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.
