Shapeshifter Mode Lock / Literature

• Academy of Mr. Kleks: Mateusz the starling is actually human changed into a bird, because magic hat that changed him had lost a button needed to change him back.
• In Animorphs, this is part and parcel of the rules of morphing—stay in a morphed form for more than Two of Your Earth Hours, and you're stuck that way. Andalites call these people "nothlits."
  • Tobias getting stuck in red-tailed hawk form is a First-Episode Twist. He spends the next twelve books still managing to be surprisingly useful to the team, at which point a Sufficiently Advanced Alien gives him back his morphing powers, as well as allowing him to morph his own human body. This leaves Tobias a difficult choice: continue fighting in the war, even though he has to remain in hawk form most of the time, or deliberately mode-lock himself back into human form forever.
  • You can apparently get out of being a nothlit if your animal form undergoes a natural metamorphosis. This becomes relevant when Cassie gets stuck as a caterpillar—once she's a butterfly, she has two hours to demorph.
  • David was deliberately lured into a pipe and then stuck there until he was trapped as a rat. He is later dropped off on a deserted island with no-one but real rats for company.
  • The Andalite Aldrea forsook her people after the genocide of the Hork-Bajir, choosing to permanently become a Hork-Bajir and marry Dak, one of the survivors.
  • Two Andalite characters become nothlits in The Andalite Chronicles: Arbron, trapped in Taxxon form, and Elfangor, who deliberately becomes human and even has a human kid. But the aforementioned Sufficiently Advanced Alien later turns the latter back into an Andalite with full morphing abilities.
  • In a more horrifying example, if the Animorphs reach the 2 hour mark while demorphing, they can be stuck mid demorph, as horribly deformed human animal mashups. Fortunately, each time this has happened they managed to fully demorph.
  • Aftran, Menderash and the ENTIRE TAXXON RACE, as well as most of the Yeerks all end up doing this deliberately as a humpback whale, a human, and anacondas respectively.
• In Mikhail Akhmanov's Arrivals from the Dark series, the Metamorph species is able to voluntarily shapeshift. Their normal form is that of an amorphous blob. There are a few individuals who have a mutation that locks the individual into the first transformation for life. At that point, only slight changes are possible. These usually become spies among other races, able to slightly alter their appearance within the confines of the race. The observer on Earth took on the appearance of a human male. He's able to change into other males of any human ethnicity but not females due to radical physiological changes. Attempting any radical changes is likely to be fatal.
• In The Belgariad, Belgarath mentions that sorcerers can't spend too much time in animal form without changing back, as the longer you spend as said animal, the more you begin to think and feel like that animal, and too much time in one form can bring the very real possibility that you simply won't want to change back ever.
• Beware of Chicken: Tigger/"Tigu" the cat goes through a painful and dangerous Tribulation in order to achieve a human form, and is quite happy with the results — but then discovers that she's unable to change back into a animal. The other animals suspect that the problem is that deep down, she doesn't really want to; she much prefers how she is now. She eventually succeeds when life-or-death circumstances force her to, but returns to human at the first opportunity, confirming that she doesn't like being a cat anymore.
• Bisclavret is about a baron who is a werewolf. For three days each week he takes off his clothes, turns into a wolf and then turns back when he puts them on again. Unfortunately, his wife takes this news badly, begins an affair with a knight and has him steal the baron's clothes, trapping him in wolf form. He's stuck that way for a year before he gets free.
• Bisclavret had a few other medieval copycats with the same basic plot, including The Lay of Melion (where the transformation is done by the wife's magic ring) and an Arthurian knight named Sir Marrok, who was stuck for seven years.
• John Ringo's Council Wars: Voluntary shapeshifting played a big role in human society until the beginning of the war imposed a Mode Lock on everyone. Results varied from unfortunate through unpleasant to instantly fatal depending upon how long the person had intended to stay transformed and how survivable the chosen form was when technology was lost. Both sides try to recruit people with useful shapes, despite the villains' purist ideology. Even though shapeshifting is a thing of the past how people deal (or fail to deal) with their mode locks remains a plot point for years afterwards.
• Curse of the Wolfgirl reveals that werewolves are unable to shift out of their human forms if there is a lunar eclipse. Then things get worse when the Big Bad of the book finds a spell that can simulate an eclipse and conspires with a bunch of hunters.
• Discworld:
  • "Yennorks" are werewolves born with permanent mode-lock. Angua had a sister Elsa who was unable to turn into a wolf and her brother Andrei passes himself off as a sheepdog because of his inability to take human form. She makes it clear to Carrot that this doesn't make them a human and a wolf, they're both still werewolves, just werewolves unable to change.
    • Also used more conventionally within the series: Angua frequently worries about the psychological effects of becoming a wolf, fearing that if she stays in wolf form too long, she will forget how to be human.
    • Shown with her father, in particular, who is slowly forgetting how to be human. Mentioned also that the human/reasoning side becomes less powerful the longer they're in Werewolf form, while the senses fade in human form.
    • Angua herself is locked into her wolf form and unable to return to human form when a wily adversary gets a silver collar onto her.
  • Borrowing can also cause this, in a way; if a witch borrows an animal's mind and stays there for too long, she'll forget she was ever human and it'll take a powerful witch to bring her back.
• Dracula: The titular vampire is not killed by sunlight. However, he can't change shape during the day except at high noon.
• Dragonlance: The New Adventures: In the spinoff book Black Dragon Codex, the titular dragon Septimus is trapped as a human without any of his magic powers for most of the novel.
• Dragon's Winter: Inverted when Karadur is locked in his human form (he's a dragon shapechanger). Later in the novel, Hawk is also so locked. Her alternate shape should be rather easy to guess.
• In The Fey and the Fallen, Half-Human Hybrid Liam attempts to control his fey magic by undergoing hypnosis treatment. The result is that the violent "beast" inside him is asleep, but he can no longer shapeshift.
• There's a German children's book (main character's named Agathe) which involves witches, shapeshifting into cats and a "stay-a-cat-powder".
• Richelle Mead's Georgina Kincaid: The succubus protagonist suffers a mode lock, along with all of the other demonic immortals in Seattle, when their supervising Archdemon goes missing (summoned and bound by his lieutenant, with help). Georgina is lucky enough to be in her default form when the lock begins — another succubus is not so lucky and gets locked into a completely different body. This stasis removed definable abilities such as shape-shifting and aura perception due to their being normally 'distributed' via the Archdemon, but their connection to hell - and their immortality — remained.
• Harry Potter:
  • Hermione puts Rita Skeeter, the nosy reporter who isn't above ruining people's lives by writing bald-faced lies about them, into a jar that makes her unable to transform out of her animagus form, a beetle. The jar is just sealed and enchanted to be unbreakable — thus, if she tries to change back... well, she'd be too big for the container.
  • The Tales of Beedle the Bard: dumbledore mentions that anyone other than an animagus that tries to polymorph themselves would permanently become an animal, unable to use magic to change back.
  • Tonks is unable to use her metamorphmagus skills when she becomes depressed about her love for Remus Lupin and thus gets stuck looking rather like a girl version of him.
  • Chamber of Secrets: Hermione gets stuck as a cat girl, after mistakenly adding cat's hair to her dose of the Polyjuice-potion, that was meant to transform her into a Slytherin girl. The potion is supposed to work for just one hour, but since it was designed for human-transformation only, it takes several weeks of professional magical treatment to reverse the effects.
• Tamora Pierce's The Immortals: A strange black hawk turns out to be a powerful mage after being given enough drugs to knock out a human - he was so sick in animal form that there was no way he could do anything, much less change back. Daine also gains the ability to shapeshift later on, but often can't shift back if she panics or forgets about her human self. Also, if she ever shapeshifted into an immortal, she would be unable to change back.
• The title villain of IT by Stephen King can be forced into one form if several people all think of it that way at once. Like a Giant Spider.
• Several people in the Kiesha'ra series by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes have had their animal forms "bound" so that they can't transform, some intentionally as punishment. It's not a pleasant process.
  • Though none have appeared in published canon, Word of God says that a shapeshifter who spends an extremely long period of time in his or her animal form can get modelocked as the animal. This is referred to as going feral.
• Discussed in The Lost Years of Merlin—Merlin is given the ability to turn into a deer at will. However, the power will naturally wear off after a while, and if he's still in deer form when it does, well, tough cookies. Fortunately, it doesn't happen.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • Treach, the Tiger of Summer, originally a Soletaken Ascendant, is said to have been stuck in his tiger form for at least the last 500 years prior to the series and to have become little more than a crazed, mindless beast due to losing his rational thought to the tiger's instincts.
  • The unnamed god of the Forkrul Assail is seen only as a D'ivers in the present-day of the story and is broken up into every lifeform in the Glass Desert — so largely bugs and butterflies, since there is nothing to feed upon in the Glass Desert for any other animals. It is considered lost by the Forkrul Assail, but the last book reveals that they drove it to this by turning their endless hunger to judge everything onto their own god and finding it wanting.
  • The seven Deragoth, or Hounds of Darkness, are said to be the D'ivers form of Dessimbelackis, the Emperor of the human First Empire, who sought to teach his subjects a lesson about respecting nature by turning them into beast shapeshifters. He took on the forms of the seven Deragoth in order to flee the T'lan Imass retribution for the mess he had created, then lost himself and became the Hounds of Darkness for good.
• In The Monster's Ring, Russell gets a ring from The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday that lets him transform into a Horned Humanoid by twisting it on his finger but its instructions warn him to not twist it three times and to never use it on a full moon. When he accidentally does both of these on the same night, he transforms into a full monster and finds that he can't change back. Fortunately, he returns to being human when the night is over. Unfortunately, he learns a month later that he's now doomed to transform into the same monstrous form every full moon.
• Oliver Twisted: Bullseye is a werewolf who was born with the inability to shift into human form, and thus appears as the pet of Bill Sikes. He's the only one who can understand him because they are brothers.
• Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy features a relatively minor example. When Shapeshifting Starfish Alien Carlo's hand starts spasming uncontrollably during the light experiment, he tries to reabsorb it into his body, but can't. It's implied that he was just so viscerally repulsed by the phenomenon that he couldn't make himself absorb the hand, rather than actually being physically incapable of doing it, but it still qualifies.
  Carlo began drawing the flesh in at his shoulder. He managed to shorten his arm by about a third before his body rebelled and halted the process. The prospect of bringing the afflicted hand any closer felt like ingesting something rotting and poisoned. And for all he knew, his body was right. What if it couldn't reorganize this flesh, any more than it could subdue a virulent parasite?
  "I can't do it," he said finally. "It has to come off."
• In the Outernet books by Steves Barlowe and Skidmore, the shapeshifter-characters Sirius and Vega are trapped in the forms of a cat and dog, respectively. This remains throughout the whole of the series (with two brief exceptions).
• In Prosperos Children by Jan Siegal, a sorceress with the ability to turn into a wolf would use her form to hunt humans for sport. One day she met a wizard who cursed her to remain in wolf form permanently until she could repent for her evil ways. After several years, she sought out the wizard so that she could show him that she had changed, but the wizard no longer had the power to change her back.
• In Renegades, Danna can transform into a swarm of butterflies, but cannot change back into a human unless every single one of them is either dead or clustered together. The Anarchists use this to hide Nova's identity when they discover Donna spying on them, trapping one butterfly in a jar.
• Retired Witches Mysteries: In book 3, the witches use a special enchanted water to force a shapeshifter back into human form and stop her from changing back.
• Mikey McGill in The Skinjacker Trilogy gets stuck in his hideous monster form whenever his negative emotions overwhelm him, and it usually takes some sort of trigger to bring him back to normal.
• The Stormlight Archive has two similar species, the parshmen and the Parshendi (a human term, meaning, "parshmen who think."). The lively Parshendi call themselves Listeners and can change forms with each Highstorm. The parshmen cannot, permanently stuck in the docile "dullform," until the Parshendi invoke the God of Evil at the end of book 2.
• In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this ultimately befalls Jekyll. He eventually starts changing into Hyde without his potion and needs the potion just to be Jekyll again. Then he runs out of the ingredients he needs to make more of it. Even after obtaining more of the ingredients, he cannot recreate the potion. Jekyll suspects it's because the original batch of one key ingredient had some unknown contaminant that made it work in the first place, and without it the potion is ineffective. As a result, when he transforms into Hyde after using up the last of that original sample, he's stuck as Hyde, who subsequently kills himself.
• Switchers: Variant. The titular shapeshifters lose their powers at 15 (which is to say, Midnight on the morning of their fifteenth birthday) and are stuck as whatever they happen to be at the time. This issue is directly and pointedly addressed in the second book, appropriately entitled Midnight's Choice.
• In This Is Not a Werewolf Story, which is loosely based on Bisclavret, Raul turns into a wolf each weekend and spends time with a white wolf which he believes is his Missing Mom. He doesn't know how she got trapped in wolf form and is thus very careful to always follow the transformation formula carefully. Raul is then trapped in wolf form himself for several months after his friend Vincent betrays his secret to the villain who trapped his mom.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion: Eventually, Morgoth loses his shape-shifting skills due to waste too much power:
    "And then he took the form he had worn as the tyrant of Utumno — a dark lord, tall and terrible. And in that form he remained forever after."
  • The Fall of Númenor: Sauron, after the destruction of his physical body in the drowning of Númenor. Even after he regains physical form, he can no longer take on a fair-seeming appearance, and is restricted to ruling through fear rather than deception.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Wizards are good Maiar in a voluntary Mode Lock in the shape of old men — in fact, they are placed into real flesh-and-blood bodies, instead of the usual fana shapes of Maiar. This is to encourage them to use knowledge to advise and encourage other peoples, rather than use their full abilities to grab power or cow people into submission. Doesn't work with Saruman.
• In Void City, one of the magical properties of the bullets fired by the gun El Alma Perdida is to prevent all forms of shapeshifting. John Paul Courtney would use it to prevent werewolves he killed from reverting to their human forms upon death, thus making it apparent that he had killed monsters rather than men.
• In A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, wizards who spend too much time shapeshifted into animal forms can forget their humanity, especially when distracted by the animal's power of flight or ability to freely range the oceans. A sufficiently powerful wizard can bring them back, though in the only case that happens onscreen the wizard also had access to the shapeshifter's Name, which may have helped.
• The Brotherhood of the Conch: In The Conch Bearer, Abhaydatta expends all his magic turning into a mongoose in order to fight Surabhanu, who is in the form of a snake. Unable to change back, he forgets that he was ever a human until the Healers manage to transform him again.

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