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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8454918" data-attributes="member: 7026594">When D&D first came out, yes, fairies were almost exclusively seen in the cutesy Victorian interpretation.  Major pop culture examples readers and players would have been familiar with (unless they were really into folklore) would be Disney ones- Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, and Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather from Sleeping Beauty.Labyrinth did give Brian Froud's lovely weird fairy goblins major media exposure, but before that, the 1978 book Faeries, with illustrations by Froud and famous Tolkien artist Alan Lee hit #4 on the NY Times Best Sellers list, and made a significant impact*. [URL unfurl="true"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faeries_(book)[/URL]I do think you're right that D&D has kept its Hobgoblins less fairylike up until now.  Building on AD&D's concept of them as militaristic, organized and disciplined larger relatives of Goblins, they've been grounded more as a human-like species. *As a side note, I think the 1977 Dutch book Gnomes, which inspired the '78 Faeries, was probably a significant impetus to Gnomes becoming a core PC race in AD&D.  It apparently sold almost a million units in the US in its first year of publication.</blockquote>