Beast Boy has become a mass of small creatures before also he has a very amazing healing factor. All shifters do really.

>>78437903

That's fine, but we can ignore it for the sake of simplifying the situation.

As for the healing factor, I noticed that tends to the trend. It makes sense considering your body is so "malleable". But even with the healing factor, if he takes some bad damage, where does it go? If you pull off a few legs from the centipede, I know there is still some delay, right? So the damage has to go somewhere for a bit when he switched back.

Depends on the story.

Animorphs automatically heal when transforming.

>>78437947

Is it healing both ways? Human to animal and then animal to human? Because assuming you can make it out of any situation with some consciousness, that's really powerful.

>>78437903
Could they all regrow into multiple Beast Boys?

>So the damage has to go somewhere for a bit when he switched back.
Not really.

Think it depends on what exactly is shifting.

Let's say that shapeshifters are made of goo. That goo has a specific quantity that can stretch or squeeze depending on the object. The amount that is lost is consistent in the case of amputation.

This also implies that a shapeshifter could repair injuries by redirecting the loss elsewhere. Ex. Lose an arm? Just take enough goo to make a new arm, at the expense of your physical height or thickness.

Beast Boy is limited to taking on only animal forms, so odds are the damage is equal to whatever he perceives it to be.
Higher level shape shifters don't haven to worry about this since they could just alter their bodies to heal themselves.
However, even if they can regrow an arm, the pain from losing it is still there.

>>78437965
Yeah. Characters have used it to save themselves from mortal wounds multiple times, though transformation requires time and concentration.

>>78437978
>>78437986
>>78438003
Hmm well damn. That's pretty powerful then as long as you can keep yourself alive to do it, you can take some extensive damage and keep going.

>>78437979
That was the other thing I forgot to add to the starting post. The whole goo transformation. I had the concept for things that transform like that in that losing mass and they just have to eat and wait it out to regrow, so I was fine with that concept. I felt like other shapeshifter's didn't quite operate on that principal, but it feels like applying this idea to them makes more sense.

>>78437978
I didn't really like this idea, but then I realised that in order for Beast Boy to be "exclusive" (that is, you couldn't just remove a sample of him and make a new Beast Boy, like you could with a plant) you would have to have a central facet that is exclusively Beast Boy. Obviously for us that would be a brain, but the issue of shapeshifting and the mechanisms around brain size are interesting.

>>78438045
You could easily replace goo with atoms if you wanna pretend to be scientific.

Beast Boy can lose and gain mass at will, seemingly like magic. If I must give a scientific excuse though I would say he can grow cells at a fast rate and when turning smaller than his base form he convert it to energy. So a lost limb in either form doesn't matter as he can create cells to replace them though tissue damage and such might be a pain in the ass to heal and stay bruise compare to healthy cells.

That was my take on it anyway. Just guessing here. I only watched the Teen Titans cartoon and that one movie. I don't know what the word of god have to say about it on the comics or anything.

Once pointing out though that Beast Boy (on the cartoon anyway) could only become things of equal or smaller size, never bigger (or was it vice versa? It was when he was with his old team) but once he got that idea out of his head he lost that limitation. I assume he is only limited to what he think he is limited to. He just too scare to turn his skin steel or whatever or maybe he legit can't. No telling but once again I never got into the comics so maybe I am just shitting out of my month and it been proven one way or another already at this point.

>>78438172
>Beast Boy can lose and gain mass at will, seemingly like magic. If I must give a scientific excuse though I would say he can grow cells at a fast rate and when turning smaller than his base form he convert it to energy
Going back to Animorphs, the explanation they used was they shrinking puts your extra mass into another dimension, and growing takes mass from that dimension.

I think the Hulk's growth has a similar explanation.

>>78438093
>obviously for us that would be a brain

but if he becomes multiple animals (which animal man does) how could they all function if they didnt all have brains?

he could shapeshift multiple brains and i guess hed have to trust them to do what he wants them to or something

im talking out my ass im sorry

>>78438172
Remember when he transformed into an alien creature when they went to Starfire's arranged marriage? He had no idea he could do that beforehand

>>78438093
>>78438172


Hm this kind of shifts the ideas in my head quite a bit. I was expecting to hear some explanation/concept on how damage gets transferred into their human form, and how losing legs as a centipede meant like losing some skin or something, but finding out that shapeshifters have that inherent second ability that include the ability to heal/manipulate their matter that well sort of takes care of any possible problems that situations like that would incur on the writers. Pretty smart.

That does give me some curiosity though if they didn't have that secondary ability to heal, how damage would be transferred from those unanalogous forms, but I can leave that for you guys if you want to discuss. Personally I kind of go back to that "goo" like principal. You only have so much mass, so losing some maybe takes it away in their human form? Maybe part of a finger or something? Not sure.

>>78438238
For multiple organisms I assumed that there was one "true" Beast Boy and the others were just sort of like floating appendages.

Just wanted to say, I am more than happy to discuss variations on shapeshifter writing and abilities, but since the main issue seems to of come to a consensus, I wanted to say thanks to all those that responded so quickly to clear up this issue. I appreciate it. I hope you all had a good Christmas.

>>78438496
OP is adorable.

They generally get around how broken the healing is by making it more difficult for them to transform when injured, usually with a "it's harder to focus" excuse. Other times, they go with a "transforming too much tires them out" to stop them from doing it constantly.

>>78438663
he is

>>78438663
>>78438761

Thank you.

>>78438756
Right. Though I suppose with that being so subjective, it allows the writers an opportunity to bend it in either direction in order to take a character out of harm or make the situation more suspenseful.

>>78437965

Yes, but transforming back and forth takes a minute or two. It's a powerful ability involving dimensional fuckery to circumvent conservation of mass/energy. Also they can't just shapeshift into anything, they need to have touched it while in human form first.

>>78438905

I just started skimming google for things on animorphs and reading an overview of their powers. I like how they go into detail about the mechanics behind the transformation rather than do some hand waving. I think it's one of the most explained variations of shapeshifting that I have seen, though to be fair I haven't seen many, but it does cover itself well. It even covers the question I have, saying something about since the transformation comes from DNA, damage/changes from surgeries don't transfer through form. They even gave some time caps and consequences to give some boundaries to the power. Same thing with the mass that you talked about. Z-Space? Mass sits there/comes from there when shifting into small/bigger forms.

>>78437857
he's rebuilding his entire body every time. he heals every wound immediately
but that would also mean he'd have to eat that body's worth of food, give or take.

>>78438221
yeah that's bullshit. it's just dumb comics shit they say when people complain about conservation of mass
it's just a massive shift in metabolism, that's all. Imagine being a super slow organism, you'd watch a plant grow and it would look like timelapse, and you'd be like "where's that extra mass coming from?"
it's coming from energy which comes from the sun and from food.
energy changes into matter. nevermind that this is happening at an unrealistically rapid rate, the important thing with comic book science is that it be PLAUSIBLE
what's more plausible, a metabolism that recreates an organism the same way nature does, with energy and cell replication? or magic mass shifting dimensions