Harlequin = Changeling?
My friend was listening to me jabber about The Freak Circus because she's great at listening to my obsessions, and we got onto the topic of the Fae. I mentioned the posters as a symbol of Harlequin's tickster nature, and she mentioned changelings.
"A changeling is most commonly a figure from European folklore: a fairy, elf, troll, or other supernatural substitute left in place of a stolen human child. It may be described as a deformed or imbecilic offspring of fairies or elves, substituted by them surreptitiously for a human infant. In the traditional belief, the “real” infant was taken away, and the being left behind only looked human at first."
Changelings were often swapped for a human baby or young child. They were labeled as "wrong" as in folktales, the child may be described as sickly, uncanny, always crying, unusually hungry, slow to develop, or oddly old-seeming in behavior. Human children were taken for various reasons, including strengthening fairy stock, wanting a beautiful human child, or taking a child into the otherworld. How they revealed a changeling was by tricking it into speaking or laughing and exposing its true nature.
A darker piece of this is that the changeling belief was historically used to explain children with disabilities, illness, neurodivergence, or developmental differences. Some old “cures” involved cruelty, and those beliefs contributed to real child abuse.
Symbolically, changelings tend to carry common themes of -
replacement/identity theft
the uncanny double
fear of difference
the child who is “not ours anymore”
liminality — belonging to neither one world nor the other
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Now, do I think this has any sort of standing for Harlequin? No. I think it's really more of the trickster nature that is his connection to the Fae. I just thought this was really interesting and decided to look into it more. Also, I really want him to have wings because it seems like fun. (Plus, who knows what's on his back when we hugged him. All we know it was "raised".)
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Master Post of My Thoughts/Theories
