Karmic Transformation

""One of you?! You would make me one of you? Filthy! Slimy! Freaks!""

- Cleopatra, Freaks

A Karmic Transformation is when a character is transformed into something they hate. It can be either temporarily or permanently. Either way, it's very ironic, and often Anvilicious. Perhaps the most popular version of this is a white racist turning black, followed closely by sexists becoming the opposite sex because these are easy to make a point about. Then there is "the hunter becomes the hunted" plot lines where the hunter is literally turned into the animal (or partially so) they were hunting.

This can be made doubly maddening when the transformation is inflicted to save their life, as an Emergency Transformation.

See also: Karmic Death, In Another Man's Shoes and Beauty to Beast. And Then John Was a Zombie is a subtrope of this. Many consider it a Cool and Unusual Punishment, especially to the Broken Angel. If the transformation is self-inflicted and not loathsome, that might be Black Like Me.

Anime

 * A common branch of Fanon in Ranma ½ attributes this effect to the Jusenkyo Curses, despite Word of God that the reasoning behind any given character's curse was Rule of Cool slash Rule of Funny. Canonical Jusenkyo curses seen lean more towards Personality Powers then anything- Genma Saotome is gluttonous, slothful, a petty trickster and a terrible father, who now changes into a panda. Most of the characters actually don't mind their curses, more or less, which takes the karmic "sting" out of them. Ranma does hate his Gender Bender curse, but grows to tolerate it due to it having certain benefits, not to mention the fact that the idea he is some kind of chauvinist or pervert is, itself, purely Fanon. The only other person in the main cast who hates his curse is Ryoga Hibiki, and seeing as how he goes from a Made of Iron martial artist with Super Strength to a defenseless, tasty little pig, that makes him Blessed with Suck (the fact his cursed form is so adorable and thusly popular with the girls keeps it from simply being a Baleful Polymorph). Only two examples of Jusenkyo victims with actual Karmic Transformations show up in the series, and neither is a main cast member.
 * Anime-only Kin'nee is a hulking thug who loves to destroy things and mindlessly obeys the orders of his crazy cult because it means he gets to hurt people. His Spring of Drowned Priest curse turns him into a tiny, weak, pacifist and devout Bhuddist whenever he gets splashed with cold water.
 * Herb, from a late manga story, is the leader of a civilisation of truly horrid misogynists who shunned all contact with human women and kept up their numbers (and bred for strength) by using Jusenkyo to change animals into women. Their children were taken from their mothers and forbidden any contact with the opposite sex once they were weaned. Attempting to create a "test girl" in this way led to him getting a Nyanniichuan curse and then getting stuck in female form for added measure... though it's entirely plausible that he got cured off-screen after the story arc ended.
 * Ryoga hates his curse even more in Ranma Abridged, given that the creators made him Jewish, and pigs are the most commonly-known un-kosher animals. Of course, that doesn't stop him from taking advantage of the benefits of being a cute little piggy.
 * Armitage III, the title character is a Ridiculously Human Robot, her partner is a policeman who hates robots and synthetic humans, but who slowly needs more and more cybernetic parts. They Fight Crime!
 * from Xam'd: Lost Memories.
 * In Nyan Koi the main character is cursed to change into a cat because he accidentally knocked the head of a statue of a feline god. He treats cats badly because he's allergic to them, but to break the curse he needs to help 100 of them.
 * In the final episode of the anime, amid claims of a second season, he does transform.
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist,
 * In Saiyuki Chin Yisou deliberately enacts this trope on Hakkai, turning him into a youkai literally seconds after he went on a revenge driven rampage against the youkai who kidnapped and raped his sister.
 * In Bleach, this is the back story to all Vizards, who were Soul Reapers forcibly given Hollow Masks and turned into monsters. However, after a while, they mastered it, and  Ichigo gets his own mask and treats it as an annoyance.

Comic Books

 * The X-Men comic The House of M has.
 * Ultimate Marvel has a similar thing.
 * In Spawn # 30, Spawn turns the leader of the KKK into a black person and then the leader gets lynched by the rest of the Klan members.
 * Animal Man: The final demise of Dr. Myers, a scientist who has been involved in animal experiments.
 * Lucy Lane, who used Powered Armor to attack Kryptonians, not caring if they are good like Superman or bad like General Zod, finds that she has somehow been turned Kryptonian.
 * Wouldn't that be the very definition of Cursed with Awesome? Turning into Superman as a karmic punishment?
 * It's not that awesome if your former racist bastard allies (including your own father) attack you with kryptonite and red sunlight weapons everywhere you go.
 * In a Very Special Issue of the 90s Youngblood spinoff Bloodpool, the titular team attends a concert that's attacked by a disgruntled rock band pissed that the club rejected their act in favor of a trio of black songstresses. After their inevitable defeat, the molecule-manipulating hero Fusion uses his powers to make them "black".

Commercials

 * The Capri Sun drink commercials. "Respect the pouch! Respect it!"

Film

 * Freaks.
 * This is central premise of Watermelon Man, which is unusual in that the actor playing the white bigot was Godfrey Cambridge, a black actor, made up to look white.
 * In the first X-Men film, Magneto tries to find a way to turn normal humans into mutants. He uses this technique on a Senator who hates mutants . In the third X-Men film,.
 * In the second Wishmaster movie, a mob boss wishes for his enemy's head. Guess what happens...
 * The film Goodbye, Charlie has a womanizing male chauvinist die and come back as a woman.
 * As does the film Switch.
 * The film The Hot Chick has the Alpha Bitch main character make fun of a shabby looking guy (who turns out to be a criminal), only to find herself body swapped with him.
 * In the first segment of Twilight Zone the Movie, William Connor, after making hateful racial remarks in the a bar towards Jews, African-Americans, and Asians is transformed a Jew, African-American, and Vietnamese person. (He doesn't actually transform and the same actor appears throughout, but he appears as minorities to his different tormentors.) He then learns what it is like to be persecuted.
 * What Could Have Been: This was supposed to teach him a lesson about tolerance and lead to a happy ending. Unfortunately, the actor was killed in the infamous helicopter accident - leading to an altered Cruel Twist Ending and Karmic Death.
 * At the end of the second Dragonheart movie, the Big Bad reveals that it happened to him years ago: He was turned into a human. Of course, he didn't learn the lesson, since he's still the villain...
 * In The Fly 2,
 * Trading Places: after ruining the life of Louis Winthorpe, the Duke Brothers
 * The main plot of District 9, which involves
 * Variant: In Ant Bully, a child who'd taken out his frustrations on ants is reduced to the size of one, and has to learn to live among them. While he only shrank to ant-size rather than becoming one, the karmic elements of this trope still apply.
 * In Constantine,
 * The Pedro Almodovar thriller La Piel que Habito is about a Karmic Transformation;
 * In the live action version of The Adventures of Pinocchio, Lorenzini (Udo Kier) is kicked by Donkey!Lampwick into the fountain that causes wayward boys to transform into jackasses, and swallows too much of the water. He leaps off a cliff into the sea,.
 * After finally becoming a real boy, Pinocchio (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) tricks Volpe and Felinet (Rob Schneider and Bebe Neuwirth) into drinking from the same fountain.
 * A special case in Bruce Almighty. Bruce Nolan curses God after having a rotten day, calling Him "a mean little kid with a magnifying glass." God shows up and challenges Bruce to do a better job of running the universe, endowing Bruce with all His power. What's unusual about this example is that Bruce doesn't so much hate God as he is envious of Him, and at first he thinks having all of God's power is pretty awesome. It only gradually dawns on him that being God comes with enormous responsibilities, and doesn't mean getting one's own way all the time.
 * A special case in Bruce Almighty. Bruce Nolan curses God after having a rotten day, calling Him "a mean little kid with a magnifying glass." God shows up and challenges Bruce to do a better job of running the universe, endowing Bruce with all His power. What's unusual about this example is that Bruce doesn't so much hate God as he is envious of Him, and at first he thinks having all of God's power is pretty awesome. It only gradually dawns on him that being God comes with enormous responsibilities, and doesn't mean getting one's own way all the time.

Literature

 * In Empire State by Colin Bateman, the Klansman villain disguises himself as a black man, but gets struck by lightning and the makeup gets fused to his skin.
 * A couple of examples in Discworld - Mr Pounder, the ratcatcher in Maskerade, gets reincarnated as a rat, for example. Not to mention the New Firm in The Truth. It makes more sense when you read it.
 * In Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing With Dragons, the dragon Woraug
 * A second example happens in the third (or fourth, depending on whether you're going by chronological or publishing order) novel in the same series, Calling on Dragons. The rather ridiculous Arona Vamist, who had made a career out of chastising the magically-inclined for not being "traditional" enough, was turned into a seven-foot, blue, perpetually hovering, donkey with wings, an accumulated Baleful Polymorph picked up by a rather stupid rabbit named Killer the heroes had been traveling with.
 * In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is changed into a dragon. The narration justifies this by stating that it was because he was resting on a dragon's hoard, thinking dragonish thoughts. He gets better thanks to Aslan.
 * C.S. Lewis was drawing on Norse mythology for that one - Fafnir the dragon, formerly a man or dwarf, and later slain by Sigurd.
 * Rabadash the Peacemaker the Ridiculous, who was turned into a donkey by Aslan.
 * In The Wheel of Time
 * Robert Heinlein's Double Star is about a Martian-phobic guy who becomes the body double for an Earthling diplomat.
 * In the Oz book The Lost Princess of Oz, Ugu the Shoemaker attempts to conquer Oz, and Dorothy punishes him by transforming him into a dove. She later offers to return him to normal, but by then he prefers his new form.
 * Partially subverted by the Evilutionary Biologists in Jack Chalker's The Moreau Factor (note the title) who got transformed into Petting Zoo People and Half Human Hybrids using their own technology before their collective Face Heel Turn. Their shady employers' attempt to keep them under permanent control by making them unable to leave ended up backfiring spectacularly by giving them nothing to lose instead.
 * Heck, Jack Chalker made an entire career out of this trope. Virtually every Chalker villain who isn't killed undergoes a Karmic Transformation, and for many it's both.
 * In The Green Mile the Complete Monster guard Percy Wetmore is constantly bragging about how his family connections will soon get him out of the prison and into a much easier job in a mental institution. There's an offhand reference early on to Percy eventually going there... which turns out to be because Magical Negro John Coffey screwed with his head and left him catatonic, so he goes as an inmate.
 * In Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger, a family of hunting enthusiasts grow wings, shrink to the size of small birds and are forced to live in a nest in a tree, while a family of anthropomorphic duck move into their house.
 * In Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, Demon warlord Leon Abbot, a firm believer in Might Makes Right, has his mind transferred into the body of a guinea pig.
 * Rod Serling wrote a story called "Color Scheme" where a racist rabble-rouser in the South gets changed into a black man; his victim (a black civil rights preacher whose youngest daughter is killed when his house is set on fire by the mob the racist guy stirred up) turns white and uses the rabble-rouser's own words against him. It ends with the preacher returned to his black self but pushed past the Despair Event Horizon and believing God Is Evil and Humans Are Bastards while the racist-- still black-skinned, what's left of him-- has been dragged to death behind a car.

Live Action TV

 * A racist white man in an episode of  M*A*S*H  has his skin stained darker and is fed watermelon by the doctors, who say it's because his blood transfusion came from a black man.
 * In the Doctor Who episode "Planet of the Ood",.
 * In the serial Ghost Light, an anti-evolutionist Victorian Clergyman is turned into a missing link-style apeman (complete with banana to hold).
 * In the story "Dalek", the titular Dalek is 'infected' with Rose Tyler's DNA and ends up destroying itself rather than become even semi-human.
 * A The Twilight Zone WW 2 story had a Glory Hound soldier in the Pacific Front who repulses his battle-weary mates by acting like a Blood Knight Psycho for Hire. The other soldiers tell him that by this point the enemy is Not So Different (and probably much worse off), to no avail. Later, Glory Hound discovers that he's transformed into a Japanese soldier, and is sickened when his own bloodthirsty words are spat back at him by his "commander". Naturally, it was All Just a Dream.
 * Mork from Ork's Crowning Moment of Awesome was inflicting this punishment on a group of racists who had been terrorising Mindy because she's Polish. view here
 * The Outer Limits episode "Tribunal" has one of the best examples. An old Nazi war criminal who escaped justice is taken as an old man back through time and put in the camp he ran, now in the outfit of a prisoner. Combining this with Karmic Death he is then shortly executed by his past self as just another worthless Jew.
 * "The Grell" has a guy who was racist against aliens turned into one. He learns his lesson and treats them with compassion in the end.
 * Happens to the Omnipotent Q in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode when he is punished by being turned into a human - admittedly it was his own choice (though he had only "a split second" to decide, that could be forever to a Q) and he doesn't hate humans. He certainly, however, needed to understand them a little better.
 * It's worth noting that while Q claims he had "a split second" to decide, it's implied that he fully intended to be made a human and sent to the Enterprise. Why? Because he knew all those different creatures he tormented over the years would be looking for him now, and he wanted protection. Regardless, the trope was definitely the Continuum's intent.
 * Also in Star Trek: Voyager Janeway and Seven of Nine are abducted by an alien whose race was destroyed by the Borg. In revenge against the crew for their Enemy Mine situation with the Borg a while back, he plans to direct them into Borg space so they'll all be assimilated. Janeway and Seven escape, but the alien does not.
 * Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Inverted. At the end of the show, when the tide of the war finally turned against the Dominion, the disease affecting the Changelings finally destroys the female shapeshifter's ability to shapeshift, locking her into a single form. Not only does she have to witness the defeat of everything her people stood for, but she has to do it in the form of the creature her people most loath: a solid.
 * In an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina turns Libby into a geek. At first, it seems to work, as Libby's old Girl Posse turns on her and she has nowhere to go but the other geeks. Then it backfires spectacularly, as Libby leads them to rule the school with an iron fist and mercilessly mock other students for not being geeky enough.
 * In a Season 3 episode of Supernatural, Sam and Dean are being chased by Gordon Walker, a Well-Intentioned Extremist hunter who specializes in vampires, but also hunts demons. Gordon wants to kill Sam to stop him from leading a demon army. Sam and Dean happen to be hunting vampires in that episode, and.
 * In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale Of The Hunted", an Egomaniac Hunter gets turned into a wolf and hunted down by her own father (who was unaware of the transformation and thought the "wolf" had killed her). She manages to survive and get changed back, with a newfound respect for life and nature.
 * While the Mission Impossible team attempts to free an anti-apartheid resistance leader in the episode "Kitara", they use drugs to temporarily turn a white supremacist African governor's skin black, and more drugs to give him false memories of a black grandfather. Said governor is immediately suspected to actually be the resistance leader, and the team springs the real one during this diversion.

Mythology

 * An entire book of mythological Greek fables (Ovid's Metamorphoses) is devoted to transformation stories, many of them karmic in nature--making this trope Older Than Feudalism.
 * Lycaon was a tyrannical and cannibalistic king of Arcadia who tested the divinity of a disguised Zeus by serving him human flesh. Zeus turned him into a wolf, but Lycaon retained some of his human features. His name is the origin of the word lycanthrope.
 * Actaeon was a hunter who had the extreme misfortune of coming across Artemis bathing. She turned him into a stag so his own hounds would tear him apart.
 * It's not just that he saw her; he stared impolitely. Siproites also saw her naked, but he was only turned into a woman.
 * There's also the story of the prophet Tiresias, whom the gods transformed into a woman for killing a copulating female snake (supposedly because he found the act of mating repulsive). An additional element, not mentioned by Ovid, makes the punishment especially karmic: during the seven years he spent as a woman (before he found a way of reversing the process), Tiresias became a well-renowned prostitute.
 * It earned him a second Karmic Transformation of a sort: later, Zeus and Hera, arguing over which gender got more enjoyment out of sex, asked Tiresias since he'd had experience as both. When he answered "Women", Hera got upset and blinded him. Zeus couldn't fix the blindness, but could make him the original Blind Seer.
 * Midas was cursed with donkey ears by the gods for his poor judgment of a musical contest.
 * That’s not karma. That’s Apollo being a dick and Midas simply preferring the sound of a pan flute over that of a harp.
 * Then there's Narcissus: a self-absorbed pretty boy, he was so obsessed with his own beauty that he fell in love with his reflection in the surface of a pond. He transformed into a flower, and became rooted to the spot--forever drooping down over the water's surface.
 * Which may be a better fate than the versions where he simply falls down and drowns.
 * Not his fault. He rejected a fey, and like the Greek pantheon was known for, the fey cursed him for it.
 * A spectacular case of Karmic Transformation happens to Gilfaethwy and his brother Gwydion after they rape their Uncle Math Mathonwy's handmaiden, somehow forgetting their uncle is a powerful wizard. After Math marries his handmaiden to preserve her honor, he punishes his nephews thusly: They're transformed into a literal couple of animals (deer, boar, and wolves) for a year each, switching between genders and their children are adopted by Math and his wife.
 * Some believers in reincarnation do believe that stuff like this can, in fact, happen.
 * In Native American Mythology, ticking off a spirit is a good way to earn this fate.

Theatre

 * In the musical Finian's Rainbow a racist white senator is turned black. Thanks to laws penned by himself, he finds he has "no rights in this state -- not even the right to stay black."

Tabletop Games

 * Absolutely endemic to Ravenloft. One of the sample paths of corruption for misbehaving player characters was to transform from a thuggish human into a towering ogre, at which point your character has fallen so far into corruption the DM takes him away from you.
 * Then you have Twisting in The Carnival, where unprotected members eventually get physically warped to reflect their inner nature (for example a very shy girl becomes transparent, and an agent for a long-extending secret police has her arms replaced with tentacles). Can be Cursed with Awesome or Blessed with Suck depending on the specific twisting.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade has a term for this: Cleopatras. Cleopatras are former models, movie stars, or just insufferably vain people who are targeted and embraced into the Nosferatu clan for no good reason than because they really like to Break the Haughty.

Toys

 * In Bionicle, the character Nidhiki was a guy who betrayed his fellow heroes and suffered from insectophobia. He defected to a band of mercenaries who were less than merry, and was mutated into an insect shortly thereafter. So Yeah.

Video Games

 * Utawarerumono
 * In Jak 3 Count Veger spends half his screen time getting annoyed at Daxter.
 * Featured in Wonder Boy In Monster World: The Dragon's Trap for the Sega Master System (rebranded Dragon's Curse when it was ported to the Turbo Grafx 16). After slaying a dragon in the game's opening level, the main character is cursed by being transformed into a fire-breathing reptile himself. The player spends the entire game searching for an artifact to reverse the transformation, with the hero transformed into a different creature after each successive boss is defeated.
 * In the Age of Empires II Saladin campaign, the narrator remarks that the Crusaders invaded the Holy Land with stories that the Saracens were a bloodthirsty and ferocious people. At the beginning of the campaign the Saracen leaders, particularly Saladin are shown as being wise, cultured, and benevolent. By the end of the campaign they have become as violent and bloodthirsty as the crusaders they defended against. May also be Truth in Television depending on your view of the crusades.
 * Most of the Scarlet Crusade in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. After the events of the Cataclysm, it is revealed that
 * There is also a daily quest for the Knights of The Ebon Blade, in which you are supposed to kill some Scarlet Crusade members and then turn them into ghouls.
 * A lot of Gilneans were turned into worgen when trying to fend them off.
 * Sylvanas is also raising her enemies as undead; some of them, like Lord Godfrey, are not too happy about this.
 * In the first Quest for Glory game if you harm the spitting plants or the stag, the dryad will turn you into one.
 * in In Famous 2 activated the Ray Sphere in his backstory, killing hundreds of people in the process, in the hopes of awakening his Conduit powers.

Web Comics

 * The "D.O.L.L.Y." arc of The Wotch, has Anne (who tends to throw around Gender Bender spells for fun) getting scouted by a group of militant feminists. When she eventually squares off against them, she finds that the most effective way to scare them off is to... turn them into men, of course!
 * Not to mention Miranda's Shoot the Dog treatment of their leader.
 * Anne's personified feminine pride turned a bunch of male chauvinists into girls too, but in that case they don't remember being male and they got their own spin-off: The Wotch: Cheer!.
 * In Dominic Deegan, the misogynist Stunt eats a vegetable with a random transformation power and turns female. Before being turn back to normal, he comically comments on his fear of his reduced mental capacity.
 * Not a punishment, but karmic nonetheless. Later, in the arc "The War in hell", Lady Loxo eats a soul (don't ask) and turns into a snakelike demonic creature. Apparently, she was manipulative untrustworthy-a "snake"-before she died. She tricks Bulgak into doing so, and he turns into a lumpy orc-like shape.
 * Subverted in Anti-heroes, a webcomic inspired by The Order of the Stick, Lana defeats a vampire hunter and instead of killing him, attempts to turn him and then flee. Next time we see him, it turns out he hasn't become a vampire, because he can't ever become one again, having been one before, and found the cure for it.
 * MSF High: This is Rainer's life.
 * Housepets had a character transformed into the dog "king" by a gryphon here
 * In an El Goonish Shive filler strip, Dan tries to inflict this on Justin by turning him into a girl for messing with the narration when he was tasked with it. This backfires because, since Justin is gay and desperate to be with a guy, he views it as an opportunity to "ask out every cute guy [he sees"].

Web Original

 * Whateley Universe example: Trevor James Goodkind is the White Prince, one of the heirs of the Goodkind fortune. The Goodkinds hate mutants and privately support a lot of the anti-mutant organizations worldwide. Also, he supports his Father who rails against transsexuals . No points for guessing what Trevor turns into: an intersexed mutant who can't even pass as a guy anymore.
 * Happens to the Egomaniac Hunter in the short animated film Blackface with a hint of Stable Time Loop at the end.

Western Animation
""You may have noticed that Ms. Rip Van Winkle here plans to turn me into a frog, the exact creature I was bad-mouthing earlier. Coincidence, or cleverly orchestrated device to teach me a lesson? You be the judge.""
 * Kenai from Disney's Brother Bear was turned into a bear, the very creature he was hunting obsessively.
 * Demona being made human during the daytime in Gargoyles by Puck. She ended up using it to her advantage by becoming a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
 * In a more spiritual manner, Jon Canmore becomes the Hunter, even when he tries to get the others out of it at first, he finally succumbs to anger and rage and "transforms" to John Castaway.
 * In The Emperors New School, Kuzco mentions that he hates red-eyed tree frogs. Three guesses as to what he gets turned into.


 * The 1988 Hungarian cartoon Willy the Sparrow is about a boy who's turned into a sparrow by the Sparrow Guardian after she discovers he enjoys scaring shooting sparrows for fun.
 * In an episode of South Park where Cartman starts turning everyone against kids with red hair and freckles, Stan and Kyle successfully cause him to think that he himself has become one. Cartman being Cartman, he ends up turning it around and starts preaching the superiority of people with red hair and freckles.
 * In the animated movie, Turtles Forever, Hun from the 2003 series comes into contact . He ends up using to his advantage, now being able to defeat eight turtles without a sweat.
 * "Some people just can't handle change."
 * On the SpongeBob SquarePants episode, "I Was A Teenage Gary", Spongebob asks Squidward to watch his pet snail Gary while Spongebob goes to a jellyfishing convention. Squidward says he will, and promptly blows it off, causing Gary to nearly starve to death. Squidward later gets injected with snail plasma by accident and turns into a snail.
 * When Baron Dark and Prince Lightstar broke the Lightstar Crystal it kick-started the plot of Skeleton Warriors transforming the Baron into the first of the eponymous Skeleton Warriors and granting him the power to use the darkness in peoples souls to transform them into more of his kind. Prince Lightstar and his his sister were granted the powers of energy channeling and flight, respectively. Their brother, Prince Joshua however, had sided with the Baron but when he learned of his plan he pulled a Heel Face Turn at the last moment and is caught between the two when the crystal shatters, transforming him into a half-skeletonised human with glowing eyes and a gravelled voice. This also results in his being able to walk through shadows and teleport between them but gives him a psychic link with Baron Dark.
 * There's a big transformation, reflecting the townspeople's greed, at the end of Jiri Barta's stop-motion version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
 * There's a big transformation, reflecting the townspeople's greed, at the end of Jiri Barta's stop-motion version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.