Shapeshifter Guilt Trips in Literature.
- Older Than Print: In Arabian Nights, one story involves a hero being told that he must kill a demon that is taking the shape of his mother. He refuses, is sent back where he started, and has to undertake all the other challenges of the quest again, as well as kill the copy of his mother.
- In a non-villainous example, Bartimaeus of The Bartimaeus Trilogy regularly appears in the form of Kitty Jones in the beginning of Ptolemy's Gate, purely because he knows how much guilt his master still feels over Kitty's apparent death in the previous book. He sometimes exaggerates the curves, though.
- In Juliet Marillier's Child of the Prophesy, the Evil Matriarch Oonagh does this during the middle of the climactic showdown: while facing off her son and granddaughter, she takes on the appearance of the son's dead wife. Made worse by the fact that she killed the wife in the first place. This throws her son off-balance long enough that she would have killed him, had his half-brother not intervened.
- Harry Potter:
- A spell in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gives Ron Weasley a double-dosage of this trope - the two people closest and dearest to the victim manifest and give a Breaking Speech in the form of a counterpoint argument.
- A Boggart does this to Mrs. Weasley in The Order of the Phoenix, tormenting her by transforming into an image of her children, dead. The "Guilt" part is amplified when the reader knows that Mrs. Weasley's two brothers, Fabian and Gideon, died in the previous war against Voldemort, so Molly has all the more reason to dread losing her family.
- A very neat example takes place in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light during, well, calling it fight would charitable, between Yama, the God of Death and Mara, the God of Trickery. The first of many Moment of Awesome for Yama.
- Magic Time: There's a whole swarm of these towards the end of the final book, divided into groups targeting each main character. (For instance, a doctor who survived Chernobyl fights animated radiation corpses. What, the title made you think it was a kids' book?)
- In the novel Myth-Taken Identity, a group of shape shifters are running around disguised as the protagonist of the series, and their chief uses it against the protagonist's mentor in the climactic fight.
- The Space Trilogy: In Perelandra, Ransom is fighting the Un-man (the demon-possessed undead corpse of Weston, the previous book's villain) when it suddenly reverts to Weston's actual personality and begs for mercy. Ransom ignores it, and the narration points out that Weston's actual soul had most likely been completely subsumed long before.
- Star Wars Legends plays this one straight in Sacrifice. Jacen disguises himself as Ben when dueling Mara.
- This is one of the main tactics of Sacred Eclipse in Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle. Against Celis, it becomes her mentor Wade; against Greifer, it becomes his princess Milmiette (which doesn't work, Greifer sarcastically says that the real Milmiette already knows he has a rude personality); against Lisha, it becomes her father Count Atismata; against Lux, it becomes Lisha (this does cause him to flinch, due to the fake Lisha saying something unexpectednote ; against Yoruka (more accurately, Lux being controlled by Yoruka) it becomes her younger brother.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) experiences this in one book: while on a raid on a Slaaneshi cult, he's quite surprised to see Amberley Veil (his boss with benefits), and can't bring himself to shoot her. In fact, hearing the soldier next to him comment in the same love-struck tones though with a different name, he is consumed by jealousy and about to shoot him. Fortunately Jurgen moves closer and dispels the effect, revealing her as the old brothel owner. "Impersonating an Inquisitor is a capital crime" indeed.
- In Ahriman: Exile, when Ahriman summons a daemon in order to interrogate it about Amon’s plans, the daemon tries to break his concentration (and thus escape from its bindings) by taking on the form of his dead brother Ohrmuzd. Ahriman, being no stranger to the ways of daemons, is unfazed.
- A rare hero-to-hero (and subverted) example appears in Animorphs #41, where Jake meets Elfangor and Calls The Old Man Out for putting the fate of Earth on their shoulders. It turns out to be Tobias in an aged-up Ax morph. Of course, the whole book is revealed to be All Just a Dream at the end.
