Beta Test Baddie

aka: Beta Baddie

Galatea: What’s wrong, hero? Not strong enough? Maybe that’s because I’m the real hero here...
Supergirl: You know what, no matter how bad you beat me, I’m real. Not a clone.
Galatea: Shut up!
Supergirl: Deep down, you know the truth. You’re not a person, you’re just a weapon, grown out of one of Hamilton’s petri dishes.
Galatea: SHUT UP!

— Justice League, "Panic in the Sky"

A villain whose main, often hidden, motivation is that they feel ashamed or enraged at the thought that they are seen as obsolete or surpassed by someone in front of them. This can be anything from a teacher who found a new student to a scientist who builds a "better" android, and is a common tragic fate for a Replacement Goldfish.

In the android/clone/other Doppelgänger scenario, the typical reason for this assumption is that the character lacks some vital component to be truly great or human, and might even be considered dangerous because of the lack. The typical subversion is that the original was too willful and independent, and subsequent models were made much more compliant.

If this "second model" is one of the heroes, the original's feelings may grow into an obsession with beating the newcomer and proving he's the best. The most humiliating defeat he can have is usually being shown that he was an Ineffectual Loner.

This kind of character is often The Resenter or one who has an Inferiority Superiority Complex. Subtrope of the Sin of Envy.

See also: Broken Hero, Psycho Prototype, Clone Angst, Replacement Goldfish and Flawed Prototype. Not to be confused with a Dummied Out Mook in a video game.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Angel Sanctuary: Plays heavily into most of the angels, both the good and the bad. *deep breath*
  • Alexiel is jealous of God's favoring Rosiel, and feels that being a Lady of War makes her ugly and un-feminine.
  • Rosiel's descent into madness is not helped by his jealousy of Alexiel, since he was born hideous.
  • Lucifer had it all... until God commanded him to rebel, since he was destined to become the devil. And that's before he met Alexiel.
  • Michael grew up as The Unfavorite to his Aloof Big Brother... until Lucifer inexplicably went rogue, for no apparent reason.
  • Lailah aka Sevothtarte was a brilliant scientist, but she was also relatively plain, and never matched up to her superior Anael. When she finally got her chance to shine, jealous co-workers raped her. Although she killed them in self-defense and scapegoated Nidhogg for the deed, she was still branded a fallen angel, which left her so emotionally shattered that she sold herself to Sandalphon to escape from her past. Though she believes (as Sevothtarte) that she's safe from her past, her actions give her insecurities and self-loathing away constantly.
  • Then comes The Reveal: all angels are created from and fed by Adam Kadamon's cells as part of a grand experiment by God. Hmm... Could explain a lot.
• In Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, the android AR Six is, when we first meet her, driven to prove her worthiness as a lifeform by destroying 'the original' from whence she came (Alita herself).
• Bleach: Ulquiorra is hinted to have this motivation, since he always pierces "interesting" opponents in the same place where his Hollow hole is located.
• Death Note's Mello and Beyond.
  • Mello join the mafia and confronts Kira because he wants to surpass Near, because he thinks Near is a more perfect successor to L.
  • Beyond's entire motivation for killing 3 people and setting himself on fire is to beat L as a criminal, since he could never beat him as a successor.
• Digimon Adventure 02: BlackWarGreymon, being created from nothing but strands of the current Big Bad's hair combined with the remains of the preceding Big Bad's control spires, has this problem. Much of the drama of his story arc comes from the protagonists trying to convince him that no matter how he was born, he's certainly a real person now.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • This is the reason why Envy hates humans; they can overcome obstacles because of their tenacious spirits, and they have the love and friendship of those around them. Eventually this causes them to commit suicide. Really says a lot about the homunculi's family dynamic.
  • The same can also be said with Father. Considering that all of the homunculi were born from his desires, then through Envy, Father had a serious case of inferiority complex, which motivated him to try to become a perfect being.
  • Several of the homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) are motivated by a desire to become fully human, and will do anything they feel will further this goal. Lust explains that without a human soul, she feels incomplete. Envy in particular burns with a fanatical desire to personally murder his creator for this feeling. Wrath feels inadequate as a homunculus and wants to steal Edward's body to be truly human. There's also a lot of friction between lesser homunculi and the "better" versions, who can more convincingly pass as human.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Kazundo Ghoda was the director for the team of scientists and engineers who successfully created nanomachine technology that can remove the radiation produced by a nuclear bomb. The "Japanese Miracle" was a complete success in the final days of World War IV and should've put Japan back into the spotlight as a first-world superpower, but because he merely oversaw the development team and wasn't credited as the creator, Ghoda didn't get the recognition he thought he deserved. Because of this, he schemes and manipulates both the Japanese government and the American Empire to go to war with a group of post-war refugees who just want equal citizenship rights.
• Gundam
  • Canard Pars in Gundam SEED X Astray. Everything he does is motivated by the fact that he was discarded as a "failed" prototype of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED protagonist Kira Yamato. Canard wants to kill Kira so as to prove he's not a failure. Ultimately, X Astray's protagonist Prayer Reverie dies saving Canard, triggering a Heel–Face Turn. Canard later sees Kira in person for the first time, and walks away.
  • In the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED anime, Big Bad Rau Le Creuset is a failed clone who has the face of a man who abused him by trying to force him to become an extension of his own ego. Lacking any sense of identity, the clone becomes The Resenter towards the entire human race, and Kira (a successful genegeneering project) and La Flaga (his father's biological son) in particular, ultimately going into Omnicidal Maniac territory. In Gundam SEED Destiny, Le Creuset's clone Rey Za Burrel tries to live out a better version of the former's life, for similar reasons.
  • Shagia and Olba Frost from After War Gundam X are a pair of Category F Newtypes who were rejected by the government because their Psychic Powers weren't strong enough. They're now planning to kill every Newtype in existence to prove their own value.
• Hellsing: Enrico Maxwell is obsessed with gaining personal power and glory to compensate for the fact that he's a bastard child, abandoned to the church.
• Fate Testarossa from Lyrical Nanoha is faced with her Tyke-Bomb/Artificial Human status, rejected by her mother and does a Heel–Face Turn after her Heroic BSoD induced by this feeling.
• Dr. Hell from Mazinger Z has shades of this. Part of his animosity and resentment towards Dr. Kabuto comes from the fact he thinks Juuzo surpassed him, rendered him obsolete and took all away him when they were younger: due to his crappy childhood Hell threw himself into becoming a scientist in order to stand out. When he was a college student people still shunned him but they respected that he was the top student, and he prided himself on that. However Juuzo quickly replaced him, and he also earned the heart of the woman Hell was infatuated with. All of it contributed to the breakdown that turned Hell into a Mad Scientist. And in the third episode of Mazinger Z, after his first batch of Mechanical Beasts were crushed by Mazinger-Z, Hell got a Villainous BSoD because after fifty years, Juuzo Kabuto STILL could surpass easily whatever Hell did.
• Twisted in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. Though the Winged Ones don't honestly seem to care that they're only replicas, when Michel kills them, he tries to tell them that they're worthless because of it. They respond by revealing, as they die, that he was a clone too, only raised to believe that he was the genuine article. Cue Villainous Breakdown.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Not a villain, but one of the reasons for Asuka's breakdown was being a Humongous Mecha pilot was all she thought she had, so she worked hard for one decade to become the best... only to be surpassed and beaten at every turn by a meek kid that, as far as she knew, they picked up from the street a few months back, making her feel useless and worthless.
• Mewtwo's circumstances in Pokémon: The First Movie are much the same as Blackwargraymon's in the Digimon example above; he was cloned from Mew's DNA in a lab, and spends the majority of the movie railing against the implications of his origin. His eventual Heel–Face Turn is triggered by the revelation that the manner in which one came to be is not as important as what one does with the life they have.
• Slayers: "Copy Rezo", who spends his entire, brief life trying to outdo the original Rezo. He is greatly angered every time someone mentions that he is "just a copy".
• Ranban from Space Pirate Mito was driven to perform a coupe d'etat in the form of blowing up an entire planet and taking over the Galactic Patrol due to the fact that he was imprisoned because his body never settled on a gender (his species is gender neutral until puberty).
• Tekkaman Evil in Tekkaman Blade is D-Boy/Takaya's identical twin brother, Shinya. He's got a hell of a brother complex - in addition to ridiculously amplified sibling rivalry, he's also decided that the world can only handle one of them and that it's destined that one will kill the other. These motivations are greater factors in his drive to kill Blade than alien possession. Even the other Raddam-brainwashed Tekkamen are terrified of him.
• The Twelve Kingdoms: The King of Kou, who suffers a massive inferiority complex towards a king (Shoryu) and a Queen (Youko/Sekishin) who are actually people Trapped in Another World.

Comic Books

• The Boys: The series has an inversion in the form of Black Noir, the Homelander's physically-superior clone, engineered as a Summon Bigger Fish safeguard in case the original became uncontrollable. Unfortunately, the Homelander never rebelled, meaning Black Noir was prevented from fulfilling his sole reason for existing. So he started recording himself committing atrocities, gaslighting the Homelander into thinking he was insane until he finally rebelled, allowing Black Noir to intervene.
• Dark Nights: Death Metal: Batman's Evil Doppelgänger Owlman is furious at the thought of being upstaged by The Batman Who Laughs, and agrees to help stop the destruction of the multiverse solely because he's, in the words of John Stewart, "feeling petty".
• Mortal Kombat (Midway): This was the modus operandi of Kintaro, who felt inferior and "living in the shadow" of his prince, Goro.
• Spider-Man: This was a fairly hefty chunk of The Clone Saga and is common amongst his enemies:
  • Green Goblin tried to kill Spidey as a means to secure himself in the criminal underworld, and when he was unable to kill him, it resulted in Norman committing almost all of his energy to killing Peter.
  • Eddie Brock felt inferior after he incorrectly theorized an innocent person was a Serial Killer. Spider-Man brought the real killer to justice, which resulted in Eddie losing his job. And then he met the symbiote, who also resented towards the webhead for "dumping" it...
  • The Vulture embarked on a life of crime when he was screwed over by his younger, more savvy business partner.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Priscilla Rich, who was already a criminal, feeling like she's being forced to play second fiddle to those she does not consider any better than her, two times people with powers, is what causes her to don a costume become the Cheetah and use her Super-Speed to fight superpowered heroes. When she nearly loses a footrace to Mala she gives away her disguise and her intended mission infiltrating Paradise Island to keep from being beaten at her specialty.
• X-Force: The series gave us a Beta Test Good Guy in Cable, the scarred cyborg soldier. He had gone through life assuming he was a flawed clone of Stryfe, who had strong telekinetic powers and insanity to match. He eventually found out he was wrong: he's the original, Stryfe's the clone.

Fan Works

• In the Pony POV Series:
  • Makarov is this, even though he doesn't mention it too often: he has no Light of Existence of his own because Pandora couldn't make him one. As a result, he devours and absorbs the Lights of others in an attempt to become the Ultimate Lifeform. According to Loose Canon and supported by Word of God, the original Dark World Shining Armor was actually Makarov who was found by Cadence after Discord defeated him, and grew a Light of Existence and became truly complete. He's genuinely benevolent and has Undying Loyalty to Twilight and Cadence.
  • Queen Chrysalis has a big case of this. She was created by Pandora from the original Cadenza's cast off Shadow of Existence (the current Cadence was her light) using an artificial Light of Existence. As a result, she feels she's incomplete and her actual plan is to try and complete herself. She ultimately succeeds by being hit with the Elements, transforming her into a twin of Cadence. However, it turns out the Elements decided her being a Sociopath was also an imperfection, so they throw in a heart to truly complete her.

Film

• In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Kadaj and his brothers are "larval" forms of Sephiroth, who need Jenova cells in order to completely "mature", not that it's ever entirely clear why they exist in the first place. Word of God has explained these are literally incomplete copies of Sephiroth. He tried to reincarnate himself in full, but he wasn't strong enough and had sacrificed too many of his memories to keep himself alive in the Lifestream to create a perfect copy. So he created three copies that were as close to him as he could get with the memories of himself that he had to work with: Loz is his strength & masculinity (completely ignoring his crying fits), Yazoo is his cruelty & "enigmatic allure," and Kadaj is his insanity & childishness (which is notable in that Kadaj is the only one who shares the original's cocky refusal to use firearms).
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has the evil ninja, Storm Shadow. Backstory shows he perceived his Mentor showed too much favoritism towards Snake Eyes.
• A Mexican movie called Una película de huevos y un pollo ("A movie of eggs and a cock", innuendo made completely on purpose). The bad guy is a stone egg who needs a chicken's heart to make a spell to have feelings.

Literature

• Older Than Feudalism: In The Bible, Cain slew his younger brother Abel because he was jealous of Abel's sacrifice receiving greater praise from God. "The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but He did not have regard for Cain and his offering. Cain was furious, and he was downcast." Genesis 4:4-5.
• Frankenstein: The Creature's murderous rage is fueled by being alone and universally hated on sight. He was fairly content until he discovered that everyone he met was horrified at the sight of him. He wanted company, and his creator refused to provide any. He's written as an intelligent and compassionate person at first, but becomes a nameless victim of What Measure Is a Non-Human?.
• Inverted in Shade's Children. A beta version of an artificial intelligence gone rogue is discovered at one point. It's a lot less intelligent than its successor, though, so it doesn't understand the situation at all and gets destroyed very quickly.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In Diplomatic Immunity, the villain is the genetically engineered near-clone/test run for the Emperor of Cetaganda and is motivated in part by this trope.
  • Mark, the clone duplicate in Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, though he did a Heel–Face Turn quickly enough.
• Wicked: It is suggested that Elphaba's more villainous deeds were motivated by her belief that she lacked a soul. This is actually quite a big theme in the book, as opposed to the Musical's Beautiful All Along theme. It links back to the Animals, and how they're considered inhuman, thus soulless, despite being sapient. Also notions that the reason the water killed her is because it was a symbolic baptism, that is, her acquiring a soul.

Live-Action TV

• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), Cylon human model number 1 John Cavil believes himself to be inferior to the robotic versions, which pisses him off to no end ("I want to see dark matter!").
• Heroes: Sylar's motivation for being a superhuman serial killer is that after his parents forced him into a boring, menial, unspecial job and he was let go by Chandra after Chandra concluded that Sylar wasn't special, Sylar wanted to be special. His idea of special just happened to be having every power he can get his hands on.
  • Sylar is a good example of both how pathetic and how dangerous villains like this can be, since the sense of incompleteness that drives them probably won't go away no matter what they do and no matter how much of their goals they achieve - which means that they'll never, ever stop. There aren't enough powers in the world to make Sylar as "special" as he thinks he needs to be. Too bad that There Are No Therapists...
• Knight Rider featured not one, but two examples of this trope:
  • KARR, the Evil Twin of KITT, was a flawed prototype that was mothballed for its indifference to human life, and harbored a lingering resentment against its creator and its replacement, which it called an "inferior production-line model."
  • Garthe Knight was disowned by his father when he became a criminal, and later replaced as Wilton Knight's heir and son by series hero Michael Knight. Michael's face, which had been destroyed by a gunshot, was also reconstructed in Garthe's image. Garthe always bore a lingering resentment against Michael, who he considered a usurper and an inferior copy.
• Stargate Atlantis has the humanoid Replicators of the Pegasus Galaxy who grew to hate humans because the Replicators cannot Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, and they see themselves as the red-headed stepchildren of the Ancients.
  • This is a bit of a subversion, though, because the Replicators who actually care about ascension aren't the bad guys. Played straight, however, since the reason that most of the Replicators hate humans and want to destroy them is because of their jealousy over being neglected by the Ancients.
• The android Lore from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who was literally the initial model replaced by his android brother Data. A textbook example of the trope. Ironically, Lore had emotions from the start, while Data started out as mild-mannered artificial intelligence incapable of truly experiencing or understanding human emotions and longed to have them. Data once even told Lore that he "envied" him. Lore, on the other hand, lacked something Data was programmed with: a conscience. Lore murdered their creator, Dr. Noonian Soong, because he felt "Father" loved Data more.
  • In the TV series, Dr. Soong himself said Lore was the earlier model. Later Star Trek episodes suggested that there were previous models that didn't even get to Lore's sophistication (or crashed and burned before getting a chance to develop). The tenth movie Star Trek: Nemesis introduced one of these named "B-4", who only had a very crude artificial brain.

Multiple Media

• BIONICLE has the plant monster Karzahni, a prototype for the Morbuzakh. In an interesting case, it's actually the Super Prototype and it knows it, but also felt that its form was inferior what with the limited lifespan deal Makuta created it with and could be improved upon, and requested that the protagonists bring it some Mutagenic Goo in exchange for The Cure for Nokama's poisoning.

Music

• Fear Factory's entire discography consists of science-fiction concept albums full of songs which describe this trope in agonizing detail, from the first-person perspective of clones, androids, and cyborgs "born" into a world that doesn't need or want them, a world consumed by a war of man-vs-machines. Prominent examples include "Replica" from Demanufacture, and "Descent" and "Resurrection" from Obsolete.
• This is why Proto Man is an antagonist in The Megas' "History Repeating" double album. At some point, he was taken apart and some of his parts used to construct Mega Man (he's designed on the album cover as a SkeleBot 9000 and implies that his mask is to cover that one of the parts used was his face), meaning that when Wily brought him back online, he was consumed with resentment and Unfulfilled Purpose Misery, furious at Light for abandoning him and Mega Man for taking his place. Luckily, it turns out that a lot can be solved with a good Kirk Summation, and Proto Man finishes the double album letting go of his anger and deciding to find his own path.
  Proto Man: They lost me, forgot me...made you from parts of me...if you're the one, my father's son...then what am I supposed to be?

Video Games

• Beat Angel Escalayer: FM 77 is a clone of Sayuka, and wants to defeat her and steal the Doki Doki Dynamo to become "complete".
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex: Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann both have mechanical body augmentation, whereas the player character is one of the first agents to be augmented using new nanotechnology. Gunther in particular resents the fact that his generation of augmentations is supposedly being rendered obsolete, although this resentment is probably not his primary motive.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a more dramatic example with Sir Hugh Darrow, who is known as the Father of Augmentation but is ironically genetically incompatible with his own inventions, leaving him a bitter old cripple who secretly fears and resents that humanity is entering its next stage of development without him. He's also a member of the Illuminati and part of their conspiracy to control and limit all augmented individuals through a mass killswitch, but keeps his real motives and fears hidden from his fellow conspirators and modifies their control signal to instead turn augs into psychotic berserkers out of misanthropic spite.
• Fallout: New Vegas: If you handle Dean Domino's personal quest right, it ends with him admitting, to both you and himself, that he didn't betray his best friend Ian Sinclair and cause the fall of the Sierra Madre for any sort of personal gain or revenge, but because Sinclair was always happier than him, and Dean was enraged by that and the fact that he didn't understand how.
• Final Fantasy IX: Kuja the villain is the original and Zidane the hero is the replacement. Kuja goes truly cuckoo after learning that his lifespan was purposely designed to be short as part of the plan.
• Scaramouche, the Balladeer from Genshin Impact. Ranked 6th among the Fatui Harbingers, he is a beautiful youth infamous for his cruelty and arrogance. But in truth, he is a puppet created by the Electro Archon as a prototype and briefly considered as a vessel for the Electro Gnosis. When she saw him crying upon his "birth", she made the decision to seal his powers and set him free in hopes he would live a normal life. He instead saw this as Parental Abandonment, blaming his own weakness and slowly becoming obsessed with reclaiming the destiny she'd denied him. To this end, he betrays the Fatui and steals the Electro Gnosis for himself, taking part in an experiment to turn him into a Man Made God. The Traveler defeats him, and his Hazy-Feel Turn results in him obtaining a Vision — essentially the "heart" he'd always wanted.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Jimmy Pegorino is deeply driven by a desire to join the Five Families, despite the fact that they see him as a joke. He'll take any chance at making a profit and cozying up to any heavy hitters, be they fellow mafia or Dimitri Rascalov. This has disastrous consequences when Niko ruins his drug deal with Dimitri, causing him to go after him as revenge.
• Haunting Ground: Daniella is this in spades. She is a homunculus that lacks the ability to experience physical sensation, and is haunted by the belief that she is "incomplete". To address this, she stalks Fiona with the intention of stealing her womb.
• The Kingdom Hearts series has plenty of these.
  • The Riku Replica created by the Organization in "Chain of Memories". They make him to fight Sora, and give him false memories of being the real deal. When he finds out that he isn't the real thing, he develops some serious emptiness issues. He goes as far as trying to kill the original so that he can be his own person. Interestingly, when first created he wasn't this, as he knew he was a Replica but considered himself superior to the real Riku since he embraced the darkness willingly and gladly. Getting his memories wiped, implanted with fake memories to think he is the real Riku, and then learning that they're fake is what drives him off the deep end.
    Riku: "As long as you're around, I'll never be more than a shadow!"
  • The Organization themselves, high-ranking "Nobodies" - empty husks created when The Heartless tear out your emotional core. Most are warped into inhuman mooks with no sense of self, but the Organization retain their human shape and memory, so they know what they've lost. Their members range from conflicted to psychotic, while their leader has no interest in being whole again and just uses hearts as a power supply. 3D adds another twist - they could have regained their hearts without hurting anyone over time, and some of them (Axel, Roxas) showed signs of doing so. Xemnas kept this quiet so they'd be vulnerable to his original self's body-stealing plan.
  • The fourteenth member of the Organization, Xion (from 358/2 Days) falls into this the hardest, being the focus of her debut game. Played with in that she's a Replica of the series' main character, like the Riku Replica above, and subverted in that she just feigns being a Beta Test Baddie, ultimately turning out to be one of the only good characters in the game.
• Knights of the Old Republic: HK-47 has elements of this trope, lamenting his incompleteness in the first game, and outraged that the HK-50's, based on him, exist. Only, he does not feel inferior to them in any way, decrying them as in fact being lesser than he in most respects, such as behavior and, well, color. Even more infuriating, they fall within his I Cannot Self-Terminate programming.
• One character in Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC has this motivation. The main enemy is a clone of Shepard, who was created by Cerberus as a spare organ repository for the genuine article.
• Mega Man:
  • In the original series, Bass/Forte was created for the sole purpose of defeating Mega Man, and eventually turns on Wily for continuing to make other robots after him (as it means Wily no longer thinks Bass can do it, and heaven forbid someone else kill Mega Man before he can).
  • Also Proto Man — he's essentially a prototype of Mega Man with an unstable reactor and a bit too much free will. Not technically a "baddie", but one would easily be forgiven for believing him to be a baddie after playing Mega Man 3 but not finishing the game (or watching the Ruby-Spears cartoon).
  • Copy X from Mega Man Zero, who was built as a replacement for the original Mega Man X. He was built in order to prevent the people of Neo Arcadia from noticing that X was gone, and decided the best way to end the fighting between man and machine that had been going on for the better part of 200 years was to enslave all Reploids and annihilate the ones that resist. Certainly not helped by the fact that he keeps justifying his actions by stating he's a perfect copy of X and thus cannot be wrong, because he's only doing what X would do, right?^note Wrong, since X knows and is equal parts saddened and angry at what Copy X does.
  • Dr. Wily from Mega Man Battle Network lost his robotics research's government funding to Dr. Light Hikari's network research, making him bent on world domination in order to get revenge on the society that ignored his robotics research.
• Metal Gear Solid: Liquid Snake believes himself to be an inferior clone of Big Boss, and genetically inferior to his brother, Solid Snake, due to having received "recessive genes" while Solid got the "dominant genes". Of course, as it turns out, it was really Liquid who was supposed to be the superior brother, but he doesn't know that. Despite being Nigh Invulnerable, Made of Iron and an Implacable Man, all at once. Ironically, Word of God says that neither of them was the superior one and Liquid apparently just has a shoddy grasp of genetics.
• Mortal Kombat: Sheeva had shades of this trope, after her Shokan race was replaced as Shao Kahn's chosen warriors by their mortal enemies, the Centaurians, despite being given other, equally important jobs (like protecting then-resurrected Queen Sindel).
• Nintendo Wars:
  • Inverted in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Cyrus betrays his father, which he is a clone of and a failed vessel for a Grand Theft Me experiment, and helps the heroes exactly out of a sense of not being fully human.
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike has a similar inverted example to Days of Ruin with the Andy clone. Rather than being bitter about being a cheap copy he asks if Andy has friends and, when told yes, remarks that it makes him happy because he feels as if he has them as well.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • E-101 Beta from Sonic Adventure: replaced on the crew of the Egg Carrier by "younger brother" E-102 Gamma after Gamma defeats him in battle, then scarily remodeled for Gamma's final boss fight. They end up destroying each other, but the good news is that this releases the animals trapped inside them, finally liberating them from the Doc.
  • In the same vein, E-123 Omega. He was deactivated by Eggman when he started the E-1000 series, was reactivated by Rouge and now spends his time annihilating everything Eggman creates just to prove he's the best of Eggman's creations. The ironic part is that he's a heroic version of this trope... well, mostly anyway.
  • And of course, Metal Sonic is often portrayed as having such issues. In the Sonic OVA, he eventually destroys himself, while in Sonic Heroes, he's driven to usurp Eggman, take over his army, and use the powers of Perfect Chaos, Shadow, and most of the cast to become Metal Overlord. All of this drives him so nuts he eventually starts thinking Sonic is a copy of himself.
• Double stacked in the Soul Series. Originally, Astaroth is modeled after Rock when he is created, and feels some annoyance at it, and Astaroth being arrogant he wants to prove he is the better despite being modeled, and in IV, a replacement built by the same cult that make Astaroth is sent to kill him and bring back his body due to the fact that he appears to have been able to start thinking for himself. If there was any jealousy between them it's unknown.
• Stray Souls: Dollhouse Story: Inverted. Clown Sam believes he's the complete Sam, so he tries to assassinate the other parts.
• Super Robot Wars
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2: Wodan Ymir, an artificial being from an alternate universe who was made from the corpse of the alternate version of one of the heroes of the game, Sanger Somvold. Similarly, Lemon Browning was made from the corpse of the alternate Excellen Browning.
  • Super Robot Wars Reversal: Duminas was a monster created for an unknown purpose. Her creator decided she was a mistake and tried to kill her, but her creator was killed in response. Duminas then spent the entire plot trying to go back in time and ask him why her creator called her a 'mistake', so she could fix herself. Along the way, she made three creations of his own, but she showered them with love. Upon her death, one of the good guys remarks that she figured out what she was... A human.
• Tales of the Abyss
  • A major inversion, occurs with Asch, who himself was replicated and loathes his clone not only because he considers it weak and useless but because it took over his life.
• Xenogears: Ramsus initially appears as the Big Bad, although as the game progresses and he gets defeated by Fei and his Split Personality, Id, Ramsus develops an inferiority complex to Fei, going so far as to ruin the plans of one of the game's real Big Bads by ignoring his orders and attempts to kill Fei (he gets completly and utterly trounced, which doesn't help his issues). It turns out that Ramsus was going to be an artificial Chosen One before Fei was born, but after Fei was conceived, Krelian gave up on Ramsus to focus on Fei, which was the initial result of the inferiority complex.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: Subverted with Ellen, who was going to be this but became part of the main cast instead because the creator wanted to avoid the Cerebus Syndrome that a recurring villain would entail. Granted, Ellen tried to be this for a little while, but she wasn't very good at it.
• Our Little Adventure: Umbria's main quest is to reclaim her power with 'The Brotherhood' and getting her old body back. The form she is currently using is an imperfect copy of Julie's Bard class and appearance, though Umbria looks little more evil than the original Julie.
• Sluggy Freelance: Kusari insists she's an improved version of the mysterious superhuman assassin Oasis, but in spite of having some abilities Oasis doesn't, she's bothered that she's considered inferior for other reasons. (These reasons can't be fully comprehended without spoilers about what the two really are.) She was created in imitation of Oasis by people who didn't have the necessary resources at their disposal.

Web Original

• In The Gamer's Alliance, Rune is an almost perfect clone of the deceased sorcerer Jemuel during the Great War but is annoyed when he is still referred to as a mere clone who hasn't reached the original's potential. He spends his life trying to become more powerful than Jemuel, but in the end he fails miserably although he does cause the reactor core explosion in Libaterra due to his machinations.

Western Animation

• Played with in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. One episode's plot revolves around XL stealing the one part that heroic XR has and he doesn't — by grabbing XR and ripping it out of his chest, while he's still fully conscious. This sends XR into a manic-depressive state over losing this part, as he now thinks he's the worthless one. It turns out that the part was a worthless air freshener device. Even more so, the air freshener was only put in because the aliens that had built him could smell an odor. Everyone who worked with him were incapable of noticing the change once the device was removed.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Spider-Carnage is a demented Evil Twin of Spider-Man. Hailing from an Alternate Universe, he is his world's version of Peter Parker... maybe. An encounter with Miles Warren resulted in Peter (already highly unstable following the deaths of Uncle Ben and Aunt May) being cloned. The clone took up the identity of the Scarlet Spider and became a productive member of the superhero community, while Peter became enraged, feeling that Ben's existence threatened his own. Then The Reveal came in from Curt Connors — Peter might actually be the clone. This news pushed him over the edge, attracted the Carnage symbiote to him, and sent him on the path towards destroying all reality in a Class Z apocalypse.
  Spider-Carnage: I really, really hate clones.
• Steven Universe:
  • Peridot assumes this trope will be at play with Jasper in comparison to Amethyst because Jasper came from Earth's Beta Kindergarten, which was a horribly mismanaged rush-job designed to pump out as much Cannon Fodder for the Gem War as possible, while Amethyst came from the perfectly managed Alpha Kindergarten and thus Jasper should be inherently inferior to Amethyst. It turns out to be an inversion. Jasper, due to pure random chance, ended up being the most physically perfect Gem Peridot had ever seen and the "Ultimate Quartz".
  • Amethyst herself is an inversion, being a hero who views themselves as incomplete and flawed compared to the villain, as she was 'born' with a defect that renders her half the size of a normal Quartz.
• In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the main villain for much of the series, Hordak, is one of scores of clones of a Galactic Conqueror called Horde Prime. However, he is genetically defective, rendering him sickly and weak compared to his brothers. After surviving a Suicide Mission meant in part to get rid of him, he tries to conquer Etheria to prove to himself and Horde Prime that he is worth something after all.
• In The Smurfs (1981), Gargamel of all people manages to display at least some of this in the episode "Crying Smurfs". To be exact, he captures Weepy and comments on him being a failure as he prepares to eat him, to which Weepy responds by pitying the wizard. Quite unusual for him, Gargamel then breaks down into tears and says that nobody respects him (and even apologizes to Weepy) before he relapses into his usual behavior - thus revealing that he feels inferior compared to others and wants to prove himself but neither likes to show it nor let it get to him easily.
• In Trollhunters, Angor Rot lost his soul due to a Deal with the Devil, and traps the souls of all the Trollhunters whom he's killed in his body in order to fill the void. As a semi-inversion, he's actually willing to work with the heroes if Jim can get his soul back for him. That turns out... poorly.
• The Venture Brothers:
  • Jonas Venture, Jr. was one of these in his first appearance. He was a twin absorbed by Rusty Venture before birth, and he lived inside Rusty's body for thirty-odd years with no one knowing he existed. When he finally escapes, despite a stunted, deformed body, he insists that he's the more worthy son of Jonas Venture and tries to kill Rusty and take his place. The two reconcile, and from then on Jonas, Jr. is a successful super-scientist and do-gooder. In fact, the roles are reversed, with Rusty becoming envious of J.J.'s accomplishments, as pointed out when Dr. Killinger tries to convert Rusty into a supervillain and J.J.'s archenemy.
  • In the episode "Perchance to Dean", D-19 is a very straight example. He was one of the clones of Dean Venture who was aborted in infancy by Rusty for being flawed. He survived, living secretly in the Venture compound, but he was hunchbacked and hideous. He becomes obsessed with winning his father's love, and he plans to overcome his physical flaws by stitching together a Dean-suit out of the skins of the many other Deans who have died over the years. He even tries to murder the current Dean to complete it.

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