Fair

How do you like your Fairies? Plucky tricksters that love harmless jokes? Amoral monsters? Isolationist assholes who hate anything unnatural abd trespassers? Or just another race living in the world?

cum dumps

Larvae for eternity.

Plucky trickster mostly, always feel like they should represent the beautiful and playful part of nature.

There should always be a dark side though,
like locusts, as soon as food become scarce or the environment becomes contaminated they start eating things they shouldn't and BOOM you got an entire swarm of flying mini-vampires breeding like there's no tomorrow and eating anything with a pulse.

Fried, with salad on the side.

I tend to go for the "powerful, innately aware of some advanced concepts and features of the world, but childish and naive" route.

Pure fucking evil.

Purchasable as living lanterns and emergency rations.
Failing that, semi-sentient pests that need collecting and refining into ether drinks for mad sorcerors beforethey grow to become something worse in the spirit-fae-daemon hierarchy shows up.

I tend to go with Victorian fairies, so, blue-and-orange morality.

I like them crudely fit into "normal" society
Almost nothing's their size, there's special, semi-legal work allowances that allow a fairy to be paid less than minimum wage for the little work they can do, which is fine because a bag of carrots feeds their family for a week, they have flight, maybe some petty magic tricks, but really nothing to put them on the map
Families of Faries form partnerships with human households, such that they get a roof and food in exchange for doing small tasks and minding the children
Their life cycle doesn't really mesh well with humans, living about 30 years, having a 6-8 year development period, and not really getting "old" until about 26
Their economy is borked, since some work for their shelter, food, and gifts alone, some make it work using their human pittances to buy tiny apartments and miniature feasts, and the occasional fairy able to actually work on-par with a human doing intellectual/desk work makes so much money that they, their immediate and secondary families, and their neighbors could never spend it all
Faries as a whole don't add up to anything significant in human society. This means they have little in the way of either great love, or great dislike from humans, beyond those that they immediately associate with
Many humans have fond memories of the fairies that loosely looked out for them as children, so there is a broad, kind-of background appreciation for them.
It's a sad event when someone accidentally steps on one, but it's also the sort of thing that might not ruin your entire day, even if you think about it before bed for a few nights.

As a whole their society greatly resembles a population of refugees, albeit a stable, dully warmly received refugee population. Little they do will ever really amount to actual influence, and their lives are kind of awkwardly perched upon human society, but they aren't exactly unwelcome. People are broadly pretty okay with them, so long as they aren't bothering anyone