Editing Changeling

A '''Changeling''' is a creature of fantasy, generally an offspring of an otherworldly species left to be raised by parents of a more mundane sort.

== Folklore ==
Being folklore there are many variations, but they all follow the same pattern: a fairy kidnaps a child and replaces it with something known as a changeling. What the changeling is, how it behaves, how long the parent is stuck with it, and how you get rid of it sooner than that (''if'' you should get rid of it), depends on the version. In some versions it's the fairy's offspring; in others, it's a piece of wood with glamour on it. Sometimes to get rid of it you throw it in the oven, other times you be abusive to it and the faerie switches the children again because you aren't taking good care of its child. (In practice, this had a nasty tendency of escalating to full-blown infanticide.) In Ireland it was common to dress up boys as girls up to the age of 12 or 13 because their fairies had a preference of kidnapping boys, and items like iron scissors would often be left where the child sleeps to ward off the fairy. The child that is kidnapped is also called a changeling. All mentions of changelings prior to this and the previous sentence refer to whatever the fairy left in the child's place.

=== World of Darkness ===

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The [[World of Darkness]] gamelines [[Changeling: The Dreaming]] and [[Changeling: The Lost]] use this definition.

== Dungeons & Dragons ==
In [[Dungeons & Dragons]], Changelings are a race introduced in the 3.5 edition campaign setting of [[Eberron]] as humanoids with a hint of [[doppelganger]] in their ancestry, which gives them limited shapeshifting abilities. In their debuting edition this takes the form of their supernatural signature racial feature is <strike> [[Druid|A Thousand Faces]] </strike> Minor Change Shape, which is similar to disguise self, but is not an illusion.

{{D&D4e-Races}}

== Warhammer 40,000 ==
In [[Warhammer 40,000]], changelings are [[Tzeentch]]'s servants, and are total dicks.  They're a special type of [[Horror]] daemon that have the ability to disguise themselves as anything, and use that ability to wreak all manner of mischief.  However, because they have shifted forms so many times, most changelings have forgotten their original form. Only Tzeentch knows what each changeling originally looks like and commonly uses this as a bargaining tool to bind their loyalty to him.

One of the most famous hijinks with a changeling happened when one of them impersonated the Governor of the [[Hive World]] Raxos and threw it into total civil war, eventually conjuring a warp portal and having his other daemon buddies join in the fun. As usual, the [[Grey Knights]] were called in to contain the situation, which resulted in the total pacification of daemons in the uprising. However, the Grey Knights could not account for the changeling that started the war and assumed that it escaped in one of the evacuation shuttles that were taking refugees off-planet. So, in typical Inquisitorial fashion: the Grey Knights shot down all of the fleeing shuttles, killing thousands of civilians, in an effort to kill off the single changeling that MIGHT have boarded one of the shuttles. Overall, whether the changeling was there or not, Tzeentch was most likely pleased by the amount of "[[Just as Planned]]" it did to bloody an entire planet.

== My Little Pony ==
In [[My Little Pony]], changelings are insectoid shape shifters that feed on love and gain power from it. In their natural forms, changelings have gaunt bodies covered in holes and are equipped with insect like wings and a horn and they capture prey by wrapping them in some kind of webbing. They are led by a queen who is named "Chrysalis", who is the vanguard for an invasion by subjugating an area of conquest by infiltrating it from within and taking out its body of government to throw the rest of the place in disarray, which in the show's case was Canterlot's Captain of the Royal Guards and Princess Celestia.

After being beaten they attacked and ate a town [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Drsqz60T0zE/UPBSqYfUr4I/AAAAAAABObA/f4hgUP4aWJs/s1600/3.jpg full of kittens]. 

After their debut, the fans decided that when ever a pony was animated wrong (and it happens quite a lot [http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_188503&feature=iv&src_vid=iJDqrmoSXe4&v=4b5ZjGdjz1k]), appeared multiple times in one scene, or was acting in a manner that goes against the fanon, it was actually a changeling.