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* ''Literature/TheScholomance'': {{Deuteragonist}} Orion Lake is a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid created from his mother's experiments. In a more literal example than most, he only realizes this when he sees another maw-mouth for the first and recognizes it has [[HorrorHunger the same, bone-deep hunger]] he's felt all his life.

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* ''Literature/TheScholomance'': {{Deuteragonist}} and resident mal-slayer Orion Lake is a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid created from his mother's experiments. In a more literal example than most, he only realizes this when he sees another maw-mouth for the first time and recognizes it has [[HorrorHunger the same, bone-deep hunger]] he's felt all his life.
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* ''Literature/TheScholomance'': {{Deuteragonist}} Orion Lake is a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid created from his mother's experiments. In a more literal example than most, he only realizes this when he sees another maw-mouth for the first and recognizes it has [[HorrorHunger the same, bone-deep hunger]] he's felt all his life.

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* "Literature/BigfootDreams": Duke and Earl manage to find Clinton's mauled corpse and they all realize that the Clinton they've been communicating will was a bigfoot, having turned into Clinton after undergoing the ritual to become human. Even Clinton didn't know it until he saw the body.

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* "Literature/BigfootDreams": Duke and Earl manage to find Clinton's mauled corpse and they all realize that the Clinton they've been communicating will with was a bigfoot, having turned into Clinton after undergoing the ritual to become human. Even Clinton didn't know it until he saw the body.



* In ''Literature/DanganronpaZero'', protagonist [[AmnesiacHero Ryoko Otonashi]] is revealed to be [[BigBad Junko Enoshima]] [[LaserGuidedAmnesia with all her memories removed]]. Her boyfriend, Yasuke Matsuda, had been wiping her memories and planting fake ones in a journal she created by her own request. All just as a method of testing out memory-erasing methods for the killing school life. The HeyYou treatment she gets from everyone is already a big hint that her name isn't real, and other character who do recognize her as Enoshima never get to call her by name to misdirect the reader.

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* In ''Literature/DanganronpaZero'', protagonist [[AmnesiacHero Ryoko Otonashi]] is revealed to be [[BigBad Junko Enoshima]] [[LaserGuidedAmnesia with all her memories removed]]. Her boyfriend, Yasuke Matsuda, had been wiping her memories and planting fake ones in a journal she created by her own request. All just as a method of testing out memory-erasing methods for the killing school life. The HeyYou treatment she gets from everyone is already a big hint that her name isn't real, and other character characters who do recognize her as Enoshima never get to call her by name to misdirect the reader.



* In the Creator/OHenry story "A Man About Town", the protagonist is obsessed with learning more about people, particularly stereotypes like the titular "Man About Town". He questions people, including a learned friend. His obsession causes him enough travel and tunnel vision that he has a traffic accident. In the hospital, he reads a newspaper article about the accident where the victim is described as a "typical man about town."

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* In the Creator/OHenry story "A Man About Town", the protagonist is obsessed with learning more about people, particularly stereotypes like the titular "Man About Town". He questions people, including a learned friend. His obsession causes him enough travel and tunnel vision that he has a traffic accident. In the hospital, he reads a newspaper article about the his accident where the victim is described as a "typical man about town."



* In ''Literature/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' humanity, with the exception of the main character, went extinct following the emergence of the [[EldritchAbomination 17 Beasts]]. As it turns out the Beasts didn’t wipe out humanity; they were humanity. The Beasts were actually the original lifeforms inhabiting the planet, who ended up getting forcibly uplifted into human form by the extraterrestrial Visitors. The apocalypse that destroyed all life on the surface was a result of the "curse" that the Visitors placed on humanity failing due to overpopulation, causing them to revert back to their original state.


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* In ''Literature/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' humanity, with the exception of the main character, went extinct following the emergence of the [[EldritchAbomination 17 Beasts]]. As it turns out the Beasts didn’t wipe out humanity; they were humanity. The Beasts were actually the original lifeforms inhabiting the planet, who ended up getting forcibly uplifted into human form by the extraterrestrial Visitors. The apocalypse that destroyed all life on the surface was a result of the "curse" that the Visitors placed on humanity failing due to overpopulation, causing them to revert back to their original state.
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* While Alexandra from ''Literature/TheFallenWorld'' often talks about how much carnage she saw during the [[WarIsHell Alpha Centauri Campaign]], but even she didn't even realize just how bad it got for her. As it turns out, she isn't the original personality but an alter created by the AI Arcadia when she tried to [[DriventoSuicide kill herself]]. She was temporally turned into an AI and became part of Arcadia's gestalt. During that time she gave up all of the EFSN's secrets she knew to Arcadia, including the codes to Arcadia's ExplosiveLeash. The original personality sleeps in the back of her mind until [[HeroicSafeMode she is pushed to far]].
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* A recurring idea in ''The Fifth Head of Cerberus'' is Veil's Hypothesis. The book is set on twin planets whose shapeshifting aboriginal natives were exterminated by human settlers. But a mysterious anthropologist named Veil proposes that it was in fact the ''natives'' who slaughtered the colonists, adopted their form, and have forgotten that they were anything other than human. The truth or falsity of this hypothesis is left for the reader to puzzle out.
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* "Literature/BigfootDreams": Duke and Earl manage to find Clinton's mauled corpse and they all realize that the Clinton they've been communicating will was a bigfoot, having turned into Clinton after undergoing the ritual to become human. Even Clinton didn't know it until he saw the body.

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* ''Literature/AniDroids'':
** In the original novella ''Literature/{{Argo}}'', Mira, the only human character, finds out at the climax that she, as well as most if not all the human race, is an android.
** In the rewrite and expansion Mira is a flesh-and-blood human, at first. But in the final chapter she wakes up to discover that she's been replaced by an android programmed with most of her memories, save that her adventures in the book were replaced by a fake vacation to Cuba. While her unedited consciousness has been downloaded into an ani-droid!



* Mira, the only human character in Rick Griffin's ''Literature/{{Argo}}'', finds out at the climax that she, as well as most if not all the human race, is an android.
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Plenty of explanation in the next set of bullet points.


%% * ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' was fond of this one.

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%% * ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' was fond of this one.

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** This is also the plot of Sidney Sheldon's ''Tell Me Your Dreams'' and several other books and movies.
* ''Literature/ThursdayNext'':
** In ''First Among Sequels'', when Thursday 1-4 is impersonating Thursday the second time, the first person narrator actually switches to Thursday 1-4, so even the audience is fooled...until she starts thinking about her villainous plot again.
** Goliath, the evil corporation, replaces people with synthetic versions on such a regular basis that the GenreSavvy characters check themselves frequently to make sure they're still...them.

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%% ** This is also the plot of Sidney Sheldon's ''Tell Me Your Dreams'' and several other books and movies.
* ''Literature/ThursdayNext'':
** In ''First Among Sequels'', when Thursday 1-4 is impersonating Thursday the second time, the first person narrator actually switches to Thursday 1-4, so even the audience is fooled...until she starts thinking about her villainous plot again.
**
''Literature/ThursdayNext'': Goliath, the evil corporation, replaces people with synthetic versions on such a regular basis that the GenreSavvy characters check themselves frequently to make sure they're still...them.

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The twist in Before I Go to Sleep isn't that Christine isn't who she thinks she is, but that her "husband" isn't who she thinks he is. The dragon in "The Best" knows he's a dragon the whole time; he's just concealing it from everyone else.


* In "The Beast of 309", a man who lost his eye as a child works for a long time to afford a cloned replacement. The medics say it will take over four years to grow. At the end, [[spoiler:he has a cardiac arrest, and the medics say there is also a heart transplant available somehow in case it is needed. Then he connects the dots with the fact [[WalkingTransplant his own eye has been lost when he was four]]... thankfully, the new heart wasn't needed in the end.]]
* ''Before I Go To Sleep'' by S.J. Watson is about Christine, a woman who each day forgets everything that has happened to her for years (she is in her 40s, but cannot remember anything since her early twenties). Each day, her husband (who she does not recognise) explains to her what has happened to her, why this is the case, and what happened to her to make her like this. Later, she meets a doctor, who suggests that she keep a written journal (a film journal in the [[Film/BeforeIGoToSleep movie]]) to keep some sort of day-to-day continuity. Through this, and further meetings with the doctor, she discovers that her husband has been lying to her about parts of their past; he explains this as embarrassment about certain events, as well as an inability to cope with having to explain so much to her every single day; the reader is led to believe instead that he is an abusive, unfaithful husband who is using Christine's amnesia to hide a dark part of their relationship. However, the eventually revealed reality is even worse; he is not her husband at all, but her sociopathic ex-lover who has abducted her and used her memory loss to convince her of his false identity as her husband. Furthermore he is the one responsible for her condition; when she broke off their affair, he viciously beat her and left her for dead.

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%% * In "The Beast of 309", a man who lost his eye as a child works for a long time to afford a cloned replacement. The medics say it will take over four years to grow. At the end, [[spoiler:he has a cardiac arrest, and the medics say there is also a heart transplant available somehow in case it is needed. Then he connects the dots with the fact [[WalkingTransplant his own eye has been lost when he was four]]... thankfully, the new heart wasn't needed in the end.]]
* ''Before I Go To Sleep'' by S.J. Watson is about Christine, a woman who each day forgets everything that has happened to her for years (she is in her 40s, but cannot remember anything since her early twenties). Each day, her husband (who she does not recognise) explains to her what has happened to her, why this is the case, and what happened to her to make her like this. Later, she meets a doctor, who suggests that she keep a written journal (a film journal in the [[Film/BeforeIGoToSleep movie]]) to keep some sort of day-to-day continuity. Through this, and further meetings with the doctor, she discovers that her husband has been lying to her about parts of their past; he explains this as embarrassment about certain events, as well as an inability to cope with having to explain so much to her every single day; the reader is led to believe instead that he is an abusive, unfaithful husband who is using Christine's amnesia to hide a dark part of their relationship. However, the eventually revealed reality is even worse; he is not her husband at all, but her sociopathic ex-lover who has abducted her and used her memory loss to convince her of his false identity as her husband. Furthermore he is the one responsible for her condition; when she broke off their affair, he viciously beat her and left her for dead.
]]



* Done excellently in the ''Literature/{{Dragonlance}}'' short story "The Best." It's told in the 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.



* ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' was fond of this one.

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%% * ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' was fond of this one.
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* In ''Ancestral Night'' by Creator/ElizabethBear, Haimey's backstory, as she remembers it at the book's start, is that she grew up in a culty HiveMind subculture called a clade, and during her mandatory year away from the clade (required by the larger polity called the Synarche so she was making an informed and uninfluenced decision about it) she hooked up with a woman who had exciting political views, believing that the Synarche and the clade were basically the same thing, since they were both trying to control what individuals think. She was absolutely horrified when the woman turned out to be a suicide bomber, who inexplicably decided to trigger her vest while they were on a date. The justice system concluded that she wasn't involved, but her clademothers were so offended by the scandal that they turned their backs on her, which at least spared her having to fight for her continued independence, and she hasn't been in contact with them since. She's aware her memories have been edited, both by the Synarche due to the trauma and by the clade to protect their secrets, but she's sure of the basics. It turns out [[spoiler: she was the one who actually made the bombs. The bewilderment she felt was not that she was in a relationship with a suicide bomber, but that her lover had triggered it ''without her''. She thought her involvement in terrorism was a way of getting back at her clademothers, but they'd actually programmed her to do this, hating the Synarche as much as the anarcho-libertarians, but for opposite reasons. And they've never contacted her again because, when the Synarche confronted them with evidence of this, the clade ''committed mass suicide''.]]
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* {{Subverted|Trope}} in Rog Phillips' "Rat in the Skull", in which a laboratory rat unwittingly lives its whole life hooked up in the pilot's seat of a MobileSuitHuman. When some teenage boys stumble upon the inert robot and remove the sleeping rat, the narration muses upon how traumatic it would have been for "Adam" to discover its real nature... except the psychologists conducting the experiment never allowed their test subject to learn what a rat ''is'', so the poor thing's perplexity remains complete to the end.

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* {{Subverted|Trope}} in Rog Phillips' "Rat "Literature/{{Rat in the Skull", Skull}}", in which a laboratory rat unwittingly lives its whole life hooked up in the pilot's seat of a MobileSuitHuman. When some teenage boys stumble upon the inert robot and remove the sleeping rat, the narration muses upon how traumatic it would have been for "Adam" to discover its real nature... except the psychologists conducting the experiment never allowed their test subject to learn what a rat ''is'', so the poor thing's perplexity remains complete to the end.
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* In ''Literature/ImThinkingOfEndingThings'', at the end of his dying dream, Jake (who had been imagining himself as his fake girlfriend up until this point) comes face to face with his true self, the depressed, lonely janitor, after being chased through the school. He finally recognizes it as himself and dies shortly after.
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* ''The End of Summer'' by Creator/AlgisBudrys, is set on an Earth where humans -- and all other mammals -- are effectively immortal, their bodies automatically resetting from all non-fatal damage and disease; as a consequence, they have all lost the ability to form long-term memories, and carry artificial backups that they re-upload daily. The main character, Fay, accidentally kills a young boy's pet dog, and sets out to find a way to grow a new one to adulthood. This involves working out how the global immortality works -- and he realises that he's the person who caused the global immortality, and the subsequent global stagnation.
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* ''Literature/DarkerThanYouThink'': Will Barbee is ultimately revealed to be the Child of Night, whose identity he has been seeking throughout the story.
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** One of the earliest examples is "[[Literature/TheOutsider1926 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! -- undead.

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** One of the earliest examples is "[[Literature/TheOutsider1926 The Outsider]]", "Literature/TheOutsider1926", 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! -- undead.



* OlderThanRadio: Used in the 1839 Creator/EdgarAllanPoe short story "William Wilson", wherein the titular VillainProtagonist discovers that the mysterious doppelganger that has been constantly foiling his schemes is himself, or rather the personification of his conscience.

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* OlderThanRadio: Used in the 1839 Creator/EdgarAllanPoe short story "William Wilson", "Literature/WilliamWilson", wherein the titular VillainProtagonist discovers that the mysterious doppelganger that has been constantly foiling his schemes is himself, or rather the personification of his conscience.
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* In ''LightNovel/DanganronpaZero'', protagonist [[AmnesiacHero Ryoko Otonashi]] is revealed to be [[BigBad Junko Enoshima]] [[LaserGuidedAmnesia with all her memories removed]]. Her boyfriend, Yasuke Matsuda, had been wiping her memories and planting fake ones in a journal she created by her own request. All just as a method of testing out memory-erasing methods for the killing school life. The HeyYou treatment she gets from everyone is already a big hint that her name isn't real, and other character who do recognize her as Enoshima never get to call her by name to misdirect the reader.

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* In ''LightNovel/DanganronpaZero'', ''Literature/DanganronpaZero'', protagonist [[AmnesiacHero Ryoko Otonashi]] is revealed to be [[BigBad Junko Enoshima]] [[LaserGuidedAmnesia with all her memories removed]]. Her boyfriend, Yasuke Matsuda, had been wiping her memories and planting fake ones in a journal she created by her own request. All just as a method of testing out memory-erasing methods for the killing school life. The HeyYou treatment she gets from everyone is already a big hint that her name isn't real, and other character who do recognize her as Enoshima never get to call her by name to misdirect the reader.
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* ''LightNovel/{{Another}}'': Built in to the curse affecting Class 3-3. Because of an incident where students pretended a dead student was still alive, now each year a [[DeadAllAlong dead person]] (the "extra") will show up in Class 3-3. Nobody knows who it is, not even the extra themselves, because everyone's memories are altered to fit the extra's appearance. The trouble is, with the extra present, there's now an imbalance between life and death in class 3-3, and to fix the problem, people connected to the class will die until the extra is killed. Quite the kick in the teeth to find out that you're dead and you're causing all your friends' deaths, and they have to kill you again to survive.

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* ''LightNovel/{{Another}}'': ''Literature/{{Another}}'': Built in to the curse affecting Class 3-3. Because of an incident where students pretended a dead student was still alive, now each year a [[DeadAllAlong dead person]] (the "extra") will show up in Class 3-3. Nobody knows who it is, not even the extra themselves, because everyone's memories are altered to fit the extra's appearance. The trouble is, with the extra present, there's now an imbalance between life and death in class 3-3, and to fix the problem, people connected to the class will die until the extra is killed. Quite the kick in the teeth to find out that you're dead and you're causing all your friends' deaths, and they have to kill you again to survive.



* In ''LightNovel/MagicalGirlRaisingProject Restart'', the magical girl Keek has trapped numerous magical girls in a VR game designed to test their worthiness as magical girls because when they were tested to become magical girls, they were forced to participate in death games by their examiner, Cranberry. Keek believes that these Children of Cranberry are not fit to be magical girls as they would have picked up bad habits from their exam even if they were mind-wiped of the death game. If they cannot pass her game and die, that proves they were not worthy to be magical girls. She wants to extend these retests to all magical girls who were created by Cranberry and the magical girls inspired by Cranberry. Then Snow White gives her proof that Keek's examiner (who Keek has been mind-wiped of) had conducted death games inspired by Cranberry as well, making Keek herself one of the magical girls she finds unacceptable. This contradiction shatters her and causes Keek to disappear inside her own virtual world.

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* In ''LightNovel/MagicalGirlRaisingProject ''Literature/MagicalGirlRaisingProject Restart'', the magical girl Keek has trapped numerous magical girls in a VR game designed to test their worthiness as magical girls because when they were tested to become magical girls, they were forced to participate in death games by their examiner, Cranberry. Keek believes that these Children of Cranberry are not fit to be magical girls as they would have picked up bad habits from their exam even if they were mind-wiped of the death game. If they cannot pass her game and die, that proves they were not worthy to be magical girls. She wants to extend these retests to all magical girls who were created by Cranberry and the magical girls inspired by Cranberry. Then Snow White gives her proof that Keek's examiner (who Keek has been mind-wiped of) had conducted death games inspired by Cranberry as well, making Keek herself one of the magical girls she finds unacceptable. This contradiction shatters her and causes Keek to disappear inside her own virtual world.



* In ''LightNovel/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' humanity, with the exception of the main character, went extinct following the emergence of the [[EldritchAbomination 17 Beasts]]. As it turns out the Beasts didn’t wipe out humanity; they were humanity. The Beasts were actually the original lifeforms inhabiting the planet, who ended up getting forcibly uplifted into human form by the extraterrestrial Visitors. The apocalypse that destroyed all life on the surface was a result of the "curse" that the Visitors placed on humanity failing due to overpopulation, causing them to revert back to their original state.

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* In ''LightNovel/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' ''Literature/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' humanity, with the exception of the main character, went extinct following the emergence of the [[EldritchAbomination 17 Beasts]]. As it turns out the Beasts didn’t wipe out humanity; they were humanity. The Beasts were actually the original lifeforms inhabiting the planet, who ended up getting forcibly uplifted into human form by the extraterrestrial Visitors. The apocalypse that destroyed all life on the surface was a result of the "curse" that the Visitors placed on humanity failing due to overpopulation, causing them to revert back to their original state.
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* In ''LightNovel/SoImASpiderSoWhat'' Shiraori discovers that the gaps and inaccuracies in her memories are due to her originally being an ordinary ''house spider'' in Japan. When she was killed and reincarnated like the class, [[JerkassGods D]] attached a piece of her soul and a lazily modified set of memories to the spider so it could act as a ''decoy'' while D slacked off. She was never expected to survive past a few years.

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* In ''LightNovel/SoImASpiderSoWhat'' ''Literature/SoImASpiderSoWhat'' Shiraori discovers that the gaps and inaccuracies in her memories are due to her originally being an ordinary ''house spider'' in Japan. When she was killed and reincarnated like the class, [[JerkassGods D]] attached a piece of her soul and a lazily modified set of memories to the spider so it could act as a ''decoy'' while D slacked off. She was never expected to survive past a few years.

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