Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27793210-20161201084732/@comment-24674051-20161201182305

An interesting thought. We do need to understand where fairies come from to fully answer that question.

But my hunch is that fairies are born as fairies, just as dwarves are born, or rather hatched, as dwarves. Which does mean that Rumple, Bae, Gideon, and Henry all have Fairy heritage. Now, that begs the question of what that means exactly.

My thoughts on that are that the fairy DNA are recessive, and they never present themselves in male descendants, except in a very rare case of having a male descendant of a fairy mate with a female descendant. The Males simply become carriers of the gene, and any male born to a fairy is immediately abandoned (ideally to the Father).

However, Female descendants of a fairy can display the fairy traits, and when they do, the fairies take measures to gather the new fairy into the fold. Typically, an immediate female decendant of a Fairy is simply brought in and raised as a fairy. and because of the recessive nature of the gene, female descendants that are more than 1 or 2 generations removed do not typically receive the gene. (since the trait would be passed through the male ancestors). The fairies still track these females (as best as they can) just to identify future generations, and also possibly prevent the procreation of a male fairy.

And should  this conjecture be accurate, this could help provide some justification for Blue's moratoruim against fairy relationships.

And a small side conjecture. Belle's Mom, Collette, is actually descendant of a fairy through several generations, and what saved Belle (and why she had to disappear) is that her fairy nature was  revealed, and she did not want Belle to be taken to be raised as a fairy. Of course, this would mean the Belle is also part Fairy, and could make for an interesting story if Gideon turns out to be a Male Fairy.