The Fair Folk

Lizzie utter'd not a word
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in

"Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men."

— The Fairies, William Allingham

Modern society has lived with the Disneyfied version of fairies for so long – the Fairy Godmothers of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Tinker Bell 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 cute little bewinged pixies who fluttered happily around humans. Elves didn't make children toys or live deep in forests with no interaction with mortals. Often, they would interact with humans with no thought to the consequences of their actions, or they would be tricksters that deliberately delighted in the utter mess they made of mortal lives (such as the classic character Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream). At worst, they're like serial killers with magic: otherworldly horrors who kidnap humans for explicit use as playthings to torment, assault, rape, maim, or eat — or sometimes to find even worse, very abstract things to do to them (some stories in folklore get dark). The Fair Folk almost always live in the Land of Faerie, often have Faerie Courts and even full-scale Wainscot Societies, and may be depicted as an Inhumanly Beautiful Race. They are usually vulnerable to Cold Iron, though not always (the Irish "Dullahan" are weak to gold).

For more information, including much of what used to be this page's description, please see the Analysis tab.

In a manner of speaking, the old tales of fairies have been replaced with aliens. In both cases, you have creatures who are ineffable and don't understand humanity, who randomly abduct humans, play with them, and return them with Time Loss and occasionally strange powers/afflictions. Periodically, there are tales of those who have dealt with them and benefited, but for the most part, mundane people are merely their playthings. For more on this interpretation of this trope, see Alien Fair Folk.

Frequently found in concert with Grimmification, as the original folklore of the darker breeds of fairies needs little exaggeration. Compare and contrast Fairy Companion, Fairy Devilmother (essentially the Evil Counterpart to the Fairy Godmother), Mage Species, Our Elves Are Different, Our Fairies Are Different, Our Goblins Are Different, Our Pixies Are Different, Our Mermaids Are Different, Nature Spirit and All Trolls Are Different. See also Changeling Tale, a specific subtrope having to do with fairy abduction, doppelgangers, and the like. Not to be confused with Changeling Fantasy, which is a type of Cinderella Plot.

All of the above aside, it's entirely possible for the fairies to be as diverse in their beliefs and actions as humans. There actually were plenty of myths and folklore about fairies who helped humans, though they were still believed to be dangerous if angered— but then again, the belief that supernatural beings are helpful to humans that show them kindness and angry if neglected is ubiquitous in many traditional religions and folk beliefs, including Greek Mythology. Some fairies may be malevolent, but others may be friendly to humans, or at least willing to leave humans alone as long as the humans do the same for them. In some cases, the fairies may be more in conflict with each other than humans, and act accordingly. Indeed, the trope of entirely malevolent fairies can be just as divorced from traditional folklore as the bowdlerised 19th century fairies of Romantic literature, as both overlook the realities of a very complex series of beliefs and practices that ultimately date back before the arrival of Christianity in Britain and Ireland.

Whatever the case, no matter how aloof, curious, silly, chaotic, flippant, ignorant, and/or light-hearted any may appear, they'll switch to their Game Faces if fundamental rules are broken near them — or even by them. Which will not go well for somebody.

The Wild Hunt is an often-overlapping trope. Youkai are a rough Japanese equivalent while in the Middle East, the Djinn carry many of the qualities associated with the Fair Folk. The Greys is a more modern trope with many similarities. Demons — when not The Legions of Hell — are often also portrayed this way (and sometimes there is rather little distinction). Jerkass Gods tend to be very similar, if typically a few steps higher in terms of power and awe (although the more powerful depictions of fairies may border on outright Physical Gods, and in Celtic Mythology the distinction can get very blurry). An extreme example may be a Humanoid Abomination.

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Examples:

• Folklore
• Literature
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games

Animation

• Mermaid is about a rusalka, a Russian water spirit. She's rather more like a siren, having a fully human body, and using her beauty and singing to lure young men into the water, where she drowns them.

Anime and Manga

• In Ah! My Goddess The Movie, the local Dark Magical Girl Morgan Le-Fay is explicitly mentioned to be a fairy. She is also The Dragon to Celestine, the anti villainous Big Bad. Though she's more lonely and broken than properly evil.
• The Ancient Magus' Bride is another example of classical ideas of fairies. They prefer being known as 'good neighbors' in this manga, hearkening back to more Gaelic mythology. The rest of the series so far has kept up with this trend, using terminology and creatures from British mythology as well as others. However, some fairies from the series do eat humans including the titular ancient magus, at least in the past, and in the very first episode, a group of fairies attempts to spirit Chise away into the fairy world (while she technically isn't in any danger of death, the fairy world does twist humans who stay in it, turning them into fairies themselves over time.) And then there's Ashen Eye, a rather malevolent and cruel trickster who is pretty much the single darkest take on the Fair Folk this series gets.
  • It is also implied that most fairies by nature have a skewed understanding of morality compared to human norms and don't feel emotions the way humans do. Elias Ainsworth, who is at least part-Fair Folk, starts with a bit of a Lack of Empathy and when he does develop emotions, he is clearly puzzled by what he's experiencing and unaware of how to deal with it. When he attempts to save Chise's life by sacrificing one of her friends (purposely choosing this friend because he's jealous of the relationship she and Chise have), the Fairy Queen Titania chalks it up to him still "loving the way 'they' do", implying this kind of behavior is common for the faerie.
• Berserk plays this trope dead straight with Rosine, a fairy-like Apostle who likes to carry kids off in order to turn them into her creepy little pseudo-elves in a rather twisted version of the Changeling Fantasy. The real Elves of the series, such as Puck, are more the benevolent version. Oddly, while the real Elves are indeed harmless, they have a very serious case of Blue-and-Orange Morality. Puck, for instance, seems to forget that he's living in a Crapsack World, finds being a Jerkass a more repellent trait than carving one's way through walls of enemies and civilians alike, and follows Guts primarily to partake in the adventure. Not unlike the reader...
• In Digimon Ghost Game, Digimon classified as "Fairy-type" tend to fall under this trope.
  • Petermon was a Corrupted Character Copy of Peter Pan, and as such was a vehement Adult Hater (despite being Adult/Champion-level himself) and Psychopathic Manchild who abducted human children and Rookie-level Digimon to his Land of Faerie Pocket Dimension.
  • Piximon would randomly send unsuspecting humans back in time because he thought they'd "have fun", and tries to rob the protagonists of their Digivices as "payment".
  • Downplayed for Pucchiemon at first. She's just a fickle and slightly annoying fairy Digimon who fell in love with resident idiot from Osaka Fukatsu and forces him to act like her as payback, including Impossible Tasks like casting a Care-Bear Stare attack she did several times before. But then she evolves into the towering monster cat Meicrackmon: Vicious Mode, and that's a different story.
  • Cthyllamon is an Evil Knockoff of MarineAngemon who is classified as a Fairy Digimon. He's a vicious Mega-level Psychopathic Manchild who wants to flood the world in Digital Water and as a Mega, can easily overpower lower-level Digimon despite his rather ridiculous appearance.
• Durarara!! subverts this trope with Celty Sturluson, an Irish Dullahan desperately searching for her missing head. At first, she may look intimidating and a little bit sinister, but soon we discover that she is genuinely a very kind, gentle, and caring person. For an Unseelie Fae, she is actually one of the most friendly and affable characters in the series. She is also afraid of space aliens. As Shinra points out, part of this may have to do with the fact that Celty's an amnesiac Dullahan. She might not have been so nice if circumstances were different (quarter-Dullahan Ruri Hijiribe, for example, is a serial killer with a monster fetish).
• Kaori Yuki's Fairy Cube is probably the best example of this trope being used properly in manga. From the protagonist's Fairy Companion debating whether or not to eat him in the beginning, to a Tuatha Dunann being weak to a pair of scissors (and being unable to cross fresh water), to the presence of changelings replacing children, a lot of classic fairy-lore is involved. Granted, some of it is modernized (said fairy companion is played as more of a non-romantic Tsundere, for example), but the effort is easily appreciable.
• Nasuverse:
  • In the backstory and side-materials, the Fae are established as being Nature Spirits that are a reflection of the Planet’s consciousness, specifically described as it’s “sense of touch” and live on the Reverse Side of the World. Considering the general Nature Is Not Nice attitude the planet has in the series, the Fae are naturally pretty twisted.
  • They show up in Kara no Kyoukai, specifically in 6th book/movie, Oblivion Record. There, they were responsible for kidnapping Satsuki Kurogiri when he was a child, resulting in him swearing vengeance upon them. They didn’t really, though. What really happened was that he killed a few, so they messed with his mind as a dying act of revenge.
• One Piece: The so-called "fairies" of Dressrosa who go around stealing people's valuables are actually a race of small dwarves called the Tontatta, who are unimaginably strong for their size and are so fast they are effectively invisible to most people. The reason they are called fairies dates back to ancient times when the original Royal Family of Dressrossa, the Donquixote Family, enslaved the entire Tontatta tribe. When the Donquixote family left Dressrosa to become World Nobles, they were replaced by a new royal family the Riku Family. The original King Riku felt pity and guilt for the enslavement of the Tontatta and immediately freed them, telling them that they can take whatever they want from the kingdom as compensation for their treatment while he took responsibility. Thus, beginning their habit of stealing from the people which the Riku family attributed to the work of magical fairies in order to hide the existence of the Tontatta, thereby keeping them safe from others who might want to enslave them again.
• In Saint Seiya, Fairies are malevolent butterfly-like creatures who dwell in the Underworld and work alongside Hades and his army.
• Spirited Away features Yōkai, strictly speaking, but otherwise has all the usual elements; abductions, curses placed upon mortals who eat the food of spirits, evil beings who enslave mortals by stealing their names, that sort of thing.
• The Guardians of the Tower are known in the legends as Fae. Not only are they all sorts of weird looking (Headon is a bipedal bunny with eyes in his Slasher Smile), they can be rather manipulative and are implied to plot the destruction of the current ruling system.

Comic Books

• Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things: the eponymous girl lives in a strange neighborhood, where abducted children are sold by goblins to the rulers of the Twilight Kingdom.
• The Fair in DIE are a more science fantasy take on this trope, being robotical creatures that may offer great boons to those who find them, but each time someone requests a boon they flip a coin, with a 50/50 chance of them granting it.
• Figment has the Sound Sprites, who create objects from sound. Because of this, they prize aural perfection and speak entirely in 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.
• Smut Peddler Presents My Monster Girlfriend: The Forest Folk in "Forest Wedding". Many of them are vaguely humanoid and come in various shapes and sizes.
• 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 partly inspired the Hellboy movie The Golden Army. Said changeling, seeking vengeance against Hellboy, becomes the driving force behind an army of fae seeking to restore the glory days. Restoring the good old days, or going out with a bang, they don't seem to be picky. Resurrecting an ancient sorceress named the Queen of Blood (aka, Nimue) to lead the army adds destroying the world to the list.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Iron Man: In Kieron Gillen's Iron Man (2012) run, Malekith the Accursed calls The Wild Hunt 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 (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 the sort of things the Elves did with the stolen infants. He wants to make Tony angry. It works, and Tony singlehandedly carves a bloody trail through Svartalfheim without once raising his voice, using a suit armed with Cold Iron 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 War of the Realms told him to Bring It while holding his parents hostage), admits that Tony on the rampage genuinely frightened him, and even years later, during War of the Realms, he takes the trouble to manipulate someone else (a dragon) into going after Tony rather than facing him himself.
  • Paul Cornell's Wisdom and Captain Britain and MI13 feature Oberon's daughter Tinkabelinos (yes...), who resembles a foul-mouthed cross between Boudicea and a punk rocker.
• Lady Death: The Eldritch in Medieval Lady Death are heavily inspired by the Melniboneans in The Elric Saga: a brutally and immoral race of fae humanoids that despises humanity and regularly goes on killing sprees against them known as "the wild hunts".
• Mary Marvel (1945):
  • In issue #19, the Queen of the Nymphs punishes one of her subjects by cursing a whole forest into changing the nature of whoever wanders into it.
  • In issue #23, a group of gremlins/poltergeists follow a man wherever he goes, causing chaos and mayhem around him, because he wrecked a truck filled with furniture haunted by them.
• Proof (2007): The female fairies 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.
• The Sandman (1989) reinvigorated this trope for the modern era. The Sandman directly crosses over with a number of other DC comics, meaning that nasty elves also play a part in The Books of Magic, Hellblazer, and several other Vertigo Comics series.
• Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005): The Sheeda are fairies who live at the ass-end of time and who Time Travel back to raze human civilization and plunder its profits whenever humanity reaches a certain tech level.
• Shade, the Changing Man: A late issue focuses on a group of actors filming the type of Disneyfied, Bowdlerized fairy tale made for children, shot on location in Ireland. They get together at a pub to express contempt for the film and the irresistible amounts of money that compelled them to take part in it, and the older Irish natives talk about the terror and brutality of the real fairy tales they grew up with. When Shade arrives and enters a Fairy Ring, his madness amplifies the effect across the entire country, with results deadly and deranging. The madstorm also wipes out the entire film production, to the relief of the surviving actors.
• Tamsin and the Deep, and the sequel series Tamsin and the Dark by Neill Cameron and Kate Brown have this in spades. The entire series is based around Cornish mythology. They do actions from stealing someone's ice cream to kidnapping a male descended from Lutey, one of Tamsin's ancient ancestors, every seven years in exchange for magic powers.
• Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose: The Fair Folk pop up from time to time, although the miniature pixies/goblins are more common. Notably, they don't seem to have any of the weaknesses listed at the beginning of this article.
• Thunderbolts: The Thunderbolts fight an army of fairies. At first they're tiny winged women but then what looks like winged actual-size cthulhumanoids show up. Their names are largely consonants, and, according to Elsa Bloodstone, those are the same kind of true fae that Lovecraft wrote about.

Fairy Tales

• In the fairy tale "Childe Rowland", Burd Ellen is kidnapped by elves when she inadvertently runs around a church "widershins" (counter-clockwise), and two of her brothers attempting to rescue her are trapped and enchanted by the King of Elfland, until Childe Rowland saves them.
• In "The Jezinkas", the Jezinkas have the charming habit of gouging out men's eyes.
• Joseph Jacobs's "Kate Crackernuts", the prince is forced to leave his bed every night to dance at the fairy hall, and is deathly ill because of it. (One notes that this was a folk explanation of TB — the victims wasted away because they got no sleep by night.) Fortunately Kate eavesdrops on the fairies and learns not only how to cure him, but how to undo an unrelated curse on her step-sister. The same thing, albeit gender-flipped, happens in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
• It's never explained in-story who or what The Pied Piper of Hamelin was, but some theorize he may have been one of the Fair Folk.
• "Rumpelstiltskin": Rumpelstiltskin helps a young woman spin straw into gold, but then demands her first-born child as payment.
• "Sleeping Beauty" is gifted by six fairy godmothers with beauty, grace, wit, and great skill in music, singing and dancing, then cursed out of spite to prick her hand on a spindle on her sixteenth year and die by a seventh fairy. The curse is softened, but cannot be completely removed, by the final fairy.
• In Whuppity Stoorie, the "green gentlewoman" saves a woman's pig but demands her son in payment.
• Iruoch in the second novel of the Widdershins Adventures trilogy is an evil faerie with a taste for human children, eight unnaturally long spider-like fingers, and a physics-defying hat and coat.
• "The Nix in the Mill-Pond": The titular nixie promises the poor miller she will make him a rich man if he will give him "that which has just been born in your house." The miller naively assumes the nixie is referring to some puppy or kitten, and he promises what she demands. Then he goes back home and finds out his wife has just given birth.
• Madame d'Aulnoy:
  • "The Yellow Dwarf": The Fairy of the Desert is a wise but malevolent being who looks more like a witch than a stereotypical fairy. She is allied with the Yellow Dwarf, and when Princess Toutebelle breaks her promise to marry the dwarf, the Fairy of the Desert and the Yellow Dwarf show up at her wedding to wreak havoc at the celebration.
  • Madame d'Aulnoy's works feature several other fairies who fit in this category, such as the Fairy of the Spring in "The White Doe", who curses Princess Desiree to not see sunlight for fifteen years in revenge for the queen forgetting to invite her (after she helped the queen out) and Carabosse in "Princess Mayblossom" (who curses the titular princess to spend her first twenty years miserable).
  • "Graciosa and Percinet" contains mostly good fairies, including the titular Prince Percinet, but there is a wicked fairy who assists Wicked Stepmother Grognon in punishing Princess Graciosa — until the fairy realizes exactly who she has been punishing and snaps Grognon's neck for her trouble.
• In "The Elf Maiden", elves have mysterious magical powers, weird customs and a strong dislike towards humans, whom they tend to avoid.
• In "The Gold Mountain", the dwarf is a wicked, magical creature who tricks humans into giving him their children.
• In "The Three Little Men in the Wood", the titular characters seem to be some kind of leprechauns or dwarves: they are magical, tiny humanoid creatures who live in the woods and are willing to reward or punish humans who stumble upon their home.
• In Croatian tale "Reygoch", Curlylocks and her cloud-dwelling fairy kin seem more mischievous than evil, coming down to Earth every night to mess up with the men's livestock only for fun.

Fan Works

• The Fluffy Folio: The Vinefang Faerie takes on a kindly guise, luring in unknowing adventurers to feed to carnivorous plants.
• Galar Grapples: In "The Fairy Trick," Opal accepts Jermaine's request for a friendly rematch, provided he trains up the new Pokémon he catches. He does, but she's gone when he returns to Ballonlea Gym. She later reappears after his battle with Bede, saying her behavior is "a little Fairy-type Pokémon magic."
• Mendacity: The Fae are alien, cruel, and wicked beings, who delight in tormenting ponies and each other and seek to one day rule the world as they did in days long gone.
• Nine Days Down: The Fey, capricious and dangerous beings who range from bestial hunters such as bewilderbeasts and changelings to intelligent and deeply malicious beings like Nuckelavee. A few remain free in the upper world, but the worst of them were all banished to Tartarus long ago.
  The monster strutted before a veritable horde of creatures like him, inasmuch as anything was like him. The Fey. Chittering, cackling, impossible things, no two of them alike. One was like a huge dog, wrapped in chains and flexing claws of corroded bronze. Another bled from every orifice, giggling endlessly. One wore a coat made entirely of faces. And there were so many more.
• The Palaververse: This is what the Mage-Lords were perceived as by the ancient inhabitants of the Equestria Girls universe when they crossed worlds — otherworldly beings who seemed to wear human appearance like ill-fitting clothing, striking from deep forests to steal people away, never to be seen again.
• Xenophilia:
  • Lero Michealides used to be a captive of the Fae before escaping to Equestria.
  • In the Recursive Fanfiction, Into the Hedge, the Fae and their world are further explored.
• The Generous Ones from Alexandra Quick, and other inhabitants of the Lands Below such as Bewi. The Most Deathly Power also has a similar shtick.
• Child of the Storm features the Winter and Summer Courts, mostly based on The Dresden Files. As in their native canon, they're very prone to using Exact Words, each and every one of them is a Rules Lawyer and they love making deals. They are also incredibly dangerous. The sequel reveals that as a species, they're descended from humans/an offshoot of humanity that entered the realm of Faerie in the Nevernever several hundred thousand years ago, and evolved to not only be able to use magic, like humans, but to be magic (which contributes to their Blue-and-Orange Morality).
  • Lily and Fix, the Summer Lady and Summer Knight, appear at an Asgardian function and are quite helpful to Harry, offering the benefit of their own experiences of change, though Loki remarks that he paid them in information — however, he also adds that they did want to help, but the Fae being the Fae (or, in Fix's case, a human who's bound to the Fae), it has to be Equivalent Exchange. During the same chapter Mar-Vell mentions that he barely got away from Maeve, the Winter Lady, with his virtue intact. In the sequel, Queen Mab, mother of Maeve and Queen of Winter, gets involved, and demonstrates why even Thor and Loki — who she's as powerful as at her weakest — treat her with respect (though as Doctor Strange casually mentions, she knows much better than to get in his way).
  • Harry doesn't have any explicit connection to the Fae, but his somewhat uncanny mannerisms and fondness for fire lead to speculation that Lily was connected to the Summer Court. While there are other reasons for this, Word of God noted somewhat cryptically that Lily did meet some of the Summer Court and they rather liked her. Considering her temperament and her connection to the Phoenix, this is perhaps not surprising.
  • The Alfar of the Nine Realms generally don't follow this. However, Gravemoss is an exiled Light Elf and, intentionally, reminiscent of the darkest and most horrifying tales of the Fair Folk with all the knobs turned up. Thanks to him, in chapters 58, 59 and 60, we see an army of Winter Fae mercenaries known as the Slendermen. They are every bit as creepy as you would expect and play this trope as straight as an arrow.
  • In chapter 68 Professor Lupin notes that the Courts rarely bother wanded practitioners for whatever reason, leading to a number of wanded scholars to assert that they don't exist, before making it clear that they are very real and extremely dangerous. He also goes on to note the existence of The Wild Hunt, led by Oberon and the Erlking, who are both invoked by those who wish to channel the powers of hunting spirits. The Erlking will help someone he deems worthy (though if he does not deem them worthy, things can get messy). Oberon, on the other other hand, is a great deal more capricious.
  • Likewise, Malekith the Accursed is mentioned, and shown to have been one of the most terrifying foes Asgard's faced, being forced to resort to orbital bombardment of Svartalfheim, a.k.a. 'the Dark World', which is now a Death World more or less devoid of life. Or at least, as Thor discovers in chapter 50 of the sequel, it used to be.
• Justice Society of Japan features these as a major antagonist, inspired by the type from Changeling: The Lost. Milly Ashford, for instance, is implied to be a Fetch.
• Their Midnight Revels: They are present in this story in all of their mischievous, conniving, but surprisingly charming and romantic glory. Two of the lovers are Miranda and Ariel from The Tempest. The fairies are portrayed as magical and amoral in creating illusions to fool mortals, have oracular foresight (though they say things do change), but have limitations.
  The fairies are still vulnerable to iron, because Ariel burns himself on a pot. They cannot enter Downton unless they are invited by Robert Crawley, the master of the house. Edith is not able to follow the fairies on her own, she must be led by someone she knows and trusts so Ariel enchants Thomas first. The World of Faerie is shown by magical creatures living in rocks, trees, and are in tune with nature such as their homes are built with outdoor views. It is based on various sources particularly Shakespeare’s and the world of artist, Brian Froud.
• The Alarmaverse: The fia sídhe, heavily based of fairies from Celtic lore, are deer who live in the sídhe, a realm normally inaccessible from Equestria that can only be entered and exited where it intersects with normal reality — other forms of interdimensional travel do not work within it — and operate by a very different sort of morality than mortals do. One of them, Abhean, thinks he’s required by honor to behead Bon Bon for insulting Derpy, and the three Derpy meets in the sídhe were quite happy to hunt and eat her, given the chance.
• The Life and Times of a Winning Pony: The fey are a group of pony-shaped magical creatures known for their love of contracts (and... interesting and creative ways of interpreting them), their unique takes on morality, their inability to lie and their aversion to Cold Iron.
  • The rusalka in The Incredibly Thrilling Investigation of Storm Kicker. It looks like an earth pony, but just slightly... wrong, and it's described as a trickster spirit that uses what appears to be a form of vocal glamour/mind control to turn ponies into thralls and force them to dance with it, and it's perfectly happy to kill them if they, say, miss a dance step, or if it gets bored. It apparently considers this a justifiable way to alleviate its loneliness.
  • Muses are fey that feed off of the psychic energy associated with artistic creation. As such, they often associate with artists, inspiring them to create more and greater works in exchange for, essentially, sustenance, although they lack the ability to create truly original works in their own right.
  • There is speculation, in-universe, that unicorns share a closer relationship with they fey than other pony tribes do, due to the fact that cold iron, which hurts and repels fey creatures, also disrupts and impedes unicorn magic. Theories presented in-universe include unicorns being descended from pony/fey hybrids, or from ponies who managed to steal the fey's magic.
• The Stanford Adventure Club: Zantabraxus is identified as a Hmong variant of this. When Klaus Wulfenbach is wounded while he was fighting in the Vietnam war, she expresses her gratitude for defending her country by abducting him from his bed to make him her consort. Klaus didn't mind really much being married after meeting her.
  • Her twin children have quite interesting abilities, even if Gil's are more developed: he Speaks Fluent Animal , has Healing Hands and can fly and use pyrokinesis.
  • Equivalent Exchange seems to be a thing with fae folk: since Gil often helped Ardsley and gave him gifts, Ardsley finds himself in his debt and could be forced to do Gil's bidding. Gil is genuinely horrified to learn this detail.
• In The Crystal Court, the Courts are portrayed as ambivalent to the matters and suffering of humans (which they are usually the cause of), kidnapping babies or forcing human musicians to play until their hands bled. They even seem to have a contempt for their own kind as well, leaving their own children with human families as changelings and desiring to execute Ruby and Sapphire for their inter-court romance (even though their respective courts were under a truce).
• In brilliant lights will cease to burn, the fae are somewhere in between their modern and folkloric portrayals. Appearance-wise, they are cute and/or beautiful pixie-like creatures, but they act much more like their traditional counterparts, temporarily granting people powers through contracts and generally causing mischief. They outright said that they would have whisked Izuku away and made him their pet if it weren't for the fact that he's the only living magician on Earth.
• In Celestia's Rocket Adventures, this is how the Pokémon universe seems to translate 'alicorn', as Celestia, Luna, and Twilight all end up as Fairy-types. They may look pretty and generally friendly (and in Luna's case boisterous), but as Team Flare and Ash can both testify to, they are not to be trifled with.
• A popular concept in Touhou Project fan works is that Yuuka Kazami, the ancient and inexplicably powerful flower youkai, used to be a fairy. The idea is that as Yuuka grew stronger, she became the Humanoid Abomination that's familiar to fans, the implication being that this can happen to any fairy as they grow in strength. Such as Cirno, who in canon is on the low end of the power scale among Touhou characters but abnormally strong among fairies, and seemingly gets stronger with each of her canon appearances.
• The Bridge establishes that fae folk did once exist in droves on Terra in the Pleistocene, often existing by themselves or with ancient humanity in advanced civilizations that inspired the likes of Shambhala and Atlantis. They originated because massive amounts of mana made some populations of humans evolve into naturally magical species, explaining why so many fae folk and yokai look humanoid. When mana levels plummeted after the Toba catastrophe 70,000 years ago, and the sacrifice of what remained to create the guardian beasts like Gamera, most of the fae folk turned back into humans over the generations, but on rare occassions a new fae might be born to keep legends alive and some survivors like the three Shobijin sisters persisted.
• Spellbound (Lilafly) reinterprets many of the Miraculous Ladybug characters and events in terms of fae magic. Adrien and Felix are half-fae, cat shapeshifters, and their mother disappeared into Tír na nÓg, which is a big part of their father's motivation to isolate them from the world. Chloe is another half-fae, explaining a great deal of her cruelty, while Sabrina is a selkie whose coat was stolen, enslaving her to Chloe's family. When the kwamis show up, they aren't happy about one of the fair folk holding a Miraculous, but Plagg gives Adrien a chance because the situation is urgent. Adrien's innate magic has side effects on Miraculous usage, though, and Adrien has even more secrets to keep than in canon, because if Marinette learns too much about the fae, she's likely to be Killed to Uphold the Masquerade.
• In Boldores And Boomsticks, Ruby brings up the trope in regards to Fairy Types in Chapter 32.3. Weiss, not familiar with the older, scarier stories, is dismissive of the idea until they talk to Olivia, who tells them about Tapu Lele, who she describes as the most Fae of all the Guardian Deities despite them all being part Fairy-type, being completely unrestrained in battle because her ability to heal means that she feels no need to hold herself back, and her mood can apparently change from kind and generous to self-centered and uncaring fairly easily. Olivia then confirms that the Fairy type was named after mythological beings from old tales, especially from the Galar region, the Pokémon world's version of the UK, where many stories of The Fair Folk originate in our world, and that she feels that the name is accurate and that Fairy-Types are as vengeful as they are adorable.
• Vow of Nudity: Spectra, like all changelings, is statistically a fey rather than a humanoid. This means she speaks sylvan and the list of spells/effects that affect her are completely different to most player characters.
• The Faustian Queen who appears in Sixes and Sevens, inspired by the same character from Marvel 1602, is also hypothesized by Emily to be the Faerie Queen of British folklore. The Queen's court includes a Mari Lwyd and little men who look like they stepped out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. She also mentions her relationship to other Christmas figures like Krampus and Perchta, pre-Christian Germanic and Alpine folklore creatures associated with mid-winter.
• Seven Favours For Harry Potter heavily features Fae characters, presenting a world where the wizarding world and the Fae have a sort of uneasy truce between them. At the beginning of the fic, Hagrid bargains with Lady Vidia of the Spring Court for seven favours to be granted to Harry. Not surprisingly, this has a lot of unexpected consequences.

Films — Animation

• In Beauty and the Beast (1991), the prince is turned into the Beast and his household servants into animated objects because he wouldn't let a disguised enchantress stay the night and scoffed at her payment of a rose. Though referred to as an "enchantress", she otherwise fits most traditional examples of fairies and their behavior toward humans when they feel insulted. Especially since her punishment, designed to correct his character flaws, extends to his staff, who didn't deserve it.
• Brave: The Wisps are supernatural folk. They're said to have the power to change fate. They're frequently shown leading Merida away from danger. Twice they lead her away from Mor'du and towards help before she even knows he's there. They also lead her to the ruined castle so she can learn the truth about the legend of the princes, and the true danger of the spell, and in the end, they lead her back to the stone circle so she can save her mother. If not benign, they are at least fairly neutral.
• The Leafmen from Epic (2013), while not malicious, are heavily influenced by them. Chris Wedge's motivation to make the film came from seeing a museum painting of tiny fairy folk in a forest.
• Hercules: In the ancient world of Greek mythology the closest analogues to fairy and elves were lesser nature-spirits (nymphs, gorgons, sprites) that could somewhat be called gods in the most minor sense. Hades two stooges, Pain and Panic, seem to represent and even display some of their less pleasant behaviour like spiriting away babies from their cradles and transforming themselves into adorable children to lure unsuspecting men to their doom.
• Tinker Bell from Disney's Peter Pan - despite being the poster child for the less threatening modern "disneyfied" type of fairy, she's still spiteful and ruthless enough to arrange for the murder of her perceived romantic rival (a teenage girl no less) and is completely unapologetic afterwards.
• The Princess and the Frog somewhat treats Facilier's Friends on the Other Side like this. They're beyond the ability of humans to stop but can be warded off with the proper precautions. They grant wishes which give people exactly what they asked for without giving them what they wanted and have high prices—effectively, they're supernatural Loan Sharks. Even Facilier's tendency to call them his "friends" when they're anything but friendly fits this. It's a polite name which avoids angering them in the way that a more accurate name might.
• Aisling from The Secret of Kells is a fairy (though it's implied she doesn't like to be called that) and Word of God and a tie-in comic state that she's one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Though she turns out to be much nicer than how the Fair Folk are usually portrayed, she still doesn't take kindly to those who intrude in her forest and initially even threatens to set her wolves on Brendan if he doesn't leave.
• The Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2. She has the image of a sweet fairy godmother but is, in fact, a sociopath who intended to use a promise made by the king to have Fiona marry her son in order to rule the kingdom as queen mother. When that plan failed, she proved willing to stoop to unimaginable lows, causing the king's Heel–Face Turn.
• Sleeping Beauty (1959): Even though she's usually called a witch these days, Maleficent is actually a "wicked fairy". While the previous Kingdom Hearts games had gone with the sorceress description, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep rightfully lists her as a fairy.
  • Discworld: To quote Nanny Ogg's Cookbook: "How hard is it to invite her along, give her plenty of drink and a plate of ham rolls all to herself, and keep her out of the way of your posh auntie? Play your cards right and you could be ahead by an extra good wish."
• The Daoine Sidhe in Song of the Sea, right down to suggesting other names when the protagonist calls them "fairies". Downplayed since most of the Daoine Sidhe Ben and Saoirse encounter are reclusive but still friendly; even Macha, the dreaded Owl Witch who turns people to stone by stealing their emotions, is more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist who's under the misguided belief that she's helping them.
• Spirited Away is a Japanese Youkai Fairy Tale that portrays them as acting very similar to The Fair Folk.

Films — Live-Action

• The 2013 47 Ronin have the Tengu, half-human/half-crow goblins from Japanese Mythology who had no problem rising Kai, a human boy and even teaching him some of their powers. Tengu-forged swords have magical qualities, becoming an Absurdly Sharp Blade in the hands of a fearless warrior and dull in the hands of a coward. They live in The Lost Woods in a Hidden Elf Village and rarely show themselves to outsiders, except to kill them horrifically of course.
• The trolls in Absentia are unseen entities who make their home in an extradimensional space between walls, but possess unmistakable shades of this. They enjoy making deals and are insistent on paying what they owe, even if the other party doesn't want it. They seem reluctant to attack anyone who makes a deal with them, but they also attract attention to others around you.
• The main villains in Bright are a terrorist group of elves trying to recover their leader's Magic Wand and they commit several horrific crimes like murdering a innocent Mexican family including their baby merely For the Evulz. It's also noted that the Dark Lord was a renegade elf that tried to Take Over the World over 2,000 years ago and is pretty much treated as the setting's Greater-Scope Villain.
• Subverted partially with King Brian and the other leprechauns in Darby O'Gill and the Little People, since Brian himself is a good friend, albeit mischievous, to the titular character, the Banshee and the Dullahan however...
• Del Toro does it again with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. No wings or sparkles here, the creatures (officially known as Homonculi) look more like evil hunchbacked lemurs.
• The deranged, fickle and bizarre inhabitants of The Sixth Dimension from the movie Forbidden Zone share lots of traits with the Fair Folk. Of Course, everyone's deranged in this movie, but the inhabitants of The Sixth Dimension layer on top a slice of Fleischer-style surrealism to make them look even crazier.
• The Guardian (1990), a horror movie about a dryad who poses as a babysitter, abduct babies, and feeds them to her tree.
• The Hallow is an Irish folk horror movie about a family stalked by elves, who seem to be a kind of virulent parasitic fungus, and is looking for a new host.
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army, also directed by del Toro, establishes that the magical world is at odds with humanity. The magical world is ruled by the royal line of Elves. There are also tooth fairies, which are ravenous six-limbed insectoids who move in swarms can devour a person whole (and since they crave calcium, they always start with the teeth), as well as trolls and goblins.
• The Elves in Krampus are incredibly scary and very similar to the traditional despiction of fairies. Naturally as the film itself is an inversion of the Christmas lore.
• 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."
  • Jareth himself and his Goblins; the film is essentially a changeling tale.
  • And the Fieries. They're playful rather than evil, but they have unfortunate gaps in their understanding of human physiology...
  • Also the brownie that screws up the marks Sarah's using to get through the maze. From his perspective, she's defacing his flagstones.
• The hexe witches of The Last Witch Hunter are apparently inspired by these.
• In Ridley Scott's Legend (1985), 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").When they're stuck in a cell in Darkness' stronghold, Gump is unable to pick the lock because it's made of iron. "Iron is trouble for fairies."
  • On the other side, Meg Mucklebones the hag and the goblins led by Blix are purely, gleefully villainous to the point of Card Carrying Villainy.
• The eponymous creature from the Leprechaun slasher film series is one of these. He's actually more in line with earlier folklore than modern interpretations.
• In Maleficent, the Perspective Flip of Sleeping Beauty (1959), Maleficent is explicitly a fairy in the more traditional sense alongside the more typically modern Flittle, Knotgrass, and Thistlewit, (the new versions of Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) rather than a human witch. In fact, there's a whole land of Fair Folk in various forms, called the Moors, where they mostly mind their own business. Like in traditional folklore, they're weak to iron and the main antagonist King Stefan uses this to his advantage when fighting Maleficent.
• Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth features a fairy world alongside the real world. The main character is brought into the world by a fawn and occasionally guided by benevolent sprytes. There are malicious denizens of the world, however, such as the Pale Man. It's left ambiguous whether the world is real or just the girl's imagination.
• The Filipino horror anthology Shake Rattle And Roll 13 has a segment featuring tamawo, a Philippine equivalent to the Fair Folk. They appear as pale humanoids with long, white hair, and dress like tribal warriors.
• Troll 2: The Goblins would count, given their enchanted food with nasty side effects, their posing as humans through glamour to lure humans to their doom, and their love for all things plant and hatred of man.
• Were the World Mine, a musical adaptation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', about an outcast gay kid cast as Puck in the school play who ends up making a magic flower and causing people to fall in love with people of their own gender, essentially becoming Puck, often in musical sequences that are vague about whether it's a fantasy or not. The English/drama teacher, as well, is implied to be a fairy, complete with magic that makes the townspeople bend to her will. Granted, this is to give Puck/Timothy a chance to fix everything, but it's still not quite right from a human perspective. Overall, the fairies depicted are very sympathetic, but there is definite selfishness and laughing at the trouble being caused to mundane people going on.
• Willow downplays this with its fairies. The inches-tall brownies are mischievous and don't hesitate to kidnap the baby Elora Danan when Madmartigan's back is turned. By contrast Queen Cherlindrea is a tall, beautiful, ethereal — and stern — woman who, after talking to Elora, explains the entire situation to Willow (who until this point isn't aware Elora is The Chosen One), gives him a magic wand to use, and tells him where to go next. Two of the brownies also accompany him as allies, though they specifically decide to stay with him despite all the peril just because it's fun, and the "love dust" one of them carries causes a lot of trouble for Madmartigan in particular later.
• In the beginning of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Charlie meets a superstitious old peddler who recites a line from the poem by William Allingham posted as the Trope Quote, clearly believing that the "mysterious workers" who work in the factory have something to do with the Fair Folk. Of course, this is a subversion; the Oompa Loompas are friendly, harmless creatures, and are not fairies (but still rather unsettling, what with their bright orange skin and eerie morality ballads). If anything, Wonka himself behaves more like the traditional Fair Folk archetype.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: Both the Children of the Forest and the White Walkers live beyond the Wall and have been there since the Long Night, though no one is really aware of this below the Wall. The White Walkers are malevolent magical creatures who take human children offered to them, reminiscent of changelings. As far as the Walkers are concerned, they weren't always like this. The first White Walker was a human that the Children performed some sort of ritual on to turn him into the Night's King, making them Was Once a Man humanoid abominations in addition to this. The Children of the Forest are mysterious, magical, forest-dwelling creatures who have long contested with humans and have been fading as The Magic Goes Away.
• The Haunting Hour featured the Fair Folk in some of their episodes. Specific examples include:
  • "Intruders": A fairy named Lyria explains to a girl named Eve that Eve is a changeling and invites her to rejoin their world. Eve enjoys her new friend and powers at first, until Lyria demands Eve let her kidnap Eve's little brother...
    Eve: What will happen to him?
    Lyria: You don't want to know.
  • It's also heavily implied that, while the fairies may look like beautiful winged humanoids, they can assume a more monstrous form. All we see of this, however, are red eyes glaring at Eve from the forest.
  • "Red Eye": A girl named Georgia discovers that the Alp, a creature that can inhabit small objects, has been following her dad around on his business trip through Europe, appearing in all the photos he's sent her. "Alp" is actually a variation of "elf," and the creature takes the form of a red-eyed, shadowy demon.
  • "Lotsa Luck": Greg, an Irish-American teen, makes a deal with Seamus the leprechaun in order to end his string of bad luck. Greg soon learns that, after exhausting all three of his wishes, the leprechaun will take his soul, and has to find a way to break their contract.
• Lost Girl: Every supernatural creature is effectively fae. This includes vampires, kappa, succubi, and lots of other nasty things (thought Dark Is Not Evil is in effect for some of the characters). The ruling bodies of the Fae are effectively the Seelie and Unseelie Courts (here referred to as "Light" and "Dark"), and both courts view humans as a handy tool for their plans and ascribe to rather dated notions of justice (such as Combat by Champion).
• In The Magicians (2016), the fairies live in another dimension of Fillory, and can only be seen by those who have made a deal with them. Fairies are all very pale, fair haired and eyebrowless with Black Eyes of Evil, although they tend to operate more on Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Queen Mab, the Lady of the Lake and Frik in Merlin (1998). Mab is the Big Bad of the story, and is depicted as a sociopath who means well, but cannot comprehend the consequences of her actions. The Lady is on Merlin's side, but she is fickle and unpredictable, and on a whim gives Merlin an impression that Mab killed his mother (she only arrived just after she had died of childbirth). Frik simply does whatever he finds most amusing, when he isn't bossed around by Mab — until he gets turned into a mortal, anyway.
• The Sidhe in Merlin (2008) transformed two of their own into mortals as a punishment. They require the death of a mortal prince before they'll change one of them back... and that was the one who hadn't technically done anything. She seems to have only been transformed because of her father's crime. The Sidhe reappear in Series 3: They possess a baby princess then wait around till she grows up and they can manipulate things so she'll marry Arthur. The implication is that at some point Princess Elena will be completely consumed by the Sidhe.
• Plenty of Fairies exist in Once Upon a Time (2011). They use Fairy Dust as a catalyst for 'good magic' and seem to be incapable of doing anything remotely negative, though there are variations of Fairy Dust. Pixie Dust, described as a nuclear form of the regular stuff, and Dark Fairy Dust, which seems to just turn the target into an insect. After the Dark Curse is cast, the Order of Fairies are now a nunnery in Storybrooke. In the mid-season finale of the third season, we hear of a character known as The Black Fairy, a fairy who was banished years ago for practicing dark magic. When she finally appears in Season Six, she manages to abandon her own child, steal her own infant grandson to raise him away from his parents in a dark dimension where time works differently, turn him into an evil sorcerer, and hospitalize The Blue Fairy, leader of Storybrooke's good fairies. And all of that within two episodes, with only three characters knowing she's even around. Uh oh.
• While he's technically a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Q from Star Trek fits this trope to a T. Delights in making a mess of mortal lives? Check. Took a shine to humans (or, specifically, Picard) as a human loves a pet? Check. Comes from a society of "magical" entities that would seem amoral to human standards? Huge check.
• Supernatural:
  • In the episode "Clap Your Hands If You Believe...", fairies are initially mistaken for aliens due to their penchant for abducting people using bright lights and leaving behind Crop Circles. Some of them actually encourage this.
  • There's also the Changelings from the episode "The Kids Are Alright". They kidnap children and take their form so they can drain the life from the mother.
• 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. Similar to Yeats' fairies, they are Ambiguously Evil; in this case, due to Blue-and-Orange Morality. They seem to think they are doing Jasmine a favour (since it's implied she's unhappy in her present life).
• Some of the wizards in Wizards of Waverly Place come off this way.

Music

• Emilie Autumn's story included in the re-release of her first album, Enchant, is about one of the fair folk falling in love with a human. And the resulting mess. Autumn labeled it as "fantasy rock", which dealt with "dreams and stories and ghosts and faeries who'll bite your head off if you dare to touch them".
• Heather Dale:
  • Heather Dale's song "Changeling Child" is all about this. The song tells the story of a woman who yearned to be a mother, and to that end spent a whole night bartering with the local faerie queen, who eventually relented and gave her a child. However, the woman failed to realize that the faeries are very fond of Exact Words: the mother-to-be didn't specify that she wanted a child who would age, and when she realizes her mistake, she is unable to reach out to the fae, as the latter kept their end of the deal. The story ends saying she kept the child (whether it was a fae itself, a corpse, or a piece of wood is never elaborated upon), holding it until she died.
  • "The Fair Folk" is about fairies and how you shouldn't get them because they'll steal your soul.
• Inkubus Sukkubus' song "Away With the Faeries", and potentially a good deal of their other songs as well.
• The Fall's "Elves", although it's all very hard to follow...
• Three Weird Sisters' ''Song of Fey Cross'' portrays a typical Gaelic style faerie mound legend.
• Current 93, in addition to their version of "Tam Lin", have a number of songs about this theme, with "Oh Coal Black Smith" (actually based on a Renaissance-era poem) bringing home the gold for being pure fearsomeness.
• Meg Davis' song Elf Glade is about a young man who doesn't believe in Elves being regaled of tales of the Fey Folk and lured out into the darkness "beyond the fire light" by a young woman who, it turns out, is one of the fey. To say she is peeved about his initial disbelief is an understatement, and while the young man's fate is left unspecified, it seems things will not turn out well for him. The last words of the final verse, before the chorus, are:
  Now we keep you, never leaving
  Trade your life for not believing!
• The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love, loosely inspired by the Tam Lin legend.
• The Pogues Sit Down by The Fire
  And if you ever see them
  pretend that you're dead
  Or they'll bite off your head
  They'll rip out your liver
  And dance on your neck
  They dance on your head
  They dance on your chest
  And they give you the cramp
  And the cholic for jest
• Queen of the Wave by Pepe Deluxé. In "A Night and a Day", describing the villain Mainin's Start of Darkness, the fair folk are mentioned off-hand as one of the sources of forbidden knowledge who corrupted him.
  The hole where the fairies said their word
  a perverse thing to follow
• Folk-rockers Steeleye Span preserve a few old British Isles folk-ballads about the Gentry (touches iron). Typical ones include:
  • Seven Hundred Elves descend on a lonely farmer's house with the intent of causing chaos and running him off their land.
  • Thomas The Rhymer, a setting of an old lowland Scottish song, has Thomas abducted into the Elf-World to serve the Queen of the Elves as bard.
  • Long Lankin is from the old war-torn Border country, concerns a killer who is in it For the Evulz, and inspired Terry Pratchett to name one of his psychotic Elves after the title character.
• The Horslips were an Irish rock-folk band who also used traditional themes concerning the Sidhe. The penultimate track on their Book of Invasions album, called Sideways to the Sun, deals with the older people sadly withdrawing themselves from Ireland as they cannot compete with the changing ways of Men and the advent of hostile Christianity.
• The faeries in Stolen Child by Loreena McKennitt, like in the Yeats poem from which it takes its name, think they are doing the child a favor by kidnapping him, because "The world's more full of weeping, then you can understand."
• Der verzauberte Wald by Shei is about a woman who wanders into the magical forest at night, despite the warnings. Turns out everything people said about that forest was true.
• In "Faerie Queen" by Heather Alexander a woman is riding through the forest one night when she comes across a group of fairies dancing. The queen had just come back from a hunt but, it turns out, her prey was the woman' s soon-to-be husband. The woman tries to get her husband back by beating the fairy queen at playing the fiddle. She ends up winning through The Power of Love:
  I raised by hand, my hands like lead, my heart ablaze once more
  The faerie queen looked down on me, shaken to the core
  "I've played for many centuries yet, by the stars above,
  You've taught me skill is not enough; it can't compare to love"
  • His later song, He of the Sidhe uses the same melody and similar fiddle solos, but the plot has been changed to a changeling boy earning his freedom from the Faerie Queen via another fiddle contest, and the Queen subsequently giving up on those kinds of challenges, seeing as she's lost twice, now.
• Jethro Tull's song "Mayhem, Maybe" is sung from the perspective of one of a gang of mischievous elves, recounting their adventures tormenting human villagers and a few wild animals. Another song of theirs, "Kelpie", is sung from the perspective of a dangerous water fey, looking for his next victim.
• Spice Girl's video of "Viva Forever" has them represented as (stop-motion) fairies and abducing a kid to their realm.

Poetry

• John Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Erlkönig, along a very similar theme to the above. In this poem the "Erl-King" is a Faerie creature who wants a boy he finds pretty to come with him, but when the boy refuses, he seizes the boy's soul by force, killing him (though an alternative interpretation holds that the ill boy was feverishly hallucinating). The name Erlkönig is often anglicized as Erl-King or Alder-King, but it is ultimately a corruption of the Danish ellerkonge, which in fact means Elf-King.
• A topical complement (and historically the inspiration) to Erlkönig is Erlkönig's Daughter (alternately titled Herr Oluf), another German ballad inspired by Danish folklore, by Goethe's contemporary Johann Herder. A young bridegroom is riding around to invite the guests for his wedding the other day, when he meets the elves. The Elf-Queen asks him to dance with her. When he adamantly refuses, she curses him with a sickness. Next morning, he's dead.
• On the surface William Allingham's "The Fairies" appears to portray them as endearing:
  Up the airy mountain,
  Down the rushy glen,
  We daren't go a-hunting
  For fear of little men.

However he then emphasizes that they're anything but, abducting a little girl for seven years who then dies of sorrow, and putting thorns in humans' beds to punish them for interfering with their trees.

• Neil Gaiman's "The Fairy Reel" is about a man with whom a fairy girl has fallen in love. She's so in love with him that she decides to steal his heart. Later she gets bored with it, and uses it to string a violin.
• Christina Rossetti's poem, "Goblin Market", is about a girl who starves herself after giving in to temptation and eating fairy food.
• The Stolen Child, by William Butler Yeats, is about a child lead away by the fairies. The fairies here are Ambiguously Evil; while they believe they are doing the child a favor, as it's implied that he's unhappy (although he might just be overwhelmed by the misery around him), they show no sign of telling his parents or family that he's alright.
  Come away O' human child,
  To the waters and the wild,
  With a Faery hand in hand,
  For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
• In "Tam Lin", Tam Lin is spirited away by the Queen of Elphame [Elfhome]. He enjoys his stay there, but learns that every seventh year, the elves have to pay a "tithe [tax] to Hell". Fearing he himself will be the tithe, he flees. The Queen denies that she would have offered Tam Lin, but that still seems to imply the elves regularly sacrifice one of their own to the Devil.

Professional Wrestling

• MsChif is sometimes described as "demonic", the inferno listed among her places of residence, but as she has a banshee gimmick, she's really this trope.

Radio

• In one Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama, Jamie has been giving it some thought, and has decided that the Doctor must be one of the Fair Folk. He's not, but it's an understandable mistake for someone who's just been whisked away into an otherworldly realm by a disheveled little man playing a recorder.
• Pilgrim is about a human (or "hotblood") who has been cursed into becoming The Ageless by the King of the Grey Folk or Fairie for vocally denying their existence. Many episodes involve Pilgrim helping humans who have been dragged willingly or unwillingly into a Fair Folk squabble.
• The titular magical beings from The Hidden People are this, vicious and cruel and taking pleasure in kidnapping and exploiting human children.

Theater

• In John Milton's Comus, the Fair Folk have no powers over true virginity — not because they are weak, but because Virgin Power is that strong.
• Frozen (2018) adapts the Fair Folk as a substitution for the Rock Trolls of the original film.
• Henrik Ibsen re-used the Shakesperean plot in one of his early plays: St. John´s Eve presents the elves as benign woodland creatures, mostly written as a part of the Scenery Porn.
• Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland used elves as henchmen for the good guys in some of his more farcical plays. In one of his later plays, the fair folk trope is played straight, as the hulder herself abducts the titular character into the mountain to make him do the dirty work for her (This Hulder is plain evil). The abduction trope is subverted as the hulder´s daughter is lured out of the mountain by a young poet, and the fair folk wants him dead for it.
• In Twice Charmed, Franco DiFortunato wagers the Tremaines' livelihood on their deal.

Web Animation

• Brackenwood:
  • The YuYu are tiny, goblin-like beings who come out at night to steal people away to a dark netherworld, and can fuse with each other into a cloud of black smoke.
  • The early short "Bingbong of Brackenwood" features another group of similar beings, perhaps an early "draft" of the YuYu or perhaps something different. They resemble tiny featureless humanoids that glow a soft yellow like a candle, and with flames for hair. Bingbong finds them in a clearing, dancing in a circle while others play pipes and drums. He runs in to join them, at which point the humanoids look at each other, nod, and begin to dance faster and faster around Bingbong as their yellow glow turns orange, then red... until Bingbong looks down to find them all lying dazed on the ground, at which point he loses interest and wanders away. This is a reference to Fairy Rings, which were believed to be where fairies would force the mortal entering it to dance to death.

Webcomics

• In Arthur, King of Time and Space, the Fey have agreed to help Morgan become queen, for impenetrable reasons of their own (hence "Morgan le Fey"). However, they don't actually seem to be all that bright...
• Blindsprings has the masked spirits to whom Tamaura is contracted. At time of writing their benevolence has yet to be established.
• 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.
• The Feyn in City of Somnus have insect wings and look like overgrown Tinkerbell. Do not be fooled by appearances. That's true, they Cannot Tell a Lie (it's their magical nature), but feed on human creative energy and take this "for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand" as an invitation to "rescue" lots of cute, creative kids. They also act like spoiled children themselves, fight each other a lot (to pools of technicolor blood) and tend to be very in-your-face. And if you happen to be a grown-up, they turn outright cruel.
• Fey in Code Name: Hunter seem to be mostly a combination of the Scottish and Irish traditional fair folk. Including kidnapping of mere mortals in order to pay tithe to Hell.
  • Max once lampshaded the "Disney" idea most Americans have of fairies. "Trust me, a person would have to be desperate to go through a fey gate"
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has the Fae, who are usually carefree and childish, but (especially when in their own realm) can be downright unsettling in how bizarre and arbitrary their rules are, how angrily they come down on those who offend them, and above all how powerful they are. [[spoiler:In the case of Mab herself, this is partly, but not entirely, Obfuscating Stupidity to conceal her plans to avert an incoming catastrophe.
• Immortals in El Goonish Shive apparently used to call themselves fairies, and they certainly live up to the old stories. The ones the audience has seen have done things like arranging an attack on a school, or trying to have an innocent killed, and even some of the nicer ones have manipulated children into killing a monster when there were better options available. They are voluntarily held in check by rules allowing them to "only guide and empower mortals," which mostly just means that they have to be subtle about their mischief.
• The Dreen in Girl Genius are (probably) not literally fairies, but they are extra-dimensional beings of great power whose timestream runs "tangental" to humanity and who insert themselves (both for good and ill) into the latter's lives for utterly alien reasons.
• Gunnerkrigg Court 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 mostly directed at other Fairies rather than humans. Still, this behavior provoked stunned silence (and breaking the Gosh Dangit To Heck rule) from the protagonists.
  • To add to their alien-ness, the City Face interlude shows that they don't distinguish between lengths of distance and lengths of time.
  • Penchant for mischief belongs to the cute part.
  • Chapter 36 revisits Foley House, where former fairies and other Gillitie Wood creatures go, specifically the class of those four ex-fairies we have seen in Chapter 15. Etheric side of the classroom is effectively one crazy playground, and inhabitants generally are childish, but so adorable and hilarious that Annie puts up with their manners (or rather lack thereof) and joins the fun... not that everything was so simple.
• Hexenringe shows the faerie-like Xili viewing activity in the human world.
• Humon often draws mythological creatures that lure humans to a watery death or the like. Even though they all look cutesy in her drawing style, most of the fair folk are, if not malevolent, at least dangerous. And then there are the hunters who think they captured a huldrekarl (a male huldra, they're hollow inside and have a fox tail) — even though they have him in chains he smiles. The comic has not been continued, but it's titled "who caught whom?", implying that those men are in for a nasty surprise. (Or a sexy one. Or maybe both.)
• The fae in Into the Midnight City are implied to engage in nefarious trickery, like stealing souls.
• In IronGate the Fey enchanted Embers with her fire powers as a child, which resulted in her accidentally killing her parents. In the story called Whiteout, one of the Fey appears as a huge dangerous ice based monster with many ice minions at its command.
• Elves in MS Paint Adventures behave more in this manner than the usual elf characteristics. In Jailbreak, they're even willing to trade wishes for the right to a baby, much like the typical fae "give me your firstborn" type of wish exchange.
• 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 Race, 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, willing to rip a pet bird apart or steal human children for their own entertainment, and in the words of Quentyn's narration live to "see how evil they can be without breaking the rules". 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.
• Nothing Special: Quite a fair bit of creatures in the Spirit World. Some are friendly and social but then of course you have a few snobs who don't bother with socializing outside their own kind (such as some faeries whom Callie was trying to get information from) and then there's the ones who think so highly of themselves to the point they think can decide if a person lives or dies i.e Callie's Dryad mother, Lyla.
• Sandoval, the Xoan Ambassador from Oglaf.
• Used as a subversion◊ (of the popular version) in The Parking Lot Is Full.
• The snow spirits of Penny Blackfeather have this vibe, although the one we have the most experience with is small and in distress.
• Realta: The fae were the antagonists in the prologue and still haunt the four kingdoms today. They appear as silvery spirits who attack travelers. They can normally be warded off by Cold Iron, but characters note that it is becoming less and less effective.
• In Rhapsodies Peaseblossom, the pixie featured in many of the strip's dream sequences, is at best capricious with a very mercurial temperament. At worst some of her "bright ideas" are kind of... fatal.
• In Roommates (and in its Spin-Off s Girls Next Door and Down the Street) The Fair Folk is the (magical) third option between Heaven and Hell and one ''happy'' family so all related to the token fair teammate Jareth. They seem to actually invoke Interspecies Romance to increase their numbers and make the magic family tree *somewhat* healthier and accidentally created the Mage Species (those hybrids who aren't strong or fair enough) in the process so any magical talent implies Fair(y) Relatives. They also do everything any self-respecting fae of this trope does, the child stealing included and... let's just say that almost all things Nightmare Fuel and Fridge Horror in the series have something to do with them.
  • Let's look at the Erlkönig: He thought that stealing the little brother of his son's love interest is a good idea, that locking the cast in a Lotus-Eater Machine is a gift not to mention the time he pressured the token fair teammate (his son) into hosting The Wild Hunt. And he is one of the nice ones.
  • As far as their society goes, they have themed courts all ruled by Kings, Queens, Royal Couples or a couple of royals all exalted by blood inherited or spilled. Over this is the Conclave to minimize infighting and bloodshed. Which generally means that they punish losers and accept winners, so people can go against them, just need to win or else.
• Sluggy Freelance: Fae are divided into several different varieties. Cookie and Christmas Elves 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 Laser-Guided Amnesia. Children however, she traps in her mists until their minds become weak enough for her to feed to her mushrooms.
• Spina Cage has had a single faerie appear so far. He tries to eat the main character.
• In The Weave, the fairies are organized in a complex society structure under the rule of the Court of Queens. Most of them are self-serving, manipulative, and cruel to humans and their own folks alike. Besides that, they also deal in magic, can be murdered with Cold Iron, and are an Inhumanly Beautiful Race.
• Zebra Girl: Some inhabitants of the Subfusc, as well as some of the things leaving it for the mortal realm (or waking up in it) seem to be this, most notably the Goblins and the Vorpal Pook.

Web Original

• The Ellehemaei (all the main characters) in Addergoole.
• The Forest Queen in Ash & Cinders is literally bolted to her own throne by its branches weaving through her body, forcing her to move the branches of her throne with her mind if she wants to move at all. Cinder notes that she can't really tell if the Forest Queen is doing anything of her own accord, or whether her actions are manipulated by something more Fae.
• The ThinkGeek website invoked this trope on their "Candy Unicorn Horn" item.
  • "We made a deal with faeries to get these candy treats."
  • "(Seriously, we could have died. We probably still will. Faeries are tricky.)"
• In The Gamer's Alliance, the Faerfolc are mysterious and powerful beings who can turn out to be friendly (provide a blessing) or hostile (kill or torture anyone who trespasses on their lands) depending on the circumstances... and what mood they happen to be in when you meet them. When they were released from captivity, they offered cryptic advice to the heroes but later on rampaged in Libaterra, killing hundreds of people in their lust for revenge before retreating back to the forests to live their life in peace. Currently the fey have two factions: the neutral, tradition-bound ones led by Morrigan who wish to live away from the corruption of mortal civilizations, and the fanatic destroyers led by Curdardh who wish to purge the world from "impure" races.
• The single Gnome we've seen in Hundred Companions thus far seems to have these tendencies, apparently unable to distinguish between a hilarious prank and an assassination attempt.
• Moonflowers is set in Ireland, where The Wild Hunt are the antagonists. They've abducted the American Alima's parents, turned her father into a dog, and are hunting Alima herself while she's grieving for her missing family. It turns out that the Wild Hunt cursed her family to be three of the victims in the Fairy Raid. However, the Wild Hunt is unusually extreme: Maidin the river-spirit is quite nice (even if he's not all there), has been friends with a supporting character for decades, and is attempting to renew a Reincarnation Romance with said character's grandson.
  • Ramped up further when their leader the Horned Hunter, constantly stated as "almost a god," is revealed as a straight-up force of nature representing predators. Which is why the Irish gods have so much trouble helping the Song family—because very technically, obstructing him too much would "go against the natural order"--plus, telling a predator to just stop hunting has a real danger of making him kill EVEN MORE PEOPLE in retaliation. While they can make him stop targeting the Song family, they'd need to replace them with other victims. Both humans and gods are frantically playing Xanatos Speed Chess with the Hunter, resulting in one Gambit Pileup and the Filipino goddess Mayari's unexpected arrival.
• Orion's Arm has a sci-fi take on the trope. These Fair Folk are a clade who apparently decided to copy fairy myths by using technology to miniaturise and make themselves invisible. Eventually, they were hit by a [[{{Nanomachines nanowar]] attack that turned the whole clade to stone. There's various in-universe theories about these strange events: perhaps the real Fair Folk were offended by the imitators and cursed them, or perhaps the scientific Fair Folk were fighting a war against an unknown enemy and lost, or perhaps the stone state is like a chrysalis and eventually they'll Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Phantasia has fairies trying to kill humans for what they've done to the planet.
• Mentioned, but so far unseen, in The Saints.
• SCP Foundation
  • Bright's proposal for SCP-001 mentions faeries as a race of beings that attacked the Foundation's predecessor. They looked identical to humans and were allergic to iron. The Foundation's predecessor was nearly destroyed by them, but thanks to a Deal with the Devil was able to fight back and kill all of the fairies.
  • SCP-562 ("Revel Rousers"). It's rather strongly implied that this is a modern version of the Fair Folk bringing people to a party in Faerie, including the Year Inside, Hour Outside effect on its victims and the way they are lured into agreeing to go to it.
  • SCP-1323 ("A County Fair"). This is in another dimension which can only be accessed at certain points and times in our universe. Customers have to buy tickets by paying things like "a joyful laugh and a sorrowful tear" or "a lost love". Anyone who eats food there has a chance of staying there permanently, the same way that people who ate food while in Faerie would be trapped there. The livestock pavilion contains (among other creatures) unicorns.
  • The nameless SCP in slot 4000 is a forest inhabited by faeries (though the document doesn't call them that) with the unique property of having no names. Giving them (or the forest or the landmarks within) a name, or being named by a faery, is a very bad idea, with consequences up to and including having one's name stolen (hence why it's not called "SCP-4000"). Foundation members who interact with the faeries must follow a lengthy list of rules to avoid angering them, and even then some of the faeries seem to be innately hostile to humans. One of the faeries claims that they are the survivors of the attempted genocide mentioned in Bright's Proposal. In their account, the faeries used to be allies and helped the Foundation fight the Factory, but the Foundation's predecessor betrayed them, killing many and somehow stealing their very names. This is why some faeries hate humans in general.
  • SCP-6800 ("The White Ashes"): Pygnite is a metallic substance made up of the ground-up corpses of faeries.
• There are theories that the Slender Man may or may not be an example; one of the earliest tales is that he dwells in a forest and does something with naughty children. A Lack of Lexicon is less ambiguous about this.
• In Tales of MU, Elves fall somewhere between this and a deconstruction of Can't Argue with Elves.
• The Tall Tales short story "Trespasser" includes a fae whose primary interaction in the story is to capture trespassers and send changelings back to the human world.
• In the Whateley Universe, the Faerie are an ancient race who think of humans as pets raised (originally) in a garden world. They apparently feel the same way about werewolves. Fey, one of the protagonists, was changed into her current appearance by an ancient Faerie spirit who now resides in Fey's head. While Fey is inhumanly beautiful, in "Ill Winds" her true form is a luminescent energy form that isn't remotely human.
• This series of posts on Tumblr◊ posits that we, humans, are effectively this to animals.

Web Video

• Critical Role: Being a Dungeons and Dragons Actual Play, Fae creatures appear from time to time. They typically are not evil as much as they are amoral. Completely untrustworthy and unlikely to consider the effects their actions have on others. For this reason, Allura warns Vox Machina not to trust anyone they meet in the Feywild and be very careful what they say or agree to. One such creature, Garmelie, a satyr, draws caricatures of people and will offer assistance in exchange for some odd request.
  Matt: Even the nicest Fey have their weird or dark sides.
• Dimension 20: This is a big driving factor in Neverafter. Fairies are ultimately perpetuators of stories, and some of them want their charges to get their Happily Ever After... no matter what they have to go through in the process, or how much they might bristle against that Happily Ever After. The Fairy Godmother who aided Cinderella was the same fairy who cursed the Frog Prince; the Wicked Fairy who cursed Sleeping Beauty also forced Pinocchio into a situation where he had to lie in order to save Gepetto's life; and the Blue Fairy revoked Pinocchio's humanity because she expected he would never lie again, even as the Neverafter became a Crapsack World.

Western Animation

• A lot of the spirits from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Especially Koh, a giant centipede spirit who delights in stealing people's faces...
• In DuckTales (1987), the leprechauns that Scrooge McDuck and his nephews meet aren't evil per se, but they are willing to kill anyone who trespasses on their property, even by dumping them into a snake pit in their castle. (This almost happens to the protagonists, but when the Leprechaun King finds out that they were invited by the leprechaun who brought them there — despite the fact that the leprechaun in question is a Snake Oil Salesman — he decides they can't do that.)
  • The 2017 remake includes Kelpies (styled like My Little Pony characters, no less), which as to be expected want to drown the main characters.
• One of the monsters in Extreme Ghostbusters is an evil leprechaun who quotes a famous poem about fearing the Fair Folk.
• Brian Froud's Fairies was adapted as a half hour animated special in the 1980's.
• The Fairly OddParents! — the magical creatures, even those not from Western mythology, all seem to have a bit of this. Jorgen Von Strangle is an absolute sadist and Da Rules seem to mostly be made to frustrate everyone and do not help much. Norm the Genie (aside from being a general Jackass Genie who delights in causing mayhem) has no clue that inflating a balloon that looks like a child's head and causing it to explode when you say that you want to "give each and every child a great big smile" is not a good idea if you want votes (and the fairies don't have too much of a clue about that, either). Cosmo has no clue that falling for various beautiful women would upset anyone (including his wife). Pixies don't know fun is fun and boring is not (or they don't care) and desire the entire world to be boring. Santa Claus is a two-timer that flirts with female genies after Norm explodes from magic back-up. Santa also acts quite selfish and gluttonous in "Have A Merry Wishmas". Cupid is greedy and can be bribed to do stuff for money, as well as being Prideful. The series does all this even though they are Fairy Companions. Finally we have Anti-Fairies, who kill time by giving humanity bad luck, cheat at the Fairy Olympics and have gotten to the point of destroying the world... and they're the only ones who are honest about it.
  • Also, the April Fool in "Fools Day Out" called causing the Earth to go into an Ice Age by hitting several planets and stuff a "prank" or "joke".
  • One episode also has "Scary Fairies". A state brought on by a fairy being stuck in pitch black for too long, who compulsively desire to eat their Godkid. Fortunately it's all just a practical joke on Timmy, due to him having played scary tricks on Poof earlier.
  • In "Crocker of Gold" there are a bunch of leprechauns called the McPunchies. Compared to previous leprechauns, they're a muscular mob-like clan who want their pot of gold back from Crocker. However, in a surprising turn, they want the pot itself, not the gold (apparently, it's an heirloom for cooking competitions.)
• The "Third Race" from Gargoyles. They are said to be creatures of pure magic, and they are vulnerable to Cold Iron, with varying possibilities; ranging from forcing them into servitude (as was done with Puck and the Weird Sisters), to outright harming and potentially killing them. Also, the general nature, their immense magical prowess and doing as they please is very true. 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. He is, surprisingly enough, a Graceful Loser, and capable of being reasonable (though, fittingly, his reason is his own), until he feels he's being disrespected.
  • Aside from their morally questionable leaders, the other "Children of Oberon" in the series vary greatly in personality, disposition, and form. Though they all tend to be pretty mischievous, even the ones that like humans and Gargoyles.
    • Interestingly, Word of God has said they used to be a whole lot worse. After being banished from Avalon, most changed considerably; besides Oberon who, at the time, was mature and compassionate in comparison, and didn't feel like he had anything to learn. And don't even get started on his mother, Mab. In fact, Mab allegedly was so terrible that Oberon is generally seen as an improvement by his people.
  • Titania, his wife, seems to be of the other type thankfully, and is more than capable of controlling her husband (granted, she was actually much worse and the only reason she changed was because Oberon cursed her to learn humility). Unfortunately, she's the instigator for the incident with Alexander. And then also the instigator for the interference of the Gargoyles.
  • On the other hand, Puck, another prominent member of the Third Race, is a classical trickster with a great aptness for Loophole Abuse. While more benevolent than fellow tricksters Raven or Anansi, he's a great schemer when he needs to be and not above playing Goliath and Co. for his own benefit.
• Gravity Falls: Dipper and Mabel discover the legendary creatures that exist in Gravity Falls. The Big Bad merges his dimension with the earth and inviting his otherworldly friends, causing The End of the World as We Know It.
• The Mask, possibly as a nod to the considerably more violent and murderous character in the original comic, once met a fairy who'd been an ally to the Mask for the past 4000 years, and considers things like melting the skin off bones to be all in good fun. He soon realises that this Mask is different, and the Mask ends up dragging him off... to school.
• The changelings in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, whose queen disguises herself as Princess Cadance in order to open up Canterlot's defenses.
  • Discord, somewhere between a spirit of bedlam and a god of chaos, hews closer to the characterization of fairies and their ilk as being spiteful and petty.
• Sabrina: The Animated Series has two Faeries visit the mortal realm on vacation, posing as Canadian exchange students. They're immediately established as mischievous by playing pranks on Gem and friends. They like the mortal realm so much they lure two of Sabrina's friends to the Faerie Realm intending to make them eat some Faerie food — so they can take their place in the mortal realm. Oh and they're racist against mortals too.
• Sofia the First : in the episode "The fliegel has landed" a mischievous and troublesome fairy named Grotta causes distress in the cave of the trolls, and even ends bewitching Cedric.
• The Owl House: The fact that a little pixie tried to flay Luz with its huge teeth doesn't speak too well of the Boiling Isles. Overall, since it has been stated that many of our mythical beings are the result of beings from the Isles leaking into our world, is easy to guess that myths abouts fae and witches were inspired by encounters with people from the Boiling Isles. Their pointy ears, ability to use magic (thanks to an organ attached to their hearts) and condescending (and sometimes mischievous) attitude towards humans like Luz seems to reinforce this idea.
• Winx Club, of all cartoons:
  • For the greater part of the show, fairies are presented as kind and compassionate. Then, in season 4, we meet Earth fairies. Who, as soon as they're freed from their prison, they embark in a genocidal quest to exterminate mankind. The Winx eventually manage to get them to stand down, but only after they had decimated Gardenia with plants and threatened to freeze the world.
  • Also, witches are basically the same thing, only wingless and with dark alignment. And the difference between the Three Ancient Witches, the Trix and the rest of the witches is the standards: witches will try and ruin your festival out of spite if you don't invite them and are prone to form lynching mobs in response to one of them getting slapped as she deserved, the Trix started out as particularly sadistic witches with an agenda before succeeding and becoming outright psychos upon getting the immense power of the Dragon's Flame, and the Three Ancient Witches were worse.

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Now turn around thrice Widdershins, spit, and touch iron...

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