Josh,
In my own language I always try to investigate what a word or an expression means. Where does it come from? In English a hell of a job for me, but let’s give it a try. “Tales” are I think stories. Stories have a beginning where they explain you the setting, then the story itself, how things develop and then the end. All things come together and lead to a conclusion. “Fairy” is a word that contains mainly “fair”, so reasonable. It seams that the story is about how things reasonable should be, so it describes an ideal situation. As if it is reasonable, that you get your princess (or for the most of us, prince) on a white horse. The first problem is of course that most horses are black or brown, causing practical problems. The second and may be the major problem is that life is not always fair. Take the situation in Africa, plain crashes, earth quakes and so on. So it seems that fairy tales are nonsense tales. But I don’t think so. It is a reflection of dreams. And it is nice to dream, to think of a situation that is far better then the situation you have now. As long as you are able to stay mainly in the reality, the real world, it is nice to have dreams. I believe in “fairy tales”.