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'No John, you are the demons! Then John was a zombie"
If your mirror has a monster in it do not shout This kind of situation does not call for freaking out And do nothing that you would not like to see him do 'Cause that monster in the mirror, he just might be you.
- Lovable Furry Old Grover, "Monster in the Mirror"
"We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism? "
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 , Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 , TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED
-Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri''
Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only... something's wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.
It looks like the town's been taken over by The Puppet Masters, and our hero's the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down.
But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: he's the fake! Cue screams of "What Have I Become?!" A robot, a clone, a ghost, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn't the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was, complete with Fake Memories of a Mining Accident On Troy.
In an ongoing series, it'll be a duplicate of one of the main characters. In a self-contained work, it'll just be someone who thinks they're human. Either way, it's an effective inversion of The Puppet Masters.
Variation of the Tomato Surprise — hence the name. Compare I Am Who, which is (usually) a much more pleasant surprise.
This is a Twist Ending Trope. Expect your tomatoes to be spoiled!
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Bizarrely enough, the Mind Screw ending of The Prisoner implies that this is the entire premise of the series.
- Stargate SG-1 did it at least twice:
- "Tin Man" (season 1): The SG-1 team seems to have been transferred into robot bodies by a lonely alien maintenance man. In the end, they find out that they weren't transferred, they were copied, with the originals still alive.
- "Fragile Balance" (season 7): Jack O'Neill wakes up after an alien abduction to find himself in a body 30 years younger... and slowly dying. After convincing his colleagues of his identity and tracking down his abductor, he finds (of course) that he is actually a genetically damaged clone of the original O'Neill (still with the alien).
- Stargate Atlantis likes it even more:
- In "Michael" (season 2), Lieutenant Michael Kenmore awakens in Atlantis' infirmary, unable to remember who he is. After being informed of who he is and that he barely survived terrible injuries from a raid deep in enemy territory, he is let out and undergoes psychiatric therapy (including periodic drug injections) for the strange nightmares he keeps having. He eventually discovers secret observation videos of himself in the infirmary, and is horrified to discover that he is actually a Wraith that was transformed into a human using an experimental genetic drug and then brainwashed.
- Actually, he wasn't brainwashed, memory loss was just a side effect of the drug. Actually, it is implied that the drug could actually have worked if wasn't for the memory loss (as Michael states in a later episode, when the virus is offered again to him, that if he loses his memory, how is that different from death.)
- In "This Mortal Coil" (season 4), Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Teyla, and, later, Dr. Weir find that they are replicator copies of themselves, and that the version of Atlantis they are in is also a copy.
- They come to take it remarkably well, especially McKay. Mostly because of McKay's insight in the situation.
- In "The Kindred" (season 4), Carson Beckett is found by the Team. The only problem: he's supposed to be dead. But he insists and is sure, that he is the real Beckett. Turns out he is a clone.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine, "Whispers": We follow Miles O'Brien in flashback form as he seems to combat a station-wide conspiracy; turns out he's actually a clone, sent by one of the alien factions undergoing negotiations on the station, programmed to assassinate the leaders of the other faction. O'Brien seems particularly vulnerable to these types of plots; he seems to be Deep Space Nine's Butt Monkey.
- The Twilight Zone, "After Hours": A woman's shopping trip to a department store goes awry, as the people she talks to seem to transform into mannequins. In the end, we find out that she's one of the mannequins, who take turns going out into the world as a human for a month at a time. Also used in the '80s remake.
- Boomer on the new Battlestar Galactica spends the first season wrestling with the slow realization that she's the Tomato In The Mirror. Moreover, as of the Season Three finale, four other main characters are "triggered", and realise they're Cylons.
- Boomer literally has a bad experience with her locker mirror, on which someone has written the word CYLON in big yellow letters.
- In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam finds himself in the body of someone in a mansion where everyone thinks there's a vampire on the loose. After clearing up the situation, he finally gets around to looking in a mirror... and doesn't reflect. Literal Tomato "in the Mirror."
- This was hinted in the end of the previous episode, where we see the character Sam switched with actually had vampire fangs (and was a cameo by none other than Christopher Lee).
- The climax of the recent Doctor Who episode "Utopia" revolves round the revelation that the kindly human Professor Yana is, unbeknownst to him, the Tomato in the Mirror, a 'sleeper' personality and biological disguise created by the Doctor's archenemy the Master, previously thought dead. His original personality and biology is contained, thanks to some Applied Phlebotinum, in a pocket watch, and released when Yana is tempted into opening the watch.
- Before this we have the Doctor himself turned into a human Professor in 1913, through use of this pocket-watch-device. Of course the viewer knows who he really is, but the Doctor doesn't and once he finds out he's pretty shocked and doesn't want to go back.
- Star Trek Voyager did this with "Course: Oblivion", where the entire crew realized that they're imperfect duplicates. (About halfway through the episode, which is rare for this trope. Usually it's a twist ending, not a twist middle.) Several episodes earlier, a semi-sentient planet-spanning not-quite-lifeform on a hostile planet they visited to refill on Phlebotinum had replicated Voyager in its entirety, right down to the last bulkhead and Red Shirt. The "real" Voyager crew never knew about their clones; they started disintegrating, found out that it was due to their distance from their origin, and failed to get back before disintegrating completely, dissipating just before they could contact Voyager.
- In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, a villain gives the Humongous Mecha a virus, and it's spread to the base... and then to the Red Ranger, Mack, (aka iMack) who turns out to be an android.
- Another Power Rangers example, this time in Turbo: Justin notes that the other rangers are acting odd, and finds out that they are really robots. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Justin himself was a robot, who was programmed so that he didn't know he was a robot, and that the real ranger team built them to help Zordon on Eltar. Lot of good that did...
- The Torchwood episode "Sleeper" has a seemingly human woman with a seemingly happy life (complete with job and husband) find out that she's actually an alien who will be "triggered" to wage a campaign of terror on Earth.
- In an episode of Sliders, the world is populated by almost entirely by androids, and one human scientist who attempts to create an android with the transplanted memories of Quinn. It turns out that the scientist actually died, and his memories have been transplanted into an android version of himself, without him actually knowing that.
- Same thing happened in the Original Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with Nurse Chapel's lost boyfriend.
- And again in a Star Trek The Next Generation episode with Data's "mom".
- The core premise of Invasion. Set in a small Florida coastal town, several characters return from unremembered experiences in the water feeling not quite themselves. At first they appear to have been altered by mysterious glowing creatures, who may or may not be aliens, in the water. But it's soon revealed that they are in fact altered copies, and their originals were killed in the duplication process. Since they have the same memories, emotions, and personality as their originals, it raises the issue of whether and why they should be considered a different person at all. Each of them, and their 'unaltered' friends and family, answers the question a little differently.
- Angel: in "Spin the Bottle", everyone's memory is wiped back to age 17. Wesley, who at that age was head of his class at vampire-hunting school, reckons it's a test: they've been locked in this abandoned building with a vampire, whom they must identify and kill. Angel (who at that age was a living human), in a private moment, looks at a mirror ...
Literature
- One of the earliest examples is HP Lovecraft's "The Outsider", a first person point-of-view story that follows a mysterious lonely individual who cannot remember coming in contact with people. When he escapes his tower, he scares off the first people he sees and spots his reflection, revealing him to be — ta-dah! — a ghoul.
- Lovecraft did this one again in the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, which ends with the protagonist discovering that he is one of the Half Human Hybrids that are the titular Town With A Dark Secret's dark secret.
- "Imposter," a short Science Fiction story by Philip K Dick. Dick used it frequently as both a device and a premise. Perhaps the best-known example is is the film Blade Runner, very loosely based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Arguably, this is also the premise of A Scanner Darkly, although in this case the twist is identical with the character arc.
- J. G. Ballard was also fond of this device, and employed it in his 1960 story "Zone of Terror."
- Goosebumps, "A Shocker On Shock Street": A kid whose father is a horror movie director is menaced by horrible things; turns out he's the robot star, and the whole thing was part of the movie.
- Goosebumps was fond of this one. You also have the girl who suspects ghosts only to find out that she's the ghost, teenagers who discover that they're vampires, and people who think an invisible dude is a monster when in fact they're a bunch of bizarre aliens.
- Let's not forget the time when it was Halloween, and their best friends turned out to be pumpkin-headed monsters that had been causing the local mystery murders...
- In the novel John Dies at the End
 , while dealing with a conspiracy involving agents of a parallel universe, the protagonist/narrator David discovers self-incriminating evidence and catches a glance of what appears to be a dead body in his tool shed. He can't remember a half-hour or so of his day, while his gun is missing a single bullet. He also finds out about a young woman, Amy, who went missing around the same time. He immediately suspects he murdered her during a bout of temporary insanity, but while following clues, he discovers that she's alive and well, but can't remember anything from when she went missing. He later learns that those conspiratorial agents are in fact perfect clones that have replaced other people in the city. Over the course of a few days, he uncovers some very unsettling information, protects Amy from the forces of darkness, falls in love with her, travels to the parallel universe with his best friend John, and cripples the organization behind the invasion. When he finally takes a good look inside his tool shed, he discovers a corpse that looks exactly like himself. Assuming that this corpse was an intended replacement that he shot in self defense and blocked it out, he goes to reveal the identifying mark of the clones on the bottom of the body's foot. When the mark isn't where he expected to find it, Dave checks his own foot and learns that he is the clone, and personally killed the original Dave. At first, he's suicidal with guilt, but since he is completely indistinguishable from the real Dave in every way (aside from the mark on his foot that regular people can't see) and anything that would have controlled him is now dead, John and Amy manage to convince him to go on living his life as if nothing had happened. Except for his friend John occasionally calling him "Monster Dave" as a joke.
- Done twice in the Crucible trilogy by Sara Douglass. First, the protagonist goes out to return the demons to Hell — only to find out that both his wife and best friend (and soon-to-be-king) are demons. Then, when the antagonist role shifts to the angels, he discovers he is an angel too, and thus doomed to send all mankind into eternal slavery. Poor Tom.
- Subverted in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions wherein a man of declining mental health becomes convinced that failed Sci-Fi writer Kilgore Trout's short story really is a letter from God revealing his Tomato In The Mirror status.
- Sabella by Tanith Lee ends with the reveal that she and the main male character are both native Martian copies of human children who died in a certain underground cave.
- Kill the Dead, also by Tanith Lee, ends with the reveal that ghost-killer Parl Dro is, himself, a ghost.
- Done excellently in the Dragon Lance short story "The Best." It is done in first person, with the narrator being a noble who's hired the four best dragonslayers in the land to kill a dragon who's been terrorizing the countryside. At the end of the story, they reach the dragon's lair, and it's revealed that the narrator actually is the dragon in a magical disguise, and he's gathered them all together to take them all out at once, so he can sleep in peace. And it works.
- Thursday Next uses this trope in First Among Sequels, when Thursday Five is impersonating Thursday the second time, the first person narrator actually switches to Thursday Five, so even the audience is fooled
Western Animation
- Batman The Animated Series, "Soul of Silicon": A robot duplicate of Batman goes through this trope before his programming activates; the plan of the AI that created it is only foiled because the duplicate was a pacifist Tin Man.
- Its successor, The Batman, has Batman and Robin trying to distribute the cure for a madman's Zombie Apocalypse drug. Turns out they were the ones under the effects of a drug that gives you wild hallucinations about everyone else being a zombie, and that same hallucinogen was what they were about to spread through the entire city.
- Ben 10 Alien Force has a duo (ex-trio) of alien hunters that think they were mutated by DN Aliens, and hate all aliens. At the end of the episode, they are told that the reason they look like aliens is because They. Are. Part alien. NO. Really?
Film
- The Twist Ending of The Sixth Sense is a relatively subtle example of the trope; the main character has no idea that anything is odd about him, as people's reactions to his words and actions seem entirely plausible, until he realizes that they only appeared to have been interacting with him in the way he expected them to.
- The Sixth Day, where the "cloned" Arnie turns out to be the original.
- Though the movie Mulholland Drive doesn't make it explicit, it's probably the most believable explanation for David Lynch's Mind Screw. Note how Naomi Watts's blonde and Laura Elena Harring's brunette have different names in the last segment of the movie — names given previously to other characters.
- The Word of God has verified this explanation, and has additionally stated that the movie itself screws this up when it has Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring never sharing the screen except in a single shot.
- The Twist Ending of the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters featured this trope in the form of an Unreliable Narrator, with the combination of Real After All adding to the ending's confusing nature.
- In the psychological horror film Session 9, one of the protagonists hallucinates finding his colleagues murdered, except for one who he's paranoid about being the killer. The ending reveals that he is in fact the killer, having not only murdered his colleagues (including the person he suspected), but also a later replacement, as well as his wife and daughter, after suffering a previously undisclosed psychotic break at the start of the film.
- Nicely done in The Others. Grace Stewart finds herself in the midst of a haunting, only it turns out she and her family are the ghosts; the "spooks" they've been seeing are actually the living family who've come to see about buying the house. Particularly unsettling is the publicity clip where the creepy old woman talks to Grace in her daughter Anne's voice — when one realizes Anne is actually possessing the woman, a medium hired by the living family.
- In Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke's character, a private detective, turns out to be the very man he's been hired to track down.
- In Salvage, Claire Parker seems to be living a GroundhogDay-esque nightmare where she keeps getting stalked and killed by serial killer Duke Desmond, only to wake up back at work as if nothing had happened. After a non-fatal attack, she learns from the police that Desmond can't be stalking her, since he's been dead for some time. She decides maybe it's his ghost that's tormenting her, and seeks advice on how to deal with that. The first place she visits just happens to be Desmond's former church, where the janitor reassures her that Desmond can't hurt her, as he's in hell. Not reassured, she goes to his old home, and then the library, where she finds a newspaper article showing that she and her boyfriend were his last victims. Eventually, Desmond appears in her house to kill her yet again, and now she's finally told the whole truth — she isn't Claire. She's Duke Desmond, whose punishment is to keep reliving his murder of Claire, from her perspective.
- Fight Club is a masterful example, as Edward Norton's unnamed narrator befriends and starts Fight Club with Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, anarchist and soap salesman. As Durden begins to raise an army of committed nihilistic followers, the narrator becomes less and less comfortable with the direction of the movement. After Tyler Durden disappears at the kickoff of a coordinated act of domestic terrorism, the narrator hunts desperately for him, only to be told that he is himself Tyler Durden. The revelation changes the tone of previous conversations in the film, notably the inception of Fight Club — what was a brawl between the narrator and Durden that attracted other participants becomes the narrator/Durden beating himself up, rousing the curiosity of others. And Durden's intense sexual relationship with Marla Singer coupled with the narrator's open contempt for her; what were the actions and reactions of two separate characters take on a different light when you know the characters are the same person, and Marla's confusion and hurt at the narrator's scorn makes more sense. In the end, the narrator shoots himself through the cheek, "killing" Durden by demonstrating he was willing to kill himself.
- This works particularly well with his interactions with Marla. She seems to be inconsistent and somewhat crazy until you realize the twist. Then her actions largely make sense.
- Subverted, and possibly double-subverted in The Thing. For a while, it really looks like Mac is The Thing. And then he's revealed not to be. But in the final scene, it's starting to look like he could be. If so, he hasn't been for long, though.
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. Once you understand that Francis is a nut, and Cesare and Caligari aren't even their real names, everything makes a lot more sense. Including the art style.
- Actually, in the original ending everything was to be taken at face value. The producers suggested a change because they suspected the Weimar censors wouldn't allow a movie that implied an authority figure could be evil.
- Dead And Buried. The sheriff of a small town discovers that several strangers passing through town and many of the townspeople, including his own wife, have been murdered and turned into zombies by the town's mortician. At the end he confronts the mortician and learns that he himself suffered the same fate sometime earlier.
Video Games
- Video game example: In Final Fantasy X, Tidus discovers that he and his civilization don't really exist. They did exist at one point, but they were obliterated in a war with Bevelle. Now they're just all part of a dream being generated by the survivors of that civilization, which are now a gestalt of magical naked people trapped in a mountainside. No. Really.
- In Kingdom Hearts II, Roxas starts seeing mysterious people that no one else seems to notice. He eventually discovers that the Twilight Town he's been living in is a fabrication, and that he himself is a "Nobody" of the main character, Sora.
- In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud, the protagonist, suffers from freaky headaches and weird disjointed flashbacks. It then transpires that he is a clone of the villain, Sephiroth, and has been acting under Sephiroth's Mind Control for the game so far. Even more confusingly, when he recovers from his Heroic BSOD, he realizes he was never a clone to begin with (what he really is is quite complicated, but it involves the way the Super Soldiers are created, and how The Virus contains the genetic memories of those infected). When he regains his true memories, he finally develops into a fully fledged person.
- In Knights Of The Old Republic, the protagonist is revealed to be the "late" Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Revan.
- A little over halfway through Bioshock, the protagonist learns he's a genetically altered assassin, created from Andrew Ryan's DNA, and smuggled out of Rapture as a pawn in mobster Fontaine's complicated scheme to kill Ryan and take over the city.
- The short interactive fiction 9:05 revolves around this concept.
- City Of Villains has a story arc where the player character uncovers clues that they are in fact robotic duplicates made by Nemesis. Subverted by the final mission, which explicitly states that the player character is the original, but the contact who sent them on the missions is the robotic duplicate (with the real one alive but captive).
- Legacy Of Kain character Raziel's story is basically a long string of this. Over the course of the three games he appears in, he starts off as a re-ressurected vampire, only to find out that the vampires are a world-destroying evil that he must personally weed out. Then, it is revealed to him that he used to be a high-ranking Sarafan vampire hunter before he was a vampire. In part II, time travel hijinks lead to the discovery that the original vampires weren't so bad at all. Then he finds the last survivor of the original, ancient vampire race, the only one who can give him the answers he seeks, brutally and mercilessly slaughtered... by Raziel's own, past Sarafan self. Whom Raziel later KILLS along with his fellow Sarafan, indirectly preparing his own vampiric resurrection as well as his brethren's. As if this wasn't enough, just moments later, he comes to the startling realization that the symbiotic, semi-sentient, insane wraith blade that he's been carrying for two games is the future version of his own soul. Finally, he learns that he is the foretold messiah of the vampire race. No, wait — he's the messiah of the Hylden, whom he thought he's supposed to kill. No, wait, he's both at once. Turns out that the prophecies weren't all that clear on this.
- Or was he neither?! Seriously, if they don't make another game to explain all this...
- Actually he was both, given that he was the only creature with true "Free Will" he could choose to be the savior of the Hylden or the Vampires.
- Even before that, there was Kain's dilemma: Originally lead to believe that by killing the mythic Circle of Nine he could be released from his vampyric unlife, he eventually learns that he is, in fact, one of its members, the reincarnated guardian of the Pillar of Balance, and his liberation from vampirism may only come in death.
- Subverted in Deus Ex, in which protagonist JC Denton is informed that both he and his "brother" are actually artificial life forms. Rather than reacting with shock, angst, or an unconvincing identity crisis, JC calmly takes the revelation into stride, and even remarks that he had considered the possibility in the past. His artificially constructed memories of the past, that is.
- One of the few discrepancies in Deus Ex is JC's history. In one version he was cloned and artificially aged, being about six months to a year old during the game. In the other, he was genetically engineered but was raised in Switzerland. Both of these versions are supported by information from characters who knew The Truth in the form of email archives, statements, and physical evidence within The Conspiracy. In the final area, JC first guns down the man who killed his father, then sees his cloning tank, and the one that is growing his younger sibling, Alex D.
- One of the ten eleven endings of Shadow the Hedgehog does this. Shadow has taken a path which has him seeking to destroy all copies of himself — you've already fought quite a few copies during the game. He reaches the end, enters a room, and discovers hundreds upon hundreds of copies of himself in tubes. It matters little, though — once he's over the shock, he decides that original or not, he's still the Shadow the Hedgehog.
- The World Ends With You pulls this twice: first you find out everyone playing the Reapers' Game is dead and trying for a new chance at life, and then it turns out that Shiki traded her appearance to play the game, and always appeared as her friend Eri.
- In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the show within a game Address Unknown ends like this: The protagonist, John Mirra, who spent the entire show looking for the murderers of his family, realizes that he himself was the killer after he sees the killer's face staring back at him in a bathroom mirror. This, incidentally, may mean the whole purpose of the show was to set up a truly terrible pun: the main character is named John Mirra, and he solves the mystery in the bathroom (as in, the john) by looking into the mirror...yeah...
- In Xenogears when Fei finds out that his father is really the new body of Grafh, and also Wiseman is his father as well
- In Wild AR Ms, the character Rudy has his arm severed and when his friends try to heal him they discover that he is not human, but an artificial life form created as a weapon, and his body is biologically similar to the demons they are fighting.
- In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Dracula is Killed Off For Real before the start of the game. Its main villain claims to be Dracula's reincarnation. He's not, the mysterious power possessed by the main character, Soma Cruz is Dracula's power, and Soma is Dracula reincarnated. Cue Enemy Within.
- Metal Gear Solid: You Should Know This Already, but Solid Snake goes into Shadow moses Island to rescue two hostages, and stop terrorist leader Liquid Snake form launching a nuclear strike. The hostages he's meant to rescue keep having heart attacks, and Meryl claim he looks just like Liquid. Solid Snake discovers that both he and Liquid are clones of Big Boss, and that he's been used as a vector for the FOXDIE assassination virus.
Anime
- Rah Xephon is practically riddled with examples (along with Luke I Am Your Father revelations). Not only is Ayato himself a half-human, half-Mulian, but no fewer than two other characters discover the shocking truth about their own origins along the way; one of them was previously mind-wiped to make her forget them.
- Explicit in The Big O, to the point of the main character actually crying out "I'm one of the tomatoes!" Yeah, it sounded dumb, but it was a shocking twist. But it gets weirder still near the end, when he discovers this may not be the case, and he may have existed before Paradigm...
- This is the entire premise of Zegapain. Kyo believes that he is playing a video game in which he pilots a giant robot fighting against aliens trying to wipe out the computers that hold the brain patterns of the remnants of humanity, only to discover the "game" is the real world, and he is merely data in one of those computers.
- In the original Japanese version of Street Fighter 2010 (not the American localization that claims the protagonist is Ken Masters), Kevin Striker is one of the very parasites he was sent to destroy. It was all part of Dr. Joseph's master plan to use him to conquer the universe...which promptly fails when Kevin kills him.
- In GUNNM Daisuke Ido is driven into a Heroic BSOD when he discovers that he has no brain. It was removed and replaced with a microchip at the age of 19, as with all citizens of Tiphares, in order to make him less likely to violate the law.
- Desty Nova learned the same thing about himself at some point before his introduction. It is not known if that was what drove him over the edge, but it is not likely to have helped.
- Much later on,in the sequel manga Last Order, Alita gets her own TITM - twice. The first is when she learns that her past self,before her amnesia,was directly responsible for a catastrophe that resulted in the death of millions and the transformation of the entire Solar System into a Crapsack World. The second is when her brain,her last remaining piece of humanity,is revealed to have been removed at the start of the series and placed in a box she's been unknowingly carrying about for the past three volumes. She's told this just as it's exchanged for her friend's,resulting in a literal breakdown of her nanomachine body.
- Sola has a Wham Episode where Yorito realizes that he's a clone made of paper, as a replacement for the original who died centuries before, by his paper-manipulating sister.
- Shakugan No Shana gets this out of the way with Yuji in the first episode — as Shana bluntly explains to him, the real Sakai Yuji was erased from reality and eaten by a Rinne. All that he is is a temporary placeholder, meant to ease the strain on existence caused by the erasing of the orginal, and once his power of existence runs out, he'll cease to exist as well and reality will arrange itself so that Sakai Yuji will never have existed in the first place.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni has a borderline example: It turns out that Keiichi's foray In The Mouth Of Madness in the first arc was him being crazy and not a case of Town With A Dark Secret — but Keiichi only learns this in an alternate timeline when he gets a glean of his own actions from outside of his own mind at the time.
Radio
- The Firesign Theatre, in their audio production I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, uses this device ingeniously. One must listen carefully (or have seen a spoiler) to realize that the character "Clem" who finishes the story is not the one who started it, but rather a holographic clone created by the original Clem and then dismissed into cyberspace.
Comic Books
- The Reveal of Elijah Snow as the mysterious Fourth Man in Planetary.
- In Rising Stars, Poet asks Clarence Mack what he knows about the murders of the other Specials. Clarence discusses his own theories and uses his ability to enter the minds of others to show Poet his findings, when he realizes that he saw exactly who the killer was, and was murdered only moments later for it. And that, while he was unaware of it until just now, he's only having this conversation because another Special who is a medium summoned his ghost.
- A number of Skrulls believing themselves to be Marvel heroes have a bit of an identity crisis meeting their human counterparts during the Secret Invasion Crisis Crossover.
- In an early issue of The Sensational She-Hulk, our titular green goddess wakes up to see her headless body being used to provide a new mode of transportation for Chondu the Mystic's head. It turned out to be a robot body, though. They couldn't find a saw that was able to cut She-Hulk's hair, let alone through her neck.
Music
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