This chapter of the Bestiary has about run its course with landlocked shapeshifters. The majority of them are written rather than filmed—except werewolves, of course. And yet, just as I was headed out the virtual door, a brand-new film hit the streaming universe, and not one of the shapes its shifter takes is a wolf.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a pretty standard D&D campaign, with fan-favorite actors (Chris Pine! Hugh Grant! Michelle Rodriguez! Bradley Cooper! Brand-new red-hot star Regé-Jean Page!), all of whom are having a grand time. It regrets nothing.
Like shifter romances, this film is all about the fun. It dives deep into its source material, backs it up with headlong plotting and dialogue, and gives us exactly what we’ve come for. We may be able to see the twists coming well before the characters do, but we’re there for them—and if you’ve ever played D&D, it’s kind of special to see it all on the big screen (well, the TV screen in my case, but you know what I mean), live and in not too awful CGI.
This is the Shapeshifters chapter, so I won’t go into the monsters and the magical creatures, except to salute the dragons (including the portly Themberchaud), because, hey, dragons. And the Displacer Beast. I do like a giant panther/venus flytrap. Honorable mention, with bonus blurry-screen syndrome, to the cat-person whose kitten is rescued by our noble Paladin.
The horses are more than a little bit motorcycle-y—really, they’re just standing around outside a couple of deserted yurts, all saddled and with bedrolls attached? And where do they go while our team of adventurers is running around adventuring? How do they manage to just pop up when it’s time go zooming off again?
But that’s part of the game. You don’t have time to worry about horse feed and stabling when you’re busy collecting plot coupons and saving the world.
I’m here for the shifter, or as she’s called, the Wild Shape. Her name is Doric, she’s a Tiefling Druid, and she is a fine example of her species. In her original form, she’s young, small, and female-presenting. She plots, plans, fights, and delivers rapid-fire banter with the best of them.
She can turn into anything she wants, at any time, singly or in sequence. She can be a worm, a fly, a mouse, a snake, a hawk, a deer, a bear. When we first see her, she’s a huge black horse, which morphs into an even larger and more terrifying snowy owlbear.
The owlbear is the best, though I give props to the deer for fast thinking and weaponized sarcasm. It’s evident that Doric keeps her intelligence through all her transformations, and that she can see and hear and better yet remember everything that happens around her. She is detectable by sorcery, which complicates things, but she stays ahead of it with speed and smarts. When she is caught, she seizes every tiny advantage and makes the best of it.
She’s not the protagonist of the film, but she is indispensable. She’s the team’s best spy and one of its strongest fighters. Once she joins the campaign, she’s a key to its success.
We’ve seen a lot of cursed shifters, and shifters whose transformations are more liability than asset. Doric is a nice antidote to all of those. Shapechanging is her superpower, and she rocks it.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
Owl bear! Owl bear!
Are there movies/novels where such a high-powered shifter is the main character? It seems like a hard thing for an author to wrangle without the strictures of D&D.
The chronicles of mavin manyshaped springs to mind and to a lesser extent the true game by Sheri S Tepper as being shifter based. Presumably the third one as well which I think is Jinian Footseer, but I have never got hold of it
I’m surprised, but kind of have to respect, that there’s not one joke in here about how she would’ve run out of wildshape uses or how she must be like level 35. (Cuz that’s one of the most glaring deviations from the rules that stands out to anyone who’s played a ton of D&D.)
@3 Under fifth edition rules, the owlbear would not technically be allowed (though plenty of DMs would allow it), and it would take her being 20th level to do what we see with purely Wild Shape. I’ve seen a number of people who suggest she may have also been using Polymorph spells for some of the forms (since she certainly wasn’t casting any other kind of spells).
The playtest material for the next edition of D&D *would* allow the owlbear, incidentally.
She felt a bit overpowered, to be honest? I’m not a D&D player but I play other RPGs and I feel that kind of shapeshifting would be a campaign-breaker. No effort required, no consequences, no limits to the number of shifts or the size of the beast. The other characters had limits – even the paladin (who was great) was limited by his sense of his own duty.
Why, after all, do we need a drunk potato-obsessed barbarian to hit things very hard, when we have a shapeshifter who can turn into any number of ferocious monsters? Do we need a spy/scout/thief when she can just turn into a fly? Do we need a tracker when she can turn into a bloodhound or an eagle?
Bit like the Avengers – the memorable line that Matt Fraction gave Hawkeye about “I’m in a team with an immortal, a man in a ten billion dollar suit, and an actual Norse god, and I have a stick and a string from the Palaeolithic”. Or indeed like “Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taCa8qBgIFY
It’s sci-fi rather than fantasy, but Horza, the protagonist of the seminal novel in Iain M. Banks The Culture Series ‘Consider Phlebas’, is of the shape-shifting species Changers. He only ever shifts his appearance rather than his actual form however, so maybe not a true shapeshifter.
Sophia Lillis. She plays Doric. I’ll put her name here, since you managed to write an entire article about her character while mentioning every other actor in the movie by name except her.
Do better.
@2 and @6 Thank you!
@5 Like the horses, this is a “this film is purely for fun, don’t look too closely” situation.
@7 I named four fan-favorite actors in a parenthetical remark. There are more than four actors in the film.
@5 A campaign and group like the one in the movie (which I’d love to play in) would be more about fun than skilled and efficient play. So even if Doric is playing fast and loose with the limits of shapechanging, it could still be a good game if everyone’s on board with those kind of shenanigans. The “players” in the movie seem to be more interested in clever plans than in colouring inside the lines.
I think unlimited shifting is more of a problem with novel writing where the lack of limits makes raising tension difficult and the range of options allows for too many solutions.
@9 Exactly. You have to just go with it.
As a novelist, I would have to figure out how to impose limits on the infinite-shifting power. There is enough going on in the film that while she can be anything she needs to be, she can’t be everywhere at once. She can be one bee, or one mouse, but it doesn’t look as if she can replicate herself. She can’t be a hive or a swarm. So that’s a limit. She’s restricted to one iteration of a form. She might be uncapturable herself, but she can’t be in more than one place, or one form, at a time. She can’t become an army to save everybody at once.