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."

SEED: The parallel between changeling folklore and modern vaccine-scapegoating narratives is a rich essay angle on how mythic archetypes recur in contemporary parental fears. XREF: Connects to cognitive bias research and folklore studies about how parents reframe unexpected child disability as external causation.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 676