Discussion Main / InvoluntaryShapeshifter

Cutest transformation ever.

Don't make me destroy you. @ Castle Series

Please make general statements in the main text not in an example. One work/work-family per example. Please provide details — avoid X Just X. We need to know how the trope turns up in each of these shows individually.

• A staple of Speculative Fiction shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Angel, though it was also used a thousand and four times in such Fantastic Comedy shows as Mork And Mindy, I Dream Of Jeannie and Bewitched.

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Not examples

Remember that to qualify as an example this shapeshifting ability must be recurring — if it explicitly only happens once or twice, then it's a transformation event, not a shapeshifter ability.

I've pruned the following because of this reason:

• In The Little Mermaid, Ariel involuntarily turns back into a mermaid when the spell that made her human breaks. In the sequel, her daughter also involuntarily turns human after a brief time as a mermaid (while trapped in an underwater cave no less!). (Singular events, not recurring ability)
• Enchanted: Giselle is forced to change from an animated person to live action when she is pitched down a well and into the real world. (Fisher Kingdom)
• In The Thief Of Always, the Big Bad's victims turn into creepy fish once their souls are taken away. (Was Once a Man)
• A central premise in the works of Jack Chalker. Welcome to Well World; please step through the gate to be assigned to a new species. (Fisher Kingdom)
• Minoes, a classic Dutch children's novel by Annie M. G. Schmidt, is about a cat who one day woke up as a lady. She's a bit confused by the whole affair. (Humanity Ensues)
• In Shanna Swendson's Enchanted Inc, on a girls' night out, they go to kiss frogs. Katie is warned this is not the way to catch Prince Charming, because they were "frogged" for a reason, and it doesn't improve character. (Baleful Polymorph)
• Older Than Dirt: Aesop wrote a fable about a cat who fell in love with a man and asked Venus if she could become a woman. Venus said yes, but when the woman started chasing mice, she was turned back into a cat. (Singular event, not recurring ability)
• In one Goosebumps book, the main character and his friends were originally dogs, and the story revolves around their horror as the transformation wears off. (Tomato in the Mirror / Gradual Transformation)
• Warhammer and Warhammer 40000: This is half the gimmick of Tzeentch, the god of (among other things) change. More specifically, a common punishment for those who have failed the Chaos gods is to be transformed into a shapeless mass of ever-mutating flesh, eyes, mouths, limbs and viscera. Squick. Or if you please them and they want to give you a gift. Double squick. (?)
• Utawarerumono: "So you want to live forever? here then!" The moral of the story is don't piss off Iceman aka Wisitarnimetea aka Hakuoro. (?)
• In Fantasy Online, there are certain buff skills that temporarily transform you into a purple spider or rock with your character's eyes. Like other skills, this can be used to buff other characters, making it an instance of this trope. Not that anyone minds so much, since the change buffs your character's stats by quite a bit. (Voluntary Shapeshifting)
• Not Quite Daily Comic: Various mishaps ensue when a Henshin stick is left unattended. (Transformation Trinket?)
• In Jay Naylor's The Fall Of Little Red Riding Hood, Red's boyfriend, Pablo, is transformed into a shemale, by the wolf tribe. (?)
• In the Paradise setting, ordinary humans are randomly, permanently transformed into Funny Animals (though the change is Invisible to Normals) by causes unknown. The Change happens either one time or once per year, and there is no "cure" to allow reversion to human. (?)
• In the Whateley Universe, many characters are subject to involuntary shape changes. Students who've turned into a snake-girls, wolf-men, multi-limbed demons, or tentacled blobs, together with their unusual dietary and environmental needs, are major challenges the school faces. All the point-of-view characters are residents of Poe Cottage, the school's secretly LGBT dorm, and have undergone a specific type of transformation. (?)
• Happens in Ben 10 a few times with Ben sometimes turning into the wrong alien. One episode had him even become alien combos like Stinkarms (Stinkfly + Fourarms) and Heatjaws (Ripjaws + Heatblast).
  • And his original transformation into the alien werewolf, Benwolf.
  • It was also a plot point for one episode of Alien Force. Ben would go into a sort of trance and turn into Big Chill, then go out and start eating metal. It turns out that Big Chill's race asexually reproduces about every 80 years. The metal Ben was eating was used to make a sort of "egg sac" for the babies.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): Hun would have this happen to him in The Movie, Turtles Forever, when he comes into contact with the ooze from the '87 cartoon as well and the '87 Donatello and 2003 Raphael. The resulting mutation has him turning into a monstrous looking turtle. (Mutagenic Goo)

Edited by Stratadrake An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.