Bemoaning the New Body

Raina: I was supposed to become something divine, something transcendent. My grandmother said I'd be an angel, not some gnarled freak of nature covered in thorns.
Calvin: You always did like flowers.
Raina: They hurt, and it's all your fault.

— Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., "Aftershocks"

Shapeshifting can have a vast variety of outcomes for people. And in many cases, transformed characters can find those outcomes rather unappealing.

Why certain forms are disliked can include:

1. Your new form looks uglier than your original form, or at least a lot scarier-looking.
2. Your new form is or resembles a demographic group that many are prejudiced against in the setting.
3. Your new form resembles a particular individual people dislike.
4. You went through a "Freaky Friday" Flip or Physical Attribute Swap with someone else, giving them attributes you desire and you attributes you don't.
5. Your new form has inconvenient and undesirable instincts and urges.
6. You find it difficult to move in the new form.
7. The transformation hurts — or worse, merely being in the altered form is painful.
8. You had no choice in turning into that form, and you may be stuck in it.

Such bemoaning can range from snarky annoyance at an inconvenient form to having a Freak Out, Tears of Fear, passing the Despair Event Horizon, and being Driven to Suicide over the new body. It's almost always an Oh, Crap! moment if the transformation was unexpected. Expect transformed characters to say "Don't Look At Me", "I Am a Monster", and/or "What Have I Become?" if the new form is particularly monstrous (or if the character is displaying Comical Overreacting). The more negative reactions to Baffled by Own Biology, a Karmic Transformation, and Voice Change Surprise can also count. There are also complex situations where you can simultaneously like and dislike the form for different reasons. It's possible that you will someday come to like the alternate form or at least feel more neutral about it.

Often an example of Supernatural Angst. Compare with Taunting the Transformed when one character demeans someone else's changed body. Contrast with Reveling in the New Form, Transformation Exhilaration, and the Second Law of Gender-Bending (and by proxy Man, I Feel Like a Woman). Can overlap with Freakiness Shame if another character is unbothered by the transformed character's look.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Digimon X-Evolution: Subverted. After DORUgamon evolves into DORUguremon, he looks almost identical to the horde of Death-X-DORUguremon that are attacking everybody, and thus his allies start to fear him. However, despite his new appearance, it doesn't discourage DORUguremon from helping his allies and he attacks the Death-X-DORUguremon to prove that he's not on the side of the enemy.
• Dragon Ball:
  • One contestant in the 22nd Tenka'ichi Budokai Tournament is Man-Wolf, a werewolf who got stuck in his wolf form after Jackie Chun destroyed the Moon in the last Tournament to revert Goku from his Great Ape form. He says that he was more handsome as a human, gets mistreated by others in his wolf form, and can't get a girlfriend, making him resentful toward Jackie Chun. Although he loses his vengeful fight against Chun, the latter is able to use hypnosis to turn him back into a human. Ironically, his human form is actually an ugly Gonk, to the point that Krillin thinks that he was better-looking as a wolf.
  • Gotenks suddenly pulls out a hand mirror to complain about how he dislikes the mean-looking face of his Super Saiyan 3 form.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • The Elric Brothers' goal is to find a way to restore their old bodies because of the consequence of their failed human transmutation. Edward lost his left leg, while Alphonse lost his whole body, and his brother had to sacrifice his right arm to bind Al's soul in a full set of armor. Al in particular suffers from his new body; while it's immortal to some degree and he doesn't have to suffer from human needs, it isolates him from others, since he can't eat alongside them and he can't sleep and thus spends the nights all alone while awake. In the end, Al sacrifices his armor body to get Ed's arm right arm back, and Ed sacrifices his ability to use alchemy to get Al's body back, with Ed's lost left leg being a reminder of his sin.
  • In the manga and Brotherhood anime series, Zampano and Jerso hate the fact that they have been turned into chimeras. While they can shapeshift back between human and animal forms, they don't feel like real humans and want to find a way to get their old bodies back, which is why they agree to join Alphonse, Edward, and their allies. By contrast, Heinkel and Darius actually like their chimera bodies due to practical reasons, and while they also join Edward and co., they don't have any interest in becoming fully human again.
• Ghost in the Shell
  • Ghost in the Shell: At the end of the story, Motoko Kusanagi is killed after being painted as an enemy to the state. Batou figured out that she left her cyberbrain in storage somewhere and was using a Remote Body. After Batou finds a new prosthetic body to put her cyberbrain inside, Motoko comments that he should've spent a little more time searching for something she'd be more familiar with, because he grabbed a male prosthetic body that happens to look vaguely female. She doesn't really mind, as she wasn't going to inhabit it for much longer anyway.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Motoko's body is destroyed by a sniper while she's transferring memories with Project 2501. Batou is on hand to monitor the situation and was creating a backup in case she were to be lost in the process. He saves her just at the last second and takes her back to a safehouse. After transferring her memories into a doll-like little girl's body, Motoko comments about it. Batou says it's the only thing he had available.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: When Mista and Trish switch bodies after being affected by Silver Chariot Requiem, Trish freaks out because of now being in Mista's body with his hairy knuckles, untrimmed fingernails and smelly armpits.
• One Piece: At the climax of the Water 7 arc, Sanji fights an annoying Gonk chef named Wanze while trying to rescue Robin from the World Government. Fed up with his antics, Sanji kicks Wanze so hard he turns into a Bishōnen, horrifying Wanze and leaving him wailing about how ugly he looks before Sanji kicks him back to Gonk and finishes him off.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Pokémon: The Original Series:
    • At the beginning of Johto's Whirl Cup, a Remoraid reaches its goal of evolving into an Octillery. Unfortunately, the fish tank full of its Remoraid brethren don't witness the evolution and they reject its advances to join the fish tank. This causes enough mental distress that it loses in the first round of the Whirl Cup, and since it can't reunite with its friends, it bemoans its new form. However, after saving its friends, they recognize its effort and accept him as one of their own... then, they all evolve into Octillery.
    • Also in Johto, there's tribal fight between a horde of Vileplume and a horde Bellossom, who all involuntarily evolved due to the wind carrying dusts of Leaf Stones and Sun Stones. The couple of Vileplume and Bellossom who get along with each other are only able to do so because they wanted to evolve into the opposite form and have an identity crisis because of that, and therefore they don't want to partake in the tribal fight.
  • Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl: After Ash's Turtwig evolves into a Grotle, he loses the Super-Speed of his previous form and struggles to adjust to his newly gained weight. After being defeated by Paul's Honchkrow, Grotle goes out at night to replicate his old mobility, only to hurt himself constantly and cry. Thankfully, Paul's Torterra shows up to teach Grotle how to fight with a heavier body, which allows Grotle to accept his new form.
• Ranma ½: Young Saotome Ranma fell into a cursed pool while training in China. The curse causes him to become a girl when doused with cool water; warm water undoes this effect. Ranma's girl form causes no end of trouble for him, especially when meeting his host family, the Tendōs. At the end of chapter one, Ranma is willing to swim all the way back to China to seek a way to break this curse.

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who: In "Singularity," the Somnus Foundation is found to be using the bodies of the newly recruited members to house the minds of the cult's mysterious founders... leaving the minds of said new recruits trapped in decaying cyborg bodies on a Deadly Environment Prison at the Natural End of Time. As such, the first instinct of the newly transferred victims is to scream upon seeing their reflections. By contrast, when Turlough ends up a victim of the process, his first instinct is merely to grumble and complain:
  Turlough: So back in Moscow, one of those horrible creatures is walking around, wearing my skin? And look at us! These bodies are weak and feeble, patched together with scrap metal! Hardly a fair exchange.
  Alexei: You're taking this better than I did. It was weeks before I could cope.

Comic Books

• Asterix: The action of Asterix and Obelix All at Sea kicks off with Obelix accidentally petrifying himself by overdosing on magic potion. Getafix is able to restore him, only to regress him to childhood in the process; once Obelix belatedly notices that his clothes no longer fit, he's horrified. Over the course of the next few pages, he's reduced to tears over no longer being able to eat three roast boars in a single sitting and only cries harder when he realizes that he no longer has his superpowered strength and can't even give Panacea a menhir as a present. Soon after, he tries to tackle a Roman patrol in his usual style... and is easily captured, leaving Obelix chained up in the hold of a galley bound for Rome.
  Obelix: So I go back to childhood! So I lose my strength! The Romans aren't afraid of me anymore and I'm their prisoner... [crying] Oh Asterix, please come and help me out of this!
• Captain Britain: A Crooked World: In the final issues, the Vixen attempts to assassinate Mad Jim Jaspers before his tyrannical reign over the UK prompts the Americans to intervene, only to end up on the receiving end of his powers. The Vixen is transformed into a real vixen, and as Jaspers mockingly cuddles her, the narration mentions that Vixen would very much like to scream, but can't remember how.
• Fantastic Four:
  • Ben Grimm is rather angsty about the Rock Monster form he took after he was exposed to cosmic rays. On top of frequently scaring people who don't know him well, he had to give up his job as an Ace Pilot because he could no longer fit in the cockpit. The reason he first took the superhero name "the Thing" is because of how negatively he views his current form. Many early stories involved him working with Reed Richards to try and undo the change and failing. Ben gradually started to see the bright side of his condition — whether that be the sheer usefulness of his Super-Strength or his blind sculptor girlfriend Alicia Masters being genuinely attracted to his rocky body — but he almost never feels totally comfortable with it.
  • Connected to Ben Grimm is Sharon Ventura, the second Ms. Marvel and, more recognizable, the She-Thing. After an accident that bathed Ben and Sharon in gamma radiation, Sharon was transformed into the She-Thing. She took it worse than Ben, being Driven to Suicide and being heavily depressed for a time, though she understood others had it worse after an encounter with Beast and the rest of X-Factor during The Fall of the Mutants.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
  • Orlando routinely changes sex at random, and though they greatly enjoy life regardless of whether they happen to be male or female at the time, they find the actual transformation and the time immediately thereafter to be uncomfortable: in Century: 1969, Orlando mentions that transitioning makes them feel self-conscious, especially when becoming female, which they find disconcertingly like shrinking. Later, in Century: 2009, they happen to transition to female while in the shower — and immediately experience an extremely messy period, Orlando letting out an Atomic F-Bomb in disgust.
  • Also in Century: 2009, Haddo's prophesied Moonchild (a.k.a. Harry Potter) attempts to use pills to hold back his transformation into the Antichrist, and when he finally runs out, he's left groaning in horror and disgust as he begins to sprout eyeballs all over his head, trying vainly to hold back the tide with willpower. He immediately rounds on Haddo in a temper tantrum, bitterly demanding to know if this was what he wanted all along.
• Locke & Key: In "Grindhouse", when the Dassin brothers make the mistake of robbing Keyhouse, Louis Dassin attempts to rape Jean Locke — only to be tricked into following her through the Gender Door. Louis is left shocked and horrified at being transformed into a woman, and even more at getting beaten up by the now-male Jean, eventually driving the gangster to run screaming from the house in a blind panic.
• Spider-Boy: Madame Monstrosity has kidnapped Spider-Boy's friend Christina, and puts her into a machine to be turned into a Humanimal. She screams that she doesn't want to be turned into that, as the cliffhanger of issue 5. Issue 6 opens by revealing that animal to be a pigeon. She gets mutated, and hopes Spider-Boy will rescue her — but he's been captured himself. She realises there's a benefit though — she can now talk to birds, and by doing so she's able to get word to other superheroes, which leads to Spider-Man, Squirrel Girl, and some others coming to look for them in issue 7.
• The Transformers: Snarl the Dinobot Stegosaurus is noted as particularly hating his clumsy dinosaur body, seeing it as considerably worse than his original Cybertronian alt-mode. This is a sharp contrast to the rest of the Dinobots, who either enjoy their robot alt-modes or at the very least don't actively hate them.
• Zenith: Zig-zagged; in Phase IV, Dr Michael Peyne is cursed with progressively accelerating Merlin Sickness by the Lloigor. In his Apocalyptic Log, he admits that he should be happy with his increasingly youthful vigor but because it's only happened because the world has ended and the Lloigor have spared him out of Cruel Mercy, Peyne can't enjoy any of it. Plus, since he's the last man on Earth, his restored libido only makes him dependent on cold showers; teenage hormones and acne only make him feel even worse. By the time Peyne enters his earliest years of childhood, his badly spelled memoirs are being interrupted by despairing asides on how he keeps forgetting words or how tired he's become... until the toddler that Peyne has become crawls into bed, hides under his oversized shirt, and resigns himself to Death by De-aging.

Fan Works

• Better to Reign in Heaven:
  • After realizing that he can no longer erase Tessa Dithers' memories, Braun uses his control over the simulation to age Dithers into her 90s, both to torture her and to make sure that none of the other residents believe her attempts to reveal that they're in a simulation. As such, Tessa is not happy with this and spends the next couple of chapters silently despairing over her aching body and all the age-related ailments that Braun has lumbered her with.
  • Downplayed when Mattie AKA the Lone Wanderer enters the simulation. Upon finding that Braun's automatically regressed him into a 10-year-old, Mattie is acutely aware that he's lost access to his adult strength and the talents he gained out in the Wasteland, so he's understandably nervous. However, he forces himself to continue on with as few complaints as possible, focusing on finding James.
  • Later, Braun punishes Mattie and Tessa for their attempted rebellion by transforming both of them: he regresses Mattie into an unborn infant, leaving the Lone Wanderer panicking as he gradually realizes why he can't move; then Braun de-ages Tessa to her twenties just to give her a Hope Spot... and then makes her nine months pregnant with Mattie. Tessa is reduced to howling with agony as labor sets in, only growing more miserable as she realizes that their attempt to stop Braun has failed.
• Fate/Zero Paradox sees at the end of the Grail War Rider X, aka Megatron, incarnates into a human form due to the power of Angra Mainyu. Being a superpowerful Mechanical Lifeform originally, becoming a flesh-and-blood weakling really doesn't make Megatron happy.
• In The Gammus Chronicles, a Harry Potter fanfic set during Hermione's fifth year at Hogwarts, she curiously casts a spell called Gammus Imataria on herself. However, due to saying a keyword of the spell wrong, Hermione later finds out - to her horror - that it makes her turn into a She-Hulk every time she loses her temper. Hermione, who prides herself on her intelligence, panics at the idea of being stuck with a body as unnaturally tall and muscular as hers is now, and Moaning Myrtle doesn't help by warning her that, with her now-green skin, the other students might mistake her for a troll. Luckily for Hermione, however, her discomfort at her transformation actually proves vital to undoing it, because once she stops feeling angry and starts crying at the thought of being regarded as a freak, she shrinks back into her normal human form again. Hermione's reaction to becoming a She-Hulk differs wildly from Luna and Ginny's, primarily because they properly appreciate the newfound strength and attractiveness that comes with their new forms.
• In Happy Daze, Mork turns Fonzie into a woman named Francie. She hates being made into a "chick".
• In the fanfic Inside Loud, all of the children from The Loud House switch bodies. Lori declares that being in Lucy's body is "literally a disaster", Lucy (who is in Lincoln's body) feels like her soul is detached, and Lisa notes that she doesn't want to be in Lori's body.
• Pokémpanions: When Machop evolves into a Machoke the day after his birthday in “Early Evolution”, he screams in surprise when he sees himself in the mirror (especially since he’s awfully young to have evolved). While he’s initially excited to show off his new strength, he soon realizes cannot control it very well and is ashamed of himself when he accidentally injures Lombre. He comes to terms with it when his friends say they still accept him no matter what.
• There is a fanmade Mega Man comic called Rock N' Roll's Tune Switch where the Blue Bomber gets turned into a girl, much to his horror.
• Total Eclipse of the Bark: When Akane first becomes a werewolf, she's horrified by it (especially since it's accompanied by a Painful Transformation). She reviles it even more than ever when she realizes that she has injured Yayoi when she becomes feral from the transformation.

Films — Animated

• Brother Bear: Kenai is utterly horrified when he realizes he's become a bear, especially since he deeply hates them because his oldest brother was killed by one. He eventually comes to terms with it and chooses to remain one to stay with Koda.
• The Emperor's New Groove:
  • Upon learning that he's been turned into a llama, Kuzco starts crying about how he lost his "beautiful, beautiful face!" He has to hit himself in the face to compose himself.
  • When Yzma sics a bunch of guards on Kuzco and Pacha, Pacha ends up launching a bunch of potions at them with a table flip, turning them all into animals. One of them, turned into a cow, proves how much of a coward he is by asking Yzma if he can go home.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: When Twilight Sparkle becomes human for the first time, she unleashes a horrified Skyward Scream and has a massive panic attack, but she does get used to this new form over time.
• Pinocchio: When Lampwick turns into a donkey, he's utterly horrified and runs around the room, screaming for his mother. Pinocchio is equally shocked when he grows ears and a tail, though he manages to escape Pleasure Island before his transformation is complete.
• The Princess and the Frog: When Tiana first turns into a frog, she screams and expresses disgust at being green and slimy. Naveen tells her that the secretion isn't slime but rather mucus.
• Rise of the Guardians: When the children's lack of belief is making the Guardians' magic less powerful, it shrinks the Easter Bunny down to the size of a normal bunny. He hates this because he doesn't want to be cute.
• Shrek the Third: Puss and Donkey are not happy when they accidentally switch bodies thanks to Merlin's botched teleportation spell.
  Donkey: Oh, no! I've been abracadabra-ed into a Fancy Feastin', second-rate sidekick!
  Puss: At least you don't look like some kind of bloated roadside piñata! You really should think about going on a diet!
  Donkey: Yeah, and you should think about getting yourself a pair of pants. I feel all exposed and nasty!
• Turning Red: When Mei discovers her new red panda form in the mirror for the first time, she shrieks in terror and breaks down in Tears of Fear over being a "gross red monster". Ming, however, falsely believes she's having a First Period Panic.
• Wallace & Gromit, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: When Wallace finds out that he is a were-rabbit, he bursts into tears and sobs, "I don't want to be a giant rabbit!".

Films — Live-Action

• Avatar established that Miles Quaritch feels violent hatred toward the Na'vi. So when a copy of his mind is put into a Na'vi recombinant body in Avatar: The Way of Water, his first reaction upon realizing it is to say "Well, ain't this a bitch." A recorded video log from his deceased human self even preemptively remarks that the recombinant body will be "not nearly as good-looking". Recombinant Quaritch's speech to his fellow recombinant subordinates also somewhat jokingly characterizes their new bodies as a sort of punishment for their "sins."
• The Empire Strikes Back: When C-3PO the robot gets taken to pieces and Chewbacca tries to fix him, he puts his head on backwards, making C-3PO angry.
• Nutty Professor II: The Klumps:
  • Played with in the finale: Buddy Love is given a dose of Sherman Klump's Fountain of Youth serum, causing him to regress into a 2-year-old — and out of his clothes — in front of the entire boardroom. Buddy immediately lets out a horrified yelp of "OH SHIT!" but because he's a raging egotist, he gets defensive rather than publicly admit to being in trouble, claiming that his transformation is "all part of the demonstration". And when he realizes that everyone in the room is staring at him, he snaps "this is a very impressive package for a toddler!"
  • Not long after, Buddy continues regressing and melts into an animated puddle of blue sludge. He's even more alarmed and even more on the defensive about it, to the point of screaming "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!" at terrified passers-by.

Literature

• Captain Underpants: In The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers, Mr. Krupp and Melvin have switched bodies, but don't realize it until George and Harold get out a mirror to show them.
  Mr. Krupp (in Melvin's body): I'm... I'm a kid again.
  Melvin (in Mr. Krupp's body): And I'm old and fat and bald and ugly, and I have bad breath and creepy nose hairs and...
  Mr. Krupp: HEY!
• Colony: In the second act of the novel, Eddie O'Hare awakens to find that he's been so badly injured that only his head and spinal column could be saved. As such, he's now a head in a jar plugged into an extremely unappealing robot body that, in his own words, looks like "Humpty fucking Dumpty". As such, he spends the first few minutes complaining — especially when he realizes that his body is so clumsy that trying to move his leg causes his arm to reach out and crush Mr Styx's testicles.
• The Dresden Files: In Ghost Story, Harry ends up coming back as a ghost after being shot by an unknown assailant at the end of the previous book. He discovers that being undead is a miserable experience: Harry can't use magic because he doesn't have a body to draw energy from, none of his friends or loved ones can actually see him at first, and he has to solve his own murder and deal with the consequences of being dead for almost six months. At one point, Harry considers jumping into running water, which would dissolve his ectoplasmic form and render him Deader than Dead.
• Give Yourself Goosebumps: In one of the plotlines in The Knight in Screaming Armor, you can make the mistake of messing about with a time-controlling clock that begins to regress you and your cousins to infancy. Initially amused by their suddenly giant clothes, your cousins soon begin to panic as they lose their ability to stand up, eventually being reduced to wailing for their mothers, while you're left grappling with fading vision and infantile muscles as you struggle to fix the clock before you suffer a Death by De-aging. With a bit of effort, you manage to turn back the clock, instantly restoring your cousins to normal... but for some reason, it doesn't restore you. It's left ambiguous if you really are going to regress to death, if you're doomed to stay a baby forever, or if you're just stuck growing up all over again, but whatever the case, this path ends with you being cradled by Abbey as you wail your head off at how unfair this is.
• Honor Harrington: In Cauldron of Ghosts, Action Girl Yana is disgusted to learn her nanotech disguise includes massive boobs. Her combat skills (not to mention basic movement) are completely thrown off by the change in weight distribution, and she has to spend a lot of time in the gym while the transformation is underway in order to "reset" her muscle memory.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: In the finale, AM punishes Ted for Mercy Killing the other playthings by transforming him into a "great soft jelly thing" incapable of committing suicide or doing anything except suffering AM's tortures for all eternity. The last paragraphs feature Ted lamenting his awful new body, the story ending with Ted remarking "I have no mouth and I must scream".
• The Locked Tomb: Happens twice in the novels.
  • In Harrow the Ninth, Gideon's soul takes over Harrow's body while the latter is in a pocket dimension of the River. The upside is that Harrow's lyctoral regeneration finally kicks in, meaning that she's basically unkillable... but because Harrow erased all memory of Gideon from themselves in an attempt to save her soul, that also included erasing Gideon's instructions to physically condition herself, and as a result, Gideon can barely lift her signature two-handed sword. She still manages to kick ass anyway.
  • In Nona the Ninth, Nona, a consciousness residing in Harrow's body, grouses about how weak she seems. It's revealed that Nona, who is actually Alecto, the soul of the Earth and a Resurrection Beast, is killing Harrow's body by residing in it, and only the regenerative properties of lyctorhood are holding it back. Later, when Alecto returns to her own body in the Locked Tomb, the narration we see from her perspective is distasteful at the fact that Alecto is stuck in a mortal body— one that's designed to look like God's favorite Barbie doll, no less!
• The Metamorphosis focuses almost entirely on Gregor's experience of being inexplicably turned into a specimen of 'vermin'; due to his condition, he's horribly abused by the rest of his family, culminating in his father injuring him in such a way that, combined with his family talking about him behind his back, causes Gregor to die of starvation one night.
• In the Prince Roger novel We Few, Roger and the rest of the human survivors undergo bod-mods to infiltrate the Empire. Roger grumbles that 'Augustus Chung' is bulkier than his real body, while Despreaux has a case of D-Cup Distress as 'Shara,' along with a complaint about being blonde. "There are jokes about girls with this kind of hair. About how stupid they are. I’ve made them myself, God help me."
• Red Dwarf:
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers kicks off with the dead engineer Saunders being depressed over his new status as a hologram: quite apart from being unable to touch anything, he's also left saddled with a truckload of bureaucracy, not allowed shore leave with the rest of the crew, and left with the awful knowledge that because his marriage is now null and void, his wife will meet someone else. He's so upset that he tries to thump the desk in front of him in a rage, only for his hand to pass right through it and smash himself in the balls. As such, when Flight Coordinator McIntyre commits suicide and dooms Saunders to be switched off so that the more important crewmember can take his place as Red Dwarf's hologram, Saunders is nothing short of overjoyed.
  • As with the TV show, Rimmer is immediately gloomy after being brought back as a hologram, and most of his first few lines are to lament how depressed he is about it — to the point that he even talks over Lister, who's still in mourning for the rest of the Red Dwarf crew and almost drank himself to death in grief. For good measure, Rimmer makes it clear that along with the inability to touch anything, he's also bummed over being a "dirty deadie" like the other holograms that he and his brothers used to abuse.
  • In Better Than Life, Rimmer's unconscious self-loathing results in the eponymous VR game inflicting a ruinous streak of bad luck on him that ends with Rimmer being jailed as a disembodied essence, having his repossessed body claimed by Jimmy Jitterman, and ending up trapped in the body of prostitute Trixie LaBouche. Rimmer is not happy with any of it, least of all the pain of having to flee the prison with no bra. In the days that follow, he's stuck in the company of the Jittermans, who routinely subject him to sexist insults, physical abuse, and borderline enslavement, leaving Rimmer silently despairing over just how much he's lost in his new body.
  • Zig-zagged in Last Human. Kryten is initially very happy when he uses the DNA machine to turn himself into a human, despite Kochanski warning him that treating his transformation as the ultimate solution for all his problems is a big mistake. However, he soon becomes gripped with uncharacteristic anger and petulance once he realizes that he's going to die like any other mere mortal, even more so when he's injured for the first time in an accident. Worse still, the fact that his human body makes him less useful to his friends leaves him humiliated and snippy. As such, once the team regains control of the DNA Machine, Kryten decides to become a mechanoid again.
• Repeat: The plot kicks off with Brad Cohen reliving his life from the womb onwards, and once he's over the shock of being born all over again, he finds being a baby extremely frustrating. As such, he spends several paragraphs silently enraged by the many inconveniences of his new life, including the constant need for sleep, the humiliating incontinence, the embarrassment of breastfeeding, the inability to speak, and the fact that he won't be in a position to read or watch anything on TV for several months.
• Shrinking Pains: In the finale, Milo, Doug, and Cass are tied up in a basement by the villains and doomed to die when the rigged boiler explodes — or in Milo and Doug's case, when a Terminal Transformation occurs. The only way to escape is for Cass to take her first dose of the Fountain of Youth water so she'll be able to shrink out of the ropes and rescue them. Finding herself 7 years old again, Cass is quick to express her dismay over being flat-chested and missing her tattoo — to the point that Milo and Doug have to yell at her to get a move on.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Inverted. When the fifty-something Jekyll turns into Hyde, he's at least thirty years younger, due to having spent less time in his life acting out on his unspecified "base urges", and enjoys his more youthful body and ability to freely act out his worst vices. And then Hyde ends up murdering someone...
• Thursday Next: In The Woman Who Died A Lot, Thursday, having been handicapped and forced into retirement due to an accident in the events of the previous novel, finds her consciousness being transferred into clones of herself created by the Goliath Corporation in an attempt to stop her from foiling their latest plot. While the bodies are able to operate without a mobility aid, what frustrates Thursday is that they give her the libido and energy of someone in her twenties... but lack the necessary equipment, as it were.
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Eustace cries when he turns into a dragon. He had also stolen a golden bracelet from the previous dragon's hoard and put it on just before transforming. As a dragon, the bracelet is too small for him and can't be removed, leaving Eustace in significant pain.

Live-Action TV

• 3rd Rock from the Sun: It is left ambiguous whether the aliens lack genders in their normal forms or have something other than the human sexual binary, but Sally initially takes poorly to being made a woman. She puts in a request to switch, which takes until the fourth season episode "Two-Faced Dick" to be approved, at which point she is swapped with Dick, to the dismay of both (Sally coming to enjoy being a woman in the meantime). The usual Gender Bender, "Freaky Friday" Flip tropes come into play as they have to pretend to be each other, including on a double date with each other's partners, before being switched back.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Raina is an Inhuman who is eager to undergo Terrigenesis and unlock her full potential. Unfortunately, exposure to Terrigen Mist turns her into a spiky Lizard Folk creature, much to her horror. When Calvin smarmily remarks that she always liked flowers, she replies that the spikes hurt her — and at a later point says that her insides "feel like gravel", implying that there are spikes on the inside as well.
• Doctor Who:
  • During the Classic Series (and a few times in the revival such as with the 12th Doctor), it was a running gag that upon seeing what they now look like following regenerating, the Doctor would react with anything from mild disappointment to flat-out momentary horror. For example, the Fifth Doctor, upon first finding a mirror, was left staring stunned only to finally somberly say "that's the trouble with regeneration. You never know what you end up with." However, they usually come around to it or start to see the positives after having a while to adjust.
  • In "The Day of the Doctor", the zygon who shapeshifts into Osgood bemoans getting a body with asthma.
• Fallout: In "The Radio", Thaddeus has his crushed foot treated with potions from a glorified Snake Oil Salesman, and it initially appears to work perfectly. Unfortunately, after accidentally getting shot in the throat with an arrow from a booby trap, he realizes that he's now sporting his own Healing Factor and may actually be mutating into a Ghoul. On top of being shocked at surviving what should have been a fatal injury, he's left groaning in dismay as he notices the subtle deformations on his neck where the arrow was removed: the Brotherhood of Steel kill Ghouls on sight — and a Brotherhood vertibird is on its way to rescue him. As such, he has no choice but to take Maximus' advice and run like hell while Maximus keeps the Brotherhood focused away from Thaddeus and Lucy.
• Farscape:
  • In "DNA Mad Scientist", Aeryn finds herself being slowly mutated into a Pilot by Namtar's experiments and hating every second of it. For one thing, Pilots have more impressive senses than Sebaceans, and Aeryn is left so debilitated by Sensory Overload that Moya's Pilot has to advise her on how to filter out all the noise. The physical mutations are equally torturous, to the point that Aeryn finally breaks down and admits to being terrified after finding Pilot arms growing out of her stomach.
  • "Out of Their Minds" features the entire crew of Moya (except for Zhaan) being body-swapped by a freak accident. Nobody aboard is entirely comfortable with this, though Aeryn and Rygel are the most aggravated by their new bodies: Rygel, who's stuck in Crichton's body, is irritated by the fact that he's constantly stumbling around on his human-sized legs and needs a tutorial on how to urinate. Meanwhile, Aeryn is stuck in Rygel's body and frustrated at the loss of independence that comes with being smaller than everyone else and having arms too short for manual labour. She's even more annoyed when Crichton gets over his uncertainty over being trapped in Aeryn's body and starts playing around with her breasts.
  • Downplayed in "Look at the Princess Part 3: The Maltese Crichton." Here, Crichton has been transformed into a metal statue as part of his marriage to Princess Katralla; when the crew get around to asking him (via psychic headset) how he feels, Crichton isn't in any pain, but remarks "I'd really like to pick my nose."
  • In "Revenging Angel", Crichton finds himself on Adventures in Comaland; as such, he uses the imaginary setting to turn Harvey into a cartoon when the neural clone starts getting on his nerves. Harvey isn't happy with his new form, especially since it looks really silly and gives him a comical falsetto voice... and he's even less happy when he finds out that the cartoon format means that Crichton can drop 1000-ton weights on him at will.
• The Genie from Down Under: In "Baby Talk," Penelope makes the mistake of absently wishing she could hold her childhood doll the way she used to — prompting Bruce to regress her to infancy as revenge for her poor treatment that day. Too young to speak, Penelope can only express the full extent of her irritation via inner monologue, grumbling over how tired she feels all the time and fuming over being put to bed with the doll that caused the trouble in the first place. Worse still, her inability to speak means she can't just wish herself back to normal — leaving her horrified when a gleeful Bruce informs her that she'll be left waiting for a full year before she can make another wish.
• Power Rangers Cosmic Fury: Mucus, a minion from last season, escapes and uses magic to turn herself human while in hiding. While in her human body, she's safe from the Rangers, but she regularly breaks down in tears about how much she misses her true mushroom monster form. When the Rangers learn she's sincere about her Heel–Face Turn, Zayto expresses sympathy for her and uses his magic to reverse the transformation. According to Word of God, this is intended to be a metaphor for gender dysphoria.
  Zayto: No one should have to feel like they don't belong in their body.
• Psych: The Season 1 Episode "Who You Gonna Call?" features a character that wants to avert this in an... unusual fashion. The client of the week is an individual with Disassociative Identity Disorder; the "main" personality, Robert Dunn, has an alter named Regina King, who is a trans woman and has been seeing a therapist behind his back in order to receive gender-affirming care. A third alter, "Martin Brody", killed Regina's previous therapist in order to prevent her from transitioning, and nearly does the same to a new one she finds.
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "The End," Rimmer is initially quite subdued over being resurrected as a hologram, lamenting the fact that he's now just a computer simulation of who he was in life and due to being made of light, can't do anything for himself.
    Rimmer: I still have the same drives, the same feelings, the same emotions... but I can't touch anything. Never again will I be able to brush a rose against my cheek, cradle a laughing child, or interfere with a woman sexually.
    Lister: Rimmer, you never used to do any of those things anyway.
  • In "Balance Of Power," hologram corruption results in Rimmer waking up to find that his arm has been replaced with Olaf Petersen's arm, immediately recognizable by the fact it's hairy and covered in tattoos. He naturally starts complaining about having the arm of "a Danish moron" and proceeds to verbally abuse Holly over it... only for Holly to retaliate by having Petersen's arm attack him.
  • Early in "Bodyswap", the crew are forced to temporarily flush out Lister's mind and replace it with that of Executive Officer Carol Brown so that they can cancel Red Dwarf's self-destruct sequence. Brown is immediately confused and upset by the situation, spending the next few seconds demanding to know why she now has male sexual organs.
  • "Back To Reality" features the crew waking up to find that they've been playing a Red Dwarf-themed VR game for the last four years, and their real bodies look significantly different. The Cat is dismayed to find out that he's really a massive dork with a pudding basin haircut and an absolutely gargantuan overbite, especially once his real name turns out to be "Duane Dibbley," to the point that he's left incredulously reciting it over the next few minutes. In the finale, he's so miserable as his new self that he's willing to commit suicide over it — though it turns out that the whole thing is a hallucination caused by the Despair Squid, thankfully.
  • During "Emohawk: Polymorph II" the eponymous domesticated shapeshifter sneaks aboard Starbug and attacks the Cat, eating his coolness. As a result, Cat is immediately transformed into Duane Dibbley again and is once more left reciting "Duane Dibbley?!" in utter horror.
  • "Nanarchy" ends with Kryten finding the nanobots and getting them to replace Lister's severed arm. Unfortunately, they end up overdoing it by rebuilding his body into a grotesquely musclebound giant with Lister's tiny head perched on top, much to the shock of everyone aboard. Lister takes one look at his new form and starts screaming.
  • In "Pete Part I", upon finding the Time Wand, Kryten's first attempts to test it end up regressing Kochanski and the Cat into 5-year-olds. They are immediately shocked and upset, demanding that Kryten turn them back immediately; he does so — only for his next attempt at playing with time to leave them with 1970s-style hair and clothes, much to their horror.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Rascals", Picard, Ro, Keiko, and Guinan are de-aged to 12-year-olds. While Guinan takes it in stride, Picard and Keiko are annoyed at the adults' not taking them seriously, and Ro outright hates it because she doesn't want to be "short and awkward", Hates Being Called Cute, and due to her Dark and Troubled Past she doesn't have the association of childhood with fun that the others have.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In the ending of "Broken Link", Odo is forced to submit himself to the Founders' judgement so he won't die from their virus; the Founders cure him... but in an ironic punishment for siding with "Solids" over his fellow Changelings, they strip him of his powers and make him into a human. Odo is left extremely depressed, not just because he's trapped in a single body for the rest of his life, but because it means he'll never be able to rejoin the Great Link, and he's stuck with the face of his Shapeshifter Default Form so he can't fit in with humans either.
      Odo: They left it this way on purpose. To make sure I'd never forget what I was... and what I've lost.
    • Played with in "The Begotten": having finally come to terms with losing his powers, Odo finds himself regaining them thanks to the baby Changeling he was caring for. He immediately celebrates by becoming a bird and soaring across the Promenade, reverting with a jubilant smile on his face... only for it to become a look of sadness as he realizes that this only worked because the baby Changeling was dying and wanted to help him in its final moments. In the follow-up at the start of "In Purgatory's Shadow", Odo doesn't regret having his powers back, but after getting used to being human and even enjoying certain parts of it, he's a little downcast at going back to the Changeling lifestyle — especially since it means getting rid of his human furniture: he can't sleep in a bed anymore without reverting to liquid and sliding off the mattress.
    • In "Profit and Lace", Quark is surgically altered to appear as a woman, which he hates due to Ferengi culture being very misogynistic.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The season 2 episode "Charades" has Spock, a Half-Human Hybrid, turn fully human after a shuttle accident brings him into contact with medical technology from an energy-based being. While initially enjoying his humanity, being able to experience sensations such as the taste of bacon or being able to react to other people's jokes with genuine emotion, Spock needs to pass as Vulcan in order to impress T'Pring's family so that he can become engaged to her.

Magazine

• MAD: Issue #285 had a feature titled, "Recasting Famous Old Movies with Today's Famous Wrestlers." In a segment parodying the movie Big, George "The Animal" Steele wishes that he was big and promptly transforms into Andre the Giant, much to his chagrin. He complains that if he knew the machine actually worked, he would've wished for a weekend in Tahiti with Miss Elizabeth instead.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street: In one "Abby's Flying Fairy School" skit, Blogg accidentally turns himself into a puppet. When he finds this out, he screams.

Radio

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: In the radio play, novel, and television show, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are plunged into a world where Reality Is Out to Lunch by the Infinite Improbability Drive, and find themselves beginning to transform, much to their alarm: Arthur's legs and arms drift off into the sunset, leaving him wondering how he's supposed to operate his digital watch now; Ford begins transforming into a penguin and angrily demands an explanation from Trillian.

Video Games

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution: After Adam Jensen is nearly killed, most of his body is replaced with experimental cybernetic augmentations; after the Tutorial Mission, he can either reluctantly acknowledge that the augmentations are useful or state that "I didn't ask for this" and have him talk about how he's uncomfortable with the prospect of his body being largely cyberware now.
• Escape from Horrorland: After being separated from the protagonist, Lizzie turns up at the lab in Vampire Village, having been turned into a large newt-like creature by Madison Storm. She's not in a good mood and needs you to turn her back with the lab equipment; screwing up in this puzzle can result in her being transformed into various other shapes, all of which Lizzie vocally despises — not helped by the fact that Luke insists on teasing her about them, especially if she ends up transformed into a jack-o-lantern.
  Lizzie: What's going on? Where's my body? [despairing] And why do I suddenly smell like Halloween?
  Luke: Let me put it this way: you know how dad likes to call you... pumpkin?
  [Lizzie screams in horror]
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Omega survives its apparent demise at the end of its raid series by uploading its mind into the toy model of it Garlond Ironworks developed to study it. Unfortunately for Omega, this toy is relatively fragile compared to its old body and Omega is stuck in it. At one point, it freezes up while navigating the cold tundras of Garlemald, leading it to demand Biggs and Wedge insulate its hardware better.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream:
  • As with the original short story, AM has reduced Benny from a handsome paragon of humanity to a hunched, disfigured ape-thing; in the game, though, AM has restored Benny's mind so he can appreciate the horror of his predicament. As such, Benny spends most of his scenario extremely bitter over his body's shortcomings, from his crippled legs that make it impossible to climb stairs to his inability to eat food that hasn't been chewed for him in advance.
  • During the endgame, screwing up in the final showdown with AM and the other supercomputers will result in a bad ending in which the chosen player character is transformed into a "great soft jelly thing" ala the original short story, with Gorrister, Benny, Ellen, Nimdok, and Ted each getting to narrate their own personalized version of the "I have no mouth and I must scream" monologue.
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: In the finale, the Nazis seize control of the Colossus at the heart of Atlantis, and Klaus Kerner decides to use it to transform himself into a god as did the ancient kings of Atlantis. However, Indy is able to trick Kerner into powering the device with one orichalcum bead instead of ten, and after a brief Hope Spot, Kerner is reduced to a shrunken Horned Humanoid. Needless to say, Kerner is not happy with this, especially since he and Dr Ubermann had been vocal in the belief that the Atlanteans were already subhuman and destined to be made into "freaks of nature" by the Colossus, while the Nazis "suffer from no such imperfections." With his confidence in his Aryan genes shattered, the mutated Kerner takes a flying leap into the lava moat below.
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver: After being flung into the Abyss and burning all the way down to the bone for an eternity, Raziel is dismayed to find himself resurrected as a skeletal wraith with no lower jaw, no stomach, no genitals, boneless wing flaps, and a hunger for souls. The Elder God's attempts to cheer him up by informing him of his newfound worthiness do not help.
  What madness is this? What pitiful form is this that I have come to inhabit? Death would be a release next to this travesty!
• MediEvil: In the Enchanted Earth, Sir Dan can accept a mission from the local witch to retrieve seven pieces of amber from a nearby ant's nest in return for a magical weapon. Unfortunately, she doesn't tell him that this will require him to be shrunk down to the size of an insect, so when he accepts, the newly shrunken Dan is left angrily jumping up and down on the spot and demanding an explanation in chipmunk speech.
• In NieR, Emil is a young boy who is unable to look at any living thing without turning them to stone. Midway through the game he's forced to turn fellow party member Kaine to stone. After a five-year time skip he seeks a Mid-Season Upgrade in the lab where he first got these powers, so he can undo this...but to his horror, he's transformed into a Mechanical Abomination who resembles a large round head with a skeleton body. This is blunted by Nier and Kaine still accepting him, but this is quickly undone by Nier's town forcing Emil and Kaine to sleep outside its walls.
• Persona 5: Morgana believes that he was once human, and has somehow been converted into an amnesiac cat-like creature that just flat-out turns into a cat when outside of the Cognitive Realm, and wants nothing more than to return to being human. It's Subverted when it turns out that Morgana was never human to begin with, and was created by Igor in an attempt to hold the last hopes of humanity as a ploy to stop Yaldabaoth, God of Control.
• Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh: The ultimate twist of the game is that the player character isn't Curtis Craig at all, but a clone of him created by the entities of Dimension X after Paul Warner threw the real Curtis through the portal when he was a child. This original Curtis is the Big Bad of the game, a horribly mutated psychic blob hooked up to an organic life support system and only capable of communicating through the Hecatomb; he's understandably enraged at his sorry state of being — and wants to seize the clone's body as his own. As such, when the truth is finally revealed, the Hecatomb is quick to give vent to roughly two decades' worth of grievances against his mutated body in the ensuing Motive Rant.
  Curtis: God, I'm so sorry.
  Hecatomb: Are you? Are you sorry that my body is a sickening aberration? Are you sorry that I haven't slept for twenty years?!
• Portal 2: After Wheatley experiences his Face–Heel Turn and betrays Chell, he ends up trapping GLaDoS's AI in a processing unit that's powered by a potato battery. A large part of her interactions with Chell from this point forward involve her complaining about how powerless she is in this state, as she's forced to engage in an Enemy Mine before Wheatley completely destroys the Aperture facility with his incompetence.
• Psychonauts 2: A Brain in a Jar that Raz discovers in his attempts to reunite Ford Crueller's fractured mind ends up experiencing sensory overload to the degree that they cannot function after they're put in the body of mail room clerk Nick Johnsmith; their mind is the first place where Raz encounters the Panic Attack Boss in Mook's Clothing, representing just how overwhelmed the mind of Helmut Fullbear feels after being in a state of suspended animation for over twenty years.
• Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: Brill can get a Transflormation but it's both randomly timed and a Double-Edged Buff so it's a huge negative that it always happens in "pitched combat" as she says.
• The Secret World:
  • Early in "Dawning Of An Endless Night," you're sent on the trail of Joe Slater, the only surviving crewmember of the Lady Margaret. As it happens, Joe isn't doing so well: he's becoming a Draug. He's not only horribly disfigured, but in agony from the transformation, the species of coral now infesting him, and the fact that he can barely breathe out of water — to the point that he's had to move into the sewers. For good measure, he's grappling with the guilt of having stolen the artifact that brought the Draug to Kingsmouth in the first place.
    Look on your face says even my good side is worse for wear. I've been trying not to think about the... changing. Like it could all be a bad dream I ain't woken up from...
  • Downplayed in the case of Theodore Wicker in "To Hell And Bach." You investigate the sites that the Oxford demonologist visited prior to his willing descent into the Hell Dimensions, and it turns out that Wicker was transforming himself into a human/demon hybrid in preparation for the journey. Along the way, he noted that he was becoming increasingly sickened by the light as his transformation took hold... but this just made him even more determined than ever to complete his transformation. When you finally run into him in "Into The Inferno," Wicker is fully transformed into an immortal Humanoid Abomination and doesn't regret any of it.
  • During your visit to Egypt, certain lore entries mention that a number of ancient Egyptian noblemen and merchants began rising from their tombs during the backstory, restored to life by magical accident. According to the Buzzing, they were left horrified at being trapped in their hideous-looking near-indestructible mummified bodies and forced to live on after the age of the Pharaohs had ended. However, they gradually adjusted to the shock, eventually using their funerary treasure to set themselves up as businessmen and rule Egypt from the shadows as the Kingdom.
• Soma:
  • Initially, Simon believes that he's arrived at Pathos-II as his usual human self; as such, when the roof of the comm center collapses and floods the room, he's not only shocked when he doesn't drown but finds to his extremely vocal horror that his hands are suddenly covered in rubbery black skin and studded in glowing diodes. As such, his first meeting with Catherine features Simon desperately trying to deny that he's now "a walking talking diving suit with some electronics slapped on for good measure," until he has no choice but to accept it.
  • Later on, more horror ensues when it's discovered that Simon is just a copy of the original Simon's mind produced a century ago and uploaded to a cyborg body on Pathos-II by the WAU. Not long afterwards, it turns out that said cyborg body is actually the corpse of Catherine's friend Imogen Reed — albeit with a massive chunk of electronics forced through the skull and the whole ensemble held together with Structure Gel. Simon is revolted.
• Wario Land 4: Not in the game itself, but Wario complains about his transformations in the game's manual.
  "Fat Wario" description: Burp! Grunt! Wheeze! I sweat buckets with every step and I can hardly breathe! How could my slim, gorgeous body get like THIS?!

Webcomics

• The Necromancer, villain of the second story arc of Bethellium is introduced having trouble getting his new zombie body to walk and speak properly. He's annoyed at how it seems to take a little longer each time to get used to being corporeal.
• El Goonish Shive: Tedd once accidentally turned Sarah into a Cat Girl. The shock of the unexpected transformation combined with spending a day or two trapped in a form that can only say "meow" results in her developing a fair bit of trauma around transformation in general, even though it's something she'd otherwise enjoy.
• Homestuck: Gamzee throws the bodies of Vriska and Tavros, two trolls with wildly conflicting personalities (one a borderline sociopath, the other a meek and passive Nice Guy) into Jane's kernelsprite. The resulting sprite, Tavrisprite, is a hideous monstrosity that hates itself and screams in horror at its new form. It quickly commits suicide by exploding, resulting in Vriska and Tavros splitting back into themselves again in the afterlife.
  Tavrisprite: nO,
  Tavrisprite: nO, No, nO, No, nO, No, nO, No.
  Tavrisprite: yOU HAVE TO,
  Tavrisprite: Undo this somehow.
  Tavrisprite: aRE YOU LISTENING TO ME, cLOWN, aND
  Tavrisprite: Whoever the fuck you are????????
  Tavrisprite: mAKE ME STOP 8EING THIS THING!,!,!,!,!,!,!,!,
• Schlock Mercenary: After escaping her many crimes via transferring to a new body at the end of Book 15, Admiral Emm bemoans that her new body is a male, but tells Kowalski (who stole a different body) that she'll get used to it. Kowalski shoots her in the head and retorts that no, she's never gonna get used to it.

Websites

• Neopets: The Faerie Dust TCG card shows a Blue Zafara mid-way through transforming into a Brown Skeith, with the caption, "Going undercover is one thing, but did you really have to make me brown and smelly?"
• SF Debris: During Chuck's review of The Thing, he jokingly poses a scenario in which the two Things that have assimilated Norris and Palmer have a friendly chat about how stressful the situation's got, during which Norris-Thing grumbles over having the rotten luck to accurately shapeshift into a man with a heart condition, and remarks "I'm just gonna have the fucking heart attack and get it over with."

Western Animation

• Arthur: In "Bugged", Brain has a Guilt-Induced Nightmare about becoming a cockroach. When he notices his new form in the mirror, he puts his claws on his face and screams in horror a la Kevin McCallister. He is also dismayed that his insect-like state makes simple tasks (like holding a pencil) a chore and that he's given garbage for lunch.
• In Batman: The Animated Series, Matt Hagen is an actor who is turned into the misshapen blob monster called Clayface by overexposure to an experimental cosmetic cream called Renuyu that he needed to hide his disfiguring injuries. While his shapeshifting powers are incredible, he can't live a normal life, as any attempts to maintain a human form are only temporary. He spends his introductory episodes raging against Roland Daggett, who created the cream and attempted to murder Matt when he wanted to stop committing crimes on Daggett's behalf.
• Ben 10: Albedo, first introduced in Ben 10: Alien Force, is a Galvan (Grey Matter's race) who tried to create his own Omnitrix and set it to match Ben's. However, since Ben's DNA is the default, Albedo would end up turning into a copy of Ben and remain stuck in that form. Disgusted with what he's become, Albedo seeks the means to change himself back into a Galvan.
• Centaurworld: After she spends an extended time in Centaurworld, Horse's body is transformed to resemble the native centaurs. She's disgusted by the change, saying that she looks like "two beach balls had a weird kid). But, eventually, she comes to accept it.
• Futurama:
  • In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", the crew ages backwards. The ones the least keen on this are Amy, because she was fat as a child, and Zoidberg, who is dismayed at having to go through all his larval stages.
  • "The Prisoner of Benda": the Professor and Amy switch bodies so he can relive his youth and she can gorge herself. They soon decide to switch back: The Professor's body couldn't digest the food Amy hoped to eat, and Amy's body was not up to the level of thrills the Professor wanted to experience (and her breasts got in the way). Unfortunately, the machine cannot swap the same pair of bodies, and many hijinks ensue, including Fry and Leela taking on the hideous forms of Zoidberg and the Professor to gross each other out before ultimately making love anyway.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In "The Stronger Evil", Shendu attempts to possess Jackie so that he can free his fellow demon sorcerors. However, Valmont steps in the way and Shendu ends up possessing his body, instead. Literal Teeth-Clenched Teamwork ensues as both spend season 2 arguing with one another about their situation.
• Josie and the Pussycats: Mad Scientist Doctor Madro points his transformation ray at Alex, which converts him into a gorilla (after first changing him into a chicken). Alex escapes into a nearby village but gets locked in a pen by Animal Control. Alexandra and Melody finagle him out of there, mainly by shaving all the fur off his head so that he can pass for a human. Just before defeating Madro, the Pussycats manage to use the transformation ray on Alex, which restores him to human form. However, he's now completely bald, and ashamed of his appearance, since his default look is '60s beatnik hipster.
• Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny: Jindiao has this attitude when he had to possess the body of a vulture, which he finds repulsive, and has some disgusting habits, such as eating rats.
• Looney Tunes: In "Broom-Stick Bunny", Bugs tricks his enemy, the ugly Witch Hazel, into drinking a potion that causes her to become beautiful. She is appalled by this (she prefers being ugly) and goes to the genie in the mirror to find out if she's still the ugliest one of all. She not only isn't but the genie is infatuated and lunges out of the mirror to grab her.
• The PowerpuffGirls: In "Criss Cross Crisis", the entire town swaps bodies with each other, and all three Powerpuff Girls all react in varying levels of distress. Buttercup breaks down in Tears of Fear when she ends up in Professor Utonium's body (especially since she's not used to having fingers). Blossom yelps in surprise when she realizes she's in Ms. Bellum's body. Bubbles initially doesn't even notice that she's in the Mayor's body until she talks to herself in the mirror, then she does a Spit Take and passes out. She later refuses to go out because she's unhappy about being bald until Blossom gives her a comb-over.
• The Real Ghostbusters: In "Slimer, is That You?", Egon and Slimer swap bodies. Egon is dismayed at being a slimy blob.
• Robotix: When Argus first awakens after his essence is transferred into his new Robotix body, he screams in horror when he realises what has happened. Meanwhile, Nemesis is initially enraged as well, but quickly adapts when he notices just how powerful his new Robotix body is.
• The Transformers:
  • Downplayed example in the episode "Starscream's Brigade". When Starscream brings the Combaticons to life (by placing the personality cubes of "renegade Decepticons" into the wrecked chassis of World War II vehicles), they quickly bemoan their new bodies as being embarrassingly outdated.
  • In "Autobot Spike", Tagalong Kid Spike is injured and in a desperate attempt to save him his mind is transferred into a shell body known as Autobot X. When Spike wakes up, he lashes out and as the episode goes on his mind begins to deteriorate. This is justified: Autobot X was meant to hold a Transformer's mind rather than a human's.
• True and the Rainbow Kingdom: In "True Switcheroo", True and Bartleby swap bodies and scream in shock as the camera cuts to the surrounding area when they realize what just happened. True is especially dismayed that she can barely grip anything with Bartleby's Fingerless Hands. Later, when Grizelda swaps bodies with Frookie, she's weirded out by the fact that she has a tail. Frookie, however, doesn't seem to mind being human.

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