Photo Morph - "The Dangers of Shapeshifting" (Jaguar TF) (Patreon)

Physical shapeshifting is one of the most dangerous of the magical artforms, and typically it is ill-advised for anyone to practice it on their own. Aside from the myriad of incomplete and deadly half-forms, accidental inversions resulting in transforming backwards, or unintended inanimacy due to unfocused will or unknown subconscious desires and impulses, students of this practice are taught the most important first principle of shapeshifting: the mind is a plaything of body. The only being capable of shapeshifting oneself is oneself through one's own directed will. Physical shapeshifting practitioners who study this formally learn that one single part of the individual's brain must remain human, the knowledge and desire to change back. The reason why you don't hear about many self-taught shapeshifters (or really many physical shapeshifting practitioners at all) is primarily because the first time trying it is usually the last.

It is dangerous to experiment with physical shapeshifting as an inexperienced practitioner---even more so if the individual has the natural gift and triggers it without even realizing it as the individual in the above image has. The student must study how to change back while human so that the pattern and echo of that memory on the spirit is present in the new form's mind. The shapeshifter keeps that small part of them unchanged by maintaining an ever-so-slight thread to their original form, keeping that pattern in existence, usually a tiny percentage of their human mind in the shapeshift that remembers how and why to change themselves back. Essentially one must keep the trained knowledge of how to shapeshift, lest one forget it. In the case of this hapless victim, they didn't have any prior training. When they've finished turning into a jaguar, they will be one in every way and not know that they have ever been anything else. They will never be able to turn back, and instead will live a jaguar's life exactly as they would have if born that way since they have forgotten the necessary element of memory of whatever they accidentally did to trigger a transformation. In fact, they essentially were born as a jaguar. No one could turn them back. The former human pattern was forgotten and replaced with jaguar. They're more than just "stuck in the form of a jaguar, unable to change back." To the universe, they have always been a jaguar.

The reason for this has to do with some complicated relations between how to bend physical substance around a shift of essence, and the "living memory" that leaves and rejoins the land once it is disconnected from the life-thread, but there is no need to go into those details since its nothing that will be relevant to the jaguar once they are finished metamorphosing and patterning to the life of a jaguar, their mind matched to their evolutionary niche.