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"Let's go surfing now, everybody's learning how..."
By concealing yourself in the flesh of your enemies you can constantly escape detection while committing countless evil acts. The different bodies will keep the authorities guessing, and when you get bored you can simply shed your current skin and move on to the next. There is also a great deal of fun to be had with tormenting heroes with this fashion. Consider, "Mom, is that you?"
- How to Be a Villain, Neil Zawacki
Some Body Snatchers simply have no patience.
Maybe they're committing Grand Theft Me, only to find that they're quickly wearing their new bodies out. Maybe no one person they possess has all the skills they need. Maybe they have no idea who's good to take over until they've done so. Maybe they're afraid of being found if they stay in one body too long. Or maybe they're just plain nuts. In any case, when a Body Snatcher is constantly switching from body to body, they are said to Body Surf.
Naturally, this makes them hard to catch. If this is done in a closed environment, you get a Whack A Mole scenario — only who's the mole changes, making things considerably harder for the heroes. Of course, it's considerably harder for the villain, too, who had better be a really good actor if people aren't going to be able to quickly tell who is Not Himself. But villains typically don't have to worry about such things.
Compare Vain Sorceress.
Not to be confused with the move of the same name in Prototype, wherein you surf using a body.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, Dante plans to do this with her Philosopher's Stone to get around how her soul is too old to support a body for very long, having done it for four hundred years previously.
- Orochimaru from Naruto plans to do this to a number of people in the story... and usually ends up looking like a sick pervert in the process, instead of the sick sociopath that he is. These people include Itachi, Sasuke, and every pupil that he has.
- Captain Ginyu in Dragonball Z. Started out by snatching Goku's body, but when he realized that because he didn't know Goku's special fighting techniques, he had only a fraction of Goku's original power, he took a beating. Later, he decided to snatch Vegeta's body, as Vegeta was so powerful at the time that Ginyu wouldn't need to know very much about him to still be more powerful than any of the heroes at the time. He ended up inside the body of a frog and thus couldn't use his attack because it required speaking, but later ended up stealing Bulma's body when she makes a devise that allows him to communicate and almost managed to body-snatch Piccolo before being returned to the frog's body for good.
- Ironically, this leaves Ginyu as the only survivor of Frieza's minions, as both his body (now occupied by the frog's mind) and his mind (now in the frog) end up on Earth, and Ginyu-in-the-frog is seen alive and well two Time Skips later. One is left to wonder what the lifespan of a Namekian frog is.
- This seems to be the ability of Marianne's Geass from Code Geass. Though the only time we see it used is when Marianne Geass'd Anya after V.V. shot her.
- Mukuro Rokudo in Katekyo Hitman Reborn can transfer his soul between any bodies he has injured with his weapon, including artificial box animals (don't ask)... and it's his favorite tactic.
- Many people in MPD Psycho are able to transfer or copy their personalities, but Tetora uses this power whenever practical (though he always returns to (or stays in, if he made a copy) his original body fairly fast).
- The "Phantom Thief G" in D Gray Man actually an Innocence-infused orphan can possess people and Akuma just by looking at them; he's gotten roughly three-dozen people arrested in his place.
- Pandaemonium in the manga version of Chrono Crusade.
- Anon, from The Law Of Ueki, who steals the bodies of his victims by swallowing them whole. He does this to Robert Haydn and even the current God.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima, it's implied that Big Bad Fate is on body number 3, which is why Nodoka's powers revealed his name to be "Tertium" (Latin for "the third"). It's a variation, as he doesn't appear to steal people's bodies, so much as simply having a new body made to house his soul after the old body gets destroyed.
Comic Books
- The X-Men villain Proteus burns through he bodies he possesses as he uses his Mutant Powers. However, assuming he doesn't ever use his reality-warping powers, he can stay in a single body for an extended period.
- This is one of the powers of the psychic Kay Cera (A.K.A. "Cuckoo" of Clan Destine.
- Mountjoy, a villain from one of the X-Men's various dystopian futures, does this. He physically merges with his victims to possess them, and sometimes consumes their bodies for sustenance.
- This is the entire concept of DC Comics superhero Deadman, whose sole power is the ability to effortlessly possess anybody, from children to Superman.
- Doctor Doom has the Ovoid mind switch, an alien technique taught to him by the, guess, Ovoids, a species of aliens incapable of reproduction at one point so they had to clone their bodies and transfer their minds into it. Despite a later She-Hulk issue retconning it as being difficult if there's a soul / mind in the body the "caster" is trying to inhabit, Doom seems to be able to do this with relative ease, especially after the Unthinkable arc, where all he is is a spirit, and he swaps and hops about the Fantastic Four until Reed shoots Doom-in-Thing, killing both, sending Victor von Doom.... to hell.
- In Dark Empire, Palpatine did this with the clones of himself that he'd set up, always entering a new one after being killed. And he got killed several times.
Film
- The Hidden (1987). A puppetmaster-like alien takes over various people in Los Angeles and uses them to commit thrill crimes. He is chased by a member of his species who is inhabiting the body of an FBI agent.
- In Fallen (the one with Denzel Washington and John Goodman), the resident body snatcher can switch from body to body by touch. In one scene, he chases Denzel Washington in a crowd by body surfing his way through the crowd, each person reaching forward to touch the next in the chain.
- The Emperor in the Star Wars Expanded Universe was forced to do this as one clone body after another was rotted by The Dark Side, culminating in an attempt to possess newborn Anakin Solo.
- Shocker
- The Agents in The Matrix do this, at least when they're under attack. Morpheus' freedom fighters respond, of course, by massacring everyone in sight.
- The main character in the Korean horror film Dead Friend suffers from Easy Amnesia, and doesn't even remember that she had swapped minds with the main villain. Since this happened just as she was about to drown, the villain quickly jumped into the next nearest girl, and spends the rest of the film possessing different characters to get revenge..
- His true body blown up in the first ten minutes, Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame does this in Jason Goes to Hell. The host bodies die after Jason leaves them (oddly enough, NOT from the damage they take while he possesses them).
- The creature in Proteus absorbs bodies throughout the movie and is able to assume their form from then on. The minds of the victims continue to exist within it and are able to surface when it naps after a meal.
- In the J-Horror film Another Heaven, the Body Surfing killer is actually a murderess from the future whose (inadvertant?) time travel turned her into a sapient puddle of water. The bodies possessed are found to be missing their brains which are found to be merely shrivelled up and covered in tumours. The film gets kind of weird towards the end, with the implication that the killer evaporated from a housefire, and is now in the rain.
Literature
- Dog-Face Joe in The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers does it as Grand Theft Me, as any body he takes soon starts growing hair all over.
- Harry Potter: Voldemort, after being almost destroyed by baby Harry, only retained the ability to possess bodies, and he jumped from animal to animal (severely cutting their lifespan) until he was able to get his new body.
- Tak from Stephen King's Desperation is forced to possess new bodies because he constantly wears them out.
- Corpsetaker from The Dresden Files. He (she?) goes through two different bodies during his (her?) time in the limelight, forcing Dresden to engage the Whack A Mole scenario in order to kill him (her her her). The twist? He's right the first time around, and he knows that.
- To elaborate, in Dead Beat, Corpsetaker is in the body of Alicia, a college-age girl. Later on, when fighting Anastasia Luccio, head of the Wardens, Corpsetaker suckers her into gutting Alicia's body,t hen transfers his (her) mind over to Luccio's, leaving Luccio's mind dying in the younger body. Harry, however, figures this out immediately and shoots Luccio/Corpsetaker in the noggin. Of course, this leaves Luccio stuck in the young and attractive body instead of her old one.
- Absolutely everyone in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Yes, even the protagonist.
- In the War Against The Chtorr books by David Gerrold, members of the Telepathy Corps are fitted with brain implants that allow them to "switch minds" with others with a similar implant through radio transmission. The implants are supposed to be used only for military intelligence-gathering, but some agents (nicknamed "carpetbaggers") like to jump from body to body just for fun, which rather annoys the telepath who has to inhabit the body after a night of debauchery.
- The Great Game by Dave Duncan: Tion, soi-disant "god" of youth (actually a enchanter from an Alternate Universe — but that's much of a muchness, since in this story being from elsewhere in The Multiverse is the defining attribute of enchanters) holds a contest every year for the most beautiful and skilled youth in all the land. This youth 'represents' Tion and hands out the prizes — and then disappears for several years. Unbeknownst to everyone else, Tion has been committing Grand Theft Me for the sheer fun of it. The "god" is later shown changing bodies several times, and comments that male bodies 'wear better'. It is implied that the theft is reversed (with them Brainwashed not to remember) after several years of, um, wear; one of the characters has a chunk of his mind missing.
- In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath series, Bane, an undead spirit, travels in this way, moving from host to host and sucking the life out of each in turn.
- Done in a deliberately de-Mind Rape-ified fashion in A Swiftly Tilting Planet — Charles Wallace has to Body Surf throughout history to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It. Notable as a rare example of the hero doing this.
- Major plot points in several of the Wild Cards novels. One character is able to make others into "Jumpers" who body-surf by swapping meatbags with another. Meaning a single one of them can cause an entire room of people to switch bodies. When the Jumpers form an army bad things happen.
- Magos Antigonus from the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novel Dark Adeptus gains this ability through discovering some Lost Technology, allowing him to be Not Quite Dead. He's a hero, though, or something approximating it in this Crapsack World.
- The Sea Hag in the Xanth novel Golem in the Gears, much to the consternation of the protagonists.
- There were a race of body-hopping aliens in Jack Chalker's The Identity Matrix. Thing is, they weren't just possessing the bodies, they were instantaneously switching minds, which means that there were a lot of people left behind in the wrong bodies afterwards, including the protagonist, who winds up getting switched twice. And never gets the original body back.
Live Action TV
- Quantum Leap is built around this premise but the body surfer is the protagonist, and is required to "set things right" in the person's life by the end of each episode. Does involve Mental Time Travel and mind swap (which raises the question what happens to the timeline that has been "set right" after the befuddled host is returned to his or her body).
- The Goa'uld in Stargate SG-1 can do this, but tend to stick with one host as long as possible (to the point of Apophis keeping a body that had been badly scarred by the torture he'd endured at the hands of a rival.) Anubis, on the other hand, was part Energy Being and once his containment field was destroyed, he had to possess humans. The bodies burned out quickly, necessitating taking new ones frequently.
- The second episode of Angel dealt with a demon who jumped from body to body in search of the one it could live in permanently. It was a metaphor for searching for the perfect mate.
- A third season episode has an old man who shuttles his consciousness in and out of young men, mainly because the spell he uses eventually reduces his host bodies to liquid ruin. Then he ends up in Angel...
- Lexx... kind of. Mostly. Sorta.
- Lady Cassandra in Doctor Who develops this ability in her constant quest to remain young and beautiful. In one episode of the new series (New Earth) she takes over Rose (successfully), the Doctor (not so much), then Rose again, then one of the disease hosts, then Rose a THIRD time, and finally her cloned assistant (who was a willing host).
- Subverted in season four: Midnight has the other passengers eager to accept the idea that the malevolent entity that has been possessing Sky has jumped into the Doctor, freeing her. Instead, not only is she still possessed, but is now playing a rather sick ventriloquism game in trying to get the Doctor killed...
- In the spin-offs, Androvax in The Sarah Jane Adventures story "Prisoner of the Judoon".
- The demon Eyghon in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer second-season episode The Dark Age does this to several characters over the course of the episode. The catch is that he can only possess a dead or unconscious host, and, when his current body dies, it turns into a puddle of goo, spreading out to infect the next unfortunate dead/unconscious person who comes into contact with it. He eventually manages to possess Jenny Calendar, and later jumps into Angel's body (who is technically undead, being a vampire and all) after Jenny's body nearly dies. The vampiric demon inside Angel's body then proceeds to defeat Eyghon for good.
- The villain of sixth-season episode "After Life".
- Happens to Tom Paris in the Star Trek Voyager episode Vis-à-vis. A criminal steals his body and dumps Tom in his own, leaving him to avoid pissed-off previous body-swopped personalities, plus somehow get back to Voyager and convince people that 'Tom Paris' isn't who they think he is. A similar plot appears in an episode of Bounty Hamster. This time Cassie is the victim.
- Also in "Warlord" a former dictator jumps from body to body (usually volunteers from among his fanatical followers) in a quest for immortality finds himself accidentally inside Kes. At first he finds Kes' mind powers and sexual attractiveness very useful; her stubborn determination to resist him however...
- Not to mention that if you want immortality, a host body that is dead of old age before it hits ten years old is a bad choice.
- In the Original Series episode Wolf in the Fold, spirit Redjac hops from body to body while committing violent murders because he's actually Jack the Ripper. And another episode had three noncorporeal life forms using the bodies of the Enterprise crew to construct android bodies for themselves.
- Big Wolf On Campus had one of these for a Monster Of The Week. It switched bodies by touch. Since it switched between "Human forms", that meant it could also posses and animate a giant statue.
- Smallville's Bizarro kills a number of human hosts by simply wearing them out before finding Clark and becoming his Evil Twin
- An episode of Farscape had a sentient virus who could only infect one host at a time. It was double-tricky to catch because it drugged its victims so that afterwards they didn't even know they'd been possessed.
- The Rossum executives do this in the last few episodes of Dollhouse. Ambrose, Harding and 'Clyde' change bodies several times.
Tabletop RPG
- In Legend Of The Five Rings, the villains Iuchiban and Yajinden do this. At one point Iuchiban attempts a Grand Theft Me on previous main villain Daigotsu, but for the most part their hosts are unimportant to the plot. They generally warp the bodies into their own image, however.
- Less nefariously, the Kami Togashi body-hopped for over a thousand years to guide the Empire towards the Second Day of Thunder. All of his hosts were willing members of his Clan hand-picked for the duty, however.
- Similarly, the Kami Shiba used his Clan's Ancestral Sword as a focus through which he can return in the soul of the current Champion of his Clan, all of which were his direct descendants. However, he is incapable of actively directing the new Champion, and instead acts more like a spirit guide.
- In In Nomine, the Kyriotates (angels) and the Shedim (demons) are Body Surfers by necessity, they MUST possess the bodies of other beings while on Earth (unlike most angels and demons who are given special bodies to use in the physical world) and they can only possess their hosts for a limited amount of time, the Kyrios have a "hard limit" of anywhere from a day to a week or so as to how long they can borrow a given body continuously, and Shedim are required to force their hosts to perform evil acts each day, and the host becomes more likely to resist the longer they have been possessed, so the demons don't usually stick around for more then a few days at a time because the host gets too hard to control.
- Eclipse Phase features body surfing as a core element of the setting, useful not only for restoring backed-up characters after death and customizing characters for the job at hand, but also for long-distance travel in the form of Egocasting.
- The (in)famous Tomb Of Horrors module for AD&D revolved around the players trying to prevent the uber-demilich Acererak from becoming this.
When If they fail, Acererak gains the ability to manifest himself in full power within ANY undead creature on ANY plane, effectively propelling him straight into Greater Godhood.
Video Games
- In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer the player spends the entire game struggling against a body-surfer that has inhabited her body and threatens to devour her identity.
- Gann's mother possesses your companions while you are fighting her.
- In Avenging Spirit, you play as a ghost who's been brought to earth by a scientist, and you have to save your girlfriend from some gangsters. You have to possess the game's enemies in order to do anything- every time one body gets killed, you have to go right into a new one in a certain amount of time, or you'll run out of spiritual energy.
- This is exactly the premise of the First Person Shooter Geist, only instead of saving your girlfriend from gangsters, you're trying to save your old body from the paramilitary Mad Scientists who killed you (well, turned you into a ghost...it's complicated) in the first place.
- Likewise, this was the premise behind the PC RPG Omikron: the Nomad Soul, while the player character being a soul from "our" universe who is only able to interact with the alien world of Omikron by taking over the bodies of Omikron's citizens. He/she hops from body to body quite frequently; the process seems to displace the original soul, so that the body's left an empty shell when the player leaves it for another. The morality of this is never even superficially addressed, especially considering the bad guys are essentially doing the same thing, only on a much more massive scale. The player even evaluates potential hosts like new cars when you examine them, and towards the end the game even requires you to poison a guy who just saved your life so you can jack his body.
- In Clive Barker's Jericho, the player character is a commander of an occult special forces military unit, and dies rather early into the game. His disembodied persona can shift into the bodies of each of his soldiers, possessing them consensually (though I guess nothing could stop him from 'pulling rank'.)
- This is Bob the Cherub's main tool in Messiah
- Guilty Gear X2 has Eddie, who is looking for a new body to possess after Zato died. His story mode pretty much revolves around this.
- Matou Zouken from Fate Stay Night.
- Roa from Tsukihime.
- Prototype's main character Alex Mercer can kill people to absorb them, allowing you to take on their appearance and pass for them. You will do this often. There's also an unlockable move called Body Surf, but it involves literal body surfing. As in surfboards.
- Basicly all of Crash of the Titans. Aku Aku even tells you to do this to beat the first boss. Just "jack" a spike, then keep Body Surfing on up the chain to defeat more powerful mutants!
- Miang in Xenogears possesses another woman's body every time her current body is killed. She has gone through an average of one body a year for 10000 years. Grahf also lives on by possessing people once his current body wears out.
Webcomics
- Reynardine from Gunnerkrigg Court is a
demon fox-being who has the ability to Body Surf, but the events of the plot prevent him from doing so. Good thing, too, because when he does it, he kills the host.
- Coyote has the original, non-deadly version of the ability, so he can use it for fun. And he probably does.
- Fridge from Sam And Fuzzy can hop from body to body in close proximity. He's only killed when Sexxica/Candice kills every host within range of him, including herself
Western Animation
- Teen Titans gives us Jericho, who can take over anyone by making eye contact. In the penultimate episode, he does this very rapidly during a big fight scene.
Web Original
- The A.I. O'Malley from Red Vs Blue. O'Malley's degree of control over its host seems to vary from individual to individual: Caboose's mind is completely subsumed while possessed (which may account for his sudden drop in IQ once it's removed), Doc develops O'Malley as a campy would-be universal tyrant split personality, and most of the other soldiers simply have some bizarre aspect of their character amplified to dangerous levels. Church somehow escapes its effects, ostensibly due to being that much of an asshole.
- As revealed in Reconstruction, it's because he's the Alpha A.I.—which means O'Malley is merely a fragment of his personality to begin with.
- Astral Controller of Epic Tales is only able to interact with the physical world by possessing human hosts. In his first appearance he switches between multiple different hosts as the situation requires.
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