Folklorists define the fairy tale as a story of magic or a "wonder tale", a description with which Marina Warner agrees. Fairies, elves and the like can feature but often don't make an appearance.

Fairy-tale plots and characters, in fact, feature the tropes that can be found in just about every story we tell. In “Once Upon a Time,” Marina Warner shows that few things in human experience ...

In its sparseness, astonishments, and cyclical twists, the fairy tale has something in common with the 20th-century European absurd, which follows funny, appalling patterns of repetition.