"But if I did believe in the fae, I would believe that the stories about the fae are slander, because no group of real people is that consistently evil." - The Fae aren't humans, so maybe their brains don't work like ours (would pop-pagan Fey even have flesh-and-blood bodies with brains?).
I don't know about pagan Fey, but fantasy pop culture Fey seem kind of like an entire race of powerful D&D-Lawful stereotypical evil sociopaths, or just powerful and D&D-Lawful humans with very strong in-group preference; they don't hate you but they have no inhibitions against harming you if it benefits them or just amuses them, and they like to manipulate people into making unfair contracts with them.
My pet hypothesis is that Fey started out as a peasant culture metaphor for 1) nature, 2) rich people. Like nature and rich people they are unpredictable and dangerous and sometimes they give you nice things and sometimes they harm you. Like rich people they can give you nice things but dealing with them is dangerous. Like rich people they are intriguing and glamorous and they have nice things. Like rich people they have a strange culture you don't understand and they use your ignorance of it against you. Like rich people they are good at manipulating you into unfair agreements that harm you and benefit them (rich people wrote the law and know it better than you, or if they don't the lawyer they hired does, and they can leverage their advantages into making you accept bad deals because the alternatives are even worse). Like rich people they demand deference from you and they might hurt you if you don't give them the deference they want; you must call them flattering names ("the gentry, the fair folk"), you must be careful to avoid offending them.
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Date: 2020-07-22 06:51 am (UTC)I don't know about pagan Fey, but fantasy pop culture Fey seem kind of like an entire race of powerful D&D-Lawful stereotypical evil sociopaths, or just powerful and D&D-Lawful humans with very strong in-group preference; they don't hate you but they have no inhibitions against harming you if it benefits them or just amuses them, and they like to manipulate people into making unfair contracts with them.
My pet hypothesis is that Fey started out as a peasant culture metaphor for 1) nature, 2) rich people. Like nature and rich people they are unpredictable and dangerous and sometimes they give you nice things and sometimes they harm you. Like rich people they can give you nice things but dealing with them is dangerous. Like rich people they are intriguing and glamorous and they have nice things. Like rich people they have a strange culture you don't understand and they use your ignorance of it against you. Like rich people they are good at manipulating you into unfair agreements that harm you and benefit them (rich people wrote the law and know it better than you, or if they don't the lawyer they hired does, and they can leverage their advantages into making you accept bad deals because the alternatives are even worse). Like rich people they demand deference from you and they might hurt you if you don't give them the deference they want; you must call them flattering names ("the gentry, the fair folk"), you must be careful to avoid offending them.