The changeling legend is the exact template for anti-vaccine narratives of child transformation

Evidence

Ashliman continues, “Stories with these fantasy endings provided hope, wish fulfillment, and escape to an era that was plagued with birth defects and debilitating infant diseases.” Reading these accounts, I couldn’t help thinking of my encounters with vaccine-scapegoating parents by the soccer field or at the Y. The stories they told me to explain their child’s sudden strangeness conform almost precisely to that of the changeling: my child was perfect, normal, until an event (the vaccine) happened, and that event turned them into something else—a distorted, doppelganger version of themselves. To quote McCarthy again: “Boom—the soul’s gone from his eyes.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 676

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the doppelganger/doubling theme running through the whole book — the child-as-substituted-stranger is the same logic Klein applies to political identity. — connects to: the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”
• STORYSTEM: The changeling legend as a structural template for how communities narrate sudden transformation of a loved one into an invader — a strong spine for fiction about a town that collectively decides its children are impostors.