Identity theft via Hemalurgy?

[Trusk'our]

So, this is the first time I've actually asked a question here since signing up, so if I accidentally break some kind of rule, please let me know.

  Hemalurgy seems to always warp the recipient of an invested spike, particularly with stolen human attributes. Since Identity is something that can be stolen via hemalurgy, I was just wondering if you were granted someone else's Identity, would your physical body change to appear more like them?

[+Invocation]

That's very much RAFO territory every time it gets asked of Sandman, Identity is something he's very hesitant to canonize things on. It would apparently take a lot of work beyond just an Identity spike, though:

Quote

Krios (paraphrased)

If you have a form of manipulating your Identity and a form of healing, are you able to shapeshift or even evolve your body like growing wings?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

You'd have to do some real work on your Spiritweb to make that work. It'd take more work than you're implying, but the [singers] for instance are doing this. It'll take a little more work, it's not just blanking your Identity. Hemalurgy would make it very easy, but also very evil. But what you want to achieve is possible.

Stuttgart signing (May 17, 2019)

 

[Chinkoln]

I would say that it wouldn’t be an immediate warping of the features, but as the person continues to grow and mature throughout life, they will take on some attributes of the spiked person. I doubt they would change enough to be recognizable as that spiked person, but it would be noticeable changes. I think the more major adaptations would be to their personality and other more supernatural things, like access to investiture and how their Spiritweb interacts with others.

[Trusk'our]

So, based on your quote, you couldn't use this method to make HUGE changes to yourself, such as changing from a human to, say, a horse. But you could probably make moderate modifications to yourself, much as the singers do, such as changing your body's height, weight, musculature, and general shape, but no extra limbs or organs.

Okay, I have another idea on this subject; instead of using hemalurgy, use an unsealed metalmind that feruchemically grants someone else's Identity and Feruchemical healing to match yourself to their physical Identity, then stop tapping and let it stay that way for awhile. Eventually, you might start to more easily see your new changed self as your true self, and magical healing would no longer tamper with you altered form. In addition, if you didn't store your own Identity while tapping theirs, would your own features mix with theirs?

[Trusk'our]

I’ve taken some more thought to my previous theory on using Hemalurgic duralumin. If you were to Hemalurgically give yourself the Identity of someone of a different race, would you change to their race in given time? If your own Identity is not completely overwritten, but is merely entwined with the new Identity, would you become a mixed race? What if you give yourself the Identity of someone of the opposite sex? Would you change to their biological sex, or perhaps you’d be stuck in between? What if you took the Identity of an animal, like a wolf? Could you turn into a Cosmere equivalent of a werewolf? (werewolves on Scadrial, and a Scadrial version of Van Hellsing to hunt them. That should be the next sequence of books for Mistborn )