Shifting Shapes, Shifting Selves: The Cultural Afterlife of the Shapeshifter

Since time immemorial, shapeshifting has been used as a potent metaphor for hybridity, fluid identity and transformation. The shapeshifter as a supernatural creature, grounded in folklore and mythology, is a common presence in Japanese anime and manga. It serves as a site for negotiating issues of gender, sexuality, and self-hood within contemporary readership globally. This dissertation examines how the characters in Kamisama Hajimemashita and Inuyasha battle their own conscious, otherization, and traditional stereotypes, against Human-Yokai relations. Shapeshifting here transcends the physical metamorphosis and dives beyond what is external; it is not a mere visual spectacle in these manga and anime, rather it acts as a narrative device which drives personal and emotional evolution. This study also investigates how digital fandoms actively reframe and expand shapeshifting narratives through fan-fiction, fan-arts, and fan-theories. By integrating folklore studies, this dissertation traces the continuities between traditional myths and their contemporary revisions, illustrating how shapeshifting mirrors real-life struggle, while simultaneously providing the much desired sense of escapism from the same. Through close readings of the two shoujo texts, this research explores transformation, both physical and symbolic, as a mode of resistance, fantasy, and self-reinvention within anime and manga; this has been possible through the characters of Tomoe (Kamisama Hajimemashita) and Inuyasha (Inuyasha).