just fairy things

Hello friends and fairy freaks. We need help. I'm already $3k in the hole on vet bills and now I gotta take time off work because my wife has cancer. It's like we've been cursed. Here's some cat pictures.

or are they actually swans wanting human partners?

sorry my understanding of this myth creature is more from an animated movie than actual folklores

oh sincere! sincerity! oh shit i was being funny! i could've been infodumping this whole time?? fuck

swan maidens come from a variety of fairy tales, the most famous (european) one probably being Swan Lake. in that case it was a curse situation, so a sorcerer had cast a spell on them to only be women when the light of the moon touched them. the rest of the times they were swans. this is cause they ran away from arranged marriages or cheated on their boyfriends or shit (the sorcerer was a sexist read The Black Swan by mercedes lackey for an amazing adaptation of swan lake). there's also stories of boy swans though! like The Six Swans (also bc of a curse). and there's leda and the swan where zeus turns into a bird to seduce* this woman, leda.

overall i know of instances of individual characters transforming into various birds as a power they have but i dont know of any staple myths about Swan People as like. a race. maybe cause we have angels for that niche? or maybe cause we have bird ladies in the form of harpies and stuff. most stories of bird people are about curses.

AND to answer your previous question about selkies: they are a different class of "underwater person" than mermaids. mermaids are permanently half fish half person, selkies are either 100% seal or 100% person; they have a magic seal skin they put on to transform. you could trap them as humans if you steal it. a lot of stories about them center around fishermen trapping them as their wives. 👎

A guardian of wild spaces, the embodiment of nature untouched by mankind's industry and greed. Fewer and farther between.

The ideal of "Purity" made manifest, elusive and powerful and hunted for fruitlessly by many a person. To kill. To actually kill. Living symbol of the oh-so-coveted Purity, not treated as a sacred thing to protect, or even predated for food to survive off, but a trophy for knights and lords to boast about.

So absolutely fierce and deadly that no one smart dared to fight it fairly. A gentle maiden had to betray it into resting in her lap so that a man could spear it while its guard was down.

Able to heal any wound no matter how severe - it promised miracles, if you could find one.