The Unfair Folk @theunfairfolk - Tumblr Blog

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sparrowlucero

more little tea kettle dragons

available on my kofi as adoptables

littleguysdaily

imissthembutitwasntadisaster

Not superstitious and not not superstitious but a third secret thing (read a lot of fairytales as a child and doesn't believe them but also would never be rude to a mountain while still on it just in case)

hylltonart

Finally finished painting this water nymph

timelapse + WIP images

thefugitivesaint

Hiro Kimura, ''Howling Mad'' by Peter David, 1989 Premise: Wolf is bitten by a werewolf and turns into a man on full moon nights. That's the gist of it.

grickle14

Check out the "Symbiotic Loops Online Group Exhibition" hosted by the UK WOWxWOW gallery. This sweet bear bartender is one of the ORIGINAL ART pieces I have for sale in the show! https://wowxwow.com/symbiotic-loops

SYMBIOTIC LOOPS - ONLINE GROUP EXHIBITION 9TH - 30TH JANUARY 2026. WOW x WOW Gallery proudly presents Symbiotic Loops. The creative process.

yinza

Sliding in with this at the tail end of Mermay...

You usually see octopus mermaids with the torso the other way, but a friend pointed out that octopi have their beaks amid the tentacles, and I thought it'd be fun to play with. Imagine being welcomed into an embrace by all those limbs.

Prints available on Inprnt and in my Etsy shop!

[Image Description: A digital painting of two mermaids in an embrace. The mermaid on the left has the body of an octopus which is black on top and a warm gold on the underside of the tentacles. She has light brown skin and wears a black hijab and long-sleeved grey shirt with a gold pattern. She is reaching around the other mermaid's waist while her tentacles swirl open around them. The mermaid on the right is a fat black woman with black natural hair. Her tail is that of a whiptail catfish and matches the brown of her skin, with a paler gold underbelly. She holds the face of the octopus mermaid in her hands. The two of them smile softly at each other. /end ID]

unita-n

Horses from 2019 Inktober

thestuffedalligator

"Um," said the fairy. "Choose something else."

Rosamund hesitated. It was, she had to admit, the first time she had ever been given a wish, so she wasn't an expert with this sort of thing, but she felt that this was not part of the typical script. "Sorry," she said. "Is that not allowed?"

The fairy grimaced. When it spoke, its voice came out pained and stressed. "Y-y-y-e-e-e-no," it sighed at last, dragonfly wings sagging. "No, technically no, it's not not allowed, but-" It suddenly brightened. "How about gold? Can't go wrong with gold. Gold's a good wish."

Rosamund frowned. This was really not going the way she expected at all. "Excuse me-"

"Beauty, that's a good one too, beauty's always popular," it went on. "And if there's a ball nearby tonight I can probably-"

"Excuse me!"

The wand was twiddled in chitinous fingers. "Right," the fairy said, sounding scolded. "Sorry, it's just..." Its voice trailed off.

Her grandmother's clock chimed midnight from the mantelpiece.

Then - "I'm sorry," it said, not daring to look up, "I know it's not fair, but - you know what I am. You know what we do to wishes. If you wished for wealth I'd have to turn your hair into silver, so you’d have to tear every strand out of your head before you could spend it. We can't help it. It's what we do. The cost of a wish is that you get what you want, but you don't get it the easy way.

"So if you wish for a child, it'll be - strange. Twisted, somehow. Made of pine or marzipan or have the head of a hedgehog. That's the cost of a wish-child; you'll get the child you wished for, but it'll never be - right."

Rosamund waited to see if there was anything else. She felt a sting to her pride when she realized there wasn't. "Is that all?" she said. "I wouldn't care what I got-"

"You all say that," the fairy said. "You all say you wouldn't care what you got. You all say it, and you really believe it, until the neighbours sneer at you and your hedgehog child for too long, or your back aches because your thumb-high child can't help you in the fields, or your pine child kicks and bites and won't obey, and then you think, 'This isn't the way it was supposed to be,' and then..."

The fairy stopped and looked into Rosamund’s eyes. It was a beautiful thing, all glittering carapace and iridescent wings, but just for an instant it looked terribly, terribly old.

"I'm sorry," it said. "But I'm tired of making unloved children."

theunfairfolk

I heard he was named for Minos’s stepfather

(narrator voice: this ask is about the minotaur)

well. yes and no, but mostly no. minos was the offspring of zeus and europa, specifically while zeus was in the form of a bull. europa ends up married to the then king of crete, king asterion, who raises the zeus-children essentially as his own (though their heritage was public knowledge). “i’m not the step dad i’m just the dad who stepped up” and all that shit. since zeus was the father they wouldn’t have been seen as bastards or scandalous anymore than a modern family adopting a child would be. (asterion’s personal feelings at being bull-cucked are afaik unknown).

so minos inherits the throne of crete from asterion. he marries pasiphae. he makes some Bad Decisions and poseidon’s like “time to curse ur wife to have sex with a bull. get it? like your mother had sex with bull zeus? but this time it’s just a bull and the baby’s gonna be wack.” tada, minotaur. and reportedly, some of the citizens of crete, who probably do not enjoy having the minotaur in their nation, nor the fact that their king angered the gods like that, start calling him “asterion” after the OG bull-cuck. like. as an insult to minos. same energy as “wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy”.

minos would’ve taken pride in being half-god, but the whole “your mother had sex with a bull” thing was probably a sore subject (even if that bull was a god). his wife being compelled to do the same thing was a calculated punishment on poseidon’s part. neither pasiphae nor minos would be jumping to name the child that had been sent as a divine punishment, and if they had, they definitely wouldn’t have gone with asterion.

theunfairfolk

The minotaur was a prince.

theunfairfolk

Do you ever think about how we’ll never know if the minotaur could’ve learned to speak? To communicate in any way? What kind of a life could he have lived if he wasn’t torn away from his mother and tossed into a prison for the crime of being born? Do you think of the stories that describe the infant as “ferocious” as if that excuses what was done to him?

Do you think about how the only names we know him by are ones taken from his jailer, the man who locked up a child and sent countless others to their doom? At the very worst he was a pawn caught up in the crossfire of an angry god and a foolish king. But truly he was just hurt. Abused. Neglected.

The prince of a kingdom that feared and reviled him.

theunfairfolk

“but he eats people!” yeah. good.

emptymanuscript

Note that the monster name is his father’s (His mother’s husband’s) name.

Minotaur. Taur (Taurus) means bull. Mino (Minos), he is the legal son of King Minos. It’s his patrilineal line and a physical description.

His Jailer gave him his own name.

There’s surely something there about projection. The son is serving time for his father’s crimes.

Literally in this case. The Minotaur is a curse from the gods on Minos because Minos dishonored his contract with them. He promised that if he was made King of Crete he would sacrifice his best bull to them. He became King and sacrificed another bull in order to keep that wealth of his best bull. So the gods gave Queen Pasiphaë a lust for the bull and made her bear the minotaur.

Minos was certainly meant to be reminded forever of his transgressions in the face of his child.

But here we can return to this alternate take. Minos has Daedalus build the Labyrinth and confines the Minotaur inside it, feeding it by sacrifices sent in to be killed. Was that the gods’ intent?

Or did the gods grant him a choice? To atone for his sins by caring for the consequences, to do what he should have done in the first place and give up his pride to be the bigger person for the sake of others. To honor the contract of Father where he failed the contract of King.

And Minos chose instead to make his son the whipping boy for his own crimes. To project his crime, which caused the Minotaur, onto the Minotaur.

Is it both projection and victim blaming? I will punish you for my crimes. I will punish you because you are the consequence of my crimes. I will punish you because better you than me.