Mr. Revise is in overall charge of the Golden Boughs Retirement Village. His exact status is unclear, but he is descended from Literals, a group of magical beings who, unlike the Fables, who are characters from story, appear to personify literary concepts. He is the son of Kevin Thorn and the grandson of the Pathetic Fallacy, though he appears older than both of them. As such, Revise holds a considerable amount of supernatural power.

Revise considers his role to be "neutering" Fables partly by stripping them of their darker elements, with his ultimate goal being to rid the world of magic. He had been close to accomplishing that before the Fabletown refugees made their way to this mundane world.

Tying in to Revise's intention to destroy magic, The Golden Bough was originally written by Sir James Frazer to show that even the "enlightened" faiths of the 19th Century were descended from the most superstitious and primitive. Like Frazer, Mr. Revise appears to be a modernist who wants to abolish superstition. In the end of the Great Fables Crossover, he's revealed in a more sympathetic light, as it is mentioned that keeping the laws of physics constant over time had been his idea, making science possible. It's also pointed out that he's been a stabilizing force against whims of Kevin Thorn, who could justify any event by claiming poetic license. Eventually, he decides to follow his father in the new universe created by the Deus ex Machina.