And welcome, everyone, welcome. This is a blog devoted to the subject of transformation.
Some of you know me already from deviantART.com. For years, I have been posting art of people, mostly women, being transformed in some way or other. Maybe they become an animal or part-animal. Maybe they become older or younger. Maybe they shrink or grow, gain or lose weight, change genders, have body parts that shrink or enlarge, etc.
I’ve decided to start by posting my essay on this subject from deviantArt. Then, in the future, I’ll expo d.
This text piece has been undergoing a lot of edits since the first draft on Monday, October 29, 2018. I’m trying hard to create a statement about the fascination I’ve had with transformations all my life and also try to start a conversation on the topic for others who share my interests or similar interests.
I had an urge to do some math today regarding the art on my dArt website. I have roughly 280 items that I posted on my website. And I realized just over 89% was art involving transformations of all kinds.
I have always had a thing for transformations. It goes back to before I was even in kindergarten, even in nursery school. There were two Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts that I saw on television. One of them was “Beginner’s Luck,” an early Spanky-starring short of the series. (It also marked the first appearance of Alfalfa.) In this short, Spanky’s mother has entered Spanky in a kid’s talent contest, where he is to recite Antony’s eulogy from Julius Caesar,. I won’t give away everything. But, at the end of the short, Spanky’s mother is on the stage when the curtain is pulled. The hem of her dress is hooked on the curtain and the dress is pulled off while she’s still on stage, leaving her in her slip while the entire audience of men, women, and children bears witness to what was, believe me, an earned humiliation.
Spanky, trying to come to his mother’s rescue, pushes a picture in front of her, with the result that it looks like her head is on the body of a cat. (I originally thought it was a dog.) I know this was the first time I learned the effect that transformation had on me, because I still remember, 60-some years later, that the night after seeing that short, having an arousing dream in which Spanky’s mother didn’t just hide behind a picture that made it look like her head was on the body of an animal, in the dream, she WAS the animal. (In all honesty, due to my age at the time, what I experienced wasn’t so much a wet dream as a “wet-the-bed” dream.) Yes, Spanky’s mother being in her underwear at the end might’ve lent the short a sexual element to my four-or-five year old self at the time. But I think it was already there.
The other Little Rascals short was “Shrimps for a Day,” in which an engaged couple are turned into children by Aladdin’s Lamp. At the end of this short, the little girl wishes to be “big again,” and instantly grows back into an adult, but the nightgown she’s wearing doesn’t grow, giving us a pretty good look at her legs for a 1934 short.
That was the beginning of a fetish I’ve had all of my life. A lot of good examples of this fetish, as I’ve already said, are on display in my gallery. I’ve had fantasies of teachers, neighbors, women on TV, classmates, my psychologist, and others being transformed.
I do have some personal rules about what I do and don’t like in transformation stories and art:
I’m not into TransGender transformations. I’ve learned over the years that many people like to imagine themselves turning into whatever gender they aren’t. If you’re one of them, that’s fine, more power to you. But I’m not interested in TG myself. Just not my thing.
I prefer imagining women who are transformed. One of my great disappointments involving Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie is that so few of the people transformed are women. This is mostly because the protagonists of those shows were male, I know. But when are we going to get the show about a mortal woman married to a warlock or having a male djinn?
That said, I’m usually not into stories about women who are turned into cats. For one thing, woman-to-cat is such an overused theme in stories. There are exceptions. One of the best cat transformation stories I can remember is “The Catnappers,” a second season episode of Bewitched in which Endora turns a female client of Darrin’s into a cat. She is then “cat-napped” by a sleazy private eye who knows Samantha is a witch. After much fuss-and-bother, the cat is turned over to Darrin in his office and, by phone call from Tibet, Endora turns the cat back into a woman — while it is still on Darrin’s lap. The pose of the cat-turned-woman after being changed back is, I think, what did it for me.
But, I recently considered commissioning a comics page of the woman returning to her hotel and still acting like a cat; i.e, still walking on all fours, drinking from a saucer of milk, grooming herself by licking, literally curling up on the bed. But a few days before I would’ve ordered the commission, I was driving on a local street and, after a curve, I found a very handsome black cat lying dead on the street. And that killed the commission or any like it for the near future. I’m too fond of cats, and seeing one lying in or by a road, or reading about one killed — even big cats like lions and tigers — I don’t like it, and that’s another reason I don’t like reading about woman-to-cat transformations.
And I REALLY don’t like stories where a transformed person is killed while transformed. For this reason, I seldom like seeing stories where someone is transformed into an insect or something else easily killed. (Granted, my story posted not too long ago, “Annelid Analyst,” took a pretty dark turn with its transformation. But I made sure she was going to survive it.)
My fondness for imagining women being transformed doesn’t mean I dislike women. I’ve done TF stories involving people I don’t like, and I didn’t like the stories. See what I have to say in my paragraph below about age regression. For me, the fascination is how the transformed deal with the transformation.
I like age regression stories, not so much age progression. I think that’s because age progression happens naturally to all of us. And, as for age regression, I’ve run into some people who think the appeal of that fantasy is imagining having sex with someone regressed to an underage state. There may be such people, but I’m not one of them. For most, they like to imagine being regressed themselves. For me, it’s imagining the regressed person having to deal with their adult mind in a child’s body that interests me. That’s the entire point of my novel, Skye Sparkler www.amazon.com/Skye-Sparkler-K… Sorry about the plug, that’s done now. I like to imagine the transformed with her mind and intelligence in their transformed states. This goes also if the transformed is an inanimate object, a statue or mannequin or doll or some such. I like them to have just enough of their mind to be aware of what’s happened to them.
I have conversed with enough metamorphiliacs to know that I’m in the minority among them. I’d say most of the others prefer to imagine being transformed or being able to transform into animals or other things themselves. Here is where metamorphilia coincides with furry fandom. As I understand things, furries sometimes or often feel that they are other species trapped in the bodies of humans. They may feel they are foxes or wolves or cats or birds or what-have-yous that had the misfortune to be misborn as homo sapiens.
I, on the other hand, like to fantasize that someone is being turned into something by someone else. It may be with their consent. One of my favorite transformations in a movie was in the 1963 Captain Sindbad starring Guy Williams between his turns in Zorro and Lost in Space. In it, Sindbad’s girlfriend (a princess played by the late, lovely Heidi Bruhl) asks the court wizard to turn her into a Flamebird so she can fly out to Sindbad’s ship and warn him of a trap. That’s my preference, though, again, I always want the transformed to survive the change and, maybe, eventually return to her normal self, as the princess did in the movie.
Of course, another part of this fantasy is that it’s one that can’t be performed in real life. It is possible to be operated on and go from being male to female or vice versa. I suppose you could pay for an operation to get some sort of tail or feathers or similar attached to your body, but I don’t know how happy those additions would make them, and few, if any doctors, would be willing to perform the procedure. So, while transformation might make for some appealing fantasies, that it can’t be really done is a sort of safety valve for the fantasy.
(I have, over the years, commissioned photo shoots by mail, and one with an ex-girlfriend decades ago, where they have posed as dogs, monkeys, chickens, etc. But those were done with the understanding they wouldn’t be shared. And I don’t do revenge porn.)
This posting is an attempt to start a dialogue on the Transformation Fetish. (I call the people who are under its spell “metamorphiliacs.” If you have a term you prefer, let me know.) You know it’s more than just fantasy because you feel it inside you. Just like someone knows they’re gay, someone will also know that they’re into transformation. Those if you who are reading this, if you’re a metamorphiliac yourself or know someone who is, please direct them to this post. I know there are others out there.
I got started on this idea when I heard from someone who’d become a fan of my gallery. It was one of those “I thought I was the only one!” posts. Let’s let others know they aren’t alone and that there’s a place to discuss this.
TransformationStation 