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Baaaaaaaaaa humbug
I am a clone, I am not alone...
If you had ever seen us you'd rejoice in your uniqueness
And consider every weakness something special of your own — Robert Calvert (Hawkwind), "Spirit of the Age"
"If we outlaw cloning, then only outlaws will have clones." — Sifl, The Sifl and Olly Show
I think I'm a clone now
There's always two of me just a-hangin' around
I think I'm a clone now
'Cause every pair of genes is a hand-me-down
— Weird Al Yankovic, "I Think I'm A Clone Now"
In the real world, genetic clones are actually fairly common. When created from the same single cell at fertilization, they're known as "identical twins." When created through asexual reproduction, (in some plants, bugs, fish, sharks and even birds) they are parthenogenetic offspring.
More rare, but increasing, are the recently pioneered artificially created biological clones, like Dolly the Sheep.
None of this has anything to do with Speculative Fiction, where clones are totally different, and being a clone absolutely sucks. It's enough to make a clone sing the blues.
Though real artificial clones have to start at conception and go through childhood all over again, and can even have phenotypes that vary from their parent, Speculative Fiction clones are like perfect meta-xerox copies of the cloned person. They are exactly like the target at the moment of cloning, (possibly excused by age acceleration) with all their forebearers' memories and skills, although their personalities can develop from there.
As a result, many clones brood about how they're not "real," just hollow imitations of the original. The clones tend to deal with this rather badly. Some make desperate attempts to act different. Others go mad and try to murder the original to take their place. (Emphasis on "try" — hardly any succeed.) If the clone is a main character, they will spend the whole show angsting about how they're the Tomato In The Mirror. Occasionally they will have powers just like the Artificial Human. This often just ups their feelings of alienation, though.
That's for the lucky clones who are created properly. In many shows, cloning is an imprecise science, so there is a high probability that any clone will turn out to be an Evil Twin — almost as high as the probability of creating an evil computer (Because everyone knows that Science Is Bad). Other unlucky clones will just have birth defects or be increasingly inexact duplicates.
And that's for the clones who are just unlucky. The really unlucky clones have malevolent creators who can make custom clones, sometimes in bulk — which are exact meta-xerox copies of the original except that they have fanatical loyalty to the creators. Or the innate skills of a ninja assassin. Or superpowers. Or just add some alien DNA to create Half Human Hybrids, or even a different set of reproductive organs. Or all five at once — and those clones will still look, act, and think exactly like the original in every other way. You can expect all that tinkeing to make something Go Horribly Wrong, too. A clone like this is always considered highly expendable by their creator, except in rare cases where said Evilutionary Biologist has developed an attachment to it.
Because of all this (or possibly as a cause of all this), clones get very little respect. Heroes who hesitate at killing intelligent life might still kill their evil clone. In the question of What Measure Is A Non Human, most clones rank somewhere between the Big Creepy Crawlies and the Mecha Mooks. Interestingly, on the question of What Measure Is A Non Unique the only clone that matters is the last one... provided the original is dead.
This assumes the clone ever had a mind of its own, of course. Sometimes a clone is an Empty Shell without the original's Soul, and exists only so that the creator can overwrite their mind and personality onto it in case of accident. In this case, it's more like coming Back From The Dead — although if the clone has a mind of its own at the start, this is yet another reason its life sucks. And let's not debate how Our Souls Are Different, in which case clones (especially of the deceased) will be soulless abominations before god and nature.
Some clones aren't biological clones at all — they're robot doubles, or copies created by the good old transporter. These have more reason to be exact xerox copies — but they get even less respect.
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Straight Examples
Anime and Manga
- Zero, a character from the Tenchi Muyo OVA was made into a kind of half-clone of Ryoko. This did not quite go as the creator planned, however, and Hilarity Ensues.
- Gundam SEED had direct cloning be highly illegal, in contrast to simple genetic modification, though it didn't stop a powerful politician from cloning himself several times, believing the clones would be superior successors to his biological son. At least three have been seen, and of those one became a manipulative nihilist that attempted to wipe out the human race, and another became a pawn of the secret Big Bad of the sequel. All of them apparently suffer from birth defects that prematurely accelerate their aging and cause intense pain if not treated with medication.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its sequels have Fate Testarossa. Near the end of the first season, she's a Tomato In The Mirror when Precia reveals that she's a clone; Fate, though treated as an equal by her new employers, who know she's a clone, and her classmates, who don't, once briefly wonders if she even counts as a person once during A's. In later seasons she's surrounded by people who care for her individually, though, and this is quickly refuted. In StrikerS, she adopts children similar to her to be raised in a loving environment so that they will not have to ask the same question.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Rei Ayanami is a tragic cocktail of Half Human Hybrid, Raised By Wolves, and Easy Amnesia. Then again, pretty much everybody is a tragic cocktail of at least three different tropes, clone or no.
- Pokémon. The first movie features an angry, bitter clone (who is an actual separate Pokémon — the original that he was cloned from is a lot cuter) which makes a lot more from the trainers' Pokémon. He returns in a TV special, though he's mellowed down.
- What about Aitwo? She considers herself to be like the original Ai, though she's never angsted about being a clone.
- Rah Xephon has Isshiki Makoto, who, in both flashbacks and his final breakdown, is shown to take the fact that he's an inferior clone...rather hard, to say the least. Indeed, he almost directly causes humanity to lose the Human-Mu war out of a need to prove that he was more than an imperfect copy of his "father"
- In a truly staggering example of the clone inferiority complex, after the villain of first season of Slayers, Rezo the Red Priest, makes a Heroic Sacrifice and dies on the apocalyptic magics of the protagonists to allow the destruction of the demon he was host to, the clone created by his spurned former lover becomes obsessed with convincing the same protagonists to use the exact same potentially world-ending spell on him so that, in the unlikely event of his survival, he can claim to have achieved something the original had not. The dubiousness of trying to one-up a self-sacrificing gesture by surviving your own is apparently lost on the mind of a megalomaniac.
- Turns up in XXX Holic, where it is eventually revealed that Watanuki is a time-travel duplicate of "Syaoran", and was so depressed about being a clone that his suicidal thoughts and desires turned on his Weirdness Magnetness- he's only being haunted because he wants the ghosts and demons to kill him. Keep in mind that the character in question had Laser Guided Amnesia the entire time. That's right, he was so emo about being a clone that it attracted ghosts, even though he didn't remember that he was emo about it, or that he was a time travel duplicate in the first place.
- The contestants in Gantz were all clones created at the time of death of their originals, with all memories intact. Sometimes Gantz makes mistakes, so sometimes the 'dead' originals got better.
- They're not really cloned though, they're copied using some form of transporter technology.
- Tell that to the Kurono Reika just made for herself.
- Although she's not technically a clone, in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, Sloth tries to kill the Elric brothers to prove to herself that she isn't their mother.
Comics
- During the Marvel Universe Civil War, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, and Hank Pym manufacture a programmable clone of Thor from genetic material collected when Iron Man first met him. He mercilessly kills C List Fodder Black Goliath, somewhat exceeding his programming, and ends up messily disposed of by one of Thor's old friends, Hercules.
- When the real Thor comes back, he is not happy at what has transpired.
- In Fred Perry's Gold Digger, Brianna, the third Digger sister, is actually a clone/Biological Mash Up of Gina and Brittany. After her accidental creation, she quickly goes nuts and tries to eliminate her "sisters" (due to a curse that was the reason for the process that created her), though they eventually manage to talk her down. Even then, for several issues afterwards, Brianna has something of an identity crisis. By "several issues", about fifty or so, on and off.
- The Spider-Man comic book, and its infamous "Clone Saga" (which ran long enough to include every single thing mentioned above). It was definitely a Dork Age, but the named, important clone — Ben Reilly — was well liked by some fans. For years, continuity completely failed to mention him — the effect that losing his "brother" would have had on Peter was totally skipped. More recent comics occasionally will mention his name, and some fans hope that One More Day might at least mean that Ben still lives.
- Poor, poor Madelyne Pryor.
- The X Men comics are eaten up with this trope. Besides Madelyne (the clone of Jean Grey), there was Stryfe (Cable's clone - that's right, the clone of the son of a clone) and Joseph (Magneto's clone). All came to bad ends.
- There is also X-23, a Tyke Bomb Opposite Sex Clone of Wolverine. Her psychological issues could fill a whole storyline themselves. And that's in the X Men Evolution original. In the comics it gets even worse: after escaping from the lab she was created in (and being triggered to kill her 'mother' along the way), then is held and interrogated by SHIELD. When she gets away from them, she ends up as a streetwalker (specializing in cutting and/or being cut by her clients) for a time.
- X-23, however, discarded the 'I'm not real!' aspect of this trope approximately an issue after first feeling a twinge of it. While X-Force were slaughtering numerous clones of the Marauders, and justifying it as 'just clones'. Her friends are jerks.
- Marika Utika of Twin Spica. Not only is human cloning illegal by international treaty, the whole Replacement Goldfish status doesn't help.
- The Mauler Twins of Invincible are a mutated mad scientist and his clone. They simply cannot agree on which was the original, and consider this important because he created the clone to be his servant.
- Eventually, a sequence of events occurs which guarantees the original- whichever he may have been- is now dead. The Twins miss a single beat... And then commence arguing over which is the lower-generation clone!
- They are also, coincidentally, blue clones.
- And then things get a bit more insane from that point on. The Maulers have always been obsessed with not noticing any differences between them; the cloning process overloads the senses so it's never quite actually clear what is what or who is who or so on...
- In the classic Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter run, the bad guys have an army of brainwashed clones of the hero, providing them with useful cannon fodder and him with a desire to kill every last clone to reclaim his individuality. Somewhat creepily, after his death his friends attempt to hunt down and kill all the remaining clones—with the apparent approval of Batman, one of the most stringent advocates of Thou Shalt Not Kill in The DCU.
- It gets worse, since at least two clones have since turned out alive and heroic - one in the mid-1970s Secret Society of Supervillains early issues, and the other one much more recently in Kurt Busiek´s Power Company.
- In The Warlord, Deimos creates a clone of Morgan's son Joshua, ages it to adulthood, and sends it to attack Morgan, leading Morgan to believe he has killed his own son.
- In Mister Blank, the Mad Scientist Doctor Ixcel creates a superpowered clone of the main character, Sam Smith. Both Sam and the clone insist they're the original, but otherwise get along quite well.
- Lobo from The DCU. For some time, he automatically cloned. Cut him deep, the blood makes another Lobo. This was eventually nuetralized by the Magnificent Bastard, Vril Dox, except for one clone who manages to slip off. Said clone improves his brain, hunts down Lobo and...both fall into bunker which is bombed silly. One crawls out and goes on about how he's not going to reveal who lived. Lobo tends to be aware of the Fourth Wall, a seeming explanation for why he is tight-lipped.
- Jaime Madrox, the Multiple Man from the Marvel Universe. For some time, his clones were cool with being who they are. Then things started getting weird. One turns traitor and joins with the long-term X-Men enemy Mister Sinister (no, really, that's his name). Another dies of the Legacy Virus. Jaime starts going around the bend because he's just too much people for one man. Later, he gets it together but his clones don't. All the thousands of aspects, idiotic or not, in the human mind tend to get manifested in his clones. He can and has created a clone to free him from a prison cell but it's possible the clone will be his sadness and be too depressed to move. Another is unpredictable and tries to kill an old ally. It is reabsorbed but indicates that it could pop out in any future clones and go try to kill again.
- Transmetropolitan uses braindead clones for rather... specific purposes.
- In Witch (the comic) the 'astral drops' were initially just magical clones of the protagonists, created to stand in for them while they're off saving both worlds, and apparently fine with that lot in life. However, after Will creates a flawed clone, they start gradually developing their own personalities, eventually rebelling against their creators. Who, in an aversion of What Measure Is A Non Human, actually decide to set them free.
Films
- The Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I. pronounced, for plot reasons, that clones could only exist for a single day before some meta-phlebotinum law of the space-time continuum destroyed them. This was filmed after Dolly the Sheep demonstrated the utter banality of clone life.
- To be fair it didn't seem so much as cloning as actually resurrecting the dead for a day.
- What banality? Dolly died at age 6 from a retrovirus that was common in the flock she was from and is also common in sheep that live mostly in doors, which Dolly had to for security reasons.
- Occurs in Alien Resurrection. The main character is Ripley 8, a clone of the original Ellen Ripley who in Alien 3 commited suicide in order to prevent the birth of an Alien queen. About midway through the film, she discovers the fates of Ripleys 1-7: Cloning someone who fell hundreds of feet into a lake of molten rock is an inexact science, as it were.
- The Island starts off in an enclosed habitat somewhere on an apparently ruined and frozen Earth. People who live in the habitat can't get out because of a virus that'd kill them instantly, and are kept happy and given something to look forward to with the "lottery", which will eventually grant a lucky few a place on the Island, the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Things quickly start to go downhill when the main character finds a live insect from the outside. To make a long story short, it turns out the habitat is fake, all the people living within it are clones, the frozen Earth is a hologram, and those who win the Lottery are actually brought in the real world and sliced up to get organs, body parts and children. The whole thing is a giant body part backup bank.
- This entire premise is ripped off from the late '70s b-movie Parts: The Clonus Horror.
- Leastaways, DreamWorks was willing to make an out-of-court settlement with Clonus' makers.
- In Species 2, Eve, a clone made from the half-alien hybrid Sil, is kept in a female-only environment and studied for weaknesses so that if another incident occurs like it did in the first movie, the attacker can be destroyed efficiently. Things go badly for all concerned.
- This is also the central plot point of Star Trek: Nemesis, where Picard discovers that the Romulans had developed a clone of him for use in a Zany Scheme that was later abandoned. Even though said clone made it through the first twenty years of his life having had no contact with the original Picard, he still develops a massive inferiority complex and constantly justifies his actions as being "exactly" what Picard would have done if he had been raised in the same situation, rather than accept that he is his own person.
- Played with rather disturbingly in The Prestige: a magician has a machine built that creates an exact duplicate, memories and all, in order to perform an amazing "teleportation" trick. The duplicate, essentially being the same person, would go on to complete the show, while the original falls through a secret trap door and drowns and has his corpse secretly disposed of every night. The magician essentially clones himself and then commits suicide for the sake of his magic.
Literature
- The clones in William Sleator's The Duplicate really have it rough. First off they get less and less sane the farther from the original they are, and even the sanest ones still develop black marks on their hands and die abruptly. And since they're not convinced they are copies (they're physically and mentally identical to the original until the marks appear), this all feels monstrously unfair.
- In Xenocide, one of the sequels to Ender's Game, Ender enters a dimension that allows you to create anything that you can hold perfectly in your mind. Ender unintentionally creates copies of his siblings. The copies eventually deduce that they aren't clones of the original siblings per se, but manifestations from Ender's mind: the personification of Ender's innocence and kindness in his sister, and of his ambition and ruthlessness in his brother. This causes both copies to angst endlessly until they are re-integrated by Ender's death and the copy-sister's loss of her body.
- In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels, The Thrawn Trilogy, an insane Jedi named Joruus C'baoth clones Luke Skywalker from the hand he left behind in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke shows no compassion towards his clone Luuke at all, and Mara's compulsion/curse to kill Luke is satisfied by killing Luuke, so she doesn't differentiate between them either. Now granted, C'baoth may have replaced parts of Luuke's brain, but none of the protagonists ever treat him as a sentient being. Of course, Zahn also subverts the trope by having C'baoth, one of the main antagonists, be a clone. His insanity is a side effect of faulty cloning procedures, but he is treated by the other characters as a person in his right.
- A point of contention to be made here: "Luuke" had been utterly mindscrewed by Joruus (who in turn was implied to have been altered by Palpatine, but the 2007 sequel novel Outbound Flight indicated that he was faulty materials to begin with) to the point where he was a meatpuppet, who might not have survived without C'baoth pulling his strings; a similarly altered person (an Imperial general a few dozen pages prior) had died within a few hours when C'baoth was forced to leave; the only reason there is a "might" in the above sentence is that C'baoth finished the procedure on Luuke, and the general was left halfway done. With all this, there's a good question if Luuke still counts as sentient.
- Star Wars plays with this trope in all possible ways:
- Thrawn's human based clones are treated vastly different, depending on characters; some (Imperial die-hards) flat out hate them, and are very discriminatory; this was initially indicated as being a side-effect of the Imperial "humans first" doctrine, putting them in a second-class status to the "properly-generated" humans, but was then retconned with the Clone Wars.
- The majority of the Imperial Army regards the above clones as mere tools. A moff is absolutely horrified to find that the major he was working with is a clone.
- Others, on both sides to boot, see no difference between them and a normal human (Luke and Mara both exhibit this opinion in the Thrawn duology, also written by Zahn), taking this logic to its natural conclusion when Luke decides to not kill a not yet mature clone of Grand Admiral Thrawn on the grounds that it hadn't done anything wrong and Leia and Han encounter several clones of Soontir Fel, inserted as sleeper agents on an agrarian planet. They're both uneasy around them, but the clones just want to be left alone - they don't have any more loyalty to the Empire. While the Solos are uneasy, they try to treat Fel's clones normally.
Carib: "You're [Leia] a sophisticated woman, a politician and diplomat, fully accustomed to dealing with the whole spectrum of sentient beings. And you're good at it. Yet you, too, feel uncomfortable in our presence. Admit it."
- A species in the Expanded Universe decided that they reached the absolute peak of their species, and so decided to freeze their entire civilization within this point of absolute perfection; every member of that species has been cloned, again and again and again, and they entered a static phase that lasted 5000 years. Also, they kept evidence by numbering the clones.
- Meanwhile, the Clone Wars novels make it very clear just how much life sucks for the clone troopers — they have no pay, no leave, no votes, if they're too badly injured to be capable of battle afterwards, they tend to get euthanised, and deserters are executed. Oh, and did we mention the age acceleration of growing old twice as fast, or faster under the stresses of battle?
- At least the current Star Wars CGI series has the heroes treat the clones as individual sentient beings. If this troper recalls correctly, this is a very large and welcome surprise to the clones.
- Cloned stormtroopers are indoctrinated to the point where it seems they have trouble figuring things out, and 622
 , at least, has no idea if his loyalty is from free will.
- The X Wing Series had the clone of Ysanne Isard, who believed herself to be the original and looked the same except for a nasty scar and no memory of how she got it. The real Isard, in an Enemy Mine/prelude to betrayal, told the Rogues to go kill her, and they had no objection to what amounted to assassination, despite generally being shown as unwilling to kill outside of battle. Said clone is subsequently called "the Isard clone" by the narration, and is taunted by the Rogues into realizing that she is a clone before they kill her.
- A bit of supplementary material for the Dark Forces Saga reveals that the prototypes for dark troopers - robotic stormtroopers - were aging veterans from the Clone Wars with, in some cases, seventy percent or more of their bodies replaced by cybernetics. The ones who made it into the field were very effective. But no one asked them first, and a lot of them couldn't take being forcibly made into cyborgs and committed suicide. Considering the Fantastic Racism directed towards clones and cyborgs...
- In the Ray Bradbury short story "Marionettes, Inc.", a man makes a clone of himself to stand in for him at home while he goes away. However, the clone decides that he likes the original man's life and doesn't want to be stored away in a box in the basement. The solution? He betrays his owner by locking HIM in the box forever while he (the clone) lives the life of the owner, his family completely unaware of the switch.
- Actually, if you couldn't tell by the title, it was a robot, not a clone. Albeit a very sophisticated robot that eventually develops sentience, but still one that if you place your head to the chest you can hear a clock ticking instead of a heart beating.
- Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go depicts the kids growing up in a special boarding school, carefully told and not told about the total lack of any real future and any choice in their life as they will all go on to be carers for donors and then donors themselves (they seem to be universal donors). Strangely none of them ever try to run away or escape their fate.
- Speaking of clones who get it rough, hardly anyone could compare with Honorverse genetic slaves. Not only are they mass-produced to be nothing more than property (a common slur from their Mesan masters is cattle), they are commonly raised "conditioned" for their service, which often included various violent "adjustments" ranging from simple beatings to gang-rape. At the ripe old age of six upwards.
- This practice is not widely approved of within the setting, and owning slaves- genetic or otherwise- is extremely illegal in advanced societies. But there are still more than enough customers in the galaxy to keep the Mesans in business.
- Unfortunately, the (overwhelmingly) largest and most powerful civilization in the galaxy, the Solarian League, refuses to shut down slaving outright, due to a great deal of political influence held by Mesa.
- The replacement clones from Jackson's Whole, in Lois Mc Master Bujold's Vorkosigan series hardly have anything better, as they are raised to be not just slaves, but to literally replace the aging bodies of rich and powerful through brain transplants. For where their original brains go, take a wild guess. On the other hands, elsewhere in the Galaxy cloning, while unpopular, is a somewhat tolerated and well-regulated practice, and clones enjoy all the basic rights.
- And in Brothers in Arms, we learn that a clone was made from Miles Vorkosiganyears ago, when the original was just six years old, in a long-running Xanatos Gambit to substitute the clone for the original once the clone is adult enough that the six-year age difference won't matter. The "artificial growth and memory implantation" parts of this trope are averted: the clone goes through normal growth, and receives regular briefings on the original's activities so that his impersonation will be realistic. The original eventually defeats the plot by treating the clone as a real person with an identity (and a name) of his own, something the clone's creators never did, triggering the clone's Heel Face Turn.
- In fact, the "artificial growth" part isn't just averted - it's inverted. The original has a chronic condition acquired during fetal development that has stunted his growth and left his bones extremely brittle. The conspirators who created his clone found, to their frustration, that he was growing up taller and stronger than the original, and subjected him to repeated radical surgeries to correct the 'problem' - then later, as the original had his brittle bones surgically replaced by artificial ones, the clone was put through the same surgery each time, to keep him 'up to date'. Even long after the clone's Heel Face Turn, he was left suffering a deep-seated aversion to any form of surgical procedure.
- Similarly, in Alfred Slote's Clone Catcher clones are walking organ banks for the rich (and since there's no magic aging, they have a good long time to know that), and the guy who hunts them down if they run is the book's protagonist. Did I mention it's a kids' book? (In fairness, pretty much every character in the book comes to condemn these practices, but it's still an awfully creepy premise.)
- In the Deathstalker novels by Simon R. Green, we have Evangeline Shreck (cloned before the series starts to replace the Evangeline who was killed by her father when she wouldn't let him rape her), and the clone of High Lord Dram. And that's not to mention the clones (and sometimes esper clones) that the empire enslaves for labor.
- In the beginning of the Dune series, the science of creating the gholas was held in distaste by most of the civilized empire as being something like necromancy, but essentially it was cloning reproductions from bodies. After it was learned that gholas could 'awaken' and regain their memory and personality, then later awaken all genetic memory, it was incorporated into the Bene Gesserit eugenics plans, to produce Kwisatz Haderachs on demand.
- To be more clear on the subject, gholas aren't clones. Up until the third book in the series, gholas are the actual bodies of the deceased. They're just placed into axlotl tanks as quickly a possible, which essentially regrows the dead tissue and brain cells to the point that the body is brought back to life. The body has no memories of its former life, until the Bene Tleilax engineer a [1] that would result in the ghola having their psyche exposed to something their former life would vehemently oppose that it shocks their mind into reawakening. The later novels have gholas grown from simple cells, rather than the original body, so they are true clones... But are known as gholas because the term has evolved over time to encompass a far more complicated definition. Oh, and the Bene Gesserit are paranoid of creating another Kwisatz Haderach to the point that they commonly kill anyone with the potential to become one and have diverted their breeding program, which originally was intended to produce a Kwisatz Haderach, towards the goal of just plain improved humanity. There is never another Kwisatz Haderach after Leto II.
- In The Goodness Gene, the main protagonist discovers he is a a clone of Hitler, created solely to lead a dictatorship in the Dominion of the Americas; he—understandably—goes into Heroic BSOD mode.
- In the Skullduggery Pleasant books by Derek Landy, protagonist and budding sorceress Valkyrie Cain has an enchanted mirror from which she can extract the reflection. She sends the reflection out to attend school and suchlike while she fights magical crime as the sidekick of Skullduggery Pleasant, magician-detective and animated skeleton (bad war wounds). At the end of each day, she puts the reflection back in the mirror and absorbs the memories it accumulated. The reflection acts just like her when out on its own, but only because that's its job. When face to face with Valkyrie, it is clearly a soulless image with no will of its own. (Or is it? Skullduggery warns her that she uses that reflection way too much. It may be developing a life of its own.)
Live Action TV
- The rebooted Battlestar Galactica goes to town with this one in the case of Cylon Number Eight (aka Sharon "Boomer" Valerii). While the other Eights are fairly well-adjusted to being Cylons, Boomer is a sleeper agent and can't understand the crazy things that are happening to her. Like waking up in a water tank, with no idea of how she got there, or discovering multiple stolen explosives among her personal possessions. Interesting case because all the identical Cylons are equally clones of each other.
- Doctor Who: "The Invisible Enemy" featured miniaturized clones of the Doctor and Leela, though K-9 explains that they aren't "really" clones, but a sort of phlebotinum-photocopy. Surprisingly, they gave no sign of having any trouble with their status as duplicates specifically created for a Fantastic Voyage, nor with the fact that their predicted lifespan was something on the order of twenty minutes.
- Subverted with Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter. Well, she's not actually a clone so much as someone with a Truly Single Parent. She does get told she's "not real" by Donna, and very quickly calls her on it.
- Played straight with Slime!Martha in The Sontaran Strategy, though.
- Doctor 10.5 in Journey’s End. As a Biological Mashup he has a human lifespan with no regenerations. Not to mention that the original Doctor is angry at him for his Shooting The Dog actions. On the other hand, (no pun intended) he does finally get to snog Billie Piper, so this may be subverted.
- Sabrina The Teenage Witch: A sentient, mentally identical clone of Salem is casually destroyed magically by Hilda in the episode 'Thin Ice'; in the much earlier episode 'A Halloween Story' a magic spell creates a copy, but this double is essentially mindless and soon absorbed back into its creator.
- In Stargate Atlantis, the clone of a previously killed off character joins the team. He looks exactly like the old character, has the same personalities, and has most of his memories. The catch? Without the regular injection of a special chemical, he'll eventually die because his cloned tissue can't regenerate fast enough to counter natural cell damage. Because of this, he was frozen in stasis until a cure could be found.
- However, after they note that it is not actually the real Beckett (and in a bit of fridge logic, even if it were, it would mean that a clone who was for all intents and purposes the same person had died, just as sad, really), they pretty much immediately forget this. Despite the way they react to some copies of the team earlier that very season (although these copies were made by Replicators, they were completely human themselves).
- Beckett was helped by the fact his "original" was already dead, whereas the Replicator-made clones of Weir, McKay, Ronon, and Sheppard had to deal with the fact their originals were alive, well, and staring them in the face (except for Weir).
- Stargate characters seem to have two default reactions to duplicates: (A) it's the same person in another body, or (B) it's a disposable fake. They never seem to consider (C) it's an identical twin sibling, which is what real clones are.
- Star Trek has probably provided more examples of the Cloning Blues than the entire rest of television, fiction, and comic books put together.
- Namely, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Jem'Hadar and Vorta fit the "really unlucky clones" described above to a T, including innate combat or tactical prowess and the inbred belief that their creators are gods.
- Mocked in one instance where Worf has the chance to kill one of his captors. He kills the one who is cloned all the time and the Cardassians say he should have killed someone not as disposable.
- Star Trek The Next Generation had one odd aversion, however: on discovering a transporter-cloned version of Riker who was trapped on a planet for many years, the new and old version have an equal claim as the "original" and seem to avoid most of these issues. "Tom" Riker continues his career, then appears in Star Trek Deep Space Nine having left Starfleet to join the Maquis.
- In V: The Series, a clone of Star Child Elizabeth is created by the invaders, that looks exactly like the original, but doesn't talk, and tends to eat humans. In the end, she's killed by an invader when she rushes him in order to save the life of the original Elizabeth and her boyfriend, Kyle.
- An episode of Farscape featured a villain who could make perfect copies of people, and lampshaded the common mistake by being mildly offended when someone referred to it as cloning. Very unusually, the "twin" of John Crichton survived the episode and neither of them tried to kill each other, though for the sake of sanity the crew split into two groups, each with a copy. Also unusually, neither one was clearly established as the copy (the scientist claimed both were "equal and original"), although savvy viewers probably guessed that the one who finally got together with Aeryn was the doomed one..
- While the copy of Crichton that ended up on Talyn may have been the doomed one, he was still not outed as a clone, a point which was driven home in his final message to the other John when they played Rock,Paper, Scissors one last time.
- To add some context, at the end of the initial episode, the two Johns play Rock, Paper, Scissors in an attempt to pick who was real and who was the clone (or something to that effect). However, both kept picking the same thing resulting in a long string of ties. This troper doesn't remember the specifics of the final message, but the essential message was that the point was irrelevant as they both were real and both individuals that had developed in different ways.
Music
- The Who's song "905" features a clone, who is presumably the 905th iteration of the line, lamenting his inability to do anything original whatsoever.
- Alice Cooper's "Clones (We're All)" (6 has similar problems to the Who's 905).
- The Weird Al Yankovic song "I Think I'm a Clone Now," mentioned above.
- My Clone Sleeps Alone by Pat Benatar. Her clone lives in a sterile sexless future.
Tabletop Games
- The original Dungeons & Dragons included a spell called "Clone". It made a magical duplicate of someone, and when they became aware of each other's existence, each was filled with an unrelenting desire to kill the other. As of Third Edition, the "Clone" spell now just creates a lifeless copy of the user's body. It needs to be preserved somehow or it will rot (a relatively simple spell takes care of that), but if it is still intact when the original dies, they reincarnate in that body (though the clone does not gain any knowledge — i.e. experience or abilities — that the original gained since the clone was created). However a similar effect is preserved in the expensive item "Mirror of Opposition". It creates a temporary clone whose only purpose is to kill the original.
- In Paranoia, all PC's are clones, and on death are replaced with duplicate clones with the character's memories and personality. They have much reason to get the blues, repeated cloning can lead to personality quirks and full-blown psychoses. Oh, and being a mutant is treason — this leads to the situation of mutants executed by other clones for treason when discovered, but their replacement clone instantly arriving can't be executed again until it's proven to also be a mutant. Due to inherent problems with the cloning system, they may come back with a different mutation!
Video Games
- In the Advance Wars series, Black Hole has a tendency to enjoy making clones of your commanding officers and pitting them against you towards the endgame. The clones have all the same statistical points of their counterparts, but their personalities are seriously lacking; they regularly proclaim, in an almost morose and self-defeating way, that their only purpose is to take orders and fight. Afterwards they're invariably destroyed.
- Days Of Ruin provides a different version, in which Big Bad Mad Scientist Caulder/Stolos is a Truly Single Parent and views his clone children as expendable minions and test subjects, as he can always replace them if they die. Isabella/Catleia turns out to be a 'backup' of one of the original four, who was killed in one of his experiments. And yes, she whines about 'not being real', as does Cyrus. Sigh.
- It gets better: Even Caulder/Stolos is a clone of the original, and it seems highly likely that the side-effects of cloning are partly responsible for his insanity.
- The Riku replica in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, lives a sad existence, constantly having his memories written and rewritten. There's a funny one pager at the end of the manga that jokes about just how sad it is.
- Even worse: Xion from 358/2 Days.
- When you think about, almost all of the Unknowns have some form of sadness or regret (despite being unable to have emotion) at being only "an empty shell without a heart". However, this may not include them in this trope.
- The King Of Fighters series loves clones so much that there have been at least 5 or so clones of Kyo Kusanagi running around at one point (Kyo Kusanagi's 1 & 2, K', Krizalid, K9999, and Kusanagi). There was also the Opposite Sex Clone Kula, and one of the bosses, Zero, had a clone who was the boss in the game preceding him. The series is inconsistent about the use of the term, however, as K' is actually a normal human modified to have Kyo's powers and there is argument over whether Kula is something similiar.
- The Metal Gear Solid series loves clones. Liquid Snake feels inferior to his 'brother' Solid Snake because Solid was supposedly given all the dominant 'soldier genes' and Liquid got all of the recessive ones from their clone-source (they mean alleles, but hey: turns out it was the other way around, showing genes aren't the only thing that determine your fate). While MGS-verse clones still have to grow up from scratch, once they hit about thirty they start undergoing rapidly accelerated aging, which seems to work at the speed the character designers dictate.
- Ac!d-verse Snake gets a tomato in the face when it's revealed he is a clone of Solid Snake.
- In Street Fighter, depending on which plot twist you're in, BBEG M. Bison (known as Vega in Japan) has an army of clone soldiers, including Juni, Juli and Cammy. However, the term "clone" is used inconsistently and it's been stated that Juni and Juli are girls kidnapped from Germany.
- Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 had Wodan Ymir, a W Number android, based both physically and mentally on Sanger Zonvolt who died in the Shadow Mirror universe. Outside the fourth wall, the character was created so that the game could use Sanger's incarnation in Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden incarnation as the 'Sword of Magus' without it feeling wrong based on his characterisation and development in the previous Original Generation game.
Also, Wodan actually resolves his Cloning Blues at the conclusion of the Earth Cradle arc,
and not only is it Badass, it's actually pretty damn touching. Hell, even Sanger, the original, wept Manly Tears at Wodan's death as a true warrior fighting for his cause.
Western Animation
- The DNA Delivery clones employed by Bedlam in Get Ed are apparently so faulty that being hit hard enough (either by a board to the head or getting tossed out of a moving hovercraft at high speed) causes them to disolve into a puddle of goo (that can momentarily reform before splatting again) that, according to Loogie, tastes minty.
- Gargoyles has Thailog, who is something of a subversion of this trope (and thus covered below). But later, he and Demona work together to recover the other Manhattan Clan's DNA and then hand them over to Dr. Sevarius to make their own clones; Malibu (a clone of Brooklyn), Brentwood (clone of Lexington), Hollywood (clone of Broadway) and Burbank (clone of Hudson). They lack in smarts, as they were programmed only to "obey Thailog". Without Demona's knowledge, Thailog also creates a clone from DNA merged between Demona and Elisa Maza named "Delilah" to act as his new partner to replace Demona; needless to say, Demona is not very happy when she finds this out. After Thailog and Demona are defeated, the clones join the Labyrinth Clan, but in the comics they temporarily betray their clan to ally with Thailog. After Delilah helps them recover their senses, all but Brentwood return to the Labyrinth Clan (with Brentwood prefering Thailog because "Thailog smart").
- In the ABC continuation, the clones turn to stone apparently permanently because of a malfunction in their cloned DNA. But, this being the ABC continuation, it didn't happen.
- Fairly Odd Parents: Timmy has done this many times. He once remarked about it:
Norm the Genie: Well, there you go! So I whipped this little baby up to cover for you with them. Wanda: The ankles are filled with marshmallow! Cosmo: Ah, oh, oh no! It broke! Norm: And get ya out of school! (gongs a clone) Tada! Timmy: A clone? Been there, done that.
- Scourge of Transformers has the Sweeps, physical clones who are supposedly his huntsmen. However, they all have different voices and apparently different personalities—as wary as Scourge is, the Sweeps are even worse, and he occasionally has to ask Cyclonus for help ordering them around.
- Apparently, Cyclonus was also supposed to have a clone "armada". One clone shows up in the movie when he is first created, but it is never seen again. This is the subject of much fan discussion.
Parodies, subversions, and exceptions
Anime and Manga
- Christmas in Kurau Phantom Memory is Kurau's "pair". As a Rynax, she is basically an energy being and has to borrow Kurau's genetic material to form her human body, making her technically her clone. Kurau loves her immensely and will do anything to protect her "little sister", but Christmas still gets her share of grief when Kurau loses her Rynax, causing Christmas to be terribly lonely for many years.
- The Zentradi of the Macross universe (and the Macross part of Robotech) are initially all artificially-generated beings. Some cloning remains in practice, even if it's strongly hinted that many are reproducing biologically by the time of Macross Frontier. They don't seem to suffer any angst about it, even the ones who are obvious clones of important characters from the original series.
- This troper was bewildered by an apparent plot hole between the original Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and its sequels, particularly Macross 7. The official sources state that a total of about 1 million people survive the zentraedi planetary bombardment in 2010 AD. Macross 7 is set in 2045 AD, featuring the 37th immigration fleet, 7th (hence the title) to have a main colony vessel capable of carrying about 1 million people. Official source materials include a book with a more detailed timeline, mentioning the start of mass cloning of the surviving population, and its end when mutations due to the procedure's strain on DNA started appearing. No mention of how many copies of each individual was made but presumably they were loaded onto the immigration fleets to spread the seeds of humanity across the stars.
- In To Aru Majutsu No Index, Mikoto feels sorry for the clones that have been created using her genetic material, referring to them as her sisters. She goes to great lengths to try to save their lives. It's not a total subversion though, since the clones suffer immensely as victims of a cruel experiment.
- In another interesting further development, apparently the only ones who view them as less than human are themselves, possibly linked to identity crisis with shared memory/perceptions. Even the bad guy of that arc would always try to talk to them as individuals (unsuccessfully) before deciding to kill them.
- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, related to the above XXXholic example in incomprehensibly complex ways. And unrelated ways. Maybe unrelated. Incomprehensible complexity makes it hard to tell sometimes.
Comics
- In Judge Dredd, Dredd is a clone of Chief Judge Fargo, as is his Evil Twin Rico, and several other Judges, including another one called Rico. They were "artificially aged" to five, and from then aged normally (the latter Rico is therefore noticeably younger than Dredd, the oldest Judge on the force). While the assumption behind the cloning programme is that clones of great Judges make great Judges, this does not appear to be the case (Dredd himself may be the ultimate Judge, but as well as the first Rico there's Judge Kraken, who was More Than Mind Controlled by the Sisters of Death and turned to The Dark Side, and Cadet Dolman, who didn't have a Face Heel Turn, but did say Screw Destiny and quit to be an astronaut).
- The character Array from Gold Digger avoids most of the usual clone problems, being able to create new versions of herself complete with suitable personalities apparently at will and dismiss them later with the only side effect being that any new identity created is permanent — any of her personas whose body is currently not in use instead ends up sharing her brainspace. Since they're all still aspects of "her" (and seem to share a telepathic link even over long distances), they actually get along rather well.
Films
- In The Sixth Day we follow the main character Adam Gibson as he stumbles on an evil plot involving clones. Halfway through fighting the organization who he believes has put a clone of him in his place, he finds out he is really the clone, and the one living in his house with his wife is actually the real Adam. He does get pretty disappointed, but he quickly recovers and enlists the original Adam to help him destroy the conspiracy.
- And the film avoids one of the other tropes, the magically identical clone. The woman in the Quirky Miniboss Squad, upon awakening after coming out of the clone tank, is pissed that she was obviously killed and has to get her ears pierced and hair coloured again.
- In Solaris, the crew of a space station are each faced with the person most important to them, in the flesh, even if that person is dead. These creations function as clones of the original person, with their memories only up to a point. The subversion is that one crew member, Snow, turns out to actually be a clone. The person most important to the original Snow was himself, so he created his own clone unintentionally. Then the clone killed him, stuffed him in an air duct, and resumed the dead man's life.
- Boba Fett from Star Wars is described as a precise genetic copy of his "father" Jango, unlike the clone troopers, who were genetically engineered to allow accelerated growth, among some other changes. Thus, Boba ages at a normal rate (he is seen as a child in Attack of the Clones). Being genetically identical to Jango, however, does not stop him from contracting a disease called "clone degeneration" in the novel Bloodlines, at the age of 71. Why this condition only affects clones is anyone's guess.
- That might make some sense, assuming cloning in the Star Wars verse is as tricky as it is in ours. Many, many clones of adult organisms die young because they get an extra early dose of chromosomal degeneration.
- Questionable. Dolly appears to have died of a common retrovirus in sheep, completely unrelated to being a clone (except in that Dolly had to be kept indoors for security reasons, and sheep catch it more often indoors for some reason). Popular media tends to state she died of premature aging or whatnot.
- The Hayflick limit is what these clones are running up against. You'd think sufficiently advanced technology would have overcome the problem, or they would have been careful to start with pluripotent stem cells.
- It should be noted that Boba spent some time in the Sarlacc, which contributed to his health decline.
- Lampooned in Multiplicity as Michael Keaton duplicates himself (and the clones duplicate themselves) with each clone having a different personality.
- Which was itself parodied by The Simpsons in a Treehouse Of Horror episode. Homer's clones degraded as clones of clones of clones (etc.) were made; so much so that two featured clones were: Homer as he appeared & sounded in the original "Tracy Ullman Show" shorts, and Peter Griffin.
Literature
- Variation in the novel Altered Carbon: Psyches can be transferred between 'sleeves' (physical bodies), usually for transportation between planets as data. It is possible, through an illegal and expensive process, to have your psyche copied to another body, producing a psychological 'clone' who is your twin in mind, but could have a completely different body. For example, "Dimi the Twin" (an assassin notorious for this technique, because he doesn't trust anyone but himself enough to work with them) features with backup from his psyche copied into the body of a woman.
- The novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is very realistic about artificial clones, treating them just like twins. This is pretty amazing, since it was written in the 1930s. (On the other hand, the techniques used to make the clones act the same are quite a stretch.)
- Mind you, they technically were twins — none of the manipulation was genetic, and the technique essentially created a dozen sextuplets. Again, though, this was pretty damn visionary considered DNA wouldn't even be discovered for 20 years.
- The structure of DNA wasn't discovered till 1953, DNA was originally discovered in 1869 or 1919, depending on how you want to count it. Though the idea that DNA (rather than the much more common RNA) was the actual hereditary material did take longer and was shown in the 40s with the definitive Hershey-Chase experiment in 1952.
- The Ira Levin novel The Boys From Brazil has Hitler clones that are just like identical twins — including the part about acting differently when they're raised in different environments.
- The Nazis who made the clones considered the nurture bit, however — all the clones are placed in families where the husband is much older than the wife, as was the case with Hitler's parents. To round things off, the adoptive fathers are killed when the clones have reached the age Hitler's father died.
- Clones in the Dune novels, called gholas, are realistic to an extent in that they are created as embryos, and must fully gestate and grow up at a normal rate. The similarity ends there, though — a ghola can be "shocked" into recovering all the memories its original had up until the moment of death, even if the original was still alive at the time his cells were harvested (note that this applies for ALL humans, not just clones. In Dune, you possess all the memories in your entire lineage).
- There is a reasonably accurate portrayal of a clone in Lois Mc Master Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series: Miles is visibly deformed (less than five feet tall, slight hunch, serious problem with fragile bones). A clone is taken from him (by enemies who intend to use it to replace him), but since Miles' problems are teratogenic — caused by fetal poisoning — rather than genetic, the clone starts to grow normally. The enemies physically alter him, through surgery, to match Miles' appearance; they also use pain (from the surgery and separate) to train him to obey. His life seriously sucks — until he actually meets Miles, who regards him as a younger brother and gradually alters his attitude (over about 4 books) until Mark manages to break his conditioning and really consider himself an individual.
- Further, Mark and Miles are as different as night and day in their fields of interest. Miles is a military nut with a preference for brunette amazons, while Mark is a scheming business man who likes voluptuous platinum blonds.
- Even before meeting Miles, Mark is one of the luckier clones in the universe. On Jackson's Whole, there are farms of clones raised specifically so that their progenitor can have his or her brain transplanted into the clone just before death.
- John Scalzi's Old Man's War trilogy features extensive cloning, though most of the time the clones are never brought to consciousness before having their progenitors' consciousness transferred. The Ghost Brigades, however, has an unusual example where a clone develops consciousness overlaid with a failed attempt to transfer a progenitor's consciousness, causing internal conflicts.
- A series of sci-fi novels written by Steven L. Kent explores this trope. All enlisted men in the future armed forces (not officers or NCOs) are clones and the main character is a special kind of clone himself. A twist is that all the regular clones have no idea they're clones and are biologically programmed to die if they ever find out.
- The Regeneration book series by L. J. Singleton features 5 cloned teenagers that aged naturally. One of them was cloned from a serial killer and struggles with his violent urges and all of them have some form of minor superpower
- The C.J. Cherryh novel Cyteen averts this quite nicely - much of the plot involves attempting to re-create a dead scientist by raising a clone much like the original - and there are many difficulties.
- Anna to the Infinite Power, a YA novel (and later movie) which actually provides a thoughtful take on how the attempt to clone a single genius multiple times might be hampered by the distinctive personalities of her clones.
- In The Duplicate by William Sleator, the protagonist cloned himself. Unfortunately, the clone believed he was the original, and in turn cloned himself, who ALSO thought he was the original. Unfortunately for them, clones tended to develop mental illnesses quickly. The second clone became clinically depressed, while the first one was basically the original's Evil Twin.
- A duology of novels, Farthest Star and Wall Around A Star by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson, feature a form of teleportation that basically sends a copy of you elsewhere but leaves the original too. The copy can also be modified en route, since all you're transmitting is information. Interestingly, this is how most physicists figure real-life teleportation might someday work.
- The novel The House of the Scorpion plays with this one. The main character is a clone, created as a heart donor for his aged drug-lord "twin." He ages normally and has his own personality.
- The Finders Stone Trilogy by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb subverts that trope twice. When main heroine, Alias, who is herself an artificial, magically created being, found out that she has many clones, made by her creators from her, she is, an original, angered of "copying" while actual clones are much more calm, have their own lives and don't mop about their origin at slighest. Even more - clothes either would like to be friends with Alias or unaware about her or, at least, have a neutral attitude even if know. Two clones are seen in the seriers and couple of more mentioned and all of them confident women with different personalities. Eventually, Alias accepts her "sister" as equal and seems to be in ease with the whole deal.
Live Action TV
- Kyle and Jessie of Kyle XY are clones grown in a lab, but the cloning itself is realistic; they were grown at normal speed, not fast, (spending a lifetime unconscious in tubes), and they don't have clone memories. The word "clone" is never used, either, though cloning is clearly described and they look exactly like the originals from many years ago. (Now, the explanation of their intelligence and powers, on the other hand....)
- Strangely enough, the third season finale strongly suggests that neither are clones, but simply identical versions of their same-sex parents. It is even stated that an unseen character is Kyle's biological mother, which was never even hinted at before in the show.
- Unless this troper is hugely misunderstanding the process as implied, the egg had to come from somewhere. It might not be a very strong connection but it seems likely to have a large impact on somebody of Kyle's good nature.
- In the Outer Limits episode "Think Like a Dinosaur" (and the short story it is based on) the teleporter creates perfect duplicates of people at the destination. The catch here is that it is the original who is now worthless — and destroyed. This sort of duplication/destruction teleportation turns up a lot in Sci-fi.
- Ba'al and his many clones on Stargate SG-1 have clones of both the host and the symbiote. They are completely indistinguishable and they even set up a Xanatos Gambit by pretending that the clones are fighting against the "real" Ba'al, convincing SG-1 to capture every single one (with a string of puns) — and then each one claims to be the real one.
- Also in Stargate SG-1, the entire Asgard race is a race of clones that is portrayed fairly realistically. They don't have magical "clone memories"; those need to be transferred via computer from the original body (Thor undergoes this procedure almost as often as Daniel dies). Also, the Asgard have been cloning themselves for so long that they have suffered severe genetic degradation and are no longer capable of reproducing themselves in any way other than by cloning themselves.
- After reading the above, this troper realizes that Ba'al likely used the Asgard cloning methods, since he was Anubis's right-hand man for awhile, and Anubis had access to Asgard technology.
- They do mess up a bit at the end of Stargate: Continuum. After the final Ba'al clone is killed, his cloned host body seems to be a fully sentient being (Vala even goes over to comfort him), and not just a slab of meat. While it makes sense that the Ba'al symbiotes would have clone memories (due to the Goa'uld's genetic memory), this should not apply to their cloned human hosts, who should by all accounts be vegetables at the most (only the original Ba'al's original host body should have that person's memories, and the original Ba'al was apparently killed by Mitchell at the end).
- In all fairness, that happens right at the end, and the conversation between Vala and Bhaal's host is never shown, it could always be argued that she discovered the host had no memories or anything.
- Even without memories, he should be as worldwise as a baby, not mindless. There's nothing wrong with his brain. And that's not taking into account what he could have learned from being joined with Ba'al.
- There's plenty of precedent for a symbiote's memories being shared with the host, going as far back as Carter having bits and pieces of her Tok'ra symbiote's memories in season 1 (or was it 2?)
- Trouble is, if the host had no personality or memory to begin with, then he would be unable to resist the influence of the symbiote, and would thus be no more than a human version of Ba'al — ergo, they'd have to kill or imprison him.
- Perhaps he just never very happy with his arrangement.
- Star Trek often subverted the Cloning Blues by having the crew be unwilling to simply kill the clones. However, the writers were usually quite willing to kill clones, and often casually dispatched them in ways that would never happen to a regular character.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine specifically establishes that "killing your own clone is still murder," at least in the 24th century Federation.
- But note that in the Star Trek The Next Generation "Up the Long Ladder" showed the characters acting with astonishing callousness toward clones: When the ship comes upon a colony (after discovering and evacuating the now-rustic descendants of its crashed sister-ship) populated by the cloned descendants of five shipwreck survivors (the rest of the colony ship's crew died in the crash, leaving a gene pool too small to reproduce naturally), the colony says that their genes are starting to degrade to the point where cloning won't work anymore and plead for genetic donations. Disgusted, the Enterprise' crew declares that no one onboard nor anywhere in the Federation will participate in such a practice. The colony then discreetly steals genetic samples of Riker and the doctor whom, upon figuring out what happened and discovering their clones being grown, both decide on the spot to single-handedly murder all of their not-yet-conscious clones with hand-phasers in cold blood. The Enterprise then forces the colony of clones (to whom the concepts of sexual intercourse and romance are utterly alien) to absorb and intermarry with the rustics from their evacuated sister colony (which is kinda difficult with a 3-2 male-female population).
- Worthy of mention is how the crew found out that they had genetic material stolen — with the doctor realizing that they were missing cells compared to their last cell count. Yes, It seems that in the future, we will not shed hairs or skin cells.
- That's not correct. She already had reason to suspect that samples were taken, and then scanned the stomach lining for missing cells because that's the best area to harvest them from.
- The stomach lining consists of epithelial cells, and thus still sheds cells. The science still fails.
- Of course, in Voyager, not only are the crew delighted to give their genetic material to an alien entity whose motives are incomprehensible to our human minds, but they allow themselves to be perfectly copied so that the clones can live out the rest of their sorry existence on a bizarre hellish planet with no way to escape.
- An earlier Outer Limits example is the original series' "The Duplicate Man". Twenty Minutes Into The Future, an anthropologist illegally brings a Megasoid, a member of an intelligent but bloodthirsty alien race, to Earth. When the creature escapes, the cowardly anthropologist has himself "duplicated" so that his clone can secretly hunt the Megasoid. As in the episode's literary source (Clifford D. Simak's short story "Goodnight, Mr. James"), the clone unknowingly has a poison in his bloodstream that will kill him at a preset time. The Outer Limits version adds the twist that the anthropologist's dissatisfied wife is happier with the clone, since her real husband has become cold and distant. However, the Outer Limits version cops out of killing the protagonist by revealing that he's not the clone but the original.
- Some genetically engineered X5 supersoldiers in Dark Angel have clones, which are treated basically as identical twins with their own unique identities. It still sucks to be them, because Manticore (the evil organization that made them) punished them for the escape of their originals. Alec has had a particularly rough time on account of being a clone of the serial killer Ben.
Music
- The Leo Kottke/Mike Gordon song Clone (from the album of the same name) has fun with this idea.
- The parody song "I Think I'm A Clone Now" by Weird Al Yankovic.
- Note that it details the transition from embarassment ("...What would people say/If only they knew that I was/Part of some geneticist's plan...") to enjoyment ("...I've been on Oprah Winfrey - I'm world renowned...") of one of the two clones.
Radio
- The radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy featuers Lintilla... and Lintilla and Lintilla. Apparently there were some problems with a cloning machine which would be forming a new Lintilla while halfway building the previous one, so turning off the machine would be counted as murder. There was also Allitnil and his buddies Allitnil and Allitnil, who were Niallivs, sort of, sent by the same cloning corporation to eradicate all the Lintillas by "marriage" licences which were really agreements to stop existing, getting around the whole homicide aspect.
Video Games
- In the MMO Tabula Rasa, all of a player's characters on one server are clones of each other, in order to explain why they all have the last name and share a supposedly rare special ability. Despite that, clones don't share memories by default. Players must earn special credits to use the ubertech necessary to share experience and training from one character to a new clone, and even then there can be differences in how that knowledge is actually applied. Clones can also look different, or even be a different gender. It's been stated that human science is working on the creation of Half Human Hybrids using this technology.
- Not quite right, as non-cloned characters may be relatives.
- Half Human Hybrids are available now, playing all the related tropes (That this newbie troper remembers off the top of his head) straight.
- In 6 Days a Sacrifice, the final game in Yahtzee Croshaw's Chzo Mythos games, the player repeatedly encounters a man in ridiculously old-fashioned clothing (funny thing, he looks sort of like Trilby, the protagonist from the first and third games in the series) who is invariably killed by a tall, faceless, demonic man. Later we learn that the installment where the protagonist has found himself was built on the original site of Defoe manor, and the people there are trying to summon an elder god with the help of John Defoe, a rather angry spirit (named John for convenience, as his father never named him; he was apparently somehow deformed and his father viewed him as a sin against God) bent on generic murder, and the Trilby-like men are, in fact, clones of the original Trilby, there to keep John in line, as Trilby is the only person John ever actually feared. For clones they seem remarkably well adjusted, especially because they tend to die at the hands of the Tall Man, often gruesomely.
- In fact, 6 Days offers a direct subversion of the trope. One of the Trilbyclones was unaware of his nature until he was confronted by two identical duplicates. When this happens, he fails to snap or have an existential meltdown, claiming that he'd considered this to be one of the likelier explanations for his situation.
- It is suspected that the protagonist in the game Portal is a clone. The antagonist taunts her saying that her brain is "permanently backed up" on a computer, and there are hints indicating that a death is not a particularly noteworthy aspect of a failure. In addition, the game contains scribblings and other artifacts left by previous participants of the survival courses, and the game does not really exclude the possibility that some of the said participants were just previous instances of the PC.
- When confronted with the fact that HE'S the clone, Zero pretty much says "fuck it."
- in City Of Heroes, Countess Crey's master plan involves mass cloning of superheroes to make her "Paragon Protectors".
- In Fallout 3, Vault 108 has lots of Garys...
- Halo. Master Chief and all the other spartans were kidnapped as six year old children to begin their training. To prevent any questions from being asked, they were all flash cloned, the parents got the clones. In the Halo universe, cloning single organs is simple, cloning a full human isn't, they are born with no memory, are mindless vegetables, and after several months, they die. So, as far as the Spartan's parents know, they all suddenly suffered major brain damage and died tragically. The Spartans never find out about this.
- The true tragedy of this is explored more thoroughly in [[ilovebees.com the I Love Bees]] story.
- Super Robot Wars has averted this a number of times with the Balmarians. Ingram and Viletta, knowing exactly who and what they are, skip all the wangsting and decide to actually do something with their lives, saving lives or at least setting into motions events so other people can save those lives. In Alpha 3, two more Balmarian clones take the hint and help the survivors of the Empire after the planet is anhillated by a meteor storm.
- The Replica in F.E.A.R. don't actually go through a whole lot of angst about their cloned nature, because ATC deliberately designed them to have limited cognitive capabilities and independent thought processes. The Replica themselves are vat-grown, mass-produced, disfigured and inhuman-looking beings that spend most of their lives in stasis inside small pods until activated for combat, but once activated they show all the typical range of human emotions, including surprise, anger, and fear - albeit mixed in with a terrifying single-mindedness and absolute loyalty.
Web Comics
- The El Goonish Shive offers at least a partial subversion: Ellen, an accidentally created female duplicate of Elliot, becomes depressed because she believes that because she's a duplicate, there is no place in the world for her. However, unlike most clones, she is accepted by the rest of the cast as a real person, and she ends up living a normal (at least by EGS standards) life, taking on a role as Elliot's twin sister. Although she was established a bit quickly as the "solution" for Elliot's lesbian ex.
- In Schlock Mercenary, the character of Gav Bleuel (based on the real-life comic artist of Nukees) put himself into suspended animation in the 21st century, and is later awoken (after being found in a disused storage locker) in the 31st, where he is accidentally duplicated nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
- He's just the most extreme example. The entire webcomic is full of clones — mostly gate-clones like Gav (created by exact sub-atomic-level duplication), but also a time-clone: time-traveller meets his old self, and because the timeline is changed, they both continue to exist. Also, biological cloning is possible, but outlawed.
- It's Walky! initially played it straight, when the saintly, innocent girl Joyce gets a "reverse" clone, thanks to accidental exposure to Imported Alien Phlebotinum. The clone is not so much evil as sluttish, but still manages to be a complete antithesis to Joyce, who then shoots her. In the head. The subversion comes in much later, when an Evil Lawyer catches wind of the incident — and suddenly, she's wanted for murder.
- Parodied in The Non Adventures Of Wonderella, in an installment titled "BadToTheClone".
- Subverted in the latest Final Blasphemy; Wily uses numerous robotic doubles of himself and one true biological clone just to make sure he's not targeted. These are pretty standard applications of the trope, and when Jeremy is captured, he finds out that he killed that biological clone of Wily rather than the genuine article; he's frustrated but relieved as he doesn't think that counts as murder. Unfortunately, the law does think that counts as murder. Cue Big No.
- Molly's doppelganger Galatea in the "There But For the Grace" story arc in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob. Raised in an unloving environment, she grew up to be paranoid with an Ubermensch complex but now seems to have calmed down and gotten a reasonably happy ending—even if she has, for the moment at least, been Put On A Bus, intending to Walk The Earth for a while.
- Kevin And Kell actually includes a sheep clone named Dolly who eventually started aging quickly. But thanks to a certain sci-fi device, she became a lamb again (albeit with her memories intact). It is not clear whether she still ages quickly.
- Narbonic : the title character, Helen B. Narbon, is a clone of her mother. (The "B" stands for "Beta".) Lampshaded when Helen gets an invitation to her high school reunion:
Dave: You went to high school? I though you were a clone. Helen: That doesn't mean I didn't have a childhood. You think I was decanted from the replicating pod full-grown? For heaven's sake, Dave, I went through all the normal developmental stages! Dave: Egg, facehugger, chestburster, and queen?
Web Original
- The idea of a stereotypical, perfect-copy clone is used in a fantastically original manner in the web-novel John Dies At The End.
- Cloning can be done fairly easily for people in the civilized regions of Orions Arm, memory transfer optional. This isn't commonly done, since property laws get all iffy when cloning comes into the picture: Most of the time, the copies can own property but have no property to begin with. Other times, if the clone is given the original's memories, property can be split down the middle if a disagreement arises. It varies A LOT depending on region. Nonetheless, one person cloned himself hundreds of times and is in the process of making a documentary on the myriad ways his copies have gone. On the net or in virches (virtual environments), copying is done very frequently. These are not usually included in population counts for this reason.
Western Animation
- Futurama gets this more or less right: Professor Farnsworth's clone looks like a younger version of him, but has a completely different personality. The clone also has a deformity that the original doesn't have: a piglike nose from pressing against the glass of the cloning chamber.
- Thailog from Gargoyles was cloned from Goliath's DNA and rapid-aged to match Goliath's age; however, unlike the stereotypical clone, he didn't share Goliath's memories or worldview (indeed, he was indoctrinated via subliminal messages into becoming a Machiavellian villain), and had no real desire to destroy Goliath other than that of every villain to destroy the meddling hero. As well, the rapid-aging process was portrayed as having the side-effect of causing Thailog's coloration to be different from Goliath's. The characters consider Thailog to be Goliath's son, although twin brother would be more accurate.
- In the second season WITCH episode "H is for Hunted", Nerissa produces an Altamere of Will, a living, breathing, feeling, thinking magical clone of her that retains all of Will's memories and friendships. Nerissa tells the Altamere that the only way it can have a real life is if it kills the original Will, otherwise, it will be absorbed back into the Heart of Kandrakar and obliterated forever. This leads to a vicious fight between Will and her Altamere, though once Will realizes her Altamere is a being with a soul, she refuses to fight it, and accepts it as a friend... a few seconds later, it sacrifices itself to shield Will from one of Nerissa's attacks.
- Nerissa later makes an Altermere of Yan Lin, who survives and is introduced to Yan Lin's family as her long-lost twin sister Mira.
- In the Kim Possible episode "Kimitation Nation", Dr. Drakken creates an army of duplicates of Kim, Ron, and classmate Bonnie. When discussing it with Wade, she comments that cloning shouldn't work like that according to science class. He agrees; it's not "really" cloning, but they'll just refer to it as such to simplify things. The clones were merely used in a Fantastic Aesop and killed off by soda.
- In Justice League Unlimited, Supergirl learns that the now-villainous Professor Hamilton took genetic samples of her to create a murderously sociopathic clone of Supergirl, named Galatea. However, Hamilton modified the clone to be an older version of Supergirl to make her tougher. Furthermore, Galatea is also a homage to the later copy of Supergirl, Power Girl, as noted by her white costume with a chest hole intended to show off her cleavage, as well as her more developed...musculature.
- In the third season of Transformers: Beast Wars, a clone of Dinobot is created who bears little resemblance to the original beyond his name, a similar-sounding voice, and having an alternate mode based on the same animal. (Thankfully, the aging issue can just be tossed aside in this case... It doesn't apply to robots.) In an earlier season Dinobot's biological form was cloned by the villains to serve as an infiltrator; Dinobot was implied to have eaten him, but he was an enemy so it didn't matter that he was a copy.
- Parodied in the Season Two opener of The Venture Brothers.
- Although it is implicitly played straight. If Orpheus' trip to the nether in an attempt to resurrect the Venture Brothers is any indication, Dr. Venture cloning experiments rendered the Venture Brothers soulless casks of themselves, since Orpheus is unable to find their spirits therein.
- Except that their souls were located inside the learning machine, so their souls just hadn't been transferred to their bodies yet.
- One episode of Care Bears has No Heart kick Mr. Beastly out for yet another infraction of common sense, which means that Shreeky is left to do all the menial labor normally left to her dimwitted partner. She eventually comes up way to get out of her unenviable situation: she creates five magical clones of herself, and introduces them all to No Heart. But when she gets to the one who's supposed to "take the blame for [making] messes", the Shreeky clones start bickering amongst themselves, at which point No Heart bellows that he'd rather have Beastly back than deal with them. After he leaves, Shreeky smugly expresses her satisfaction with the results of her apparent Xanatos Gambit, at which point the other Shreekies start bickering over who really came up with the idea...prompting the real Shreeky to say "there's only room for one Shreeky around here!" and casually disintegrate them all with her magic mirror.
- Danny Phantom gets the "Evil Clone Created To Destroy Me" - only the clone isn't really evil, just manipulated by Vlad Plasmus. The clone is also a she (Dani Phantom).
- Time to watch Clone High. Their angst is entertaining.
- Averted somewhat in Code Lyoko. William's phenominally stupid artificial clone, created through the supercomputer, has to replace him for several months, and yet he never complains or angsts about his situation, probably because he doesn't realize what he really is, or just accepts it without really understanding it. It's actually the real William who suffers in this situation, as he comes back to find that the clone has completely trashed his reputation through said stupidity.
- Many people may have forgotten, but the AndrAIa who appears in all episodes of ReBoot past her introduction is in fact a backup copy of the original sprite who, unable to leave the game herself, piggybacked the copy onto Enzo because she didn't want him to be separated from her forever.
- Exo Squad featured clones of major NeoSapien generals and other characters, however, they tended to realize they were clones and one even stated that his predecessor had died on Venus. Given the tens of thousands, if not millions, of deaths that possibly occurred during the series, it is not exactly a case of Back From The Dead. Most never actually seemed to care about being clones, however, most were already genetically engineered humans to begin with.
- In Carl Squared, C2 has a significantly different personality to Carl. (Of course, C2 also 5% DNA from car's dog Rex, which causes him to catch frisbees in his mouth and scratch behind his ear with his foot).
Real Life
- A totally different kind of Cloning Blues occurs in Real Life, with creatures that reproduce asexually — by dividing their cells into two, creating an identical clone. Studies have indicated that it's way easier for parasites to optimally adapt to a strain of creatures with identical DNA than to a species whose biology is based on the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction, and there's evidence that that might be the reason sexual reproduction evolved in the first place. (Go read Carl Zimmer's book Parasite Rex to find out more.)
- Most fruit bought in today's grocery stores are in fact clones, a practice much simpler than "cloning" depicted on TV and a practice that goes all the way back to ancient China — in essence it's an artificially induced botanical form of asexual reproduction.
- These clones are typically called Cultivars and are usually registered and well documented. For example, *all* "Grape Juice" is made from the Concord Grape (White grape juice is typically from the "Niagara Grape"). Every single Concord Grape vine is genetically identical to every other Concord Grape vine. For decades, these grapes have been cloned naturally by taking a cutting off one of their branches, shoving it in the ground, and waiting for roots to appear. Sometimes the growers get creative, using a cloned top of the plant and a cloned root system (called rootstock) stuck on for good measure — for plants that are really tasty or grow really well except for their roots.
- This is a common practice with fruit trees as well. In the Yakima Valley in Washington State, USA, where most of the country's apples are grown, it would be difficult to find an orchard tree whose seeds had the same genetics as its root cells.
- Pygmy Sundews, a type of Carnivorous Plant, take this one stage further. They grow a special type of growth called a "gemmae" — basically a seed without a shell. These gemmae, when ready, explode off the plant and land nearby, where they grow into a perfect clone of the original plant if the conditions are right. It makes growing hybrids very easy, as once you have a plant you like, you can simply wait and in the fall, it will clone itself a few dozen times over.
- Seedless grapes and domestic bananas are in fact no longer able to reproduce sexually, having adapted to being cloned by humans instead. Going back to the original point that spawned all this talk of cloned plants, one strain of banana was made completely extinct about a century ago due to a parasite that evolved to only feed on that strain. The most common variety of banana nowadays is at risk of the same fate. There are no reports of wild bananas having this trouble.
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