Replacement Goldfish / Literature

• In the German novel The Adopted Room by A. Michaelis, 11-years old boy Achim is adopted by a family. He later discovers that they had a son called Arnim who died in an accident when he was 4 - and they were born very close to each other. He contemplates that this is the reason he was adopted by them, despite having asthma.
• The The Berenstain Bears book The Berenstain Bears Lose a Friend features a literal replacement goldfish like the Monk example below. Sister's goldfish dies and Papa gets her a lookalike to try to keep her from noticing and getting sad. It only works for a short time.
• The main victim in The Body in the Library is this to elderly Mr. Jefferson, after both his son and daughter die in a plane crash.
• Caliphate: Hamilton loses his girlfriend Lauren right at the start of the novel when she is killed in an operation against Filipino terrorists and spends the next 8 years grieving her death. When he is called to infiltrate the titular fundamentalistic state, he falls in love with Christian slave girl Petra who looks so similar to Lauren that Hamilton believes she could pass off as her younger sister. At the end of the story after he manages to save the day, he proposes to her in marriage.
• Casteel Series: Heaven Casteel dyes her hair blond to resemble the mother she never knew. Problem is, this causes her father (who already seems to be displaying an unhealthy interest in her) to confuse her with her mother (whom he raped, resulting in Heaven's birth), to the point where he tries to force himself on her. This is still a subverted example, as she chose to dye her hair rather than being pressured into it, but in the next book, her daughter is pressured into doing this by her grandfather (she's living with him, recovering from injuries sustained in the car accident that killed her parents). Sure enough, she nearly becomes his victim as well.
• In Celeste, Celeste is forced to take on the identity of her dead twin by her mother. Her dead twin brother. Yeah.
• In The Children of Húrin, a few months after Túrin's blonde sort-of Love Interest Finduilas dies he finds a naked, blonde amnesiac girl lying unconscious on her grave. He sees this as a sign, and they fall in love. Pity she's actually his long-lost sister.
• Clade: After The Plague, a lucrative market arises for photorealistic computer sims of dead people, created based on photographs, videos, and the memories of the people ordering the sim. Some customers want the sim to be as much like the real person as possible, but others want sims that lack any disappointing traits, or that repeatedly apologize for everything they did wrong during life.
• In The Cyber Dragons Trilogy, a rather dark example. Miles' niece, Rebecca, was killed in an attempted rescue of her from kidnappers. Overwhelmed with guilt, he accepted an offer by Fate to replace his niece with a bioroid replacement as well as an erasure of his memory that she was ever killed in the first place. In the end, Miles gets himself killed and Kei adopts the bioroid as his daughter.
• At the end of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, in the final book, Susannah travels through a portal to an alternate version of New York where she meets an Eddie and Jake Toren, a different Eddie and Jake from the ones she knew, from a little further out on the beam from the keystone world, but close enough for her.
• Discussed in Diadem from the Stars. After Vajd tells his young lover Aleytys in glowing terms about her Missing Mom Shareem of Vrithian, Aleytys becomes angry with him, thinking he wanted Shareem and is just settling for her daughter. Vajd insists that's not true: Shareem was just the Precocious Crush of a child and what he feels for Aleytys is real.
• In Doctrine of Labyrinths, Diokletian spent decades pining for his former lover Methony, so when he meets her son, Felix, who bears an alarming resemblance to her, he tries to pursue a sexual relationship with him. Although Felix is gay and not generally that fussy about who he sleeps with, his vanity is wounded by the idea of being a mere stand-in for his dead mother, and he points out that Diokletian could even potentially be his biological father (Methony was known for her promiscuity but Diokletian is certainly one of the men she was sleeping around the time Felix was conceived.) Diokletian never really forgives Felix for refusing to indulge his frustrated fantasies of Methony, but he is at least suitably squicked when he realises his feelings might be incestuous, and makes no further attempt to act on them.
• A Dog's Life is about a stray dog named Squirrel living on her own and looking for her brother Bone, who was taken by humans when they were puppies. Along her journey, Squirrel comes across a small female called "Moon" that looks very much like Bone would have as an adult. They become friends and travel together, but Moon ends up hit by a car one day.
• In "A Double-Dyed Deceiver", a story by O. Henry, the Llano Kid acts as this for a grieving mother whose son is missing, as part of a plot with the local US consul to steal a load of money from the family safe. He ends up warming to his new 'mother' so much that he ultimately decides to stay behind and live as her son, and threatens to kill the consul if he makes trouble. The story takes a dark twist, when it's revealed that the Kid essentially pulled a Kill and Replace, because the reason why he's in the area in the first place is because he killed a man in a bar fight and skipped town. And the man he killed? The missing son.
• In Double Identity, Bethany was cloned from her parents' deceased daughter Elizabeth.
• Dune:
  • Duncan Idaho (who was killed in the first book) is eventually resurrected as a series of clones (which become pretty much disposable at one point). Eventually, the Idaho clones learn to awaken their latent memories of the past.
  • Also in the first book, Paul's first son — Leto II — is killed by the Harkonnens. In Dune Messiah, he has another son and names him... Leto II.
• In Edith Pattou's East, main character Rose was born to replace her dead older sister Elise, their mother's favorite of her (altogether) eight children.
• In the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the Doctor's companion Fitz is abducted by Faction Paradox, lives with them for several years and apparently dies. The Doctor replaces him with Kode, a several generations removed copy created from the original's biodata, who he moulds into a duplicate of Fitz. Things become awkward when it turns out the original Fitz is still alive...
  So how do you feel, Doctor, now you know? Now you realise? Like a dad who pushes his kid up to the post office in a pram then only remembers him when he's on the bus home? Like a kid who gets a new dog, then finds his old one wasn't put down after all?
• In Peter Dickinson's book Eva, scientists have developed a procedure where the neural patterns of one creature can be 'regrown' in the brain of another creature, thereby preserving the mind. One of the scientists is in a horrible car accident with his wife and daughter. When his daughter is left shattered and in an irreversible coma, the procedure is done on her, placing her mind in the body of a chimpanzee. It's a roller coaster from there.
• In Fate of the Jedi, Abeloth tries to force Ben Skywalker and Vestara Khai to take the place of The Son and The Daughter, whom she had once been The Mother to back when she was mortal.
• In The Fault in Our Stars, considering how Hazel says her and Caroline's "cancer selves" could be sisters, Augustus's determination to get to know her as soon as he sees her (insisting she come to his house to watch a movie right then without actually asking her or considering that she might have other plans), and his giving her his Wish, essentially his most valuable possession, a mere two and a half weeks after meeting her, it really sounds like Hazel is Augustus's for Caroline, at least at the beginning of their relationship.
• In Forever Amber, the heroine Amber marries the creepy, elderly Earl of Radclyffe. It turns out he's attracted to her because of her resemblance to his long-lost love, Judith, and even has Amber wear Judith's wedding gown. Neither Radclyffe nor Amber realize that Judith was Amber's mother.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Only In Death, after Caffran's death, Dalin Criid is slotted into his father's place in the Ghosts. He bitterly resents it but is aware that he can do nothing to stop it.
• In The Giver, if a child dies, the Community says his name less and less during the day as a way of allowing them to say goodbye to him. The parents can then apply for a replacement child who will be given the same name.
• Daphne in The Golden Oecumene made a replacement for herself as a last gift to her lover before retreating into a Lotus-Eater Machine, making its personality an exaggerated parody of everything she thinks her lover wanted in her. Cloning is touched upon, but the duplicate eventually develops its own sense of selfhood—and in any event, the lover is also an Artificial Human, having been created from a computer simulation.
• In Hannibal, Hannibal seems to be trying to do this with Clarice by making her into a replacement for his dead younger sister. It's heavily implied that he succeeds, since the novel ends with Hannibal and Clarice becoming lovers and going on the run together.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry to Sirius Black. Harry's strong physical resemblance to his father James makes him a substitute for his best friend after Sirius escapes prison and then gets stuck going stir crazy in his parent's house in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This causes some tension between the two in the text when Harry is revealed to be less daring than James and Sirius is unable to handle it appropriately (saying things like "you're not so like your father at all" and "the danger is what would have made it fun for James"), and is reflected also in the film version when Sirius actually calls Harry by James' name in the battle scene where he dies. This Replacement Goldfish situation is also what prevents Sirius from being the father figure that Harry desires, and Harry from being the best friend that Sirius desires, neither are able to fully transition into the Godfather/Godson relationship because of their inability to get past the physical similarities that James and Harry had. Harry can't be the James that Sirius remembers because he never knew him, and Sirius can't be the father that Harry craves because he's trapped by the trauma of his youth.
  • Part of the reason why Harry and Cho's relationship failed is this. Cho latched onto Harry mostly because of his connection to her dead boyfriend Cedric.
  • Angelina dates Fred Weasley while they are in school (or at least went to the Yule ball with him once); after Fred dies, she marries his identical twin brother George.
• Hazel from The Heroes of Olympus starts out this way for her half brother Nico. They both know that he originally rescued her from the underworld after trying to retrieve his dead sister Bianca and finding that she had chosen to be reincarnated. The subject hovers (mostly) unspoken between them, but they eventually forge their own relationship independent of Nico's grief.
• In one of James Herriot's Yorkshire vet books, he is trying to clip the beak of a bird (a needed procedure for the health of the bird) belonging to an old, blind lady who is easily upset. The bird dies, and he stares with horror at it. He and the caretaker conspire to buy another exactly like it. The lady accepts it as the original. except she mentions the bird never sang so much before - clipping its beak did wonders!
• In The Hunger Games, Katniss can't help but see her little sister Prim in Rue, since Rue is the same age and roughly the same size as Prim. When Rue is dying, Katniss actually calls her "Prim" in her thoughts before correcting herself.
• In Jessica, Ruthie seems to have a rather odd version of this. Her Imaginary Friend, Jessica, is her constant companion, always eager to play whatever game Ruthie devises and willing to take the blame for Ruthie's actions. Ruthie's parents are unamused and do not play along. Shortly before starting kindergarten, they suggest that Jessica should stay home. Ruthie, of course, takes her along anyway. After spending the majority of the day homesick and unhappy with only Jessica for companionship, Ruthie is approached by a girl volunteering to be her partner. Ruthie, unsure, brightens up considerably when the girl's name happens to be Jessica. Soon they are best friends, illustrations showing them happily doing all the activities that Ruthie and the first Jessica enjoyed.
• In Little Women, Mr Laurence sees his late granddaughter in Beth as both were young girls who loved music. Beth becomes a favourite of his, and after her death, he tells her sister Jo that Jo "must be [his] girl now", to which Jo replies that she'll try to fill Beth's place. However, later books indicate that that role is filled by Amy after she becomes his granddaughter-in-law.
• Melody Logan in the Logan Series was a victim of this in regards to two characters; her cousin Laura and her mother Haille. Her Aunt Sara expected Melody to dress and act as Laura did, and treated her more like she was her daughter Laura and not her niece. Sara's husband Jacob and Laura's twin brother Cary were aware of what Sara was doing and despised Melody for it though Cary later fell in love with her. Because of her strong resemblance to Haille, Melody also faced considerable derision from the Logan Family because of Haille's Black Sheep status and the family merely transferred their hatred for Haille onto Melody.
• In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, in a moment of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy, sells his wife Susan and infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane at auction to a sailor named Richard Newson. Nearly twenty years later, Newson is presumed lost at sea and Susan and Elizabeth-Jane track Henchard down to re-unite the family. What Henchard does not learn until after Susan falls ill and dies is that his daughter Elizabeth-Jane died a few months after the auction; the Elizabeth-Jane who has returned is Newson's daughter, and was named in her dead half-sister's honour.
• The Monster Garden: After Monnie swims away, Alf gives Frankie two rabbits. She loves them, but they aren't the same as Monnie.
• In My Brother is a Superhero, Stellar wants to kidnap Zack in order to replace the version who died in his own universe.
• My Sweet Audrina has an odd twist to this trope. Audrina, the title character, is a girl living in the constant shadow of her elder sister who had died nine years before she was born, and her parents have absolutely no qualms about letting their daughter know that she was born and raised for the sole purpose of replacing her dead sister. But as it turns out, Audrina and her sister are one and the same. Audrina had a very sheltered life and, on one of the few times she was allowed to walk home without an escort, she was attacked and raped. She managed to get home safe and sound, but after a few suicide attempts her father forced her into electro-convulsive therapy in order to erase her memory of the event. Many of her supposed mental problems, as well as the personality defects her parents are constantly trying to fix, are caused by the initial treatment and the constant confusion her parents keep her in to maintain the amnesia. And, as it turns out, that's only one of her problems...
• In Neogicia, the female protagonist ends up mentored by a man whose daughter left home a few years previously. He is quick to state that this trope isn't in play after mentioning that he misses his daughter.
• In the Paradox Trilogy, John Brenton sees every daughter he works with as a replacement goldfish for Enna, even calling them by her name.
  Devi: That's your daughter, isn't it? Enna.
  Brenton: She's actually Mettou's daughter. I shot my last daughter years ago when she'd degenerated to the point where she was killing people in her sleep. But it makes no difference, they're all Enna to me.
• Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is an inversion of this. The second Mrs. de Winter spends most of the book failing to live up to the memory of Rebecca, her husband's first wife, who had drowned accidentally. She is explicitly told, often, that she doesn't measure up, by Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca's personal maid. The second Mrs. de Winter becomes more and more desperate in her attempts to live up to Rebecca's memory, because Mrs. Danvers has her convinced that that is what Maxim, her husband, wants. Just when the second Mrs. De Winter (she is never given a first name, and the book is a first person narrative) is near a breakdown, and Mrs. Danvers suggests that she throw herself out of a window, it is revealed that Maxim never really loved Rebecca, and in fact, came to hate her, because she was cruel, cold, manipulative, and unfaithful. Not only that, she had taunted him one night until he murdered her, by telling him she was pregnant with another man's child, which she intended that he would support. It doesn't end there, and Maxim is vindicated, so they can go on with their lives together.
• The Reynard Cycle: If he is to be believed, after the events of Defender of the Crown, Reynard plans on replacing Persephone with her own daughter, Larissa.
• The Rifter: John/Jath'ibaye takes up with the young Ourath because Ourath reminds him of Ravishan who is dead, even calling him by the wrong name sometimes. Not only is it not a satisfactory relationship, but Ourath conspires to murder Jath'ibaye. Jath'ibaye, with his habitual sense of guilt and responsibility, wonders if Ourath would have been a better person if he'd had a lover who appreciated him for himself as his first relationship instead of Jath'ibaye.
• Nurse Agnes Meredith in Septimus Heap starts hoarding dolls after losing her son Merrin in the first book — after all, with dolls you at least know what you are with.
• Discussed and finally subverted in Shaman of the Undead. Redhead suspects and outright accuses Brittle of treating Ida as new Lena Wolf, The Lost Lenore, but he disagrees, stating that they are different and it would be unfair to Ida.
• In The Silmarillion, Elrond and Elros may be possibly this for Maedhros, whose twin brothers, Amrod and Amras, had died. However, there is a high chance that they are actually this for their uncles, the seven-year-old Elured and Elurin, who were abandoned to starve to death in the woods in the wintertime after the Second Kinslaying by Maedhros's followers and who Maedhros desperately tried (and failed) to find.
• In the novel Skinned, if a person dies but their brain is intact, the brain is scanned and the information is placed into a human-like robot body. Sometimes a person will choose to have it done to themselves. The main character of the book, Lia, is "killed" in a car accident, but her parents choose to keep her around as an android. Needless to say, this causes many emotional difficulties for both the now-robot Lia and her family.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Sansa Stark is apparently one for her mother Cat's Unlucky Childhood Friend, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish. He can't seem to make up his mind if she's a younger and prettier Cat 2.0 or the daughter he would have liked to have had with Cat if they had married, and it's squicky as hell.
  • When Cersei gets separated from her beloved Jaime, she uses her cousin Lancel as one of these. Complete with sleeping with him.
  • While Robert Baratheon never really viewed Cersei for his lost love, Lyanna Stark, he did call her Lyanna’s name during sex, and that caused… problems, to say the least.
  • Daenerys is one for Jorah Mormont's estranged wife, Lynesse Hightower.
  • Daenerys herself has Daario Naharis to replace her dead husband Khal Drogo, and her three dragons to replace her miscarried son Rhaego (this miscarriage left her infertile).
  • Jon Connington sees Aegon VI Targaryen as a replacement for his dead friend (and possibly more than that), Aegon's father Rhaegar.
  • Ned Stark oddly sees himself as this, as both his title and his wife had been intended for his older brother Brandon, who was killed.
  • In a very screwed-up version of this trope, Theon Greyjoy ends up being made into a replacement for Ramsay Bolton's servant Reek, via horrific torture and mental conditioning.
• Kaladin collects young draftees into his squad as replacements for his dead brother Tien in The Way of Kings.
• Inverted and played straight in Dave Duncan's Strings. A proper explanation requires retelling half the novel. In short: the protagonist seems to have been raised to continue his grandmother's life's work after his father died in an accident. At the age of 18 he finds some oddities and concludes that he's probably his father's clone. Either that or his grandfather's clone for brain transplantation. All 3 versions prove wrong, he isn't going to replace anybody. But there are SEVERAL clones of his father, and grandmother did try to Raise Him Right This Time. None of them stay on Earth to work on the grandmother's portal project, however.
• Sweet Valley High series:
  • Twice, Steven ditches his girlfriend Cara to pursue girls who resemble his dead girlfriend Tricia. To make matters worse, he refuses to see either girl as her own person and instead tries to mold them into Tricia's image—the food they eat, places they go, interests that they have. Not until one of the girls finally blasts him for this and declares that she deserves better than being used as a substitute does he finally realize how unhealthy his behavior is.
  • Elizabeth falls for a guy who looks like her ex-boyfriend Todd (who had moved to Vermont), only to find out that he is a jerk.
  • Bill Chase falls for Elizabeth because both her looks and personality bear a strong resemblance to his own late girlfriend Julianne.
• In The Sword-Edged Blonde, it actually takes years, but due to flashbacks, it seems more immediate. Eddie's attraction to Cathy Dumont was cut short when she is murdered along with everyone else in town, but later, someone with the ability to arrange such things arranges for Liz, Cathy's sister to walk right in. Eddie realises that Cathy and Liz aren't the same person, but since Cathy wasn't actually as right for him as he might have thought, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
• In Tailchaser's Song, Roofshadow admits that she's drawn to Pouncequick because he reminds her of her deceased brother Snufflenose.
• Tarzan was the replacement for his ape mother's dead infant.
• Tuf Voyaging: The first thing Haviland Tuf did with the incredible biowar capabilities of the Ark was clone his dead cat Mushroom. Though he acknowledged the newborn kitten wasn't the same and named him Chaos instead, and didn't clone him or his other original cat Havoc when they died (mind, they'd had multiple litters of kittens by then and he kept most of them).
• The Underdogs novel Acceleration has a major reveal involving this trope. Shannon, the Antagonistic Offspring of the villain Grant, is a clone. The original Shannon Grant killed herself the day Grant took over England. Her father had her cloned, with as many of the original's memories as would transfer. The new Shannon stuck around for a while before killing herself again. Her father repeated the process until the fifth clone broke the cycle by running away and joining La Résistance.
• Lizzie, for Ripred in The Underland Chronicles. She reminds him of one of his deceased daughters.
• This is essentially the premise of The Vampire Diaries, when Stefan sees a girl who looks exactly like his girlfriend Katherine, the vampire who turned him and his brother, presumed dead for 150 years, and decides he has to get to know her. Since this happens at the start of the series, things don't go so smoothly as in most examples.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In Ethan of Athos, Terrance brings his wife's corpse to the best scientists money can buy and asks them to revive her. They can't, but offer to create a clone identical to Janine in looks, personality, and mannerisms — perhaps even with a few improvements. Terrance declines, but he does have the scientists splice her DNA into donor ovaries so that he can have thousands or millions of Janine's babies.
  • Averted with prejudice in Mirror Dance, by both Miles's and his mother Cordelia's emphatic refusal to treat Miles's clone Mark as anything but Miles's brother. One of the reasons for this is that in the setting, most civilized societies with cloning technology treat a clone as legally either the child of the person who originally commissioned its creation, or the sibling of the clone's genetic progenitor.
• In Ed McBain's novelette Whatever Happened to Annie Barnes? a ruthless, rich Italian, on discovering that the title character bears an uncanny resemblance to his lost love Francesca, uses psychological conditioning in an attempt to remake her into an exact copy of the deceased.
• Descarta of Within Ruin is originally one of these for Virgil's first love Ankaa. However he comes to love her for herself and decides not to put Ankaa's soul into her has he originally intended. Descarta is completely taken by surprise by this revelation.
• In Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell is always trying to replace what he's lost in his life, starting with his dog. Although he considers platitudes like "you can get another dog" stupid ^note and any pet owner can tell you it's not a good thing to say it is still, ironically, how he deals with the loss of his childhood pet. The Bella seen at the start of the first book is not the first, and every small dog he acquires as an adult gets the name (at one point his nieces are referred to as walking the current Bella). When his wife Liz dies, he has an affair with her sister and sometimes mistakes her for or outright calls her Liz. He names his falcons after his deceased wife, daughters, and sisters, which his hunting companions find somewhat strange. The only loved one he doesn't try to create a substitute for is Cardinal Wolsey, but then, he does something different in that case.
• You Have a Match: Savvy's parents had her by accident, gave her up for adoption, then regretted it and had Abby, who's a year and a half younger. Abby realizes she was a replacement baby.

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