Unless you do a wick check that proves that both usages are different/distinct enough to split them off, we can't just split them off based on your general argument.
Uncanny Valley Hot Babes in Your Area Are Looking To Know YOU! Click Here to Sign Up for FREE! | Not quite back tbh. Don't expect much.Ugh. there is a problem with doing a wick check as the two usages exist on a spectrum; for a few examples:
- Pure type 1:
- In "The Elf Maiden", elves have mysterious magical powers, weird customs and a strong dislike towards humans, whom they tend to avoid.
- Mostly type 1:
- Emma Bull's War for the Oaks has the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. The Seelies are, at the least, tolerant of humans, and usually kind and friendly — as the Fae would define it (The Pouka, who is more familiar with humans than most, does say they have been "unkind" to mortals in the past). They're even capable of falling in love with humans as humans would recognize love. The Unseelies are malicious and nasty, and think nothing of twisting a mere mortal to their ends.
- Both:
- Changeling: The Lost paints Fairies as powerful incomprehensible alien entities that regularly abduct humans and take them off to their homeland, where they are warped to fit their masters' perceptions of them. The Changelings of the title are humans who've managed to escape back to Earth, but who've been changed by their time in the world of Faerie and are trying to avoid their former captors at all costs. Notably, Changeling also directly correlates the modern concept of Alien Abduction with the Fae, explicitly invoking such standbys as lights in the sky, strange experiments, and Keepers taking the form of Little Green Men or The Greys in a number of places. It is later explained that the True Fae need conflict to prevent themselves fading away into the random background chaos of Arcadia. As a result, the closest thing they have to friends among other Fae are their sworn enemies, as by fighting they're keeping each other alive. They can also be inanimate objects (Props), legions of lesser beings (Wisp), and entire self-enclosed universes (Realms) in addition to their normal forms (Actors). With enough Titles, they can do the aforementioned simultaneously!
- Mostly type 2:
- Robert E. Howard wrote several stories, the best known of which is the Bran Mak Morn story "Worms of the Earth", featuring a race that lived in Britain before first the Picts, then the Celts, drove them underground where they mutated from their already unpleasant original selves into reptilian abominations.
- Pure type 2:
- 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.
Most examples are to be in the mostly type 1 to mostly type 2 range. I will try though.
Keep in mind, those examples you pulled are on page examples. Wicks have to be taken from the related page.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallYes, see How to Do a Wick Check and check all these wick checks for reference: Wick Check Project.
Uncanny Valley Hot Babes in Your Area Are Looking To Know YOU! Click Here to Sign Up for FREE! | Not quite back tbh. Don't expect much.First of all, if the examples exist on a spectrum between the two types, I'm not sure the two being on the same page is that much of a problem, maybe being fodder for the Analysis page. At the very least, if you were to perform a split you'd need to figure out how to divvy up examples between the two.
As for the current point, it's not that checking on-page examples are completely irrelevant, but people are likely to encounter a trope in the wild on a work page or some other page that links to it, and that can give them an impression of what the trope is regardless of whether or not they actually read it. Work pages are also where people can add examples without actually reading the description of the trope; conversely, an example added to the trope page that isn't reciprocated on the work page may reflect the priorities of those with a particularly well-developed sense of what the trope is, as opposed to those more casually familiar with it. Obviously this applies more to misuse than other types of fodder for a TRS thread, and others may be able to explain better than I can (I'm autistic too), but the idea, at least in my view, is to get a sense of what the troper base thinks the trope is.
Don't worry about not getting it. I'm neurotypical and I too struggled to understand it at first. I'll try to explain it the best I can.
So, when adding on-page examples, you have the benefit of having the trope's definition being right there. If the description is wrong or not very clear, there is going to be misuse among the on-page examples. And probably the wicks too. You are right in that regard, however, this is not the only case where things can go wrong with a trope.
If the description is clear but the trope's name is misleading, then the on-page examples are probably mostly fine. The wicks? Those are another matter entirely. Chances are, they are full of misuse.
That's why checking the wicks is important. And, often, even more important than the on-page examples. After all, the major indicator of a trope having issues is how it's used across the wick. Most edits (and potholes) are done relying on memory (of the trope's meaning) alone. If the impression a trope's title or description or (just its general usage) leaves is wrong, then no matter the state of the on-page examples, the trope it's being used incorrectly. Just checking the on-page examples won't tell you that — not in most cases.
If a trope's usage across the wiki is not misuse, chances are, there's not really a problem there. It might be better to check whether you are misunderstanding the trope. Worse case scenario, we only need to fix up the description and that's it. Major actions (like splitting, renaming, etc.) are probably unnecessary.
So, here we do things as follows. First, if reading a trope's on-page examples leaves you with a bad feeling, then you go and check the wicks. If there's something wrong with them as well, then you can bring it to the TRS under one (or more) of the reasons listed.
Trailblazer of old tropes. (She/her)I have to agree that if on-page examples show a problem, you can say there's misuse even before showing a wick check. However a wick check is still useful to see how it's used, and TRS requires them because they can point to what tropes could be launched to take up the misuse.
On the main topic: I know there was a TRS thread more than a decade ago that raised the same concerns, but I think it stalled (can't find it with how bad our thread searcher is). I think a two-way split is warranted: one for fey, beautiful beings with inhuman morals and concerns, and another for when writers pointedly subvert our expectations of fairies/elves and make them outright evil while still having the same trappings of ethereal beauty and closeness to nature (like Discworld's Elves).
Also, I should note that "Fairies in Folklore are... actually morally neutral" is reductive. In British and Irish folklore, fairies could be anything from modern benevolent-but-careless to clearly evil (the changelings who kidnapped children and replaced them with their own), with the amoral ones being perhaps the most lasting portrayal but far from comprehensive. An added complication is that different stories would use the same words like fairies/elves/pixies and such for very different beings with little in common other than "small, human-like but not human, appear pretty at least at times".
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.I will say that descriptions are actually overlooked even by people adding examples to the main page, I know this from experience (so I launched a trope about autographs being destroyed as The Autographed Ball, with a very clear description, but people immediately added misuse so it had to be unlaunched and relaunched as Doomed Autographed Item just to ensure people knew what was going on) so it's not out of the question for a bad name to cause misuse on the actual trope page, however trope pages also only show a fraction of the overall usage and the way the trope is used across the actual wiki could vary drastically, to the point where not checking off-page wicks means that you could be missing out on entire patterns of misuse.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall![]()
If Septimus Heap didn't add it to the discussion page while mass-adding old TRS threads a while back, it's probably old enough not to be in the database anymore. That, or it was under another name or wasn't actually a TRS thread but was on Trope Talk or something (in the latter case a Google search might help).
Okay so i put results of a Wick check (even if i kind of give up and checked entries on the trope page) into a Google Doc file:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eEm0Oxg32jo7GxPKMAXEMgj2hTGCQOORC8ExbKPevUY/edit
of 50 examples used: 21 fit definition one for the most part, 14 are mostly type 2; 9 fit both equally and 6 are Zero-Context Examples or at least close to it
Edited by janlor1996 on Feb 14th 2023 at 7:08:15 PM
So, it seems bringing it to the TRS would be a good idea. Although we should check other tropes about depictions of fairies in media. Maybe one of them covers the evil fairy definition already.
Trailblazer of old tropes. (She/her)![]()
If you want to bring it to TRS, also just add yourself to the TRS Queue with your trope and you'll be pinged when it's your turn.
EDIT:
is right, I did not read the check. That's on me. Please do a proper check per
.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Feb 14th 2023 at 6:12:28 AM
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallThe Fair Folk is not really supposed to be divided into Folkloric fairies and evil fairies. That's a reductive understanding of the trope and the description. It's a depiction of fairies as mystical, knowledgeable, powerful, and often unknowable (or at the very least operating on a very different set of morals and values than the humans that encounter them) nature linked beings. This is why the final line says an extreme version may be a Humanoid Abomination, given that they share many of the same themes as Eldritch Abominations (another often misinterpreted and misused trope). The description actually does a pretty good job of describing it.
This depiction is how many old folklores portrayed fairies. And since many stories have human POV characters (often those who disrupt nature either on purpose or by accident), The Fair Folk were frequently depicted as being antagonistic, even evil because they were typically used to send a fable like message, like "don't mess with nature", "don't wander the woods alone at night", "be respectful of your environment", etc. But that's not the same as saying "The Fair Folk are either folkloric or evil".
Now if you are coming across examples that do reduce the trope to just those characteristics, i.e. "Character A is an example of The Fair Folk as she's a fairy and uses her powers for evil" and "All nymphs from Greek Mythology are The Fair Folk", then we'd have a clear misuse issue since being evil or being from myths is not really the point of the trope. But again, that's different from what's being suggested.
Edited by amathieu13 on Feb 15th 2023 at 11:31:09 AM
If Laconic is bad, that means the Laconic is at fault, not the trope.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13590429520A15060100&page=94#2348
...
Use "?action=source" URL suffix to see source code for wicks and potholes on a page.
Edited by Malady on Feb 15th 2023 at 7:46:41 AM
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576![]()
Laconics on the site are kind of infamous for having the habit of being incorrect and there's an entire thread on cleaning them up, so don't use them as the sole basis of your judgment on the trope itself.
And if a wick takes you to a page where the trope doesn't seem to appear, you should go to the edit screen as that likely means the trope is A) either potholed like so or B) commented out for being a ZCE
Edited by amathieu13 on Feb 15th 2023 at 11:07:47 AM
the Definition on the main page is also ambigious
Also the proper Wick Check is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LlW3MNFXfubJrnZJR6fPkbRyAHAWUqU1XLD0cQeHVY8/edit
That's neat and all, but you can easily just make a Sandbox.Fair Folk Wick Check to include all of those wicks. Also, what do type 1 and type 2 mean? You have to explain. And after you finish your wick check you can put it on the TRS Queue list and wait for your turn to open a thread for it. But you have to present an issue and some possible solutions.
Uncanny Valley Hot Babes in Your Area Are Looking To Know YOU! Click Here to Sign Up for FREE! | Not quite back tbh. Don't expect much.![]()
the types are:
TYPE 1: Purely Folkloric Fae and Mostly Folkloric Fae
TYPE 2: Purely Evil Fae and Mostly Evil Fae
BOTH: Equal Measure Folkloric and Evil Fae
OTHER: Not fitting to either, mostly Zero-Context Examples
Can you describe the TYPE 1 that don't have enough Context?
Edited by janlor1996 on Feb 16th 2023 at 9:51:14 PM
To be honest, this wick check seems kind of flawed by design. Wick checks are done to see how a trope is being used, not to confirm what you think is already happening. If you went in already having these two types and then sorted the examples you found into the types, you're doing it wrong and are running right into confirmation bias. I can't know for sure that's what you did, but from the way the check looks, that's the vibe I'm getting. (Also since the trope has 4370 wicks, you have to check the square root of that number which is 66.)
I have time so I'll run a separate wick check as verification on the first. If the two show similar issues, then we can move forward with confidence in what the issue is to figure out how to best fix it.

I Noticed that the Fair Folk trope seems to be describing two things:
- Folkloric Fairies
- Evil Fairies
these two are not the same, as Fairies being originally Evil is a Common Knowledge, Fairies in Folklore are more correctly described as Powerful Mysterious Beings, that can be be quite dangerous if offended, and prone to playing potentially harmful pranks, but overall are actually morally neutral, while most of the evil Fae are actually specific varieties or individuals So I think that the Fair Folk trope needs to be split between Fair Folk which keeps the folkloric fairies and a new trope called Unseelie which will be the Evil fairies, am i correct or not?EDIT: Fixed Interpunction
Edited by janlor1996 on Feb 11th 2023 at 11:15:32 AM