Shapeshifter Baggage / Anime & Manga

• In Attack on Titan, Titan Shifters are otherwise ordinary humans who can generate an entire Titan body out of thin air. It's implied that this is only possible because Titan flesh is about as dense as smoke, held together by their consciousness or something; Titans are noted to weigh a great deal less than something their size should, and dead Titans rapidly evaporate. Despite this, Titans still exhibit many attributes that match the mass one would expect from something their size; they can crush buildings and fortifications by falling on or striking them, can be heard coming with thundering footsteps (and can leave deep footprints), and can pick up and wield massive objects.
• Boomers in the Bubblegum Crisis series present this problem. How can a man-sized android shaped like an ordinary salaryman sprout enough mass to turn into a Humongous Mecha with flailing tentacles? At least in one case it was because it was an absorbing type Boomer that used nanotechnology to fuse machinery, and eventually even scenery to its mass.
• In Kenichi Sonoda's Cannon God Exaxxion, the Robot Girl sidekick can shapeshift into a hoverbike. She stores the excess mass needed to change in her breasts.
• In Case Closed, the APTX-4869 toxin has a million-to-one chance will de-age a victim back to when they're 8 years old. This is explained that it causes apoptosis to occur within non-neural cells, so that a large portion of tissue gets killed off and simply evaporates away. Shinichi described the sensation like his bones melting. However this doesn't explain how the re-aging antidote causes the mass to return.
• Averted in Devilman. When Ryo's "father" died after being possessed by a demon, Ryo moves the corpse and discovers that the weight is double what it should be.
• The Saiyan Oozaru form from Dragon Ball is never fully explained; how does one quickly transform from a human-sized alien to a full-blown giant monkey? Of course, not much else makes "scientific" sense in that series. However, Oolong the pig's physical strength and body mass remain constant regardless of his current shape. Simply becoming a motorbike, for instance, doesn't guarantee he's strong enough for Bulma to ride.
  • Likewise, Namekians regrow limbs and occasionally grow to the size of buildings, among other powers that make the Saiyans look plausible in comparison (for instance, Namekians don't need food - even plants in real life need nutrients from other sources in addition to air and water).
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Averted. Envy, despite their lithe and feminine physique, is very heavy, and as a result, they make very deep footprints and can break a steel fence after a short fall, in addition to not even budging when Ed punches them in the face. This is noticed by the main characters and clues them in on the size of Envy's true form…
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)'s version of Envy, meanwhile, only ever takes human forms within a certain size range and seems to weigh as much as a normal human. The exception is the huge dragon thing in the climax, a form they shifted into once they passed through the Gates and got stuck in.
• In Gantz, the final boss of the Osaka mission "Nurarihyon" could change shape and size from a little old man to a monster the size of a high rise building, and is capable of splitting to multiple variable life forms of himself and demonstrates different powers with every different forms he assumes. He could survive being squashed to a puddle of blood and reform to another different gigantic monster instantly. He was eventually killed off by consecutive blasts that squashed him to a blood puddle (again) by the main team leader, taking the bridge along with him.
  • There was also a Puppeteer Parasite which had the unique ability to clone and grow the body parts of its host, until they became a shambling Body Horror of screaming heads, limbs, and even metal weapons. No explanation is given for their abilities or where the mass comes from, only that they're one of many stowaway species accidentally collected by the Giants' ark ship.
• The Invaders in Getter Robo Armageddon. For example, in one episode, the main characters respond to a distress signal from the ruins of New York City. When they get to the origin of the signal, they find two puppies and a dead person at a radio station, but the puppies afterwards turn out to be a pair of building-sized Invaders from a larger group that set a trap.
• Gundam 00 Awakening Of The Trailblazer actually averts this with the shapeshifting ELS: they are never shown turning into something larger or smaller than their original shape, and when they do want to form something larger, several of them combine themselves together into one mass to do it. They also are shown to take at least some time to seal a hole that gets blown in their bodies: they can't just regenerate the lost mass, they have to rearrange their structure to plug the hole.
• Played with in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. Dragons are capable of using magic to alter their size and (with enough skill) take on human form, with the excess mass being converted into mana. While this doesn't cause any weight problems, Tohru compares the feeling of all that compressed magic to wearing a suit that's several sizes too small.
• Subverted in the lesser known manga Momoiro 1/10 — Momoiro is 50 feet tall and weighs several tons. When she's shrunken to the size of a normal human, she still weighs several tons and is denser than lead. Trying to walk across the top floor of her school causes the floor to collapse, running across a parking lot causes a trail of destroyed concrete, etc etc.
• Happens often in Naruto, as it seems chakra has No Conservation of Energy.
  • Orochimaru's true form is revealed when he spits out a baseball-sized piece of something through his throat... which grows into a monster several times the size of his body.
  • Kimimaro can grow bones from his body and use them as weapons, apparently just by controlling the hormones of his body. Putting aside that he apparently needs to be able to survive removing his own bones without bleeding to death this would also require his body to have an infinite amount of calcium to make the bones out of.
    • The manga Kimimaro seems to have an accelerated healing factor which attempts to explain this, but really just invokes the "Biomass from thin air" part of this trope.
  • While not exactly a shapeshifter himself, Shikamaru is able to change the shape of his shadow, and he is specifically limited by his shadow's current area.
• In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga, when a God Warrior discovered in ancient ruins is activated, its flesh grows over its ceramic skeleton (albeit relatively slowly). Where does the matter for this comes from is not explained.
• In the manga, NEEDLESS, users of the Doppelganger Fragment (Mainly Eve Neuschwanstein) require large amounts of calories to shapeshift. Because of this, Eve drinks large amounts of a soda called Super Gel Dero Doro Drink that contains around 5,000 calories per can.
• The Pokémon Ditto can change into 'mons of any size, but the anime once subverted it with a Ditto that couldn't change size.
• After the Magic Pants, this is the second most common source of Fridge Logic in Ranma ½ whenever Jusenkyō transformations are concerned: Mousse, Shampoo, and Ryōga all change into smaller animals with no explanation as to where their mass goes, or where it comes from when they change back. Genma and Pantyhose Tarō change into larger animals (in Tarō's case, a chimera that is several stories tall). On a lesser scale, Ranma, Herb, and Rouge also lose or gain mass drastically, even if they remain roughly human-shaped (in Rouge's case) or merely change sex (for Ranma and Herb). Might be justified in that Jusenkyō curses its victims with magical transformations.
• In Rosario + Vampire, the bat narrator Kou-chan functions as the Shapeshifting weapon for Kokoa. The trope is subverted because Kou keeps his weight in any form, which is Played for Laughs on several occasions.
• Saikano uses this, but doesn't attempt to handwave it or anything of the sort.
• s-CRY-ed is a good example of a justification of this trope, although transformation is only seen in one character and in a subset of the typical creation power. Whenever an Alter User summons their Alter, the mass they require for it is taken from surrounding objects or the environment itself. When protagonist Kazuma's Alter upgrades to the point where it's a true transformation rather than just a gauntlet, summoning it seems to involve breaking down his own regular arm to turn it into Shell Bullet, to say nothing of a few other uses of Alters that break down dead bodies, human or animal, for mass. Yikes. Taken up a further notch with another Alter User whose Alter is a Humongous Mecha. His first use of it, in response to a bunch of villagers backing him to the edge of a cliff, was to vaporize them as material.
• The kagune of the titular creatures in Tokyo Ghoul. Hand-waved as involving a specialized organic material called RC cells, it isn't clear how someone can store that much excess biological material inside their body without extra weight or mass. The most extreme example in the series has to be Eto, a 44-kg girl that routinely produces a Kaiju-type armor from her RC supply.
• Played straight in UFO Princess Valkyrie. Laine is incapable of modifying her height let alone her huge breasts. Because of the latter she is very bad at impersonating men. Her attempt at transforming into a small male dog goes as well as you'd expect.

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