Basic Trope: A Fairy Godmother that curses her godchildren instead of blessing them.
- Straight: Alice is an evil fairy that appears to a newborn Bob and curses him with misfortune throughout its life.
- Exaggerated: While good fairies instill goodwill and blessings on human children, Alice kidnaps human children (leaving a replacement like a child-shaped stump or an evil little fairy baby like a cuckoo bird) and keeps them as slaves for the rest of their lives (that is if they could even die in the Fairy Realm).
- Downplayed: Alice is a True Neutral fairy that does bad things for good reasons out of a desire to keep balance in nature and society, specializing in curses over children who are predestined to grow up to be horrible people.
- Justified:
- Alice was insulted and/or made a victim by the Bob's parents, so the curse is done to their child as Revenge by Proxy.
- The Fair Folk operate on Blue-and-Orange Morality, so a "blessing" to them would look like a "curse" to us.
- Inverted: Fairy Godmother.
- Subverted:
- Alice seemingly curses Bob, but the curse was actually created with the express purpose of educating Bob, making him a better person in the long run than his parents ever were.
- Alternatively: Alice knows that Bob will grow up to be a very dangerous individual, and the curse is a way of keeping his destructive potential in check.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice lays a curse on Bob, but the curse ends up making Bob a better person in the long run by allowing him to experience hardships of the common man, something that his rich and uncaring parents would never understand. When Alice sees this, she tries to use other methods of killing him.
- Alice grants blessings in exchange for an intangible price that makes the "blessing" actually a curse in the process. For example:
- Alice "blesses" Bob with the gift of being a Chick Magnet, but it makes it so that every woman in the world (including his own mother) desires him beyond all rational thought. This also makes all men in the world possess an irrational (sometimes murderous) hatred of him to compensate. It sucks especially since he's gay.
- Alice "blesses" Bob with a good work ethic. This gives Bob a zeal to work on his job with an almost supernatural passion... until his body gives out from the stress it causes him.
- Alice "blesses" Bob with immortality. But really, Who Wants to Live Forever?
- Parodied:
- Good fairies go to a Hero Academy, while bad ones go to an Academy of Evil. Both sides learns how to be Fairy Godmothers, but they do these things and go about their duties on the opposite ends of the moral scale.
- Alfonso is a Fairy Godfather who essentially operates as a magical mob boss.
- Deconstructed: Due to the unpredictable nature of magic and interventions by good fairies allied with her charge, Alice has to observe her then-charge Bob (who she has cursed with a Cruel and Unusual Death at a specific time and place) to ensure that every facet of the curse has been met. In doing so, Alice starts to develop a soft-spot for her godchild, even considering him to be like a son to her. By the end, she changes her mind and tries to stop the curse from reaching its conclusion, only for her meddling to be the cause of his fate instead.
- Reconstructed: ???
- Zig Zagged: Alice "blesses" Bob with complete fearlessness under the delusion that it is what he wants. This gets Bob killed and Alice takes no responsibility for it. It turns out that when she was a baby, she was cursed by her Fairy Godmother Carol with the "blessing" of bliss, taking away her capacity to feel shame or guilt about anything and turning her into a sociopath. While Alice is classified as
Chaotic Neutral (when she is meant to be a Lawful Good Fairy Godmother), Carol is very much Chaotic Evil, thus making Alice a second-generation Fairy Devilmother, and would eventually go on to use her fairy powers to eventually create a third Devilmother in the process. - Averted: Fairies would much rather mind their own business and try to stay out of human affairs.
- Enforced: The writer is much more interested in authenticity than Sugar Bowl Disney antics, thus portrays the Gentry as being like the mischievous morally-grey race that mythology and folklore that the Fairy Godmother trope spawned from.
- Implied: Two expecting parents line their windows in iron bars and place various totems provided by the village healer to ward away any unwelcomed supernatural activity.
- Logical Extreme: The Fair Folk are all actually demons that live to instill suffering, chaos and evil onto the world and are treated as such.
- Played for Laughs: Alice tries to be an evil Fairy Godmother, but all of her curses are either really dumb, really unimpressive or have unintended good consequences. For instance, she curses Bob with total chemical castration. Fortunately, Bob comes from a long line of rapists and sex-offenders, and since Bob has no sex drive at all, he winds up becoming a well-adjusted asexual that treats women as equal to men.
- Played for Drama: ???
- Played for Horror: Fairy Godmothers are actually cross-roads demons that fools children into selling them their souls long before they know any better in exchange for a "Happily Ever After", the fairy returning to collect their souls for eternal torment in Hell before they can even reach adulthood
- Lampshaded:
- "Never trust a stranger handing out gifts. They always up to something."
- "Never trust a fairy. They're just as likely to curse you than they are to hand out gifts."
- Invoked: In a book for expecting parents, there is a chapter dedicated to singling out the differences between good fairies and bad fairies and contingencies to ward away the bad ones.
- Defied: Before the King's first-born child is born, he has the castle covered head-to-toe in iron before having every soldier outfitted with iron armor and weapons to get ready to go to war with the Fey for an eventual war with the species.
- Exploited: Using clever word-play, Bob's parents tricks Alice into turning her curse of poverty into a blessing of life-long prosperity.
- Discussed: "Unlike what you may have seen in Disney movies, fairies are not going to give you a dress and a prince out of the goodness of their hearts. They're much more likely to rob you, cage you or kill you with its paranormal STDs after they magically roofy you."
- Conversed: "Why does the Fairy Godmother do all of this for Cinderella, anyway? If she was actually doing this for charity, she should use her magic to help starving children in Africa. We know she can control plants if she could turn a pumpkin into a carriage, so why not help the crops grow? Because she is up to something."
- Untwisted: Alice is a Goth that slips her contempt for humans in every sentence she speaks, but she gives legitimately good blessings to her charges anyway. When her most recent charge Bob dies of illness, she is summoned to court on suspicions that her magical gift is what killed him. Eventually she is found innocent, only to confess afterwards that she actually was the one that killed him.
- Unparodied: An Artifact of Doom that belonged to Alice is a Magic Wand similar to wands wielded by other Fairy Godmothers, but it twists all spells that are normally entirely positive or harmless into curses, hexes and other forms of dark magic, thus any Fairy Godmother that uses it end up condemning their charges with an unfortunate fate not matter how pure their intentions are.
- Gender Inverted: Alex is a Fairy Devilfather that curses Bobbie to grow up with a Gonk face and be undesirable to all men, thus leaving her a burden to her conservative, nobility family.
- Intended Audience Reaction: ???
