History Main / TheFairFolk

Modern society has lived with the {{Disneyfi|cation}}ed version of fairies for so long – the {{Fairy Godmother}}s of ''Literature/{{Cinderella}}'' and ''Literature/SleepingBeauty'', Tinker Bell in ''WesternAnimation/PeterPan'' – that it seems hard to imagine that some would consider fairies evil. And yet, some of them were.

* ''Literature/TheLaundryFiles'' brings its own take on the subject in ''The Nightmare Stacks.'' Elves are a HumanSubspecies (that is, of the genus ''homo''; further from ''sapiens'' than ''neanderthalensis'') that diverged half a million years ago in an AlternateUniverse. The most notable divergence, aside from the pointy ears, is the way they discovered magic long before they developed speech. They've since developed into a species of sociopathic PlanetLooters of alternate Earths, because while humans are adapted for speech, tool usage, and teamwork, elves are adapted for magic and ''predation''. Traditional elf folklore has a grain of truth to it, but it's been badly misinterpreted, filtered through medieval monks recording word-of-mouth from terrified peasants who barely got a glimpse of their captors. Don't bother with cold iron; it's resistant to a few of their weapons, but nothing else -- they wear full plate armor without problems. They can lie to you just fine, they're only forbidden to lie to superiors by their ''{{geas}}''-controlled society.

* ''Literature/APoisonDarkAndDrowning'': On the way back to UsefulNotes/{{London}} from Ralph Strangewayes' house, [[TheProtagonist Henrietta]] and her friends decide to take a shortcut through fairy territory. A fairy that Henrietta refers to as "Goodfellow" leads her through, and tells the group not to accept any offerings from the faeries they come across, or say "thank you" to them, since they take it as a sign you [=HAVE=] accepted. When Queen Mab identifies them as humans, she isn't pleased, especially since she had to send so many of her kind to aid humanity in their war against [[EldritchAbomination the Ancients]]. She demands they give up something deeply personal to be allowed passage. [[spoiler:Magnus makes the sacrifice of a memory for them to go through.]]

** ''The Queen of Air and Darkness'' riffs on this trope by having telepathic aliens on a frontier world use the legends of Faerie against the human settlers, right down to kidnapping children to use as changeling warriors.

* ''Literature/TheChangeling'' deals with a modern version of such beings.

* ''The Chronicles of Fairie'', a 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.

* A mostly benign version appears in Lloyd Alexander's ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfPrydain'' in the form of the Kingdom of Tylwyth Teg, a [[HiddenElfVillage secret realm]] BeneathTheEarth populated by strange and [[GoodIsNotSoft grouchy]] Fair Folk.
** Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch are [[TheWeirdSisters a trio of hags]] who present a less benevolent - though still not wholly evil - instance of this trope, operating on BlueAndOrangeMorality and seeming deeply uninterested in whether Arawn, the series' BigBad, takes over the world or not.
* ''Literature/{{Coraline}}'' (again by Creator/NeilGaiman) strongly hints that the Other Mother is one of the Fair Folk, with one of her victims referring to her as "the beldam", an archaic term for a fairy or witch.
** One of said victims appears to be a nicer sort of fairy -- this is only revealed toward the end in the original novel, but due to the necessity of actually portraying them visually, shows up sooner in the graphic novel, and was dropped for the film version.

* Used by Paul Kidd in his novelization ''Descent into the Depths of the Earth'', where faeries are ancient, powerful, decadent, insular, isolationist, supremacist, given to truly byzantine machinations to get what they want, and most of them think ''physical reality'' is beneath them.

* Melissa Marr's ''Faerie Court'' series is made of this trope; her faeries are divided into four courts: Winter, Summer, Dark, and High (with the occasional solitary fae moving freely among the courts). Each court has defining characteristics, but the fae themselves are very much individual people with distinct personalities. Most, to some degree, view humans as inferior; the extent of this can vary, with some seeing them as wayward children and others as expendable playthings.

* ''Literature/FairestOfAll'': Siofra and Mahon were both kidnapped by fairies. They're held as captives and also made their concubines, in both cases unable to leave while treated cruelly. Here fairies are human sized but visibly inhuman, and have birdlike attributes such as talons or wings.

* The Powrie from Nick Perumov's ''Keeper of the Swords'' series, loosely based on the Anglo-Scots faerie-goblins of the same name, are diminutive, bloodlusty, immortal creatures who enjoy killing and eating humans (they didn't retain the infamous red caps of their folkloric counterparts). However, they have a weakness: they worship dragons, and if you luckily have one as a friend, you can control them.
** The elves from this series also display some traits of the Fair Folk. The Light elves keep those traits under an affable exterior and a charade of friendliness to the local CrystalDragonJesus, the Dark elves are openly uncaring about mortal affairs.

* The fey of Maggie Stiefvater's books ''Lament'' and ''Ballad'' are exactly this -- entirely devoid of empathy, governed by rituals and care only about their own pleasure, thinking of humans as little better than playthings. Nuala, being a ''leanan sidhe'' is an exception; she is very close to humankind and is thus capable of human feelings. However, even she has a distinctly cruel and exploitative side... (it goes with the territory considering what type of faerie she is.)

* ''Literature/TheLaundryFiles'' brings its own take on the subject in ''The Nightmare Stacks.'' Elves are a HumanSubspecies (that is, of the genus ''homo''; further from ''sapiens'' than ''neanderthalensis'') that diverged half a million years ago in an AlternateUniverse. The most notable divergence, aside from the pointy ears, is the way they discovered magic long before they developed speech. They've since developed into a species of sociopathic PlanetLooters of alternate Earths, because while humans are adapted for speech, tool usage, and teamwork, elves are adapted for magic and ''predation''.
** Traditional elf folklore has a grain of truth to it, but it's been badly misinterpreted, filtered through medieval monks recording word-of-mouth from terrified peasants who barely got a glimpse of their captors. Don't bother with cold iron; it's resistant to a few of their weapons, but nothing else -- they wear full plate armor without problems. They can lie to you just fine, they're only forbidden to lie to superiors by their ''{{geas}}''-controlled society.
* A particularly bizarre example is John Christopher's ''Little People'', where vacationers in Ireland are plagued by malevolent fairylike creatures who turn out to be the products of Nazi genetic experiments. They're also psychic and have a penchant for kinky sex, because it's that kind of novel.
* In ''Living Alone'' by Stella Benson fairies are indifferent -- for a reason.

* Creator/ArthurMachen went back to the earliest folklore and legends and created a particularly nightmarish version he called the Little People. They appeared in his famous stories "The Shining Pyramid" and ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Impostors The Three Imposters]]''.
** Machen's ''Literature/TheWhitePeople'' is the [[DirectLineToTheAuthor transcription]] of a [[NightmareFuelStationAttendant young girl's]] diary mentioning the strange advices of [[EvilMentor her nurse]], encounters with "nymphs", mysterious ceremonies and [[CampbellCountry ancient Roman ruins]]. Machen was a huge influence on Creator/HPLovecraft, and books like ''The White People'' can be seen as the bridge between the Fair Folk of old and the {{Eldritch Abomination}}s of the more modern CosmicHorrorStory (which Machen himself more or less originated, with ''Literature/TheGreatGodPan'').

* Dennis L. [=McKiernan=] likes to demonstrate his [[ShownTheirWork knowledge]] of fairy lore in his Mithgar series as well as his Faery series.

* Many of the characters in Elizabeth Hand's novel ''Mortal Love'' are implied to be Fair Folk. One of the main characters, Larkin, is even referred to directly as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".

* Surprisingly for a kid's book, many of the denizens of the Wildworld in Creator/LJSmith 's ''The Night of the Solstice'' fit this to a T.
* Creator/GeneWolfe's ''No Planets Strike'' has the Beautiful Ones of the [[RecycledINSPACE planet Sidhe]], who allow unlimited immigration in (supplemented by luring sailors off trading spaceships) but won't allow anyone to leave once there, kill those who try, and horrifically torture those who otherwise run afoul of them.

** ''Here Abide Monsters''. A SpeculativeFiction novel including flying saucers. Nevertheless, the people of Avalon -- the AlternateUniverse into which the protagonists stumble via a CoolGate -- are the Fair Folk.

* The fairies in ''Poison'' fit this perfectly. The whole plot is set in motion by one of them kidnapping the heroine's sister.

* Creator/RALafferty's ''The Reefs of Earth'' gives us the Puca, a composite Fair Folk depicted as part alien colonists, part goblins, and part UsefulNotes/IrishTravellers, with hints of Nephilim and Neanderthal about them as well. The mature Puca in the novel are quite mellow, but their charming and precocious children sincerely want to kill every human on the planet.

* In Julian May's ''Literature/SagaOfTheExiles'' 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 equals 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 -- and despite appearances, it's by no means clear that the Tanu are any better than the Firvulag.
** What makes it even worse is that they're at least partially the direct ancestors of humanity. And the ostensibly "human" [[spoiler:Mercy-Rosmar]], due to the high quota of Tanu genes, is a thorough ball-busting bitch.

* Creator/MercedesLackey's ''[=SERRAted=] Edge'' series, and a whole host of other related works, are 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." They were driven there by the increasing preponderance of iron (which is hazardous to them) in the world, but some have adjusted and made a comeback.

* They featured heavily in ChivalricRomance. Such as ''Sir Orfeo'', which starts with the king of Fairy kidnapping Orfeo's wife -- although when Orfeo gets a promise out of him, he does [[IGaveMyWord keep it]]. They are particularly likely in the earlier ones. Such as Morgan Le Fay (Le Fay = the Fairy), who really was one of the Fair Folk in the oldest romances. The Lady Of the Lake was also a fairy who mutated into an enchantress. Still, they never quite left; the late romance ''Literature/SirGawainAndTheGreenKnight'' features the Green Knight who is overtly one of the Fair Folk.

* ''The Stolen Child'' is founded in the myth of the changeling found in European folklore (wherein the Fair Folk/fairies/hobgoblins/sidhe steal a human child and replace it with one of their own). The fairies/hobgoblins of ''The Stolen Child'' are not evil, per se (similar to how they are portrayed in Yeats' poem), but they are wild and uncivilized creatures, given to theft, vandalism, all manner of mischief, and stealing human children.

* The Fair Folk in Tom Deitz's ''Tales of David Sullivan'' are completely unable to comprehend human morality. They have a very strict code of honor, and show signs of honest affection for others, but they are truly immortal -- if they are killed, they simply come back. They fight wars out of sheer boredom. This leaves them without any understanding of human death, and thus extremely careless of consequences. They also have very little sense of human social mores: to start with, one of the secondary characters has sex with a selkie, both in humanoid forms and in seal forms. They are very clearly the old gods of Ireland, with all the capriciousness one would expect from having read any Irish {{mythology}} at all.

* David Brin's ''Those Eyes'' has faeries as 'aliens' who do traditional mischievous faerie and cow-mutilating alien things [[spoiler: Who are being driven to extinction by humans being more skeptical, seeing through their glamour]].

** ''ComicBook/IronMan'': In Creator/KieronGillen's run, Malekith the Accursed calls TheWildHunt on Tony Stark entirely because he calls himself "Iron Man" and elves hate anything associated with iron since it's one of their few weaknesses. It should be noted one of the Mandarin's Rings wanted him to go after Tony as part of the rings' scheme and was set to mentally manipulate him into doing so, as the other rings had been doing to other wielders [[EvilerThanThou (It backfired horribly)]], but Malekith went along with it anyway, apparently for the hell of it. Gillen has stated that he wants the elves to come across as alien in mindset as anything Tony has encountered in outer space. Malekith also unwisely provokes Tony with a changeling crack or two (Tony has recently discovered that he was adopted at this point), and gloats about [[EatsBabies the sort of things the Elves did with the stolen infants]]. He wants to make Tony angry. [[GoneHorriblyRight It works]], and Tony [[OneManArmy singlehandedly carves a bloody trail through Svartalfheim]] [[TranquilFury without once raising his voice]], using a suit armed with ColdIron weapons, hunting down Malekith personally. Malekith, who it should be noted is someone who enjoys pissing off ''Thor'' (as in, he once cut off his arm and burned it to ash in front of him, and at the end of ''ComicBook/WarOfTheRealms'' told him to BringIt while holding his parents hostage), admits that Tony on the rampage genuinely frightened him, and even years later, during ''ComicBook/WarOfTheRealms'', he takes the trouble to manipulate someone else (a dragon) into going after Tony rather than facing him himself.
** Creator/PaulCornell's ''Wisdom'' and ''ComicBook/CaptainBritainAndMI13'' feature Oberon's daughter [[ShoutOut Tinkabelinos]] (yes...), who resembles a foul-mouthed cross between Boudicea and a punk rocker.

** The Nisse (Norwegian) or Tomte (Swedish) was a gnome-like creature that lived on farms and helped farmers with taking care of animals and [[FertileFeet keeping the soil bountiful]]. Though mostly benevolent, they're still Underjordiske, and if they were disrespected, they could cause mischief, or even [[UnstoppableRage kill every single animal, tear down the barn]] and/or [[WalkingWasteland turn the soil infertile]].

* ''[[http://overflowingbra.com/results.htm?varname=246 Faeophobia]]'' is a series of highly erotic stories with an unusual (and generally sympathetic) depiction of the Fae. In this scenario, the Fae are a group of very highly nymphomaniacal races, who move ''en masse'' to Earth from Faerie, due to magic having become inactive there and active on Earth, which had caused them to start dying out. In this depiction, the Fae are generally non-hostile (sex is their primary form of interaction with humans), but they are still highly chaotic, and tend to cause severe social disruption; although in this case, primarily in the form of orgies.

* Despite being the poster child for the less threatening modern "disneyfied" breed of fairy, Tinker Bell from Disney's ''WesternAnimation/PeterPan'' is still spiteful and ruthless enough to arrange for the murder of her romantic rival (a teenage girl no less) and is completely unapologetic afterwards.

* ''ComicBook/SevenSoldiers'': The Sheeda are fairies who live at the ass-end of time and who TimeTravel back to raze human civilization and plunder its profits whenever humanity reaches a certain tech level.

*** There are also a few Pokémon that fit the bill as well. The Fairy/Steel-type Tinkatink line all utilize metal hammers that they make themselves, with Tinkaton using metal it harvests from ''Corviknight.'' There's also three of the [[spoiler:Paradox Pokémon you'll find in Area Zero, the Fairy/Psychic-type Scream Tail[[note]] Primal Jigglypuff[[/note]] and the Ghost/Fairy-type Flutter Mane[[note]] Primal Misdreavus[[/note]] in ''Scarlet'' alongside the Fairy/Fighting-type Iron Valiant[[note]] Robotic Gardevoir/Gallade hybrid[[/note]] in ''Violet.'' A Scream Tail even attacks Penny ''directly.'']]

* The [=ThinkGeek=] website recently invoked this trope on their newly released "[[http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/wacky-edibles/e9af/?cpg=180P Candy Unicorn Horn]]" item.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'' and other Creator/PalladiumBooks games have a wide range of fairies and nature spirits, some of whom are Scrupulous or Principled and positively nice (such as brownies) while others are nasty, brutish and puckish. Even nice fairies, though, are apt to feed you enchanted food with unpleasant results. The continuity also has the Splugorth, low level cosmic entities who employ magic-resistant species to rob the fae and put them into mystical weaponry.

* In ''VideoGame/RomancingSaga3'', the fairies love to play tricks on humans by spiking their tea, if the are silly enough to agree to drink with them, and intentionally give wrong information on how to reach the Fire Palace located in their jungle. The only fairy that doesn't act like this is Peony, who foregoes lying to the player and tells them the real path, out of gratitude for saving them previously.

* ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'': Fae are divided into several different varieties. Cookie and ChristmasElves are cute, sociable, and relatively harmless, but far more dangerous kinds exist.
** The gang ends up needing to deal with a mushroom fairy. She is forbidden from harming adults, limited to messing with their minds and inflicting them with LaserGuidedAmnesia. Children however, she traps in her mists until their minds become weak enough for her to feed to her mushrooms.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'': The Fair Folk are shapeless chaotic beings who feed off of the emotions of mortals, often leaving them zombified husks. They don't typically have driving motivations so much as drives they adopt because they seem dramatically appropriate, and would like to see Creation as a whole dissolve into the Wyld because the very concept of something operating by logic and physical laws disgusts them, since their own world operaes purely on narratives and tropes instead. Some of them have moved into Creation, losing the "shapeless" part, perceiving themselves as magnificent nobility stranded on the edges of an alien world who cannot return home (since scarier things await them...), and a few [[GoingNative go native]] and decide that Creation and its inhabitants are simply too much fun to do away with. Their stories and struggles are enticing, and it turns out that when you're stronger then the average [[PunyEarthlings mortal]] by far, it's pretty easy to live your chosen Narrative (unless you piss off the Wyld Hunt, a returned Solar, or a Lunar, who will kill, destroy, or eat you respectively).

* In Mexico, the chaneques (chaneque in singular, from nahuatl “those who live in dangerous places” or “the owners of the house”) from Myth/AztecMythology could fit here. They’re entities associated to the underworld, they live in the forests, lakes, rivers and jungles. Their main activities are watching the mountains, springs, trees and wild animals. They tend to pass their time playing mischiefs to mortals like throwing stones, breaking things, shaking hammocks, pulling dogs’ tails, frightening farm animals, stealing stuff and like that. They’re also related to health and the lack of it, especially illness related to the loss of soul, but they can also reward mankind with wealth and good fortune. In some zones of Veracruz, they’re divided in two kinds: good and bad. The first type appear in zones where mankind lives. The latter prefer secluded places, undisturbed by human civilization. There are different descriptions of their physical appearance: 1) they’re people about 1 or 1.2 meters height, their feet are the other way around, malformed body, they have tails and they don’t have the left ear; 2) they’re short people, with big heads and chocolate-like skin color; 3) they’re dwarves with childlike faces, and/or 4) they look like small children. Their boss is Chane, god of soil and water, who cares for humans, but punishes sinners, especially adulterers, using two magic animals: lupu’ti the donkey and shunu’ti the cat. Chaneques also put spells on children to take them away from home, keeping them as servants. Mothers, to avoid this, give amulets to their children like the deer’s eye (actually a brown seed), crosses made of palms and put their clothes on the other way around. In fact, they can also make travelers lose their way, so to avoid this, they must wear their clothes the other way around. They can also make humans lose their tonalli (a spirit associated to a person's birthday), which can only be undone with a special ritual. In Chiapas and Tabasco they can be worse, because they attract boys for harmful intentions, but amulets made of nuts and river stones can keep them away.

** Grain nymphs (first appearing in the Dragonlance setting) can go either way. Usually benevolent to humans (and looked down upon by their kin as city-slicker snobs) their presence can ''double'' a farm's harvest, giving plentiful bounty to whatever community it feeds, but woe betide a farmer who tries to exploit or hurt a grain nymph; not only will it drive her away, she "marks" the transgressor so that farm animals (including horses) [[AnimalsHateHim regard him as an enemy]], ''forever''.

->''"Up the airy mountain\\
Down the rushy glen\\
We daren't go a-hunting\\

We dare not go a-hunting\\

* ''[[ComicBook/DisneyKingdoms Figment]]'' has the Sound Sprites, who create objects from sound. Because of this, they prize aural perfection and speak entirely in [[AddedAlliterativeAppeal alliteration]] to reflect this. Anything and anyone that doesn't communicate in this manner is considered imperfect and a source of bad audio and must be imprisoned.