Ravana looms so large over the rakshasa class that it is easy to mistake the type for a synonym of villainy alone, but the wider tradition is considerably more varied than its most famous member. Ravana himself, ten headed and twenty armed in the standard iconography, is a rakshasa king whose abduction of Sita from her forest exile sets the entire plot of the Ramayana in motion, and his brothers Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana round out a household that is not uniformly monstrous: Vibhishana, alone among his siblings, counsels Ravana to return Sita and, refused, defects to Rama's side entirely, ending the war as an ally rather than an enemy. The Mahabharata gives the class an even more sympathetic turn through the story of Hidimba and her brother Hidimbasura. The brother, true to type, hunts humans for food and sends his sister to lure the Pandavas into an ambush; Hidimba instead falls in love with Bhima on sight, warns him of the plot, and after Bhima kills her brother in the resulting fight, the two marry. Their son Ghatotkacha grows up carrying his mother's rakshasa nature and his father's Pandava loyalty at once, and fights and dies for the Pandava side at the climactic battle of Kurukshetra, a rakshasa hero rather than a rakshasa villain by the story's own telling. What unites Ravana's court and Hidimba's family despite their opposite moral roles is the same set of underlying traits: formidable strength, an association with wild and forested places at the edge of settled land, and above all the capacity to change shape, which narrative uses equally to explain a rakshasa's menace, when a beautiful disguise lures a victim to their death, and its capacity for real transformation, when Hidimba changes her own intentions as completely as she could change her form.