Clone Angst

"I am a clone, I am not alone...
If you had ever seen us you'd rejoice in your uniqueness
And consider every weakness something special of your own"

— Robert Calvert (Hawkwind), "Spirit of the Age"

In Speculative Fiction, being a clone absolutely sucks. It's enough to make a clone sing the blues.

Though Real Life clones are simply the equivalent of identical twins produced artificially instead of naturally, have to start at conception and go through childhood at the usual speed to reach adulthood, and can even have phenotypes that vary from their genetic source, Speculative Fiction clones are like perfect meta-xerox copies of the cloned person. They are exactly like the target at the moment of cloning (possibly excused by age acceleration), with all their forebears' memories and skills, although their personalities can develop from there.

As a result, many clones brood about how they're not "real," just hollow imitations of the original. The clones tend to deal with this rather badly. Some make desperate attempts to act different. Others go mad and try to murder the original to take their place. (Emphasis on "try" — hardly any succeed.) If the clone is a main character, they will spend the whole show angsting about how they're the Tomato in the Mirror. Occasionally they will have powers just like the Artificial Human. This often just ups their feelings of alienation, though. This, of course, only works with artificial clones that are identical to the original; natural identical twins are clones as well, the difference is that twins don't have the exact same memories, personality and relationships as the other (and neither do artificial clones in Real Life).

That's for the lucky clones who are created properly. In many shows, cloning is an imprecise science, so there is a high probability that any clone will turn out to be an Evil Twin — almost as high as the probability of creating an evil computer (because everyone knows that Science Is Bad). Other unlucky clones will just have birth defects, Resurrection Sickness, or be increasingly inexact duplicates.

And that's for the clones who are just unlucky. The really unlucky clones have malevolent creators who can make custom clones grown in a vat, sometimes in bulk — which are exact meta-xerox copies of the original except that they have fanatical loyalty to the creators. You can expect all that tinkering to make something Go Horribly Wrong, too. A clone like this is always considered highly expendable by their creator, except in rare cases where said Evilutionary Biologist has developed an attachment to it.

Because of all this (or possibly as a cause of all this), clones get very little respect. Heroes who hesitate at killing intelligent life might still kill their evil clone. In the question of What Measure Is a Non-Human?, most clones rank somewhere between the Big Creepy-Crawlies and the Mecha-Mooks. Interestingly, on the question of What Measure Is a Non-Unique? the only clone that matters is the last one... provided the original is dead.

This assumes the clone ever had a mind of its own, of course. Sometimes a clone is an Empty Shell without the original's soul, and exists only so that the creator can overwrite their mind and personality onto it in case of accident. In this case, it's more like coming Back from the Dead — although if the clone has a mind of its own at the start, this is yet another reason its life sucks. And let's not debate how Our Souls Are Different, in which case clones (especially of the deceased) will be soulless abominations before God and nature.

Some clones aren't traditional biological clones at all — they're robot doubles, or the fruit of a Brain Uploading, or time travel duplicates, or copies created by the good old transporter. These have more reason to be exact xerox copies — but they get even less respect.

Sometimes a story resolves the issue by having the original and the clone(s) fuse "back" into a single being. This is seen as a way to solve their problem without anybody dying. How much logical sense it makes that this would be possible depends on what flavor of Applied Phlebotinum was used to make the clones, but it's common to see this solution used even when the clone was clearly not physically "split" off of the original.

Subtrope of Our Clones Are Different. Note that all instances of actual cloning in Real Life require a live animal of the same or similar species with a womb to carry the cloned animal to term. Science fiction tends to ignore this requirement competely, which only enforces the Trope.

See also Scale of Scientific Sins, Creating Life, Identity Breakdown, and Existential Horror. Closely related to Expendable Clone. Contrast with Clones Are People, Too, where they do get to live their own lives. One of the most common sub-tropes to Supernatural Angst.

Warning: This trope is often introduced as a Plot Twist, so expect spoilers.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Afterschool Charisma's premise is a lot like Clone High if that was done seriously; that is, a school in the near future is populated by teenage clones of historical figures as a research/social experiment. And yes, they cloned Hitler (Who, surprisingly enough, is actually one of the most kind-hearted clones; go figure). There is enormous pressure on the clones to live up to their originals. Marie Curie, who wants to study music, transfers out, while Mozart, who embraces his fate and looks down on non-clones can't handle the pressure and attempts suicide.
• Appleseed Ex Machina: Briareos and Tereus, a bioroid made from his genetic material are identical right down to birthmarks (though since Bri is a cyborg now, it's not immediately obvious to anyone who didn't know him before the fact), and share quirks and tendencies to a ridiculous degree. Genetics Do Not Work That Way! Naturally Tereus feels angsty about his lack of uniqueness, even though millions of other bioroids demonstrate no such issues, and are treated as fully equal to humans — to the point that the government mostly consists of bioroids. Tereus might be unusual because he is the single prototype unit of his genetic template and personally knows his "original". He also seems to have at least some attraction to Briareos girlfriend that carried over from the cloning, but knows that he can't have her, since he is only the copy. At the same time Briareos gets angsty because he's afraid that Tereus might replace him in both his positions at work and as Deunan's boyfriend, as Tereus has a fully biological body and he is a giant mechanical hulk.
• Ayakashi Triangle: After Matsuri is split into a boy and girl, they more or less agree Matsuri originally being male (even if he hadn't been for months) makes the girl an Opposite-Sex Clone. Despite her having the same memories and personality, the girl Matsuri concludes being a "fake" means she has no right to their original identity and doesn't even belong in the same home.
• In the second season of Darker than Black, it turns out that Suou is actually an Opposite-Sex Clone of her "brother" Shion; since she was created the same age as him, her past is all Fake Memories. She angsts about it until Hei hears her and points out that as far as he's concerned, she's still the same person he's been dragging all over Russia and Japan and it doesn't matter where she came from. Unfortunately, despite the "d'awww" moment, it does matter, as those Fake Memories are only being held in place because of the Meteor Shard in her necklace. Which is breakable...
• Future Robot Daltanious takes place in a world where clones are treated like slaves, as they're often abused, mistreated and killed for their organs. Almost all the alien empires (Helios, Zaal, Marios, Proxia) treat them like shit and call them disgusting. Supreme Commander Kloppen of Zaal has a mental breakdown when he finds out he's a clone, tearing down the Zaal flag and begging Dolmen to hear his cries. He gets nothing in response.
• Discussed and defied towards the end of King of Thorn, since by that point both Marco and Kasumi have died and been resurrected as Medusa constructs; essentially, they are just copies of their original selves. Marco, not being one prone to angst, simply recommends they live on as normal.
  Marco: Your worth hasn't changed. And it never will.
• Christmas in Kurau Phantom Memory is Kurau's "pair". As a Rynax, she is an energy being and has to borrow Kurau's genetic material to form her human body, making her technically her clone. Kurau loves her immensely and will do anything to protect her "little sister", but Christmas still gets her share of grief when Kurau loses her Rynax, causing Christmas to be terribly lonely for many years.
• Of the four Links in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords (2004), Blue takes the thought of being a copy the worst, insisting that he's the only Link and that he doesn't need the others.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • The series has Fate Testarossa. Near the end of the first season, she's a Tomato in the Mirror when Precia reveals that she's a clone; Fate, though treated as an equal by her new employers, who know she's a clone, and her classmates, who don't, once briefly wonders if she even counts as a person once during A's. In later seasons she's surrounded by people who care for her individually, though, and this is quickly refuted. In StrikerS, she adopts children similar to her to be raised in a loving environment so that they will not have to ask the same question.
  • Note that the franchise as a whole prefers Clones Are People, Too. Despite there being nineteen different clones running around^note Fate, Ginga, Subaru, Erio, Vivio, Zest, Jail, Uno, Due, Tre, Quattro, Cinque, Sein, Sette, Otto, Nove, Dieci, Wendi, and Deed (Due and Zest both die near the end of StrikerS), only three of them (including Fate) ever angst over it, and they all get better thanks to being Happily Adopted.
• In Mega Man Megamix, the big twist of the "Greatest Enemy in History" story is that Mega Man — at least the unusually villainous, cavalier, and borderline insane one we've been following in the start of the story — is a copy designed by Dr. Wily. This freaks the hell out of him as not only did he not know this at first, he preserved the original Mega Man's personality, morals, and sense of justice, sincerely believing that he was doing the right thing to save the world, but with his mind unknowingly corrupted by Dr. Wily's "Evil Chip". In the end, he decides to oust himself as a fake right as the real Mega Man returns to action, and when Bass attempts to kill both of them, Copy Mega Man sacrifices himself to protect the original. In the aftermath, Proto Man reveals that he convinced the Copy to do whatever he felt was the "right thing" in light of discovering what he truly was, leading to a disturbing implication that the Copy felt he was Beyond Redemption and simply wanted to die (and that Proto Man knew that he would).
• Twice from My Hero Academia has this because he once cloned himself via his Quirk so much they all thought they were the genuine article, and suffers a Split Personality, a mental block on using his Quirk on himself, and issues if his face is uncovered as a result. In the "Meta Liberation Army" arc, he suffers enough damage (that he knows from experience a clone wouldn't survive) to realize he was the real one, removing that limit.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Rei Ayanami is a tragic cocktail. She's a Half-Human Hybrid with Easy Amnesia. Her isolated upbringing with Gendō Ikari left her with No Social Skills. And she hates it to boot. After being cloned (again) she is just pissed off and tired, wanting to die. But she isn't allowed to.
• RahXephon has Isshiki Makoto, who, in both flashbacks and his final breakdown, is shown to take the fact that he's an inferior clone...rather hard, to say the least. Indeed, he almost directly causes humanity to lose the Human-Mu war out of a need to prove that he was more than an imperfect copy of his "father"
• In Saber Marionette R, Star-Face discovering that he, along with every king before him, is a clone of the original King of Romana, and that his younger brother Junior is not a clone, but rather the actual son of the previous king and born from a human mother, is enough to send him on a Villainous Breakdown and causes him to be Driven to Suicide.
• Slayers: In an a drastic example of the clone inferiority complex, after the villain of the first season, Rezo the Red Priest, makes a Heroic Sacrifice and dies on the apocalyptic magics of the protagonists to allow the destruction of the demon he was host to, the clone created by his spurned former lover becomes obsessed with convincing the same protagonists to use the exact same potentially world-ending spell on him so that, in the unlikely event of his survival, he can claim to have achieved something the original had not. The dubiousness of trying to one-up a self-sacrificing gesture by surviving your own is apparently lost on the mind of a megalomaniac.
• Tenchi Muyo!: in the manga, a villain grows a Ryoko clone named Minagi who has a nearly opposite personality from the original, being very sweet and kind (though no less brave than Ryoko). Minagi suffers the requisite existential angst in the beginning, but gets over it and goes off to live her own life, reappearing in the manga occasionally as Ryoko's "sister." Her biggest problem is being a dead ringer for a notorious Space Pirate.
• Virgin Ripper: The shinigami Hikari, was in life the clone of a Delicate and Sickly girl named Hotaru, and was created specifically for the purpose of donating nearly all her internal organs to her "original" (including the heart) — which, of course, meant death for her. She didn't take The Reveal well, to say the least...
• XXXHOLiC: Turns up, where it is eventually revealed that Watanuki is a time-travel duplicate of "Syaoran", and was so depressed about being a clone that his suicidal thoughts and desires turned on his Weirdness Magnetness- he's only being haunted because he wants the ghosts and demons to kill him. The character in question had Laser-Guided Amnesia the entire time. That's right, he was so depressed about being a clone that it attracted ghosts, even though he didn't remember that he was depressed about it, or that he was a time travel duplicate in the first place.

Comic Books

• Druuna: In the penultimate album, "Clone", Druuna herself is cloned by a group of machines residing on Earth After the End who are trying to understand humanity. The clone discovers the truth by the end, and immediately starts angsting about whether or not she's really human.
• Gold Digger: Brianna, the third Diggers sister, is actually a clone/Mix-and-Match Critter of Gina and Brittany. After her accidental creation, she quickly goes nuts and tries to eliminate her "sisters" (due to a curse that was the reason for the process that created her), though they eventually manage to talk her down. Even then, for several issues afterward, Brianna has something of an identity crisis. "Several issues" meaning about fifty or so, on and off.
• Iron Man: Tony Stark Iron Man had the revelation that Tony did die in the second superhero Civil War and the Tony apparently revived from the coma is actually a backup of Tony's brain in a reconstructed body. He struggles with having all of Tony's memories while feeling he's not the original at all. During the events of Iron Man 2020 (Event), as he sides with the robot revolution, he embraces his status as an artificial being and renames himself Mark One until an intervention by F.R.I.D.A.Y., who assures him that he's still human where it counts, leading to a He's Back! moment for Tony.
• New Warriors: Namorita, Namor's cousin and member of the New Warriors, became distressed when she discovered she was not the daughter of Namor's cousin Namora but her clone. Namora, being half Atlantean and half Human, could not conceive a child so she enlisted the aid of a banished scientist to help her give birth to her own clone.
• The Outsiders: In Outsiders (2003), the clone of Metamorpho created by Monsieur Mallah and the Brain is recruited first as an amnesiac Metamorpho. Later, he's faced by the original one and revealed to be a clone of him. He renames himself Shift and stays on with the team. Metamorpho wants to assimilate Shift back with himself, but eventually realizes that this part of him had made a life for itself. During this time, Shift finds himself soul-searching and trying to find meaning to his life.
• PS238: The comic inverts this. Tyler is afraid that his parents will love his clone, Toby, more than they love him, because Toby has superpowers, just like his parents always wanted. This thankfully won't ever happen since Toby used his powers to make sure Tyler's parents would still love him. Unfortunately, thanks to the Equivalent Exchange nature of his powers, Toby had to sacrifice any chance of being friends with Cecil.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): A downplayed example, with an evil Alternate Self than Sonic's actual clone, but the basic principle is the same. In issue 172, Scourge taunts Sonic, boasting that the reason Sonic hates him so much is because he knows they're the same guy and all it would take is "one bad day" to make Sonic into him. Sonic turns it around by pointing out that all it would take is just a little kindness and selflessness to make Scourge just like him. Shaken, Scourge goes to great lengths to return to Anti-Mobius, force changes on the entire world and make their world more than just a Mirror Universe of Mobius Prime, just cause he hates being recognized as a copy of Sonic. Among other things, the planet is now called "Moebius," the Anti-Freedom Fighters are now the Suppression Squad, etc. Even after his defeat, Scourge declares himself a "Sonic the Hedgehog at his fullest potential", not held back by friends or morals.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): The Imposter Syndrome mini-series introduces Surge the Tenrec and Kit the Fennec, who were introduced as "clones" of Sonic and Tails (despite having a different species and even gender than the original), though it is later revealed that they really aren't clones. That said, despite not being actual clones of Sonic and Tails, they still embody the spirit of this trope, shaken by the revelation of who they are: two people who Starline had taken in, given them fake memories in order to do his bidding, overwriting their original personality to more closely resemble Sonic and Tails, and giving them abilities that will help keep up with them. When Surge discovers the truth, she breaks, screaming that everything about her revolves around surpassing Sonic and that she has no agency over her own life.
  Surge: [My past] is not "irrelevant"! I need context! If I have no past, all I have is this! And "this" is nothing! I'm nobody! I-I-I'm just a knockoff! Everything that I want — that I think I want — is a lie!
• Spider-Man: The Clone Saga features this as a major premise, as it opens looking at how the man who came to call himself Ben Reilly reacted when he realised that he was the clone of Spider-Man created by the Jackal rather than the original. Ben went so far as to declare that he wasn’t even a person, and had to go on the road and spend five years establishing his own identity before he felt ready to return to New York. The manipulations of the Jackal and the Green Goblin made it increasingly confusing whether Peter or Ben were the ‘real’ Spider-Man, culminating in Peter having a breakdown when evidence emerged indicating that he was the clone. The two eventually overcame this, settling into a dynamic where Peter Parker lived his life despite being the apparent ‘clone’ while Ben made his own existence even if tests confirmed he was the ‘original’, but this culminated in the Green Goblin revealing that Peter was the original and Ben the clone, with all contrary evidence an elaborate deception. Since Ben’s return to life, he is generally content with his current identity, but the manipulation of the Beyond Corporation have led to him becoming convinced that Peter abandoned him.
• Supergirl:
  • In Supergirl (1982), Supergirl gets an Evil Clone. Later, her clone is depowered and tries to steal Supergirl's life, but loses her memories and convinces herself that she was the real Kara Zor-El/Linda Danvers. When Supergirl makes her clone remember her real origin, "Linda" cries over wanting to live a normal life. Kara promises to help her establish a new identity for herself.
  • In the Crucible storyline, Kon-El/Conner Kent, a clone made from half-Superman's DNA, and half Lex Luthor's DNA, spends months travelling around the world as looking for a meaning to his existence.
• Ultimate Marvel: Spider-Woman Jessica Drew is Peter Parker's female clone, created during the Ultimate Clone Saga. While on the surface she doesn't appear to have had difficulty with it, she eventually admits to Miles Morales, Peter's successor as Spider-Man, that it wasn't an easy thing to deal with, and she doesn't feel like a real person in her own right.
• W.I.T.C.H.: The girls used their Astral Drops (temporary magical clones that replace and merge back with them when they return from missions) too often, causing the Drops to begin to develop into living beings. The trouble starts when Will has a panic attack about losing her personal identity and makes her Drop an independent entity which the clone angst hit hard.
• X-Men:
  • Jean Grey's clone Madelyne Pryor didn't take it very well when she found out she was a clone created by Mister Sinister for the sole purpose of having Cyclops's baby, since Sinister believed he could create an extremely powerful mutant by combining Cyclops and Jean Grey's genes. The revelation drove Maddie insane and she tried to kill her and Cyclops's infant son and after failing killed herself. After that, the newly-resurrected Jean adopted Baby Nathan with Cyclops, since they were dating and he was genetically her son anyway. And then the baby got into his own cloning problems...
  • X-23, a Tyke Bomb Opposite-Sex Clone of Wolverine's 'I'm not real!' angst is downplayed, as it's discarded approximately an issue after first feeling a twinge of it. As such, Laura has always been treated as completely separate character from Logan, with her angst coming from being artificially created to be assassin rather than being a "copy" of her dad. In The Killing Dream, the first arc of her solo series, a demon possessing Wolverine attempts to bait her into serving him by telling her she has no soul because she's a clone. It takes a Battle in the Center of the Mind where she encounters the personification of the fragment of her humanity the Facility failed to destroy—or possibly even the Enigma Force—to give her the power to break the demon's hold over her. Nonetheless, the idea she may not have a soul does rattle Laura quite significantly, to the point that she even questions Miss Sinister about whether clones possess a soul while the latter was in the process of trying to steal her body! She later asks Blackheart, another demon, whether or not she has a soul, figuring that someone who tortures souls as a hobby would know. Blackheart mockingly assures her that she does have a soul, since he wouldn't be able to hurt her if she didn't. Then again, demons are notorious liars.
  • Laura's clone sidekick Gabby doesn't express much angst about being a clone. That changes in the Krakoa age: When Madelyne Pryor is killed, the Quiet Council uses her clone status to justify not resurrecting her. Gabby is worried that the same exemption might apply to her, making her a sort of "second-class mutant." There are counter-examples to consider, though: The two dead Cuckoos (see below) were resurrected through the now-standard Krakoan process. When Gabby is killed by the Shadow King, her friends decide to take a chance and resurrect her themselves, leading to an encounter with The Five, the ones in charge of resurrections. Upon learning the complete vagueness of the rules on clones and resurrections, they tell the Quiet Council that those like Pryor deserve to live and to change the rules so that only clones of active mutants can't be created.

Fan Works

• BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant: Noel goes through angst after she learns she's a Murakumo Unit and a clone of Saya. When Ruby discovers her poetry journal, she sees that her poems have gone from cheesy and goofy, to existential and nihilistic, questioning her existence and if it's all a lie, which itself eventually devolves into scratched out repeating of "clone", "fake", and "monster" over and over again. She also expresses a lot of self-loathing that her existence came at Saya's expense.
• The Pony POV Series has Fluttercruel, who while not a physical clone, is a separate soul created by Discord when he couldn't break Fluttershy and based off her, making her Fluttershy's spiritual (and possibly Discord's, since she got some traits that didn't come from her 'mother') clone. After his defeat, they're left Sharing a Body. While Fluttershy genuinely cares about her as a daughter, Fluttercruel sees herself as nothing more than a 'rip off' of her. She eventually overcomes this.
• From The Longingverse Scootaloo was cloned from Rainbow Dash's DNA in order to learn how to make an alicorn. And while not a clone, per se, Spike is revealed to be just a stuffed toy dragon that Twilight accidentally gave life to. Both eventually get over it.
• "Blink", and its many, many continuations all revolve around this as Twilight Sparkle discovers that Teleporting doesn't take you from one place to your destination. Instead the Teleportation spell just takes the Teleporter to a formless void dimension with no food, water or Magic in it while the Magic used in the teleportation spell creates a perfect duplicate of the Teleporter and anything and anybody they were teleporting with that has all of the previous copies thoughts, memories, and abilities from before they had Teleported: the copy then winds up in the place the original was teleporting to; while the original is simply left behind and trapped in the pocket universe forever... and Twilight had found herself surrounded by the corpses of the previous versions of herself that died from starvation, dehydration, or were killed by other previous versions of Twilight Sparkle that had gone insane and cannibalistic trying to survive in this hellscape.
• In "I Forgot I Was There", Twilight Sparkle unwittingly brings her own reflection to life while trying out one of Starswirl the Bearded's hidden spells. It takes a while for everyone to adjust to the situation, but eventually they accept the duplicate as her own pony. Then it's revealed why Starswirl hid all knowledge of the spell: it's not permanent.
• The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers fic "The Clone War: A Retelling" is based around the idea that during the events of "Blue Ranger Gone Bad", when the Blue Ranger was impersonated by a clone of himself, the clone wasn't destroyed, but in reality everyone confused the clone and the original, with the villains keeping the original Billy as an abused servant in the belief that he was just the clone while the clone took on Billy's personality after the two morphed while Billy and the clone were in contact. The clone is left bitter when the other Rangers immediately judge him as 'evil' after realising his true nature even though he hasn't done anything beyond be a clone, but Billy and Zordon agree to give him a chance to make a new life as Billy refuses to condemn his clone to the same fate he endured as Zedd and Rita's prisoner.
• The Arrow fic "Happy Accident" features an interesting variation of this when Black Siren is killed and Oliver's attempt to resurrect her in a Lazarus Pit results in Earth-1 Laurel Lance being brought back to life in her counterpart's body. While Constantine confirms that it is the soul of the original Laurel in Black Siren's body, Laurel is uncomfortable when she lets herself think about the implications of the fact that her "new" body has scars and tattoos she doesn't remember receiving or getting, to say nothing of the idea that the body she was born in is decaying in a grave somewhere.
• In the Farscape fic Left Behind, after Crichton and Chiana are left behind on Rohvu, Chiana freaks out when Crichton reveals that he knows for a fact there were at least two D’Argos left behind on Rohvu that are now dead, and he’s sure that he saw another Chiana in the escape pod before it left.
• The Naruto fanfic In the Blood (justplainrii) revolves around a handful of clones assumed to be made by Orochimaru. Most of them aren't aware of their genetic source, but the ones that do have severe identity issues. The clone of Orochimaru himself probably has the worst time of it.
• One of the several reveals of Sonic X: Dark Chaos is that Sonic, Shadow, and Eric are failed "clones" of Maledict himself, which he made to create an "Ultimate Weapon". Because of this, all three of them can use the Chaos Emeralds (and Rings) to power themselves up. He thought they were failures and disposed of them many decades before the story. None of the hedgehogs are happy with this truth, even though Maledict admits he treated them wrongly and is glad they grew up into fine hedgehogs.
• "Sunsplit" has this be mentioned by Sunset Shimmer in regards to being Sunburst's Opposite-Sex Clone:
  Celestia was ticked, let me tell you. I mean, just creating life like that, kind of a big deal. Didn't help that I was in the middle of a breakdown, you know, the usual 'am I real' kinda thing you read in sci-fi, but the gala went pretty good despite all that.
• The Justice League: The Spider sequel Web of Cadmus focuses on several clones feeling the burden of their origins, although the clones of Superman, Hawkgirl, the Martian Manhunter, Supergirl and Spider-Man eventually decide to find their own way with their templates, although the Flash's clone rebels against the heroes to be a villain.
• In Fate/Parallel Fantasia, this is briefly contemplated by False Caster when she realizes that Servants are only copies based on information recorded in the Akashic Records; meaning that if she found a way to return to her own world, she might find another version of herself still there, one with a better claim on being the "real" her. She ultimately decides to carry on and try not to worry about it.
• In Riding the Dragon Michael Hasek-Davion is replaced by a programmed clone who suffers a severe mental breakdown due to being programmed with the original's PTSD.
• Shed 17, a fanmade eerie deconstuction of Thomas & Friends lore, has a particularly gruesome one. During the course of the video it is stated that Thomas was a son of the original owner of the railway station. He died in an accident and was later rebuild as a Bio-fusion of human organs with mechanical parts. At the climax, he visits the titular Shed 17, to find out that he's not the real Thomas, but merely one of the many clones that were made in order to recreate the boy, albeit the most successful one. Seeing the remains of the failed experiments, and one of them even still alive and trying to get out of its containment capsule, Thomas is shocked so much by the revelation that his organic spinal cord pops out of his body shell and his human face falls off, revealing a skeleton screaming in agony and despair.
• In The Worm fic Atonement, Pandora's biggest motivation is to define herself as a real person and not just a bad copy of Panacea.
• The Institute Saga: Galatea is cloned from Supergirl and used by Magneto as his weapon. And she is not happy about it.
• Ryuji from Kamen Rider Days is technically a replication of another person (Ryuki). He struggles a lot with the feeling that he isn't a real person, something his closer allies have tried to disabuse him of.
• Subverted in the FTL: Faster Than Light fic Look at Me. Brian is perfectly OK with being ressurected through cloning, but his shipmates, Pell and Xander, aren't. As far as they're concerned, the real Brian is dead and his clone's a slap in the face. If only because they had to watch their friend bleed to death, and then witness his clone lurch out of his tank like the Frankenstein's Monster from his slab.
• The fan novelization Super Mario Sunshine: A Sprite of Light reveals that Bowser Jr. is actually a clone of Bowser created through magic. The revelation hits Jr. hard, since it means not only that Princess Peach is not his mother, but that there was never a mother for him to find in the first place.
• Next Grand World: Discussed between Caster Servant Da Vinci and Rider Servant Da Vinci, the latter of which was created by the former to replace her if something were to happen to her.

Film — Animation

• In Ghost in the Shell (1995), this is a factor in Motoko's detachment from the world, in which she wonders about her significance given her entirely artificial shell. In one particular scene, she notes that even mannequins look like her, and that she has duplicates nearly everywhere. In particular the chosen shell of the Puppet Master is also quite similar to Motoko.
• Pokémon: The First Movie features Mewtwo, an angry, bitter clone of Mew who becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. He returns in a TV special, though he's mellowed down.

Film — Live-Action

• The 6th Day: Adam Gibson stumbles on an evil plot involving clones. Halfway through fighting the organization who he believes has put a clone of him in his place, he finds out that he is the clone; the one living in his house with his wife is the real Adam. Downplayed in that he quickly recovers from his disappointment and enlists the original Adam to help him destroy the conspiracy.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence's child protagonist David is a mechanical copy of the designer's deceased son. He doesn't take it very well when he finds out he isn't one-of-a-kind, jumping off a building into the ocean.
• The twist ending of Anti Matter is that most of the film has been from the point of view of a duplicate created accidentally by a Teleporter Accident. She is unable to form new memories and does not feel hunger because she isn't real. She is an echo of the original that was left behind when the original was teleported due to the wormhole closing too quickly. The other characters were hiding the fact that she is a duplicate because she kept forgetting that she was a duplicate and getting distressed by the revelation.
• Horse Girl: Sarah becomes convinced she's a clone of her grandmother, which she find incredibly upsetting. She's driven to more and more extreme behavior in order to confirm this.
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has Maisie Lockwood, who's revealed to be a clone of Benjamin Lockwood's deceased daughter. He loved his daughter so much that he's willing to cross several ethical lines in genetic engineering to bring her back, which causes a friction with his partner John Hammond who broke all ties with him. Needless to say, when Maisie learns about this, she doesn't take it well at all and is so traumatized that she's left frozen in place and Owen has to physically drag her away to safety.
• Oblivion (2013) uses this, with The Tet planet-looting probe endless cloning Jack and Vika in order to accelerate and help speed along the process of plundering Earth's remaining usable resources and killing off the few, surviving bands of humans. The clone of Jack is endlessly haunted by memories of Earth That Was and his wife. We have no idea how much Vika remembers, but she's obviously very broken.
• This is the central plot point of Star Trek: Nemesis, in which Picard discovers that the Romulans developed a clone of him for use in a Zany Scheme that was later abandoned. Even though this clone made it through the first twenty years of his life having had no contact with the original Picard, he still develops a massive inferiority complex and constantly justifies his actions as being "exactly" what Picard would have done if he had been raised in the same situation, rather than accept that he is his own person.
• They Cloned Tyrone: A major part of the story is Fontaine's growing existential crisis over his status as a clone programmed with the memories and personality of the "real" Fontaine. The matter only gets more complicated with The Reveal that there is no "real" Fontaine, as he was cloned from the head of the conspiracy and most of his memories are outright fabricated.

Literature

• 7th Son: The Beta clones get varying degrees of this once they discover what they are. In particular is Fr. Thomas, who fears that because he is artificial he has no eternal soul. Which is kind of a big deal for a priest.
• In the novel Altered Carbon, digital copies of human psyches can be replicated and transferred to other bodies. This happens two ways: the first is a form of remote storage used as emergency backup by the ultrarich to circumvent the "real death" usually caused by the destruction of the cortical stack. The second involves the duplication of a single psyche into two bodies, a highly difficult and illegal process. It is also used by the main character, Takeshi Kovacs. While not provoking any existential angst in itself — both versions are, as digital copies, as "real" as the other — it does require one copy to be destroyed to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, provoking a difficult discussion about which version has gained more "worthy memories" since the duplication. The dilemma is eventually resolved by a game of rock, paper, scissors.
• The main character in Blueprint suffers from depression ever since she's a child, seeing as how she's just a clone of her mother. Her mother was a famous piano-player who couldn't use her fingers anymore after a disease crippled them — desperate for her legacy to live on, she had herself cloned and raised the protagonist to be a great piano-player, all the while making it very clear that she was a clone and this was why she was brought into the world. She suffers not just because of the disease she knows she will develop and her abusive mother, but because she doesn't particularly enjoy playing the piano. Eventually she breaks free and makes her own life as a painter.
• Isaac's children in Edenborn are all clones of the scientists who saved their parents' generation. One of them discovers that they were originally intended to be vessels for the minds of those dead scientists. That clone wrestles with the practical and moral consequences of this possibility.
• In Tom Holt's Falling Sideways: After being dumped by the first Phillipa clone, David sneaks into Honest John's House of Clones to make a second one, who is not-at-all pleased to find that she's a clone of a clone, and not part of the centuries-long plot her father set up.
• The Finder's Stone Trilogy of Forgotten Realms novels by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb:
  • The trilogy subverts this trope twice. When main heroine, Alias, who is herself an artificial, magically created being based on a clone of her Vain Sorceress co-creator, found out that she has many clones, she is originally angry at being "copied"; the actual clones are much calmer, have their own lives, and don't mope about their origin in the slightest. Even more — the clones would like to be friends with Alias, are unaware of her, or don't care even if they do know. Two clones are seen in the series, a couple more are mentioned, and all of them are confident women with different personalities. Eventually, Alias accepts her "sister" as an equal and seems to be at ease with the whole deal. Alias herself had just learned that she was not, as she thought, a naturally born person (hence feeling like a "thing to be copied"), and had been given the impression that her sisters hadn't existed past the destruction of the last of the five entities involved in her own creation so when one of them popped up in front of her Alias had a bad moment — since said last entity had specifically labeled the others as being more puppets to his whim than free spirits like Alias. As for her sisters being calmer, non-mopy, etc: most of them don't seem to have the first clue about where they really come from. Of the three that have actual screen time in the books, only one knew the full story. The other two both thought themselves simply amnesiac, much like Alias herself when first introduced.
  • Played straight in the second book of the trilogy, The Wyvern's Spur. Flattery Wyvernspur, the novel's Big Bad, is a clone of the bard Finder Wyvernspur, who created Flattery to be a living library of his songs. Flattery hates the fact that he was created in another man's image and resents his "father" for abusing him and treating him like a tool, and he seems to fear that his status as a clone makes him something less than fully human. He seeks the titular wyvern's spur so he can use its power to kill Finder and wipe out the entire Wyvernspur family, partially to prove his right to exist, but mainly out of spite for his creator.
• In The Goodness Gene, the main protagonist discovers he is a a clone of Hitler, created solely to lead a dictatorship in the Dominion of the Americas; he — understandably — goes into Heroic BSoD mode.
• The Indestructible Man (a Past Doctor Adventures novel) looks at 'adult' versions of classic Gerry Anderson shows such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, placing a significant emphasis on the identity issues suffered by the 'Captain Scarlet' equivalent of Captain Grant Matthews, who is troubled by both his immortality and the knowledge that he is essentially a clone of himself.
• John Dies at the End uses the idea of a stereotypical, perfect-copy clone. In this case the angst isn't about being a clone so much as it is that he killed the original main character and took his place without knowing. His best friend and girlfriend forgive him, but now his biggest worry is Villain Override.
• Journey to Chaos: Vaya has a minor emotional meltdown when Mr.15 tells her that she's artificial, and that her memories were implanted before she was born. Haburt Kloac, the one who commissioned her creation as a Replacement Goldfish, treats her like the real deal.
• The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna revolves around an "echo," a clone of a person who will replace the original if they die. Echoes are illegal and can be decommissioned at any time, resulting in a lot of angst for Eva, especially when she slips up and reveals her true existence.
• Otherland: Paul Jonas spends most of the story wandering through various simulated worlds, unaware that he's a virtual copy and the original is still alive in an induced coma. When he finds out, he realizes that everything he's accomplished is meaningless from a personal perspective, as his real body will have none of the accumulated memories and his virtual self can't ever be considered a real person. This sends him across the Despair Event Horizon but gives him the resolve to perform a Heroic Sacrifice.
• In A School for Sorcery, there is a form of magic called "doubling power" that involves summoning your image into a mirror and then borrowing power from them. Unbeknownst to Tria, the protagonist, said reflections continue their own existence. By the end of the book, the surviving Tria is not the original, and angsts about whether she's still the person she once was, a justifiable fear since she encounters the mirror clone of another character who was purposefully abandoned when he was no longer of any use.
• The Southern Reach Trilogy: Features in Authority. The returned copy of the biologist realizes that she's not the original, and is depressed by it. She however gets over that rather quickly and retains mostly positive feelings towards the original.
• In We Are Legion (We Are Bob), replicants are digitized copies of brain of real people, usually those, who were frozen after death. The process is destructive, leaving the original dead. Bob has some trouble dealing with the fact that he's a copy. Even more later, when he awakens and learns that he's now a backup of the original digitized Bob, as the latter has been destroyed in a sabotage attempt (which is why he's missing several days' worth of memories).
• In Xenocide, Ender enters a dimension that allows you to create anything that you can hold perfectly in your mind. Ender unintentionally creates copies of his siblings. The copies eventually deduce that they aren't clones of the original siblings per se, but manifestations from Ender's mind: the personification of Ender's innocence and kindness in his sister, and of his ambition and ruthlessness in his brother. This causes both copies to angst endlessly until they are re-integrated by Ender's death and the copy-sister's loss of her body.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Buffy gets the ability to read minds, Oz concludes that the act of cloning his thoughts is enough to call his own existence into question.
  Oz: (Thinking) I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me, and she becomes me. I cease to exist...
• Doctor Who: Defied by Jenny in "The Doctor's Daughter", a fraternal "clone" (the process doesn't produce an identical duplicate). She does get told she's "not real" by the Doctor and quickly calls him on it.
• Foundation (2021): This is a major theme in the first season, as a result of the Empire being ruled by a series of clones of Emperor Cleon I. Most of the Emperors are privately insecure about their nature, which manifests in various ways.
  • Cleon XI (Brother Dusk in the first two episodes) is nearing the end of his life, and agonizes over whether his has been a worthy contribution to the legacy of his bloodline. He also quietly despairs over the looming collapse of the Empire as predicted by Seldon, which will make said bloodline obsolete.
  • Cleon XIII (Brother Day from episode 3 onward) is haunted by Seldon's criticism of the Genetic Dynasty, specifically his claim that the former would prove to be "just another grape, destined for the same bottle". It's clear that his Vision Quest in "The Missing Piece" isn't just about refuting Halima's anti-cloning views — he wants to prove to himself that he does possess a soul. When he completes the quest but fails to receive a vision anyway, he doesn't take it well.
  • Cleon XIV (Brother Dawn from episode 3 until the end of the season) has it the worst, being not only a clone but a defective clone who's left-handed and colorblind. He's spent his whole life carefully aping his brothers, knowing that they'll have him killed and replaced if they realize he's different.
  • And then it's revealed in the first season's finale that the entire Genetic Dynasty of Cleons is fundamentally flawed, as the original Cleon's preserved body, used as the template for all later Cleons, has been corrupted at some point in the past few centuries, meaning all successive Cleons are imperfect duplicates of the first... and the entire concept of the Genetic Dynasty is that they're supposed to be perfect copies.
  • This continues into Season 2, as Cleon XVII (the current Brother Day) is shown to have developed a Mortality Phobia due to the corrupted Imperial genome making him lose faith in the Legacy Immortality provided by the Genetic Dynasty. To compensate, he's become obsessed with having children to procreate like a normal person and cement himself in history as the final Cleon and founding father of a new dynasty. His Villainous Breakdown in the season finale is triggered when Vault Hari bluntly informs that despite everything he's done to try and individualize himself, he's still not considered an outlier in Seldon's plans.
  • Cleon XVII's actions as Brother Day, while done out of a certain level of desperation, are nonetheless more proactive than Cleon XVI was when he was reigning, something the latter now deeply regrets, wondering if he'll be forgotten as just a footnote in the Genetic Dynasty's history.
  • Cleon XVIII (the Brother Dawn of Season 2) also finds himself heavily affected by Day's actions, as discontinuing the Genetic Dynasty in favor of normal procreation not just robs him of his status as heir, but renders him outright obsolete, and leaves him so morose that Queen Sareth is able to emotionally manipulate him into agreeing to her plan to cuckold Day (as petty revenge for Day assassinating her family), as being the true father of her child will give him the purpose and legacy he's desperate for.
• In Juukou B-Fighter, Shadow/Black Beet suffers from this. Originally created to defeat the B Fighters by his master, he eventually starts to question his own existence and his loyalty starts to waver. Then, it is revealed that he is an actual clone of Takuya/Blue Beet and eventually become obsessed with killing Takuya in order to prove his own existence and in order to gain immortality as he is dying due to being a short-lived clone who was only created to serve his purpose in defeating the B Fighters. He eventually ditch his master to fight for himself.
• In Legends of Tomorrow, Ava Sharpe discovers that she's just one of hundreds of mass-produced clones from 2213, recruited by Rip and given a false identity. Rip then also admits that she's Ava #12. He keeps replacing them after they die, which doesn't help her confidence.
• Orphan Black deals with this extensively as part of the premise. Even though all the clones use real-world science (meaning they all lived separate lives and had childhoods), the angst part comes in when they realize the vast conspiracy connecting them. The only one who doesn't experience a crisis of identity upon learning the truth is transgender (female to male), meaning he has already gone through a crisis of identity, so he takes the news in stride.
• Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode "Demon", two crewmembers come into contact with a fluid substance on a previously uninhabited planet which causes the substance to gain consciousness. In the end, the whole crew allow themselves to be perfectly copied so that the clones can build a life on this planet. "Course: Oblivion" reveals that the clones quickly forgot their true identity, assumed the identities of the Voyager crew and tried to "get home" to Earth as well. A new technology causes their bodies to destabilize, which leads to their memories resurfacing and lots of angst.

Music

• The Who's song "905" features a clone, who is presumably the 905th iteration of the line, lamenting his inability to do anything original whatsoever.
• Mutter by Rammstein is about a cloned child who is angry about never having a mother—or even a name, for that matter.
• The page quote is provided by Hawkwind from the song Spirit of the Age, about a clone with angst.

Tabletop Games

• Promethean: The Created: The Created, being almost-people cobbled together by mad demiurges seeking to play god by creating life from nothing, tend to get this in spades. Their lives tend to be made even harder because they can't spend much time around regular humans without those humans subconsciously becoming freaked out about them, with effects ranging from minor distaste to blaming them for all the problems or thinking of them being nothing but uppity tools that need to be reminded of their place in things to outright exhorting others to grab the Torches and Pitchforks to destroy the monster in their midst.
• In Paranoia, all PCs are clones, and on death are replaced with duplicate clones with the character's memories and personality. They have plenty of reason to get the blues^note which is itself treason, as Happiness Is Mandatory, especially if your Security Clearance is below Blue, as repeated cloning can lead to personality quirks and full-blown psychoses, not to mention Clone Degeneration. Oh, and being a mutant is treason — this leads to the situation of mutants executed by other clones for treason when discovered, but their replacement clone instantly arriving can't be executed again until it's proven to also be a mutant. Due to inherent problems with the cloning system, they may come back with a different mutation!

Toys

• Hydraxon II in BIONICLE is the exact copy of the original Hydraxon jailer who died during a great prison break. He was created from the body of Dekar, a normal Matoran whose memories have been suppressed by Hydraxon's. Presenting him evidence of his true being just makes him angrier and sink deeper into denial, causing him to think that everyone trying to explain that he's not the original is tricking him. Interestingly, the real Hydraxon is still alive on a Respawn Point, but the two never met since the series had been canceled.

Video Games

• In Baldur's Gate II, you run into a character called the "Enraged Clone" while escaping Irenicus' dungeon. The clone is completely insane, thinks you are Irenicus, and attacks you. She declares that she could never be "her" no matter how often memories and feelings are forced on her. Judging by the other tanks in the room she is far from the first attempt. We don't find out who the poor clone is supposed to replace until much, much later.
• BlazBlue: Continuum Shift: Clone angst befalls Noel Vermillion, revealed in the first installment to be a clone of a young girl called Saya. It's exploited to hell and back by the Big Bad Hazama, whose great scheme is to Break the Cutie, make her embrace her Superpowered Evil Side and go on an omnicidal rampage. In the end, it takes a violent intervention from Ragna combined with a speech about how Clones Are People, Too to finally snap poor Noel out of it.
• Borderlands 2: Discussed when the Hyperion Corporation advises you not to think about the fact that the current you is just a digital reconstruction of the original.
• Fallout 4 has a mechanical example in the form of Nick Valentine. He's a discarded prototype Synth who woke up in a garbage dump one day with the memories and personality of a pre-War detective who volunteered for some brain-scanning science experiment. Nick has since made a place for himself in the Commonwealth as a Private Detective, and a good one at that, but for all his accomplishments he still agonizes about not being his own man, even though he's grateful toward the original Detective Valentine for giving him his skills and ethics. His personal quest involves hunting down a (ghoulified) mob boss that Detective Valentine was never able to bring to justice, if only to tie up the last loose end from the "original" Nick's life.
• At the end of Gaia Online, Labtech X reveals his plot to create an army of Animated Humongous Mecha and take over Gaia...and also his motivation: he's a clone of Johnny K. Gambino, who abandoned him in favor of his naturally-born son Gino.
• Halo Infinite: One of the big climatic moments involves the revelation that The Weapon is in fact an exact copy of Cortana, who by the time of the game has committed many atrocities as part of her Created uprising against the rest of the galaxy. When she finally learns the Awful Truth, combined with the knowledge of what Cortana has done, Weapon is justifiably horrified, and even restores her deletion protocols, wanting nothing to do with what she could potentially become. Master Chief, however, refuses to do so, expressing his faith that The Weapon will not follow the same path as Cortana.
• Hitman: Codename 47: Subverted. The protagonist uncovers at the end of the game that he's the end-result of a dedicated cloning program. His origin is cause for significant strife later in his life, but he's never all that choked up over it — he just kills everyone.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn this turns out to be Aloy's backstory. She is really a clone of the original scientist that created the world she inhabits, as a last desperate attempt to save humanity when the AI running this system fails. The AI's last act was to create Aloy as a means to reboot itself, as her DNA would allow her to literally open doors that no one else could. The discovery of being created for this sole purpose and not being born naturally proves devastating.
• Horizon Forbidden West would introduce another clone of Elisabet Sobeck in the form of Beta, who was created by Far Zenith in order for them to gain access to the Zero Dawn facilities to steal GAIA for themselves. As a result of her abusive treatment by them, she spends most of the game being pessimistic as well as angsting about whether or not she could live up to Elisabet or even Aloy once she's rescued, even ranting as to what her defect is. It takes a heart-to-heart conversation with the latter about Rost for Beta to begin accepting who she was as a person different then her fellow clones.
• Dark Pit from Kid Icarus: Uprising is not happy about being a clone. Borne from a magic mirror that creates Evil Knockoffs, he spends the entirety of level six running away because he doesn't see why he has to fight Pit, then spends the rest of the game as a Tsundere trying to prove himself as his own man not shackled to Pit's legacy (though that doesn't stop the two from teaming up). Dark Pit's Divergent Character Evolution uses a curious inversion where the more comfortable Dark Pit is with his existence and the more he makes himself his own man, the more similar to regular Pit his fighting style becomes: in level six he tries "kiting" the player as well as outright hiding, but later in the game you get to play as Dark Pit, and his style is as identical to Pit's as you want to make it.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The Riku Replica in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories lives a sad existence, constantly trying to live up to or replace "the real thing." There's a funny omake at the end of the manga that jokes about just how sad it is.
  • All Nobodies (shells of former beings who have lost their hearts) experience at least some of this, with Roxas, Sora's Nobody, highlighting it the most. Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] reveals that their angst is for naught, as Nobodies are the natural state of beings who lost their hearts, and are not inherently self-contradictory. Xemnas only fed them false information because he wanted to turn them into Master Xehanort's heart tanks.
  • Xion from Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Mingling with the aforementioned Nobodies of Organization XIII, it is later revealed that Xion is actually a replica, in the same vein as Riku Replica, created to replace Roxas should he prove himself to be useless to the organization, meaning she has even less worth than Nobodies, being artificial humans who are never meant to exist. Not only that, but towards the end of the game, she learns that by continuing to live, she is unwittingly harming many people, including those she cares about (as long as she exists, Sora can never wake up, and Roxas will grow weaker and weaker until he ceases to exist). In other words, she has to die for The Needs of the Many.
• Mass Effect:
  • Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect 2 is a heavily-modified clone of a ridiculously rich businessman with two duplicates of his X chromosome, and has some major confidence issues on the subject. She also has a genetic twin sister, who is (quite realistically, actually) sixteen years younger and an exact clone. She has fewer issues, primarily because she doesn't know that Miranda exists (Unless you take the Paragon ending to her Loyalty Quest). Lair of the Shadow Broker adds more to this, as it turns out she's infertile, most likely as a result of her genetic engineering; whether this was intentional on her father's part or if it was the fluke that led him to declare Miranda a failure is open to interpretation.
  • Shepard angsts after their resurrection by Cerberus in the second game, even asking Jacob early on if they were a clone, though Jacob states that since he saw their "dead" body filled with wires and tubes, he's pretty sure they're not a clone and Shepard was instead reconstructed. The exact details of what the Lazarus Project actually did however are left vague.
  • In Mass Effect 3, files recovered during the assault on the Cerberus base leave the question even more open-ended, as it was revealed that Shepard was actually braindead when their body was recovered. Cue Shepard having a moment of existential crisis at whether or not they are who they think they are.
    Shepard: I don't remember anything. Maybe they really just fixed me... Or maybe I'm just a high-tech VI that thinks it's Commander Shepard.
  • The Citadel DLC has the villain be revealed to be a clone of Shepard, who lacks their memories and was created by Cerberus simply to serve as "spare parts" if Shepard ever got injured. Part of the clone's resentment towards Shepard seems to stem from the Illusive Man preferring to bring back a corpse, rather than use a copy.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: This is the motive for everything Makoto Kagutsuchi does as the homunculus clone of the WDO's Number One, as it's his self-awareness of being a homunculus clone that drives him to protect Kanai Ward's defective homunculi by any means necessary, which includes bringing the main detectives to Kanai Ward and using them as pawns.
• Metal Gear:
  • The series loves clones. Liquid Snake feels inferior to his "brother" Solid Snake because Solid was supposedly given all the dominant "soldier genes" and Liquid got all of the recessive ones from their clone-source (they mean alleles, but hey: turns out it was the other way around, showing genes aren't the only thing that determine your fate). While MGS-verse clones still have to grow up from scratch, once they hit about thirty they start undergoing rapidly accelerated aging, which seems to work at the speed the character designers dictate.
  • Metal Gear Ac!d 2-verse Snake gets a tomato in the face when it's revealed he is a clone of Solid Snake. Which would make him a clone of a clone.
• Neo Contra has its moment when Bill Rizer finds out that he was really just part of an experiment to replicate a legendary hero, which drives him into a brief Heroic BSoD.
• Never7: Though cloning is legal and increasingly normalized, Haruka has a deep inferiority complex due to being a clone that manifests as trying to act like an Emotionless Girl.
• In P.N.03 the main character, Vanessa Z. Schneider comes across a clone of herself during one of the main story missions. At the end of the game, it's revealed that the client paying her is another clone. It's slightly subverted in that the original person is unknown and that while Vanessa is somewhat disturbed the client knew about it from the beginning and doesn't mind.
• Resident Evil 6: Carla Radames was turned into a clone of Ada Wong by Derek C. Simmons. She was firmly convinced that she was the real deal, and when she learns the truth, she decides to take her revenge on Simmons, as well as prove herself superior to the real Ada.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: Konoe is upset when she learns that she's actually a clone of the real Konoe and was receiving the latter's memories in order to become an Unwitting Pawn for Par Mythos. She decides to continue living and finding her purpose despite being a clone, and does her damndest to survive in a brutal boss fight against True Konoe. Unfortunately, her power is far below the original's, so she dies in the post-boss cutscene without being able to accomplish anything.
• Space Station 13: Subverted/Averted depending on the server. Doctors are encouraged to tell newly cloned patients that they were "in an accident" and "bumped their head" and "barely survived, thank God" to save this from happening. Played straight if a new doctor screws up and decides to tell the patient. On other, less RP oriented servers, cloning is just seen as a means to an end, and the implications are largely ignored.
• StarCraft 2: This is part of a side plot for Fenix in Legacy of the Void. At first, he believes he is Fenix from the original Starcraft games, which both Artanis and the player know is false, as Fenix died. As time goes on, Fenix begins to realize this fact, and the fact that he is not a dragoon (a robotic suit used for heavily injured Protoss that still allows for combat), and is actually a mechanical reproduction that had the memories of Fenix downloaded into the body. Artanis assures him that he deserves the title of Fenix, that he is indeed a noble warrior with the heart of the original. After much confusion about who he therefore is, he decides to choose his own path, and comes out of this depression with a new outlook and name: Talandar. The epilogue states that Talandar became a leader to the other purifiers who, like him, are just robotic duplicates downloaded with the memories and personality of other deceased Protoss warriors.
• In Star Wars The Force Unleashed II, the protagonist is a clone of the original Starkiller from the first game. He's not particularly happy about this.
• In Styx: Master of Shadows, The Styx that the player controls turns out to be but an expendable clone the original Styx created to help further his own goal of obtaining the Heart of the world tree. The clone realizes that all his thoughts and purposes about obtaining the heart of the world tree are not actually his own thoughts; they are all orders from the original Styx as he plays the clone like a puppet. The clone is so pissed about this prospect he sets out to kill and take over the original Styx, and decides to oppose every goal Styx has just because those are the only thoughts he is certain to be his own.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2:
  • The game gives us Wodan Ymir, a W Number android based both physically and mentally on Sanger Zonvolt, who died in the Shadow Mirror universe. Wodan resolves his clone angst at the conclusion of the Earth Cradle arc with a Dying Moment of Awesome. Even Sanger, the original, wept Manly Tears at Wodan's death as a true warrior fighting for his cause. Outside the fourth wall, the character was created so that the game could use Sanger's incarnation in Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden as the "Sword of Magus" without it feeling wrong based on his characterisation and development in the previous Original Generation game.
  • Ingram Plissken. There have been so many clones of him made by the Balmar empire in order to keep possessing over the Time Diver, that a lot of them have identity issues.
• Tales of the Abyss:
  • The game has an analogue of cloning known as fomicry, which uses pure magic to create an identical copy of an original at the time of replication (dodging the aging issue) and without any memories. Most of the game's replicas use many of the pitfalls of this trope, including plenty of wangst about not being real. In one case it's even two-sided between replica and original: Luke's Tomato in the Mirror moment when he realizes that not only is he a replica, but that he was created just so his original could be kidnapped without anyone noticing, and Asch's continual resentment that his replica stole his life, and is in his own eyes an unworthy successor to his normal identity.
  • Replication has a tendency of permanently weakening the person being cloned, as demonstrated by the cheagle original and clone. If that isn't a good reason to have being-replicated cloning angst, what is?
  • Aside from this, however, the game does take a serious look at the Clone Angst trope, including the Replacement Goldfish factor, and the cast generally treat the replicas with the respect they're due as living beings. It would be hard for them not to, what with the protagonist being one and all...
• Subverted in XCOM: Chimera Squad by Half-Human Hybrid Cherub. He was The Pollyanna and rarely let anything get to him, despite his fellow hybrid Zephyr bullying him for being a clone and calling him "Knockoff". When it's discovered that the leader of the Sacred Coil gang was the man he was cloned from, his only concern is that the others will hold it against him but Director Kelly reassures him that nobody thinks of him that way.
  • In fact, Zephyr was an inversion as she felt isolated by the fact she wasn't a clone. The hybrids were a mass-produced Clone Army while Zephyr was one of the scant few who started out human, and as a result she felt like she didn't belong when she was with the all-hybrid Skirmishers.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive:
  • The webcomic plays this depressingly straight at first, but ultimately subverts it. Elliot's magical Opposite-Sex Clone Ellen starts out believing she has no place in the world, only to find the rest of the cast are willing to accept she's more than "a girl copy of Elliot" even before she's fully come to accept it herself. Elliot himself is extremely protective of her, even during her first day of existence when the psychological trauma made her a little crazy and she was basically trying to ruin his life.
  • We find out much later exactly how un-bothered he really was. When she asks him whether he wasn't confused by the whole thing, he responds that it was "pretty simple, actually":
    Ellen: (in disbelief) Really. The spontaneous creation of a female clone with all your memories. That was simple.
    Elliot: "She's family. Help her." Not that complicated.
    Ellen: ...
• Homestuck: The first major instance of time travel in the story ends with the version of Dave from the Bad Future remaining in the new timeline as a duplicate to the new version of himself, and fusing with his past self's Sprite. Despite being two versions of the same person who share all personal history up to the point where they diverge, which at the point where he gets back to is less than a day gone from the new timeline's perspective, it's very clear that the other characters see him as a sort of "secondary" Dave, such as his own best friend referring to his timeline's Dave as "the real Dave" to Davesprite's face. This ends up giving Davesprite serious issues with identity and self-worth, as he eventually starts to internalize the idea of actually being just a "spare" version of himself.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Molly's doppelgänger Galatea in the "There But For the Grace" story arc. Raised in an unloving environment, she grew up to be paranoid with an Übermensch complex, but now seems to have calmed down from her clone angst and gotten a reasonably happy ending — Walking the Earth for a bit before The Bus Came Back and she became one of the major characters in the strip.
• Latchkey Kingdom: Rose gets this fairly often. As a monstrous shadow double of Willa Dragonfly, she can't speak, and she can't fight in dungeons because she can't hold a sword. She's told Willa that she's the real one a few times. She's joined a support group titled "Living with curses". It's more of a "Deep existential inferiority complex" than simple "angst".
• Subverted in MoringMark - TOH Comics. Willow and Hunter discover that Boscha's daughter Jay is a Grimwalker and worry about her going though this, but it turns out that's she's known since she was five and doesn't actually care. She isn't even above joking about it with her friends.
• Narbonic: The title character, Helen B. Narbon, is a clone of her mother. (The "B" stands for "Beta".) Considering Helen Alpha (a boxed-wine-swilling, antagonistic shrew of the most hilarious sort), there's more to this notion than just facetious antagonism. Rather than spending her time locked in an identity crisis, Helen faces a supercharged version of every woman's fear that she will one day turn into her mother.
• Schlock Mercenary: After Kaff Tagon sacrifices himself to save his ship and crew during the Uli-Oa mission, he is grieved for and mourned over four months until his father finally decides to clone him from his last RED-REO backup, which took place 42 minutes before his death. The new Tagon is quickly apprised of his circumstances by Tailor, who deliberately lets him know he's not really the original Tagon in order to allow him to continue to believe in agency and free will. While everyone else mostly treats Tagon like he's the original, he is very aware that he's not, and quickly grows concerned that he may not live up to the original's example.
  • Several years earlier, Gav (originally from Nukees and having since appeared all over the place) found himself cloned several hundred million times in an effort to rescue the also-cloned captives of an F'Sherl'Ganni Bu'uthandi. (It's okay if you can't pronounce it. The transliteration is off anyway, and it's a bowdlerization of a much longer phrase.) Anyway, while many of them are just as happy to be themselves as always, some take towards extraordinary means to differentiate themselves, such as full-body mods and even brain mods which give them different skills and personalities, even different genders. This eventually turns out to be extremely troublesome when the Gavmunity over on the Oisri artifact becomes a high-profile target.

Web Original

• In The Gamer's Alliance, Shamshir, Venom and Rune are clones of Jemuel who are active during the Great War. Although being effective antagonists who get the job done, they're still seen by their creator Dante as nothing more than failed experiments to resurrect the real Jemuel. Although the first two clones are content being relegated to assassins, Rune is much more bitter and ambitious and eventually ends up dedicating his life to surpassing Jemuel in power and cunning.
• Mahu: Defied in "Second Chance." The Galactic Commonwealth creates whole armies of clone soldiers whose only objective in life is to serve the nation. They are biologically engineered for war and thus it seems they have no emotions, as that may get in the way of their duties. Only one of every thousand happens to inherit some of the memories of the person who was cloned. They are immediately "disposed of" before they get a chance to brood.
• In A Rake by Starlight, Stebil Tanz admits to being a little bit defensive about not being the original, even though, legally, he is the same person.
• In Twig, Mary is a clone of a student of a minor politician who is designed to commit Murder-Suicide against her parents, and she struggles with differentiating herself from the actual Mary who she replaced, as well as the fact that her creator views her as basically disposable. This eventually drives her to make a Heel–Face Turn when the Lambsbridge Gang offers her the family she really wants.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Fern, a plant duplicate of Finn born from a cursed grass demon combining with a copy of Finn's soul, has all his memories and initially believes he's the original. He comes to terms with being a clone, trying to live up to his heroic legacy, but eventually cracks under the pressure (not helped by his tendency to pick the violent solution first) and attempts to Kill and Replace the original.
• Comically discussed in the Amphibia finale "The Hardest Thing": Anne is "saved" from her Heroic Sacrifice by the Powers That Be making an exact copy of her the instant before her death. Functionally, it's the same as if the clone was the original come Back from the Dead, but she offhandedly mentions she might have an existential crisis about it later.
• Played for Black Comedy in Dead End: Paranormal Park; when Barney is killed in a Sadistic Game Show, Norma and Pugsley use the lifeline to bring him back. Rather than revive the dead Barney, it instead makes a copy of him with all his memories, resulting in him seeing his own dead body turn to dust right in front of him. And then he ends up seeing the dead body again while time travelling in the finale of the second season.
  Barney: When we get back, uh, remind me to call my therapist!
• DuckTales (2017):
  • In the Grand Finale "The Last Adventure!", May and June struggle because they were cloned for one purpose and they failed in that, and know that Bradford will destroy them without a thought once his plan succeeds. They get a Rousing Speech about family from their progenitor Webby, make a Heel–Face Turn, and help the Duck family save the day, and end up adopted by Donald afterward.
  • Meanwhile, Webby herself has an identity crisis when she finds out she's a clone and everything she thought she knew about herself was a lie, but soon remembers that family is what one makes of it and rouses herself to go save her family. Then she finds out she's Scrooge's clone specifically and happily accepts him as her father.
• In the second season of The Hollow, Reeve and Adam get hit with this after the group learns that they're all digital copies of the previous season's characters, wondering what the point of surviving long enough to get to an offline server is if they aren't real and the flesh-and-blood versions of themselves are safely living their lives unaware that their clones even exist, and if living fake versions of those lives would have any meaning when they know the truth. At one point, they agree that just dying and getting hard reset without any memories might be the best option.
• Played for Laughs in Invincible (2021) with the Mauler Twins, who argue frequently with one another over who is the clone and who is the original. This is due to the process by which cloning is done, wherein one Mauler not only clones his body, but his mind too, copying his mind and his memories into the brain of the clone, thus giving the clone the belief that he, too, is actually the original. In the second season, this dynamic gets turned on its head when, after becoming horrifically disfigured in an explosion, a Mauler creates a clone. The original's disfigurement makes it very obvious that he's the original, distressing the clone greatly...at least until the clone offs his creator and goes about making his own clone, thus resetting the status quo.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Too Many Pinkie Pies", Pinkie clones herself as a way of being able to spend more time with her friends. Then the clones start cloning themselves leading to dozens of Pinkie clones running amok. The trope is inverted in that it's the original Pinkie Pie who has an existential crisis.
• In The Owl House, Hunter learns that he's not a witch like he thought, but a Grimwalker modeled after Belos's late brother Caleb. This kickstarts a massive identity crisis, frankly not helped by the fact that Belos has killed dozens of Hunter's "brothers" in the past, and would have killed Hunter too if Luz hadn't saved him. Hunter tries his very best to hide his true nature from Gus and Willow, and swears Luz to secrecy as well. Interestingly enough, it's not the Grimwalker-part that Hunter has the most trouble with, but the fact that he believes everyone will hate him once they learn he's a clone of someone who he thinks was an evil witch hunter.
• ReBoot: There's a clone of Bob due to Megabyte stealing Bob's code. Original Bob starts to think he is the clone, until the clone is revealed to be Megabyte in disguise.
• In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Hordak is a defective clone of Horde Prime. He starts off unperturbed at being a clone and servant of his progenitor, but is ashamed that he is imperfect and thus unworthy of his brother's love. It takes Entrapta's friendship for him to realize he can be whoever he wants to be.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • In season five, Dean learns from his father's colleague that he himself is a clone, and he carries this grief all throughout the season. At the end of it, when Dean finally spills the news to Hank, he instead completely averts it, finding it to be actually really awesome and helping Dean move on.
  • In the Finale Movie Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, after spending the previous two seasons strongly implied to be Rusty's half brother, a blood test confirms that the Monarch is actually a slightly altered clone of Rusty, with 2% Baboon DNA added in to offset hairloss (which also increases his aggressiveness). The Monarch is understandably devastated to learn that he's a clone of his Arch-Enemy at first, having Villainous BSoD and contemplating retirement, until his wife reframes it as the ultimate Cain and Abel situation and the Monarch proclaims that he will continue to arch Rusty, while proclaiming that he is Rusty's better self.

Real Life

• Identical twins, triplets, etc. are technically naturally occurring clones, produced when a single fertilized egg splits into two or more (which, as far as scientists can tell, happens randomly - Hereditary Twinhood doesn't apply to identicals, contrary to many TV shows). Most seem fine with it. Except for cases when the two are constantly compared to each other, and worse, forced by their parents to wear identical clothes. Still, that's the result of social pressure, not anything inherent to the fact they're biologically identical. Though this certainly wasn't the case in the less enlightened periods in human history, when twins were considered an ill omen or a sign of outright demonic taint.

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