Sevenfold Silence

Perusing the nonfluffypagans community on LJ, I found this in the comments, written by user misslynx:

"One interesting pattern that my partner wrote a paper about in grad school is that the depiction of fairy beings has varied considerably over time. In mediaeval accounts, they tend to be predominantly depicted as powerful, dangerous and usually malevolent - sometimes the same beings are referred to alternately as both fairies and demons. There's also a lot of emphasis on their tendency to mislead travellers, tempt them off their paths, and lead them into, at best, being lost in the wilderness, and at worst, any of a variety of horrible deaths. But as the legends move into early modern times, that image is toned down considerable, and they seem to be more trivialized than demonized. That's when you start getting accounts of "the little people", shown more as mischievous tricksters than deadly deceivers. And as the Romantic movement developed, you have more emphasis on them as beautiful but fragile remnants of a lost world of magic and wonder that had been crushed by modernization and the industrial revolution."

Two points:

First: writing as someone who identifies as otherkin and "something fey", my immediate question was "and which one's the real/best version of the fairy story?" (Oh God, shame on me for even thinking that.) To which the answer is, in my opinion, "they're all good". Personally, I detest the cute light happy Disneyfied version of fairies, and I'd be enormously suspicious of anyone who came to me insisting that was their true form, and I'd likely banish the shit out of any external spiritual entity that came my way insisting that, on the grounds that It Must Be My Mind. But I understand its cultural merit. As for the other definitions of a fairy--they're all valid. They're all slightly different, and maybe one clicks 'better' than the others for any given person, but none of them are really wrong. They all contribute in a meaningful way to the full composite image of Fairy.

I probably don't have to tell my target audience "hey! Vaguely-defined magical beings can manifest in a plethora of culturally-specific ways!" but somehow it hit me, hard. I've been thinking a lot about the nature of Fairy lately--perhaps that's why.

Second: the final definition given of what a fairy is, the Romantic-era one about beautiful fragile things from a by-gone age? Divorcing the comment entirely from fairies, that's one of the best damned definitions of otherkin I've seen. (Only, though, when you abandon all issues of identity, which you shouldn't; they're rather intrinsic to the definition of otherkin.) Still--uncanny, I think.

Mind, the people on NFP might (understandably) go apeshit when they see that I've appropriated a comment on one of their posts to add to a conversation about otherkin...