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Changeling Tale
- 522 statements
- 101 feature instances
- 92 referencing feature instances
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Before fairies went around granting wishes and bestowing Pimped Out Dresses to cinder maids, they spent a lot of time doing some serious mischief. One favorite game of The Fair Folk was to abduct human infants and leave behind one of their own in exchange. This "change child" or changeling was just a ruse to conceal the theft: since it was actually a faerie, it would prove ungovernable and the parents would eventually have to get rid of it. The real baby, meanwhile, was taken to the Land of Faerie to serve as a conscript or slave. According to most European fairy tales, baby boys and children with golden hair were in particular danger of being stolen by elves and possibly replaced by an unwanted child (often a Red-Headed Stepchild). Alternatively, the mother might be abducted, seduced, and impregnated by the Tuatha de Danaan (or local equivalent), resulting in a (possibly malevolent) fairy child. We know for a fact that Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe in any of these incidents was not to blame in absolutely any way. Compare Alien Abduction. Meanwhile, the "changeling" tag served as a "Just So" Story to conveniently explain physical and/or behavioural peculiarities that have since been demythified as Science Marches On. Before modern medicine and genetics did in the wizard, so to speak, this trope was almost certainly one of the more common backstories used for members of The Freakshow, as well as a potential rationale for abuse or infanticide. To deter fey folk, infant boys were often dressed as girls, and Cold Iron would be hung over cribs and doorways. Common items included horseshoes, bells, nails, scissors and steel files. (What Could Possibly Go Wrong?) Early baptism was also encouraged, and it was often cited as the reason why mothers could not work for some weeks after childbirth: they had to watch over the baby to prevent this. Simple abduction by fairytale beings also counts under this trope. Due to the inscrutable nature of the Fair Folk Returns Policy, 1:1 replacement of your child is not guaranteed. The earliest fairy tale versions are Older Than Print. Contrast Moses in the Bulrushes, where the parents do the switching. See also Doorstep Baby. Compare Persephone, Year Outside, Hour Inside, and its inverse Year Inside, Hour Outside. Subtrope of Doppelgänger, The Fair Folk, Land of Faerie, Invasion of the Baby Snatchers, and very often Switched at Birth. Not to be confused with the Lighter and Softer Changeling Fantasy, which is a Rags to Riches/Cinderella Plot. |
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Changeling Tale / int_130c865e | type |
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Changeling Tale / int_130c865e | comment |
In The Midwich Cuckoos, Gordon Zellaby suggests that the Dayout babies, who resemble neither their mothers nor their fathers nor any known race, would have been undoubtedly identified as changelings in the past, though modern science has no word for them. He notes: | |
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The Midwich Cuckoos | hasFeature |
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Changeling Tale / int_1463a028 | type |
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An episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a piece on a woman with Capgras syndrome (see below). The suspect, a video game addict with a nasty boyfriend, kept her daughter under the stairwell and refused to believe she was real, but had been replaced with another — unless she only heard her daughter's voice. But the minute she saw her daughter, the delusion would set in again. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_148f217e | type |
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In The Curse of Blackmoor Manor, one of the Penvellyn ancestors was rumored to be a fairy's child, foisted off on her presumptive father by means of this trope. She was actually a foundling whom the man had adopted on the quiet. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_17cbfa95 | type |
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Referenced in Midwinter Night's Dream by the teacher at Jovana's special needs school, who tells Lazar that some people think autistics are changelings, as they don't seem to be of this world. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1940a436 | type |
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In Symbaroum, or at least its Dungeons & Dragons conversion, elves have been kidnapping human children and replacing them with elf-children for centuries. The Abducted, as the humans taken by the elves are known, are usually reared to serve as ambassadors to humankind or as warriors to supplement the dwindling ranks of the Iron Pact. The changelings proper are a miserable breed, cut off from the greater elven lifecycle and usually treated quite harshly by humans once their true origin comes out. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1b9ff398 | type |
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Changeling Tale / int_1b9ff398 | comment |
Us: Red, a.k.a. the original Adelaide, was kidnapped and replaced by her Tethered counterpart in 1986, and the Adelaide we've been following this whole time has actually been the replacement. Adelaide's parents raised the Tethered version of their daughter as their own and, though distressed by their child's seemingly sudden muteness, never suspected a thing. Interestingly enough, by the time the movie takes place, the Tethered Adelaide has started a family and has become a loving mother while Red has been driven insane, suggesting that Tethered are not inherently evil but are simply a product of the conditions they are raised in. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1ca4b766 | type |
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Changeling Tale / int_1ca4b766 | comment |
Otherworldly is a subverted tale in this regard - the five leads are Fair Folk swapped with human infants and raised in the human world. However, none of their parents (human or magical) were in on this as it was done by a (currently) unknown third party, the Fair Folk parents were left to think their children were dead or gone forever, and the fate of the original human changelings is still up in the air. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1d2c4895 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
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The Crystal Court: Spring has a habit of collecting human babies to play with (usually till they die), and replaces them with fae babes that she felt were unfit for her court like in the case of Amethyst. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1f0bc3d3 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
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In the Hellboy short story "The Corpse", Hellboy exposes a fairy changeling, then he has to perform a task for the fairies to get the original child back. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_1f86ee96 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_1f86ee96 | comment |
Mentioned in Christine. When recounting his family history to protagonist Dennis, George LeBay notes that his brother Roland was apparently a very nice baby once, but something happened and Roland grew up to be a violent, hateful piece of work who took pleasure in hurting George, to the point of giving young George a permanent scar and expressing precisely zero remorse about it. Otherwise, though, there's no implication that Roland is anything other than human before his death. | |
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Christine | hasFeature |
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Changeling Tale / int_21834e53 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
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This is the basis for The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw, who wrote it in response to the awful folktales about how to get rid of one. The half-Folk changeling, Saaski, was transformed into a baby and swapped with a human child because her limitations were a nuisance to the Folk, and she's unhappier about it than everyone else. Later on, she restores her foster parents' daughter to them. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_240f6a57 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_240f6a57 | comment |
In Raymond E. Feist's Faerie Tale, the boy Patrick is taken away by "the shining man" and replaced by a changeling. The family takes the false child to the hospital, and there is a chilling description of the changeling's behavior, and how modern medicine attempts to explain it (that his brain was damaged by fever, that they don't understand how his brain could look like it does under an MRI). | |
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Changeling Tale / int_27f4c7fb | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_27f4c7fb | comment |
Coraline (book and film) is a sort of inverted changeling tale, where a human child is lured into a paradisaical realm populated by inhuman but loving and attentive facsimiles of their parents and neighbors, in particular an Other Mother who controls the whole place. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_28508de | type |
Changeling Tale | |
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Happens to Bloom, the protagonist of Winx Club: First she learns that she's a fairy, and then is revealed that her parents aren't her real parents, and that she's a princess of another world. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_2a3477a2 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_2a3477a2 | comment |
In Whither, Emelind is a literal changeling, but she considers the universe where she was raised in to be her true home. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_2b755acf | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_2b755acf | comment |
"Childe Rowland": The protagonist's sister Burd Ellen is kidnapped by elves when she inadvertently runs around a church "widdershins" (i.e., counterclockwise to the sun's path). | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_2df83962 | comment |
Rather early on in Fate: The Winx Saga, Aisha deduces that Bloom is a changeling who replaced her parents' stillborn biological daughter. Bloom decides to tell her parents that she's a changeling at the end of season 1. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_2e0d6d31 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_2e0d6d31 | comment |
Estranged focuses on both a fairy prince, now being raised as "Edmund" and aware of his true nature,note Fairies apparently have No Infantile Amnesia and his human counterpart, only called "the Childe" and treated as a sort of exotic pet. The two are forced to team up when the fairy king and queen are overthrown, putting them both in danger from the usurper's assassins. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_318b09a0 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_318b09a0 | comment |
These are apparently very common among human-folk in The Inheritance Cycle. Thus, when Elain is having a child in Inheritance, and Eragon asks Arya the elf to assist, she does so, but is very careful not to interfere too much because people fear her intentions. Then, when the child is born with a cleft lip, Eragon is called upon to heal the child. Before he takes the child away, he consents to allow the village healer Gertrude to accompany him into the tent where he goes to heal her, as he is mindful of Arya's warnings about fear of changelings. He knows that her presence will reassure the villagers. | |
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In Suburban Glamour (pun intended) the teenage protagonist learns that she's a literal changeling, and is the daughter of Fae royalty. She's initially elated to have the chance to get out of her dull, miserable life in a small middle-of-nowhere English village, but soon comes to realize that her Fae family are controlling and distant, and that they did abandon her for seventeen years without any explanation and as such have no right to barge into her life and start making demands of her. She decides to remain with her human parents, who at least love and respect her even if they don't always understand her. | |
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Wonder Woman Vol 1: (Earth-One) Nubia was stolen by Ares rather than the fey, and not replaced, but her tale remains the same. Taken from her family and raised as something she's not, only to learn as an adult she's actually an Amazon and has a twin sister. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Highlander has Duncan being called a changeling by people in his clan, as he was found as a baby after his parents' true child died at birth. There's no proof immortals were really changelings. | |
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In Katherine Kerr's Deverry series, the Guardians (pretty much the Fair Folk, except there's already another species who are elves) are eventually reincarnated as human children. From the description of their behavior, this is an explanation for autism. | |
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In an early book of The Dresden Files, when Harry explains to the reader why Murphy's department exists, he mentions that people don't believe in (among other things) baby snatchings by the Fae, yet mysterious baby disappearances do happen, so they need someone to saddle with the investigation. And when they hire Dresden as consultant, they have a chance at finding the baby. | |
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In the Supernatural episode "The Kids Are Alright"... they're not. They've been replaced by changelings, who kill their human fathers and feed on their mothers. Meanwhile, the Changeling mother feeds on the replaced children. | |
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Discworld: Lords and Ladies, being based on The Fair Folk legends, references this — elves are known to have a habit of stealing children, and while they aren't seen to do it in the book itself, the mere possibility is so infuriating to the usually laid-back Nanny Ogg that she actually (if half-jokingly) suggests Cold-Blooded Torture. Later, in The Wee Free Men, their child-stealing ways get actual page time. | |
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The Torchwood episode "Small Worlds" involves a girl who is a changeling (unbeknownst to her or her family), and the fairies come to get her back. | |
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Changeling (2008) is a modern version of the same ancient fear, with The Fair Folk replaced by society as the antagonist. | |
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The fairies from The Mortal Instruments also do it. It is difficult for them to multiply, so they depend on bringing human babies into their realm and replacing them with weaker fairy children. The shadowhunters accept that, but only because the only alternative is to lure adult humans into their realm until they've got offspring there with the fairies. This trope plays a part in the backstory of the main character of The Infernal Devices. Tessa Gray's ostensibly mundane mother, Elizabeth Moore, was actually a Nephilim named Adele Starkweather, granddaughter of the head of the York Institute, Aloysius. Baby Adele was switched with the real Elizabeth Moore by fairies as punishment for Aloysius' misconduct towards Downworlders. Because she was a mundane, "Adele" did not have the aptitude to become a Nephilim and died when she received her runes. Meanwhile, Tessa inherited her mother's Nephilim powers even though she was not raised in the Shadowhunter world. |
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Frankelda's Book of Spooks has gnomes operating this way, offering their services to children in exchange for their names as a front to steal their identities and turn them into new gnomes. Though everyone perceives the gnome as the child it replaced and concept art shown in the credits shows this clearly, the victim child and viewers only see the gnome in a Paper-Thin Disguise, which carries over into cameos in later episodes. | |
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The Haunting Hour episode "Intruders". Eve is contacted by a fairy named Lyria, who explains that Eve is really a fairy that had been taken in by a human couple. | |
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The World of David the Gnome: Ends up biting a troll mother in the butt. She switches her baby with that of a farmer (because it smells better and is quieter), taking the human back to her cave to raise. however the farmer discovers the ruse and trails the troll back home, stealing his baby but not returning hers. He instead places the troll baby on a rock in the middle of a roaring river. Since trolls can't swim, the mother is powerless to save her baby. David agrees to save the infant, but only after getting her to promise never to try such a stupid trick again. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Hilda: At the end of Hilda and the Stone Forest, Hilda and the troll child Baba are put through one of these that involves not just the two of them being switched, but fully transformed into the other species as well (Hilda becomes a Troll and Baba a human). They spend a large part of the next story, Hilda and the Mountain King, in their altered states and lives before the changeling spell was broken, and returned to their original forms. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Kaye from Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales is a changeling, swapped as an infant for a human baby. She later meets the child she was switched with, who has aged only a few years in the Seelie Court. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Labyrinth: "I wish the goblins would come and take you away... right now." Be Careful What You Wish For, Sarah... | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_61d236b7 | comment |
In InCryptid, Johrlac (also known as "cuckoos") leave their offspring as Doorstop Babies with human families, and their natural Backstory Invader powers make their Muggle Foster Parents believe that the cuckoo was their own child all along. They have no interest in taking human children, though. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Somewhat akin to this, in Touch (2017) the elves come into our world and try to kidnap people with strong magical powers/potential, generally focusing on kids. Also, it's eventually revealed that Sarah is an elf who was adopted by humans, growing up with vague memories of her origin. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Heir to Sevenwaters, Clodagh's baby brother is taken by The Fair Folk, and a glamoured Plant Person is left in his place. Clodagh must journey into the Land of Faerie to switch them back. This is part of a more complicated plot by Mac Dara of the Fair Folk to reclaim his half-human son Cathal, who was supposed to rejoin the Fair Folk on his seventh birthday but escaped. | |
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Variants appear frequently in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell where fairies seem pretty fond of kidnaping in general, but usually don't bother with replacements or stick to children. It comes closest to being played straight with the Raven King who learns magic after being taken as a child, and Mrs.Strange who gets an actual replacement. | |
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The Owl House: As Luz spends her summer on the Boiling Isles instead of at summer camp like she was supposed to, someone kept up the charade by writing letters to her mother Camila, and after camp ended, took on Luz's form to continue tricking Camila into thinking they were her daughter. This ultimately turns out to be far less sinister than it appears at first glace. The Doppelgänger (a shapeshifting basilisk by the name of Vee) was on the run from the Emperor's Coven, snuck through Eda's portal a few minutes after Luz first came through, took on Luz's form due to her having been the only human she had seen up to this point, and was immediately mistaken as the real Luz by Camila. The only reason she continued keeping up the charade for so long is because Camila was the first person to show her kindness. Camila is understandably shocked when she learns the truth, but after she gets over it, she tells Vee that she's free to stay as long as she'd like, and by the end of the series appears to have officially adopter her as a second daughter. | |
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In Pathfinder, changelings are the daughters of Hags, who copulate with (usually unwilling or bewitched) human men. As in classic versions of the legend, the changeling will be left on a doorstop or swapped for a regular child. In the latter case, Hags being irredeemably evil, it's probably best not to speculate what happens to the original baby. Changelings are Always Female (until 2nd Edition, but even in 2e male Changelings are relatively rare), and generally grow up to be rather attractive, although there is always some physical abnormality that identifies them for what they are, most commonly heterochromia. They are not inherently evil like their mothers, nor are they all destined to become witches when they grow up, although if they do so they will likely have a natural aptitude for it. At some point in their young adulthood, changelings will experience a psychic call from their biological mothers. If they choose to heed this, they may decide to undergo a ritual in which they pledge themselves to the cause of evil and are transformed into Hags themselves. However, they are free to ignore or reject this summons and choose their own path in life, making them an appropriate race for player characters. | |
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The Enchantment Emporium has Joe the Leprechaun. He lives in the human realm because his family wanted a mortal child "for entertainment". At the beginning of the book, Joe is taking a potion to prevent "fading away" — also known as "being called home" — since the Human side of the trade died and the potion keeps him anchored; he really doesn't want to go back to a family that abandoned him. (And the human may have died of old age. Even if that means Joe looks 30 and may be 80-90, he still has spent most of his life among people and not Leprechauns.) | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_6a4bddd6 | comment |
Referenced in Iron Man. As Malekith the Accursed hunts Tony Stark, he taunts him with the knowledge that he was adopted and compares him to changelings, saying that Tony has been one of Malekith's subjects his entire life. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_6ac55ec7 | comment |
Dungeons & Dragons: In 5th edition Hags reproduce by kidnapping babies, eating them, and then giving birth to a baby that initially looks identical to the eaten one. They then typically leave their child with the unknowing parents of their meal, until the kid turns into a Hag in their teens. Previous editions didn't have any official material on Hag reproduction, though Paizo published an article in Dragon that stated Hags typically seduced human men and left the resulting children in their fathers' communities, a backstory they'd later reuse for Pathfinder. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_701f0ece | comment |
In Berserk, a young girl named Rosine offers up her parents' lives to the Godhand to become a fairy (or rather, a demon that takes the form of a fairy). She then makes the same offer to other children, transforming them into insectile pseudodemons that can look like fairies (to the disgust of Puck, an actual elf). Her mistake is trying to make the same offer to her former best friend, Jill, because said friend happens to have just met series protagonist Guts, a former mercenary on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against all demonkind following the horrors of the Eclipse. In-universe, there's a changeling story that inspired Rosine: the story of Pirkaf, a boy who looked like an elf. The people of his village didn't trust him, and so when he was old enough he went to the elves for answers. Pirkaf then learned that he was actually human - when he was a baby, he got sick, and his parents went to the elves for help. In exchange for their help, the elves made him look like one of them, so his parents would remember who they owed for his survival. On hearing this, Pirkaf returned to his village, only to find it gone - the elves, angry that their aid was forgotten, had magically replaced it with a forest. Pirkaf was left all alone in the world. |
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In The Twelfth Enchantment Lucy's niece is replaced by a strange demonic creature by one of the fairies of the book. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_792239e5 | type |
Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_792239e5 | comment |
In Tales of Symphonia Kilia is this. The party returns to Palmacosta only to discover that Governor-General Dorr has been working with the Desians in order to acquire a cure for his wife, who has been transformed into a monster prompting a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Lloyd. Dorr is then stabbed in the back by Kilia, who reveals herself as a doppleganger. leading to his death after the ensuing boss fight. It turns out the real Kilia died some time ago, and the fake one replaced her in order to keep an eye on Dorr, and monitor the experiments at the ranch from behind the scenes. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_7ac0e0b0 | comment |
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: A setting-appropriate version of the trope gets discussed a couple of times: Dys runs into the notion of human babies getting replaced by beings of another species and comes to wonder if it could have happened to himself and his twin sister, Tang. Both of them are knowledge-craving introverts who have trouble connecting with their peers and also see a lot of appeal in the idea of discarding their human body to become an AI. During their childhood, Nomi-Nomi thought that themself and Rex, who are the My Species Doth Protest Too Much members of the Heliopause, were changelings. Their active imagination went as far as getting Teleportation technology involved in their theory. |
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Changeling Tale / int_7c0f1317 | comment |
Diogenes Club series: In "The Gypsies in the Wood", brother and sister Davey and Maeve are abducted by the fair folk, reappearing after a few days — but is it really them? Their mother rejects the boy as an impostor because of his obvious changes and accepts the girl, who is superficially the same but different in personality, as her daughter returned. This turns out to be the wrong way around: the girl is a changeling, but the boy is really Davey, who escaped before being replaced but with his memories so muddled that he couldn't explain what had happened. Later, the changeling tries to lure away Dickie, the son of Davey and Maeve's elder sister, to be taken in Davey's place, but Charles Beauregard and Kate Reed from the Diogenes Club intervene in time and not only rescue Dickie but negotiate a safe return of the real Maeve. In "Angel Down, Sussex", a girl named Rose Farrar is abducted by Alien Fair Folk. A changeling shows up fifty years later, looking the same as Rose did when she disappeared, in what is first assumed to be a case of Year Inside, Hour Outside. The Diogenes Club is less successful in this case, and the original Rose's fate and the purpose for which she was taken remain a mystery. |
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Changeling Tale / int_7f640c59 | comment |
In The Sims 3: Supernatural, the backstories for some of the families in the new Moonlight Falls neighborhood are variations this. The fairy Flora Goodfellow switched Linda Rodgers' adoption to that of a fairy baby and took the human baby she was supposed to adopt. Flora Goodfellow also accidentally turned the Hoppcraft toddler into a fairy. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_83d41855 | comment |
Gargoyles: Xanatos and Fox's newborn son, Alexander, is targeted for abduction by Oberon and Titania, who want to raise him on Avalon. It's a bit atypical, however, because they're neither replacing him nor doing it in secret; also, their motive is that he's Titania's grandson and thus one-quarter fairy himself. Interestingly, when Oberon first catches Titania holding Alexander he assumes that she's doing the usual version of this trope and tells her to stop. He goes along with it once he learns the spoilered info. Word of God says that in this continuity, Morgana le Fay is a Changeling rather than Arthur's blood sister, and that Nimue is the human whom she was switched with. Arthur apparently does not know the truth yet. |
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Changeling Tale / int_8637da0a | comment |
In the Paranormalcy series, Evie and Jack are these. Jack was stolen by the faeries at a young age, and Evie's mother is a human and her father is a faerie. Both of their stories bring some of the traditional mythos into it, with them both having blonde hair. | |
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Frozen: Kristoff and his reindeer sibling Sven were adopted by a group of trolls when they were children. In their case, they were presumed orphans and their adopted family took good care of them. Kristoff happens to fit the blond cliche, however there's no proof he was ever replaced with another kid. | |
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Changeling Tale / int_8f3265d8 | comment |
The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black features one of these, with a twist. The mother immediately picked up on it and retrieved her own child from the fae, and then refused to give the changeling back, saying any mother who abandoned her child didn't deserve them. They consider each other brothers, and while it does cause some problems for the changeling due to his dual nature, he finds a way to make it work. | |
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In Grim Hollow, the wechselkind race are sapient golems in the shape of human children which are created by the Fair Folk to act as decoys when the fey steal human children. Etharis being the kind of world it is, these Artificial Humans are hated and feared by humanity. | |
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Several subverted changeling tales (the Erlkönig tried to steal Toby but the Jareth and Javert stopped him, Jareth babysat LÃr but King Haggard sent the Red Bull after them etc.) appeared in Roommates, but you know it must be common if the token fair teammate (Jareth) refers to the practice as babysitting. And he never messed up so badly to kill anybody, his father was not this lucky. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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The Magicians (2016): In a variant, Fray turns out to not be Fen and Elliot's real daughter, who died at birth. | |
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The Magicians (2016) | hasFeature |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_98c4e2dc | comment |
The second season finale of Hilda Hilda is changed by a trolls offspring after apparently drinking a magical berverage made by a mother Troll which at first seemed to be helping them. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_9e876c22 | comment |
In Good Omens, the infant Antichrist is swapped for a normal human baby this way, with demons instead of fairies. Thanks to the incompetence of an order of Satanic nuns, though, he winds up in the wrong normal human family. | |
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NIMONA: A flashback to Nimona's past reveals that she was once a little girl who lived in a village, when it was attacked by raiders. Nimona seemingly inexplicably gained shapeshifting powers and killed all the raiders, but her parents feared her and no longer viewed her as their child, and so gave up to the sinister Institute for experimentation. Legends aboard about a shapeshifting creature that on occasion assumed the identity of those it killed, and it's left vague if Nimona was actually replaced by such a creature or became it or in some way merged with it. | |
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Triss in Cuckoo Song wonders why her family is acting so oddly. It's because Triss isn't Triss, she's a changeling mockup made out of branches and other odds and ends by the Besiders. The story actually follows the Triss-copy as she tries to both save herself before she falls apart, and rescue the original Triss. | |
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In The Ancient Magus' Bride, Shannon is a changeling who was swapped out with a human boy named Shanahan. As she explains most changelings are killed or abandon the human world when discovered, but hers were rather understanding and left her alive. She only discovered that she wasn't human when she stopped aging and Shanahan came to visit her, having become a fae himself after being in their realm for so long. She ended up marrying him and returning to the fae realm after her co-workers noticed her longevity. | |
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Like many fairy tale tropes, this is referenced in the Lorwyn expansion for Magic: The Gathering, on the card Crib Swap. | |
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"Fairest of All": Deconstructed and subverted. Mahon and Siofra are both thought to be changelings by their parents as a result of being autistic, with abuse because of it. Both initially believe this and live with (also abusive) fairy folk, but ultimately realize they are indeed human, just different from most. It's clear this is simply a way to explain autistic children by people who don't understand them (as some scholars posit that such tales were for autism and other conditions). | |
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Trollhunters has changelings as a troll species created by the evil Gumm-Gumms, capable of assuming human form by swapping with a human infant taken through a portal to the Darklands. The baby has to be alive for them to retain this ability, and they don't age while in the Gumm-Gumms' care. The changelings can assume their true form at will, which is notably more humanlike than most other trolls. | |
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In the Trylle Trilogy, Wendy is a troll child that replaced the baby her mother actually had, a boy. Her mother somehow knows this and tries to kill her when she is 6. When she is in high school, a "tracker" named Finn finds her and brings her back to her mother, Queen Elora of the Trylle. She finds out that the Trylle (troll) society has done this for generations. They replace human babies from rich families with troll babies in order to acquire their trust funds. They then take the human babies, who are treated as second class citizens. | |
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Looming Gaia: Changelings are a type of monster created by the divine Allmother that takes the form of a normal-looking child, which constantly cries without sleep and is always hungry, while the real child is taken away to be raised by Allmother and her followers. She only sends changelings to replace the children of abusive and neglectful parents to ensure that they never want to have children again. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Heather Dale's Changeling Child is about this. An infertile woman asked the queen of the fairies for a child of her own however, being Literal-Minded, the fairies gave her a son who wouldn't grow. | |
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The Faerie Queene contains stories of humans (like the Redcrosse Knight) who have grown up in Faerie Land because of this trope, aware of their race but not their true identity. | |
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A more mundane example in the web-novel Domina: The fey (who are just crazy women who think they're Celtic fairies) kidnap people, and subject them to Bio-Augmentation so horrible it destroys their memories. Those few who escape are returned to as close to human normal as possible and become the changelings, a culture of hackers fighting the fey. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Into the Hedge starts off with one, with the Cutie Mark Crusaders being kidnapped and then replaced by fetches. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Folk musician Alexander James Adams was once known as Heather Alexander. His stage reason for this is that Heather was the changeling left in his place, of late returned to Faerieland. This is pretty much in keeping with the themes of most of his songs. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Djinn: It turns out that Sarah killed her own son because she subconsciously realized that the child was actually replaced with a baby djinni. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Kings Quest (2015) Episode 2, Graham discovers that the Goblins have modeled their entire society after fairy tale books they found, including one that details this specific practice. Later on he encounters a human raised by Goblins as a result of such a swap, who unfortunately has to put up with All of the Other Reindeer. This man eventually meets the Goblin with whom he was traded and they become surrogate brothers, eventually becoming Manannan and Mordack, the Big Bads of King's Quest III and King's Quest V respectively. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Warhammer: The Wood Elves are not above this kind of thing, although they seldom leave anything behind as a replacement. They tend to steal away beautiful boys from the land of Bretonnia surrounding their forest home, who then become ageless servants at their feasts. It is possible that stolen girls are returned to Bretonnia as its damsel sorceresses. There is also a daemon called The Changeling, with the ability to impersonate others flawlessly. Though it tends to impersonate full-grown and important people to cause mischief, rather than replacing babies. |
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A similar plotline occurred in the first season of Alert: Missing Persons Unit. The sister of the boy who was kidnapped long ago believes that the one who was recently rescued is an imposter. | |
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic uses the term "Changeling" to describe a race of shape-shifting bug ponies that feed off of love. While they don't go around kidnapping children and replacing them with their young (as far as we know), they did kidnap Princess Cadence on her wedding day so they could replace her with a doppelganger. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_c51cb60a | comment |
Changeling: The Lost is all about this. Of course, the faeries in this case don't stop at kids, and the "changelings" of the title are actually the humans they've taken. The Gentry usually just leave something made of detritus and a fragment of their captive's soul in their place. Tragically, such "fetches" not only look human, but often think they're human and have no idea of the truth. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Poison, the heroine's baby sister is kidnapped and replaced by a changeling, kicking off her quest. It's actually all part of the Hierophant's plan to recruit her as his heir, and her sister is actually returned as soon as she sets off — as the girl Poison passes on the boat. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In The Avengers Elseworld Avataars: Covenant of the Shield, those who develop strange powers in their childhood with no obvious cause are believed by the superstitious to have been "exchanged" for a fairy child, and are therefore known as X-Changelings. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Star Wars: Galactic Folklore and Mythology: The egg-laying Rodians have a variant of this where unhatched eggs are said to have their hatchlings stolen by the diminutive thumbfolk, who take them to the Netherworld to raise as their own. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In "Angel Down, Sussex", a girl named Rose Farrar is abducted by Alien Fair Folk. A changeling shows up fifty years later, looking the same as Rose did when she disappeared, in what is first assumed to be a case of Year Inside, Hour Outside. The Diogenes Club is less successful in this case, and the original Rose's fate and the purpose for which she was taken remain a mystery. | |
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This trope plays a part in the backstory of the main character of The Infernal Devices. Tessa Gray's ostensibly mundane mother, Elizabeth Moore, was actually a Nephilim named Adele Starkweather, granddaughter of the head of the York Institute, Aloysius. Baby Adele was switched with the real Elizabeth Moore by fairies as punishment for Aloysius' misconduct towards Downworlders. Because she was a mundane, "Adele" did not have the aptitude to become a Nephilim and died when she received her runes. Meanwhile, Tessa inherited her mother's Nephilim powers even though she was not raised in the Shadowhunter world. | |
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Rivers of London: Played with in Foxglove Summer, in which two missing girls are found wandering in the forest, and one of them turns out to be a duplicate after they've been taken back to their families. The twist is that the replacement is actually the real biological daughter, who'd been swapped for a faerie changeling as an infant without anyone realizing it had happened. In a subversion of how parents usually react to this trope, her mother still wants the child she's been raising returned to her, and to hell with whether she's genetically related or not. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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The Spiderwick Chronicles: Changelings don't appear in the series, but they are detailed in The Field Guide, which explains them to be a form of faerie that assume the appearance of a human child whilst the original child is whisked away to be raised by faeries. Due to their supernatural origins and Blue-and-Orange Morality, changelings are prone to strange behavior (one might only eat flowers and leaves, another might speak entirely in songs and riddles) and often have strange traits (for example, appearing extremely old despite still having the size and proportions of a child). While many changelings eventually leave their human families and return to their faerie kin, some end up Becoming the Mask and lose their faerie qualities entirely to live their lives as regular humans. | |
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In Brenna Yovanoff's debut The Replacement, the main character Mackie is a changeling (or a castoff, or a child left in someone else's bed... the Morrigan gives a lot of names). There is a rather sinister purpose to the child-switching here. The faeries (although they're never named as such) don't want a pet or anything nice like that. No, what they want is a child for the Lady to sacrifice. What's more, the fae kids who get switched into the human world usually don't survive, due to their weaksauce weaknesses of being allergic to iron and blood. Mackie only survived to high school because his older sister loved him so much. The kid who was switched with his girlfriend's little sister? Not so lucky. She does show up in the book, but as a revenant to be re-switched for Natalie. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Spellbound (Lilafly): Felix meets a changeling at the Samhain revel. She was originally human, but made a bargain, and has been a servant to the fae ever since, with magic altering her body; she can shapeshift, but her native form has ladybug traits such as additional insectoid arms. She later impersonates Marinette, whom Chloe has taken into protective custody. | |
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In "The Gypsies in the Wood", brother and sister Davey and Maeve are abducted by the fair folk, reappearing after a few days — but is it really them? Their mother rejects the boy as an impostor because of his obvious changes and accepts the girl, who is superficially the same but different in personality, as her daughter returned. This turns out to be the wrong way around: the girl is a changeling, but the boy is really Davey, who escaped before being replaced but with his memories so muddled that he couldn't explain what had happened. Later, the changeling tries to lure away Dickie, the son of Davey and Maeve's elder sister, to be taken in Davey's place, but Charles Beauregard and Kate Reed from the Diogenes Club intervene in time and not only rescue Dickie but negotiate a safe return of the real Maeve. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_e1f005f8 | comment |
Mirror's Image has Queen Chrysalis replace a stillborn Twilight Sparkle with her daughter in order to ensure she has a family to feed her with their love. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Witch Doctor features "cuckoo faeries", but the guise is so horrifyingly unconvincing you almost wonder why they even bother. And no, they don't get less creepy as they age. | |
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Laurell K. Hamilton being a stickler for mythological accuracy, this is mentioned in passing in the Merry Gentry series, but is not practiced by any of the Fey living in the United States, since it might interfere with the driving plot. Another reason the fey in the series might not kidnap people is because they don't want humans hating them. Their powers are failing. Or they were... | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Pan's Labyrinth. Although Ofelia rather loves her human mother, and seems to have loved her long-dead father, it's presented as an unambiguously better thing to live in the underworld full of magic. Mostly because dad is dead, mom is very weak-willed, and new stepdad is a zealous fascist. Unlike most examples, Guillermo del Toro actually takes into account the implications of such a statement. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, Courtney encounters a genuine changeling, but decides the baby's parents deserve it and the kid is better off among the Night Things (a.k.a. fairies). | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Ars Magica. Faeries do the standard "kidnap children and replace them with changelings" routine. In one inset story, a villager talks about having killed the faerie creature that had been left in their baby's place — and a nearby wizened stranger disgustedly mutters that they would have traded the brat back if the humans had only asked. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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In Tales of the Abyss, this happens to Luke Fon Fabre. He was kidnapped from his home, and replaced with a Replica copy. The copy is revealed to be he character the player knows as Luke. The original Luke never returns to his old life, becoming the God General Asch the Bloody. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
Changeling Tale / int_f3cbb86a | comment |
Something like this happens in BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm as part of a sidequest. Sleeping in a certain house causes the entire party (except Catie, for some reason) to be kidnapped by a tribe of shapeshifters who live in the basement. Catie must then save her friends by identifying the originals among the imposters. | |
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An episode of Merlin (2008) has a variation on this one, in which a princess is not replaced, but is possessed by a Sidhe in infancy, as part of a plot to put a Sidhe on the throne of Camelot. The princess doesn't know the Sidhe is inside her, although its presence makes her very clumsy and uncoordinated. The plot is that once she's married Prince Arthur the Sidhe will take her over completely. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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While Faeries don't actually kidnap human children in the Artemis Fowl books, this trope is referenced in the painting The Faerie Thief, which Artemis steals from a bank vault during The Opal Deception. It depicts an elf trying to snatch a baby from its cradle. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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There's More Magic Out There: Sabrina replaced the human Sabrina as a infant. The knowledge of this is the source of a lot of her problems. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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What The Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror: A particularly eldritch take. In addition to the missing children are all really Fuckroach Larvae in disguise, there were no missing children to begin with. The Larvae fully brainwashed the "parents" into believing that they're their children. | |
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Changeling Tale | |
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Cuckoo Bird: Izuku is a half-puca, half-elf switched out with the "real" Izuku Midoriya. He uses his Animorphism to make up for not having a Quirk. Shinso is also revealed to be a changeling (apparently part siren). This fic also includes a dark twist in that changelings and their human counterparts are eventually forced to fight to the death. | |
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