Usually when we think about fairies, the mind goes to tiny beautiful girls with butterfly wings and a ton of sparkles. At their most threatening, we got the token fiesty Tinkerbell.
Or do we?
For me, the world of the fae and fairies is a fascinatingly surreal, dangerous, occult world where things are never what they seem and time is its own different beast. The concept of the fairy is so versatile and malleable that you can have anything from this: 
to this: 
to this: 
to this:
You get the idea I know I just wanted to spam with cool pictures.
The whole idea of fairies as creatures is so wonderfully in flux and undefined that a fairy story could easily be a lovely, sparkly, bright children's story about friendship or a dark, creepy, terrifying horror story about death, loss, and general mayhem. It could be a mystery story or it could be a slasher flick. Anything goes! Their design is up for grabs to create anything, and they will still be legit fairies.
Unlike other creatures like the werewolf or the vampire which are constrained (despite their lush variety) within certain basic trajectories, fairies are unlimited in what they can be, who they can be, where they live, and what structure their society have, if they have it.
Even across different mythologies and folklore, fairies vary dramatically. Despite the general celtic design (and not all of celtic fairies by far), just a little scratch on the surface of what “fairy” means and translates to in various languages gives a completely different design to them. For example, in Greek fairy has at least two words: νεράιδα (pronounced naeRAHeeda) which implies a water fairy, gendered female, But it can also be αερικό (pronounced ahaereeKOH) which means wisp of the air. The second version is considered a lot more threatening than the first, but the first a lot more cunning and conniving. One is expected to be anthropomorphic, the other is expected to be pretty much anything or no shape at all.
And… that's fascinating! And I wanted to talk about it because starting a comic with Greek fairies is out of the question right now, with my schedule.
What about you? Have you ever had or will you ever have fairies in your webcomic or stories?
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The Fae
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Jan. 22, 2022
6 likes!
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TheDeeMan at 5:40AM, Feb. 2, 2022
Yeah, I'm currently plotting a murder/mystery/thriller based around the changeling mythology and they're a type of fairy. So hopefully sometime in the not too distant future the story will see the light of day. Dee - Succubus writer dude
giovanni at 3:12AM, Jan. 23, 2022
may i interest you in an elficologue named Pierre Dubois (he invented the word)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Dubois_(author). he is the absolute specialist in everything concerning fairies and european folklore. he published many encyclopedias, comic books and novel pertaining to the Little Folks
bravo1102 at 2:48PM, Jan. 22, 2022
@hushicho: that's actually a great hook in a story where the fae are totally misunderstood and the context is totally missed because of the demonization of supernatural creatures that took place with Christian dualism. The jinn aren't so rigidly good and evil in Islam, sometimes they're just indifferent.
hushicho at 2:33PM, Jan. 22, 2022
A lot of people really don't understand the Fae or fairies. They're not just little pixies. One of the first times I ever saw the subject well-discussed was in the book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, which looked at a number of folk beliefs and practices in those same regions. Fairies, like demons, are often misunderstood. People love to oversimplify things to "good" versus "evil" and that's simply not the case. People tend to throw in lingo they either don't understand or that is "close enough" to them, and that's how we get words literally demonized -- that is to say, made to mean something they never did originally, misused by people too ignorant to know better.
bravo1102 at 1:20PM, Jan. 22, 2022
Fairy Tale:a true story. Great with Conan Doyle as the believer and Harry Houdini as the skeptic. Peter O'Toole and Harvey Keitel. Great film.
EssayBee at 12:33PM, Jan. 22, 2022
Fairies gave rise to one of the big hoaxes of the last century, the Cottingley Fairies, which even ensnared Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle in its tale.
Jason Moon at 10:01AM, Jan. 22, 2022
You guys want to see some terrifying fairies check out the book called "The Call" by Peadar O Guilin. Pretty scary stuff.
usedbooks at 6:42AM, Jan. 22, 2022
Not in my stories. Fae are creepy AF. (I joke sometimes that I have one in my home that hides things from me.) I love to hear/read faerie lore from different cultures. Scarier than ghost stories, tbh.
marcorossi at 3:50AM, Jan. 22, 2022
I think that all cultures had many tales of "fairy people" in a wide sense, but as these were folktales they were very confused and multiform. With the advent of Tolkien it became customary to have more specified "races" of fairyes, but originally elfs, dwarves, goblins, faeries, kobolds, yokais etc. were all the same stuff from different traditions IMHO.
anonymous at 2:56AM, Jan. 22, 2022
My lore in my universe is that they are both angels and demons alike. They are created kind of like a supernatural versions of buzzards, crows, and vultures. Each type is either bright or shadow. Also each type were at some point high ranking super being. They became abusers of real magic and were cast out of the eyes of the lord. They lost some of their immortality.
Andreas_Helixfinger at 2:22AM, Jan. 22, 2022
My comic universe has its own version of fairies called imsies, which are basically fairies/aliens native to the world that my stories take place in. I wanted their species to be called something other then fairies, that still had a whimsical ring to it, in order to disssociate them from the stereotypical image we have of faries, while also making them fit in better with the sci-fi tone of my comics. They come in various forms and races, some with cultures of their own. Their powers and their nature shall be explored further down the line.
bravo1102 at 1:10AM, Jan. 22, 2022
I went with the studies of various folklore folks that the fairy experience and the UFO abduction experience are two different cultural interpretations of the same event. I've used it in some stories but not my comics.