The Fair Folk/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Fairies are portrayed as vicious, amoral creatures.

  • Straight: The "Fair Folk" kidnap children, torment mortals, and cause mayhem wherever they roam.
  • Exaggerated: The Fair Folk are as bad as Eldritch Abominations, if not ones themselves.
  • Justified: They operate under Blue and Orange Morality, and neither understand nor care about human morals.
    • They operate erratically much as humans do when under narcotics. Where do you think we got the word spirits from anyway?
  • Inverted: Fairy Companion.
  • Subverted: The Fair Folk are mischievous Tricksters, but they cause nothing more than minor mischief and annoyance, and side with good when the time comes.
    • The Protagonist believes them to be operating under Blue and Orange Morality but finds latter they have motives that may be strange to a human but are at least understandable, such as considering the forest to be their turf. They are devious and brutal and use magic in sinister ways of course. But are not humans nasty when they fight too?
  • Double Subverted:The Fair Folk are mischevious Tricksters, but cause nothing more than minor mischief and annoyance... until the opprotunity to wreak true mayhem arises, and they take it with gleeful abandon.
  • Parodied: The Fair Folk are ridiculous, Sugar Bowl fairies whose pitiful attempts to cause mischief never cross beyond Poke the Poodle.
  • Deconstructed: The Fair Folk try to continue their mischief and mayhem into the modern age, only to be revealed and find out that Muggles Do It Better.
  • Reconstructed: The Fair Folk adapt to the modern age quite nicely, adding ruthless hacking and deadly Magitek weapons to their arsenal.
  • Zig Zagged: Some fairies are evil, others arent. Some fairies may swing alignments depending on the situation.
  • Averted: Fairies are many things, but cruelly malicious is not one of them.
  • Enforced: The work is an adaptation of old myths, from when fairies were genuinely feared.
  • Lampshaded: "I was expecting pretty winged women, not amoral psychopaths!"
  • Invoked: A depraved ruler takes over the Fair Folk, and decides to use her powers to torment and destroy humans For the Evulz.
  • Defied: The ruler of the Fair Folk, whether due to morality or fear of retribution, keeps a tight rein on her followers.
  • Discussed: "You ever read the old myths about fairies? They weren't always nice..."
  • Conversed: "Why is it that when people want to make fairy tales Darker and Edgier, they always make the fairies old-fashioned 'evil' ones?

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