Love fantasy settings where “fairy” is treated like a fantasy junk drawer. Settings where “fairy” means elves and goblins and pixies, but it also means trolls and fauns and rabbits in waistcoats and talking pianos.
Settings where if it’s magical, and meets a certain degree of whimsy, it’s a fairy. You know?
Hand to god forgot about pokemon when I made this post but god fuck yes that is exactly what I’m talking about.
I was talking about this with a friend and she nodded and went “Like the muppets”
This is a fairy court.
Listen to me. Listen to me.
The pig shares its fate with the harvest king. Pratchett understood: it’s fattened all summer until it can barely move and then the knife and everyone else gets through the dark eating its flesh. It’s forbidden to the people that don’t truck with that “going down into the dark to come back up” business, it’s a deeply fairy animal. She bedecks herself in silk and jewels, but please remember: a sow will eat a man, bones and all, given the opportunity.
The frog is a miracle of metamorphosis: it’s an animal, with bones, not some flittering bug, and it changes, it transforms. This frog sings and dances and commands a legion. If you listen, he’s very quick to tell you he’s the color of the leaves. If you cut his head off, would he laugh and promise you the same in a year? Would you go to his home, would you hold yourself chaste against the blandishments of his curvaceous bride, would you bend your neck?
Their attendants are a bear that wants to trade jokes with you, that wants you to laugh! Just laugh! If you laugh, he wins! Their attendants are a thing, unknowable and unspeakable, deviancy and deviation personified and walking about. Such things he can show you if you’ll just deign to watch. Their attendants are a dog with the hands of a man. Or was he once a man, and his fingers are all that remember? Another man, seems unchanged, but for his tongue: so twisted that none can understand him. He toils forever in their kitchens. Will that be your fate? Was that the pianist’s?
Their retinue is madness. They admit it, claim it! Their musicians play mayhem, and dancers tear themselves to pieces in their whirling.
Listen to me! They want you to come with them, to dance, to sing, to dream! They tell you clearly:
All of us under its spell
We know that it’s probably magic
Have you been half asleep, and have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same
They’re telling you. I’m telling you. Listen, please. No one returns from the theater.
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