Cloning Blues: Difference between revisions

''If you had ever seen us you'd rejoice in your uniqueness<br />

''And consider every weakness something special of your own"''|'''Robert Calvert ([[Hawkwind (Music)|Hawkwind]])''', ''Spirit of the Age''}}

As a result, many clones brood about how they're [[What Measure Is a Non -Human?|not "real,"]] just [[What Have I Become?|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]]. [[Cursed With Awesome|This often just ups their feelings of alienation, though]].

And that's for the clones who are just unlucky. The really unlucky clones have [[Evilutionary Biologist|malevolent creators]] who can make [[Designer Babies|custom clones]] [[Uterine Replicator|grown in a vat]], sometimes [[Send in The Clones|in bulk]] -- which are exact meta-xerox copies of the original except that they have [[Battle Butler|fanatical]] [[Cyanide Pill|loyalty]] to the creators. Or the [[Lamarck Was Right|innate skills]] of a ninja assassin. [[Stock Super Powers|Or superpowers.]] Or [[Lego Genetics|just add]] some alien DNA to create [[Half -Human Hybrid|Half Human Hybrids]]s, or even [[Opposite Sex Clone|a different set of reproductive organs]]. Or all five at once -- and those clones will still look, act, and think exactly like the original in every other way. You can expect all that tinkering to make something [[Gone Horribly Wrong|Go Horribly Wrong]], too. A clone like this is always considered [[Tyke Bomb|highly expendable]] by their creator, except in rare cases where said [[Evilutionary Biologist]] has [[Truly Single Parent|developed]] [[Replacement Goldfish|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 NonUniqueness UniqueValue]] the only clone that matters is the last one...[[Twinmaker|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 [[Our Souls Are Different|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 [[The Soulless|soulless abominations]] [[Came Back Wrong|before God]] and [[Scale of Scientific Sins|nature.]]

Unrelated to [[Something 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.