YMMV / Fables

• Adorkable: Beast beams and becomes damn near giddy when a Fabletown citizen refers to him as "Sheriff" early on in his tenure. He also geeks out like a little kid with a new toy while wearing the Big Damn Golden Armor.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Bigby is a very divisive and controversial figure. Some perceive his treatment as a glorification and rationalisation for an amoral savage thrill-killing callous cannibalistic social-Darwinist Villain Protagonist, that represents the absolutely worst that real life humanity has to offer, whereas others simply see him as a badass or a responsible family man.
  • Another questionable aspect of Bigby is his insistence that he doesn't care about human morality because he's a wolf, despite the fact that he regularly shows that he has an astute grip on human ethics, law, politics, etc. This suggests that he perfectly understands morality, but uses being a wolf as an excuse to commit immoral actions and not have to justify them.
• Anticlimax Boss: Leigh Douglas becomes Mister Dark's apprentice, and is set up to become the final Big Bad of the series. She's very easily and unceremoniously killed by Rose Red, achieving none of her goals.
• Ass Pull: When the Adversary is finally defeated and captured, the heroes choose to not kill him. The reason given basically boils down to wanting to show that they have the moral high ground. Keep in mind, this is the Adversary, a man who has killed countless billions of innocent people across numerous worlds. It's hard to imagine a situation where they don't have moral superiority over him.
  • Discussed in detail by the characters themselves, and it was a deal with Pinocchio for necessary information. Many of the characters are not happy with it.
• Awesome Art: James Jean's covers were striking, emotive and haunting, and for which he won 6 consecutive Eisner Awards for Best Cover Artist. It's likely he could have pushed his streak further if he hadn't retired from the comic book industry.
• Base-Breaking Character: Jack to extremes. Views shift from Loveable Rogue to monster virtually identical to Max Piper.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The story where Bigby has to save one of his sons from being attacked by monsters (revealed to be his brothers). The battle's narration stretches quite a few lines, apparently causing natural catastrophes hundreds of miles away, making mundies go insane and.. causing two-headed cows to be born? ... what? It also makes Snow see The North Wind the same way Bigby sees him, resulting in her calling him an "evil old man." Cue the end of the chapter however, and, with the exception of Bigby's brothers being introduced as minor roles in the story, none of this is ever mentioned again.
• Bizarro Episode: The Great Fables Crossover.
• Broken Base: Bill Willingham's decision to use the comic as a platform to express his political views turned a lot of fans away from the comic, to say the very least.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Designated Hero: The Fables can sometimes get a tad... extreme in their attempts to keep hidden. The Tommy Sharp incident is a good example. Add to that how many of them are massive hypocrites and you get some characters that are the embodiment of the Good Is Not Nice trope.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Flycatcher seems to be really popular. Kind of unavoidable given what a massive woobie the poor guy is, not to mention his surprising badassery. Also helped by the fact that he's the only Fable who's completely good.
  • Boy Blue after he Took a Level in Badass and battled against the Empire singlehandedly.
• Evil Is Cool: Plenty of the villains, but the Adversary stands out in terms of sheer badassery.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Once Upon a Time due to both having the initial high-concept of "fairy tale characters trapped in the modern world". However, this was mostly in the run-up to Once Upon A Time being first broadcast, it dropped quite a lot when the first few episodes of the TV show made it clear how significantly different the actual plots and styles of the works were. Despite this, many Fables' fans still blame Once Upon A Time for being the main reason why Fables hasn't been adapted to another media yet.
• Genius Bonus: Plenty of the characters who are not explicitly named or only slowly implied. Not to mention; in the first Jack of Fables book, we see a black janitor named "Sam" who doesn't seem to remember where he is. By the end of the book, he starts running very fast and we see that the tigers had been turned into butter, and Revise shouts that he thought he had him censored - who's he talking about? The Story of Little Black Sambo.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember the story arc with Jack filming a movie trilogy about himself that kicked off the Jack of Fables spinoff? Yeah, that's sort-of a real thing now.
  • Even more hilarious in that the real life version was an epic-level flop, as opposed to the fictional versions' record-shattering success.
• Informed Wrongness: After being captured and taken to Fabletown, The Adversary/Geppetto is taken on a tour of the place, during which he launches into a long rant against both the residents and the modern world, accusing them of being no better than himself or the Empire and therefore having the moral ground to judge him. The story plays it off as him making several good points, however, this ignores two things:
  • Firstly is that Empire is... well, an empire. It's an expansionist, colonial force whose citizens may have lived in relative comfort, but that comfort came at the expense of numerous other worlds that were invaded for the express purpose of enslaving their populations and stealing their resources.
  • Secondly, while the residents of Fabletown did take morally dubious actions, they did so in order to protect themselves from humans and the Empire itself, which was still attempting to wipe them from existence. This despite the fact they were one small neighborhood on a remote world.
• It Was His Sled: It's become pretty common knowledge that Snow and Bigby end up together.
• Jerkass Woobie: Spratt falls into this, when she is seen to be the only fable left on the farm, crying to herself as everyone else had literally left her to be killed by Mr. Dark. Of course, Spratt isn't exactly nice, and the Fables themselves aren't exactly shining paragons of morality either.
  • Bigby was this even before he pulled a Heel–Face Turn and left the Homelands. His backstory shows just how miserable of a life he had before he went bad.
  • Mr. Dark and Mr. Revise.
• Love to Hate: Jack and the Adversary.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Some consider Jack taking advantage of an emotionally devastated Rose Red (to the point that she didn't even realise who he was) in order to have sex with her in The Great Fables Crossover to be the point where he stops being the guy you love to hate, causing the reader to just hate him instead. On the other hand, given his treatment of the Snow Queen, he was a villain nearly from the very beginning. His worst act may have been selling his own son to demons to save his own skin.
  • Totenkinder sacrificed every child on the planet to fuel her own power against Mister Dark in The Unwritten crossover.
  • Hansel murdering Gretel certainly counts, though he may have crossed it even earlier with his countless witch burnings.
  • Bluebeard murdering Tommy Sharp just to ensure he couldn't tell anyone about Fabletown. Especially since the other Fables had taken care of that situation weeks beforehand so his typical excuse of wanting to protect Fabletown doesn't hold up well.
  • Goldilocks and the Colin's cousins murdering Colin for undermining their revolution.
  • In Happily Ever After, Rose Red pretty much soars into this, planning to fulfill an ancient curse that says she or Snow has to kill the other in order to inherit the family's magical power. If it weren't enough that she happily intends to go through with it, she also plans to do it by controlling Bigby into killing her, and apparently also their children. Then, if all that wasn't bad enough she planned on using said magic ring to seduce Bigby into falling in love with her, essentially RAPING him, AND kill everyone in both the farm (which she used to lead with grace) and Fabletown in case anyone was going to interfere with her plans. The fact that she's being fueled by hoards of powerful and evil spirits might imply that her mind has been corrupted which led to the dramatic Face–Heel Turn. If not, there's no excuse left for her actions this time. Ultimately Subverted in this case: Rose decides that considering Snow has had children of both genders, the curse can be or has been broken, so she decides to Screw Destiny and leave her be, making amends with her and promising they can write one another.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • The series ran into this after the "The Dark Ages" arc with the much maligned "The Great Fables Crossover", which had barely anything to do with the ongoing plots of the series and had a really inconsistent tone. Several arcs afterwards were better received, such as "Cubs in Toyland", but the series otherwise never really recovered, with many resolutions being very anti-climatic.
  • The last three-four issues or so were considered by many to not be as equally strong as the rest of the series.
• Spiritual Adaptation: While it's unlikely that Fables will ever be adapted into live-action, there's always Once Upon a Time by Disney if you want a good idea of what a hypothetical television adaptation of the comic would look like.
• Stoic Woobie: Snow White. She may not let it slip much but she had a truly horrendous life before coming to Fabletown.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "A Frog's Eye View" from 1001 Nights of Snowfall.
  • Boy Blue's death, and the wake that follows with nearly every single one of the fables mourning.
  • Darien's death in "Cubs in Toyland". It really hits hit home when right before sacrificing himself, he cries and asks why he has to die when he's still just a kid, who never got to do anything yet.
  • Mr. Dark's death.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Reynard Fox plays a big role in some of the first issues as a cunning badass of great help to Snow White and the Fable Community. After the Revolution arc is over with however, he gets reduced to a background character for the rest of the series.
  • In some ways, Darien Wolf is wasted because, as he said, he was only a kid and didn't get a chance to do much. While he did a Heroic Sacrifice, was the storyline with the toys necessary in the long run?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • For much of the series Bigby maintains his status under the General Amnesty via generous Loophole Abuse. Notably, he swears to kill numerous people, but then declares his vengeance suspended until some unknown later time. It seems like those Fables would have been obvious targets when he Came Back Wrong. Instead, he's Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • Small one, but the fact that all of Snow and Bigby's children can transform between human and wolf (and any other creature they should desire) only seems to serve as plot detail when they're children, as they often transform into wolves and even has to learn how to appear human most of the time. As they get older and start having more character-centric stories, however, their love of transforming into wolves appears to go away as they all eventually stay human on-screen all the time. It would have been interesting to see at least one of the children find out he/she preferred being a wolf and chose to stay permanently in that form, as opposed to his/her siblings and father. At the very least have some of them still occasionally transform into their father's real species which they loved so much as children, instead of making it look like they completely forgot about that ability in the end.
    • It's perhaps most noticeable with Blossom, who is shown at the end to have become a Nature Hero. Yet despite living in nature among animals, official artwork still only portray her as being in human form, when a wolf form would surely have made the most sense in her case.
  • The only mundy to ever find out about Fabletown was Tommy Sharp, who is killed by Bluebeard after his first appearance. It would have been interesting if a more affable mundy had learned about the Fables and to see what sort of interactions they would have with them.
  • Many readers feel that the whole premise of the Fables in exile is dropped too quickly, with the fight first against the Adversary, then against Mr Dark, taking too much time against the organization, power-plays and day-to-day life of Fabletown itself.
• Too Cool to Live: Colin and Boy Blue.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • If you're pro-choice Frau Totenkinder (at least after her backstory) probably comes across as somewhere between a Pragmatic Hero, Retired Monster, and Only Sane Man. Particularly when you consider that everyone in Fabletown would likely be dead a dozen times over if she'd lost her power.
  • The Cubs in Toyland arc. The toys reveal that Toyland is a version of hell for toys who killed their owners and the toys accept the charge, with Therese outright calling them killers. But in every example they give, the 'crimes' of the toys aren't being a Killer Teddy Bear or Perverse Puppet, but simply things like being made of flammable material or the owner choking while chewing on them; events that are completely out of the toys' control and far more the fault of whoever made them, or the adults who should have been supervising the child.
  • In the Haven Murder trial due to John's amazing defense it's admittedly hard not to feel bad for Mr. Brump. Brump who just pages before was celebrating that he successfully won his team the Haven baseball championship by striking out Weyland. Throughout their celebration the Goblin was crying tears of joy and ended up getting too drunk and ended up eating a Squirrel Fable out of natural instinct which he would have had even less control over since he was wasted. After John argued Brumps defense citing the scorpion and the frog and how natural instincts are exceedingly difficult to control. Flycatcher admitted to Blue's grave that John's argument completely won him over but to be a fair ruler he had to sentence Brump harshly or it would set a bad precedent.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The comic series is about a whole community of fairy tale heroes who live in New York and their lives and adventures. The kids are gonna love it, right? Some of those adventures include: A murder mystery with an apartment drenched in blood, Snow White being raped by 7 dwarfs in the past, the nice, friendly and charming Boy Blue going on a trip to murder the Adversary and slaughtering anyone who gets in his way, a war and so on.
• The Woobie:
  • Flycatcher. His entire family was murdered before his eyes — with his wife and eldest daughter gang-raped before they were killed — while he was powerless to do anything since his curse had turned him back into a frog at the worst possible moment. The trauma caused his mind to suppress the horrendous memory, and he spent centuries believing his family was still alive, only to finally remember their deaths when his wife's ghost is brought back for only a few precious seconds to kiss him and reverse his curse yet again. Even after he becomes a hero and King of Haven, he still has to deal with his guilt over feeling he's betraying his late wife while falling in love with Red Riding Hood.
  • Colin. He just wants to get off the Farm and ultimately his desire for freedom gets him murdered by Goldilocks.
  • Boy Blue is a Heartbroken Badass who's suffered a big Trauma Conga Line. And then he practically gets an obsessive religion devoted to him when he just wants to live a normal life with Red-themed characters.
  • Pinocchio for spending years not knowing what happened to his father Geppetto since fleeing from the Adversary only for him to discover Geppetto IS the Adversary and the true mind behind the Empire.

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