Evil Twin: Difference between revisions

[[File:Evil_Kermit.jpg|link=The Muppets|frame|It's not easy bleeding green!]]

Often, in science fiction, the [[Evil Twin]] is created from the original character by [[Applied Phlebotinum]]. Most of the time, this results in a "Good Twin" and "Evil Twin", neither of which are complete entities on their own. See [[Starfish Character]] for examples of this.

[[Beard of Evil|A goatee or other beard]] is a staple of [[Evil Twin|Evil Twins]] everywhere. This comes from the ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series|Star Trek the Original Series]]'' episode "Mirror, Mirror", in which the evil duplicate of Spock is distinguished only by the fact that he has a beard. It is common for parodies of [[Evil Twin]] to use a [[Good Hair, Evil Hair|beard]] as a distinguishing characteristic, in some cases even when they shouldn't be able to grow facial hair - for example, Flexo in [[Futurama]] or Cartman in [[South Park]]. Some evil twins use [[Identical Twin ID Tag|Identical Twin ID Tags]] to differentiate from their good counterpart such as [[Good Scars, Evil Scars|scars]] and [[Evil Makeover|evil costuming.]]

Compare [[Criminal Doppelganger]], [[Evil Counterpart]], and [[Enemy Without]], and see also [[Doppelganger]]. For the situation where the original character pretends to be the [[Evil Twin]], see [[Impersonating the Evil Twin]]. When multiple characters' [[Evil Twin|Evil Twins]] team up, they become [[The Psycho Rangers]].

If they are [[Different As Night and Day|literal twins]], they might be [[Cain and Abel]] and/or [[Separated at Birth]], but an [[Evil Twin]] need not be a relative of the original, and a separated pair doesn't necessarily include an evil one.

* Throughout ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]'', there are sinister flashes of another Syaoran floating in a tank of water in the villain's base, who seems to be "influencing" the Syaoran who is traveling with the good guys. In the manga, the truth is revealed. {{spoiler|The Syaoran in the tank is the "original" Syaoran, and the one traveling with them is really a [[The Heartless|heartless]] clone whose emotions were inspired by psychic connection. Upon the good Syaoran's release, our [[Evil Twin]] Syaoran succumbs to his programming.}}

* Knives in ''[[Trigun]]'', Cain in ''[[Trinity Blood]]'', and Aion in ''[[Chrono Crusade]]''. Apparently, being a guy who's the hero's evil twin means being a genocidal psycho and having a brother complex the size of the Empire State Building. Knives, Cain and Aion are anime's unholy trinity of [[Evil Twin|Evil Twins]]. The three of them are practically [[Expy|expies]] of whomever came first. Roshel/Rociel in ''[[Angel Sanctuary]]'' is very much like them too, with the difference that Alexiel is female and his non-identical twin. Also a partial subversion in that [[Dark Is Not Evil|Rociel is a supreme angel and Alexiel, a fallen one]].

* Zeon from ''[[Gash Bell]]'', [[Evil Twin]] to the title character. Angry at not being able to have a [[Dangerous Forbidden Technique]], which was given to his [[Idiot Hero]] of a brother. Has a [[Redemption Equals Death]] moment

* The entire [[Bizarro Universe|Bizarro World]] in the [[Pre Crisis]] [[Superman]] mythos can be considered a form of [[Evil Twin]] by [[Applied Phlebotinum]], though it slowly changed from "evil opposite" to "goofy opposite".

* In addition to Bizarro, Superman has at least four other evil twins, each by way of a different trope. There is his [[Evil Counterpart]] [[Kneel Before Zod|General Zod]]. There's Hank Henshaw, who went from being a [[Take That]] parody of [[Fantastic Four|Reed Richards]] to an evil Superman by way of [[Grand Theft Me]]. There's his [[Mirror Universe]] double Ultraman (in fact, there are currently two Ultramen, from two similar but distinct [[Mirror Universe|Mirror Universes]]). And finally, there's his alternate universe counter part [[Superboy|Superboy Prime]], who began life as a sort of [[Sidekick]] by way of [[Retcon|Ret Con]], but was eventually transitioned into a villain.

* [[The DCU]] has Earth-3, a [[Mirror Universe]] of [[Evil Twin|Evil Twins]], including Alexander Luthor, the good twin of [[Lex Luthor]]. President John Wilkes Booth was assassinated by Union sympathizer Abraham Lincoln and Benedict Arnold is on the dollar bill, too. It also has the anti-matter universe, /another/ [[Mirror Universe]] of [[Evil Twin|Evil Twins]]. The main visible difference between the two? The anti-matter universe is home to the Crime Syndicate of Amerika [sic], while Earth-3 is home to the Crime Society of America.

* [[The Flash]] (Barry Allen version) had an [[Evil Twin]] in the form of Eobard Thawne, who had plastic surgery to resemble him, and then traveled back from the 25th century to become Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash. A later [[Retcon]] would reveal that Zoom was descended from Malcolm Thawne, aka Cobalt Blue, who really ''was'' Barry's estranged twin brother but had completely different powers.

** Professor X has an actual evil twin, Cassandra Nova. It's later explained that ''everyone'' has an evil twin, a psychic construct the Shi'ar call the ''mummudrai'' that they face off with before birth. Xavier killed Nova in the womb, but, because she was the [[Evil Twin]] of an extremely powerful psychic, she managed to survive as a mass of miscarried fetal tissue and reconstruct herself to the point where she could enact revenge.

* Played straight in the ''[[Squadron Supreme]]'' limited series, when Hyperion is replaced by his [[Evil Twin]] as part of a larger [[Evil Plan]].

Hoo boy. Let's say it's popular, and even more so if the base subject has a [[Mirror Universe]] or an [[Evil Twin]] as part of its own canon.

* [[The Movie]] of ''[[The Magic Roundabout]]'' introduces Zebedee's [[Evil Twin]], the ice-wizard Zeebad who was imprisoned under the Roundabout itself. This would probably qualify it for [[Canon Discontinuity]] were it not for Tom Baker's wonderful [[Large Ham]] voice role. And then he became [[The Daily Show|Jon Stewart]] in the [[Cultural Translation|American]] version.

* In ''[[The Mysterious Benedict Society]]'' series, the villain Ledroptha Curtain is the [[Evil Twin]] of the protagonist Nicholas Benedict. The two were [[Separated at Birth]]. When the Society first meets Mr. Curtain, they don't realize this, and don't figure it out until they receive a message from Benedict warning them to "Beware the Gemini."

* Played straight in the short story ''The poet and her double'' in the book ''Women and Ghosts'' by Alison Lurie. Karo McKay, a young and gifted poet, finds out that she is followed by her [[Evil Twin]], the anti-Karo.

** In "Too Many Roscoes," the real Rosco is kidnapped by a band of bank robbers while the ringleader -- an impersonator named Woody (James Best in a dual role) -- takes to the streets assuming Rosco's identity ... all to help his two criminal associates gain control of an armored truck delivering a $1 million shipment to Hazzard Bank. (Incidentally, the main characters fail to call Woody on his fake identity when "Rosco" bungles simple facts about his friends but remembers facts about the expected bank shipment in exact detail.)

** In ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Star Trek Voyager]]'', the Emergency Medical Hologram on the [[Evil Counterpart]] ship U.S.S. ''Equinox'' has had his "ethical subroutines" removed, making him an [[Evil Twin]] of the Doctor on ''Voyager''.

* The season-long "Family Secret" arc on ''[[Sabrina the Teenage Witch (TV series)|Sabrina the Teenage Witch]]'' ends with the revelation that every member of the Spellman family has an evil twin. Sabrina is then subjected to a series of tests to determine whether she or "Katrina" is the evil one. {{spoiler|Hint: It's Katrina}}. The loser is sent off to the Other Realm Twin Cities. She returned in a later episode where she took Sabrina's place while the latter took Katrina's place in an Other Realm jail. There, Sabrina met Zelda's [[Evil Twin]] Jezebelda, an evil [[Mad Scientist]] Witch who, amongst other things, created ''the Black Plague''. For some reason, Hilda's evil twin doesn't appear, but was mentioned. Hilda was the good twin that came closest to offing her evil twin during the tests.

* ''[[Out of This World]]'': Evie splits herself in order to attend a party while also writing a speech about the evils of school uniforms (Specifically, bright yellow dresses with blue baseball caps, and breeches for the boys). Unsurprisingly, the process results in a serious Evie and a reckless Evie. The serious Evie is portrayed as the "real" one, at least until Serious-Evie tries to give her speech and discovers that she's now ''in favor'' of the dress code. Troy attributes their eventual recombination to [[The Power of Love]], which is kind of [[Squick|Squickworthy]] if you think too hard about it.

* ''[[Malcolm in the Middle]]'' had a hilarious inversion. Dewey is finding people who are just giving him money for no reason. At first he doesn't question it, but Reese finds out that there's another kid who looks just like Dewey. He then [[Genre Savvy|surmises]] that for every person there is an evil opposite. When Dewey is worried that he's met his evil twin, Reese points out the kid is virtually a saint and that Dewey is the [[Evil Twin]]. Reese then recruits Dewey to do a lot of bad things and get the other kid blamed, but by the end of the episode, Dewey tells the other kid's older brother on what's going on and gets Reese beaten up.

* ''[[Friends]]'' gives us [[Granola Girl|Phoebe]]'s [[Evil Twin]], Ursula. Or rather, ''[[Mad About You]]'' gave us Ursula, and ''Friends'' revealed she was Pheobe's [[Evil Twin]]. Parodied in another episode, when Joey was dating someone who honestly believed he was the character he played on TV. When she saw him on TV while Joey was in the room...

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' classic series adventure ''Inferno'', the Third Doctor is sent into an [[Alternate Universe]] where he encounters evil-fascist-twin versions of his friends in UNIT -- the evil Brigadier has in fact ''lost'' his facial hair, but gained an eyepatch in response. Bizzaro Liz is a brunette instead of a redhead. Curiously enough, there's no evil version of the Doctor himself (although the [[Expanded Universe]] novels did suggest that the evil tyrant ruling this fascist alternative Britain was in fact an alternative version of the Third Doctor with a different body who went evil after his forced regeneration by the Time Lords).

* ''[[WKRP in Cincinnati]]'' did it with Venus Flytrap being suspected of crimes that were committed by a pimp-dressed [[Evil Twin]] complete with the obligatory goatee.

* In ''[[Dark Oracle]]'' the major antagonists, Blaze and Violet fall somewhere between this and [[Evil Counterpart]]. [[No Name Given|Evil Sage]] (Season 2, Episode 3, "Through A Glass Darkly") on the other hand, plays this absolutely straight, being the [[Dark World]] twin of Lance's girlfriend, Sage, and her complete opposite in terms of personality. Whereas real-world Sage is a geekily-cute girl, with low self-esteem and very odd taste in--well pretty much everything--her comic book counterpart is a vindictive bitch with creepy [[Mismatched Eyes]], [[Tattooed Crook|evil tattoos]], and a plethora of [[Kick the Dog]] moments. She's hyper-aggressive to Sage's shyness, enjoys playing mind games with Lance, and looses a poisonous snake on a pair of girls who defaced her locker. It takes a near-death experience to bring the real Sage back.

* In ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'', Hextor, the god of Tyranny and War, is the [[Evil Twin]] of Heironeous, the god of Chivalry and Justice.

** D&D loves this trope. It also had the Mirror Of Opposition, which spawned an [[Evil Twin]] of anyone who looked at it (the twin then mmediately tried to kll and replace the original), the spell Simulacrum (a physically identical but less-powerful duplicate of the target, absolutely loyal to the caster), and at least two different takes on the "magically created copy of you trying to kill you" in monster form, the nastier of which had the horrifying combination of being more powerful than the original and ''totally invulnerable to anyone else's attacks''.

* In ''[[Changeling: The Lost]]'', when [[The Fair Folk]] kidnap mortals they leave behind Fetches, magical duplicates of their victims, right down to their memories. All Fetches are incomplete, though, meaning they lack ''something'' of the original. When that something is empathy or a sense of right and wrong, then you've got an [[Evil Twin]]. Things get more complicated if they merely lack your alcoholism or bitterness, though. It works both ways. Fetches don't know they're not the original person, so when someone shows up who looks like a monsterous version of them (and nobody else can see the monsterous things, and thinks it looks ''exactly'' like them, but a different age), who hates their guts and has strange magical powers, they are perfectly justified to think they are the victim of this trope.

* In the ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' video games, Sonic has had a number of evil robotic duplicates -- the number of ''characters'' involved is unclear, but at least five different bodies have been used. In addition, the sometimes-evil character Shadow is [[Evil Counterpart|very similar to Sonic in appearance and abilities]].

* ''[[Super Robot Wars Original Generation]]'' example: Beowulf, Kyosuke's Shadow Mirror counterpart. In OG 2, he is portrayed to be pretty much identical and as heroic as Kyosuke. But in Original Generations, it's revealed that he's a total sociopath obsessed with the world's destruction and rebirth, implied to be assimilated by the Einst, and just plain evil, perhaps as an after effect that Kyosuke in the Shadow Mirror Universe has no Excellen to balance it out ( {{spoiler|Excellen was killed in the dimension and rebuilt into Lemon}}). Needless to say, this [[Evil Twin]] makes the Shadow Mirrors look like good guys. Thus far, he's only made a brief appearance during a cut-scene at the beginning of ''Original Generations'', though fans have speculated that he may become a a prominent villain sometime in the future.

* Statesman, the resident [[Alternate Company Equivalent|Superman equivalent]] and [[Big Good]] of ''[[City of Heroes]]'', has ''two'' evil twins: Tyrant, the [[Dimension Lord]] of the [[Mirror Universe]], and Reichsman, the little-seen [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazi version]] from the [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler|dimension where the Nazis won]]. Naturally, pretty much every high-profile hero in the game has an evil counterpart in Tyrant's dimension, as the Praetorians. And as of Issue 17, every player character -- hero and villain -- can run a story arc featuring multiple iterations of his or her own [[Evil Twin]]. Heroes will also encounter a good doppleganger during their arc.

* In ''[[Skies of Arcadia]]'', actors-turned-robbers Vize, Anita, and Faina appear as [[Palette Swap|Palette Swaps]] to heroes Vyse, Aika, and Fina, which has unfortunate results for the silhouettes on the Wanted poster (even though the heroes are already wanted as pirates, [[The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything|sort of]]). Turns out they even mirror several of the heroes' moves. When you beat them {{spoiler|they make a legitimate business out of looking like you.}}

* ''[[Kid Radd]]'' features an [[Evil Twin]] as one of a [[Goldfish Poop Gang]] duo - he serves as the titular character's [[Shadow Archetype]] later in the story.

* The ''Sister'' arc of ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'' has main character Elliot get "cursed"<ref> i.e. being zapped by a [[Transformation Ray]] gun</ref> into a [[Gender Bender|female form]], then touch a [[Green Rocks|magical diamond]] which separates him into his normal male self, and a female version, named Ellen, who has all of the same memories, experiences, etc. Believing that she's the embodiment of his "curse", and thus will disappear when it wears off in less than a month, she goes crazy and tries to become his evil twin in a desperate attempt to gain ''some'' sort of identity. {{spoiler|She was wrong about disappearing, and wasn't so good at the evil twin thing. She now lives as Elliot's twin sister, joins the cast, and is accepted by Elliot's friends and family against the initial predictions of others. An extremely rare case of a "clone" getting a happy ending.}} All that stuff you saw in that spoiler? [http://www.egscomics.com/sketchbook/?date=2003-07-27 May not have been Dan Shive's plan to begin with...]

* {{spoiler|Cloney}} from ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' is eventually revealed as {{spoiler|Aylee}}'s [[Evil Twin|Evil Clone]]. There's also Alt-Alt-Torg compared to regular Torg.

** ''[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold|Batman the Brave And The Bold]]'' "Deep Cover for Batman" features a version of the alternate-universe evil Batman counterpart Owlman who's appeared elsewhere--he doesn't match any recognized iteration, though; is not Thomas Wayne Jr. or the [[Nietzsche Wannabe|existentialist type]]. Brave and the Bold isn't really in Earth-1, so presumably its Mirror World isn't really Earth-3. Also features a ''good'' Joker who wears something like the Red Hood costume from one of his back stories and goes by that name. Somewhat cracked, but a good guy. Slight Mid-Atlantic accent.

** Notably, the show averted the common "[[Evil Twin]] switches for Good Twin" trope; thanks to a flaw in the cloning process, Thailog's pigmentation is different enough from Goliath's that the two couldn't be mistaken for each other except in very poor lighting.

** Reportedly, both versions were [[Aborted Arc|meant to be]] explained/[[Retcon|retconned]] to be the same character, though it's hard to imagine how that would have happened.

* The [[wikipedia:Han twins murder conspiracy|Han twin murder conspiracy]] -- Jeena Han tried to have her identical twin sister Sunny murdered.

** Anyone born in the developed world who has a twin can probably prove it by referring to birth records or something. Anyone implicated in a serious crime who happens to have a twin and never tells the police about it is [[Too Dumb to Live]], so there's no reason to worry ''too'' much about being framed by your own [[Evil Twin]].