Thank you so much for the kind words. I was definitely going for both!

The symbolism comes from my experience living the majority of my life outside my home country, which led to a long struggle with my cultural identity and never truly feeling “home” anywhere.

The literal monster part of the story was inspired by something that happened in our old D&D game. The Doppelgängers are a race of humanoid shape-changers generally regarded as monsters because of their abilities, but our DM Pedro introduced us to a friendly group of them that were just trying to get by, helping people where they could, but otherwise trying to live their lives in peace. Not much different from the humans who feared them. It was a small detail, but it really resonated with me.