You could argue that Barty Jr's skill with the Imperius would aid him in overcoming a foe's sense of self impeding the transfiguration, too.

 

Well, you don't have to be good at opponent transfiguration for it be a potent weapon. if you try to transfigure someone's skin into sulfuric acid, even if you only get, say, 10% of it, and only manage a dilute solution, that person is still going to have a bad time.

That said, I think the best evidence that human transfiguration isn't a potent weapon in a duel, at least in canon, is that... no one uses it. They're fighting a war for their lives. If human transfiguration was more viable than curses, why not use it?

 

Transfiguration requires the caster to focus and envision the outcome far more than thy would for, say, a Severing Charm. I think it would put you at a disadvantage in a duel if you are trying to imagine a grand piano in the place of your opponent rather than focusing on what your opponent is actually doing.

 

There's no evidence in canon that transfiguration involves visualisation.

I'm personally not a fan of the idea. It seems so shallow - just imagining the way something looks. Transfiguration goes far deeper than appearances. And we know that you can use transfiguration to make things you don't fully understand, because teenagers with no education in biology or chemistry are able to create living animals. So it's not that you have to visualise the whole thing, including its interior workings.

 

From what McGonagall says in DH, I would say Transfiguration of any type is based in more conceptual/existential principles.

This is why, for instance, you have so many seemingly cute, almost counter-intuitive Transfigurations based on verbal, intellectual, or metaphorical relationships in canon (pincushion to porcupine, needle to matchstick, etc.), and it also explains comments like "into nonbeing, which is everything" in response to "where do vanished things go?"

It seems like you have to constantly be refining your understanding of concepts like transience, mutual contingency, and so on. Anything that helps you either identify plausible (or superimpose artificial) relationships between substances or objects; anything to help you wrap your mind, not around any specific or strictly physical relationship, but rather, around conceptual or artistic relationships, as a way of facilitating the state of mind that allows wizards to bend the laws of materiality (as opposed to working within them) to transition from one substance to another that may seem entirely unrelated.

The idea would be that while physical reality is rigid and scientific, magical phenomena such as transfigurations are facilitated not by encyclopedic knowledge of the mundane, but by mastery of artistic principles like metaphor, which allow the mind the bridge what are normally impossibly large gaps between various physical substances and manifestations.

tl;dr: Transfiguration seems to be the utilization of artistic and existential metaphors to reinforce the notion of matter as no more than differing arrangements of vacuum and elementary particles.

 

I largely agree that success in transfiguration revolves around understanding of the concepts involved, I don't think I would put it quite subjectively as you. I would say that there's an established body of transfiguration concepts which are precise and complex, and it's these concepts you have to understand to pull off transfiguration, not a subjective mental gymnastics where you just have to fool yourself into thinking the objects are similar enough to transform into each other.

 

I wouldn't say fool yourself, since it would be something, in my imagination of it, more akin to a superimposition of a more conceptual ("truer," or more magical, if you will) understanding of reality (as the interaction of mutually contingent, impermanent, and ultimately identical and interchangeable particles and forces) over a more rigid, strictly analytical understanding of reality (as a collection of fundamentally distinct and/or unrelated objects and organisms).

 

that kinda goes to the 'hypnotising yourself to make yourself believe that it's true' nasu-school of magic.

on another note, if partial transf is viable in battle, why does it have to be visible?

can you just, i dunno, transf a capillary vaein in the brain into dust or something?

voila!! instant aneurism, almost instant death. undetectable unless deep scan is done.

 

Reminds me of Scotty explaining a transporter used to beam onto a ship in warp: "The notion of transwarp beaming is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse." He's moving his whole body just by breathing and you're supposedly taking the time to pinpoint the distal vessel of your preference in order to cause a blockage; something that is not instantaneously disabling, by the way.

In the end, I see it as a conflict between the caster and his target, over who controls the target's personal reality. Transfiguration in combat is best used to unbalance the enemy and cut off their movements, as the landscape is much less resistant to change than a wizard.

 

Too much effort, in my opinion. I've always thought that curses, hexes, and jinxes were far easier to do than charms or transfiguration, just because it requires intent more than focus, so when you're in a duel, it's probably much more difficult to have the level of focus needed to do a human transfiguration.

Skilled duelists could probably transfigure inanimate objects no problem because that's easier than human transfiguration, so why go through the effort of human transfiguration when you can just turn a chair into an animal and have it attack your opponent?

 

Canon has too few duels involving Transfiguration, and most of the ones who actually used it were the masters, like Dumbledore and McGonagall. It's shown that transfiguring humans is highly complex and how many people can muster the sheer concentration and knowledge to use it while duelling? Dumbledore is a possibility, but the only time he duelled seriously against a human was Voldemort, someone who he couldn't afford the slightest slip of focus. Better go for simpler but powerful and fast spells.

Transfiguration's, hell, most of HP magic's mechanics are headache inducing. I totally agree that Transfiguration involves a deep understanding of concepts, and it actually explains why it's so hard for most of students. Really, how many people can think beyond what they see, what they think is the real world? Most people only develop the capability of complex abstract thinking at around twelve yrs old, and just like the average person usually can't make heads and tails of the more complicated sciences, very few will be able to perform the most complex Transfiguration.

There are other things in the books, such as the Gamp's Law and Harry's first use of the Sectumsempra that bugged me very much. Why food would be any different of any other transfigurations? And all Harry knew of the Sectumsempra was that it would be cast against enemies. He knew the spell's incantation and it's intent, nothing more. Hell, it seemed that Snape had somehow written a cheatcode in the universe, anyone who wanted to harm an enemy, had magic, and said the word would get the result he envisioned (that situation repeats itself over and over in the books). I could be wrong, but these things may suggest that either magic has a degree of sentience (I think Dresden Files had something similar) or there is some higher being pulling the strings.

 

How is it hypnotism if the concepts are based in reality? What about the ideas I mentioned is it that you think is untrue?

 

That's not what he meant, he just compared it with nasuverse mechanics. In that universe, the magi use self hypnosis to reach a proper mindset for using magic, sort of fooling themselves that they can do those 'miracles'.

 

Ah, I think I see.

Just to clarify, I don't mean, like, some kind of hokey thing where you convince yourself that a porcupine = a pincushion.

It's more like . . . When you look at an object in the physical world, say for instance, an apple. What you see is a red, somewhat firm object that rolls about if nudged, seemingly independent of any other object, etc.

But some other part of you looks at that object, that looks like an obloid red fruit, and knows that it is actually an arrangement of various organic compounds that are all atoms in different patterns of the same elementary particles and that much of it is actually vacuum. You know that these particles are only allowed to assume such patterns as a consequence of the various interactions between the numerous energies involved (strong/weak nuclear force, etc).

You know that it is not wholly or truly independent (gravity, etc), and you know that its color is merely the product of a biochemical process taking place in your eyes and brain that has to do with the reflection of photons, etc.

You know that while its form appears stable in time, it is always and gradually changing, always in flux, always under some pressure or acted upon by some force or process, somewhere, external or internal. Even glass does not retain its shape on a long enough timeline, and sort of . . . melts, I think, in terms of shape, IIRC. Even the substances that seem hardest, like diamonds, can be broken under enough force, and will change their form without external pressures if subject to great enough periods of time.

Our whole perception of reality, and indeed, reality itself from what we know, for all that it appears to be a collection of unrelated and independent objects and substances, is actually an immensely interdependent interaction of properties that are mutable not only in terms of their materiality, but in space and over time as well.

And not only that, but because we know that matter can ultimately be equated to energy (thanks, Einstein), and that energy is neither created nor destroyed, we can also conceptualize matter, which is constantly changing/degrading by a series of processes into secondary, tertiary, and subsequent other forms, as being in something of an equilibrium with the energies that govern and mediate its existence and potential transformation.

Hence, where do vanished things go? "Into nonbeing, which is to say, everything," replied Professor McGonagall.

We don't see what we know to be true from experimentation and so on, at first glance. We look at something and have to imagine it on a molecular level, or how it would change over time, etc. Much of what something is, we have to understand in abstract, metaphorical, or even purely linguistic terms, which is why it's so interesting to me that Transfiguration makes use of metaphorical/artistic/linguistic relationships.

This would open up the subject in a lot of new ways, and shed a lot of light on what occurs in canon. We are told that magic exists as a way of superseding physical reality, and in this way, Transfiguration would just be a way of nudging along a process that already exists, a way of recognizing that everything is already related in some way to everything else, or that it can be if you try hard enough, and that it is already constantly in flux.

And it would still explain things like, why some Transfigurations are harder than others, how it could be its own substantial field of study, and so forth. Rather than chucking the academic process out the window in favor of self-hypnotism, it would foster a study of the various relationships, scientific, artistic, or otherwise, between substances and forces in the natural world. You could find new ways, or invent your own, sure, if you were Dumbledore or some equivalent (also, Alchemy), but I think the primary corpus of the subject would have more to do with exploiting the plethora of connections that already exist. Which would also explain the laws.

EDIT: Also, this is why I think that, while conjured items are not permanent, by JKR's admission, they need not be short-lived. Really, everything fades in time. Perhaps a skilled enough wizard's conjurations simply degrade at the same rate as an actual version of that object would.

 

You put a lot of thought on this huh? The using of metaphorical certainly makes sense, the 'real' world is very counter-intuitive and while we do understand it in some level, picturing it in our conscious minds...well, it's not easy to achieve that level of abstraction at all. Would those metaphors be sort of shortcuts then? It makes me curious how far can transfiguration be taken. But something is bugging me, what if Draco the amazing ferret followed his new instincts and...well...copulated with a female? In a world where Hagrid was possible, I am not so sure of the result.
Edit: Why do humans that are transfigured in animals regress to animal-like cognitive skills? Is that because the caster himself thinks of animals as incapable of complex thought?

 

I think the reason we don't see people being transfigured left and right has more to do with the difficulty of doing it, rather than how it could be blocked. Transfiguration seems to be an immensely difficult branch of magic, and human transfiguration a particularly advanced part of it. I doubt the number of people capable of transfiguring a human and doing it during a duel are particularly high and probably only includes the very most talented people. Even among those, I don't see them using the skill very often because it's probably just not necessary. Unless they're fighting someone they really have to pull out all the stops on, it's probably easier and more reliable to use less advanced techniques.

When it comes to someone protecting themselves from transfiguration, I think it has to do with strength and skill with magic as well as mental preparedness. Like any other offensive magic, it would stand to reason that a wizard would need to be aware that it was coming for them, to be able to defend against it. But I don't think that itself would be enough to stop it. Assuming there isn't just some general shielding or counter spell, I think the wizard being attacked would have have to actively vie with the attacker for control of their body. Their ability to do so would be dependent on their strength and skill with the magical arts, and transfiguration in general. This too is why I think a large part of why human transfiguration doesn't seem to be a popular method of attack. In order for a wizard to be able to transfigure another with any reliability, they'd have to be advanced enough that it just wouldn't be necessary.

 

I wonder if an animagus would be able to self transform after being transfigured.... such as if we took james potter, transfigured him into a pig, and then he changed into a stag.... but if he changed back would he have broken the transfiguration and be James Potter, or would he still be James porker? Since you dont need a wand for it... based on the fact that sirius turned into a dog.... also I like to think this is possible so I can read all those "My lifes in danger and i wanna train super hard, but im gonna learn to be an angimagus which is meh at fighting" fics.

 

I'm fairly sure that it's entirely possible to use human transfiguration in battle, but unless it's some sort of exhibition match then I'd say using standard wizard combat would be orders for magnitude easier and more efficient. The spell still has to connect, and even if we assume transfiguration is invisible, there are plenty of other non-visible spells that would be quicker and more suitable. We also know shockingly little about battle tactics -_ for example, it could be common to have some kind of anti transfiguration ward around yourself in battle, which makes it impossible to transfigure you without your consent.

Anyway, full human transfiguration is a Master level skill, and there's simply more effective ways of fighting with magic, both lethal and non, that it's unlikely to be a common tactic. Could Dumbledore do it? Probably. But since we haven't seen him do so, there's probably a reason for it.

 

I would agree that we don't see too much human transfiguration used as a means of combat, other than what Barty does to Malfoy, and, as others have said, this is likely due to a number of factors such as difficulty, the possibility of shielding oneself from enemy transfigurations (I see no reason why The Shield Charm wouldn't function here as it would anywhere else), etc.

I do feel, however, that it would be useful to point out that nonhuman transfiguration is still a huge part of the duels we see between skilled wizards. They may not be doing it to each other, but both Voldemort and Dumbledore, and to a lesser extent, McGonagall and Snape, used a considerable amount of transfiguration to duel each other.

In the Albus v. Tom situation, we had Albus animating the statues left and right, and Voldemort nullifying fire by transfiguring it into a snake (another seemingly largely conceptual/metaphorical transfiguration, seemingly based on a similarity of shape or perhaps movement). With Snape v. Minerva, wasn't there a swarm of knives that was transfigured into a cloud?

The answer would seem to be that while the regular type of Transfiguration is essential to world manipulation in conflicts between wizards of any substantial skill, human transfiguration is not really attempted, even by masters. I would say that the most likely reason is the one I mentioned earlier. If someone can just cast a shield charm, what's the point?

You'd either have to be so much more badass than someone, or get such a huge drop on them, that nothing they tried could prevent you. I think someone already mentioned Percy's use of it, and I would think Moody's is the only other one.

And, ironically, as mad as McGonagall was that Barty did that to Malfoy, she had pretty much already threatened to do the same to some first years (Ron and Harry). Sure, she was kidding then, I think, but I also wouldn't be surprised if she'd actually turned a shitty kid into a frog once or twice.

tl;dr: regular transfiguration = combat; human transfiguration = punishment to be handed down by someone who totally outclasses their victim.

 

What you guys have to remember about Transfiguration is that each transfiguration is unique. Meaning that for every single possible transformation, there is a unique wand movement and spell.

For example, transfiguring a Hedgehog into a pincushion would have a different wand movement and incantation compared to transfiguring a Cat into a pincushion or even a Pincushion into Hedgehog.

The combination of spell that you may want to use in battle may not even exist.