Tomato in the Mirror



""My God... I'm a tomato!""

- Mayor Adam West, Family Guy

Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only... something's wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.

It looks like the town's been taken over by Puppeteer Parasite, and our hero's the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down.

But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: HE'S the fake! Cue screams of "What Have I Become?!" A robot, a clone, a ghost or nearly one, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn't the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was, complete with Fake Memories of a Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story.

In an ongoing series, it'll be a duplicate of one of the main characters. In a self-contained work, it'll just be someone who thinks they're human. Either way, it's an effective inversion of Puppeteer Parasite. Assuming the duplicate works through the immediate suicidal tendencies (and/or murderous intent of others) they may find themselves having to ask a Trial Balloon Question to see if "their" friends and family would still accept them.

Variation of the Tomato Surprise, hence the name. (Note the key difference is that here, the character doesn't know they're a tomato.) Compare I Am Who?, which is (usually) a much more pleasant surprise. The opposite of this is And Then John Was a Zombie. See also Expendable Clone and Dead All Along. For extra oomph, expect the tomato to break the mirror in frustration. If the surprise is the character discovering that they were the villain all along, that's The Killer in Me.

'''This is a Twist Ending Trope. Expect your tomatoes to be spoiled!'''

Advertising

 * Parodied / given a shout-out in this Adult Swim bump.

Anime and Manga

 * The Trope Namer (of sorts) is The Big O, to the point of main character Roger Smith actually crying out "I'm one of the tomatoes!" Yeah, it sounded dumb, but it was a shocking twist. But it gets weirder still near the end, when
 * also goes through this
 * The Bride of the Water God: Yeomha doesn't realize she is a doll with Nakbin's memories.
 * In D.Gray-man, it's eventually revealed that
 * The beginning of Darker than Black is rather brutal about this, with an added Obfuscating Stupidity Tomato Surprise. It spends the first episode and a half setting up a sickeningly obvious Meet Cute - then we abruptly find out that
 * The second season has one regarding secondary protagonist Suou Pavlichenko.
 * In Serial Experiments Lain when the eponymous character realizes in what is one perhaps the most dramatic and mind-bending reveal in a seriesful of dramatic and mind bending conspiracies that
 * Goku in Dragon Ball series:
 * He finds out from his long-lost brother Raditz at the beginning of DBZ that he is an alien (Saiyan) sent to kill all humans on Earth. He forgot his purpose and mellowed out after he fell off a cliff and hit his head as a child. It takes the death of to finally come to terms with his origins, resulting in his "I am the Super Saiyan Son Goku speech."
 * There's also a sort of in-universe example of this. Goku's friends have all known since soon after they met him that he once transformed into a giant ape monster and killed his own adopted father, but they keep it a secret from him. Goku eventually has his Tomato In The Mirror moment much later, but it's already been spoiled for the audience.
 * In Ergo Proxy,
 * This show gets a second one:
 * Deadman Wonderland, Shiro
 * In Star Driver,
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist, Number 66, formerly Barry the Chopper, causes Alphonse to doubt that he ever was human. This, coupled with his lack of memories regarding certain events about his childhood - well, you do the math.
 * Also,
 * Plus,
 * And a Bilingual Bonus:
 * In Gantz, this is what happens with Kishimoto. Apparently, she actually failed suicide, and the her that was sent to Gantz was actually a clone. When she gets sent back to the normal world, she sees that the other her is living normally at home, and she ends up having no place to go.
 * The same thing ended up happening to . Yikes.
 * Gate Keepers
 * Double-Subverted in Gravion:
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 00:
 * In Gunnm Daisuke Ido is driven into a Heroic BSOD when he discovers that
 * Desty Nova learnt the same thing about himself at some point before his introduction. It is not known if the truth drove him insane, or if his insanity helped him deal with the truth. Seeing as he was the only person who doesn't seem to care about their shared condition, it was likely the latter.
 * Much later on,in the sequel manga Last Order, Alita gets her own TITM - twice. The first is when she . The second is when . She's told this just as it's exchanged for her friend's,resulting in a literal breakdown of her nanomachine body.
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni has a borderline example:
 * Taikoubou from the Houshin Engi manga later finds out that he's actually
 * Kiddy Grade:
 * This also happens in the Reverse manga when
 * In King of Thorn, one of the protagonists turns out to be a tomato in the mirror.
 * In the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha,.
 * In the third season, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, there's a flashback showing
 * Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion, though she seemed to at least have a slight clue from the beginning that she was not quite normal, and may have actually known the whole thing.
 * She certainly knows more about what's going on than almost all of the other characters, but she's not confident about how many times she, she reacts to Kaworu with nothing but confusion, and some lines in episode 25 can be interpreted as implying that she doesn't know that she.
 * One episode of Paranoia Agent follows three people who meet in an online chat room and decide to make a suicide pact together. Throughout the episode, they attempt time and time again to kill themselves, and fail every time. In the end of the episode, one of them realizes that
 * RahXephon is riddled with examples (along with Luke, I Am Your Father revelations).
 * Rave Master:
 * Shakugan no Shana gets this out of the way with Yuji in the first episode—as Shana bluntly explains to him, the real Sakai Yuji was erased from reality and eaten by a Rinne. All that he is is a temporary placeholder, meant to ease the strain on existence caused by the erasing of the orginal, and once his power of existence runs out, he'll cease to exist as well and reality will arrange itself so that Sakai Yuji will never have existed in the first place.
 * Sola has a Wham! Episode where
 * Sorcerer Stabber Orphen:
 * Tenchi in Tokyo:
 * Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle falls under this with
 * Played with in xxxHolic when Yuuko reveals
 * This is the entire premise of Zegapain. Kyo believes that he is playing a video game in which he pilots a giant robot fighting against aliens trying to wipe out the computers that hold the brain patterns of the remnants of humanity, only to discover the "game" is the real world, and he is merely data in one of those computers.
 * Kitsune To Atori - One of three stories that have absolutely no relation to each other whatsoever. The plot of the first chapter was pretty confusing but involves a tale of two sisters. The younger sister, Atori, hates lies and sees the foxes (who have magical abilities and can transform into other forms) as deceitful and evil, which is also partly fueled by the fact that her older sister suffered a fox attack and now bears a scar on her eye, which she covers at all times. Thinking that her sister is being too lenient on the foxes, she becomes confused when she reassures her that "It's fine if your not honest, as long as you stay by my side." Later Atori finds her older sister removing their sword that cuts through spells and attacks her, assuming her to be a fox disguised as her sister. Through a series of revelations it's revealed that she and her sister had been lying all along. Atori is actually a fox and her "sister" used a spell to make her forget her painful past and live peacefully.
 * The third chapter of the manhwa, and the last one-third part anime movie of Shin Angyo Onshi invokes this. A young fisherman found Munsu and tells him that a miracle-doing physician in his island village is experimenting the dead. Munsu and Sando investigates the matter, and found out that said physician is indeed experimenting the dead. The twist came when Munsu tells the young fisherman to kill her beloved sister, which he tearfully done...
 * It is speculated that this trope applies to Munsu's Sando (Chun Hyang) as well. Many stronger Sando are animals/magical beasts that can take human form, as most clearly demonstrated by Hwang's Sando, who first can be seen as a giant wolf/bird hybrid beast but later presents herself as a little girl. The cute Chun Hyang was known as Mong Ryong's constant companion, and Mong Ryong himself is known as a veterinarian. It is not a far stretch to speculate that Chun Hyang is the same.
 * A stand-alone ero-manga titled Borderline uses this: a man falls in love with a mannequin, which then comes to life and makes love with him. It later turns out that they were both mannequins to begin with.
 * Puella Magi Madoka Magica has
 * It Gets Worse.
 * In the first episode of Mnemosyne, Kouki Maeno discovers that . Unusually, he actually takes it pretty well: after one Attempted Suicide, he settles down and grows into a well-adjusted man.
 * Cardcaptor Sakura hosts the second type: at the end of the first arc, the series takes an abrupt twist when the cast (and audience) learns that wasn't human. Needless to say, the character in question goes through several of the same angst and questioning of their own existence as is described above when they later find out themselves.
 * In Pandora Hearts, it is revealed that

Comic Books

 * The plot of the Spider-Man Clone Saga was going to originally resolve itself in this way, with the "clone" Ben Parker finding out that he was the original, while the "original" Peter Parker, whom comic book fans had been reading about since the original clone story in the '70s, would be revealed to actually have been the clone all along. And then Marvel Comics chickened out... (After the infamously long Clone Saga want back and forth at least a half-dozen times about which Spidey was the clone.)
 * This is the plot of the last Spirou and Fantasio comic by Tome and Jenry, Machine qui rêve.
 * The JLA's initial way of dealing with the White Martian threat was to hypnotize them into thinking that they are mere humans. This leads to an issue where Batman declares that several members of the JLA need to track down a great threat to the world: Bruce Wayne. Turns out that one of the brainwashed martians was working for Wayne as an assistant. After being involved in a plane wreck it loses its memories again and decides (from papers it had) that it is Wayne and takes his form (making it a double example of this trope: a martian who is forced to think it is human who then winds up thinking it is a different human).
 * The Reveal of as the mysterious Fourth Man in Planetary.
 * an even tighter fit for this trope is the revelation that
 * In Rising Stars, Poet asks Clarence Mack what he knows about the murders of the other Specials. Clarence discusses his own theories and uses his ability to enter the minds of others to show Poet his findings, when he realizes that
 * The Kevin Smith comic Green Arrow: Quiver features the titular hero, Oliver Queen, returned from the grave. This seems at first to be a typical comic book resurrection, but why does Oliver seem convinced that he never died at all, that everyone else is acting very odd, and that cellphones and modern computers are the sort of things only supervillains possess? Turns out that this is Ollie's body brought back to life, minus his soul. The Spectre wanted to resurrect him, but his soul was happy in heaven. So they compromised; Oliver's body was given new life, but with ten years of his history removed to avoid all the Wangst he would have otherwise gone through (as his life was in shambles when he died). In the end his body and soul are reunited, returning Ollie back to life for real this time.
 * A number of Skrulls believing themselves to be Marvel heroes have a bit of an identity crisis meeting their human counterparts during the Secret Invasion Crisis Crossover.
 * In an early issue of The Sensational She Hulk, our titular green goddess wakes up to see her headless body being used to provide a new mode of transportation for Chondu the Mystic's head.
 * There's a short Marvel comic called "The Creature". A man finds an alien's diary and runs around trying to find someone who'll believe him. The random guys on the street don't believe him. The policeman doesn't believe him. The soldier guarding a military base tells him to take it to the observatory. The man rushes to a scientist there, hands him the journal. The journal is written in an "unearthly scrawl" which only the person who wrote it could read.
 * The Comic Within A Comic Tales of the Black Freighter in Watchmen.
 * In the first issue of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, the titular character learns that . This sends him into a major Heroic BSOD.
 * This trope was played with throughout the first half of Doom 2099. Doom claims he jumped to the future due to a failed experiment, which also damaged some of his memory. People note strange discrepancies at first (he's too young, his face isn't scarred [at first], etc). Then Doom learns he was the son of a political enemy to Latveria, who was kidnapped by the REAL Doctor Doom and Brainwashed into thinking he was the real Doom as part of a Xanatos Gambit.
 * Inverted in a Far Side comic where a man tries to warn people on the street about the presence of vampires. His reflection is the only one that can be seen in a large mirror being carried by two men behind him.
 * In the Wolverine comic Old Man Logan, this applies to
 * Machine Teen is initially unaware that he's a robot. When he's injured at school he refuses to accept that he's not bleeding, and when he's forced to aknowledge it, he immediately shuts down while the knowledge is deleted.

Fan Works

 * In the Titanic fanfic Rose's Sense, Rose finds herself isolated from the people around her. She doesn't understand why until.
 * No John, you are the demons.

Film
"Film Brain What? What a twist!...I don't mean that sarcastically. That is a genuine statement from me. This is a shocking development. Mostly because he's the only one who can act. Remotely."
 * The Twist Ending of The Sixth Sense is a relatively subtle example of the trope; the main character has no idea that anything is odd about him, as people's reactions to his words and actions seem entirely plausible, until he realizes that they only appeared to have been interacting with him in the way he expected them to.
 * The 6th Day, where the "cloned" Arnie turns out to be the original.
 * Though the movie Mulholland Drive doesn't make it explicit, it's probably the most believable explanation for David Lynch's Mind Screw. Naomi Watts's blonde and Laura Elena Harring's brunette have different names in the last segment of the movie—names given previously to other characters.
 * The Twist Ending of the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters featured this trope in the form of an Unreliable Narrator, with the combination of Real After All adding to the ending's confusing nature.
 * The Faux Horror Film Session 9 did this in the form of The Killer in Me.
 * Nicely done in The Others. Grace Stewart finds herself in the midst of a haunting, only it turns out Particularly unsettling is the publicity clip where the creepy old woman talks to Grace in her daughter Anne's voice --
 * In Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke's character, a private detective, turns out to be the very man he's been hired to track down.
 * In Salvage, Claire Parker seems to be living a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare where she keeps getting stalked and killed by serial killer Duke Desmond, only to wake up back at work as if nothing had happened. After a non-fatal attack, she learns from the police that Desmond can't be stalking her, since he's been dead for some time. She decides maybe it's his ghost that's tormenting her, and seeks advice on how to deal with that. The first place she visits just happens to be Desmond's former church, where the janitor reassures her that Desmond can't hurt her, as he's in hell. Not reassured, she goes to his old home, and then the library, where she finds a newspaper article showing that
 * Fight Club is a masterful example, as Edward Norton's unnamed narrator befriends and starts Fight Club with Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, anarchist and soap salesman. As Durden begins to raise an army of committed nihilistic followers, the narrator becomes less and less comfortable with the direction of the movement. After Tyler Durden disappears at the kickoff of a coordinated act of domestic terrorism, the narrator hunts desperately for him, only to be told that . The revelation changes the tone of previous conversations in the film, notably the inception of Fight Club—what was a brawl between the narrator and Durden that attracted other participants becomes And Durden's intense sexual relationship with Marla Singer coupled with the narrator's open contempt for her;
 * Subverted, and possibly double-subverted in The Thing.
 * The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Once you understand that, everything makes a lot more sense. Including the art style.
 * In the original ending everything was to be taken at face value. The producers suggested a change because they suspected the Weimar censors wouldn't allow a movie that implied an authority figure could be evil.
 * Dead and Buried. The sheriff of a small town discovers that several strangers passing through town and many of the townspeople, including his own wife, have been murdered and turned into zombies by the town's mortician. At the end he confronts the mortician and learns that he himself suffered the same fate sometime earlier. What is more, it's implied that he's investigated the killings dozens of times before, his memories being wiped each time he learns the truth, because the mortician enjoys playing mental chess games with the sheriff.
 * Jacob's Ladder. In a deleted scene, Jacob finds out that
 * The Neverending Story. When confronting his "true self" in a mirror, Atreyu sees.
 * Impostor.
 * Literally in the Bittersweet Ending of Mirrors. Ben leaves the Mayflower building after having defeated the demon, but none of the emergency workers seem to notice him despite his injuries.
 * In the original Korean version Into The Mirror, Young-min gets but doesn't realize it because nothing is different...except for the fact that
 * The Jim Henson made-for-TV Mind Screw film The Cube.
 * In The Nines, it turns out
 * Depending on the version of Blade Runner you watch, either or just  is a/are replicant(s), and going to snuff it fairly soon, or live happily ever after.
 * The ending of Hellraiser Inferno reveals that the being known as the Engineer that Detective Joseph Thorne was after is in fact the embodiment of his own dark urges; when Joseph confronts the Engineer the thing even peels away its blank face to reveal Joseph's underneath.
 * In Terminator: Salvation Marcus Wright finds out halfway through that he is a modified cadaver used to outfit a prototype infiltration Terminator. The converse situation occurs in an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles where the Terminator Cameron believes she is a human girl.
 * In Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation, the story begins with a college professor filming himself as he brutally kills a hotel full of innocent people, including his own children, because of his obsession with reincarnation. Thirty-five years later, some creep decides to make a movie about it, and sets out to cast the killer and his victims. So what?
 * As seen in this video, in the film Transmorphers the main character is eventually revealed to be . The reviewer had this to say-


 * The film Shattered follows a man who survives a car accident with amnesia. Along the way he discovers that
 * Toy Story: Buzz Lightyear. Consider the implications of realising that you're not a Space Ranger, not a human being, the universe you remember doesn't exist: "YOU ARE A TOY!"
 * The movie Identity does this, but in that movie
 * In Unknown (2006), several men wake up in a warehouse with toxic-vapor-induced amnesia. They discover that some of them are kidnappers, and at least one of them is a kidnappee, but they don't know who's which. The protagonist hopes he's not one of the villains, and the gradual return of his memories eventually reveals he's an undercover cop. This comes as a great relief ... until, at the end,
 * In Moon, the protagonist, after spending 3 years on the moon,
 * In The Da Vinci Code,
 * Passengers: Claire, a therapist counseling a group of plane crash survivors, grows suspicious when her patients start disappearing, and she suspects that the airline is behind it when a mysterious man starts coming around and insisting that the crash was pilot error. Meanwhile, others insist they heard an explosion beforehand. Claire takes on the mission of finding out what really happened while trying to protect her patients from what she believes is a corrupt airline. It turns out that
 * The original ending of I Am Legend fits into this trope, at least metaphorically. It had . This was the ending in the book as well.
 * At the end of The Deaths of Ian Stone Ian Stone
 * Frailty has two such twists. First is the discovery that the man the FBI agent has been talking to for most of the film At the very end of the movie, you find out that
 * The Machinist has Christian Bale's character Trevor, who hasn't slept for nearly a year, stalked and tormented by a man named Ivan. Ivan eventually kidnaps Nicholas, the son of the woman Trevor is (sort of) dating. Ivan appears to have murdered Nicholas, causing Trevor to kill Ivan. When disposing of his rug-wrapped body,
 * The Moebius strip of a film known as Triangle does this in numerous ways throughout the movie, which largely consists of a repeated sequence that reveals more of its story every time, each time arriving at a Memento-like "how we got here". This story includes Melissa George's character
 * Meet the Robinsons: A young boy named Cornelius "Lewis" Robinson befriends a boy named Wilbur, who apparantly came from the future. It is later revealed that
 * In Cars 2 (or, at least in the theatrical trailer), Mater is told that everyone sees him as a fool, and then looks at his reflection. Get it? Tow Mater in the mirror!
 * The 2008 film Hide follows the journey of an Outlaw Couple as, following her freeing him from a prison transport truck by causing it to crash, they head back to the town where they stashed their stolen loot prior to their gun battle with the police that led to his arrest. Along the way, however, they become aware that a Serial Killer has kidnapped the man's sister and is holding her captive in the very same now-deserted town...yet when the sister manages to free herself and the couple finds her, she freaks out at the sight of them . Then the last few minutes of the movie provide an even stranger twist..
 * The Truman Show has this Lighter and Softer,
 * At the end of Sintel, the title character sees her reflection and realizes
 * The protagonist in Cypher is the hapless Unwitting Pawn in a Gambit Pileup where one Mega Corp forces a Memory Gambit on him to fool their competitors Lie Detector, said compatitor sabotages the Memory Gambit, and a Reverse Mole from the first company convincing him to come back, all while the organization of Sebastian Rooks tries to play him and the MegaCorps for suckers. Only at the end does he remember that he is Sebastian Rooks, and pulled that same Memory Gambit on himself before the movie started to pass the Lie Detector.
 * After is captured at the end of Cube Zero, Jax reveals that  is NOT an employee overseeing the cube. He's just as much a lab rat as the Cube residents, as another layer of the Cube experiment to "observe the observers". So were his colleagues. He can't even choose execution over staying in the cube, as he already waived this right long ago... he simply doesn't remember because the real operators removed this information from his mind.

Literature

 * The protagonist of Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale is.
 * Stephen King probably has more than just the one, but an early story from his Night Shift collection, "Strawberry Spring," (published in the collection Night Shift) has something like this happen to the narrator,
 * Shutter Island.
 * One of the earliest examples is H.P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider", a first person point-of-view story that follows a mysterious lonely individual who cannot remember coming in contact with people. When he escapes his tower, he scares off the first people he sees and spots his reflection, revealing him to be—ta-dah! -- a ghoul.
 * Lovecraft did this one again in the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which ends with the protagonist discovering that he is one of the Half Human Hybrids that are the titular Town with a Dark Secret's dark secret.
 * And again in his story "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".
 * Philip K. Dick used this trope frequently as both a device and a premise. Perhaps the best-known example is is the film Blade Runner, very loosely based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Arguably, this is also the premise of A Scanner Darkly, although in this case the twist is identical with the character arc. And never forget the short story "Imposter", in which
 * J. G. Ballard was also fond of this device, and employed it in his 1960 story "Zone of Terror."
 * Another classic science fiction example is Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World." The main character becomes convinced that some sinister conspiracy is keeping the citizens of his town stuck in a Groundhog Day Loop by erasing their memories every night. He eventually learns that
 * Goosebumps was fond of this one.
 * "A Shocker On Shock Street": A kid whose father is a horror movie director is menaced by horrible things; turns out he's the robot star, and the whole thing was part of the movie.
 * You also have the girl who suspects ghosts only to find out that she's the ghost, teenagers who discover that they're vampires, and people who think an invisible dude is a monster when in fact they're a bunch of bizarre aliens.
 * "My Hairiest Adventure": a kid starts growing hair after trying some instant-tanning lotion. He thinks there's something wrong with the lotion and he's turning into a dog as a result, but everyone insists the stuff is harmless. Turns out it is, he was born as a dog, and so were all the other kids in the town. The adults are involved in an experiment to turn dogs into people, but it's starting to wear off...
 * Another book by the same author (though not part of the Goosebumps series) involves a kid who is convinced that everyone he knows is being replaced with a duplicate, a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Turns out at the end that he is a robot, and his memory chip is malfunctioning.
 * In the novel John Dies at the End, while dealing with a conspiracy involving agents of a parallel universe, the protagonist/narrator David discovers self-incriminating evidence and catches a glance of what appears to be a dead body in his tool shed. He can't remember a half-hour or so of his day, while his gun is missing a single bullet. He also finds out about a young woman, Amy, who went missing around the same time. He immediately suspects he murdered her during a bout of temporary insanity, but while following clues, he discovers that she's alive and well, but can't remember anything from when she went missing. He later learns that those conspiratorial agents are in fact perfect clones that have replaced other people in the city. Over the course of a few days, he uncovers some very unsettling information, protects Amy from the forces of darkness, falls in love with her, travels to the parallel universe with his best friend John, and cripples the organization behind the invasion. When he finally takes a good look inside his tool shed,
 * Done twice in the Crucible trilogy by Sara Douglass. First, the protagonist goes out to return the demons to Hell—only to find out that both his wife and best friend (and soon-to-be-king) are demons. Then, when the antagonist role shifts to the angels, he discovers he is an angel too, and thus doomed to send all mankind into eternal slavery. Poor Tom.
 * Appears in Hunter S. Thompson's seminal work The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, wherein the main character and his foreign photographer searches Kentucky during the annual horse race derby for the very poster child of the decadence and depravity associated with the derby. In the end, after four-five days of madness, culture shocks and innumerable amounts of alcohol, his photographer exclaims: "It's us!"
 * Subverted in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions wherein a man of declining mental health becomes convinced that failed Sci-Fi writer Kilgore Trout's short story really is a letter from God revealing his Tomato in the Mirror status.
 * Sabella by Tanith Lee ends with the reveal that
 * Kill the Dead, also by Tanith Lee, ends with the reveal that
 * Done excellently in the Dragonlance short story "The Best." It is done in first person, with the narrator being a noble who's hired the four best dragonslayers in the land to kill a dragon who's been terrorizing the countryside. At the end of the story, they reach the dragon's lair, and it's revealed that . And it works.
 * Thursday Next uses this trope in First Among Sequels, when
 * Goliath, the evil corporation, replaces people with synthetic versions on such a regular basis that the Genre Savvy characters check themselves frequently to make sure their still . . . them.
 * I Am Legend. The book, obviously. In fact, this is the entire reason for the name of the book.
 * Lord Dunsany's short story "The Return", in which the narrator—who promises a real ghost story—only discovers at the end that he is the ghost. (Also broadcast as a radio play.)
 * The short story The Copy by Paul Jennings features a copy machine (which creates a mirror-image replica of objects put into it) which a boy uses to copy himself so he can beat down a bully, but becomes jealous of his copy and kills him. Afterwards, his mother remarks that it's odd - his mole used to be on the other cheek, and he's writing with his left hand instead of his right...
 * This is the plot of the Deep Space Nine relaunch novel Fearful Symmetry, told first from Captain Kira's perspective, then from that of her double, Iliana Ghemor, a Cardassian sleeper agent altered to look like Kira and remember being her. In the novel, Ghemor is the tomato; in the Deep Space Nine episode it was a sequel to, the tomato was
 * Alastair Reynolds does this a lot in the Revelation Space novels. Chasm City offers a particularly convoluted example: Our lovable hero Tanner is actually
 * In Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, a Crapsack World in which a super weapon poked big holes in the time-space continuum and which is held together by Applied Phlebotinum the narrator tells the story of himself and his best friend Gonzo and how the world came to be.
 * In the Gene Wolfe's The Other Dead Man the protagonist fights off Came Back Wrong crewmates. Then he is shown a mirror...
 * In the Harry Potter series, when Harry realized that Also, Harry realizes this is the reason for the similarities between himself and Voldemort...
 * In Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix, Harry believes himself to be the tomato when he overhears members of the DA mutter something about him being possessed by Voldemort. As he'd just witnessed/felt like he'd actually attacked the father of his best friend, he is terrified of the possibility that he'd been the one attacking people. He wasn't.
 * In Order of the Phoenix, Harry gets a Pensieve Flashback of one of Snape's memories. In the memory, Harry sees his father, James, bully Snape and Snape call Harry's mother, Lily, a Mudblood when she attempts to defend him. The chapter is titled 'Snape's Worse Memory' and the reader is lead to believe that James's bullying is what makes it his worst memory. Come Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, we discover that it actually is his worst memory because of the moment he called Lily a Mudblood.  It's such a Tomato in the Mirror that the film version of Order of the Phoenix leaves out Lily because Deathly Hallows hadn't been published yet and the filmmakers had no idea.
 * The Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear book Clones features, you guessed it, clones. Possibly subverted. Tash, after avoiding a horde of clones of herself and her brother, finds a defective Tash-clone that thinks she is the real girl and the others are after her. Since they seem to have her memories, Tash freaks and wonders for a while if she isn't a defective clone herself. Apparently our Tash is legit, but you never know.
 * "Something Was Wrong" from the second book of the Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark series.
 * Ted Dekker's Christian suspense novel (and later movie) Thr3e is about a young man tormented by a serial killer that decides to make him his next victim. He's aided by an old childhood friend and an FBI agent whose brother was one of the victims. It later turns out that
 * This is also the plot of Sidney Sheldon's Tell Me Your Dreams and several other books and movies.
 * At the climax of The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees-Brennan,.
 * A rare happy example of this trope: throughout Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold!, Ben Holiday spends the novel trying to find a way to summon the Paladin, the invincible champion of the kings of Landover, only to discover when he is finally successful that.
 * Used in the 1839 Edgar Allan Poe short story William Wilson, wherein the titular Villian Protagonist discovers that doppelganger that has been foiling his schemes is himself, or rather the personification of his conscience.
 * This happens in the The 39 Clues, at the end of Book #7 - "The Viper Ness". Near the end, they discover a opera that reveals Amy and Dan are
 * The urban fantasy book White Apples by Jonathan Carroll has an enemy mook who
 * The young adult series Mindwarp had one of these. The kids at the core of the series, teenagers with superpowers who're hunted by alien shapeshifters, often make reference to Todd, a kid who vanished from their small town before they started coming into their powers. Come book 5, Todd shows up back in town; to him, there was a bright light one night, and he returned several months later with no knowledge of the intervening period. . The trope is also played with every kid in the series.
 * In Wonderland by Joanna Nadin, what was designed as a clever plot twist was actually made pretty obvious to the readers. The main character begins about to kill herself and her best friend, encouraged by that friend. Then the story is told in flashback and she realises Many readers called it, especially since, and so the plot twist was no longer there.
 * In The Adoration of Jenna Fox, the titular character Jenna wakes up from a year-long coma after an unspecified accident with no memories of her life. Her parents say that she'll remember with time, and she does begin doing so, but it doesn't take her long to realize that something's off, something her parents are hiding from her. The Reveal is that . She even says "I'm not a tomato" at one point; it does make sense in context.
 * In Shadowfever, Mackayla Lane figures out fairly early in the story that she must be some kind of Tomato since she's still alive. Afterwards, the plot is divided between Mackayla trying to figure out who or what she really is and the search for the Sinsar Dubh which has been the MacGuffin of the entire series. In the end, it is revealed that
 * A variant of this trope occurs in the World War Z supplement Closure, Limited. The interviewer is given what appears to be a tour of the titular organization, which provides closure for customers by dressing up a zombie to look like a loved one and kill it. The interviewee goes at great length to explain the detail they take, flat-out explaining that his customers generally know that the end-product isn't really their reanimated loved one, but the need for closure is so great that they don't care.
 * In the Magic: The Gathering short story collection Shadowmoor, one of the stories is Meme's Tale, in which the titular heroine is forced to flee her goblin family, and has no idea until she glimpses her reflection in a pool that
 * Mira, the only human character in Rick Griffin's Argo, finds out at the climax that she, as well as most if not all the human race, is an android.
 * At the end of Diana Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon, Howard Sykes finds that he is
 * Done in a Sesame Street book, of all places! The Monster At The End Of This Book has Grover being terrified of the title character and pleading with the reader not to reach the end of the book and reaching the monster. Hilarity Ensues as Grover tries increasingly drastic measures to prevent the reader from reaching the end of the book. When the reader finally reaches the end, Grover thinks he's doomed...but then he realizes that he is the monster at the end of the book. Go figure.

Live-Action TV
": But I created you! Dalek: No. It is we who created you!"
 * Are You Afraid of the Dark?:
 * "The Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor''. The adopted Karin is invited to The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday on the 13th floor of the apartment building. The employees are soon revealed to actually be aliens with three fingers and no faces(Nightmare Fuel), and seem to be trying to abduct her. After she and Billy escape, and the ship leaves, Olga reveals to Karin through the TV that the aliens left her there ten years ago and were trying to rescue her. Billy then looks at her and sees that she has shapeshifted back into a faceless alien as well.
 * The Tale of the Dream Girl. Johnny, after putting on a girl's ring, is being pursued romantically by the ghost of the ring's owner. The girl in question has a backstory and death similar to that of the song Teen Angel, where she ran back into a car that's dead on the train tracks to get her ring when the train hit. Johnny eventually realizes that he was in the car with her (and her boyfriend). He ran back to pull her away but he didn't make it and died with her.
 * Another episode had a girl thinking the new neighbour was a ghost, only to learn she was the one who was dead.
 * Bizarrely enough, the Mind Screw ending of The Prisoner implies that this is the entire premise of the series.
 * In the episode The Schizoid Man, Number Six seems to have been mistaken for an agent trained to impersonate him.
 * Stargate SG-1 did it at least three times:
 * "Tin Man" (season 1): The SG-1 team seems to have been transferred into robot bodies by a lonely alien maintenance man. In the end, they find out that they weren't transferred, they were copied, with the originals still alive.
 * "Fragile Balance" (season 7): Jack O'Neill wakes up after an alien abduction to find himself in a body 30 years younger... and slowly dying. After convincing his colleagues of his identity and tracking down his abductor, he finds that he is actually a genetically damaged clone of the original O'Neill (still with the alien).
 * And before both (in the 7th episode of season 1) Jack gets copied by the Unity (living blue crystals).
 * The crystals don't count for this trope though as the alien copy was fully aware throughout it was an alien copy and was simply intent on further exploring humans and earth, using Jack's identity to do so. It never at any point thought it was the real Jack.
 * Stargate Atlantis likes it even more:
 * In "Michael" (Season 2), Lieutenant Michael Kenmore awakens in Atlantis' infirmary, unable to remember who he is. After being informed of who he is and that he barely survived terrible injuries from a raid deep in enemy territory, he is let out and undergoes psychiatric therapy (including periodic drug injections) for the strange nightmares he keeps having. He eventually discovers secret observation videos of himself in the infirmary, and is horrified to discover that he is actually a Wraith that was transformed into a human using an experimental genetic drug and then brainwashed.
 * In "This Mortal Coil" (Season 4), Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Teyla, and, later, Dr. Weir find that they are replicator-made copies of themselves, and that the version of Atlantis they are in is also a copy. They come to take it remarkably well, especially McKay. Mostly because of McKay's insight in the situation.
 * In "The Kindred" (Season 4), Carson Beckett is found by the Team. The only problem: he's supposed to be dead. But he insists and is sure, that he is the real Beckett. Turns out he is a clone.
 * Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Whispers": We follow Miles O'Brien in flashback form as he seems to combat a station-wide conspiracy;
 * The Twilight Zone, "After Hours": A woman's shopping trip to a department store goes awry, as the people she talks to seem to transform into mannequins. In the end, we find out that she's one of the mannequins, who take turns going out into the world as a human for a month at a time. Also used in the '80s remake.
 * Also the episode "Four O'Clock": A self-righteous man goes around telling anyone who will listen that at precisely four o'clock he will, by sheer force of will, cause every evil person on the planet Earth to shrink to two feet tall. Four o'clock rolls around and the man finds himself shrunk to a height of two feet tall, much to his chagrin.
 * The 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica has done this with five characters. Boomer spends the first season wrestling with the slow realization that she's the Tomato in the Mirror. Moreover, as of the Season Three finale,
 * Boomer literally has a bad experience with her locker mirror, on which someone (herself? - even her Cylon personality isn't sure) has written the word CYLON in big yellow letters.
 * goes through her own version of this trope after
 * And in the series finale Head!Baltar and Head!6 explain is actually  thus making
 * In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam finds himself in the body of someone in a mansion where everyone thinks there's a vampire on the loose. After clearing up the situation, he finally gets around to looking in a mirror... and doesn't reflect. Literal Tomato "in the Mirror." This was hinted in the end of the previous episode, where we see the character Sam switched with actually had vampire fangs (played by Robert MacKenzie, who bears a close resemblance to Christopher Lee).
 * The climax of the recent Doctor Who episode "Utopia" revolves round the revelation that the kindly human Professor Yana is, unbeknownst to him, the Tomato in the Mirror, a 'sleeper' personality and biological disguise created by . His original personality and biology is contained, thanks to some Applied Phlebotinum, in a pocket watch, and released when Yana is tempted into opening the watch.
 * Before this we have the Doctor himself turned into a human teacher in 1913, through use of this pocket-watch-device. Of course the viewer knows who he really is, but the Doctor doesn't and once he finds out he's pretty shocked and doesn't want to go back.
 * In The Next Doctor
 * Turn Left's time-beetle on Donna's back counts, considering that, while the audience knew about it, Donna didn't, and anyone who stared at her back, knowing something invisible was there, was instantly met with Donna telling them off for acting so strange, only for her to find out there was something (horrifying, too) there.
 * And most recently in
 * In The Almost People, we, who is in fact.
 * in "Victory of the Daleks" believes he is an allied scientist who created a new form of unmanned weapon. He is actually

"Behold the god who bleeds!"
 * Star Trek: Voyager did this with "Course: Oblivion", where the entire crew realized that they were in fact not the real Voyager crew. (About halfway through the episode, which is rare for this trope. Usually it's a twist ending, not a twist middle.) Several episodes earlier, a semi-sentient, planet-spanning, not-quite-lifeform on an inhospitable planet they visited to refill on deuterium (you know, that stuff you can make from water and exists everywhere'') had replicated the entire crew. Unbeknownst to the original crew, they eventually copied the entire ship, too, right down to the last bulkhead (try not to think about just how they did that). They forgot they were copies and made warp drive modifications that were harmful to themselves, so they raced back to Voyager hoping to get more genetic samples to save themselves. They failed to get back before disintegrating completely, dissipating just before they could contact Voyager.
 * It was even more bitter than that. Eventually, they gave up hope of their own survival and were merely trying to pass on the new technology (that was going to get them home very, very quickly) to their originals. They very nearly succeeded.
 * Also happens in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a damaged and amnesiac Data takes up a life in a pre-industrial village. The reveal is obviously not a shock to the audience, but a big one to Data.
 * Same thing happens also to Kirk in "The Paradise Syndrome".


 * In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, a villain gives the Humongous Mecha a virus, and it's spread to the base... and then to the Red Ranger, Mack, (aka iMack) who turns out to be an android.
 * In Power Rangers Turbo: Justin notes that the other Rangers are acting odd, and finds out that they are really robots. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Justin himself was a robot, who was programmed so that he didn't know he was a robot, and that the real Ranger team built them to help Zordon on Eltar. Lot of good that did...
 * The Torchwood episode "Sleeper" has a seemingly human woman with a seemingly happy life (complete with job and husband) find out that she's actually an alien who will be "triggered" to wage a campaign of terror on Earth.
 * In an episode of Sliders, the world is populated by almost entirely by androids, and one human scientist who attempts to create an android with the transplanted memories of Quinn. It turns out that
 * Same thing happened in the Original Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with
 * And with in "Requiem For Methuselah"
 * The core premise of Invasion. Set in a small Florida coastal town, several characters return from unremembered experiences in the water feeling not quite themselves. At first they appear to have been altered by mysterious glowing creatures, who may or may not be aliens, in the water. But it's soon revealed that they are in fact altered copies, and their originals were killed in the duplication process. Since they have the same memories, emotions, and personality as their originals, it raises the issue of whether and why they should be considered a different person at all. Each of them, and their 'unaltered' friends and family, answers the question a little differently.
 * Sadly, the series was canceled after one season, so this was never resolved.
 * Angel: in "Spin the Bottle", everyone's memory is wiped back to age 17. Wesley, who at that age was head of his class at vampire-hunting school, reckons it's a test: they've been locked in this abandoned building with a vampire, whom they must identify and kill. Angel (who at that age was a living human), in a private moment, looks at a mirror ...
 * Supernatural: In "Road Kill", the Monster of the Week doesn't know she until the end of the episode.
 * The Monster of the Week in "Heart" has no memory of her transformations into a werewolf, so she doesn't truly realize what she is until Sam traps her in her apartment and she awakens to see how she's torn the place up.
 * Red Dwarf: This trope is played with in the episode Out of Time, when Lister is apparently revealed to be a Ridiculously Human Robot. He is floored by the revelation, but gets no sympathy from Kryten, who points out that his emotions are only artificial. However, the moment the crew escapes the unreality pocket through which they were traveling at the time, he becomes human again. (In fact, as the other reality was false, he had never been anything but human.)
 * Rimmer in various episodes. In The Inquisitor, a copy of himself provides a Reason I Suck Speech; in Terrorform, it's through a speech delivered by ; and in Rimmerworld he ends up marooned on a planet with only for company.
 * In the episode "Omega" of Dollhouse we find out
 * Later, after seeing Senator Daniel Perrin investigating and campaigning into the Dollhouse, we find that Perrin's wife is
 * The Fear Itself episode "New Year's Day". A young woman wakes up during a Zombie Apocalypse and tries to get to her friend's apartment. At episode's end,
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
 * The Buffybot, in her premier in the episode "Intervention". Not only did she think that the real Buffy looked like her, but
 * Also parodied, in that the Buffybot is quite overtly a heavily Flanderized version of Buffy herself;
 * Dawn's among the last to learn that she's only six months old.
 * A long sequence in "The Replacement" follows "real" Xander watching Xander doing various errands and "hypnotizing" people. This convinces the "real" Xander (and the viewers) that the other Xander is a robot or demon. Eventually, "real" Xander discovers that he is Xander's weaker points, and the other Xander is Xander's stronger points. The coin he's using to "hypnotize" is merely a quarter he found squashed by a train that he plays with in idle moments.
 * Kamen Rider loves this trope. Usually, the monsters in the show have human guises (or in the case of one show, were humans), and usually, one of the main riders is a monster as well. Some examples include;
 * An episode of The Outer Limits has a potential President being visited by a time traveller while flying on an airliner. She tells him that he is going to die when one of the engines fails, and so in order to save himself he will need to jump out, killing everyone on board to save himself. Supposedly her awesome future tech will prevent his horrible death. If he doesn't, the person who is elected as the next president (who she never names, but he suspects is his rival) will turn the country into a 1984-esque totalitarian regime, as opposed to the idyllic future she claims to be from. His ego eventually wins out, and he follows her advice. He is saved as she said he would be, only to be told that the evil dictator was him, and that he's now averted that future. When asked why she would bother saving him, she reveals she hasn't; cue splat.
 * In the original novel Planet of the Apes two interplanetary scientists (named Gene and Phillis) find Message in a Bottle with the main plot. The last line of a novel describes how Phillis fixes make-up with hand mirror on her chimpanzee face.
 * In one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a man goes to a psychiatrist because he's begun having delusions that he used to be a Martian. It turns out, he is a Martian, and is merely one of thousands of invaders. Fortunately, the psychiatrist is also one, and he's able to silence him before he can blow their cover.
 * In the Super Sentai parody short "Rolling Bomber Special", Shingo Katori of SMAP fame plays the Unlucky Everydude who keeps getting attacked by the (fortunately very ineffective) Super Sentai "Freshmen", who think he's the destroyer of worlds they've been hunting all this while. It's not till he's 'activated' and robotic limbs start ripping out of his body that he realises they were right.
 * Played for laughs in Chapelles Show, which had a sketch featuring a rabid member of the KKK who's blind so he doesn't realize that he's black.
 * In the American version of Being Human (UK), Sally Malick is first hunted by a ghost calling himself the Reaper, who claims that it is his duty to destroy ghosts who, like Sally, have stayed on earth too long or who have become destructive in some way. Then the Reaper starts trying to recruit Sally to become a Reaper, and then starts destroying innocent ghosts, increasingly seeming like a psychopathic serial killer. Yet, for some reason, everyone seems to be blaming Sally for the killings, even though she is desperately trying to stop the Reaper. Until the reveal that she is the Reaper.
 * In the Super Sentai parody short "Rolling Bomber Special", Shingo Katori of SMAP fame plays the Unlucky Everydude who keeps getting attacked by the (fortunately very ineffective) Super Sentai "Freshmen", who think he's the destroyer of worlds they've been hunting all this while. It's not till he's 'activated' and robotic limbs start ripping out of his body that he realises they were right.
 * Played for laughs in Chapelles Show, which had a sketch featuring a rabid member of the KKK who's blind so he doesn't realize that he's black.
 * In the American version of Being Human (UK), Sally Malick is first hunted by a ghost calling himself the Reaper, who claims that it is his duty to destroy ghosts who, like Sally, have stayed on earth too long or who have become destructive in some way. Then the Reaper starts trying to recruit Sally to become a Reaper, and then starts destroying innocent ghosts, increasingly seeming like a psychopathic serial killer. Yet, for some reason, everyone seems to be blaming Sally for the killings, even though she is desperately trying to stop the Reaper. Until the reveal that she is the Reaper.

Music
"Hang on, ! We're out of this at last Something's changed, it's not your face It's mine!"
 * Daniel Johnston's "Devil Town" seems to be about this trope--I didn't know they were vampires / It turns out I was a vampire myself... That is, unless it's actually about something else entirely over some people's heads.
 * At the very end of the Genesis Concept Album / Rock Opera The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the protagonist Rael discovers that are actually the same person.

"She won't be walking, when she goes Won't be talking; they'll be nothing they don't already know Are no magic words left to say She'll be leaving him, flying away"
 * Who Will Love Me Now? by PJ Harvey is a narrative song where the character sings of monster in the forest who has done terrible things, the monster lamenting 'who will love me now?' At the end of the song the character reveals they are the monster.
 * This is played with in The Emptiness, by Alesana. Specifically,
 * Used in video for The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up"
 * The video for Garbage's "Bleed Like Me".
 * Sally Fingerett's song "She Won't Be Walking" is a song about domestic abuse. The chorus is positive and hopeful:

Then you find out that the reason she'll be flying instead of walking is because

Radio

 * The Firesign Theatre, in their audio production I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, uses this device ingeniously. One must listen carefully (or have seen a spoiler) to realize that the character "Clem" who finishes the story is not the one who started it, but rather a holographic clone created by the original Clem and then dismissed into cyberspace.
 * In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio The Natural History of Fear, the main characters appear to have had their memories erased to blend in and hide inside a fascist Big Brother city, but

Religion

 * Older Than Feudalism: The Bible features not only an example but a meta-example: King David has just had one of his soldiers killed to cover up the fact that he (David) had impregnated the man's wife. The prophet Nathan shows up and gives an account of a rich man who stole the only sheep of his poor neighbor to feed a houseguest. He asks what should be done to this man. David, incensed, declared that the man should be put to death and asked who he was. Nathan: "You are the man."
 * There's an Egyptian version of that tale, too: the god Seth is attending a god congress, and an old woman walks up to him asking for reddress: her evil brother has killed her husband, usurped his position and maimed and driven away her son. Seth agrees that a great injustice has been done to her, and asks for the name of the criminal.

Tabletop Games

 * Clue is the Ur-Example. The winning player may discover that they are the one who killed Mr. Boddy, forcing them to declare that they killed Mr. Boddy - and can still lose if they get how and where wrong.
 * This is a huge element of the fetches in Changeling: The Lost. They believe themselves to be ordinary humans, but they have the ability to see things others can't -- that is, the people on the street who look like monsters. At some point, the fetch usually finds out that it's not a real person; it's a copy made by one of The Fair Folk to serve as a replacement for the human they took to Faerie to serve as their plaything. Those "monsters" they're seeing? They're the people who managed to escape from Faerie in the first place. And a lot of them aren't big fans of something fake living their life...
 * The Changeling book also suggests this motif as a brilliant Twist Ending Prelude:
 * Werewolf: The Forsaken also has an element of this. What's that? You're just an ordinary person being stalked by werewolves, spirits and ghosts? No, you are a werewolf, and you always were one since birth - it's just been dormant. (The bite is so that they can track you down after you go through your violent First Change - it's not infectious, and the Change proceeds with or without the bite. A panic-stricken person post-Change might not realize this or be in the mood to listen to the explanation, so consumed with fear over being a "monster"...)
 * Arkham Horror has an expansion that adds Tomato in the Mirror as a mechanic. Roaming Innsmouth runs the risk of drawing Innsmouth Look cards and learning your investigator is a Half-Human Hybrid, mimicking the Lovecraft examples under Literature.

Theatre

 * An ancient example is Sophocles' Oedipus the King; Oedipus searches for the man who killed the previous king only to realise that

Video Games
"Mega Man X: The heart is what counts. Not the body..."
 * The Force Unleashed II is all about Galen Marek aka Starkiller trying to find out whether or not he's the original Starkiller or a clone. Turns out
 * Killer7: Thought the Killer 7 were Harman's split personalities? Nope.
 * The last level of Braid has Tim running a deadly gauntlet, with the Princess following above, disabling traps and opening doors. He reaches the end and
 * In Klonoa 1,
 * In the true route in Ever 17, the amnesiac Kid looks himself in a mirror and realizes that In fact,
 * In the flash game "Trapped" you believe you are Benjamin Greunbaum, the owner of the hotel you're in which is under siege by a group of robbers. This impression is based on finding a wallet with that name in it. Turns out, you're actually
 * The sequel "Escape" has Dialla
 * In the original Japanese version of Street Fighter 2010 (not the American localization that claims the protagonist is Ken Masters), Kevin Straker is
 * Subverted in Mega Man Zero 3. Zero doesn't care that he's the clone. Zero doesn't care about how the Ax Crazy Omnicidal Maniac Final Boss is the original Zero driven insane. All he sees is an enemy who needs to be taken down.
 * Clone Zero is the real Zero, his "heart and soul" transferred to the clone body. Omega, original body or not, is one entirely different person.

":"
 * This is echoed in Mega Man ZX Advent. Grey has spent enough time fighting for his life against Maverick Mechaniloids, Pseudoroids, five other Mega Men, and both Prometheus and Pandora that when he finally learned that, he stopped giving a damn about who he originally was. That one of the Mega Men in question was Aile certainly helped him stop caring about his predetermined identity.
 * In Final Fantasy X, Tidus discovers that
 * In Kingdom Hearts II, Roxas
 * And then there's Xion, who realizes You can probably figure out what happens next.
 * In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud, the protagonist, suffers from freaky headaches and weird disjointed flashbacks. It then transpires that he is a clone of the villain, Sephiroth, and has been acting under Sephiroth's Mind Control for the game so far. Even more confusingly, when he recovers from his Heroic BSOD, he realizes he was never a clone to begin with (what he really is is quite complicated, but it involves the way the Super Soldiers are created, and how The Virus contains the genetic memories of those infected). When he regains his true memories, he finally develops into a fully fledged person.
 * In Knights of the Old Republic, the protagonist
 * And in the sequel, when the Jedi masters explain to you that you are a
 * A little over halfway through BioShock (series), the protagonist learns
 * The Minerva's Den DLC from ''BioShock 2 ends with
 * The short interactive fiction 9:05 revolves around this concept.
 * City of Villains has a story arc where the player character uncovers clues that they are in fact robotic duplicates made by Nemesis. Subverted by the final mission, which explicitly states that the player character is the original, but the contact who sent them on the missions is the robotic duplicate (with the real one alive but captive).
 * Legacy of Kain character Raziel's story is a long string of this. Over the course of the three games he appears in, . Then, it is revealed to him that . In part II, Time Travel hijinks lead to the discovery that . Then he finds the last survivor of the original, ancient vampire race, the only one who can give him the answers he seeks, . As if this wasn't enough, just moments later, he comes to the startling realization that . Finally, he learns that
 * Even before that, there was Kain's dilemma: Originally lead to believe that by killing the mythic Circle of Nine he could be released from his vampyric unlife, he eventually learns that
 * Gets better. In Defiance, Raziel
 * In Luminous Arc 3 Levi discovered that the God but is said by his companion that the thing that matter is
 * Subverted in Deus Ex, in which protagonist JC Denton is informed that
 * One of the few discrepancies in Deus Ex is JC's history. In one version In the other,  Both of these versions are supported by information from characters who knew The Truth in the form of email archives, statements, and physical evidence within The Conspiracy.  To address these issues the DX team created the Deus Ex Continuity Bible with the issue at hand explained here. Needless to say, the site contains massive spoilers.
 * In Team Dark's ending in Sonic Heroes, Rouge discovers . This is followed up on in one of the multiple endings of Shadow the Hedgehog, with Eggman admitting that
 * In the canon ending of Shadow the Hedgehog,
 * The canon ending also has a completely separate Tomato in the Mirror:
 * The World Ends With You pulls this twice: first you find out, and then it turns out that
 * Joshua. He This is after the sudden revelation that.
 * In Max Payne 2 The Fall of Max Payne,
 * That show (and the finale described above) were a long Homage to Twin Peaks.
 * In Xenogears when Fei finds out that
 * Not only that, but he also discovers that Then he discovers  Then, we learn that . If this was not enough, Fei later learns that . Fei is not a case of tomato in the mirror, he is
 * In Wild ARMs 1,
 * Something similar happens to
 * In Castlevania Aria of Sorrow Dracula is Killed Off for Real before the start of the game. Its main villain claims to be Dracula's reincarnation. He's not,
 * Metal Gear Solid: Solid Snake goes into Shadow Moses Island to rescue two hostages, and stop terrorist leader Liquid Snake from launching a nuclear strike. The hostages he's meant to rescue keep having heart attacks, and Meryl claims he looks just like Liquid. Snake then discovers that
 * Liquid has a second later of ketchupy goodness rendering himself a double tomato, though he never finds out personally. He knows he's a clone, but thinks that he's the inferior genetic specimen while Solid got all the good gene goo in the course of their creation.
 * If anything, Raiden in Sons of Liberty is an even bigger tomato than Snake. A former Child Soldier who ends up suppressing his traumatic memories, he goes through all kinds of virtual reality training reenactments of Snake's best missions, and his mission in the Big Shell was modelled right off of the Shadow Moses mission. His relationship to the game's Big Bad, Solidus Snake, closely resembles the one between Solid Snake and Big Boss, and the entire mission was meant to be an experiment to transform Raiden into the spitting image of Solid Snake himself as well as a social experiment in giving The Patriots control over all digital information. To say that Raiden was an Unwitting Pawn by this point would be a grand understatement.
 * As if Konami can't stop recycling the plot enough, a similar theme appears in Neo Contra when Considering how the game pokes fun at the Contra series and its sillier bits, it is probably an intentional jab at That Other Series From Konami.
 * S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: You wake up at the start of the game with no memories and a single note in your PDA saying "Kill Strelok." Turns out you were  This turns out to be an odd example of the antagonists being brought down (at least, if you pick that ending) by their own competence.
 * Ys Book I and II: Feena first appears in Book I as a ordinary-looking girl locked up in the Shrine dungeon, and seems to have lost her memory. In Book II, right before the final boss, she is revealed to be one of the twin goddesses of Ys. During the ending cutscene, she tells Adol to "remember the girl in me".
 * Snatcher pulls this off rather beautifully. So, Gillian Seed is a Deckard Expy working for an organization hunting down Snatchers, robots that look like humans. Also, you and your wife have amnesia and can't remember anything about your past. Well, it's quite obvious that Except...  Hideo Kojima is so good a writer even the Genre Savvy are left in surprise. There are about 5 other Tomato Surprises that are subverted in the very same game too.
 * In Folklore, your two protagonists are an amnesiac Mysterious Waif named Ellen and an Intrepid Reporter named Keats. Ellen naturally gets freaked out at first by the supernatural discoveries she makes, while Keats strangely takes it all in stride, presumably because he just wants to know the truth. Their being drawn to the same location and chain of events appears to be related only by the person who called them.
 * Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World features Emil, a cowardly teen who is given the ability to channel incredible power from the dormant spirit Ratatosk in order to protect Marta, who seeks to awaken the spirit himself from the core she carries and restore his power. Over the course of the game, Emil's recollection of certain major events is spotty, and many people in his hometown of Palmacosta, from which he left six months prior, know his name but don't recognize his face, much to his annoyance. Eventually it comes to light that
 * In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment,
 * In Persona 4, Unlike most examples, the main characters (save for said character) were not terribly surprised by this, and took it in-stride.
 * The extent to which this trope applies in Digital Devil Saga is certainly arguable, but it probably applies when Serph
 * Ihe Cybran Campaign of Supreme Commander. Dr. Brackman, creator of the Symbionts, calls all Symbionts "his children" and refers to the player as "my boy". The debriefing at the end of the campaign reveals that
 * Tales of the Abyss gives us Luke fon Fabre, a spoiled rich kid who's been shut-in at his mansion for seven years until the start of the story due to a kidnapping incident which shocked him into losing his memory. He soon goes on to find out that he's supposed to be the the world's savior, and continues to give everyone grief about how special he is.
 * Star Ocean: Till the End of Time:.
 * Tomato-In-The-Mirror reveals have become a staple of Silent Hill games since Silent Hill 2, in which James realizes that he
 * Especially prevalent, and beautifully done, in Shattered Memories. The basic premise of the game centers on the main character Harry Mason searching for his lost daughter Cheryl after a car accident. The bulk of the game is a mix of exploration and action (in the form of running your ass off from the demented creatures chasing you,) with bouts of psychotherapy interposed between segments.
 * Fatal Frame 2 has an example of this. The player is led to believe that Mayu In the penultimate chapter of the game,
 * In Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier it's revealed that is W00 a genetically engineered human made by a project which tried to create the perfect soldier. It causes some worries, but it's fairly short-term. He's in a group consisting of a smart-mouthed android with a split personality, a second android with cat-ears and like-wise split personality, a 2000+ year old Pettanko oni princess, another princess who's as top-heavy as her sword and a chinese fox-spirit who cracks more sexually slanted jokes than you can shake a sword-cane at. And the other guy was in a group even crazier than this one.
 * Baten Kaitos Origins plays this in a really interesting and powerful manner: That strange world that Sagi keeps getting sent to, where a bunch of people keep calling him Marno?
 * In Prototype, Alex Mercer had extremely mixed feelings when

"Albert Wesker: Are you saying I was...manufactured?"
 * Second Sight.
 * In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, it is eventually revealed that
 * Actually,
 * Disgaea 2 has another example
 * Phantom Dust has the amnesic main character searching for clues of his and everyone else's lost memories in the post-apocalyptic, ghoul-filled world. It is revealed to him by his friend, Edgar, that When the protagonist beats the final boss it is further revealed that
 * Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh has this as its big endgame twist: Over the course of the game, the player character Curtis is haunted by insane visions, compounded with his own guilt over presumably causing his mother to hate him and eventually commit suicide, as various people he doesn't like around his office at Wyntech are being killed off. As Curtis investigates deeper into Wyntech's past, he discovers that the company used to dabble in experimenting with transdimensional portals, his father was involved in their projects, and Curtis himself was used as a guinea pig. The final reveal is that
 * in Lufia and the Fortress of Doom there is a twist towards the end where it is revealed
 * The big Tomato Surprise in Soul Nomad and The World Eaters revolves around the titular creatures - extradimensional entities cast between worlds by the various gods.
 * Used, averted AND defied in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's: The Battle of Aces, where some of the Dark Pieces know that they're copies/fakes, others don't, and the "reals" sometimes refuse to tell the fakes about their being fakes, like with
 * Itsuki in Suika realizes that she at the end of the first chapter.
 * Ghost Trick pulls a pretty major one in the end. Sissel spends the entire evening hunting down clues to who he was before his demise.
 * The white chamber ends with the revelation that Sarah has murdered her entire crew. At this point, her ending fate is already sealed by in-game choices.
 * In a literal in-the-mirror moment at the end of The 7th Guest, Ego, the player character, is revealed to be Tad, the titular seventh guest.
 * In Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits, Kharg discovers that he is a human/demos hybrid.
 * Resident Evil 5: In a flashback set a few years before the events of the game, Albert Wesker discovers that he is just another one of Umbrella's old experiments—Project W.

"Shepard: Maybe I'm just some sort of high-tech VI who thinks s/he's Commander Shepard?"
 * One of the endings to Chrono Trigger that is only obtainable in a New Game+ leads to Marle discovering that she is now a descendant of Frog. She is not amused.
 * In Mass Effect 3 its revealed in some old logs that took place before the second game, that Shepard was completely brain-dead when they were recovered by Cerberus, with one of the Lazarus Project scientists commenting that because of this, bringing Shepard back would be impossible. The fact that Shepard somehow was resurrected anyway, has them momentarily wonder aloud if s/he is the real one.


 * Its implied, that Shepard is the real one, but its never directly confirmed.
 * The old PC Adventure Game Wax Works has the player trying to undo a family curse that has caused every set of twin boys to have one good and one evil son. After traveling through time Quantum Leap style to four other similar sets of twins, you finally go back to the witch that cursed your ancestors to begin with and kill her.
 * Monster Girl Quest Paradox has repeated hints that there's something off about Sonya. Multiple characters claim that she shouldn't exist, and the trailers show her seemingly transforming into something else. At the end of Chapter 2, it turns out that she's an Apoptosis. Her true nature is awakened due to significant contact between people of different universes, which the Apoptosis are created to prevent, and she becomes the Final Boss of the chapter.

Webcomics
"The Wise Wizard Guy: You, Detective... you are a tomato. The Detective: Yeah, I know. The Wise Wizard Guy: ... no "oh God, what have I become"? The Detective: Nope."
 * A mundane version of this occurs in DMFA, when Dan realizes why he doesn't trust Abel.
 * The big twist of Fleep is that the building collapse which trapped Jimmy in the phone booth was caused by
 * This trope in a nutshell, courtesy of Nedroid's Reginald and Beartato.
 * Tainted has a paladin find themselves in this situation.
 * Parodied in The Way of the Metagamer 2: In Name Only.


 * In Gunnerkrigg Court, isn't quite human, and  except for
 * Fans had a short where Tim wakes up to find that he's the only person left on Earth. Two aliens offer him a series of female human clones modeled after people from his memories, so he can repopulate the world. The story ends with Tim finding out that

Web Original

 * A Creepypasta story titled "Mice" featured a narrator who had trained "mice" into becoming intelligent and making their own communitees. He regularly kills some of the weaker ones to discourage any rebellion against him. In the end, it's revealed that
 * Another Creepypasta relates the story of a kid being adopted into a family and the subsequent murder of his family members by an unknown man, except for himself,
 * Up until the Wham! Episode in Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction, every problem that befell upon either the Red or Blue teams was caused by the Freelancers and their many AI. So naturally, it was a very shocking twist to find out
 * In Super Stories,

Western Animation

 * Batman the Animated Series:
 * "His Silicon Soul": A robot duplicate of Batman goes through this trope before his programming activates; the plan of the AI that created it is only foiled because the duplicate was a pacifist Tin Man.
 * "Growing Pains": Clayface forms a separate sentient being, in the form of a young girl, to scout for him. She forgets who she is and is found by Robin who falls in love with her. She tells Robin of a man who is chasing her, and when they encounter him he seems to be her father; he tells the girl (Annie) that "It's time to come home." In the heartbreaking final scene, Annie realizes what she is, and throws herself into Clayface to save Robin, being absorbed in the process. Robin proceeds to leap right toward the Moral Event Horizon by hurling batarangs into the tank of industrial-strength solvent above them, causing streams to pour out onto Clayface as he demands he bring Annie back. Since Annie gaining separate sentience was a fluke to begin with, Clayface can't. Batman catches Robin's arm just as he's about to hurl the batarang that will execute Clayface.
 * The Batman, has Batman and Robin trying to distribute the cure for a madman's Zombie Apocalypse drug. Turns out they were the ones under the effects of a drug that gives you wild hallucinations about everyone else being a zombie, and that same hallucinogen was what they were about to spread through the entire city.
 * Still in the DCAU: Superman the Animated Series: Bizarro is full of Fake Memories that have him convinced he's Superman. He even convincingly looked and acted like the real Superman, at least initially...
 * A variation of this trope occurs in Justice League. Superman and Wonder Woman were forced to have illusions in which they saw each other as monsters. Fighting ensues. After a while of brutal fighting from both sides, Superman discovered, to his astonishment, Wonder Woman's - not the monster's - reflection in water. Superman tried to expose the ruse to Wonder Woman, but found his attempts futile. Following small, but brutally one-sided fight, Wonder Woman finally got an answer to "Where is Superman?!" The monster pointed to a mirror revealing that she had been fighting her friend the entire time.
 * Also from Justice League is the two-part episode Legends. After a few members of the League get transported to an alternate universe, they find themselves in a bizarre world that is seemingly a pastiche of the retro Golden Age and Silver Age comic books, with its own (cornball) version of the Justice League, the Justice Guild of America, who regularly battle against equally cornball villains. However, after some investigation by Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, it's revealed that
 * Ben 10 Alien Force has a duo (ex-trio) of alien hunters that think they were mutated by DNAliens, and hate all aliens. At the end of the episode, they are told that the reason they look like aliens is because They. Are. Part alien. NO. Really?
 * Also
 * At the cliffhanger end of the Season Two finale of Transformers Animated, In the next season, it's revealed that
 * Except Isaac isn't her . He's the genuine article, even when you consider the revelation of Sari's "birth". After all,.
 * Parodied in Family Guy when Mayor West, upon being struck in the face with a brick, touches the wound, then stares at the blood on his hand, dramatically realizing he's a tomato.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: despite being a typical unlikely leap in logic from Mayor West, it has everything to do with the trope, and nothing to do with the Trope Namer.
 * Used in an episode of Legion of Super Heroes. Superman relizes that he is actually the shape-shifting Ron-Karr, tricked into believing that he is Superman in order to be put to use as a spy.
 * And the only reason Ron-Karr was planted there was because Chameleon Boy(another shapeshifter) was planted in the villain's team with the same method, needing a similar Tomato in the Mirror moment to get him back.
 * Used twice in Futurama;
 * One of the "Scary Door" gags: "Why should I believe you? You're Hitler!"
 * In the episode "The Honking", Bender is run over by a "were-car" while staying at a mansion he inherited from his uncle. When people back in New New York are getting run over, Bender believes the were-car followed him, until it turns out Bender became a were-car himself.
 * Subverted in "Into The Wild Green Yonder". Fry looks around to find the person whose thoughts he can't read (the dark one). After not finding anyone, he concludes that he is himself the dark one, as his thoughts can't be read by other telepaths.
 * Played straight in Bender's Big Score though. Fry loses Leela to a man named Lars. He later travels to the past and splits in two, with the original him returning to the future and the time loop created copy staying and living 12 years in Fry's original time. When Bender travels back in time to kill this Fry,
 * On The Secret Saturdays, the Saturday family and their nemesis, V.V. Argost, go through the entire first two seasons, to retrieve clues that would help locate Kur, only to find the surprising truth.
 * Parodied in an Adult Swim bump with a silent movie version of The Big O. Dorothy speaks for a while followed by the subtitle "You're a tomato." Cue Roger acting surprised. The whole thing found here: http://www.bumpworthy.com/bumps/1856.
 * SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Hall Monitor," Spongebob and Patrick are out to catch a maniac, who broke through open windows and caused car crashes. Turns out Spongebob's the maniac. He found that out after rampaging blindly through the city while stuck in a mailbox.
 * In Lego Ninjago, Zane has gone his whole life not knowing if he actually has any parents. Guided by a mysterious falcon, he eventually stumbles upon a hidden laboratory. He first discovers, then sees mysterious blueprints. Moments later, he realizes these aren't just any blueprints...
 * In Young Justice, was the most adament about  It would turn out that

Real Life

 * Secret Jewish heritage converts neo-Nazi
 * One incredibly sad example is that of David Reimer. He and his twin brother were being circumcised shortly after birth, but the careless doctor burnt off his entire penis. Therefore, he was sexually reassigned as a girl. He appeared to be feminine in the first few years of life, but then exhibited wholly masculine traits, leading to a mental breakdown in adolescence when as a social female he underwent aspects of male puberty despite having had estrogen treatment. At this point he finally learned the truth from his parents. He transitioned to male much as an FTM transgender person does, but felt haunted the rest of his life by the lies of his childhood, eventually culminating in his suicide (as well as that of his twin brother) at age 38. It didn't help that at this point he was already a textbook example in university sociology classes about the limits of social conditioning.
 * There's a museum in Galveston, Texas that had an exhibit on the world's most dangerous creatures, with pictures and a few of the smaller ones. At the end of the exhibit, there's a picture of "The deadliest creature in the world".