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Appearance Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
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Some characters Lie to the Beholder, appearing selectively different to one or two people than they appear to anyone else.
Other characters appear differently to anybody who sees them. One man will view them as a tall blonde woman, where another will see a short black man. Obviously, this makes tracking the character down by description difficult. Such an ability is almost always mystical in nature, although scientific or pseudoscientific explanations like "psychic resonance" or "nanotechnology" are often used in science-fiction settings. Keep in mind that when Appearance Is In The Eye of The Beholder, that means that the entity involved looks different to multiple people at the same time.
A common variant of this in settings with multiple species is to have an entity which appears different depending on the species of the beholder, most often as a member of the same species.
A Form You Are Comfortable With and You Cannot Grasp the True Form are often forms of this. Compare Lie to the Beholder, which generally causes the same illusion to all affected viewers. Compare an Empathic Shapeshifter, who physically changes, while this trope is more often an illusion. Often employed by a Master of Illusion
Examples
Anime
- The Truth in Fullmetal Alchemist takes the form of a silhouette of the one talking to it, because what everyone is actually seeing is their personal "truth" connecting them to all other life in the world.
- In Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Kafuka Fuura only appears in front of those who she had gave up her organs to. Other people will only see the host bodies she possesses at the time, which are basically almost the entirety of the class 2-He and the same people she had gave up her organs to.
Comic Books
- This is why Galactus looks to us humans like a human with a funny hat and the letter G on his belt buckle. To the Stone Men from Saturn he looks like a Stone Man, to Toad Men he looks like a Toad Man, etc.
- Thanks to Word Of God, this could describe how in Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin sees Hobbes differently from everyone else.
- This is explicitly shown several times in The Sandman, where Morpheus (as his name implies) always appears like a member of the observer's own species and culture, or like what the observer would expect the God of Dreams to resemble.
- One Justice League of America story featuring Hal Jordan as The Spectre had this applying to Hal, making it hard to convince the Justice League that he was who he said he was.
Literature
- In Stephen King's IT, when the heroes go to the villain's lair, the sign above the door of the lair is like this: each character sees it differently.
- In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Sky Pirates! the Doctor himself was heavily implied to be one of these.
- In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, each character is asked to see the Wizard one at a time, appearing as something different to each one. It's all a trick, however; the real "wizard" is The Man Behind the Curtain.
- There's an interesting variation in the Dragaera series: the goddess Verra is not described as appearing differently to everyone who beholds her, but it becomes clear that when she speaks, everyone hears something different, effectively holding multiple different conversations simultaneously. Descriptions of godhood elsewhere in the series imply that this is a result of one of the defining characteristics of deities and demons in the Dragaera-verse.
- In The End Of Mr Y, everything in the Troposphere is dependant on the eye of the beholder.
- In The Well of Lost Plots, the Grand Panjandarum resembles the beholder when they appear at the end of the book.
- In the Young Wizards series the Powers That Be can manifest in multiple ways. In one particular form of manifestation*
hastily slapping together a lump of matter and shoving a fragment of themselves into it they look different to every mortal who sees them. The main character perceives the Lone Power to be a handsome faced man with red hair, and the Archangel Michael to be a glowing seven foot tall woman wearing sweats and sneakers.
Live-Action TV
- In Babylon 5, the character Kosh (once outside of his encounter suit) appears to a member of any given starfaring race as that race's version of an "angel"—except to a Londo. To him, he's invisible.
- The restarted Doctor Who loves this trope. Every other 11th Doctor episode seems to mention "perception filters", which make the Monster of the Week appear differently - however, the filters don't always work the same way to everyone, especially when different psychologies are taken into account, bringing it into this trope.
- The maid in the first season of American Horror Story appeared young and beautiful to the husband, but middle-aged to the wife.
- Pleasure GELFs in Red Dwarf can appear to any onlooker as their perfect mate, despite looking like disgusting green blobs in their natural form.
- Also Psirens, whose true form was some sort of giant beetle thing.
- Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Man Trap". Early in the episode the salt vampire made itself appear differently to three different people simultaneously. It looked like a young Nancy Crater to McCoy, an older Nancy Crater to Kirk, and to crewman Darnell it was a young blonde woman who looked nothing like Nancy Crater. Later in the episode it changed methods, appearing to all comers as an the older Nancy Crater, and making use of a different Trope
Tabletop Games
- Any member of the Romancer Kith from Changeling The Lost always appears as the beholder's perfect ideal of beauty.
- The monstrous dream larva in Dungeons & Dragons uses this ability to be every one of its enemies' worst nightmares at once.
- 3.5 had a spell called "Reflective Disguise" which caused anyone looking at you to think you were a member of the same race. A potential downside was that you looked like the same gender as well, which could easily lead to Pronoun Trouble.
- The Obfuscate Discipline power "The Familiar Stranger" from Vampire: The Requiem has an effect somewhere between this and The Nondescript.
- Members of the demonic race of gilmyne in Exalted appear to all viewers as members of their own species - a human would see a gilmyne as a human, an elemental would see it as an elemental, etc.
Video Games
Webcomics
- The Kevin & Kell version of the story of Jesus' birth has the baby Jesus seen as being the same species of whoever looks at him.
Web Original
- The Slender Man had this effect in the earliest stories. These days, he's more often depicted as The Blank.
- A video
 from College Humor features an "Optical Illusion Girlfriend" who looks like a pretty girl to her boyfriend but an ugly hag to his friend. After an argument with his friend over her ambiguous driver license picture and them both trying to explain to each other just what they see in it, the boyfriend's perspective of her suddenly switches to the "ugly hag" and he flees in horror whereas his friend begins seeing the "pretty girl" instead and approaches her with a leer.
Western Animation
- The Weird Sisters of Gargoyles all take the same form at the same time, appearing as a trio of creepy little girls, old crones, aged female gargoyles, or voluptuous young 20-somethings, as befits who they are speaking to at the time, though they can still be told apart apart by hair color (blonde, black, white). The little girls are seen by the Manhattan clan, the old crones are seen by Macbeth, and the old gargoyle hags are seen by Demona. Meanwhile the 20-somethings are their preferred form, seen by the audience and other Children of Oberon as well as any characters not implied to see them differently (although humans will see them in period/job appropriate attire). Word Of God has stated that only the Third Race and the audience ever see them for what they truly are.
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