to the letter of this trope. A footnote of the supplementary book "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" lampshades this by describing how weird it is for wizards and witches to hear the Muggles' version of Fairy Tales.
The Fairies in Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age books are, to a one, murderous, untrustworthy, and prone to double-crossing if not properly bound -- and those are the sympathetic ones. (Makes sense, as the first book in the series is, among other things, a riff on the Tam Lin legend, and Bear enjoys playing with legends and genre tropes.)
Unsurprisingly, Fairies tend to be pretty unsympathetic in modern day versions of "Tam Lin," such as Pamela Dean's Tam Lin and Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock. In Dean's version, the Fairies are described as absolutely alien: "like linear A. They look as if they ought to mean something, but you can't tell what it is."
Holly Black's Tithe trilogy is somewhat of an inversion of this trope. The fairies are as nasty as any monster, but the higher-ups have slightly reversed roles. The Seelie Queen is a master of political games, while the Unseelie Queen is basically straight with her court. That said, the Seelie fairies won't kill you on sight. These books also use the Tam Lin plotline of a sacrifice every seven years. The Seelie fairies will just spirit away a talented human, while the Unseelie fairires will murder the first person they can find.
The Chronicles of Fairie, a book series by O.R. Melling fits this trope nicely. The trope is subverted, though, in that fairies you meet are sympathetic...to a degree. They're willing to go to almost any length to get what they want.
Although Tinkerbell is often included as one example -- if not the exemplar -- of modernized, sanitized, Bowdlerized, Disneyfied fairies, she was mischievous and rather possessive of Peter, to the point that she was perfectly willing to casually engineer the death of a perceived rival, even in Uncle Walt's rendition.
- The book explains that the fairies are too small too contain more than one emotion at a time, so when Tinkerbell gets jealous of Wendy, it utterly consumes her being. This troper would also point out that Peter himself in the novel is great example of this trope - re-reading it as an adult, the Pan comes off as a sociopath, due to his being raised by Fairies. He can't remember who Wendy and the boys are from day to day, in battles between the Lost Boys and and the Pirates he'll switch sides and kill (yes, kill) Lost Boys to make things more entertaining, and is pretty unsympathetic and selfish. His character has suffered far more bowdlerization in adaptation than Tink's.
Emma Bull's War For The Oaks has the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. The Seelies are at the least, tolerant of humans, and usually kind and friendly -- as the Fae would define it. They're even capable of falling in love with humans as humans would recognize love. The Unseelies are malicious and nasty, and think nothing of twisting a mere mortal to their ends.
Terri Windling's Bordertown anthologies have a mashup of various fae types. There are elven street gangs, half-elves, fae wannabes, fae-touched, and so on. And their behaviour toward humans varies accordingly. The Bordertown actually exists on the border of genuine, under-the-hill Faerie, and the river running through it is called the Mad River, because to humans one sip is instantaneously addictive and insanity-generating though it is possible to recover from Mad River addiction -- Tick-Tick helped Orient get off the water.
The Spiderwick Chronicles book series features a number of fae creatures, along with the ways to deal with them and/or protect oneself from them. Spiderwick's daughter, in her unknowing youth, accepted food from the fae and as a result has no desire to eat human food...she would starve to death if the tiny faeries didn't bring her food regularly.
Mercedes Lackey's SERRAted Edge series is about a bunch of elves who drive racecars made of materials other than iron (such as aluminum and fiberglass) because steel -- being 95-98% iron -- can make them very uncomfortable or hurt them.
- Iron also causes their magic to go awry, sometimes shooting off in oh-dear-I-MEANT-straight-not-LEFT directions, although both they and their human allies have analyzed the whys of this effect and come up with clever ways to exploit it.
- Not only the SERRAted edge novels, she's written an entire series of alternate histories and modern fantasies set in a world where the Seleighe and Unseleighe Sidhe are very real, both dwelling "Underhill", a sort of parallel dimension that is imbued with magic and touches on our world at "Nodes." The Unseleighe seem to make a living on Rape The Dog moments.
Speaking of the Erl-King, mentioned in the Dresden Files and Harry Potter entries above, he is the subject of a Goethe poem. In this poem he is a Faerie entity which appears before people who are near death (in the poem, a young boy dying of an illness).
- Or maybe the boy is just hallucinating in his fever. His father, riding through the night as fast as he can to get him to a doctor, certainly can't see the Erl-King or anything else out of the ordinary...but that doesn't make the poem any less spooky.
What about Michael Moorcock's Melniboneans in the Elric books which are surely nasty Elves with power (well, until they were all but genocided by Elric and the people of the Young Kingdoms i.e. us).
Even Tolkien's elves, except for a few of the wisest, show glimmers of this trope--they think of themselves as a superior species (especially above dwarves) and are sometimes openly xenophobic. They have also done things like defy common sense and the orders of the Valar to retrieve stolen items, and can carry vendettas through their full, immortal lives. The wandering mischievous Wood Elves of The Hobbit also qualify, but diverge sharply from his later portrayals.
In Julian May's Saga of the Exiles novels, mavericks who don't fit into the galactic utopia of the future are quietly allowed to use a one-way time gate to the Pliocene if they want to opt out. Unfortunately Pliocene Earth is already occupied by the psychic Duat aliens, whose Tanu and Firvulag subraces bear a startling resemblance to the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, and who fled from a utopia of their own so that they could continue their traditions of chivalry and romantic honour by waging an insanely bloodthirsty religious war against each other. The Tanu (seelie) accept psychic humans with the right attitude as their social issues and use mind control to enslave the rest as labourers, breeding stock, or expendable soldiers, while the Firvulag (unseelie) see the Tanu-human partnership as an almost blasphemous break with tradition and want to slaughter all the exiled humans so that their endless war with the Tanu can be fought "cleanly" and with honour. Not exactly nice fairies.
- What makes it even worse is that they're at least partially the direct ancestors of humanity. And the ostensibly "human" Mercy Rosmar, due to the high quota of Tanu genes, is a thorough ball-busting bitch.
The fair folk from Jack Vance's Lyonesse isn't downright malicious, but tends towards the whimsical in negligent or destructive fashion. Fear to tread...

Live Action TV

The Fairies from the Torchwood episode "Small Worlds," who would think nothing of drowning the world beneath a flood to get their hands on one little girl.

Manga/Anime

Though they stem from another mythology, the demons of Inu Yasha share quite a few characteristics with The Fair Folk. They're strange in their looks and behavior, some unthinking like animals, others articulate and intelligent. Most of them are completely impassive to humans.

Tabletop Games

The Fair Folk (appropriately enough) of the tabletop RPG Exalted, who are shapeless chaotic beings who feed off of the emotions of mortals, often leaving them zombified husks.
The World Of Darkness RPG Changeling: the Lost paints Fairies as powerful incomprehensible alien entities that regularly abduct humans and take them off to their homeland, where they are warped to fit their masters' perceptions of them. The Changelings of the title are humans who've managed to escape back to Earth, but who've been changed by their time in the world of the Faerie and are trying to avoid their former captors at all costs.
- It is explained later that the True Fae need conflict to prevent themselves fading away into the random background chaos of Arcadia. As a result, the closest thing they have to friends among other Fae are their sworn enemies, as by fighting they're keeping each other alive. They can also be inanimate objects (Props), legions of lesser beings(Wisp), and entire self-enclosed universes (Realms) in addition to their normal forms (Actors). With enough Titles, they can do the aforementioned simultaneously!
- This is in marked contrast to the earlier Changeling: The Dreaming, where the Player Character Changelings were actual (half-)Faeries using human disguises to protect themselves from Disbelief, in the Old World Of Darkness. Though the Kithain were basically fae souls shaped by human experiences, some -- especially the Redcaps and Sluagh, and the Sidhe of both Courts just after their return to the Tellurian -- were often chillingly inhuman and capricious, at least when played right. Some sub-groups -- the Leanhaun Sidhe for example -- were specifically meant to reflect the more traditional view of The Good People as rapacious and unsympathetic to their mortal victims.
The Elves in Magic: The Gathering's Lorwyn set are horned and hooved, supposedly to remind you of deers and satyrs, but... They are also aristocratic, ruthless, and predatory, and have built a society with castes based on cunning and physical attractiveness. The Castes range from Faultless, Immaculate, Exquisite, to Perfect, the top of the pack. Eyeblights, which includes non-Elves as well as ugly or disfigured Elves, are scum and can (or must) be killed.
- There are also Faeries in the Lorwyn setting; they're mostly mischievous and disrupting, if not outright evil.
In Dungeons And Dragons cosmology, the Seelie Court, ruled by Queen Titania, are arrogant elitists who refuse to consider non-Fey people. The Unseelie Court, ruled by the Queen of Air And Darkness, are simply monstrous. Of course, since the Dungeon Master has final say what goes on in his/her world, fey in individual campaigns can vary from one end of the spectrum to the other.
- While elves are often described as been close to nature and the fey, they are still typed as humanoids; fey has its own type, and includes a very wide array of very strange creatures.
- 4E has the Primodials, who combine this trope with Cosmic Horror, especially Eldritch Abomination. Besides being responsible for the creation of the universe, they would like nothing more than to return it to chaotic mush. Why? No reason, other than being the various embodiments of Elemental Powers who can't fathom why the Physical Gods wish a constant in the universe.
Kerr's Deverry series has both the Tolkienesque style Westfolk, and the Guardians, who are typical Fair Folk.
The Elves of Birthright are as beautiful, shiny and powerful as Dungeons And Dragons Elves usually are. However, even the "good" ones strongly believe all other races to be inferior, though a few tolerate humans (but never dwarves or monstrous humanoids). A neutral Elf will kill anything he perceives as a potential threat to the Elves or their forests without a moment's hesitation. The less said about the Elves who are actually evil the better.
The Elves of Ios in the Iron Kingdoms are xenophobic isolationists who have closed off their nation's borders to outsiders. Of the few Elves that do leave their homeland, a fair proportion are assassins who have dedicated their lives to hunting down and killing human wizards and mechanika-users. They do this because they believe that human arcane magic and mechanika are draining the life from their last remaining Physical God, thereby dooming the Elven race to extinction; whether or not this is actually the case has never been conclusively addressed.
- To say nothing of the Nyssian Elves, who are enslaved body and mind to a Cosmic Horror.
The Eldar of Warhammer 40000 have absolutely no compunction against contriving to see millions or billions of humans, orks, or tau dying to save a couple hundred Eldar. Their cousins, the Dark Eldar, take the concept of Squick to a whole new meaning; their entire existence is predicated on the horrific, drawn-out to-death rape and torture of countless slaves taken from other species (and even their own) to stave off the soul-sucking Chaos God Slaanesh.
- Their Wood Elf cousins in Warhammer fantasy also qualify, they are extremely xenophobic and generally act more like a force of nature than a civilized people. This is especially true with their king, Orion the Hunter, who every spring goes on a rampage around the woods and nearby area with a host of spirits and wild hunters.

Video Games

The Red Caps of City Of Heroes recalls one of the truly nasty varieties of the original Faeries. Their entire reason for being is pretty much to torture and torment others in creative ways -- their caps were red because they had been dipped in human blood. True to form, they're also extremely dangerous for their level (despite being really, really short).
- The zone of Croatoa, where the Red Caps run fierce, also has the Fir Bolg, weird pumpkin-headed scarecrows, and the Tuatha de Danaan, who aren't so much the Celtic gods as, well, "wookie moose." And then there are the black sprites that hover around Eochai (the Giant Monster of the Fir Bolg) during the Halloween event, which are called, of course, The Unseelie.
  - It is revealed that the Fir Bolg and Tuatha de Danaan are ancient enemies of the Red Caps, who transformed them into those odd forms to torment them even more.
Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters portrays the Arilou Lalee'lay as patronizing Little Green Men who were behind the myths of The Fair Folk, and fit the trope as enigmatic, implicitly malevolent allies with "plans" for humanity.
Every encounter with fairy folk in Drakengard is laden with contempt for humans. This trope is most exemplified in the case of Leonard though, as his pact-partner is a malicious fairy who bonded with him seemingly only for the purpose of torturing him over his inability to kill himself. Which should, in hindsight, have driven him to suicide, so annoying was that fairy.
In the Shin Megami Tensei games, where All Myths Are True, There are Fairies and Elves around too, of course. And while they're certainly both cute and pretty, that doesn't mean they won't kill you just for being there.
The pixies in Fable are malicious childlike buggers with raspy voices and a penchant for human sacrifice.
As of a recent update, the Elves of Dwarf Fortress eat people.
The fair folk from A Tale Of Two Kingdoms are not downright malicious, but tend towards nasty pranks against humans (particularly but not limited to the player character). The powerful and beautiful fairy queen turns out to be not so benevolent as she tries to permanently entrap you in the fairy world.

Webcomics

The Elves in 8-Bit Theater. Especially Thief.
In the webcomic Chasing The Sunset, Pixies are not evil per se but are chaos incarnated. The kind of things you do not want in a fireworks shop.
Gunnerkrigg Court's Fairies are about halfway between the cute Pixie and the chaotic trickster types. They're capricious and largely lacking in tact and empathy, but the only harm they've done is emotional rather than physical, and directed at other Fairies rather than humans. Still, this behavior provoked stunned silence (and breaking the Gosh Dangit To Heck rule) from the protagonists.
A major arc of Tales Of The Questor pits the Kid Hero against some of the nastiest members of The Fair Folk. In this case, fae are split up into Seleighe and Unseleighe, both of which were originally a home-built immortal servant species, supernaturally compelled to follow obscure and poorly known rules in addition to any promises they make. The former are suggested to be a healthy lawful neutral with a minor fondness for some mortal species, but the Unseleighe are lawful only to the letter of the law, and willing to rip a pet bird apart or steal human children for their own entertainment. The Wild Hunt ensues, showing how dangerous they are.
- The setting also contains fairies closer to the cute and friendly version, who only interact with the material plane to drop glowing rocks in small circles, inside which living creatures occasionally hear the sounds from another dimension trickle over.
DFMA may or may not invoke this trope; while the fey seem mostly good on the surface, at worst being strange and random, it has been shown that Mab, one of the title characters, has secretly been manipulating her friends for her own (unknown) ends for an indefinite length of time. What she has been doing so far seems to be to their benefit, but only as far as we know...

Western Animation

Although he got downright cuddly in later adaptations, the forerunner of the character who would become LazyTown's Sportacus is damn scary, though technically good, in the first play. There are times this editor finds herself wondering if Áfram Latibær's moral isn't actually supposed to be "behave, or the big bad scary Sports Elf will get you".
The "Third Race" from Gargoyles. Especially the episode when Oberon and Titania were out to capture Xanatos's son Alexander for the Gathering. Goliath thought it was so vile that he actually sides with Xanatos to prevent Alexander's capture.
- Oberon is consistently depicted in the series as capricious, vain and arrogant, making and breaking edicts on a whim. Sure, he'll say his magic will never harm you and yours, and it won't...until he wants it to.

Disposable Woman

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