Our Clones Are Different

"To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes."

— Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas

Clones are defined as an identical duplicate of another living thing. In Real Life, this is generally done by removing a nucleus from an egg cell and combining it with another cell using electricity. Some animals have been successfully cloned; most have had with a multitude of health problems, although in recent years more have been created that have been viable and healthy in the long term. Biologically, real-life clones are essentially just identical twins of their gene donors, albeit born with an (often very large) time gap.

So far the idea of cloning humans belongs only in fiction. The mere existence of such a person would have serious ethical questions about individuality and what scientists should and should not be allowed to accomplish using their methods. Due to this, there is plenty of leeway with how a clone of a human being might turn out. Rarely, if ever, does it resemble the real life process in any way. This is justified, however, considering the science of cloning is still in its very early stages. The examples depicted in media are likely to stay fictional, considering the extensive ethical concerns surrounding it. This trope denotes many of the fanciful ways media depicts cloning which would definitely not be possible in real life. Considering cloning has long made an appearance in media, the extent writers can create their own systems of how it works is very large. Some of the most notable deviations include the following.

Ways clones could be different

Biology

• Aging: Real Life clones go through the same process of aging that every other organism does^note Their tendency to die shortly after they are born has nothing to do with what fiction often thinks is the reason — creating a being from scratch in a laboratory is complicated and has a high risk of the embryo, fetus or newborn catching an infection or being injured, but fiction has a tendency to make aging a crucial aspect of who they are. Fictional clones are oftentimes "born" at the same age their original happens to be at the time of their creation. In addition, it's common to see clones age much faster than a normal human, even though there is no evidence for such a thing in real cloning science.
• Appearance: Once your clone has been made, the matter of how much they resemble their original source must be addressed. In Real Life, cloning is biologically no different from having a child with yourself, and thus they wouldn't look the same as you most of the time. In fiction, a clone usually looks identical to the original, but it's also become common for more independent clones to be created with an Identical Twin ID Tag of some sort, such as a different hair color or an extra X chromosome. Some works may combine the two ideas by having a clone deliberately get a makeover in order to look less like their source.
• Creation: The most common variant media plays with. In Real Life, a clone needs a DNA sample of whoever you're cloning, and they also need to be incubated in the womb of a genetically similar organism (so no putting a human embryo inside of an elephant). Fictional clones on the other hand are almost always grown in an Uterine Replicator from nothing more than a single strand of hair or another small and easily-lost piece of genetic code^note Growing an embryo to viability in an artificial container is theoretically possible, it's just that it's beyond our current technology and also doesn't give any major advantage that using a regular womb wouldn't. More fantastical works often feature homunculus-esque magic clones that are oftentimes created from pretty much anything related to the person you are cloning, such as memories, souls, the aforementioned genetic samples, or kicking a mirror too hard. Occasionally a person may in fact be born unique before they become a clone through external sources.
• Modification: Sometimes, a clone is deliberately made with deviations from their original source. This is oftentimes used to justify several clone tropes, such as the aforementioned Rapid Aging, but the actual nature of the modifications may vary. Clone modifications may vary from upgrades given to them for more desirable attributes, a change in sex, attributes of a second person or even an entirely different creature altogether.
• Successfulness: The lynchpin deciding how clones are represented in fiction. Real life cloning has a notorious tendency to result in the clone dying soon after they are created, but more idealistic works tend to make their clones come out flawlessly most of the time. Works that explicitly make cloning a failure will have the clone either come out a horrible mess or slowly degenerate towards that state.

Psychology

• Family: Clones tend to vary from seeing their creator as a parent or seeing the person they were cloned from as their Truly Single Parent. If the age gap is close enough, the clone may see their original as a sibling and vise-versa.
• Memories: While Genetic Memory is relatively untested in our own world, Fiction is an entirely different story. Fictional clones (especially ones of the Born as an Adult variety) tend to have inherited the memories of their source, believing themselves to be the original until their true nature is revealed to them. It is also common to see clones start out with no memory but instead inherit more nebulous personality traits and quirks from their source, most often their sense of morality to the frustration of Big Bads everywhere.
• Mood: Romanticism states that clones will angst over their cloned status, which will be one of, if not the defining traits in their character arcs. Enlightenment instead posits that clones would embrace their uniqueness, seeing themselves as a completely independent person in their own right.
• Parapsychology: Especially in older works, one may find clones explicitly connected to their "relatives" in some way.
  • Clone to Original: Oftentimes the clone can feel the presence of the original, feeling their feelings or sharing their pain.
  • Original to Clone: In its weakest form, the original will get periodical "mental updates" from its clone. In its fullest, he not only remotely controls the clone, he also gets feedback seeing what the clone sees, feeling what he feels, just not dying when the clone dies.
  • Clone to Clone: In its simplest form, all clones of the same individual are aware of each other, can feel each other's presence, or share their feeling all through the group. In the fullest, the various clones have a common Hive Mind and act as one multi-bodied individual.

Sociology

• Discrimination: How does society at large feel about clones? A Crapsack World may see clones as expendable and less than human and thus perfect to use as a tool for their cause so that "real people" don't get harmed. A more idealistic setting would see them as nothing less then a person, preferring Mundane Utility in their purpose as anyone who takes on the Crapsack viewpoint is vilified for their beliefs.
• Ethics: The hangup people have with cloning in the real world. Cloning is often frowned upon by society at large, whether it's because Creating Life Is Bad or because of the many flaws in the process of Real Life cloning. In general, the social stigma against cloning directly correlates to how successful the process is, with always-successful cloning being widely permitted and the creation of easily-decaying clones being illegal in most works.

This is the Super-Trope to almost all tropes related to cloning, as seen in the index Our Clones Are Identical. Due to the wide variation in how cloning is depicted in media, this almost always violates Genre Consistency and External Consistency, although it tends to obey its own Internal Consistency.

No Real Life Examples, Please!, considering this science is extremely young and, pragmatically, there has only ever been one way to successfully clone something.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Astra Lost in Space: It is gradually revealed that the Astra crew are actually clones of their same-sex parents who were being groomed to become vessels for their parents' brains to take over when the time was right (the exception being Aries). The entire "space trip" they were meant to go on was actually a scheme to banish them to the far reaches of space due to recently passed laws against cloning so that no one would attempt the very actions that the Astra crew's "parents" had in mind. All the kids have the same physical traits and talents as their originals but, likely due to how they were raised, are individuals in their own right. Luca in particular is intersex, a true hermaphrodite genetically engineered by the original to have "perfect androgyny". He identifies as male, but has breasts and both male and female working reproductive organs.
• Bleach: Nemu Kurotsuchi is a Gigai^note A fake body used by the normally-intangible Shinigami to give themselves material form given life by the insertion of a Soul Fragment of her "father" Mayuri. She's considered Mayuri's clone, and is the the only one of her kind in the series.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Father was a Homunculus created using Hohenheim's blood, and thus is his clone, but appeared as a ball-like creature until becoming a living Philosopher's Stone and recreating his appearance to resemble Hohenheim. Later, Father made seven Homunculi from his sins, whom are also considered clones of Hohenheim, yet possess powers unique to themselves and bear no resemblance to him, with some not even appearing as human.
• Future Robot Daltanious: Clones are seen as "lesser" because they borrow DNA from their originals, thus not being "real" people. Many aliens from different planets revile them, and when Kento is accused of being one, his newfound "allies" abandon him too. It's also revealed that the Heliosian Royal Family, who were initially portrayed as the victims of the Zaal, actually created their own fate by their Fantastic Racism towards clones. They didn't want to lose their grip over being Helios' Planetary Nation; thus, they began genetically engineering clones who were marched in to be puppet leaders and organ donors when the time called. If the prototype was injured, the clone would be forced to receive the exact injury. If the prototype died, the clone was sent in their place. If an organ transplant was needed, the clone was harvested. When the clone outlived their usefulness, they would be eliminated to make way for the new successor. No matter what, the clones were simply puppets of their senior vassals. One day, the clone of then-Emperor Palmillion, Dolmen, rose up against his oppressors and destroyed the Helios Empire. Declaring himself the new ruler of Planet Zaal, he then began conquering planets left and right to expand his colonies. It's also revealed that Dolmen's Dragon Kloppen is a clone as well, of Palmillion's son Harlin — but was raised to believe that he was the prototype and Harlin was the clone.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: The ethics of cloning is brought up with a highly illegal process known as "Ghost Dubbing". A "ghost" is a person's soul converted into digital data thanks to the cyberization process. Due to mass-production of full-prosthetic bodies, it's possible to build clones (even incubate biological clones and replace with prosthetics as needed) and copy-and-paste the original inhabitant's soul into the clone bodies, but this kills the original in the process. In the episode "Idolator", Section 9 investigates the repeated appearances of Marcello Jarti, an infamous South American revolutionary who's wanted in numerous countries for drug trafficking. Section 9 is curious why it's always the same person who shows up every time, despite a track record of each one being arrested or killed. Each time a new one shows up, a professional determines that it is indeed the real Marcello Jarti. By the end of the episode, it's revealed that he's been building dozens of clones of himself for countless years, and each one has a perfect copy of his soul, memories, personality, and ideologies up to the point of release, at which point they become individuals with whatever path they take in life.
• Naruto has these aplenty.
  • One brand of clones can be created from normal chakra (which are either non-solid illusions or doppëlgangers), all kinds of Elemental Releases (more durable but with less agency), or, well, whatever theme a character has (crows, paper, being The Beastmaster or a plant-man, etc.). They all consume chakra, but the most chakra-costly are probably the doppëlgangers (aka the Shadow Clones) because they provide a high degree of agency and return their memories to the caster, making training and on-battle intel-gathering all the easier.
  • It's possible to create clones by more scientific methods, which makes them as human as possible: they don't dispel upon receiving sufficiently strong hits and have free will. Orochimaru created such clones from Shin Uchiha.
  • Subverted with the Rinnegan's Six Paths of Pain. The technique allows controlling up to six bodies as if they were one's own, sharing a Hive Mind and being able to see through them. Nagato's Paths all looked eerily similar to him (same orange hair and black, metal bar piercings, and Rinnegan eyes), so at first glance, they look like his clones. When Obito uses this technique is hammered that, no, they aren't — he controls the bodies of six tailed-beast hosts without making them resemble him.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: It is gradually revealed throughout the series that Rei is actually several different clones of the same person. One horrific scene even includes a massive vat filled with lifeless clone bodies of Rei, currently without having her memories and personality implanted. Rei herself is a mishmash between Yui Ikari and the second Angel, Lilith, looking like the former with blue hair and red eyes.
• One Piece:
  • The Pacifista are cyborg clones of warlord Bartholomew Kuma, who served as the prototype to the project. They seem to be non-sapient, mindlessly following orders from whoever the highest available authority is.
  • A new variant of Pacifista, the 'Seraph' series, is introduced in the Egghead Arc, with each Seraph being a clone of a Warlord of the Sea. All of the clones so far have had Lunarian DNA (or 'Lineage Factor') used in their creation. Personality traits are retained through cloning, as is seen by Boa Hancock's clone having the same undying devotion to Luffy as the original; in addition, Devil Fruit powers can be conferred upon clones, even if the original individual didn't consume one.

Comic Books

• Dog Man (Dav Pilkey): In the third book "A Tale of Two Kitties", Petey attempts to find someone to do his chores. He purchased a machine that can make clones. Petey uses one of his whiskers and made a child clone of him. This forced Petey to look after the kitten.
• Invincible: Clones are genetically created Artificial Humans invented by the original Mauler Twin. They are "activated" at their creator's desired age and inherit the original's memories to the point that they would only know they are clones if they saw their original selves in person. The Mauler Twins are constantly debating about who's the clone and who's the original because of this.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): The Imposter Syndrome miniseries introduces the Imposters, Surge the Tenrec and Kitsunami the Fennec, who appear to be robotic clones created by Dr. Starline to serve as his minions. They demonstrate some extreme amounts of independence from their source, having separate names, memories, powers, genders, and even species from their source characters (Sonic and Tails). Subverted when it is revealed that they were not created at all, but were rather two living beings brainwashed by Starline and implanted with cybernetic enhancements and Fake Memories to make them believe they are his creations.
• Spider-Man: The villain known as the Jackal specializes in cloning. From a single blood sample, he can create a fully-formed copy of a person, with all their memories up to the point where the sample was taken. For a time, this was subject to a Retcon stating that the Jackal was actually exposing random people to a "genetic virus" that caused them to resemble others in both DNA and memory, until that was itself retconned. In Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy, a refined method of the cloning process was introduced, wherein a deceased person's mind could be uploaded into a clone body, using mechanically reproduced Psychometry on the genetic samples, essentially resurrecting them. Unfortunately, all the clones carried a genetic flaw that caused them to stabilize when exposed to certain radio frequencies that have become common in the modern world, causing a variation of the Carrion virus to spread through multiple parallel timelines where the scheme was carried out successfully.
• Superman: A classic story tells of a malfunctioning duplication device scanning Superman and creating a deformed and contrarian copy of Superman called Bizarro. In later incarnations, he is a more traditional clone engineered from a copy of Superman's DNA.
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe sees Squirrel Girl cloned by accident in the midst of a superhero battle. She and the clone seem almost exactly the same and they quickly become a team. However it soon becomes clear that the clone doesn't have the original's ability to compromise, causing her to become an anti-villain who sets out to make the world a better place for squirrels, plunging the city into chaos and taking out the Avengers along the way.
• X-23 a.k.a. Laura Kinney is an Opposite-Sex Clone of Wolverine created by the Facility. Because they couldn't do a direct clone of Wolverine because of the damaged DNA sample, they had to duplicate the x chromosome. Not only that, she was actually birthed by Sarah Kinney, who used some of her own DNA to complete the damaged sample. Because of this, later stories would pretty much retcon her clone status.

Comic Strips

• Nodwick: Artax has cloned Nodwick under the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules on multiple occasions when Piffany wasn't around to resurrect him the clericy way.
  • In one comic Nodwick finds what appears to be his own head in a jar, it turns out that Artax and Yeagar had gone on an adventure while Piffany was on a trip and Nodwick was temporarily dead so Artax had cloned him to carry their stuff. However, when he asks whether he's the original they're suspiciously unable to give a clear answer.
  • Another time they delve a dungeon full of zombies that look like Nodwick, Artax admits that he and Yeagar had been there before without Piffany and had brought a few "spares" for when the Nodwicks inevitably got killed. In this case he also claims that his Scroll of Clone was going to expire with the edition change, referencing how the spell works dramatically differently between 2nd and 3rd edition.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
  • When a piece of Ghidorah's body like one of its three heads is severed, Ghidorah's Healing Factor will regrow a new appendage from the body, with pre-severing memories and personality fully backed up and intact if it's a head that's being grown back... And the old severed head, meanwhile, will also retain all of its pre-severing memories and personality fully intact, and it will also begin to regenerate the rest of Ghidorah's body from itself (albeit at a much slower rate) if it comes into contact with energy, backing up and restoring the other two heads' own minds and personalities as it does so; unless the severed head merges with another organism which permanently rewires its biology to form a new Kaiju body instead of re-forming the rest of Ghidorah (as MaNi does in the fic). Ghidorah's heads can also transfer complete copies of their minds onto another body or organism, via mutating a pre-existing organism into an Artificial Hybrid inside the head and forcing the hybrid to form an extra Ghidorah-like brain and head on itself which the Ghidorah head can upload a complete copy of its own mind into (as San does with Monster X). Although copies of a Ghidorah head which exist at the same time as each-other through any of the above means are fully independent of each-other after the point of biological separation, there's still a psychic link between them via their similar Ghidorah-derived biology.
  • In the AbraxasVerse Timeline, Apex Cybernetics are growing a clone of Godzilla from fragments of Godzilla's scales, dorsal spines and blood samples that he's shed over the years.
• The Bikini Bottom Horror: It's revealed that starfish like Patrick can regenerate a severed appendage — and the severed appendage in turn can regenerate an entire body, which is something Mr. Krabs took advantage of via growing a Patrick clone which he constantly harvests for an endless supply of Krabby Patty meat. When the original Patrick, who initially had no awareness of his clone, eats an undercooked Krabby Patty, he assimilates his tortured clone's memories through its uncooked flesh, setting off the plot of the comic and leading an army of Patrick clones connected by a Hive Mind to go on a murderous rampage.
• A Certain Droll Hivemind: In "Entry 25", Mikoto claims that she can create weaker copies of herself out of electricity so long as there's a generator nearby, to cover up the existence of Academy City having cloned her without her permission:
  Mikoto: Oh, no, that's just... I can make clones out of electricity. It's... um. One of my powers. To make weaker doubles that can exist near... uh, near a generator. Yes.

Films — Animation

• Doraemon: Nobita and the Spiral City features a new gadget called the Duplication Mirror, which can create eggs of any sentient objects it reflects upon, later hatching into an identical clone (it works even on mammals!). The mirror was originally kept in the Spiral Planet's Cloning Chamber for maintaining their population of Living Toys, but it turns out said mirror works on humans as well when a criminal named Onigoro somehow made his way into the Spiral Planet from Tokyo and accidentally clones himself several times, leading to Doraemon and friends spending most of the story battling Onigoro and his clones. One of those clones, Hokuro ("Big Mole"), even develops a personality of his own, and is in fact benevolent compared to the others.
• Leroy & Stitch: Aside from Dupe from Lilo & Stitch: The Series making a cameo (see Western Animation), Hämsterviel has a cloning machine which, at the press of a button, creates an instant clone of whoever is standing inside the machine's chamber, and it can generate a seemingly-endless supply of clones at the speed of a factory line if one desires. Hämsterviel uses it on Leroy (himself a recolored duplicate of Stitch who was deliberately created as a new Experiment in Stitch's image) to generate an army of Leroy clones.
• Pokémon: The First Movie: Clones are created by Dr. Fuji as a method to bring back his deceased daughter back to life. Grown in test tubes, they are all referred to as "(Original Name)two" and universally look identical to their source with the addition of darkened stripes with the exception of Mewtwo, who has been modified to the point where he is considered an entirely separate species from his source.

Films — Live-Action

• The 6th Day: "Blank" clones are grown which have all identifying characteristics stripped from their genome. When a specific person needs to be cloned, their DNA is overlayed on the Blank.
• Alien: Resurrection: In the 24th century, the United Systems Military can grow clones from preserved blood samples that are two centuries old, growing inside an artificial tank from an embryo to the age that the genetic donor was at the time of the blood sample's taking. The USM clone both Ellen Ripley and the Xenomorph Queen chestburster that was growing inside of her at the time of the blood samples' extraction, but there's unpreventable cross-contamination between Ripley's and the Queen Xenomorph's DNA in every single cloning attempt. The first seven cloning attempts produce gruesome Ripley-Xenomorph chimeras, most of which die in gestation; while the eighth cloning attempt successfully produces a fully-functioning Ripley clone who has several subdued physical and mental Xenomorph traits, and it produces a Xenomorph Queen with several subdued and clearly human-derived mutations. The Ripley clone also inherits some of her original human donor's memories via her Xenomorph-derived DNA including a genetic memory.
• Judge Dredd: The Evil Plan of Rico Dredd is to create a battalion of his clones with which to violently take control of Megacity One. Although the heroes manage to shut down the process before the clones are ready, it's clear they'd've emerged from their artificial wombs as grown adults. As a further case, Rico Dredd himself is a clone of Judge Dredd that glitched during the process, making him a genetically identical evil doppelganger.
• Jurassic Park (1993) lays out its cloning rules in the form of an in-universe cartoon. The dinosaur DNA was retrieved from the blood sucked up by a prehistoric mosquito that was encased inside of amber, but the incomplete nature of the genetic samples necessitated the use of frog DNA as a substitution, which acts as a way to Hand Wave any paleontological inconsistencies present in the franchise on top of giving the all-female dinosaur population Gender Bender powers, allowing them to breed out of control. None of this is possible for numerous reasons, chief among them being the fact that any DNA that old would have expired by the time humanity got their hands on it.
• Logan changes the backstory of Laura Kinney by making her biologically Wolverine's daughter through artificial insemination of his DNA into a migrant woman. It also reveals partway through that an identical clone of Logan in his prime has been developed by Transigen, with it being fully grown by growing body parts in separate tanks before grafting them together. The clone has none of Logan's personality other than his natural savagery and is conditioned to follow his creator's commands, with enough personality to feel vengeful when Logan kills him.
• Multiplicity: Doug has clones of himself made because he doesn't have enough time. They both start out identical to him. The one he assigns to help him at work eventually becomes more aggressive, the one he assigns to help him with his domestic responsibilities becomes more effeminate and eventually forgets how to do Doug's job. When they made a clone of one of the clones, it turns out a barely functioning childlike simpleton.
• In Replicas, creating mature human clones is a 17-day process. After William Foster's family dies in a car accident, he uses his knowledge of fantastic human cloning to replicate his family (minus one child who he doesn't have a cloning pod for) before anybody fully realizes they've been missing. Foster also has to work out the problem of implanting his family's old memories in the clone bodies, which he accomplishes by creating digital copies of their neural pathways (while selectively scrubbing away any recollections of the accident which killed them and their non-cloned youngest daughter).
• Star Wars: The clone troopers are an army of artificially-created humans produced from the genetic material of the legendary bounty hunter Jango Fett on the planet Kamino, and thus they all look identical to not only him but also each other. They were created by the Galactic Republic to serve as their official army in the conflict that would soon be dubbed the Clone Wars, and they age twice as fast as a regular human so that they'd become eligible soldiers sooner.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: Fairy technology has reached the point that cloning is possible, but is illegal on religious and ethical grounds. Because the cloning process can't generate life force or a soul for them, clones are Empty Shells doomed to short lives with little to no brain activity and almost inevitably die from organ failure.
• Brave New World: Although never called 'clones' in the book, almost all individuals in this universe are one of many 'identical twins', who are reared and conditioned into their assigned ranks. Huxley goes a great deal into the process of producing the 'twins'. An egg is taken from a woman and artificially fertilised in a pot. Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon embryos (the lower ranks) go through the 'Borkanovsky method', involving an electric shock causing the fertilised egg to split up to 96 times. Epsilons, who are the lowest ranking caste, are even subject to a low-oxygen environment to keep their intelligence low. Alpha and Beta ranks, who are high-ranking and are therefore allowed intelligence, do not go through this process, however they too result from a pot birth. It is an extreme social violation for a child to be born naturally, and the word 'Mother' is an obscenity.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Academy City created an experiment to try and clone level 5 espers, since they are rare but extremely valuable. For the base, they chose the third strongest level 5, Misaka Mikoto. In total they created 20001, dubbed the "Sisters", but none of them got higher than level 2 or 3. The Sisters where grown in vats, with drugs accelerating their growth to match the the original. Later on its stated that this process shortens their already reduced lifespans, and they need to receive treatments to return their aging to normal. Once they finish growing a device called Testament is used to fill their brains with all the knowledge they need. Apparently encoding emotions with Testament is difficult, and their creators didn't care enough to get it right, so it was originally believed they didn't any. Over time though, it becomes clear they do have emotions, they just aren't good at expressing them. An exception to this is Last Order, the final Sister produced, who's younger than the rest and acts like a normal cheerful child. A quirk of having similar brain patterns as a result of Testament is that they can use their electrical powers to create a hivemind, called the MISAKA network. Last Order was created to be the networks control tower. Since the Sisters failed to achieve level 5, they got repurposed in a different experiment where they where repeatedly killed by the strongest level 5, Accelerator, in an effort to achieve level 6. The researchers involved didn't consider this unethical as they viewed the Sisters as no different than disposable lab rats, and the Sisters where taught to view themselves the same way. After finding out about her clones, Mikoto accepts them as her real sisters and fight to protect them, eventually helping them to value their own lives.
  • Later on, a new cloning project was started, creating a clone who is older than Mikoto, Misaka Worst. The process seems to have been improved by then, as Worst is a level 4 esper. Like Last Order, Worst can properly express herself. In her case she was designed to channel all of the networks negative emotions, making her a bit crazy. They did this because Worst was meant to take down Accelerator, who went through a Heel–Face Turn and can no longer bring himself to harm any of the Sisters, and most of the negative emotions in question consist of repressed hatred for Accelerator.
• Classic Singapore Horror Stories: In the future shown in the story "Down on the Farm", clones are harvested for their parts. Because the story takes place in a time when pop culture is practically extinct, the clones are usually cloned from celebrities for their attractive appearance, with the protagonist being a clone of Bruce Lee named Bruce. There's also a mention of another clone named Muhammad Ali, cloned from the boxer of the same name.
• Dune has the gholas, artificial humans created from a DNA sample of a dead person. No matter how small the sample, the process will still work extremely well, to the point where a single cell can produce such a perfect replica that it's indistinguishable from resurrection, complete with regaling their memories if exposed to a strong trauma (but to be fair, everyone has Genetic Memory in the Dune universe, so the gholas are not especially guilty in this regard).
• Fate/Apocrypha: Mordred is a homunculus clone of King Arthur herself, created from her extracted sperm (It's a Long Story) and grown in Morgan La Fey's ovaries. Mordred's resemblance to the king is rather fleeting though they are both blonde females (only biological, in Mordred's case) that look roughly the same age.
• In the gamebook The Forest of Doom, you can explore an underground cave full of green-skinned, mindless clones resembling hairless goblins, bred from mushroom spores and meant for cultivating a field of mushrooms. At one point you're given an option to attack an unarmed clone worker — do that, the clone dies and immediately melts into a puddle, and from the puddle a giant mushroom instantly grows from it. If you venture deep enough into the cave, you found out the clones are created and controlled by a Fire Demon via the demon's crown.
• The Forever War: After thousands of years of war between Earth and its colony planets and the Tauran empire, Earth develops clone soldiers who — all of them being the same individual — use telepathy to fight as one. It turns out that the Taurans are "natural clones" and do not only have the same Hive Mind ability, but somehow extend that ability to other clones, like the new human soldiers. In their first encounter, both sides automatically connect, and seeing the conflict through the other soldiers' eyes as well, discover that millennia ago, the war started due to a giant misunderstanding. Thus ends the Forever War.
• The Dean Koontz novel Mr. Murder features a clone of a writer being created as an assassin. He wasn't supposed to be a clone of the writer, but of the terminally ill son of the secret organization's founder, but the hospital mixed up the samples. The clone's DNA was altered to give him a Healing Factor and enhanced reflexes, hence no one at the organization questioning why he didn't look like the dying child he was supposed to have come from. He shares a telepathic link with the writer, allowing each of them to know where the other is. And the clone dissolves as he dies at the end.
• Never Let Me Go takes a humanist angle on its approach towards clones. Clones are reared for their organs, and may undergo multiple donations throughout their cut-short lives, until they are too weak to live. Interestingly, Ishiguro does not detail HOW clones are created, as he wanted to focus on a society that already has clones in a set position, as essentially farm animals. The most information we are given is, according to Ruth, is that they are made from 'trash' humans, like prostitutes and criminals. We later find out that 'our' protagonist clones are of a particularly special type, reared by an organisation that advocates Clones Are People, Too. In the end, these groups were disbanded as the world's opinion on ethics and such shifted once again, and the story ends with Ruth and Tommy dead and Kathy going on to fulfil the same fate.
• Rihannsu: The Romulan Way states that the Romulans used cloning and genetic engineering to replenish their numbers after over half their original population was lost in various mishaps during the Journey from Vulcan. This resulted in the removal of pon farr from their genomes, allowing them to reproduce more regularly than baseline Vulcans, but conversely also cost them most of their telepathic powers.
• The Stainless Steel Rat: In The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell, clones are created by detouring through a special Alternate Universe that duplicates incoming matter. In people, this creates mentally and physically identical copies with a permanent Psychic Link. Exploited by the villain to distribute himself across his criminal enterprise, and by a love interest to resolve a Love Triangle.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Thrawn Trilogy: Grand Admiral Thrawn uses Spaarti cylinders recovered from an Imperial tech cache on Wayland to create cloned soldiers to bolster Imperial numbers. It's explained that, due to a quirk of the Force, clones that are grown to adulthood too fast (less than a standard year) tend to go insane, which Thrawn solves by importing Force-negating creatures called ysalamiri from Myrkr. Luke Skywalker perceives the resulting clone troops as producing a sort of buzzing in his Force perception.
  • The later Republic Commando Series fixes discrepancies between the prequel trilogy and the Thrawn trilogy by introducing Spaarti-grown clone troopers late in the war. Order 66 states that quality control with the Arkanian technology is not as good but it allows much faster production than the Kaminoan process.
• Wayfarers: In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the Quelin consider being a clone to be illegal. Unfortunately, Corbin unknowingly is a clone and is arrested and thrown into a hellish prison.

Live-Action TV

• Black Mirror:
  • "Be Right Back" centers around an internet service that can recreate a deceased person's digital personality from their social media profile and then later on a Blank Slate android body that can become a near-perfect (aside from some minor details) replica of said deceased person. The main character uses it to bring her boyfriend Back from the Dead.
  • In a rare example of a Recurring Element in what is normally a Genre Anthology, "White Christmas" introduces the Cookies, a type of digital copy of a person's consciousness. They are denied basic human rights and dismissed by humanity as a whole, to the point where all sorts of inhumane actions are fully permitted as long as it's a cookie. These include blatant slavery, creating a cookie to interrogate them for the original's crime, and forcing them to listen to the same song on repeat for 2 million years. A Continuity Nod in "Hated in the Nation" shows that they were eventually given more freedom by the European Court of Human Rights, though their abuse continues to be a plot point in several episodes. "USS Callister" shows that making a Cookie is really easy. The Villain Protagonist Robert Daly can recreate a person from even the tiniest DNA sample, complete with not only their exact likeness but also memories too. He uses them to get back at their original human counterparts without any public consequences.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Sontarans are an entire race of clones dedicated to warfare against their ancient enemy, the Rutan Host. The clones require a mix of chemicals known as "clone feed" in order for them to reach full health and maturity, with one storyline ("The Sontaran Strategem"/"The Poison Sky") revolving around them engulfing the entire Earth in those chemicals in order to create a surplus of new troops.
  • The Gangers are human duplicates made from a form of living flesh who are designed to mine dangerous materials whilst controlled by humans. However, they are given independent thought upon being exposed to a solar storm. When they do gain this, they retain the memories of their original template up to the moment of independence but also have skills such as extending their limbs or mutating into monsters. They're initially unstable as well, shifting between half-flesh and human faces, although it is possible for them to be stabilized, as shown when it's revealed in "The Almost People" that Amy has been one of them for at least a short amount of time without anyone noticing.
  • In "The Sontaran Strategem"/"The Poison Sky", the Sontarans use a bactic tank of green fluid to grow a human clone as an infiltrator. Upon wiring Martha Jones into the machine as the template, the clone grows from a near-featureless adult-sized humanoid that can't leave the tank into a physical double of Martha within hours or less. The Martha clone has all of Martha's memories uploaded into her, but is reliant on Martha remaining connected to the cloning machine to stay alive, and she instantly starts dying the second Martha is removed from the machine.
  • The Daleks, being a severely-mutated remnant of the Kaled race which can't function much at all without their cybernetic casings and other advanced technology, and which have delusions of being a racially-pure organism coloring their actions to boot; oftentimes boost and replenish their numbers primarily by factory-growing clones of their organic components (the mutants) and inserting them into casings. After the Time War, Davros, being of the same pre-mutation stock as the original Daleks since he's the last non-Dalek Kaled in existence, was able to grow a new army of millions of Daleks, using a single cell of his own body for each one.
  • In "New Earth", Cassandra O'Brien was able to "force-grow" a clone called Chip, whose appearance she modeled on a man she'd met long ago: Cassandra implicitly imprinted Chip's likeness on him from her own memory without any DNA samples from the "original" actually being used. Chip has a "half life", which causes him (physically appearing to be a young man) to die of organ failure at the episode's end.
  • In "Journey's End", the Tenth Doctor redirects his aborted regeneration's energy into his preserved severed hand (which he regrew a replacement for in a previous episode), and Donna later comes into contact with the energized hand, resulting in a "biological meta-crisis" where the hand both literally and figuratively regenerates the rest of its missing body, now spliced with human DNA donated from Donna. The result is a physically-identical clone of the Tenth Doctor who has part-human DNA from Donna — the effects of which include a more human-like internal biology, lacking a regeneration cycle, and having a mix of Donna's and the original Tenth Doctor's personality quirks — and the new Meta-Crisis Doctor has the same thoughts and memories as the original Tenth Doctor, but with a more ruthless and aggressive streak due to the clone being "born in blood and battle and revenge".
• Farscape:
  • "Exodus From Genesis" features Moya being infested by a hive of insect-like Draks that begin producing clones of the crew so that they can keep the ship at the ideal temperature for the Drak Monarch to breed. These clones are born from cocoons as fully-clothed adults, and though they can easily adapt their bodies to cancel out Crichton's Impostor-Exposing Test, they can't speak. Plus, while they can fight just as effectively as their targets, it's very easy to rip their limbs off — revealing that they have gelatinous blue gunk instead of blood. On the upside, they are very easy to create in bulk, giving both the crew and the Draks an advantage when Peacekeepers invade Moya.
  • In the third season, "Eat Me" introduces a new system of cloning created by cannibalistic scientist Kaarvok; created in a matter of seconds via a gauntlet-like device, the ensuing doppelganger is fully-grown, fully-clothed, and in full possession of the target's personality and memories. Kaarvok himself refuses to call the process "cloning," and instead calls it "twinning", insisting that the twins are both equal and original — and tasty, hence why half the duo is usually eaten immediately after. Kaarvok has long since reduced his jailers to a loyal Cannibal Clan via Clone Degeneration, and over the course of the episode, is able to twin Chiana, D'Argo, and Crichton... resulting in much awkwardness when both Crichtons survive the adventure and are incorporated into the cast from then on. Even after thorough scientific analysis, it's impossible to tell which of them is the original, and the episode ends with the two Crichtons silently playing Rock–Paper–Scissors in an attempt to identify the clone — only to end every single game with a tie.
• Foundation (2021): For centuries, The Empire has been ruled by the so-called "Genetic Dynasty", a series of clones of Emperor Cleon I, who felt that only identical copies of himself could preserve everything he had built. There are always three clones active at any time, all technically named Cleon with a new regnal number, but more usually known by the codenames Brother Dusk (the eldest of the three, now a senior advisor), Brother Day (the reigning Emperor), and Brother Dawn (the youngest of the three, being taught how to rule by the older two); when the current Dusk reaches his final years, he's "promoted" to Brother Darkness and euthanized by disintegration, while a new infant Dawn is decanted and the other two are each moved up a rank. Despite the standard age differences, they all view each other as brothers, though their relationships tend to feel more akin to grandfather-father-son. Also, in addition to being physically identical, their personalities are likewise, with few variations caused by their respective experiences. And each active clone also has backup bodies ready to be activated with full memory downloads in case anything happens to them.
  • A major plot point in Season 1 is that Cleon XIV (the current Brother Dawn) suffers from genetic errors that manifest in psychological and physical differences (such as colorblindness and being left-handed instead of right), which he desperately hides to avoid being terminated and replaced. It eventually turns out that this was caused by tampering by rebels, who wanted to make Dawn vulnerable to emotional manipulation so they could lure him away and replace him with a Cleon clone of their own, who has been raised to hate the Empire. While this plot is stopped, and Dawn killed and replaced in order to preserve the dynasty's integrity, it turns out to be All for Nothing, as the tampering to the clone's base (the original Cleon's preserved body) is irreversible, leaving all future clones imperfect.
  • Season 2 adds a very disturbing layer to the nature of the Genetic Dynasty: they're all puppets of their majordomo Demerzel, who was programmed by Cleon I to enforce his vision of what the dynasty should be, which is carried out by emotional manipulation and editing their memories to keep them on track.
• Orphan Black centers on a group of identical-looking women who discovered that they were clones in adulthood and are working together to uncover numerous mysteries surrounding their existence. They discover that a sinister movement called Neolution and a MegaCorp called the Dyad Institute were involved in their creation as part of an experiment called Project Leda. As embryos, the Leda clones were implanted into women who had no idea they were part of a cloning experiment. Consequently, the Ledas have a wide variety of personalities due to growing up in different environments. The scientists who carried out of the experiment had modified the Ledas to ensure they would be infertile, with only Sarah and Helena not receiving the modification. This had the unintended consequence of causing the clones to develop a terminal respiratory disease for which they need to find a cure. All the Ledas who know about each other view themselves as sisters (with the exception of Rachel because she's an antagonist). The series places a heavy focus on the ethics (or lack thereof) of human cloning and frames the clones as otherwise normal people who deserve the same rights as anyone else.
  • At the end of season 2, the Ledas discover that there is a second batch of clones who all happened to be male, this time called Project Castor. Unlike the Ledas, who had relatively normal childhoods, the Castors were raised from birth to be a group of perfect soldiers. Because the Castors grew up in the same environment and have always known that they're clones, they have very similar personalities and view each other as brothers (with the exception of Ira, who was raised separately from the rest). However, like the Ledas, the Castors also have a life-threatening illness due to their modifications. In their case, it's a prion that targets their brains and can be passed to others through sexual intercourse (causing infertility) or blood transfusions.
  • In season 3, it's revealed that the original genetic donor for both Project Leda and Project Castor is the same person, a woman named Kendall Malone. Kendall is a chimera, a person born with two sets of DNA because she fused with her twin brother in the womb. This is a real, albeit extremely rare, condition. Kendall's unique situation makes her valuable scientific specimen with the potential to help cure both sets of illnesses. This is confirmed when a cure is synthesized using her cancer cells in season 5.
• Primeval: The third season reveals Helen Cutter's army of Cleaner duplicates are clones made from the original Cleaner's DNA using advanced technology which she discovered in the future. Helen also clones Nick after obtaining swabs of his DNA, with the clone being fully-formed and -functional just days after Helen took the samples. The clones are conditioned and mostly operate like machines, pre-programmed to recognize and obey verbal commands from their creator (to the point where even an obvious looped audio recording of their creator's voice can fool them while their real creator is physically and visually in their presence and trying to countermand the recording), although the clones have just enough innate humanity in them that one clone instinctively hesitates to commit suicide when ordered, and the Cutter clone voluntarily gives his genetic source time to save himself before carrying out a suicide-bombing order after said source had attempted to talk the clone into rebelling against his creator and staying alive.
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "Rimmerworld", Rimmer tries to populate a planet in the process of being terraformed with copies of himself. For starters, the clones are created from his holographic matrix in lieu of actual DNA. They also come out fully grown from a cocoon. Rimmer is initially unable to create an Opposite-Sex Clones, although when the other Dwarfers get there, the presence of female Rimmers suggests that he eventually succeeded in the end.
  • It happens again in "Officer Rimmer", when Rimmer decides to populate the ship with his clones in order to create a crew for himself. These clones come out of a bioprinter and require actual DNA, which Rimmer was able to locate by finding old genetic material of his. They also come out fully formed and can apparently be modified, as shown when Rimmer tried to make super macho Rimmers to act as bouncers. They also seem to have Rimmer's personality, shown when they inherit his slavishness to higher command. Additionally, the clones created by the bio-printer are infertile, and they disintegrate when the purpose that they're created for is accomplished. The bio-printer can also jam and end up creating horrifically deformed clones, leading to such horrors such as the Rimmer Monster (a terrifying amalgamation of Rimmers) and a clone of former captain Edwin Herring who has a stretched face that extends to the top of his head.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • The Jem'Hadar, the Dominion's foot soldiers, are an all-clone Proud Warrior Race that grows to adulthood in approximately a week. They're programmed to instinctively view the changelings, who rule the Dominion and engineered them, as gods, and are dependent on a drug called ketracel-white in order to live.
  • The Vorta are a race of clone diplomats serving the tyrannical genetic engineers who rule the Dominion. Each successful clone looks, sounds, and acts identical to the previous model and has their memories. This concept was introduced in "Ties of Blood and Water" to allow Jeffrey Combs to reprise the role of Weyoun despite having been fragged by his Jem'Hadar First in "To the Death".
  • In "A Man Alone", a Bajoran black marketeer named Ibudan is discovered to have cloned himself using a technobabble process, and then killed the clone to fake his own death and frame Odo for it. Julian Bashir accidentally grows a second clone while studying some of the forensic evidence, who is said to have been given Bajoran citizenship at the end of the episode.
• The Worst Witch features a spell that a witch can use to clone herself. Among the ingredients are kippers and slippers. Done correctly, the clone has the exact same personality as the donor, but if another type of fish is used in place of the kippers, the personality will be different.
• In The X-Files, a clone is an exact genetic copy of another. Cloning a person does not allow for memories or personalities to be replicated; however, personality traits are genetic, so clones may have similar personalities.
  • In the episode "Eve", Mulder and Scully investigate Teena Simmons and Cindy Reardon, two girls, seemingly unknown to each other, who look very much alike and are involved in unexplainable deaths in their families. This investigation leads to uncovering the Lichfield Experiment — a top-secret eugenics experiment devised by the US during the Cold War to respond to military intelligence reports that the Soviet Union had already developed a similar program to breed better scientists/warriors. Both the Eve and Adam (male counterpart) series had 56 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. Chromosomes 4, 5, 12, 16 and 22 were duplicated to allow for additional genes for heightened intelligence and strength; with this came homicidal and suicidal tendencies and extreme psychotic behavior, causing the project to be abandoned. The remaining Eves were housed at the Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane. The genetic profile of the Eve series was modified and re-deployed by Eve 7 to create a second run of the Eve Series. This second run consisted of Teena Simmons and Cindy Reardon, who were later re-classified Eve 9 and Eve 10 respectively. The Eve clones seem to have a strong, unexplained bond with one another — Eves 9 and 10 both committed identical crimes at exactly the same time three thousand miles apart, with no way of communication. In fact, the Eves finding out about one another is an example of their mysterious connection, since they were neither told nor had any evidence of the existence of the other.
  • The cloning version of the alien human hybrids where DNA of a human and DNA of an alien — throughout the series they are:
    • The Samantha Series, whose human DNA is that of Mulder's sister.
    • The Crawford series, made up of scientists and even drones put to work.
    • The Gregor clones, that were attempting to establish a colony on Earth, therefore had been conducting hybridization experiments using human fetuses obtained in abortion clinics that would erase their identical natures, they are arguably father figures for all other clone series.
    • Jeremiah Smith was a hybrid alien clone and a member of the resistance against the Syndicate who exhibited healing and shapeshifting abilities. He gained public attention after saving the lives of several people following a shooting in a fast food restaurant.
    • It is left ambiguous if the Alien Bounty Hunters are clones or simply shapeshifters... if not both, because while there are a multitude of them, and they can shapeshift, they all have the appearance of actor Brian Thompson.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost: "Fetches" are artificial copies created by The Fair Folk to replace the humans abducted by them. They lack souls, are Born of Magic, and revert to the things they were made from after death, but otherwise they can vary from a flawless recreation to a twisted reflection of the worst of their originals.
• Cloning in Dungeons & Dragons isn't a matter of genetic engineering, but a spell that creates a perfect copy of the caster. The clone grows in a special vat (that must be built before the spell is cast) for 120 days, and then if the caster dies any time after that point, their soul takes over the cloned body. So the spell is less about cloning and more about making a "back-up" body.
• In Pathfinder, clone is a spell that allows the caster to create a soulless duplicate of anyone from a small piece of flesh to house the original's soul in the event of their death.
• Paranoia: In the Clone Rangers' laboratory in the adventure Send in the Clones, new clones are created by mixing protoplasm with co-cola, pouring the result into human-shaped molds, freezing it, then zapping it with electricity. The clones are grown to adulthood in People Jars.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Primarchs are the 21 clone-sons of The Emperor created based on his god-like physiology, making them the second-most powerful members of the Imperium of Man. They are extremely altered from his source code, to the point that it's impossible to tell that they are clones at first glance.

Video Games

• CrossCode has the Evotars, copies of a Crosscode player's Digital Avatar running on an AI instead of a player. They generally do not know that they are really clones until somebody explicitly reveals it to them, but they aren't allowed in the Public Playground nor can they survive in water due to being made of Instant Matter.
• Deathless Hyperion have clones serving as Justified Extra Lives. You periodically come across clones in stasis tanks which you can activate, serving as a "checkpoint". If you die at any point of the game but have not used up all your clones, your clone revives itself and continues where it's left off.
• Destroy All Humans!: The Furon race keep themselves alive through cloning on account of them having no genitalia to reproduce naturally. However, each clone becomes more unstable. In order to better stabilize their cloning, Orthopox and Cryptosporidium are sent to Earth to harvest humans of untainted Furon DNA.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy: Manikins are crystalline versions of Final Fantasy's most famous heroes and villains used by the Big Good and the Big Bad as Expendable Clone Mooks. More details on them are revealed in the Cosmos and Chaos Reports collect throughout the game. The sequel reveals the existence of "Perfect" Manikins, who possess a sense of self and are pretty much indistinguishable from "normal" people. They include The Hero of the original game, the Big Good, and the Big Bad.
• Dragalia Lost: It turns out that Euden is not the true seventh scion, but rather, is a clone of him, but the way he was cloned is rather unorthodox. When Nedrick, the original Seventh Scion, died, his father, King Aurelius, cloned him using fairy magic and a fragment of Morsayati. The magic was used to transfer part of Nedrick's soul into Euden, and Morsayati's flesh was used to create the body. Complicating thing even further, it turns out that Morsayati is actually the heart of Xenos, with Euden actually being an entire fragment of the heart, more specifically, the part that gives to others. All in all, this means that Euden is a bizarre mix of Nedrick, Morsayati, and Xenos (whom are all, coincidentally the game's three main villains).
• Fate Series: Servants are Familiars based on how the Throne of Heroes remembers those who made great contributions to humanity's history. Made of Magic, they function in RPG Mechanics, having things like Character Alignments, skills with added Rank Inflation, and a Character Class System that functions as a Secret Identity. They retain most if not all memories of their original selves, and they are treated more-or-less indistinguishably from the real historical figures they were derived from.
• Final Fantasy VII has one of the most bizarre definitions of the phrase ever conceived. In this case, "clone" refers to someone who's been injected by the cells of Jenova in an attempt to recreate the process that turned Sephiroth into The Ace Super-Soldier. This one proved to be a little too different, since Crisis Core refers to them as "Copies" instead.
• Flower Knight Girl: One sub-story features the Aqua Shadows, copies of various Flower Knights formed from water and a small magic crystal, created and commanded by their secret mastermind. The aquatic copies inherit much of the original's strength and abilities, with the caveat of requiring water to sustain their forms. They also share the personalities of the Flower Knight they're based on, but they primarily take the thoughts and wishes that benefits the Blood Knight nature desired by their creator, resulting in many Aqua Shadows becoming antithetical depictions of their originals, with a handful of exceptions.
• Halo: A process called "flash cloning" can be used to replicate human tissue at a dramatically increased rate of growth, normally used for replacing lost or damaged organs. It is possible to clone an entire human, but incurable physiological problems caused by the accelerated growth mean that the resulting clone's life expectancy is measured in weeks, with few exceptions. Human cloning is, as a result, illegal and deeply unethical, but that didn't stop Catherine Halsey and ONI from creating flash-clone replacements for the 75 children they abducted as part of the SPARTAN-II Program.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Dark Pit is a clone of Pit created by the Mirror of Truth, appearing identical to the original Pit but with black hair and clothes. He starts out with his own personality (that of a Tsundere) and is fully aware of the fact that he is not Pit, but this doesn't stop him from angsting over his clone status. In fact, the core of his Character Development is him realizing that he does not need to try to be his own person, he's already there.
• In Killing Floor, the Clots are failed clones of the dead son of the man who invented the process under contract by the UK government for Super-Soldier research. They're grown through a combination of a biomechanical "Mother Clot," which both renders down bodies into a mass of cells and then "builds" a new body out of them, and a transgenic virus that over-writes their DNA with that of the dead man's. However, being Born as an Adult without a corresponding lifetime of experience and socialization (and perhaps some undiagnosed mental sickness or another that he was genetically pre-disposed to) results in a person with the mentality of an angry gorilla and the body of a fully-grown man in the prime of his life. Since they still have the virus in their bodies, clots are essentially Plague Zombies as well.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The Replicas are an artificially created type of Nobody created by the Mad Scientist Vexen to fulfill the plots of Organization XIII. In general, they are highly inconsistent but are always Born as an Adult. The first, the Riku Replica, was created based on the battle data the Organization collected on the original Riku during his time with Maleficent, being identical to the original (at first) and believing that he was the original until the two Rikus met face-to-face. The second, Xion, was intended to be a clone of Sora based on the memories extracted from him in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, but ended up developing a sense of self and then ended up basing herself on Sora's Love Interest Kairi. Both were dismissed by the Organization at large (including Vexen) and seen as mere tools, referred to as "Puppets" by their colleagues.
  • The Constructs are digital clones created by Jiminy Cricket as part of his Datascape. They have identical personalities to their source and are fully aware of their true nature, but they usually don't angst over it.
• Kirby:
  • There are at least three instances of cloning in Kirby: Planet Robobot, none of which can be described as truly perfect. In the main game, Clone Dedede is created from a DNA sample of King Dedede that Susie somehow acquired. The clone greatly resembles Dedede except for the purple shading (yellow for the 2.0 version) and the Haltmann Works Company logo on the back of its coat. It uses similar hammer attacks until it takes enough damage to eventually explode into three slimy blobs that reform as smaller clones. Each one becomes smaller and weaker upon successive regenerations until all health is eventually depleted. The pause screen for the 2.0 version in the "Meta Knightmare Returns" mode states that while it has the look and voice of the king, it does not have his soul for some things cannot be cloned. Also, some trial models were only interested in food whilst others were afraid of a certain insect; all were imperfect.
    • In the "Meta Knightmare Returns" sub-game, Star Dream tests Meta Knight with a Dark Matter Clone and a Sectonia Clone. While there does not appear to be anything inherently wrong with the Sectonia Clone, the Dark Matter Clone is explicitly stated to have pushed Star Dream to its limits so that only a partial data analysis could be completed, perhaps explaining why it is weaker than the real thing.
  • In Kirby Battle Royale, Dedede creates numerous Kirby clones in various colours that he hopes will thrash the real Kirby in his tournament. However, while the cloning captures Kirby's look and abilities, given Meta Knight's disappointment with his battles against them, it's implied that they are much weaker than the original.
• Luigi's Mansion: Debuting in the Nintendo 3DS remake of the original game and later taking centre stage in Luigi's Mansion 3, Gooigi is an emotionless Blob Monster clone of Luigi, made from a gelatinous green goo that can liquefy and reform at will, which grants him Regenerating Health although he is weak to water. It is revealed in the online Professor E. Gadd's Research Journal that in order for Gooigi to retain a human shape, E. Gadd used Luigi's biological data that the Pixelator captured which caused the previously formless and nameless goo to permanently take on Luigi's form, hence his name.
• Mega Man X: The Reploids (a portmanteau of "Replica Android") are the next generation of robotics, created by Dr. Kain by replicating the schematics of the titular X. Far more human than their predecessors, Reploids are extremely individualized, looking nothing like X and having entirely separate personalities and memories from their source, to the point where certain Reploids are created specifically to be clones of X but end up with separate personalities.
• Monster Hunter (PC) have the "made of magic" variety of clones in a few levels (debuting in a stage called "Send in the Clones"). In this form, clones are depicted as translucent ectoplasmic entities that turns into whatever monster it touches, having the same abilities, attacks and weaknesses, and while you're required to destroy all monsters to proceed as usual, you don't need to kill all clones (you do get points for killing clones though) — remaining clones disappears as soon as a level is cleared.
• Nintendo Wars: From the Advance Wars sub-series, we have two different rulesets for two different worlds.
  • In the first three games of this series, clones are identical in appearance and powers to the original. However, their memories and mindsets are extremely different, frequently hollow, compared ot the originals. The first of these from the first game was Clone Andy, who tried to mimic the real Andy with mixed results; in Re-Boot Camp, he was shown sadistically enjoying the carnage he wrought to his enemies. Dual Strike showed clones of more COs, including another Andy clone; their personalities were robotically loyal to Black Hole, though the second Clone Andy was allowed to feel empathy as he faded.
  • Days of Ruin had clones that were closer to scientific interpretations than the first three games. The only clones present were of Dr. Caulder, but despite having his genotype, their appearances, personalities, and powers were vastly different from him. Even the man himself was actually another clone of the real deal. Penny was deranged due to experiments on her, and could shift the weather. Tabitha was an Alpha Bitch who took after "daddy". Cyrus voiced concerns about Caulder's madness and ultimately chose to help bring him down. Isabella was kind and compassionate. All of them were clones, and all turned out so differently from the original.
• In The Persistence, the titular spaceship has cloning devices all over the place that automatically clone any crew member who dies and transfers their memories to that clone. This is how the game justifies your Video-Game Lives and the ability of your enemies (who come from malfunctioning cloning devices) to respawn.
• Resident Evil 6: One of the properties of the C-Virus is that it completely changes the infected individual's DNA. If mixed with donor DNA, it was found that the virus, instead of transforming the infectee into a monster, transforms them into an exact clone of the donor. However, this method of cloning was extremely costly and largely ineffective. The only known success was a woman named Carla Radames being turned into a clone of Ada Wong, after 12,234 previous failed attempts. While the clone was "born" with the donor's memories up to the point of the sample collection^note unbeknownst to donor and further conditioned to act and speak in the same manner as the donor, the clone also retained her previous memories and life experiences, albeit buried in her subconscious.
• Scourge: Outbreak: For most of the game, you're in control of the Echo Squad, an elite team of Cyborg operatives investigating an alien outbreak in Nogari Island, until a cutscene near the end reveals the original Echo Squad had died shortly after landing on Nogari; the game's Hidden Villain, Dr. Reisbeck, had the whole team cloned so he can manipulate them to take over the island, and that you've been in control of a bunch of clones the entire game.
• The Sims 4: Cloning a sim usually makes a new sim with an identical appearance, clothing, and traits. However, there is a chance when cloning that the result will be an "evil clone", with the clone's eyes appearing red, and having a few random traits swapped for evil ones, such as Mean, Evil, Loner, or Hates Children.
• Stellaris has multiple varieties of clones:
  • Clone armies in the base game are slightly cheaper than regular assault armies and train much faster.
  • The Engineered Evolution ascension perk in the "Utopia" DLC allows empires to build cloning vat buildings on their worlds that produce POPs otherwise indistinguishable from "naturally" produced organic POPs but made at a much faster rate.
  • Species with the Clone Army origin in the "Humanoids" DLC were created by Precursors as shock troops, which left them dependent on five ancient clone vats for reproduction, they're otherwise sterile, and quite short-lived unless they investigate the ruins and unlock their genomes.
• Tales of the Abyss: The game is all about cloning, which they call fomicry: pure magic used to create an identical copy of an original at the time of replication (dodging the aging issue) and without any memories. The replication process also has a tendency of permanently weakening the person being cloned, which really sells the Clone Angst and the Replacement Goldfish factor. Overall, the cast genuinely treats the replicas with the respect they're due as living beings. It would be hard for them not to, considering that the protagonist is one.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: While modern clones are indistinguishable from their originals, it's established that earlier cloning technology produced clones who were significantly more fragile. A flashback shows one of the first clones of Benjamin Franklin accidentally exploded his own head by biting into a sandwich with too much force. When Frans Rayner makes dozens of clones of Dr. McNinja (in order to make Conservation of Ninjutsu work in his own favor), he only has access to the outdated cloning tech, resulting in an army of McNinjas who all die in a single punch. Another flashback also reveals that clones can be fused back into their original, creating a single person with all the knowledge and memories of both. His is how Dr. McNinja became an Omnidisciplinary Scientist: he cloned himself, scattered his clones to get degrees in every field of science, then recombined afterwards.
• El Goonish Shive: The Dewitchery Diamond is meant to remove a curse from a person or entity, but does so by A) regarding any magical deviation as a "curse", even a simple cosmetic spell, and B) creating a duplicate of the person in their enchanted form, effectively transferring the "curse" to the clone. This accidentally results in the creation of Ellen when Elliot Dunkel uses it to reverse his Gender Bender transformation early, and of Kaoli when Nioi accidentally touched it while using a color-change spell. Clones have all the memories of the original, but from the moment they are split by the diamond they are separate individuals, and the clone gains a brand new soul. The clone also has the ability to "spread their curse", which for Ellen means she can act as a human Transformation Ray by shooting a beam out of her hand. And while Ellen initially fears she will only live as long as Elliot's original transformation was meant to last, this proves not to be the case. Magus later uses this on purpose to gain a new body by possessing Elliot and touching the Dewitchery Diamond, and retains all his abilities from his original universe when this occurs. There's also Clone Degeneration from the dissonance between a brand-new soul having a lifetime of memories, which drives the clones to insanity without intervention.
• Homestuck: Anyone who successfully plays Sburb can only do so because they and their biological parents are "paradox clones" created during the game and sent back in time to create a Stable Time Loop.
• In The Petri Dish, it's possible for someone with the knowhow to create full-grown clones of themselves, but it's illegal. Doesn't stop Thaddeus from doing it, and when he does, all five of the clones die in accidents except one, who turns evil.

Web Originals

• Eddsworld: In "Spares", the Evil Director creates a cloning machine to make clones of the main four to act as an audience for his movie. The machine is powered by a monkey, and the clones themselves are created via adding their features onto a blank dummy.
• Stellar Firma: Stellar Firma Ltd makes vast use of clones, who exist in batches designated by a first name to signify the batch and their number. Said clones are born fully grown with all their knowledge wired into their heads during the process as well as being programmed with unflinching Blind Obedience to their superiors (even past the point of self-preservation), as they are used by the company as a disposable Slave Race with the official policy being they are things not people. Likewise due to Stellar Firma's inheritance-based caste system, any failures by members of staff will result in the clones being liquified (with it being heavily implied this is where the Slurry that everyone lives off comes from). Clones are likewise capable of developing incredible physical prowess incredibly quickly simply through regular exercise (handwaved as being down the same process that allows them to be born fully grown) although this is largely unknown. The series protagonist David-7 is the only clone to be fully self-aware due to a malfunction during his creation and spends the series trying to say alive.

Western Animation

• One episode of American Dad! sees Steve and Snot cloning girls from the mall to act as their prom dates. To their frustration, the clones come out as babies, but then begin to age rapidly. Once one clone reaches the age of her DNA source, she dies.
• Archer: Mad Scientist Kreiger has five tubes in his lab that contain his efforts to clone himself. The first is obviously a fetal dud, while the others, though flawed, are progressively better, until the fifth tank is reasonably close, right down to the facial hair. None of these pan out, as the power was cut to the whole building, terminating all five clones. Kreiger has to wheel them out in a laundry cart.
• Back at the Barnyard: "Little Otis" reveals that when an animal is cloned, the clone is an adult, but much smaller than the donor, and has the donor's personality.
• Ben 10: Ben's Ditto transformation can duplicate himself without limit. This seems incredibly powerful at first, but it comes with the colossal weakness that any damage done to one clone is shared across all of them. All Ditto clones also need to be recombined before the transformation can end, else it's duration will be extended. Bizarrely, the Omnitrix seems capable of telekinetically forcing the Ditto clones to recombine against Ben's will to avert this, but only if the clones are in close enough proximity.
• Cyberchase: "Send in the Clones" features a cloning ray that can instantly duplicate both living beings and inanimate objects (as Hacker finds out when he's trapped behind a bunch of cloned pylons). The clones in question seem perfectly functional and obedient, but it's shown that too many of them will cause the original to start shrinking in mass; for some reason, they also multiply every time the original sneezes. Most of this is possibly justified by the implication that since they're in, well, Cyberspace, everything is actually made of computer data.
• Danny Phantom:
  • Ghosts and ghost-human hybrids/halfas are able to duplicate themselves into multiple copies using their ectoplasmic energy, in both human and ghost form. The clones gain all the characteristics, memories, and abilities of the original, but are self-thinking. The original can re-absorb their clone when need, and clones will automatically be reabsorbed if they are significantly weakened or pushed together with enough force. The original's powers are also proportionally weakened with each copy. Notably, halfas can duplicate themselves in both human and ghost form.
  • "Kindred Spirits" shows Vlad attempting to clone Danny out of ectoplasm in order to get his perfect halfa son. The clones range in quality from mindless zombies who barely look like Danny, to a younger Opposite-Sex Clone with much of Danny's personality and ability to shift from ghost to human form, to the prime clone who looks exactly like Danny. However, the prime clone required Vlad to get a sample of the real Danny's DNA mid-transformation in order to stabilize it so it wouldn't dissolve into pure ectoplasm like the others. Here the instability is justified since Vlad used ectoplasm rather than biology to make his clones.
    • When Dani shows up again in "D-Stabilized", she is struggling to keep her form together while she is being hunted by Vlad in the hopes of using her ectoplasm to stabilize a new prime clone. Danny is able to help her using his parents' failed invention, the Ecto-Dejecto, which strengthens ghosts and increases them in size, so she can function like the other ghost-human hybrids on the show.
  • The Fenton Ghost Catcher can separate ectoplasmic energy from a human host. When Tucker goes through it in "What You Want" while under the influence of a wish that made him a halfa, an evil ghost clone of Tucker is created, which Danny captures and releases back into the Ghost Zone. When Danny goes through it in "Identity Crisis", the process not only splits his human and ghost halves but also results in a Literal Split Personality, with the human half being a fun-loving slacker and the ghost half having major Chronic Hero Syndrome. Going through it again causes the two to become identical, except for split powers and different eye colors. The two merge back together at the end by going through the "merge" side of the Ghost Catcher.
• Gargoyles: Dr. Sevarius is able to create clones that can be rapidly aged, but the aging process results in changes to their skin, hair, and eyes, so the clones cannot pass for their donors. The clones can be programmed, resulting in the creation of a clone who is as strong as Goliath but as amoral and intelligent as Xanatos. When Thailog decides to create clones of the rest of the Manhattan clan, he keeps their programming simple: "Obey Thailog" to avoid creating another him. He also commissions a Two-Donor Clone who combins the DNA of Demona and Elisa, the two loves of Goliath's life.
• Gravity Falls: "Douple Dipper" has Dipper create clones of himself to impress Wendy. These clones come from a strange copy machine and look and act almost identical to him, although they appear desaturated and lack the symbol on their hats. They also have a Weaksauce Weakness to any liquids. Additionally, the machine can jam, leading to Clone Degeneration, like the horrifically malformed fourth Dipper clone which comes out.
• Inside Job (2021): "Clone Gunman" reveals that Cognito Inc. has an entire department dedicated to cloning. The clones that we do see are fully grown and have the same personality as the original, most notable with the John F. Kennedy clones which run havoc. However, they can't be exposed to too much heat or they'll melt and fuse together into a Blob Monster. Additionally, the clones' heads apparently have spider legs concealed within, as shown with one clone who tries to flee.
• Invincible (2021): The Mauler Twins are actually the result of a single Mad Scientist creating a clone of himself with the same memories and personality to act as a partner-in-crime and lab assistant, and whenever one Mauler Twin dies, the surviving Twin (whether they be the original or a clone) uses the cloning technology to create another Mauler Twin again. The cloning process involves extracting a blood sample, and Mauler locates a distinct blood cell which he then injects under a microscope, causing the cell to begin replicating. The clone body then grows from the blood sample inside a pod, fed processed meat through a tube to fuel its development. Once the body is fully-formed, it's still braindead, until Mauler uses a separate machine to (painfully) duplicate all his thoughts and memories onto the clone body. Mauler can also use the technology to clone someone else, to copy the mind of someone other than the clone body's genetic donor into it, and even alter the clone body's physical age from that of its donor; as happens when the Twins create a child clone of Rex's body with Robot's mind.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In "Dupe", the titular experiment (number 344) generates a ray from his head which clones anything it hits, whether that be a living being, or an inanimate object like confectionary. Dupe's ray can clone a target once or a hundred times in a single hit, and he can reverse the process (merging the clones back into the original) just as easily. An unintended and debilitating side-effect of the cloning is that the original template's strengths, rather than being replicated within each of the clones in the same amount, are instead siphoned off from the original and divided mathematically amongst them and their clones: cloning a lollipop once results in both versions having only half their normal calorie count, cloning Stitch three times means that all four Stitch's only have 25% of the original/whole Stitch's strength and stamina, and cloning four other experiments a hundred-fold each results in the clone army being so individually weak that a mundane exhalation of breath can knock them over like twigs.
• Men in Black: The Series: The MIB organization has the ability to make what are known as "Quick Clones", which are clones made of brown goo that have a very short lifespan. Their main use is to allow people to make a quick escape, and/or to provide a distraction, or in one case, to smuggle explosives. They're revealed to be quick clones when they start to babble gibberish, and then melt. They can also be deactivated early by pressing an area on the clone's jugular vein behind their ear.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Clones can be created if the creature who wants to be cloned stands in front of a certain pond and recites a particular spell (which Pinkie Pie does to herself in "Too Many Pinkie Pies"). The clones seem to be less intelligent versions of the donor, and they are zapped with Twilight's magic.
• The Owl House: A Grimwalker is a clone that can be made through magic using a Bone of Ortet, selkidomus scales, Palistrom wood, stonesleeper lungs and a galdor stone. The Golden Guards were all Grimwalkers created by Belos, whose comments suggest that they do not bear an exact resemblance to their original counterpart. Furthermore, the Golden Guards are heavily implied to be based on his dead brother, who was a human even though the current Golden Guard, Hunter, is a powerless witch. However, a peculiar trait demonstrated by the Golden Guards is they always betray Belos despite his attempts to cultivate Blind Obedience.
• The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse of Horror XIII" segment Send in the Clones, Homer purchases a magic hammock that creates clones of himself. The clones are unintelligible with no belly buttons. When the clones become dangerous, Homer abandons them in a cornfield along with the magic hammock. This causes the clones to create an army of their own.
• Star Wars:
  • Star Wars: The Bad Batch adds a layer to the Star Wars example in the Films — Live-Action folder above. Each member of the Bad Batch has a mutation which gives them unique talents. They're so different from the other clones, they barely even look like them. Omega was meant to be an unmodified clone of Jango, like Boba, but somehow turned out female.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars heavily expands upon them, showing that even though they look identical to each other, they are otherwise highly individualized. Clones in that series are created with only a serial designation for themselves, but they treat their nicknames as their real names almost all the time. They have a great sense of camaraderie with each other, seeing themselves as each other's brothers and having strained relationships with traitors and deserters among their ranks. This all straddles the line between a subversion or an invoking of this trope since the Kaminoans deliberately placed most of these characteristics in place as alterations to Jango Fett's genetics meant to make them better soldiers. Boba Fett is also a clone of Jango Fett—but unlike the Clone Troopers, he's genetically unmodified and ages normally. Jango specifically wanted a clone who he could raise as a son.
• Transformers: Animated: The Starscream Clones are the result of Starscream placing an AllSpark fragment inside of a Protoform body. Most of them are mindless duplicates, but some are Palette Swaps which exhibit a Literal Split Personality trait of Starscream's (along with an Opposite-Sex Clone).
• Transformers: Prime:
  • In "Armada", similarly to the Animated example, Starscream clones himself several times using protoforms. Unlike the Animated example, the clones are all completely identical copies of the original Starscream in looks and personality, without missing a T-cog like the original Starscream. The original Starscream later discovers that a side-effect of the cloning process is that the clones have a one-way mental link to him which causes his own pain receptors to trigger whenever one of the clones is enduring extreme or fatal physical trauma, much to his vexation.
  • Later in the series, Shockwave uses a different cloning method for the deceased Predacon leader Predaking, and he sets about cloning more Predacons. Ancient Predacon bones are harvested for the required genetic material, and the clones are grown in tanks of yellow fluid until they're fully formed adults. They apparently also inherit some fragment memories from their genetic sources, if Predaking's brief flashback to his original self's death before the clone fully understood himself is any indication.
• In The Venture Bros., cloning technology is just as possible as any other form of Weird Science, though human cloning is just as illegal as it is in Real Life. Rusty Venture has an entire basement's worth of clones of his sons Hank and Dean, their brains scanned nightly by their beds so that in the event that either of them die (which tends to happen a lot), their clones pick up where they left off. This form of cloning is shown to be effective on a metaphysical level too, Dr. Orpheus detecting their souls in the servers as their clone bodies as being finished. If he tries cloning a person with DNA alone, as was the case with a group of Nazis who wanted him to clone Hitler, they are genetically similar but otherwise distinct from their genetic parent.
• W.I.T.C.H.: Astral Drops are duplicates of the Guardians created using the Heart of Kandrakar. They are usually made when the Guardians have to go on a mission and need to leave a double in their place so as not to draw unwanted questions. Astral Drops are normally mindless clones who do what they are told, but in some cases they can become sentient beings, or Altermeres, as seen in the episode "H is for Hunted".
• Young Justice (2010): Cadmus were able to create adult clones of people, and grant the clones the memories and personality of the original while also giving them some subconscious mental conditioning to act as sleeper agents, although the clones otherwise had their own free will. Red Arrow and Guardian were both (unbeknownst to themselves) cloned from the original Roy Harper (Speedy), with Cadmus amputating the captive Speedy's arm for cloning material.

---

And no, the title is not an oxymoron.