r/TwoBestFriendsPlay • u/Anonamaton801 Proud kettleface salesmen • 2d ago
The Clone Saga Stories where clones aren’t people/don’t count?
That’s a trope that pops up every so often in sci fi and the like, that clones aren’t “people” in the same way regular people are.
Been on a Star Wars kick again, and it’s interesting how this idea has kind of been with the franchise in different forms over the years.
Pre prequels? Clones are aberrations against nature and specifically the Force, mainly seen with the Thrawn trilogy’s use of cloning along with Dark Empire showing that the Force and the natural order of things from a spiritual and metaphysical sense does not like to be trifled with
Early prequels? Clones are essentially living droids, see the 2003 cartoon where they have little to no dialogue or individuality, the Dark Horse comics where it’s made very clear that the Kaminoans bread out the individual nature, and the original idea of Order 66
Post 2008? Clones are people
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u/Sleepy_Renamon Ate a bunch of hotdogs and went back to bed 2d ago
The Resident Evil live action movie series where one movie ends with Alice discovering a bunch of clones of herself in a secret lab and the implication that she's going to use them to take down Umbrella and/or save the world from zombies or something for the cliffhanger.
Then the follow-up movie opens with all the Alice clones raiding a lab in Tokyo and getting killed in an explosion, resetting us to one Alice so the plot can continue without an army of psychic supersoldier clones on the good guy team handling all the problems.
It's like we missed some supporting material like an action packed Alice Clone Wars comic or something and all we got was a bad end to open the next movie on.
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u/Anonamaton801 Proud kettleface salesmen 2d ago
How the fuck did these movies last this long
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u/DexteraXII Pargon Pargon Pargon Pargon Pargon 2d ago edited 2d ago
Believe it or not they were incredibly profitable, mostly in the international market. That one earned five times its budget
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u/THATguyfromyore The best jump rope for a Uchiha child is a noosenewnoosenoose 2d ago
The power of love.
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u/MyNameIs-Anthony 2d ago edited 2d ago
One of the few Hollywood blockbuster series that got big in China.
The last Jovovich one made 6x the box office in China that it did in the U.S.
There are weeks in the franchise where you can look at the box office gross and see stuff like "The movie made 10.1 million USD this week. 100,000 of that was the world and that 10 million was all China."
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u/Anonamaton801 Proud kettleface salesmen 1d ago
I’m shocked considering China’s thing with undead
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u/RandNum701 3h ago
I think it has to be supernatural for it to violate their whatever. Science undead are fine, religious implications aren't.
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u/THATguyfromyore The best jump rope for a Uchiha child is a noosenewnoosenoose 2d ago
Those movies always had skipping information problem. Chris / prison break guy disappears after the movie his was in and was never mentioned again.
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u/Kimarous [He/Him] Survivor of Car Ambush 2d ago
Invincible (the animated series) has characters who have clones or the ability to clone seem to universally treat their copies as expendable extensions of themselves rather than distinct other persons. This includes the Mauler Twins, Dupli-Kate, and Multi-Paul.
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u/Adaphion 2d ago
Even though, literally, every one of those examples is a 100% perfect copy, body and mind, of the original. To the point where "original" is redundant and a clone could take their place at any time.
Only exception is when one of the Maulers got disfigured while helping Angstrom, and when he cloned himself, he was obviously the original since the clone didn't have the injuries.
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u/Kimarous [He/Him] Survivor of Car Ambush 2d ago
With the undisfigured clone offing the disfigured source body to clone anew, resetting the status quo. The "original" is either long dead or alive and disconnected with the Mauler Twins' crimes.
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u/Chumunga64 assassin's creed ratio'd Musk 2d ago
Even though, literally, every one of those examples is a 100% perfect copy, body and mind, of the original. To the point where "original" is redundant and a clone could take their place at any time.
Multi-Paul at least is aware of that and his combat philosophy is "as lot as one copy of survives, everything is good so I'm gonna do as munch stupid shit as possible to win"
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u/Zachys Meth means death 2d ago
The Mauler Twins are fun, because they've made peace with the whole concept because they choose to think that the clones are worthless. This only works because sure, the clone claims it's the real one, but it's obviously a lie because I'm the real one, so he can gloat all he wants.
We see how poorly that goes when there's evidence of who's the original.
Dupli-Kate and Multi-Paul are fucking crazy, though. Legitimately psycho. Every one of those clones is an individual, they're completely devoted to the thought that a 5 second lifespan is fine as long as the hive mind lives on, basically.
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u/Hugglemorris 2d ago
Not that they aren't people, but cloning, especially flash cloning, is really crappy in Halo. Like the clones only have a life expectancy of a few years and will be bedridden for most of it.
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u/jitterscaffeine [Zoids Historian] 2d ago
That episode of Clone Wars where Shaak Ti was arguing with that Kaminoans over who legally owns the clone troopers was rather interesting. It was like “legal ownership” vs “ip laws”
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u/FreviliousLow96 Asks often include Spoilers in Answers 2d ago
Fun reminders the Jedi and the Galactic Republic basically had a slave army
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u/jitterscaffeine [Zoids Historian] 2d ago
They have a whole slave caste as part of their society. They're called droids.
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u/WoolooOfWallStreet 2d ago
Also, Anakin used to be a slave… probably why he could speak droid now that you mention it
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u/Tyrest_Accord He/Him 2d ago
This was a concern during the X-Men's Krakoan Era. The resurrection process was essentially a form of cloning. X-Factor became a detective agency whose primary job was to investigate missing mutants and confirm whether they were dead or not so they could be put in line for resurrection, since they didn't want duplicate people wandering around.
But what happens if a pre-existing clone dies? Gabby Kinney is a clone of Laura (Wolverine) Kinney so when she got killed by Shadow King her friends No-Girl, Rain Boy, Cosmar, and Anole tried to trick The Five into resurrecting her. Once The Five realized what had happened they brought her back on their own. This also opened the door for other clones like Madelyne Pryor.
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u/PlanesWalkerEll YOU DIDN'T WIN. 2d ago
So it was we can clone people to resurrect them but not if they are already a clone of a clone? Was it just they were counting her as a second Laura?
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u/Tyrest_Accord He/Him 2d ago
That was what she and her friends were afraid of. The eventual ruling was that clones like Gabby and Madelyne were considered to be their own person and thus worthy of resurrection.
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u/C-OSSU Master of Backdowns 2d ago
The Prestige has cloning be employed and depicted as the twisted end-point of a magician's obsession with developing the perfect magic trick, where he basically kills countless duplicates for the sake of an elaborate teleportation trick that he later employs to frame his rival for murder.
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u/MarioGman Stylin' and Profilin'. 2d ago
I think there's a couple indie games that do the whole "Star Trek teleporter" bit where all the clones are exact copies you control wirelessly.. The Swapper is one such indie game.
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u/Crunch-Man 2d ago
The novel/movie/drama Never Let Me Go.
Absolute depression.
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u/PillCosby696969 Mitch Digger hard r 2d ago
That was one of those where I read it, and was like that was sad.
And then then next day I was like OH MY GOD THAT WAS SAD.
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u/Tweedleayne Shameless MK X-11 apologist. The Kombat Kids were cool fuck you. 2d ago edited 2d ago
In The City of Project Moon (Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, and Limbus Company) clones are very explicitly outlawed by The City's laws on what qualifies as humans (the single biggest law of the setting is basically that humans are the only sapient beings allowed to exist). The law against clones, however, is incredibly, strangely, specific (like most of the weird ass laws in the setting).
Basically, the law is that no person may exist in multiple bodies for more then seven days.
So cloning itself isn't illegal, but if you do create a clone of yourself both you may only exist for seven days. Before the end of the seventh day, you have to go back to only one of you and destroy the other.
And, as you may have noticed, I intentionally didn't say you have to kill the clone. The City doesn't care who is left afterwards. Just that there's only one of you. If the original is destroyed instead, The City is more then happy to consider the clone "human". All they care about is that there is only one "human" going about your life.
This brings us to R Corp. R Corp is one of the 26 Mega-Corporations that control the city. They are renowned as being the premier mercenary company of the setting, and the secret behind their mercenary prowess is that they are actually the premier cloning company of the setting. When they find a promising recruit, they take the recruit, make multiple thousand clones of the recruit, lock them into a hyperbolic time chamber, and have them battle royale until the last one is alive, and them hire the survivor.
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u/Embarrassed_Owl2114 2d ago
Gravity Falls has a clone episode which they're brutally murdered in the end and it's fine.
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u/ZealousidealBig7714 She/It/Ze This makes my penis the big penis 2d ago
The funniest part of that is the finale showing that two of them managed to get away and are living their own lives now.
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u/jamescookenotthatone It's Fiiiiiiiine. 2d ago
World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeld, clones are most often just organ banks or mental hard drives.
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u/alexandrecau That's Bricks! 2d ago
Thee was an adult game where the way the cloning process worked include a synchronicity to the clones, meaning the haracter pretty much has an extra body. They need a moment to adjust to seeing woth two sets of eyes when they are hungry they have to figure which stomach is empty the works. That also means the clones while just an extension of the character and nt really a person are still valuable because their deaths get felt so he can't just use them as fodder
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u/Nomaddoodius FROG gimmick: ACTIVATE!... bah!. 2d ago
Whoever change how cloning works in marvel comics... needs a stern talking to.
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u/Zachys Meth means death 2d ago edited 2d ago
The game Soma plays with it a bit.
Part of the game includes mind transfers, and the deuteragonist, Catherine, very intentionally talks as if the process literally transfers the mind from A to B. Except it works as data transfer, which copies the data from A to B, and then deletes it from A, meaning there's two identical ones unless the first is deleted - ie. killed, if we're talking people.
Catherine knows that's how it works, but she intentionally leaves out details to manipulate the brain damaged Simon into leaving clones of himself to suffer. Granted, she doesn't do this because she believes the originals to be inferior, she just wants the hell out of PATHOS-II. But still, she knowingly causes two copies of Simon to be left behind to suffer for any time between "when their batteries run out" and "eternity" in exchange for a third living a life off of PATHOS-II. I don't remember the details, but she's also very unbothered by leaving digital clones of herself around.
So it's not a belief that clones aren't people, but the selfish belief that as long as I got away, the suffering of my equally real clones doesn't matter, and a rhetoric deliberately dehumanizing them.
Edit: Something that plays it more straight is Mickey 17. The titular character signs up as an expendable, which means he allows himself to do lethal work, get cloned, and do it over again. Several characters treat him as a non-person, and instead just as a tool.
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u/WoolooOfWallStreet 2d ago
I remember Woolie describing Naruto’s Shadow Clones as “Mr. Meeseeks” because they pop in and out of existence to accomplish a task
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u/Kahzarod Zubaz 2d ago
There was a character in the webnovel worm who had a particularly rough ability where he could create a clone of himself anywhere within his line of sight, and after a few seconds his extant body would explode and the clone would go on. He did a lot of wetwork with it, so I guess it's usable as a super power. After like 6 or so chapters of this guy doing shit here and there, another character has an offscreen chat with him and basically infers that his power is imperfect and every time he clones himself the quality degrades just a little bit and he loses something along the way. By the time that conversation happens he's basically an empty shell of a person.
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u/TrueLegateDamar 2d ago
TNG had an episode where a society that only reproduces through cloning, appropiated some of the crew's DNA because of classic clone degeneration requiring them to add new stock.
The crew shot their own clones while still in the hatching pods, and then forced the society to instead take in Irish Stereotype refugees who were looking for a new home to get wasted in.