Me's a Crowd

If they're gonna fight over who gets the bed, how well do you think going to school in turns will end up?

Phoebe: You can't hide three 'you's at the office.
Blue Prue: Two of us may not be able to separate Gabriel from his sword but we can certainly fight him off.
Pink Prue: Which means two of us can go save Prue's job and whoever's left behind can go to the Quake with Piper.

— Charmed (1998), "Which Prue Is It, Anyway?"

Through magic or super-technology, a character decides to get a large number of chores done via copying themself.

Expect the original to choose all of the fun things to do when assigning chores around. Sometimes the copies rebel or degrade, which results in either (1) at least one Evil Twin, or (2) copies continually being made to the point of risking exposing the Masquerade, or at least ruining the original's reputation.

These copies rarely count as persons in and of themselves. See Clone Angst and Expendable Clone. If they are counted as people, expect Which Me?.

Compare with Doppelgänger Spin, Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot. Related to Gideon Ploy. Not to be confused with I Am Legion or Collective Identity. May be used in a Doppelgänger Attack. See also Literal Split Personality.

The superpower itself is Self-Duplication.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An old Seattle Mariners commercial involved the Mariners cloning star player Ken Griffey Junior so that he could play every single baseball position at the same time.

Anime & Manga

• In one episode of The Adventures of Mini-Goddess, Urd is babysitting some rats, and runs into a situation where she is asked to do three things at once. She however wants to play craps. She then makes two clones of herself, however all the clones wind up wanting to play craps as well. As you would expect, no actual work got done.
• In Angel Beats!, Kanade uses "Harmonics" to copy herself. But the copy is evil, and can also use Harmonics.
• In Doraemon: Nobita and the Spiral City, the episode's main villain, Onigoro, accidentally stumbles across Doraemon's Egg Factory and clones himself into multiple copies, all of them retaining the original Onigoro's antagonistic personality - save for one benevolent clone called Hokuro. They don't see eye-to-eye much, but decide to work together to take over the Spiral City.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stardust Crusaders: Steely Dan's Stand, The Lovers, can use dead tissue to make copies of itself.
  • Steel Ball Run: Funny Valentine can visit alternate dimensions and bring back copies of himself. Since the copies all have his exact same personality and memories, he can pass his Stand to any of them.
• In Knights of Sidonia, there are at least two Ochiais running around the Sidonia: one having possessed Kunato, and the other acting as Captain Kobayashi's right hand.
• The manga adaptation of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is all about this: Link is split up into 4 different Links (optimistic and childlike Red; aggressive and over-confident Blue; controlled and intelligent Vio(let); and the (perfectly regular) brave and virtuous green Link) plus one Shadow Link, who came from the Shadow Mirror and serves as an Evil Twin. The five Links superficially differ only by the color of their clothes (and hair, in Shadow Link's case). In the manga pages themselves, they also have their eyes drawn differently (Green: Normal and Clear; Red: Big and Wet; Blue: Smaller irises and Edgier; Vio: hyper focused and empty irises; Shadow: either empty or colorless irises), on the colored illustrations, however, their eyes are all the same as well. Oh, and they constantly bicker with each other.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Twice, a supervillain with the power to duplicate people. However, he both plays the trope straight and subverts it: While he's fully capable of duplicating himself, he refuses to do it due to the fact that the last time he did it, the clones began killing one another and he sustained a near-lethal head injury. He's been driven to insanity ever since, to the point he's not sure whether he's himself or a clone anymore. It turns out he is the real one, and this realization is what helps him start cutting loose with his self-duplication again.
  • All For One has his original Quirk implanted in Shigaraki, resulting in his 'vestige' inside of it to begin merging with Shigaraki and assume control. As such, there are technically two All For Ones existing at the same time. Even with Bakugo killing him physically, it’s been revealed his vestige self is still within Shigaraki creating issues for vestige Midoriya.
• Naruto features this as a ubiquitous jutsu for Ninja to use. As a result basically the entire main cast has done so at one point or another. Naruto himself, coupled with his near limitless chakra reserves, takes this up to eleven though in being able to produce thousands upon thousands of clones of himself as necessary to either speed up training or pummel enemies.
  Naruto: If you won't come at us, then we'll come to you!
• In Ninja Slayer, Daedalus can create and control an army of avatars while connected to the cyber-world.
• Queen Millennia:
  • All Queens Millennia look like exact copies of Yayoi, except the early ones who were mummified. Their tomb is a 4 kilometer long hallway that hosts all of them, and they assist Yayoi during the final battle.
  • Yayoi has a lot of copies of herself, organic and android, to help her with her duties.
• In episode 23 of Sgt. Frog, Keroro tries to use the (malfunctioning) Kero-Ball to fix one of his Gundam model kits, but accidentally activates the "Copy" function instead, which results in hundreds of Keroro clones infesting the Hinata house and the base. He plans to use these clones to help him take over the planet, but they're all as lazy and goofy as he is and would rather slack off. What's worse, he later learns that unless he gets rid of the clones somehow, the Kero-Ball will overload and all the Keroros (including the original) will vanish.
• However, this example above is directly lifted from the main plot of another series, Shichinin no Nana/Seven of Seven (one of the recurring characters in SoS is from Keroro, so it goes both ways). The seven Nanas, however, are all considered separate people, unlike many examples on this page. All we can say for the girl's love interest is, you poor lucky bastard, getting seven girls who all want you (and likely aren't afraid of sharing).

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: At the end of episode 27, Big M. decides to make multiple clones of himself to take over Planet Xing. This doesn't work out because the clones start arguing over which one of them is in charge of the mission.

Comic Books

• In 1963, Crystal Man can grow separate clone-bodies of his crystal form.
• The Alpha Flight character Flashback pulls his 'clones' from his own future. One of these future selves gets killed during a battle with Alpha Flight. This causes the original to freak out because he now knows how he's going to die but not when, which causes him to become afraid of being pulled into the past (which he apparently cannot control) because that could be the time he dies.
• Animal Man possesses the power to take on the abilities of any animals in his immediate vicinity. During the Grant Morrison run, in an arc where he was trapped in a cell with no animals nearby, he took on the attributes of a single-celled organism within his digestive system. Notably the ability to replicate himself through mitosis. Within ten seconds, he was able to outnumber his opponent.
• In The Authority, the Engineer can create clones of herself. It got to the point where she makes herself into a literal army. There are instances in which she has sex with Jack Hawksmoor while giving a speech at United Nations, or destroying entire fleets of mooks while resuscitating a kid. Her case is a little different, though, as she creates robots, not clones — all her other selves are still controlled by her.
• The Avengers:
  • Loki has had this power since the first Avengers story, though he uses it more frequently in the movies.
  • One story has all the different models of Ultron sharing a consciousness. In more recent years, he's taken to creating entire armies of himself.
  • Quicksilver gained this as part of his new power set after exposure to the Terrigen Mists. He became a Time Master, able displace himself out of mainstream time and "jump" into the future as well as summon several time-displaced duplicates of himself.
  • In Avengers Standoff, there are two Maria Hills running around, one who was rescued by the Unity Squad and one who recruited the ANAD Avengers It's later revealed that there are actually three of them — the real one is still in Pleasant Hill and the two seen elsewhere are supervillains transformed by the Cosmic Cube.
• The Batman villain White Rabbit is revealed in Batman: The Dark Knight #7 to be the duplicate of Jaina "Jai" Hudson. Jaina's pretty smart about this: her "duplicate" has different skin tone, eye color, and hair color, and wears an incredibly distracting Playboy Bunny outfit. Even then, Batman nearly figured out the truth, but was thrown off when "White Rabbit" appeared while he was on a date with Jaina.
• The Batman Beyond comic introduces a Legacy Character of Catwoman, who is actually Multiplex's daughter and inherited his powers. This gets tied into her cat theme by calling her duplicates her nine lives.
• In Blade, Deacon Frost has the power to create doppelgangers out of his victims.
• The PSmith of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire have a cloning-based reproduction system. As a consequence, every individual is physically and genetically identical.
• One story in the Charmed (1998) Zenescope comic has Wyatt making clones of his mother Piper to do her chores for her so she can spend more time with him.
• In Dark Empire, Luke Skywalker is able to make one doppleganger to rescue his friends and help them escape the Big Bad while he stays behind to fight said Big Bad. The doppleganger dissolves into light soon after entering hyperspace. He never has this power again, and Leia refers to it as a Sith technique.
• DC One Million:
  • The One Million incarnation of the Atom maintained conservation of matter by splitting - at half size there were two of him, at microscopic size there were thousands.
  • The Legion of Ececutive Familiars included Googal the Infinite Mouse, who was the Last of His Kind, but contained a genetic imprint of the entire species, and could therefore generate millions of (at least to humans) identical white-footed mice.
• Fantastic Four:
  • This happened to Ben Grimm once when his exoskeleton began shedding larvae that turned into clone-Grimms. The problem? They were almost all Evil Twins. Reed was forced to trap Grimm and his duplicates in an alternate dimension while he looked for a solution. Ben, meanwhile, fought off his evil versions with the help of the few good clones he could find.
  • The Impossible Man is able to do this thanks to his shapeshifting ability.
• The Flash:
  • Bart Allen (formerly known as Impulse and Kid Flash) could produce avatars of himself which could travel through the timestream.
  • The rogue Mob Rule discovered his ability to duplicate when he was dismembered by his enemies and the severed body parts grew into new people. His duplicates are completely independent from him, developing new personalities, and eventually growing to hate the original.
• In Ghost Rider, Lucifer's re-entry to Earth splits him into six hundred and sixty-six different fragments.
• Gold Digger: Villainess Array has the ability to not only create multiple bodies, but also give them different skills/abilities (or even a different species). Her name comes from the side effect of this power: when she recalls the body, it's consciousness stays behind in her head. Fortunately, they're all pretty much of the same mind (they all love her boyfriend, for example), and if she needs the same ability again, she can re-create any of them when needed, so her mind only gets more crowded if she needs some new power/skill set.
• Seven Deadly Brothers from Great Ten is one guy who can split into seven copies, and each copy retains a certain skill set from the original.
• Invincible:
  • The Mauler Twins are apparently a super-strong villain/mercenary type and his clone, neither of whom knows which is which because the original's memories were duplicated along with his body. This results in them working together relatively peacefully aside from the constant dispute, because while the idea was for the clone to serve the original, their shared memories essentially make them equals. Eventually, one of them is killed and the other has his body half burned and tries again, resulting in the original lording it over the new, obviously unburned clone until he gets poisoned and the clone tries again and manages to restore the status quo with the argument becoming about which is the lower-generation clone but once more unsolvable.
  • Dupli-Kate is a heroic version. Her brother Multi-Paul is out there somewhere, as well. Also, she's not as dumb as any of the guys who send all their selves off to battle. Among other things, she normally keeps her real self far away from the fighting, so that even if all of her clones are killed, she'll be completely safe.
• In Les Légendaires, Dark Shimy can use her elemental powers to produce a seemingly infinite amount of earth-based clones of herself in order to attack.
• Legends of Zita the Spacegirl introduces Doppelganger, a small alien circus performer, who as his name suggests can make multiple copies of himself. As a bonus, each copy has a leotard with a unique symbol and/or color. (See the Webcomics folder for another Zita example.)
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Triplicate Girl can, of course, split herself into three. Sometimes they're color-coded orange, white, and purple, (all of them are real regardless, but the cool thing is that the combined TG has a tricolor costume which splits into three mono color ones) and sometimes one of them dies while they're separated, making her into Duo Damsel. In the Threeboot continuity, the original Triplicate Girl was the sole intelligent survivor of some sort of apocalypse on her homeworld and could split and reemerge any number of selves, but when she/they was/were contacted by the United Planets, she/they split off the Legion's Triplicate Girl, who can only split out to three and won't be reabsorbed by any of her home selves because she's become too different and it worries them.
  • The original/Retroboot Triplicate Girl lost one body fighting Computo, becoming Duo Damsel. Then, she sent one of herself back in time to help Karate Kid with a mission in the 21st century, and this "Una" was also killed. With only one body left, however, she discovered she'd become able to make unlimited copies of herself, and took the new name Duplicate Damsel.
  • The Persuader once used his Atomic Axe to cut open reality and allow alternate universe counterparts of himself and his teammates to join up as the Fatal Five Hundred.
  • Legion of Substitute Heroes member Double Header is technically doing this, just very slowly.
• One of Lobo's lesser-known abilities is this trope. Should Lobo shed blood, the blood will reconstitute itself into another Lobo. Thus, a battle that could go poorly for the Main Man could quickly turn in his favor. Then, keeping with Lobo's desire to be the only one around, they'll murder each other until one survives. Vril Dox of L.E.G.I.O.N. disabled this power, but was unwittingly reactivated after the events of Sins of Youth.
• This was shown in Marvel's Lighter and Softer Marvel Adventures imprint when, via some contrived means involving the below-mentioned Jamie Madrox, the Hulk ends up with his power (including the physical impact trigger), filling the city with hundreds of different-personality Hulks wreaking havoc, due to the majority of the Hulks (predictably) reacting to duplicates of themselves by hitting them. There was even a hopeless romantic Hulk.
• In Mega Man (Archie Comics), Buster Rog G. can make three copies of himself.
• Mickey Mouse Comic Universe:
  • In the Danish story "All of Me", Mickey uses Eega Beeva's copying gun to make a clone of himself so that he could help Minnie shopping and go to a video arcade with Goofy. Unluckily, the clone starts replicating himself on its own and soon enough, there's a dozen of Mickey clones that keep replicating. When it gets out of control, the clones steal the gun and try to replicate the whole Earth for themselves... from an airplane. It only results in a copied piece of land appearing in the middle of a river as a new island, which the clones decide to inhabit anyway, until there's so many of them that the island begins to sink under their weight. Eventually, Eega Beeva saves the clones by teleporting them all to a nice uninhabited planet he saw once, making sure to stop the cloning process first.
  • In "Too Many Goofs", Goofy gets a double due to a machine made by Doc Static. At first, Mickey thinks he's got two best friends now, but the Goofs only pay attention to each other. When Mickey tries to talk about it, they turn on each other for his sake until one of the Goofs agrees to leave. Ultimately, neither Goof can bare to separate from the other and when they bump into each other on reuniting, they fuse back into one as a flaw in the replicating process that conveniently solves the problem.
• In issue #4 of Ms. Marvel (2016), Kamala uses Bruno's artificial "human" experiment in order to clone herself and perform all her responsibilities (school, superheroing, being an Avenger, her brother's wedding).
• Dr. Bedlam (later Baron Bedlam) from New Gods is a disembodied intelligence who can possess a number of robot bodies.
• Ninja High School has Jeremy accidentally photocopy himself into 100 variations, each one with different aspects of his personality.
• In Paperinik New Adventures, PK's new suit can generate "trididensomorphic holograms", which are in fact solid and can act on their own. The downside is that it consumes a lot of energy.
• Dr. Positron in PS238. There are several Dr. Positron androids, with slightly different personalities.
• At the end of the first issue of The Sandman: Overture, Morpheus is summoned to a meeting of all the different facets of himself throughout the universe.
• As fractured as Shade, the Changing Man is on the inside, it was probably badly advised for him to split up physically. After generating an evil clone who escaped and attempted to supplant the original, Shade stopped deliberately duplicating himself.
• In Sonic the Comic, Megatox is capable of splitting into smaller multiple bodies. He can also merge back to full size.
• Spider-Man:
  • The Sandman is capable of making clones of himself out of his sandy body. The drawback is that his different bodies can act out subconscious urges without him even being aware of it.
  • In The Clone Saga, the objective behind the Jackal's "Carrion Bomb" is to turn the entire world's population into clones of Peter Parker. The Jackal himself uses entirely human clones of himself as minions.
  • In One More Day, Doctor Strange casts a spell on Peter that allows him to talk to every noteworthy scientist, mystic, and healer in the Marvel universe at the same time, in an attempt to find a cure for Aunt May.
  • In All-New, All-Different Marvel, there are at least three Spider-Men (Peter, Miguel, and Miles) running around, although at least one interview implies that there's a fourth and he/she is the one in the current costume.
• In Street Fighter Unlimited, Vega attacks the heroes with Doll-like clones of himself.
• Superman:
  • In Silver Age comics, Superman employs a number of Robot Mes to cover for him to conceal his Secret Identity. Their intelligence varies from one story to the next, but it is tacitly accepted that they are not truly self-aware (and are, therefore, expendable). When occasional Phlebotinum causes one to become genuinely self-aware, it's a big problem and Hilarity Ensues. In the Bronze Age, the editors decided the robots were too much of a Deus ex Machina, so they start malfunctioning (officially due to increased pollution levels in Earth's atmosphere) and Superman stops using them.
  • A story had all the different models of Brainiac, whose mind not only inhabits every version of himself through the years (except the rebellious Brainiac 2/Vril Dox) but also an entire army of robotic drones.
  • The villain Riot has the ability to clone himself at will.
  • Alexander Luthor, Jr. can use his Reality Warper powers to create duplicates of himself that can exist independently of his main body.
• In the Teen Titans Go! story "Pieces of Me", Raven's "emoticlones" are let loose by accident, and several of them run amuck throughout the city.
• Minor Top 10 character Multi-Woman can make several versions of herself, each with a different superpower.
• Once Reed of the Ultimate Fantastic Four becomes the Maker, he becomes able to create false bodies from a hair-thin tendril. After Secret Wars (2015), he gains a more cosmic form of this trope as his consciousness is linked across every alternate universe version of himself (plus a deal with Molecule Man which guarantees that every alternate universe has a Maker).
• Doctor Manhattan exhibits this ability in Watchmen, being intimate with his girlfriend Laurie with a copy of himself while a third is continuing to work in the lab.
• A variation with X-23, herself an Opposite-Sex Clone of Wolverine: Laura lacks the ability to generate clones of herself, but the scientist heading the project to create her intended to mass produce her and sell the additional copies to the highest bidders. Laura's mother put a stop to this by sending her to destroy the embryos during her escape from the Facility while they were still in their test tubes. Later, the demon Blackheart actually succeeded in cloning her (and even worse, bonding these clones with a symbiote). During Laura's confrontation with her "sisters", she briefly mused whether they were sentient beings with the same right to exist as she did but decided that regardless they were a significant threat that needed to be destroyed.
• X-Factor: This trope more or less sums up Jamie Madrox/Multiple Man's power (triggered via physical impact), especially once he learned that his duplicates were independent and developed their own personalities the longer they remained separate from him. Only he doesn't stop with "at least one evil twin". Any personality trait can be literally embodied in one of his "dupes"; as well, he sent out dupes to master certain occupations and skills, which after the dupes are reabsorbed, he learns as well. (The latter is distinctly implied to be the cause of the former — though the "independent duplicate" problem had some prior precedents, but those had involved external factors interfering with Jamie's powers — it became a permanent issue after he had reabsorbed many of the dupes sent out to learn new abilities.)
  • Warning: Combining the 'master certain occupations' and the 'evil twin' problem is VERY BAD!
  • In the Earth X continuity, Madrox is a Knowledge Broker, said to have a dupe in every major city on the planet. However, under dire circumstances and threat of starvation, Madrox is forced to eat one of his dupes and falls victim to the curse of the Wendigo — which is passed to every duplicate around the world. The heroes of Earth are forced to Kill It with Fire to eradicate the threat of self-duplicating, flesh-eating monsters.
  • At one point, Jamie is fighting a guy who claims to have "the strength of a hundred men". Jamie quips that in a second, so will he, then swarms the guy with a hundred dupes.
  • He appears in X-Men: The Animated Series cartoon, leading to this great one-liner when using his powers against Wolverine:
    Wolverine: What is this, a two-for-one sale?
    [Madrox creates ten more copies of himself]
    Madrox: No, more like a baker's dozen!
  • Damian Tryp also falls into this category, even though he's only pulled two versions of himself into the past. Doesn't stop him from causing a hell of a lot of trouble for Madrox and his team.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • In one storyline, Calvin uses a "duplicator" to make copies of himself, who turn out to be disobedient jerkasses like the original. Eventually, he gets fed up with the copies and turns them into earthworms (but Calvin being Calvin, the clones aren't inclined to complain: they're all "Cool! Let's go gross someone out!"). This story appears in the collection Scientific Progress Goes Boink, which is apparently named after and based on this story.
  • Later, Calvin tried again for similar reasons, this time making a clone of only his "good side". However, when the Good Twin tries to become friends with Susie, the neighborhood girl (with no success whatsoever), Calvin tracks him down and argues with him, and when the duplicate is about to fight him, he spontaneously explodes. Turns out fighting doesn't count as "good".
• In one Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip, a man finds himself infinitely multiplied. He wakes up commenting on his dream, only for his duplicates to wake up in bed beside him and tell him to be quiet. He then wakes up for real.

Fan Works

• In Past Sins, Nightmare Moon uses this twice, once to infiltrate the Royal Guard and once to Fight off several monsters from the Everfree Forest.
• Exploited by Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series to outsmart Hobbes when the two of them are in a maze.
• In Unnatural Disaster Taylor eventually learns to do this.
• In The Infinite Loops, aside from the liberal use of shadow clones, there's the Mikasa glitch which is when a Loop spawns extra copies of the same Looper. Once such a glitched Loop is over the Looper will have the memories of all the copies. Doesn't stop some of them from deciding There Can Only Be One though. There's also "mini-me" Loops, where there's an Awake and an Unawake copy of the same character. Loopers tend to find these very annoying.
• Princess Luna uses this trick in RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse several times, usually to allow herself to go incognito as several normal ponies.
• In the Pony POV Series:
  • Alicorns are capable of creating Avatars of themselves, though of the known one who can play this straight is Luna, who's noted as being exceptionally skilled at making Avatars that can act independently of the original. Celestia can make ones that can act separately of herself but aren't nearly as good.
  • Queen Libra (Alicorn!Rarity) from Dark World is capable of this flawlessly. This is because Libra is the Concept of the Mortal World, so she's literally the mortal universe itself.
  • Chrysalis can extend her control through her drones, who shapeshift into her and take her form. Though she's only been shown doing this once, and even then had to keep her attention divided between her and the body double.
  • The Scootaloo Army of Awesome is this as they're literally a several thousands strong Badass Army of Scootaloo, most of which are now angels. Not alternate universe versions of her, literally the same exact Scootaloo from different loops of Dark World collected by Nightmare Manacle.
• Water Aerobics for the Aquaphobic: As a result of falling into the Spring of the Drowned Twins during a disastrous Hogwarts field trip to Jusenkyo, Fred and George are duplicated whenever they're hit by cold water, something they cheerfully exploit for making mayhem.
• In a long gone Ranma/Sailor Moon story called Ten Of Two, Ranma is tasked to become the Senshi. Not a Senshi, but all of them. At the same time.
• In Multiplicity, Ranma takes a year long training trip, in which he improves on the Splitting Cat Hairs technique and uses it to split himself into multiple solid versions of himself, all sharing one brain but acting independently.
• Scoob and Shag: Ger's Ballyhoo power, "Stunt Double", lets him create a double of himself, though it's limited to a single clone and it's not very strong. Later on, once Gerald stops holding back, he creates enough clones to literally bury Shag.
• DNMC: Konwhey's Semblance lets him turn a piece of himself (usually hair) into a duplicate of himself with its own will, personality, and appearance (to an extent for the latter).
• The Miraculous Ladybug fanfic Manynette has an overworked Marinette Dupain-Cheng akumatized into being Manynette, a legion of Marinette copies, one for each of her responsibilities; serving as class president, helping with the family bakery, working on her fashion designs, caring for her friends, attending class and doing her chores, getting enough sleep (that's the real Marinette), and being a superhero.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): Most people from Sumaru City have at least one Alternate Self from another timeline running around because they used a portal to escape their doomed reality first chance they got. They try to use nicknames to differentiate.
• Servant Shenanigans features four versions of Artoria Pendragon (regular Saber, Salter, the Lion King, and Lily), four versions of Cu Chulainn (Cu, CasCu, Proto, and Alter), three versions of Emiya (regular Emiya, Edge, and Kage), and two versions of Fuuma (Kotaru and Onion). And this is before we get to the Identical Strangers. They all have very varied relationships with each other, from the brotherly bond between the Cus, to cold politeness with the Lion King, to outright avoidance.
• Dimensional Links: The whole plot is that 18 different Links (plus Shadow and Oni) come together for a Crisis Crossover. There are even Me's a Crowd groups within the group: the Four were originally one person split into four by the Four Sword, and so are Green, Red, Blue, and Vio (also originally one person). In addition, Ocarina and Mask are the same person from different points in their lives. Likewise, they are also many different versions of Ganondorf/Ganon.

Film — Live-Action

• Multiplicity is about a guy feeling overwhelmed by all his obligations. He accepts an offer to be cloned, but each of the three clones he ends up getting has a distinct personality, leading to various hijinks.
• Being John Malkovich: There's a door into John Malkovich's head that allows people to see through his eyes and (with experience) control him. When Malkovich goes through the door himself, he finds himself in a room where everybody has his head (including the women) and can only utter "Malkovich" to communicate.

Literature

• In the Arcane Ascension series, Jonathan Teft is fond of using simulacrums, independent magical copies of himself.
• In Armadillo Fists, going to a dop convention lets you meet all the possible versions of yourself from every existing universe.
• In The Bleeder, Death controls multiple clones of himself in order to deal with the millions of people dying everyday.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Monsters II: The short story "Vend U" has a girl gain the ability to make copies of herself after being eaten by a living vending machine.
• In the first Castle Perilous, Linda conjures up numerous doubles of Gene, Snowclaw, and Osmirik to fight the duplicate zombie soldiers and servants. This later becomes Linda's favourite tactic in every book thereafter.
• The Cosmere: The god Autonomy spreads her influence to new worlds through avatars that have their own sentience and identity but aren't independent from the god herself. In The Lost Metal, one character likens her to an invasive plant, as she's attempting to replace the native god of Scadrial with a new avatar.
• In the Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green, Hazel D'Ark eventually learns to summon variants of herself from alternate universes. This goes horribly wrong when she's captured by the Blood Runners, who force her to summon those constantly, killing each one in hideous ways.
• A teenage boy finds a duplicating device in William Sleator's The Duplicate, and uses it so he can go on a date and his grandmother's birthday party at the same time. Hilarity Ensues when his duplicate claims to be the original, and ends up going on the date while he gets the birthday party. Then the duplicate makes another duplicate, and things start getting complicated. It turns out that the alien device put an automatic time limit on any duplicates — not only do they become more erratic and homicidal but they self-terminate after a certain period of time regardless of whatever else they do.
• A variation in The Duplicated Man by James Blish and Robert Lowndes, in which the protagonist needs to be duplicated by an untested device that requires six different people, one for each duplicate to be created, hooked into the machine. Turns out while the memories are copied the personalities and appearances are affected by the subjective views of the various individuals. So one copy is actually a bit shorter and more cowardly than the original because that's how its creator perceived the original while another due to her hero worship was a physically and mentally perfected version of the original. So only one duplicate ended up looking more like a twin than simply like a close family member.
• The Elenium: The Physical Goddess Aphrael can manifest in multiple locations simultaneously, which helps her maintain her Secret Identity as Sparhawk's daughter in the Tamuli. However, it takes a lot of concentration, so she lets one of her bodies relax or nap whenever possible.
• In The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Pandaemonium is capable of generating multiple copies of her body that function independently as individuals, though their senses remain connected to the main body.
• In Fate of the Jedi, Abeloth eventually turns out to be possessing multiple bodies at the same time, though they're never at the same place after the initial possession.
• In The Guardians of Childhood, Toothiana's fairies are extensions of herself, enabling her to collect teeth from every child who has lost one.
• Anaander Mianaai, The Emperor of The Radch in the Imperial Radch trilogy, is a thousands-strong demographic of herself, all genetic clones of each other and connected through a faster-than-light neural network that shares all thoughts and memories with each other. Then Mianaai disagrees with herself on a matter of governance, and things get complicated for the Radch.
• In Jack Blank, Trea is able to divide herself into three; one is all-brains, one is all-brawn, and the third is all-randomly-decided-trait.
• In Journey to the West, Sun Wukong is able to pull hairs from his body then blow on them with his magic to transform them into miniature versions of himself.
• This is the key SF element in Brin's Kiln People. The original copies himself to a number of specialized golem bodies to perform various chores. Sometimes the copy isn't clean and it "goes Frankie" and takes a vacation instead of buying groceries.
• In the Lorien Legacies, this turns out to be Caleb's unique power — his "twin brother" is actually a clone of himself.
• In Mitosis, this is the power of the titular Mitosis. There's no "prime" copy, and any copy can make more with no difficulty, but each clone becomes weaker every time a new one is born.
• In Pale, Lucy can create multiple copies of herself with glamour, with each having her full capabilities until she decides that it's just a glamour replica such that the copy that avoided destruction was her true self all along.
• In The Rapture of the Nerds, cloud people can "fork" multiple instances of themselves with little trouble.
• Done to horrific effect in the Spellsinger novels, where one villain throws an army of identical human women berserkers at the heroes. Every one of them is a duplicate of woman the heroes' main offensive magic-user is in love with. Just to show how much of a bastard he is, once the heroes have started killing the clones, he sends the real one out Brainwashed and Crazy, hoping they'll kill her by accident. They almost do.
• In The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell, an alternate dimension doubles anything that passes through it, dividing living beings into Hive Minded duplicates. The villain exploits this to run his criminal enterprise more efficiently, while a love interest duplicates herself to resolve a Love Triangle.
• This is Julia's power in Super Powereds, and Chad's first opponent during their senior year's intramurals has the same power.
• In Super Sales on Super Heroes, Andrea can create multiple copies of herself.
• In Tales of the Otori, some tribe members can split in two, leaving behind a second self as a distraction that will fade from existence when the user stops concentrating.
• In Philip K. Dick's short story Upon the Dull Earth, protagonist Rick watches his girlfriend Silvia get killed by giant supernatural angel-like creatures whom she has previously been able to summon through animal sacrifice. Rick is able to contact these creatures and bring Silvia back to life, despite their warnings that something might go wrong. Gradually, everyone Rick encounters turns into Silvia, including Rick himself by the end of the story.
• Voidskipper: Towards the middle of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, Madeline prints off six more of herself to have some extra backup. In addition, an eighth Madeline is printed off by her handler Shen, after the first seven land themselves in psychological observation due to their experiences on Blackwood.
• In Welcome to Night Vale, this is how Josh's father Troy can be seen everywhere — he somehow made multiple copies of himself so he could be helpful to everyone.
• In Where's Wally?, one of the lands is The Land of Wallies, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — a land full of identical clones of Wally.
• Meow's A Crowd in Whispering Nickel Idols, in which the semi-divine litter of kittens known as the Luck of A-Lat appear to consist of five or six most of the time, but can fan out by the hundreds when there's a whole crowd of people to interact with and influence the temperaments of.
• Within the world of Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, all Toons can summon a "dupe" which will disappear in 24 hours. They're typically used for stunts and to allow for Amusing Injuries. The Roger Rabbit who comes to Eddie Valiant is a dupe of the original trying to solve his murder before he disappears.
• In Worm, Teeth member Spree has the power of creating as many clones as he wants, allowing him to do Zerg Rush attacks on his own. The copies explode into gunk after a few minutes, though.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: After being turned into a Brain in a Jar midway through Season 4, Anton Ivanov is able to remote control multiple LMDs of himself.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): It's a natural state for them (or as natural as Artificial Humans ever get), but each of the Significant Seven Cylon models has an army's worth of clones. Most are essentially extras, but some get development as individuals, including several Sixes and two Eights in particular (Boomer and Athena).
• In Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum, Nino invents a calculator that can make living clones of people.
• This happens a couple of times on Charmed (1998):
  • In "Which Prue is it Anyway?", Prue decides she needs a power boost, and casts a spell to triple her power. Unfortunately, she doesn't realize that what it actually does is create three of her. It turns out to be useful, after all, because the two clones end up dying instead of the original Prue.
  • It is implied late in Season 3 that Prue's Astral Projection power would have eventually progressed into the ability to make fully independent duplicates if she hadn't died.
  • When Piper finds out that the Angel of Death is after her husband Leo in "Vaya con Leos", she decides to cast a spell to hide him. While the spell does confuse the Angel of Death, it had an unintended effect: every man in San Francisco got turned into a clone of Leo.
• Doctor Who:
  • Variation: thanks to The Nth Doctor, there's currently fourteen^note counting the War Doctor different incarnations of the Doctor running around space/time... it's extremely rare for them to meet (Timey-Wimey Ball, actors dying, and all that), but when they do the result tends to be similar to this trope. The 10 Doctors is an artist's rendition, shall we say, of how the first ten Doctors^note pre-the War Doctor being retconned in would act if forced to cooperate.
  • "The Deadly Assassin": While in the Matrix, the assassin takes on various generic historical personas (a samurai, a clown, a WW1 biplane pilot, etc.) to attack/frighten the Doctor (and the audience). At one point several of him seem to man several positions on a train (or trains) simultaneously to run over the Doctor's leg.
  • In another Fourth Doctor story, "The Leisure Hive", the villain Pangol used a form of Applied Phlebotinum to recreate himself thousands of times over as a conquering army. Thanks to the Doctor's interference he ended up with an army of Doctors, which disintegrated within minutes of their generation.
  • "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit": The Beast possesses all of the Ood at once, turning them into extensions of himself.
  • A straight example in "The End of Time": The Master hijacks the Immortality Gate to transform the entire human race except for Wilf ^note (locked in a radiation-shielded booth) and Donna ^note (thanks to the events of "Journey's End" making her half-Time Lord) into "The Master Race", a planet-wide population of (insane, madly laughing) Master copies.^note Luke Smith is an Artificial Human, so he may have also remained unchanged; he appears in the denouement but doesn't address his own fate.
• The Eureka episode "Primal" features Dr. Stark being copied by nanoids. The copies, driven by Stark's own subconscious desires, try to take over the world. Long story.
• In the "Fastest Man Alive" episode of the 2014 The Flash series, Barry has to fight another meta-human who eventually gets named Multiplex. Multiplex's body, after the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator explosion, appears to be made out of stem cells, which he can split off into copies of himself as he chooses (even clothes, apparently). All the copies are under his direct mental control. His main goal is to get revenge on Simon Stagg, who stole his organ cloning research and fired him before Multiplex could use it to save his dying wife. As the good guys figure out, Multiplex can be spotted among his doubles by the amount of stress he experiences from controlling the Hive Mind. Thanks to his hyper-accelerated perception, Barry is able to spot beads of sweat on one of the figures among the hundred or so copies.
  • In the episode "Aruba", Eobard Thawne brings an entire army of himself from various points across history (and some time remnants to boot) to confront the Legends.
• In Game of Thrones, the warlock Pyatt Pree appears to create a double of himself, although many of those watching think the warlocks are charlatans and this is just a trick. It's revealed in the next episode that he really can do this, and create more than a single copy too.
• In the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids episode "Honey, I Got Duped", Wayne accidentally clones himself, and the clones are given names such as Slappy and Scabby.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider OOO has this power as the Set Bonus for his Gatakiriba Combo. It doesn't get used very often because (In-Universe) it's physically taxing and because (in Real Life) it's reportedly a very expensive effect. The Movie contains a special usage, where OOO splits into eight copies and then each one transforms into one of his primary Combos to fight the Big Bad.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard can duplicate himself as many times as he has the mana for with his Copy spell, but the copies are placed a few feet to the side of him and can only mimic his movements exactly. A later upgrade gives him the ability to create up to three fully independent clones, one in each of his four elemental forms. The White Wizard's version of Copy is Dupe, whose clones can also act independently.
  • In Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, Kuroto can send phantom copies of Genm to other places to fight in his stead once he achieves Level X. He loses this power as part of his Redemption Demotion, then gets a new version of it when he becomes a villain again.
  • In Kamen Rider Build, this is one of the Mirage Smash's powers, and one of the powers of the Ninja Fullbottle created from its remains. These copies have the drawback of being a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • In Kamen Rider Saber, Ren can create up to two clones of himself by drawing on the story of The Three Little Pigs.
  • Kamen Rider Revice can conjure up to ten copies of himself once he gets the Barid Rex Vistamp, with each of the copies using the Remix transformation of one of his lesser forms.
• In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode covering The Human Duplicators, Tom Servo ends up cloning himself dozens and dozens of times during a host segment, creating a small herd of Servos to menace Crow with. Strangely enough, this is one gag that doesn't Snap Back, and the surplus Servos end up as recurring supporting characters, usually whenever Servo wants to perform with the United Servo Academy Mens' Chorus or the Sir Thomas Neville Servo Consort of the Middle Ages Just-After-the-Plague Singers. In the final episode, Servo cleans up this dangling plot thread by blowing up all the doppelgangers.
• In one episode of The New Monkees, Marty accidentally clones himself after falling asleep on a copy machine.
• Power Rangers
  • Used in a Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers PSA to show that differences between people is a good thing.
  • Power Rangers S.P.D.: Yellow Ranger Elizabeth "Z" Delgado has this ability.
  • The Monster of the Week of an episode of Power Rangers: Dino Thunder had the power to create copies of anything in front of him. At one point, he made three copies of Cassidy on the spot, and the four of them proceeded to drive Devin crazy by stacking him with chores.
  • In Power Rangers in Space, Monster of the Week Crocovile can split himself into two copies.
  • In Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, Monster of the Week Demonite can create a copy of himself with a Mirror Card.
  • In Power Rangers Samurai, Monster of the Week Duplicator can do this.
  • In Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Monster of the Week Copybot can create up to four copies of himself.
• In Powers, this is Simons' power.
• In the ReBoot: The Guardian Code episode "Game Day", Megabyte uses a code replicator to make copies of himself.
• Round the Twist has a character make only one clone to win a running competition. However, a rabbit starts cloning an army of itself with the machine. All the objects used in the machine, cloned or original, begin to dissolve eventually, due to a fault in the machine. At least one rabbit survives, though, because in the final scene, we learn what happened when Bronson put her with a male rabbit.
• In one episode of Smallville, Monster of the Week Ian Randall has the power to create a clone of himself so that they can study in two places at the same time.
• An arc in the later seasons of Stargate SG-1 had Baal make dozens of clones of himself, and in a few episodes set on Earth at least five of them hung out together. One episode even has a Gotta Catch Them All where the heroes travel the galaxy, trying to scoop up all the Baal clones. A freeze frame near the end of the episode shows fifteen clones in one room. It turns out it was a Batman Gambit. Baal knew the heroes would give him the info he wanted to buy time when he had hostages, as long as they knew he couldn't escape with that info. And the clones? Each one has a transponder, too weak to be detected, but if they all stand in one place...
• Star Trek: Picard: The five Emergency Holograms on La Sirena all look like and are based on Cristóbal Rios (the owner and pilot of the ship), and all of them can be called upon at once if needed.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Mind and the Matter", Archibald Beechcroft eventually hits on the idea of creating a world full of Beechcrofts using his ability to manipulate reality but he quickly discovers that a lot of him is as bad as a lot of everyone else.
• In Uchu Sentai Kyuranger, the rangers can make copies of themselves with the Gemini Kyutama.
• Ultraman Gaia: Ultraman Gaia manage to slice Satanbizo into 8 pieces in their battle, only for each piece to regenerate into a tiny clone of Satanbizo, each capable of acting independently on its own.
• During the Final Battle of Ultraman Geed, Geed's Heroic Willpower calls down a miracle from Ultraman King, allowing him to manifest all of his forms at once to battle Belial Atrocious.
• In Ultraman Max when Max battles against Alien Baltan, Max gets the drop on Baltan and blasts him into pieces... only for each piece to re-generate into separate Baltans. Max then decides to split himself into copies (an ability he used exclusively for this one battle, and nowhere else in the entire series) resulting into an army of Ultraman Maxes fighting an army of Baltans.
• In Ultraman X, the titular Ultra can use his Xlugger ability to split into four different colored clones.
• In the You Can't Do That on Television episode "Science", Alasdair develops a cloning machine and tests it out on "motormouth" Lisa, much to the chagrin of the others.
• In Young Sheldon S4 E17, Sheldon imagines having a second Sheldon to work with on a new theorem. They get along great until they argue over which Sheldon gets credited first, which leads to an all-out brawl (as imagined by Missy).
• In Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, Monster of the Week Debo Shinobinba can create clones of himself.

Music

• Used on the Hipgnosis-designed cover for the Emerson, Lake & Palmer album Trilogy. The inner gatefold has multiple Emersons, Lakes, and Palmers posing in a forest.
• Gumi attempts this in A Fake, Fake Psychotropic. It backfires.

Puppet Shows

• In one episode of The Muppet Show, Beaker accidentally ends up in a copying machine. The result is a multitude of Beakers, who all gang up on Dr. Honeydew. Eventually they take over the whole show, replacing the Electric Mayhem and even Statler and Waldorf.
  • In the later series Muppets Tonight, Gonzo somehow creates multiple copies of himself to perform a musical number. Fittingly, that number is Dancing With Myself.
  • Kermit also appeared with two duplicates of himself on Muppets Tonight, performing "Once In a Lifetime" in a parody of Stop Making Sense.

Radio

• And in the second radio season of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), we have Lintilla. Not to mention Allitnil, Allitnil and Allitnil.

Roleplay

• Archipelago Exodus' Terrian Brogue has this power. Now that the ability has amplified to duplicating items he's holding on his person as well, he's taken a giant leap forward in terms of versatility and usefulness... and financial value.
• In Radio City, Multiplayer is capable of creating up to fifteen clones of himself.
• In Permaneo Spes, this is Antonio's power.
• In Puella Magi Adfligo Systema, Aki can make magic clones of herself.
• In Touhou: a Glimmer of an Outside World, Shinto Gods are able to split themselves indefinitely, something Suwako fully takes advantage of.
• In Resonating Spirits, Nic King has the ability to make a clone puppet of himself.

Tabletop Games

• The Champions superhero Tabletop RPG had "Duplication" as a possible super power.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Zig-zagged across editions, with 3.5^e providing the most options for accomplishing it.
  • The Fission psionic power and the Body Outside Body spell both let you clone yourself. Through Loophole Abuse, the incantatrix Prestige Class can use the latter to produce a hundred or more clones that last all day, and apart from a bit of feedback damage if they die, they are completely expendable.
  • The spell Simulacrum creates weaker copies of the target, all absolutely loyal to the caster. Enterprising mages can use this to create a telepathic gestalt of expendable avatars.
  • The Mind Seed psionic power overwrites other people's minds with copies of the caster's consciousness, combining this trope with Split-Personality Takeover. However, they have the physical form and abilities of the victim rather than those of the caster, and while they're likely to share the same goals as the caster, being a mental copy of them, they aren't magically compelled to obey them, so there's nothing preventing someone with a particularly treacherous personality from betraying "themself".
• GURPS has a Duplication advantage and Clone spell.
• The Clarissa Explains It All Game can be played by up to six people, and all of them will be Clarissa Darling. Whoever gets a Driver's License and car first, wins!
  • The The Honeymooners and many Scooby-Doo board games work the same way, with everyone playing the same character without any acknowledgement of the fact.
• Mutants & Masterminds has a Duplication power and includes at least two crooks with the power set. Remlok, a time-traveling thief, summons himself from various futures. The Other Woman has a more conventional duplication power.
• In the Adventure! pulp RPG from White Wolf, this is the secret power of Yellow Peril villain The Ubiquotous Dragon. Being a universe where the power scale is rather low, this is not only a very powerful ability, but he also uses it in a much more low-key way than most examples on this page. Essentially, every one of his local Co-Dragons is himself, which means they are perfectly loyal and coordinated, and even if you find the body, he will still be there.
• In Eclipse Phase, Brain Uploading has become so ubiquitous that there are now more disembodied minds than there are organic bodies to accommodate them. All one needs to do create a horde of themselves is to create duplicates of their minds (in a process called "forking") and then download them into new bodies (either organic or robotic). However, if the forked personalities stay separated from the original for more than a few hours, they start to become separate and distinct people, as their experiences alter their personalities.
• The "Mr. LeThuys" in Over the Edge, who are a not-so-secret conspiracy of an old, potbellied, nihilistic Vietnamese man named Mr. LeThuy who had a mad scientist create a retrovirus using his genetic material that would slowly change anyone injected with it into an identical copy of him. His/their goal is to gradually convince everyone else to join him/them so that he/they could then end the human race and end the chaos of existence. He/they is/are also very convincing...
  • This is also how Dr. Nussbaum is able to be such a prolific researcher and inventor. There are two of him. Interestingly, the jury's out on whether he even knows he has a duplicate.
• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Proletariat can create clones of himself. Everyman, a Disparation hero found in the OblivAeon objective deck, is an alternate Legacy where the Parsons line's cumulative powers lead to this trope rather than Flying Brick.
• In Iron Kingdoms, Victoria's third incarnation can summon different versions of herself from the past and the future.
• In Magic: The Gathering, one of Jace's common combat tactics is spamming illusory doubles of himself to disorientate and confuse foes.
  • This is also the signature ability of shapeshifter Orvar, the All-Form.
• In Pathfinder, the Shadow Clone Trick lets ninjas fake this by spawning illusory doubles.
• In Scion, Laozi is fond of incarnating as a large number of grandmothers bickering amongst themselves.
• The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG: The Swarm spell allows the caster to split into a number of smaller versions of themself, all able to act independently of one another and each possessing a portion of the caster's resource pools. Overlaps with One to Million to One, as the caster can choose to cast it as a reaction to taking damage, negating that damage at the cost of essence.

Theatre

• In ZED, Zed starts the story with several doppelgängers. By the time Abraka appears, however, they have been condensed into one being.

Toys

• Makuta Bitil's Mask of Power in BIONICLE allows him to summon past versions of himself to create this effect. His past selves are unable to retain memories of future events, and he is often stricken with random injuries that appear out of nowhere whenever he gets summoned by a future version of himself.

Video Games

• Kirby:
  • Kirby Mass Attack revolves around the wizard Necrodius splitting Kirby into 10 weaker, smaller copies of itself. Kirby uses this splitting to his advantage to solve the countless puzzles of the game.
  • A similar thing happens in Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, though Dark Meta Knight only splits him into four differently colored copies.
  • In Kirby Fighters Deluxe, King Dedede uses the power of the Fountain of Dreams to create up to 63 smaller copies of himself to create Team DDD.
  • Meta Knight's corruption by the Jamba Heart in Kirby Star Allies has him split into four copies of himself depending on how many Allies there are. Parallel Meta Knight does the exact same in the Heroes in Another Dimension post-game.
  • In Kirby and the Forgotten Land, one of Fecto Elfilis' attacks is to split himself into multiple copies and heal themselves. Only one of them will be the real Elfilis.
• The Legend of Zelda
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: In the original Japanese script, Ganon refers to Agahnim as his bunshin, a word used to refer to duplicates of oneself. This implies that Agahnim was a humanoid duplicate of himself (possibly his Ganondorf form) that could escape to the Light World.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords saga. This was most likely done by Nintendo to keep fanboys from arguing about who gets to play as Link.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, Shadow Link continues to spawn endless copies of himself until Zelda takes back the Dark Mirror.
• Twisted Wonderland: Cater Diamond's unique magic "Split Card" allows him to create multiple copies of himself, which he uses to complete tasks like painting every rose in the dorm garden.
• A powerup in the NES Ninja Gaiden allows Ryu to create up to two red doubles that follow his movements. They can also hang in the air and attack if you move right.
• The Freedom Force villain Déjà Vu, who spoke in rhyme and could clone himself indefinitely until the original was knocked out (said original being easily detectable since he's the only one with a full life bar). The sequel, Freedom Force Vs The Third Reich featured the WWII-era Japanese villain Red Sun who had a slight variation of this power: he couldn't clone himself indefinitely but the clones became stronger and regained health whenever one fell in battle, hence they had to be dealt with one at a time. This variation in powers was most likely a reaction to the fact that some players would grind Déjà Vu's clones for infinite prestige points.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 3 had Gemini Man as a Robot Master, while Mega Man X4 gives us Split Mushroom. Axle the Red from Mega Man X5 could also do this, as well as Infinity Mijinion from Mega Man X6 and Flame Hyenard from Mega Man X7.
  • In Mega Man 10, Yonbain will do this if you don't kill it quickly.
  • In Mega Man IV, the two Hunters onboard the Wily Battleship have the ability to create more of themselves (but in the first one's case, the copies are far weaker).
  • In Mega Man Star Force, Le Mu can different models of EM Being.
  • In Mega Man: The Power Battle, the Yellow Devil has the ability to form smaller versions of himself.
• The latest issue of City of Heroes features a variation of this, as Villains have the option to find out if they can beat an 8 man team of themselves.
• Champions Online has Mr. Gemini, an early villain in Vibora Bay, and his Gemini Gang. It turns out that every single member of the gang is a duplicate of the original Mr. Gemini.
• The Piece of Eden had this as one of the abilities it granted in both of the Assassin's Creed games. Although they are apparently just illusions (that will stab you and the final boss, in the second game.)
• The characters Aqua, Nisha, Poodle, and Salmon have this ability in Project Dimentia Bodhisattva.
• In Dota 2, illusions are weaker copies of heroes that generally deal less and take a lot more damage than regular heroes and can't use active abilities of heroes and items (illusions inherit passive abilities on a case-by-case basis). Some patches ago, illusions gained no benefit from damage bonuses from item stats, meaning builds taking advantage from illusions needed to be designed differently than usual. They're also instantly dispelled by some of the utility abilites that would deal no damage to actual heroes such as Lion's Mana Drain, Hex or Disruptor's Glimpse. Heroes that make extensive use of multiple illusions of themselves include Naga Siren, Chaos Knight, Terrorblade, and most prominently, Phantom Lancer, whose illusions can create more illusions. All heroes can create illusions of themselves with the active ability of Manta Style item or by activating an Illusion rune.
  • Distinct from illusions are so called "clones", utilized by Meepo, Arc Warden and Monkey King, whose clones all have different mechanics.
    • Meepo's life is bound to his clones and if any of them die, they all die, but they all have no expiration timer, can actually sap experience on their own, adding it to the shared total, and use the same abilities Meepo Prime does (but they don't copy non-boot items).
    • Arc Warden's clone is limited by time, but does copy all items ^note with the exception of select few, such as consumables or the Divine Rapier(s) the original is holding. Its death doesn't entail the original Arc Warden's death, but it grants a significant sum of gold as a bounty to the player who kills it, discouraging carelessly throwing it into sieges.
    • Monkey King's clones are invulnerable, but can only attack enemies in their reach and cannot move or use any active abilities (or even gain stacks of his Jingu Mastery passive), expiring after a longer while. Wukong's Command creates many of them in a circular formation covering a large area, while the Aghanim's Scepter makes him spawn his clones whenever he goes, on a short timer^note They also ignore buildings if Monkey King isn't with them, to prevent damage to buildings the opposing team has no way of preventing.
  • Shadow Demon's Disruption creates illusions of anyone it's used on, who fight on the side of Shadow Demon.
  • Enigma's Eidolons are actually aspects of himself from other dimensions, although they're far weaker than him.
• In Heroes of Newerth, Xemplar can create illusions of himself that copies his active ability casts.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Super Mario World, some Chargin' Chucks can split into three identical copies, which all then proceed to attack.
  • Several attacks from the Mario & Luigi series have 3-4 Marios and Luigis on the screen at once. Exaggerated in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team; while the Mario Bros. are in the Dream World, Luigi can multiply himself scores of times over, whether in order to explore areas (e.g. with a pillar of Luigis) or to fight enemies (e.g. with a big rolling ball of Luigis).
  • In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, paper characters can copy themselves in order to do additional attacks on their enemies.
  • The Double Cherries of Super Mario 3D World make a copy of the player character for each one grabbed. Including Bowser.
  • At one point in Super Paper Mario, Dimentio floods a hallway with copies of himself. While they don't harm you, they are in your way and push you back to the center of the room.
  • In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga:
    • When Trunkle starts running out of health, he'll create four copies of himself, one of which has his weak point inside. He'll then shuffle it around so that Mario and Luigi will have a harder time figuring it out.
    • Cackletta will split into three when you fight her, though each clone will only attack the Mario Brothers once per round.
    • Lemmy and Wendy can use this tactic, though they both have a tendency to give away who the real one is.
  • In Mario Sports Mix, the Ninja can create clones of himself in his Limit Break.
• In the tactical RPG Kartia: The Word of Fate for the PS1, the elf twins have this power, though it's only visibly used by the male one near the end of the game in Toxa's scenario.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City has a Ninja class; one of their moves lets them create a shadow clone to fill the usually-vacant sixth slot in the usual five-man party. However, they can use this to fill any empty slot... potentially resulting in a small army of fake ninjas covering for the real one.
  • Etrian Odyssey Nexus, in addition to bringing back the Ninjas and their duplication skill, also has the Hero class. They're capable of casting Afterimages that autonomously replicate the attacks that summoned them in the prior turns (for example, if the Hero performs Frigid Slash and an Afterimage is created, then that Afterimage will repeat the Frigid Slash in the next turn so the original Hero performs a different skill or action). Since both the Ninja mirages and the Afterimages need a slot to appear, the player has to know whom to reserve the sixth slot (though if there are less than five standard party members, both Ninjas and Heroes can potentially cast more than one Mirage/Afterimage to invoke this trope).
• MARDEK Chapter 2, in which your first mission includes killing a guy who is "actually five blokes in one" or something like that. Magic thieves.
• One Demon in Dragon Age: Origins can create illusory duplicates of itself.
• Agent 47 of Hitman is a clone himself, being the 47th one. He ends up fighting a lot of himselves, and in some cases, his clones are trying to assassinate him. Er, it's complicated. Anyhow, he's apparently the superior clone.
• Mortal Kombat has Mileena, a clone of Kitana. Raised to replace the latter in the original, making a name for herself in the remake. Also, Kano gets this treatment in X, much to his chargin.
• One of the three human civilizations in the Endless Space is the Horatio, after a beauty-obsessed trillionaire discovered a Precursor cloning machine, and used it to build a massive Egopolis. Naturally, one of his faction traits is having a higher population cap than normal.
• In Kingdom Hearts, this is the ultimate plan of Xehanort, with the reason he created Organization XIII being so he could commit Grand Theft Me on the other twelve members.
• Kingdom Rush gives us the Demon Legion, who can create an exact copy of itself with the same health as the original. Better put the hurt on them before they do so!
• In Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, in the final battle, multiple mirages of Zara appear.
• In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, the playable body-double of Jack can create holographic decoys to attack enemies, as well as to draw enemy fire. Depending on how they're upgraded, they can function as Action Bombs, have a chance to be upgraded to Badass-tier or even count as a kill for the original so that he's revived when downed.
• In Phantasy Star Universe, one of the NPC's Ethan encounters is a CAST named Lou. Later in the main story, Ethan works with Lou again, but she doesn't recognize him. It turns out Lou is a mass-produced CAST built and deployed by the government, and there are hundreds of her out there. Though you run into "Lou" a number of times in the game and its expansions, they are never the same individual. One mission even has you helping Lou rescue another Lou.
• Tales of Maj'Eyal's 1.3 reworking of Temporal Wardens gave them a few abilities that involve calling on other timelines' versions of oneself for temporary aid.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse builds on the idea of Hordes from IV by making the third-to-last boss a Horde of Metatrons. Furthermore, the first form is the Final Boss is comprised of an army of YHVH heads, with a few in particular getting in attacks.
• Virtue's Last Reward has this as the villain's ultimate endgame... well, sorta. Dio is a Myrmidon, a clone of Left, the murdered brother of... Brother, the head of Free The Soul who believe that the human subconscious has been poisoned by negative emotions. To heal humanity's collective mind, Brother tried to exterminate humanity with Radical-6 (And nearly succeeded) and is now trying to replace humanity with Myrmidons who Brother believes to be pure beings.
• BloodRayne featured Hedrox the Infinite, a bestial vampire that had the power to duplicate himself whenever he is dismembered. Coupled with his extremely fast regenerative powers and new Hedrox clones being created out of his severed limbs, it's nearly impossible to defeat him... Unless if he and his clones are dropped on water, which is like acid to him.
• The two Styx games Styx: Master of Shadows and Styx: Shards of Darkness make use of this. Goblin protagonist Styx can vomit out clones of himself which serve a multitude of purposes. If you are chased, they get killed instead of you. You can control them and let them explode as smoke bombs to get cover. In the second game you can make the smoke poisonous and later let clones explode to kill everything in a 2-meter radius. Also in the second game you can assume the control of a clone when you die, provided you have spawned one beforehand. It is also important to the plot, as the player character of the first game is just a backup clone of Styx, which you find out halfway through the game. At the end of the first game, you fall into the magic soup you use to create clones and unleash the goblin plague that is a plot point of the second game on the world.
• During the Cross Ange finale in Super Robot Wars X, Embryo clones 20 of himself inside Hysterica (technically 21 but Ange kills one in a cutscene beforehand). Fortunately, they aren't difficult and can be a really great source for money and experience for characters lagging behind.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, clones of Yuriko are used to fuel the Empire's superweapon, and in one challenge mission in Uprising, the enemy will swarm your base with Yuriko clones.
• In Defense of the Ancients, several heroes are capable of generating illusory copies, and the Manta Style item allows any other hero to have this ability as well.
• In Goodbye Deponia, Rufus clones himself into three since he doesn't have enough time to save the day and Goal on his own.
• The plot of Dexter's Laboratory: Deesaster Strikes! is kicked off when Dee Dee messes around with Dexter's Clone-O-Matic machine, which not only clones her, but splits her up into many tiny clones of herself.
• In Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, the mysterious "Double Illusion" Netherworld has a peculiar ability to create clones of people who stay there too long. This is the reason why Asagi doesn't seem to have a consistent personality in her multiple appearances.
• In Dishonored 2, Emily's "Doppelganger" ability lets her create a clone of herself as either a distraction or for combat.
• In Dragon Ball: Fusions Cell takes advantage of time being screwed up by the wish to invite an army of himself from alternate timelines.
• In Ghost Hacker, Axon reveals that he has many copies of himself, and simply deleting one of his avatars will not stop him. Alpha is also an example.
• During one event in Gotcha Force, Yuji inexplicably appears with two clones and is berated by Usagi for messing around.
• In Hyper Dragon Ball Z, one of Piccolo's supers can clone himself up to two times, depleting his HP by a fair margin. The clones each have a rather imperfect AI but are rather helpful.
• In IDOLA: Phantasy Star Saga, Jasper and Wyndis can grant themselves the unique "Other Self" buff, which causes a shadow clone to appear next to them, enabling them to hit twice per hit with any attack or Skill outside of Elemental Blast.
• In Knights of the Round, Phantom can create four doubles of himself during battle.
• In Lollipop Chainsaw, Mariska splits herself into four, then eight, duplicates during her Boss Fight.
• In Pac-Man 256, the Pac-Men power summons miniature Pac-Mans that chase ghosts and destroy them, much like the Tornado.
• In Path of Exile, the Blink Arrow and Mirror Arrow skills create a duplicate of the character with their bow and quiver.
• In the Quake "Dissolution of Eternity" expansion, Hell Spawns are able to duplicate themselves.
• In Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman, Zan splits into three when finishing off bosses.
• RWBY: Amity Arena:
  • Sun's semblance allows him to send four short-lived clones of himself to fight.
  • Emerald can create phantom copies of all nearby allies.
  • When placed on the arena, Flynt Coal uses his Killer Quartet to summon 3 copies of himself and blast Gale-Force Sound. Unlike the show, they are not color-coded and all have the original's appearance.
• In Soul of the Samurai, Urabe does this in his boss fight, creating two copies of himself to attack you.
• In Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, a few of the Mummy levels involve him being split into three copies of himself by a trap, leading to puzzles that require teamwork between his selves.
• In The Fall (2014), One is part of a mass-produced series of androids who all cohabitate a region of the planet where they gradually develop a Hive Mind based on personal experiences which then filter into the server, being replicated by the Many.
• In The Legend of Valkyrie, a spell allows you to summon mini versions of your character to protect you.
• Exaggerated (literally) in Touhou Soccer, when Flandre uses her Four of a Kind ability to form a team all by herself.
• In Don't Whack Your Boss With Super Power, selecting the headband grants you this power.
• In When Tails Gets Bored, Tails clones himself after Resort Island, and Sonic has to go to Clone Valley to get rid of them.
• The April Fool's event in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links featured multiple copies of Tristan appearing, who were all so weak the player defeated them just by interacting with them.
• In This Is Your Grave, the Human Frog can multiply itself over time.
• In Styx: Master of Shadows, Styx can create clones that can crawl through certain gates, scout areas ahead, distract guards and can even be upgraded to serve as living smoke bombs or to ambush enemies inside closets and chests.
• In AdventureQuest Worlds, NOTruto can create clones of himself, much like Naruto (whom he is a Captain Ersatz of).
• In Happiness, this is Anri's solution to there being too many customers at the cafe for her to handle.
• In Apex Legends, Mirage plays with this. While he loves to play around (e.g., take selfies) with his holographic decoys as if they were real persons, those decoys are never physically tangible clones.
• In Bloodborne, Mergo's Wet Nurse can occasionally create a clone of herself that lasts for roughly a minute.
• In Bomberman Generation, Bomber Elite is able to produce two identical clones that also wield psychic powers. You won't be able to spot the real one unless you throw a bomb at them.
• In Brave Frontier, Heresy Demon Kalon can make clones of himself which share all of his memories in order to keep the seals of Karna Masta's power intact.
• In Bravely Default, Anne can set up multiple copies of herself with her Now You See Me ability.
• In Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Elyon summons two clones of himself in his Boss Battle.
• In Cytus II, Xenon's rock band consists of virtual clones of himself.
  • Ivy can create duplicates of herself, which she uses to carry out some of her operations. These duplicates are noticeably more machine-like in their behaviour and exist only to follow her commands.
• In Dark Souls III, the Crystal Sage starts spawning duplicates every time he teleports in his second stage.
• In Death end re;Quest, a glitch in merchant teleportation code caused Rook to be cloned into multiple places, all under a single mind. Since it allows him to conduct business in multiple places simultaneously, he's not complaining.
• In Destiny, Taken Psions have the ability to do this.
• In Detroit: Become Human, all three androids Hank and Connor encounter in Kamski's mansion are copies of Chloe.
• In Devil Survivor 2, Mizar continually grows and creates smaller copies of itself, and any attack causes Mizar to break off into pieces that grow fast.
• In Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015), Shiva splits into two Shivas when her health gets below half.
• In Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Ba-Boom, the Boisterous creates two doppelgangers to fight alongside him.
• In Don't Starve, Maxwell can create shadow clones to do his bidding with the Codex Umbra.
• In Dragalia Lost, the Hermit bosses split into multiple copies once they hit Overdrive.
• In DragonFable, Cysero summons seven other Cyseros during a time travel quest.
• In Dragon Force (Sega), Kyoem can create a shadow clone.
• Horatio in Endless Space 2 was an insanely rich trillionaire who left on a solo journey to find his own star system to colonize, and along the way discovered extremely advanced cloning technology, which he used to create an entire galactic civilzation of himself. The Horatio are one of the playable factions in the game.
• The Heretic Leader from Halo 2 deploys two holographic copies of himself at the start of his Boss Battle, to distract the Player Character. Despite being holograms, they are fully capable of harming the Arbiter.
• So Many Me: Filo can find Ark Seeds scattered across the world. When he collects them, they turn into other versions of himself that follow him around and help him perform tasks in the game.
• In Genshin Impact, Il Dottore is actually a collection of "Segments" that were created to serve as differing perspectives in his research. The Segments represent him at various stages of his life, with personalities that vary enough to cause confusion and rumors among the rank-and-file of the Fatui. During his confrontation with Lesser Lord Kusanali, the god demands he destroy his Segments as payment for the Electro Gnosis. The Segment negotiating with her, identified as the "Omega Build", agrees to her demands and explains that he is a particularly "selfish" version. He admits to being tired of the constant bickering and arguing among himself, and eagerly kills the others via unknown means. While creating Segments is apparently a costly and difficult process, he hints that this is only a temporary setback.

Web Animation

• A Legend Of Zelda parody, Four Swords Misadventures, has Dark Link doing this — a lot. The first time, he even used the quote from Agent Smith before showing it off. In the latest episode, he uses this power to go on a one-man riot.
  "RIOT! RIOT! RIOT!"
• RWBY:
  • Blake Belladonna's Semblance "Shadow" allows her to create a temporary shadow clone that takes the hit while she dodges away. She bitterly says that it's a perfect Semblance for a coward. She can also push off the clones for a Double Jump, and with the help of Dust, she can make her clones solid with elemental effects.
  • Sun Wukong's Semblance "Via Sun" allows him to create two light clones. Word of God is that Sun's Semblance was specifically designed to be the opposite of Blake's; Sun stays still while his clones move and fight for him.
  • Flynt Coal can split himself into four copies with his "Killer Quartet" Semblance. All four copies mirror each other's movements, so he primarily uses this to quadruple his attack power.
• Every character in Back To The Moon (except for Jehanne) is a duplicate of Georges Méliès.
• Dreamscape: Boru can create duplicates of himself.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: Dr. McNinja had to learn all sorts of things and he didn't have enough time so... it's cloning time!
• Blip: One gag shows that the cyborg Mary used her robot clones to deal with having scheduled four dates at the same time.
• Dreamkeepers: Wisp has this as her power, splitting up parts of her personality as needed.
• Fite!: Skerry sometimes appears as one figure, and sometimes as three.
• El Goonish Shive: If Tedd had his way with Star Trek Online, his bridge crew would consist entirely of himself and several duplicates of Grace.
• Grrl Power: Harem has five bodies, controlled by one mind. In most circumstances, all the bodies are capable of independent action, sort of like making your two arms move differently.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Your pal Gog-Agog is a being made of an innumerable number of worms forming billions of humanoid bodies. She has a solid grasp on the entertainment industry in the multiverse and is all around a rare example of a rather happy-go-lucky fellow in a terrible multiverse to live in. This is reason enough for many desperate people to consume one of Gog-Agog's many worms and become her.
• MS Paint Adventures:
  • Problem Sleuth: Pickle Inspector uses his imagination to create time-traveling clones of himself. it's revealed that every atom in the universe (real and possibly imaginary) is composed of subatomic time traveling Pickle Inspector clones, or part-pickles.
  • Homestuck:
    • Aradia Megido's time powers in the Medium allow her to create an army of alternate future selves, which are used to help defeat the Black King in their session. Dave Strider has the same powers in the kids' session and (ab)uses them to the point where there are at least 43 iterations of him running around at one point, both Stable Time Loop travellers and Bad Future copies.
    • In the Alpha Session, Dirk Strider has several versions of himself — his real self, his dreamself, his auto-responder which later becomes part of his sprite, and the "splinter" of himself lodged in Jake's subconscious. It's apparently part of his abilities as a Hero of Heart. Having so many versions of himself around is actively causing him to begin to hate himself.
    • After the arrival of the Prospitian warship in the Alpha session, Jane and Nanna are the only Sburb Players to have both of their instances (post-Scratch player and pre-Scratch ancestor/guardian, respectively) alive in the same universe simultaneously. Beta Jack Noir, Spades Slick, and Alpha Jack Noir also all end up together in the Alpha session as well.
    • Eggs from the Felt can teleport into the past, which he uses to create an army of... hims; he also creates an army of Biscuitses too by taking Biscuits with him when he teleports.
• Narbonic: Professor Madblood needs an army to conquer the Earth, so he builds 15,000 robot duplicates of himself.
• Schlock Mercenary turns this up to the max. Gav stepped through a duplicator device with 950 million outputs, and the clones now form a major sapient ethnicity and marketing demographic. Clone Angst eventually gets to Gav, and they start funding and implementing a program to physically and mentally distinguish themselves.
• Sombulus: Tenge Kaedermos frequently uses his powers of Self-Duplication to simultaneously study and work on rubrics for spells.
• The Wotch: Anne Onymous accidentally schedules 4 different things for the same time, and uses a spell to multiply so she doesn't have to cancel anything. Unfortunately, it turns out that the duplicates are actually aspects of her personality, and when the spell overcharges, all the aspects of her personality run loose. Cue showdown against her personified Anger, who later becomes a recurring antagonist.

Web Original

• Regularly invoked by the protagonist of Mother of Learning once they learn the simulacrum spell. Each one is sentient, sharing the soul/mana pool of the caster, although they are not biological copies. They become necessary to be in multiple places at the same time during a month long time loop.
• Jade (a.k.a. Generator) of the Whateley Universe has the ability to create disembodied copies of herself, complete with personality, that can possess and telekinetically manipulate physical objects. Needless to say, she's finding a lot of uses for them. Like pretending to be the ghost of her — actually nonexistent — older sister so she can attend two classes at once, say...but at least as initially depicted (before individual functions seem to take over a bit), they're still all very much her to the point where she's temporarily devastated when one vanishes without a trace due to another mutant using her own power to trap the loose 'spirit'.
  • It appears to be implied, in the various stories from Jade's perspective, that the copies are all still her - but they're referred to by different names both so that other people (and, sometimes, Jade herself) can keep track of who is doing what and so that the Pronoun Trouble doesn't get too excessive. Plus, a large part of Jade's secret hinges on her posing as her own sister. Unfortunately, recent events may also have implied that the whole thing may not be having the best effect on her sanity. It's really not good for you to possess an athame that's been used by an evil sorceress who routinely uses it in some very bloody rituals...
  • A number of other Whateley students have the more typical form of this power (categorized by the school as a type of spacial Warping), most notably OMAG and Troika. Most, but not all, have the telepathic Hive Mind form of the power.
• Aurora in Trinton Chronicles has the ability to create duplicates of herself out of energy and each one has her personality making them essentially her at heart. The duplicates are only linked to her in the fact that she feels their deaths or pain but nothing else. They are created from energy and must verbally impart any knowledge they learn to her. They also all seem to be 'aware' of their meager existence, going so far as to protect the real Aurora from various attacks at the expense of their own forms. Once dismissed they just dissolve into energy. There's a theory is that each clone is a part of Aurora given form but that has yet to be proven.
• In one of the comics at the Heroes website, immortal villain Adam Monroe encountered a duplicator with this power during the Revolutionary War. The duplicator was unable to overcome Adam's Healing Factor, and no matter how many doubles Adam killed, more could keep coming as long as one of them survived.
• The Spoony Experiment introduced several clones of Spoony in the aftermath of his Final Fantasy VIII review, where the original was killed. Two of the clones permanently took up the identities of Dr. Insano and Spencer D. Bum. In the Final Fantasy X review, the original Spoony is revived as a Black Lantern and kills Spencer before Clone-Spoony uses a transporter to merge with the original.
  • Of course, this doesn't count the original Insano that was running around, as well as all the various characters played by Spoony, like Gordon Ramsay, Ultimate Warrior, Terl...
• The Angry Video Game Nerd once made three clones of himself to demonstrate how a video game he was reviewing had a four-player option, since no one would have wanted to play the game.
• The SCP Foundation has SCP-1157, AKA the Bifurcated Man. Once every 4 weeks, at precisely 3:08 AM EST, all instances of him involuntarily divide into two new duplicates of himself. Also, Doctor Bright, through seemingly a side-effect of the body-surf style immortality caused by SCP-963, generates new versions of himself whenever somebody wears SCP-963 for more then thirty days.
• In Twelve Hundred Ghosts, after Fred finishes his speech about Christmas, multiple Bob Cratchits all applaud him at once.
• Pumat Sol of Critical Role runs a shop with four identical copies of himself.
• In Necroverse, Mac duplicated his own mind, downloading some of the copies into Artificial Human bodies, to create the Mac Collective, which resulted in more than nine billion Macs.
• AFK: A number of the gamers had alts (alternate characters) and thus end up with multiple selves there in the game world.
• In Nigahiga's "Pokemon Horror Movie Trailer" video, Nurse Joy does this as a Mythology Gag to the anime, only it's more sinister here. "I'm Nurse Joy! I'm Nurse Joy! I'm Nurse Joy! I'M NURSE JOY!"
• In Turnt Red, a YouTube Poop based on Turning Red, when Mei is introduced, two clones of her appear, one named Meilin, and one named Lee.

Western Animation

• In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy cloned himself, but mixed it up somehow. Each clone was a different aspect of himself (his Romantic side, his Cool side, etc.). This, of course, included an Evil Twin. Hilarity Ensues. However, even by the end of the episode, the evil twin remained, and eventually got a full-length episode where he served as the main antagonist before presumably dying (and not just in the "absorbed back into Jimmy" sense either).
• In Alienators: Evolution Continues, one of the uncontrollable mutations Wayne sported was uncontrollably and continuously cloning himself. While initially amusing, it is soon discovered that with each splitting the copies have less and less of Wayne's original DNA, threatening to cause yet another alien outbreak.
• American Dragon: Jake Long did the same, except corrupt magic was used for the last clone, and it became an Evil Twin. To make matters worse, he loses some strength for each one he makes, and has to re-assimilate them to regain it... only every clone has the ability to absorb every other, including the original.
• Animaniacs had the episode "Astro-Buttons," where Mindy accidentally gets duplicated at the end. Buttons quits because of this.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "What Is Reality?", the Riddler he controls a virtual reality universe that follows his every whim. In the end, Batman faces off against the Riddler, who demonstrates his mastery of the domain by duplicating himself. Batman realizes he can do so as well, and the two get into a ridiculous arms race of clones. Eventually the Riddler's consciousness is spread too thin for him to maintain the simulation, and it collapses, with Riddler's mind still inside.
• In an episode of The Batman, an old friend of Bruce Wayne's makes a quantum duplicator, immediately resulting in an evil twin of himself who locks up the original and becomes the super-villain Everywhere Man, who steals things and replaces them with quantum clones so no one can tell they're even gone. It takes a literal army of him to take on Batman and Robin (who were armed with the less-stable prototype duplicator), and the Dynamic Duo last long enough to take advantage of the device's one flaw: the clones eventually start to exhibit free will. The clones turn on Everywhere Man when Batman reveals he has neither the ability nor the intention of allowing them to exist after the battle, forcing Everywhere Man to dispel them all. When Everywhere Man says he can just create another army, Bats tells him he can't win because the end result would be the same. This may have just been a bluff to distract Everywhere Man, so the guy he was cloned from could sneak up, grab the duplicator, and dispel him.
• Big City Greens: Near the beginning of "Quiet Please", multiple copies of Cricket are seen inside his overly stimulus brain.
• Ben 10 gained a duplicating alien form named Ditto. Anything that happens to one Ditto is felt by all of them. Given what happens to the Stinkfly clones, if one Ditto is destroyed, the rest will presumably follow.
  • In the Retool into Ben 10: Alien Force, the form called "Echo Echo" takes this role (minus the part about feeling each other's pain), but combines it with a weird look, a creepy voice and sonic powers.
  • The reboot introduces Slapback, whose copies are simultaneously shorter, heavier, and stronger every time he duplicates himself.
• The Brak Show had an episode based around this, where Brak and Zorak spend all weekend playing video games, and then when the family decides to go out to Brak's favorite restaurant, Brak and Zorak are told they can't come because they didn't finish their homework. After the parents are gone, Zorak talks about needing a time machine, and Brak reveals that Thundercles left him the key to his Time Shed. They go back to the beginning of the weekend to warn their past selves to do their homework but get caught up in video games until they're called down for dinner, causing Brak to panic as he realizes he's out of time. This repeats many times until his room is completely filled with copies of Brak and Zorak, at which point they decide the only viable solution is to go back in time and prevent the invention of homework. They also inadvertently prevent Brak's favorite restaurant from ever being made, but the one that appears in its place is pretty good too, so it all works out in the end.
• Subverted in one episode of Care Bears (1980s), where Shreeky gets her partner/lackey, Mr. Beastly, thrown out of No Heart's Castle for something that was her fault. Shreeky ends up having all of Mr. Beastly's menial chores foisted upon her and comes up with the genius idea to magically clone herself. She introduces her legion of Shreekys to No Heart, each with its own responsibility...but when she explains that the last one's job is to take the blame for making messes, the Shreekys start bickering to the point that No Heart declares that "one Beastly is better than five Shreekys any day! Get them out of here, and get Beastly back!" (Though since this means she's gotten out of doing chores, she still got what she wanted anyway...plus a little catharsis out of vaporising her misbegotten legion of clones, who immediately start bickering again over whose genius plan it all was.)
  • In an Adventures in Care-a-Lot episode, Grumpy uses a machine to create a clone of himself to help him build his latest invention, but the clone wants nothing to do with Grumpy's original blueprints and creates a clone of his own. The two clones kick Grumpy out of his own workshop, but when Grumpy gets back in (with some help from the others), he finds the clones are sick of each other, and they willingly go back into the machine.
• Danger Mouse had the episode "Tiptoe Through the Penfolds". Baron Greenback creates a magnetic molecular molder with which he plans to create 1,000 clones of himself so nobody would be able to catch the real Baron. On a test run, he creates a series of Penfold clones, but the off switch breaks. As a result, a million Penfolds virtually flood London.
• Danny Phantom:
  • The main character uses one of his dad's "Fenton" devices to split himself in two: one to fight ghosts around the clock, the other to goof off. Of course, his personality splits too, one is The Ace and one is a slacker.
  • Form duplication is a special trick possessed by particularly powerful ghosts, Vlad being able to split himself into four normal forms, or hundreds of shadow forms. At first, Danny could only do it through the use of a power-enhancing Humongous Mecha (the two times he tried before that, he respectively only grew a second head, becoming a cyclops briefly when they re-merged, and became a Body Horror for a bit), but he managed to pull it off on his own during season three... the reason he didn't use the power more is the fact that it was STILL hard to do (the duplicates fused back with him after an attack), and seemed to require a lot of concentration and effort, showing that he needs more practice.
• In David Copperfield (1993), David's Imagine Spot during "I'll Be Your Hero" features him splitting into three differently-clothed versions of himself to rescue his mother from a dragon that resembles Murdstone.
• DuckTales (2017): In "Timephoon!", Gyro Gearloose created a clone army, revealed when denies that he's making one to Scrooge when explaining about someone stealing the time tub. The clones return in "Moonvasion!" to fight against the Moonlanders, though almost all (and possibly the original) are killed in the effort.
• In one of the pilot shorts of The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy wishes for "a ton" of copies to do chores. His Literal Genie godparents divide 2000 pounds by his body weight to get 44.5 clones (the .5 is rendered as a half-sized Timmy). The result follows the second case of the trope so that Timmy has to get all the clones rounded up into a room and wish them away before someone sees more than one Timmy at once.
• Seen in the Futurama episode "Benderama". Professor Farnsworth invents a machine that makes two smaller copies of any object. Bender uses it on himself to make two smaller clones to do his work for him. Then each of the clones makes two clones. And those clones make two more clones, and so on until the Earth is threatened by a Grey Goo of microscopic Benders.
• The Gravity Falls episode "Double Dipper" has Dipper making clones of himself with a strange copier machine. Avoids the Evil Twin trope because all of them are nice, but they insist on his carrying out a pre-arranged plan and try to stand in for him when he doesn't go along. There is also a damaged clone created by a paper jam. They have very little Clone Angst even though they know they are temporary and can be destroyed by water.
• Happens to a number of characters in a Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law episode, as done by the Deadly Duplicator.
• The He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) episode "Here, There, Skeletors Everywhere" featured Skeletor stealing a duplicating machine from Man-At-Arms. He then used it to create a number of half-sized Skeletors to over-run the palace. They were stopped by He-Man casually instigating a power struggle between them.
• Multi Man in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Impossibles had self-duplication as a superpower. The Multi Man concept was later recycled as one of the heroic identities of The Super Globetrotters.
• Jade from Jackie Chan Adventures once used magic to make a copy of herself to get out of her chores so she could go with Jackie to fight the bad guys. Not only did Jade2 sneak along (because that's what Jade would do), but Jade's duplication spell was imperfect and her clone started making additional clones. Before you know it, there's thousands of Jades running around.
• The Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Too Many Jimmys", thanks to one of Heloise's inventions.
• One Johnny Test episode had the title character notice his super-intelligent twin sisters pull the duplication act in order to spend their afternoon ogling their hunky neighbor instead of cleaning out the garage. So he uses their duplication machine to get out of mowing the lawn... and, of course, leaves it on so that it makes a total of 100 clones tearing up the lawn. And Dad, who quite specifically told them not to duplicate themselves like last time, is only 10 minutes away from home...
• Mr. Cat from Kaeloo somehow has the ability to make clones of himself. One episode revealed that he owns a cloning machine.
  • In Episode 134, Stumpy is supernaturally granted several clones of himself, which annoy Kaeloo and Mr. Cat. At the end, Kaeloo and Mr. Cat get rid of the clones by claiming that a package in the mail came for Stumpy from Ursula, but only one Stumpy can get it. The original Stumpy opens a Portal Door to another dimension and tells the clones that Ursula is on the other side, and once they run through, he closes the door, trapping them there forever.
• In Kim Possible, the Wego twins' power is to create more of themselves.
• Happens in the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Dupe", where one of the experiments has the power to duplicate anything multiple times. Originally, the protagonists think that this is a wonderful way to get everything they want done at once, but eventually they realize that every duplicate divides the sum power of the original between the dupes. It becomes Chekhov's Gun later in the episode, where they invoke Conservation of Ninjutsu against Gantu and the team of very dangerous experiments he managed to gather by dividing them into uselessness. At the end, Dupe's one true place is an ice cream cart so there will be twice the delicious treats but half the calories.
• Looney Tunes: The Larry Doyle-produced short "Museum Scream" has Sylvester at one point going through a color prism and emerging as several differently-colored Sylvesters (one for every color of the rainbow). The Sylvesters all go after Tweety, sabotaging each other's efforts to eat him in the process.
  • In the New Looney Tunes episode "When Marvin Comes Martian In", Marvin abducts Daffy, who then proceeds to drive him insane. Eventually, Daffy gets the idea to use Marvin's cloning device to make MORE Daffys, much to Marvin's horror.
• The Magic Key: In “The Anneena Academy”, Anneena finds herself in a strange dimension where everyone is a duplicate of her. Wilf, who the key brought along for the ride, spends most of the episode trying to figure out which Anneena is the real one.
• In Men in Black: The Series, the MIB have the technology to produce "quickclones" that function as perfect copies of the original. The downside? After a few hours, they start spitting word salad and melt into goo.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Too Many Pinkie Pies", Pinkie Pie is frustrated because she sometimes has to choose between different fun things that her friends are doing at the same time. She uses a magic pond to clone herself. Then the clone decides to clone itself, too, and so on. Pretty soon, Ponyville is overrun with Pinkies.
• In The Owl House, Gus frequently uses his talent for illusion magic to create duplicates of himself for various purposes such as taking notes while he's not around or cheerleading.
• In one episode of Phineas and Ferb, the titular brothers and their friends think up Personality Powers for themselves, with Phineas imagining himself with this.
  • Another episode (Appropriately called 'Split Personalities') has a molecular splitter the boys invented inadvertently divide Candace in two- one obsessed with busting, the other obsessed with Jeremy Johnson. After some confusion, the brothers manage to corral both Candaces and merge them, but not before briefly splitting the two into more Candaces!
  • Another episode has the boys create Phinedroids and Ferbots, who not only complete all the boys' projects but also start projects of their own.
  • Another episode has Doofenshmirtz creating a Copy-and-Paste-inator to create many clones of himself so he never has to wait in line again. He ends up accidentally deleting all of his copies while trying to delete a defective copy of himself.
  • One episode has Candace decide to give up busting her brothers and goes into a musical number which climaxes with several copies of herself forming a gospel choir.
  • The Halloween special "Night of the Living Pharmacists" has Dr. Doofenshmirtz turning his brother Roger into a clone of himself. Thanks to a malfunctioning -inator, the transformed Roger starts turning other people into clones of Heinz, and before long Danville is suffering from a Zombie Apocalypse-esque infestation of "Doofenzombies".
  Doofenzombies: Lots of me... lots of me...
• In one of the Pinky and the Brain comics, Brain fires Pinky and uses a duplicator device to make a copy of himself. The copy refuses to assist, however, and steals the duplicator, creating a copy of himself, and so on ad nauseum until Brain manages to "cancel out" all the copies. Pinky, of course, returns, over the course of the adventure ... and the last panel depicts lots of copies of Pinky, which presumably gets dealt with off-camera.
  • An episode of the actual show was similar. Brain tried to make clones of himself to teach a catchy dance to the world, and Pinky wound up being accidentally cloned and distracting the Brain clones with his own dance.
• One of the powers The Powerpuff Girls use is "copycat," in which they make multiples of themselves. They use it first in "Forced Kin" against an alien spacecraft but they are outwitted as the spacecraft makes multiples of itself as well. They do it again in "Nuthin' Special"—Buttercup tries to show it as her special individual power (one of several), but Blossom and Bubbles match her.
• In Marvel's licensed Ren & Stimpy comic, the Commander Höek and Cadet Stimpy story "I Scream Clones" features Stimpy acquiring permission from Space Command to clone himself in order to keep up with his shipboard duties. Predictably, the proliferation of Stimpys threatened to drive Ren mad....until he realized that he could simply clone himself and create an army of Rens to smack the stupid out of the Stimpys.
• Rolie Polie Olie: In the episode "1 Olie, 2 Olie, 3 Olie, 4", Olie duplicates himself with his dad's Multiplicatorator machine so he can watch TV while the duplicate does his math homework. However, the duplicate decides to make another duplicate to do the homework while he watches TV. It eventually gets to the point where there are 99 Olies (including the original). That's when the original Olie decides it's time for subtraction.
  Olie: It's an Olie overload!
• In the climax of the Samurai Jack episode "Birth of Evil", Aku divides himself into an army of man-sized, armor-wearing duplicates of himself. The second episode of the fifth season plays this for laughs, as it sees Aku split off a copy of himself to act as his therapist.
• Shorty Mcshorts Shorts: The concept of "The Imperfect Duplicates of Dodger Dare" is that the titular Dodger finds a magic photocopier that allows him to create as many different duplicates of himself as he wants. Hilariously, each of the copies looks nothing like Dodger, but nobody seems to notice. They can also be destroyed by water.
• The Simpsons:
  • The "Treehouse of Horror XIII" segment "Send In The Clones" has Homer do this using a magic hammock (which the clones themselves end up using, causing them to degrade in quality until one of them comes out as Peter Griffin until they all run off a cliff when baited by a giant donut). The twist is that it isn't the original Homer who survives at the end. The real one was the first over the cliff, despite hearing Lisa tell everyone the plan.
  • The "Treehouse of Horror XXXIV" segment "Loutbreak" has Homer eating a contaminated donut at work, and after he belches into Ned Flanders' face, it infects him with a virus that turns him into a Homer clone, and soon, everybody in Springfield is turning into Homer clones except for Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, who are immune to the virus. Despite Professor Frink's best efforts, he's unable to stop the spread, and soon, the entire planet turns into Homer clones.
• In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Papa Smurf, Papa Smurf", Papa Smurf accidentally created a duplicate of himself through a formula that also ends up duplicating Gargamel.
• Sonic Boom: In "Multi-Tails", Tails uses a machine to divide himself into five identical copies in order to reduce his workload. Unfortunately, each of the Tails duplicates has only one-fifth of Tails's regular intelligence. When Tails's friends try to reverse the process, they accidentally create more Tails clones.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: "An Embarrassment of Dooplers": Dooplers involuntarily duplicate in response to emotional stress. That includes being stressed by duplicating. Naturally, the duplication quickly snowballs. After the entirety of the Cerritos is filled by a depending crowd of duplicates, forcing its crew to seek refuge on high ledges and furniture, Freeman eventually snaps and starts insulting them, which turns out to be the key to making them recombine.
• Steven Universe: In "Steven and the Stevens", Steven finds an hourglass that lets him travel through time, eventually leading to him "kidnapping" himself from other timelines to make a band. When the original gets kicked out of the band, he decides to reverse himself ever getting the hourglass, only to have a copy get it, soon filling the entire room with Stevens. In contrast to the normal trope though, when the original Steven realizes how scared and confused the "current" Steven (who is about to take the hourglass) is, he destroys the hourglass, sacrificing himself and the other Stevens besides the current one.
• Storm Hawks: "InFinnity" has Finn making a clone of himself to do his chores for him. Unfortunately, the clone is just as lazy as the original Finn and makes more clones to dump his responsibilities on.
• Teen Titans (2003) has several examples of this trope.
  • Beast Boy can accomplish this by turning into an asexually reproducing lifeform and just splitting. In the comic book continuity, he is shown to have the potential to gain this power as an extension of his shapeshifting powers but isn't confident enough to employ it just yet (although some Flash Forwards have shown future versions of Beast Boy being able to more or less become a one-man green stampede).
  • This is the power of villain Billy Numerous, hence the name. All the Billys appear to have the same personality, and since Billy is a bit of a hick, he fights with himself a lot.
  • This was also the plan of the aquatic villain Trident, who considered himself to be the ultimate life form. Beast Boy solves the problem by asserting that only one of them can really be the best, causing them all to fight amongst themselves.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): Donatello is tired of fixing things, so he creates a clone of himself. The clone refuses to work and a cloning glitch makes him stronger and smarter than Donatello. He sides with Pinky McFingers, creating millions of cloned rats planning to loot the city.
• The Tick: Multiple Santa and his electrically generated Santa Clones.
• Time Squad, "Day of the Larrys": Sarcastic Robot Buddy Larry 3000 decides to build a duplicate of himself to help around the station. The duplicate decides to build another duplicate, and so on.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: In one episode, Plucky doesn't do his homework, so he builds a time machine and goes back in time to the start of the weekend, where he meets himself. Plucky B takes the time machine and goes forward to Monday morning, where he shows it to Buster and Babs, and while playing with it, they accidentally end up in prehistoric times, where they meet their ancestors.
• In Transformers: Animated, Starscream gains the ability to make clones of himself that each possess one facet of his personality. There's a sycophant, a compulsive liar, a coward, an egomaniac, and an Opposite-Sex Clone ("You Do NOT Want To Know," she says... though she seems to be the part of him that's actually competent). Upon getting to know his clones better, he realizes one thing: "This is gonna be a long orbital cycle."
  • The toyline and second Allspark Almanac add two more: Dirge, who represents Starscream's greed, and Thrust, who has Starscream's envy. Both were made by Swindle as bodyguards.
• In the Transformers: Prime episode "Armada", Starscream creates an army of clones to kill Megatron. All of them end up dead by the end of the episode.
• In W.I.T.C.H., both the animated series and original comic version, the guardians can use the Heart of Kandrakar to create soulless slave clones of themselves known as Astral Drops. Normally the use of Astral Drops is rather innocent, but have occasionally led to big problems, most notably in the animated series episode "H is for Hunted" (Nerissa turns an Astral Drop into a person with real feelings and emotions) and the third volume of the comic book (Astral Drops rebel and wreck girls' romantic lives).
  • It gets pretty messed up in the comic, when the Astral Drops suddenly gain independent souls, causing the original girls to be haunted by the spirits of their copies whenever they absorb them. The oracle eventually decides on turning the Astral drops into independent people with their own bodies, appearances, and identities, which, however, leaves the girls without cover-ups for their missions.
• Lady Redundant Woman, from WordGirl, gained the ability to do this from - get this - a photocopier accident. She literally merged with the copier. The clones turn into paper when hit.
• Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! had the episode "Too Many Wubbzys," where Wubbzy uses a machine to create clones of himself.
• In Xiaolin Showdown, The Ring of Nine Dragons can be used to split the wearer into up to nine copies of himself. The catch is that the duplication process spreads his skills and intelligence thin across all the copies. Continued practice with the ring did allow the user (notably, Jack Spicer) to overcome this weakness, though.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sleepy Time", SpongeBob duplicates himself a million times in Patrick's dream to show him all the things he can do while dreaming. In "CopyBob DittoPants", Plankton clones SpongeBob and uses him as part of a plan to obtain the Krabby Patty Secret Formula, the failed attempt due to the real deal interacting with the first clone leads to Plankton cloning a whole bunch of SpongeBobs.

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