Baleful Polymorph/Playing With

Basic Trope: A character is transformed into a form far less useful than his/her default one.
 * Straight: During her encounter with Rowena, the hermit swamp's witch, Alice is transformed into a little rabbit by one of her spells.
 * Exaggerated: Rowena, tired of the arrogant and decadent conduct of the citizens that live on the realm adjacent to her swamp, one day decides to pay them a visit and turns everyone into humble forest's critters like mice, squirrels, canaries and gophers.
 * Rowena turns Alice into a microbe.
 * Downplayed: Instead of a harmless creature, Rowena accidentally (or not?) transforms Alice into something that's actually quite useful, like a wolf, an eagle, a kangaroo or even a frikkin bear!
 * Justified:
 * Rowena transformed Alice into a humble rabbit in order to give a lesson. (Maybe she was being an arrogant jerk or cruel to the little fellas) She expects that she might learn something after walking a mile on the shoes... Erh, I mean, bare paws of a little beast.
 * Rowena has been contracted by one of Alice's adversaries to capture her alive. And since she's a capable warrior, (or even magic user on her own right) it would be easier to transport her and keep her under control if she's in a less threatening form.
 * Rowena has been put to test by a villain, and to prove her loyalty she has to kill Alice. But instead of doing so, she pulls a bluff and transforms her into a flea, which to the untrained eye (and non-magical-savy) looks like a disintegration spell. She plans to revert Alice back to her original form once the danger is gone.
 * Inverted:
 * Rowena, the hidden forest's druid, can transform herself into an animal form at will. It can be either a single form, (maybe her animal totem-spirit) or into any sort of animal!
 * Rowena transforms Alice into a powerful creature (like a dragon, a kranken, a phoenix or just some kind of massive & unstoppable juggernaut) in order to help her fighting a powerful adversary.
 * Subverted: Since Rowena's magic isn't that powerful, the spell she used to turn Alice into a rabbit only managed to give her a pair of floppy, fuzzy ears and a puffy tail.
 * Double Subverted: ...But wait, no! It turned to be a delayed reaction. After she goes to sleep that night, Alice wakes up fully transformed into a little rabbit!
 * Parodied: Rowena transforms Alice and her entire adventuring party into cute little squirrels. However, the small critters turn to be not that harmless and start a vicious coordinated attack on her! Bonus Points for Pike wielding a meat-cleaver as if it were his trusty Dragonslayer and Shiro delivering rising uppercuts into the witch's jaw.
 * Zig Zagged: The hex casted on Alice keeps transforming her back and forth between rabbit and human at totally random intervals. Needless to say, this turns into an extremely annoying (and even dangerous) situation because she ends up transforming into a little critter when she is about to deliver a finishing upon a dangerous opponent, and her lack of "magical clothes" means whenever she changes backs into human, she has to sneak around while in the buff, looking for something to cover herself, in order to save her modesty.
 * Averted: Rowena just disintegrates Alice on the spot in order to not deal again with her.
 * Enforced: The actress portraying Alice in Chronicles of Troperia as to take a time off the series. So, the writers decide to turn her character into a cat to justify her absence without ditching the character on some convoluted way. They plan to transform her back once she returns.
 * Lampshaded: "I told you you would be singing when I was finished with you... Because, you're a canary now, so you can't speak with human words. Get it?"
 * Invoked: Rowena has always been an Actual Pacifist since her witch apprentice days, therefor incinerating / freezing / vaporizing her adversaries is an unacceptable option to her. So, she specialized herself in transformation spells in order to deal with foes to reckless to treat with diplomacy.
 * Exploited: After she was transformed into a mouse by Rowena's spell, Alice decides to put this situation to good use. Taking advantage of her new form she infiltrates into the (otherwise) impenetrable Bloodhaven Fortress. She scouts the base throughly, looking for weak spots and useful passages, in order to deliver this information to her allies so they can attack and destroy the cursed place.
 * Defied: Since she doesn't want to lose her opposable thumbs to some weird mumbo-jumbo, Alice starts learning some anti-magic defensive maneuvers, either to nullify this kind of spells or to redirect them back their caster.
 * Discussed: ???
 * Conversed: ???
 * Plotted A Good Waste: After discovering about the existence of this kind of transformation spells, Alice starts suspecting that Bianca, the unusually intelligent white dove, that has tagged along her since her adventure's begging might actually be a cursed person. After looking out for Rowena, the hermit white witch, they manage to transform Bianca back to her human form; she turns to be the lost Barrier Maiden that Alice was ordered to find since the very start of her journey!
 * Played For Laughs: Alice's companions arrive too late after her lost duel with Rowena, and when they find her abandoned clothes and gear on the floor they "accurately" deduct that she has decided to go for a casual naked stroll through the forest, and now they want to find her before she does something stupid / dangerous. (And because they secretly want to some eye-candy) Never mind the fact that a really annoyed rabbit-Alice is right them beside them and has written, all over the floor, in BIG bold letters exactly what happened!
 * Played For Drama: Alice forceful transformation couldn't have arrived at a worst time, because it was on her wedding's day. Now her absence has been attributed to last-second-regret, with the groom heartbroken and devastated by it. She, as a rabbit, tries to explain him what happened, but neither he nor anyone can understand her noises and treat her as just an annoying pest. And the worst part is that Rowena seems to have just vanished from the face of Earth, and without a way to communicate herself with humans, there's a great chance that Alice might remain stuck as a little critter for the rest of her life!

Back to Baleful Polymorph