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Tinker Bell or Tinkerbell (a deviant re-spelling of the name) is a fictional character in J.M. Barrie's play and subsequent novel Peter Pan, and various adaptations of them. She is a fairy, sometimes ill-behaved and vindictive, but at other times helpful and kind to her companion Peter Pan. The extremes in her personality are explained by the fact that a fairy's size prevents her from holding more than one feeling at a time.
In one famous scene, she is dying, but will survive if enough people believe in fairies. In the play the characters make a plea to the children watching to sustain her, an example of "breaking the fourth wall". In the novel and the 2003 film, Peter calls out to dreaming children within the storytelling universe. At the end of the novel, when Peter returns to the Darling home after a year, it is revealed that Tinker Bell "is no more" since "fairies don't live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them." Like nearly everything that has happened in the story, Peter has forgotten her—real death and sadness cannot exist in his everlasting childhood.
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