Changelings Are the New Vampires. · 11:56am Sep 21st, 2015
Stop me if you've heard this one before. A race of beings that feed on a metaphor for life energy live among their prey unnoticed by most. Over time these beings have amassed a sizable following of people that consider them to just be misunderstood rather than monsters. Naturally what follows are people creating new representations of said being as the protagonist. The occasional one will even portray their prey as 'the true monsters all along', or at least as possibly the worst of the two.
For one reason or another over the centuries people have started to cling onto the vampire as a brooding hero (or in some cases, not even brooding) or a complex villain. They love the concept of the misunderstood monster and the vampire is the easiest to humanize -- largely thanks to them already looking mostly human. Even Dracula himself was originally written as a symbol of carnal desire and made into a suave nobleman, as opposed to a monstrosity like Nosferatu. Come to think of it, trying to be a sex symbol that attracts young mortal women is something the original Dracula and Edward from Twilight have in common, though one of them is a far better character.
With popularity of sexy, not-so-different-from-us vampires already etched into the collective unconscious of America, along come changelings. They even have their own leader that is quite easy to use as a stand in for Dracula.
In our little corner of the web changelings pretty much play the same as the role vampires play in young adult literature, and it's quite likely that the idea of the misunderstood changeling is so popular within the fandom because it emulated a popular idea within fiction as a whole.
That makes sense.
After all, my view on changelings basically boils down to "there's a lot more potential for interesting stories if they're more complex than they appear" which is a form of "they're misunderstood".
...though, admittedly, my base motivations are probably different than other people's. Normally, I look for gender-bending fiction because it's one of the most efficient ways to break characters' worldviews and explore how they pick up the pieces. In a fantasy setting like MLP where magical transformation is a known hazard, the "not what you thought they were" aspect changelings embody provides several much more effective ways to get at that.
(Plus, misunderstood vampires tend to be "that shining one among an evil group" which removes some of that depth and nuance I crave, even if the story in question isn't simply "emotional/psychological fanservice" or whatever you call fanwank-like writing in an original work.)
Wait, you’re only just figuring this out? The parallels are so obvious that I thought everybody was aware of them.