Personality, Ability and Identity
Frau Totenkinder's natural form is as a beautiful young woman, but she appears to be an old crone.
While generally acting in the best interests of Fabletown, Totenkinder is something of a schemer and often seems to be playing her own game. Her help usually comes with a price, such as the many "favors" Cinderella owes Totenkinder for the enchanted items she provides (although what those favors are have yet to be revealed). Very little escapes her attention in Fabletown; she was the only one to be aware of Snow White's seventh child, for example, and knew of the arrest of Trusty John, despite attempts to keep it quiet. Her intelligence network in the Homelands is extensive, as she has access to the sight of many of those running the Empire.
When she came to Fabletown, Frau Totenkinder ostensibly stopped killing newborn infants for her power, instead merely taking a little blood from each newborn Fable. However, during a conversation with Kay, it is revealed that she this is just a ruse to ease the minds of the Fabletown community, and she still secretly sacrifices children to maintain her power, only now it is many more than two a year. How she manages this is unrevealed, but she maintains that what she does is legal in the mundane world even though it would be frowned upon by the Fable community should they learn of it. While there is a popular fan theory that Totenkinder could be financing abortion clinics, none of Fables's writers or artists have weighed in on the matter.
In Fables #88 its revealed that her rocking chair is also the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel, the stone tower from Rapunzel and the stone on which she killed her baby. She gives some of its names as "Capture" (in its gingerbread form) "Refuge" (in its Rapunzel's tower form), and "Burden," "Damnation" and "Regret" (in its original altar stone form).
In the same way that Jack represents many of the different Jack tales, Totenkinder is "just about every witch in fairy tales", according to Willingham, as long as that witch was unnamed in their story. Therefore, Frau Totenkinder is not any of the Witches of Oz. In his online Fabletown forum, Willingham clarified that Totenkinder and Cinderella's Fairy Godmother are two separate characters (later confirmed in Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love.), and that the story from 1001 Nights of Snowfall was probably a nonspecific story similar to that of the Witch archetype. She is also not any of the named witches of Arthurian Legend (e.g. Morgan le Fey, or the Lady in the Lake) but she did make contributions during that era. She introduces herself to Dunster Happ as "Bellflower", which is her original name from childhood. Interestingly enough, in "Peter And Max : A Fables Novel", she states that she does not rely by one name alone, because it could be used against her, if she used one long enough to consider it her true name. This is the same reason why Mrs Someone refuses to give her real name to anyone. However, Ozma not only recognized her in "Rose Red", but, amazingly, also showed that she already knew "Bellflower" was Frau Totenkinder's oldest name.
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