This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
fleb: The examples don't match the description. This trope is about stealing someone's outer layer and wearing it as a disguise over your real body. We'd need another trope for clones and robot-clones, and maybe a third one for shapeshifters.
- * The T-1000 from Terminator might qualify. It doesn't skin the police officer or other humans it impersonates, but does kill them and mimic their appearance.
** Cromartie pulls a similar schtick in The Sarah Connor Chronicles; growing a new synthetic skin, undergoing plastic surgery to resemble an out-of-work actor, then killing him and assuming his identity.
** Also happened with the Terminatrix of the third movie.* This is at least Older Than Print; fairies were said to operate this way in English folklore, kidnapping babies and replacing them with lookalikes of their own kind known as "changelings".** The roleplaying game Changeling: the Lost plays on this. The changelings of the title are actually the humans who were abducted (at any age, not just as babies) and taken away to Faerie; fetches, beings crafted from random detritus and animated by The Fair Folk, take their place, believing themselves to be the person who was replaced.* In John Dies At The End
, Korrok's clones kill/replace the originals and proceed to go about their lives with all the memories of the original. For added authenticity, although the clones can be remote-controlled in emergencies, the replacements themselves lack alien memories and have no idea they're not the originals. This eventually leads to a Tomato in the Mirror situation.
* The premise of Imposter is that look-alike copies of key people can be sent after targets, exploding violently once contact is made. The hero is accused of being one such imposter.
fleb: And this one's confusing. If the picture's misleading in that no one ever gets skinned, it's not an example. If they remove the skin, and then study it somehow to help them change appearance, not sure what to call that.
- * The trope picture comes from the game Snatcher, where this was the main modus operandi of the Snatchers. It's a little misleading, though, because the victim's skin isn't actually used - the robot modifies its shape using a system of slats and builds artificial skin and muscle tissue over itself over a few weeks in a People Jar.
Andy Waltfeld: Where DID the picture go, actually? Right when someone finally gets the Snatcher page up and running, poof - it's gone. And who cares how inaccurate it was to the trope? We can easily tweak the description, like so:
- * The trope picture comes from the Sega CD game Snatcher, despite its oversimplification of the titular robots' preferred method of impersonating humans: grafting the replica skin and muscle tissue of their quarry over an exoskeleton in a People Jar.
Fly: I proposed this trope, and I meant it to cover robots killing victims and merely imitating their appearance - not just stealing the outer layer, although that's one way of doing it. Reinstating the examples cut by fleb. Also tweaking the write-up to make it clearer that shapeshifting is legit. AND reinstating the picture.
...Sorry, fleb.
fleb: No problem, thanks for fixing it. Dunno why the old description was like that.
