Transformation and Metamorphosis in Popular Culture

This book investigates the cultural significance of transformation and metamorphosis in popular media across diverse global and historical contexts. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship, it examines how transformation is represented in a wide range of media-from poetry and animation to horror, games, and music videos.

Sophia Staite is Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy and Gender Studies) at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and a past fellow of the Global Sentimentality Project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Germany). The leading English-language scholar of influential Japanese superhero franchise Kamen Rider, their work appears in Children's Literature in Education, The International Journal of Disney Studies, Jeunesse, and The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies (2025).

List of Contributors From Metamorphosis to Mutation: An Introduction Section I: Animated Transformations 1. Tex Affects: Transformation and Embodied Perception 2. Honor and Power: Transforming She-Ra 3. Embracing Transformation in AI-Generated Music Videos Section II: More Than Human Metamorphosis 4. Human/Animal Transformation as Environmental Communication in Animated Children's Films 5. Feline Embodiment and Human-Animal Relations in A Whisker Away 6. Sword Spirits and Sword Transformations: Encountering Object-beings Beyond Anthropomorphism Section III: Societal Transformations 7. Transition without Transformation: Space Warrior and the Ambiguity of Justice in Martial Law Taiwan 8. A Simulation Powered by Repression: Gendered and Political Transformations in The Matrix Resurrections 9. Wings of Courage: Magical Boys, Metamorphosis and Social Transformation in Toei Animation's Pretty Cure Series Section IV: Musical Metamorphosis 10. Hearing Transformation: How Music Defines Digimon's Digivolution 11. Undertale as Transformative Media 12. Metal-Morphosis: Physical, Genre and Scene Transformation in Metal Music Section V: Transforming Identities 13. Changing Vocal Gender Stereotypes in Latin American Mass Media: The case of a beauty pageant growler 14. Bearly Beloved: Halsin's Queerness and Self-Identity in Baldur's Gate 3 15. Pornography as Metamorphosis: The Problematics of the kairaku-ochi Scenes in Japanese ero-manga and Shind- Eru's Subversion in Henshin Section VI: Horror Morphing 16. The Horror of Transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses 17. Metamorphosis, Body Horror, and Female Empowerment in Lovecraft Country: Navigating Identity through Transformation 18. Love in the Time of Mycelium: Fungus as Liberator in Women's Fiction Logan - Generic Mutancy in the X-Verse Index