Cloning Blues – TV Tropes

"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 artificial clones have to start at conception and go through childhood all over again, and can even have phenotypes that vary from their parent, 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 forebearers' 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. But Fridge Logic kicks in and makes this Wangst when you realize that clones occur in Real Life all the time; they're called identical twins, and they generally don't have existential crises over it. 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 biological clones at all they're robot doubles, or copies created by the good old transporter. These have more reason to be exact xerox copies but they get even less respect. Note that all instances of actual cloning in Real Life require a live animal of the same species with a womb to carry the cloned animal to term. Science fiction tends to ignore this requirement competely, which only enforces the Trope. Unrelated to Something Blues, and to cloning Proto Man (i.e. Blues). See also Scale of Scientific Sins and Creating Life. Closely related to Expendable Clone. Contrast with Clones Are People Too, where they do get to live their own lives. Warning: This trope is often introduced as a Plot Twist, so expect spoilers.

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Fanfic

"Are you an angel?" his voice is the sound of leaves brushing over a tombstone. This the awful question, because if he hadn't asked it, he would still love her. His eyes are so blue, so strange set into the roped scars on his head.

"I don't know," she says, and as soon as her voice sounds, she knows it is the wrong answer. The first time he asked, when she was five, she said she was whatever he wanted her to be. Her left arm had never mended right.

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.

Films Live Action

Angier: "You have no idea how much courage it took to step into that machine every night, not knowing if I'd be the Prestige . . . or the man in the box."

Literature

Carib: You're [Leia] a sophisticated woman, a politician and diplomat, fully accustomed to dealing with the whole spectrum of sentient beings. And you're good at it. Yet you, too, feel uncomfortable in our presence. Admit it.

Cordelia: Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention.

Live Action TV

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In the valley of silly clones, where the people turn to stone In the valley of silly clones, people made of styrofoam In the valley of silly clones, where the people die alone

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AyleeBot: According to the latest available galactic census data, blue-haired, Caucasian human males are now the largest single sapient ethnicity in the galaxy. You outnumber several entire sapient species.

McNinja: How'd it go? Did we do it?! Ben Franklin: You're one of the clones. Get in line. McNinja: Aw...

McNinja: So...you just cloned...a clone of me. But they...don't want to kill me? Clone: I am far too busy coming to terms with the existential dread of being a clone.

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Cloning Blues - TV Tropes