From Clones to Genre describes an effect multiple works have in Real Life, and is not any work's content, so it's really Not a Trope. Looking at From Wick Check To Genre, it turns out to be a Pothole Magnet and there are practically no examples that fully use the intended defininition.

Routes:

• Move to Trivia
• Move to YMMV
• Make Definition-Only
• Cleanup ZCE
• Merge with Follow the Leader

1. Main.Djent -> * From Clones to Genre: Many bands in the early days of the genre just started out copying Meshuggah or other Groove Metal bands and varying up the riffing style to some degree. Soon enough there were many bands performing in a similar style that they could be classified into their own separate microgenre. Who are the "many bands" and how are they distinct?

1. Website.Reddit -> * From Clones to Genre: /r/PrequelMemes started out as just that, a subreddit for memes of the Star Wars Prequels. From there, other meme subreddits devoted to the other parts of the Star Wars saga began to pop up. In short time, various other fandoms began to create their own meme subs, and many of them have become large subs in their on right, [...] Unsure if PrequelMemes has started the trend for other fandoms or was just the first out of many.
2. Main.VisualKei -> * From Clones to Genre: Glam Rock, Hair Metal, shock rock. Two of the founding bands (X Japan and SEIKIMA-II) started out as KISS fans, with Seikima II being outright clones. Doesn't specifically say that these are Kiss imitators that got own imitators.
3. Wrestling.SatoruSayama -> * From Clones to Genre: His aerial moves were initially used only by incarnations of Tiger Mask, but then spread to all cruiserweight wrestling. Until then, junior heavyweights in Japan had been esentially miniature heavyweights with extra agility or downright pureblood luchadores. I don't understand wrestling terminology, is Satoru Sayama the first cruiserweight and others are copying him?
4. Trivia.DreamingOfSunshine -> * Follow the Leader/From Clones to Genre: Started a movement in the Naruto Fandom and The Self-Insert genre resulting in dozens of fics with a similar premise. Interestingly, many of these authors try to not copy the same formula, even with this sort of inspiration. See the Supplimentary Fics folder for more. What's the formula?
5. Main.JournalRoleplay -> * From Clones to Genre: From the get-go. They're not Sages of Chaos clones, they're multifandom dressing rooms. They're not Island RP clones, they're jamjars. They're not Drama Drama Duck clones, they're reverse jamjars or nexus games. They're not The Sky Tides clones, they're plot-heavy AU games. They're not Dangan Roleplay clones, they're short-term, small-cast mystery games (or "murdergames".) And so on. Some of the older examples (like Sages and Island) have been almost forgotten, and their legacy stubbornly remains in the genres they built, which arose from other games ripping them off. I have zero idea what is it going on about.
6. VideoGame.Rust -> * From Clones to Genre: One of the first DayZ clones that would eventually become the Survival Sandbox genre. But not the first one? Also says nothing what it actually popularized.
7. Main.Trance -> * From Clones to Genre: The so-called "138" movement in contemporary trance, so named after a Running Gag in the A State Of Trance radioshow where tracks from hard, psy, and tech trance producers, which typically had a tempo of 138 BPM or higher, would be played at the latter half of each episode as a reaction to slower progressive and big room trance tracks that were popular in the early 2010s. The faster and more powerful sound proved hugely popular among newer trance fans, and many artists began producing harder-tinged tracks at that tempo. By the latter part of the decade a new wave of artists producing trance at 138 BPM or higher has emerged, with labels such as Armada and Black Hole Recordings widely promoting the uptempo style, and dedicated labels such as Outburst and VII almost exclusively catering to the demand for 138 BPM or higher tracks. If 138 music already existed at the time, unsure if these are imitators or this genre effectively already existed by then.
8. Podcast.RandomAssault -> * From Clones to Genre: First as a homage to Talk Radar, Random Assault then became it's own thing like PCN-Gen, KGB, GNA, and Pixel Heroes. What's the "own thing" and who are the others?
9. DissidiaFinalFantasy.TropesAToM -> * From Clones to Genre: Dissidia effectively kickstarted Square Enix's love of nostalgia-influenced games in the New 10s to the point where "Dissidia" could be considered a sub-genre of the Final Fantasy franchise now. It began with Theatrhythm, which explicitly used the backstory of Dissidia for its gameplay, and then Theatrhythm became its own sub-series. We also got Artnicks, Airborne Brigade, Pictologica , All the Bravest, and Record Keeper, mobile games that all take heavy influence from Dissidia for the abilities and designs of the characters, as well as iconography in general like "EX Mode". We then got the arcade Dissidia title and its spin-off Opera Omnia. This idea then expanded into the home console with World of Final Fantasy. Basically, if there's a Final Fantasy game that centers on the core idea of being a Crisis Crossover between different titles, it probably takes some cues from Dissidia. I don't think "Subgenre in a franchise" is logical.

1. Fanfic.SquidwardsSuicide -> The story was immensely popular and gained quite a following. Of course, like any successful story, it was imitated... a lot... to the point where some Creepypasta wikis banned lost episode pastas from being posted.
2. Characters.GreenArrowTheCharacter -> ** In a rare case of evolving into another Expy, Green Arrow and Speedy were transformed into archery-themed versions of Batman and Robin in The Silver Age after starting out as an Adventurer Archaeologist and Boy Adventurer respectively in The Golden Age. Several of Oliver's traits were explicitly borrowed from Bruce Wayne/Batman, such as a both being Millionaire Playboy with tragic backstories that developed their superhero skills via training and use their money to fight crime. They also both have: Kid Sidekicks (Roy Harper/Speedy and Dick Grayson/Robin), a Thememobile (the Arrowcar and the Batmobile) and a secret Elaborate Underground Base (Arrowcave and the Batcave). Decades of Divergent Character Evolution (and teen sidekicks becoming standard for a DC hero) have turned Loliver from straight-up "Batman but with arrows!" to his own person but he was very much the same character once.
3. PuellaMagiMadokaMagica.TropesGToM -> * Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction: The Trope Codifier. It was the success of Madoka that lead to the formation of the subgenre. All Wish-Fulfillment is taken out of being a Magical Girl, with girls more likely to regret becoming magical girls than anything else. They slowly end up distancing themselves from their friends and family until they either die or inevitably become a witch.
4. Trivia.WalkingWithDinosaurs -> * Genre-Killer: An odd case in which two works from the same franchise both launched the genre and killed it. The original miniseries was followed by a wave of imitators, and Walking With Dinosaurs-inspired dinosaur documentaries became a genre in their own right in the 2000s. The failure of the movie in 2013, however, was followed by the well of other dinosaur documentaries drying up almost overnight— almost were made in subsequent years until the release of Prehistoric Planet.
5. Anime.PuellaMagiMadokaMagica -> One thing becomes clear early on, though; things are not as they seem. What appears to be a straightforward Magical Girl Warrior tale becomes a twisted, morally complex, and surprisingly terrifying exploration of concepts like hope, despair, entropy, utilitarianism, and the psychological issues of the Magical girls, and it does not pull punches in regards to the horror the girls have to endure. The series is, in fact, the Trope Codifier for Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction, and has served as the primary inspiration for a whole slew of imitators which, by gradually putting their own spins on the concept, spawned an entire magical girl subgenre. The full scope of this series' impact is extensive — its influence has been observed in other anime and manga like Magical Girl Raising Project, Day Break Illusion, and Yuki Yuna is a Hero, tokusatsu series like Kamen Rider Gaim ^note which notably shares a writer with Madoka Magica, and even Western works like the American graphic novel series Sleepless Domain.
6. Funny.ZeroPunctuation4 -> * Yahtzee hesitates to call Not Tonight a "Papers, Please knockoff" in case paperwork checking is the hot new genre, "and I'll feel as stupid as I do about when we used to call FPSes 'Doom clones'."
7. VideoGame.BakutenShootBeyblade -> As the first media entry in the Beyblade franchise, Jisedai Beigoma Battle Beyblade had little example but the craze it was part of, hence it taking cues from Pokémon. It is a topdown Role-Playing Game with a map to explore, NPCs to battle for money, beyblades / bit-beasts, and experience, real-time combat, and a story to follow. The game is the origin of Takao, Kai, and Hitoshi, but features plenty of characters more that didn't get incorporated in the larger franchise. Unfitting sinkhole.
8. FollowTheLeader.VideoGames -> * Doom is generally considered the progenitor of the First-Person Shooter genre, and Halo unleashed a flood of the genre on set-tops. Eventually, the first-person shooter has shed the "Doom Clone" image it had during the mid-90s and become possibly the most popular genre in all of video games, thanks in no small part to the way games like Quake, Halo, Half-Life and GoldenEye refined and improved upon the classic Doom formula. Thus, the "first person shooter" has lost the Doom Stigma and is now its very own unique genre. Unfitting sinkhole.
9. Main.UrExample -> * Nu Metal is generally agreed to have began with KoRn's Self-Titled Album in 1994, which spawned a wave of imitators that formed it into its own genre. However, even before KoRn, acts like Faith No More and Rage Against the Machine were hugely influential to the genre and some site them as the Ur-Example. Also "generally agreed".
10. Laconic.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeries -> Truncated self-aware Affectionate Parody Gag Dub of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, and the first of what would come to be an entire genre. Also Chained Sinkholes.
11. SleeperHit.Music -> * Korn's 1994 debut is a particularly extreme example. Upon release in 1994, it got little media attention and its songs received no airplay. However, critics, as well as everyone who listened to it, noted that the band had a very "unique" sound. It featured heavily downtuned guitars, angsty lyrics, funk-influenced bass, and the absence of solos. Additionally, the album would mix genres as random such as funk metal, grunge, groove metal, prog metal, hip-hop (without actually rapping), hardcore, alt metal, and even traces of death metal. With non-stop touring, more and more people were exposed to the album, and the sound garnered an enthusiastic following. As time went on, it eventually charted on the Billboard 200 nearly two years after release, and sold over 10 million copies worldwide, which shocked even the band; as per Brian "Head" Welch, they expected, at most, to become big for an alternative act, but to otherwise stay niche. The biggest success however, was that it spawned Nu Metal. Those who heard the album emulated, and later modified the sound by forming their own bands, which started in Southern California, but eventually spread across the world as a genre all on its own. This genre, while polarizing and controversial to metal purists, would take the rock music world by storm in the late '90s, and helped revitalize Heavy Metal after spending several years in the underground following Hair Metal's demise. In 2014, Rolling Stone Magazine even declared it "the most important metal album in the last 20 years".
12. FollowTheLeader.Literature -> * The success of William Gibson spawned the entire Cyberpunk genre, though credit to the first Cyberpunk work is generally given to John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Cyberpunk knock-offs usually incorporate Gibson's use of cyberspace, cybernetics, and crime noir. Cyberpunk in turn splintered into Punk Punk.
13. Main.DancingBear -> * Kizuna AI would be a relatively typical Let's Player and YouTuber, if not for the fact that she's an unknown person, or group of people, who only appears in the form of a MikuMikuDance CGI model that claims to be a "super AI" rather than a human using motion-capture tools. Not only did Kizuna herself become popular enough to star in a tourism campaign and get an anime voice acting role, but she (and her imitators) came to create the entire Virtual Youtuber genre.
14. GenreMashup.VideoGames -> * Defense of the Ancients, a mod for Warcraft III: It's an online game played in teams that contains elements of Real-Time Strategy, third person action and Role Playing Games. It ended up starting what are now called "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena" games, but for a while were just called "DotA clones." DotA itself was called an "AoS clone" as it duplicated the mechanics of the "Aeon of Strife" map from StarCraft.
15. Creator.Cygames -> * Rage of Bahamut, 2011 for Japan/2012 for the West; the English version was shut down in 2016. As their first work, it pretty much formed the character foundations for several of their other games and defined the card-based gacha mobile game in Japan for years to come.
16. Main.TheWhitestBlackGuy -> ** Eminem complained about the prominent artists copying his rapping style as being "honkeys" — several of the most prominent emcees within that subgenre are Black. Doesn't tell what new genre that is.
17. Main.RingOut -> ** Given the popularity of Super Smash Bros., there are many, many other games following the same basic formula. Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla, MultiVersus… you know what? See the Platform Fighter page for more details — we would be here all day if we tried to make a comprehensive list here. (PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is an exception; while Ring Outs are possible in a handful of that game's stages, the main way of scoring KOs in that game is to charge up and unleash Super Moves.)
18. Trivia.PlayerunknownsBattlegrounds -> ** PUBG's growth and popularity spurned the introduction of battle royale modes in other games, first it was mobile games, and then, most controversially, Fortnite, which Blue Hole had considered taking legal action against. However, the latter being a free game and having less issues than the former granted Fortnite an advantage, and is, by February 2018, the more-played game out of the two. There's even a battle royale version of Tetris of all things, Tetris 99.
19. Trivia.StreetFighterII -> * Follow the Leader: All the knockoffs caused the genre to turn into clones of the game, which inverted From Clones to Genre, until games like Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Super Smash Bros. brought variance back to the genre. Funny enough, Street Fighter characters (often Ryu himself either accompanied by Chun-Li or Ken) have made it a habit of showing up to pick fights with many of these characters.
20. VideoGame.Doom -> * First-Person Shooter: It's the Genre Popularizer. They were known as "Doom clones" for several years before games like GoldenEye and Half-Life did things Doom didn't and the name "first person shooter" became common.
21. VideoGame.DarkMaus -> Compare to the other top-down games inspired by Dark Souls, Shrouded In Sanity and Fall of Light, as well as the Side View souls-like games like Shrouded In Sanity, Void Memory, Gloom, Unworthy, Death's Gambit and Dark Devotion.
22. Main.MorePopularSpinOff -> * GoldenEye was a successful movie in the James Bond series. GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 is one of the most beloved games of all time, a triumphant aversion of The Problem with Licensed Games, and one of the games which basically made the First-Person Shooter genre into something other than Doom clones. Not to mention proving that the genre could have first-rate console titles, not just inferior ports of PC games. Many players didn't even know the game was based on a film.
23. WebVideo.TheAngryVideoGameNerd -> The Nerd (and Rolfe by extension) is extensively respected for the impact his videos had on online video reviews for years to come, with the show being seen as a Gateway Series for the medium to transition to the mainstream. He's regarded as one of if not the most influential figure in pioneering the format's structures and conventions, to the extent that he's considered the Trope Codifier of the Mid-Review Sketch Show. Many a number of reviewers who have since popped up on the Internet owe much to the Nerd, with his rage, vulgarity and sketch comedy being turned into the bread and butter of countless Caustic Critic personas to come, almost to the extent of forming a subgenre. One could even argue that his show is a precursor for online shows in general, as it predates YouTube by nine months, along with the ripple effect left by the Nerd continuing to extend into the present day with the advent of the Analysis Channel and also the video essay being an indirect result of the Nerd's influence on online content creation.

• Potholes from another trope's definition:

1. Main.FollowTheLeader -> If the imitators have enough of the spark to become successful and spawn imitators of their own, a whole new genre may be created, as imitators and follow-ups evolve and begin to codify a style.
2. Main.GenrePopularizer -> Basically, before these works came along, a genre either didn't exist, or was niche. After these works hit the scene, either the genre became popular (usually by being a Gateway Series to the rest), or we got loads of ripoffs which may or may not have gone From Clones to Genre later on.
3. Main.AnimatedShockComedy -> In The '90s, shows like The Simpsons (debuting as early as 1987 as shorts within The Tracey Ullman Show and 1989 as a standalone show) and Beavis And Butthead proved to the industry that cartoons with an adult^note though in many cases it's more of a teen/young adult audience could be a success, and introduced certain elements, like social satire (The Simpsons) and crudeness (Beavis and Butthead) that paved the way, but the genre really took off with the debut of the Trope Codifier South Park in 1997. Family Guy had a huge impact on the genre as well, particularly in its use of the Cutaway Gag. The massive success of these shows spawned a whole host of imitators and helped initiate a Ruder and Cruder shift within pop culture as a whole.
4. Main.MascotRacer -> Sometimes examples try to break the mold, but usually they stick so close to the standard aspects set by Mario Kart that this has yet to go From Clones to Genre.
5. Main.SurvivalSandbox -> In the wake of the incredible success of Minecraft and DayZ, many games sprung up that incorporate some of their mechanics. The survival genre that emerged from these games is based around a few core principles:
6. EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.VideoGames -> ** The Super Shotgun wasn't introduced until Doom II, after which it would become the franchise's most iconic weapon, second only to the BFG 9000, and a staple of FPS arsenals even well after they stopped straight-copying the game. Several of the franchise's more iconic (or at least infamous) enemies were also not introduced until the second game, including the Chaingun Zombie, Arch-Vile, and Revenant.
7. Main.BattleRoyaleGame -> In the late 2010s, however, this concept became the biggest new video game craze to hit the industry due to the shift it made to Competitive Multiplayer. Inspired by the film adaptation of the aforementioned Battle Royale, it started as a mod in ARMA, but the concept expanded into other games, and by 2017, became the dominant trend in video games thanks to the overwhelming popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which itself was quickly surpassed by Fortnite.
8. Main.SoulsLikeRPG -> A Souls-like RPG (sometimes referred to as a Soulsborne) refers to a subgenre of Role Playing Games that puts emphasis on dodging and moving over other mechanics. The Trope Maker and Trope Namer of this genre is Demon's Souls, which was released in 2009. The genre gained traction with the release of Demon's Souls' Spiritual Successor, Dark Souls, which spawned numerous clones.
9. Main.MagicalGirlGenreDeconstruction -> The Magical Girl and Magical Girl Warrior genres are very popular genres for anime and manga in Japan; they're also popular internationally, with several non-Japanese works being produced for the genres. They're normally fluffy Coming Of Age Stories usually featuring a cast of young 8-15 year old girls who gain magical powers thanks to a Transformation Trinket. However, in the 2010s, a new sub-genre began to form: the Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction, usually called "Dark Magical Girl" in anime fandom, though that is a different trope here.

1. Main.GenreLaunch -> Redirect Redirect.
2. IThoughtItMeant.DToF -> * From Clones to Genre is not about how there's an entire genre of Spider-Man stories riffing on the Clone Saga. From JFF.
3. Main.NotSoCheapImitation -> A Sub-Trope of Follow the Leader. Compare From Clones to Genre and Dueling Works. Contrast They Copied It, So It Sucks!. May involve Derivative Differentiation. For In-Universe examples, see Effective Knockoff. For when a parody gets more popular than the original, see Parody Displacement. It can sometimes cause cases of Seinfeld Is Unfunny. This is also the first step in From Clones to Genre. Compare and contrast.
4. Main.OppositeTropes -> * From Clones to Genre vs. Genre-Killer: A game that spawns a genre vs. a game that destroys one. From an index.
5. Main.CharacteristicTrope -> The dead horse counterpart to this trope would be Stock Parodies. See also Fountain of Expies for character-specific examples, One-Mario Limit for name-specific examples, Stock Shout-Outs, and Whole-Plot Reference. Compare Trope Codifier and Trope Namers, which both identify a work for becoming well known for a trope, but not necessarily laying such claims on future use of it. Contrast Ur-Example, which is when a work uses what will eventually become a trope, but wasn't actually one at the time; and From Clones to Genre, for when a trope becomes too saturated within a genre to remain characteristic to a certain work. See also Follow the Leader for intentional trope invocation based off of that one particular work. Compare and contrast.
6. Main.GenreBusting -> Compare Genre Mashup, when a work combined existing genres. Also compare From Clones to Genre, Postmodernism (playing around with a genre) and X Meets Y (creating new genre out of two old ones). 90% of the time, you will find Mind Screw within them, with the other 10% just weird. Compare and contrast Genre-Killer. For a character see Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. However, there's a lot of overlap; those who play heavily into mixing genres end up being very difficult to classify. Compare and contrast.
7. It.ElencoProvvisorioF -> * From Clones to Genre [Dai Cloni Al Genere] From an index.
8. Main.GenreTropes -> * From Clones to Genre From an index.