The tender image most familiar today, Chang'e dwelling serenely with a jade rabbit for company, is a comparatively softened later version of a myth whose earliest layers were harsher. In some of the oldest surviving references, including passages associated with the Han-dynasty text Huainanzi and reflected in Han-era tomb art, Chang'e's flight to the moon is treated less as a graceful ascension than as a theft followed by punishment: on reaching the moon she is transformed into a toad, an image that appears on Han silk paintings and mirror decorations of the lunar disc alongside or instead of a rabbit.
Sources from this period differ on whether her transformation is a straightforward penalty for taking the elixir without her husband's consent or a stranger, more ambiguous metamorphosis, and later commentators themselves argue over how to read the earliest fragments, since the relevant texts survive only in later quotation and paraphrase rather than a single continuous original account. Over the centuries that followed, and especially by the time the story reached the form most people know today, the toad receded and the gentler rabbit, already associated with the moon through a separate strand of lore, came to dominate popular retellings and the Mid-Autumn Festival's imagery, turning a tale that once carried a note of moral punishment into one centered on loneliness, longing and quiet companionship. Both images, toad and rabbit, can still be found side by side in older art and in scholarship, a reminder that Chang'e's story reached its familiar, sympathetic modern shape only gradually.