Fairy Dust was an Urban Fantasy hosted on ComicFury that drew elements from the fantasy genre but didn't claim to follow one single inspiration. It's set in a world where many mythical, fairytale, and fantasy monsters are real. Its cities are modern, although civilisation missed generous areas as well.
When a half-troll is born among a suspiciously tame tribe of fairies on one of the primitive islands, a fairy dust farming operation is jeopardized. The trolls that survived their forest's destruction, which made room for the plains fairies to thrive in, were a nuisance already, but if they started making contact with the fairies, the whole thing might go haywire! For now, the Amicale is unaware of that child's existence, but as it's growing increasingly larger than the regular fairies, hiding it will soon become impossible...
The comic has several subplots driven by one unespecified main story, with occasional bouts of comedy.Fairy Dust is written in French and translated into English in real-time. The odd awkwardly fitting speech bubble and untranslated background text sometimes witness for it.
This comic was deleted in 2020.
Fairy Dust contains examples of:
- Art Evolution: The artist admittedly learned background art throughout this comic.
- Boldly Coming: John Jensen, a specially large troll, openly seeks females from smaller but naughtier races.
- Darwinist Desire: Orc patriarchs are expected to center their life's decisions on their clan's improvement, up to and including their own wives.
- Eye Scream: A nameless character was threatened with being blinded and crippled as a punishment for desertion. He bargains for a Mercy Kill, and gets it by being stabbed through an eye socket so his killer can pretend to have been attempting to obey the original orders.
- Fan Disservice: Nude scenes abound, but a large proportion of them involve shapeless trolls, sickly tiny elves, or simply unappealing situations.
- Fangs Are Evil: Having their tusks ripped out is one of the orc serf caste's required mutilations. An adult male that still has his tusks is probably from the upper class and is more likely to display the kind of combativity needed to maintain such a status. Note that the shape of a race's teeth doesn't otherwise predict their behaviour.
- Fantastic Science:
- Doctors have to learn dozens of humanoid's races' biological quirks.
- Body fat comes up several times. Trolls are sterile unless they are very fat, while most other humanoids would be long before looking nearly as bulky, and airborne races such as fairies are considered overweight with silhouettes that a human would consider average.
- Mendelian genetics are used to determine what health issues to expect from hybrid children. Those can vary from a mismatch between bone density and adult weight, to secreting venoms without being immune to them.
- Fantastic Drug:
- Fairies' dust is a hallucinogen, elves' venom is a hypnotic and anesthetic, and incubae's is a dissociative.
- Unicorns' proximity causes euphoria and mental regression, but no chemical causing this effect has been identified so far.
- Fantastic Racism: From outright hate to mild stereotyping, varying more between individuals and culture than race. More pronounced between "civilised" races and those who are more adverse to city life for various reasons. The issue is made even more complex by the fact that fantasy races have actually different gifts and needs. What is a genuine biological difference, a gross generalisation or a plainly wrong assumption can be hard to tell apart.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Creatures from mythology, fairy tales and contemporary fantasy are thrown together pretty gratuitously.
- Gentle Giant: Trolls are mighty and capable of violence, but usually have mellow personalities.
- Glass Cannon: Fairies and tiny elves are quite deadly, but most races are able to crush them with their bare hands.
- Half-Human Hybrid: One extra appears to be a half troll/half human, and has scars that show he may have had plastic surgery to look more clearly human.
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Myces has a fairy mother and a troll father. How they managed to conceive her has been asked, but never answered...
- Humans Are Average: Averted. Each race tends to consider itself the default. From most other race's point of view, humans are quite gifted at organising into large groups, and specially weak when it comes to mental stability.
- Hybrid Monster: Common. Any humanoid can breed with almost any other.
- Incubae's traits are exclusively found on the Y chromosome. An incubus's daughter is not an incubus (or a succubus). The race can only reproduce with a female from another race. The typical incubus is such a genetic patchwork that it's hard to tell what his family tree looked like.
- Tiny elves hybrids are great elves, the genetic defect making them tiny, sickly, and obligatory cannibals being corrected by outsider blood.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Troll urine is a powerful insect repellent. Being non toxic and effective in quantities that most races can't taste, it's not an uncommon food preservative.
- Interspecies Romance: John Jensen and most of his girlfriends.
- Loophole Abuse: Peonio, a power hungry fairy, wants to bribe two trolls into staying on his island, where only tiny sized peoples live. When one of them says that he would stay if he had women of the proper size, using his friend as a standard, Peonio brings him women the size of a dragon hatchling that was given the same name as his friend.
- Kevlard: Trolls often survive gunfights because it's hard to aim for one's center of mass when one's mass is all over the place.
- Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Orcs from Glaesfeld attempt to educate a few of their members enough to use and maintain modern technology, but even knowing the end goal, they find the more successful intellectuals strange and annoying.
- Leprechaun: Leprechauns are involved in a fairy dust farming operation for their kinship with the fairfolk, that makes them immune to fairy dust. Being solitary, they also tolerate the tiny, remote colony life fairly well.
- No Accounting for Taste: Weg, the orc patriarch, is suspected of enjoying being treated rudely and picking mean tempered wives on purpose.
- The Mafia: Little is said about the Amicale, but it can be inferred that it is about organised crime.
- Old Man Marrying a Child: Weg's youngest wives are six and eight years old. He has no tastes for children and bought them for their political value.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are lizard-like animals that can grow quite large with age. Domesticated species are easy to tame, but are flightless and unimpressive.
- Our Elves Are Different: Tiny elves are pathetic and frightening wrinkly little monsters that need regular consumption of fresh humanoid flesh to stay alive, and use their venom to hunt larger races. Great elves are free of tiny elves' genetic weakness and look more like one expect fantasy races to look like. Although they have no vital need for cannibalism, they are allergic to animal flesh and may choose it over vegetarism.
- Our Fairies Are Different: Fairies could live indefinitely, but have short life spans due to being vulnerable to predators. Seeing friends crushed or devoured is such a common occurrence that they evolved a selective amnesia to protect them from PTSD. Their dust is usually an effective natural defense, as long as they see the threat coming in time.
- Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Gnomes are described in unflattering ways, but in truth, the worst they've shown was rudeness. They are short, pointy toothed, and ugly, and their fashion sense includes very random costumes as casual wear.
- Our Orcs Are Different: Orcs are the typical barbarian race. They stopped being a serious menace as the humans they were competing against won through numbers and technology. The lucky clans can still live as they please on reservations, as long as they don't attack the cities.
- Our Trolls Are Different: Trolls are as large, strong and resilient as one can expect. They have a poor sense of personal hygiene and are usually content with their appearance no matter how they actually look. They are poor warriors, as most aren't very aggressive, and their low birth rate incites them to protect their youths' lives at any cost.
- Planet of Hats: The numerous races each having a few skills in which they are particularily favoured, it's tempting even for people who know better to expect them to choose their job accordingly. However, no race has a monopoly on any given skills, and while psychological peculiarities can make some seem naive or having very strange ways of thinking, no race could be accurately described as dumber than others.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Jean-Marie uses racism to brush off any potential guilt over the mission to attack an island's native population. He also says sexist things early on, but had just had a concussion and had reverted to juvenile humour while stressed and confused.
- Property of Love: Orc patriarchs buy their wives from allied clans. While they are considered his property, female orcs are just as combative as the males and they outnumber him twenty to one: it's common for them to grab more political power than he has, and abusing them is not a smart idea.
- Really Gets Around: John Jensen will have sex with anyone who wants to. And being a huge, shameless, flamboyantly dressed troll doesn't appear to be a hindrance to appealing to the ladies!
- Toilet Humour::
- Approaching wild trolls requires one to watch their step, as their toilet is... everywhere.
- Great elves can be surprisingly tasteless. And the fact that they like to live in high places, while rival races prefer valleys, puts them in a convenient position to make a statement with their bladder...
- Tongue Trauma: þrym rips out Ellen's tongue as part of her punishment for her ongoing insubordination. It's underlined early on that such a mutilation's effect is not limited to the loss of speech, it also hinders eating to a life-threatening extent and is generally harmful to health. The tongue is, after all, an important part of the digestive system, and protects the lungs from inhaling saliva.
- The Speechless: Ellen is not only mute, but also illiterate, and has no immediate alternate mode of expression other than shoving people the way she wants them to go. Since she makes it obvious she doesn't want to let the loss of her tongue stop her from bossing people around, a lot of shoving happens.
- Square-Cube Law: Tiny races are able to lift several times their weight. Larger races compensate for their weight with thicker limbs and very dense bones, making the largest ones so heavy they can't swim.
