
Doug Kinney #3, Multiplicity
"Like a bad photocopy, each one is a little darker than the last."
Batman, referring to the Everywhere Man, The Batman

When dealing with fiction that clones things, the assumption is often made that clones must, after time, decay. That is, with each copy you make whatever Applied Phlebotinum you are using to create the clones will either decrease in effectiveness, or the clones themselves become less coherent since eventually everything is just a copy of a copy. This goes double for dead clones, who tend to dissolve because they're "less than human" rather than leave a proper corpse.

When dealing with a character who has the ability to create clones apparently out of thin air, this weakness is usually the only thing holding them back from whatever it is they're trying to do.

Uses very similar logic to Super Prototype and Conservation of Ninjutsu. The Super Prototype, when it is a one-of-a-kind machine, is awesome and unstoppable. Clones, likewise, seem really great at first—but the more of them you get, the more common and boring the idea of a clone is in the first place. As a result, they inevitably lose effectiveness because several copies of the same thing just wouldn't be all that interesting.

In some instances it may be a Justified Trope: the creator may "program" a shortened lifespan into the clone to protect their property from getting away. Relatedly, the degeneration may be because the process used to make the clone resulted in a Flawed Prototype, making all the clones a form of Keystone Army that will croak on some future date or circumstance. If the hero has qualms about killing clones, their degeneration lays them to rest. Whether out of being a Mercy Kill or making them seem less real varies.

See also Power Degeneration, which also applies to clones designed with powers.

Note that this trope does have some grounding in Real Life: Cloning isn't a fully documented science yet, and genetic kinks in the cloning process, such as shortened telomeres and genomic imprinting, remain factors that may lead to clones having shorter life expectancies than their originals. Clones of clones tend to be even worse off.

Note, this is not the same as a Degenerate Clone.

Examples of Clone Degeneration include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Ah! My Goddess:
    • In the "Adeventures of the Mini-Goddesses manga, one of the goddesses is able to make a duplicate of herself, which can make a duplicate of herself, etc, each of which is a bit shorter and squishier than its parent. In the main series, goddesses and demons can also divide themselves into avatars—smaller, less powerful versions of themselves. Before leaving, Hild splits off a 1/1000 avatar of herself in the form of a child to keep track of things on Earth. In chapter 248, her 1/1000 avatar then splits off a 1/1000 avatar which takes the form of a small crystal.
  • Clones in Gundam Seed tend to have physical or mental problems. Case in Point: Rau Le Cruset.
    • Another example would be Prayer Reverie in the Astray mangas, who was okay in the head, but was basically an Ill Girl for most of the Astray X series, and was able to convincingly fake a death of "natural causes" at the apparent age of nine
  • This is the reason why Zest Grangaitz of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha was considered an imperfect Artificial Mage. He got the memories, abilities, and personality of the original, but his body was suffering from severe health problems.
    • Averted with Fate Testarossa, who appears completely healthy over a decade and a half after her creation, as well as Erio Mondial, who has been alive for at least a decade as of Force.
      • Fate is an interesting example. Although she has none of the issues seen in this trope, she isn't a perfect clone, either. Changes in personality, eye color, and other small details mark her as a distinctly unique individual, which led to her ultimate classification as 'failed clone' despite the fact that her incredible raw magical aptitude perhaps make her even better than the original.
  • In Fate/stay night, Ilya will eventually die young because of her nature as a modified homunculi Holy Grail.
  • In her last few scenes, Rei Ayanami's limbs had a tendency to ... fall off. Her body, being a mishmash of Lilith and Yui's DNA, isn't capable to holding together without Rei's AT field to counter the effects of imperfect cloning. After expending so much of her energy to counter Kaworu the previous day, she can't hold herself together.
  • The Sisters in To Aru Majutsu no Index have to go through body adjustments specifically to prevent this. Justified because they were only made so that Accelerator could kill them.
  • Cloneblades in the Witchblade anime are attempts to copy the titular weapon. But cloneblades are, while powerful are inferior to the original and over time they burn out and take whoever they're bonded to with them.
  • In the fifth Kara no Kyoukai movie, Shirou Enjoe learns of his clone status the hard way. And then his arm falls off.
  • Naruto can create up to a couple thousand copies of himself, but they dispel whenever they take a direct hit. He also doesn't trust them enough to let them out of his sight, which suggests that they're not as smart as the original. Which is saying something, considering who we're dealing with.
  • Lupin III: The Secret of Mamo plays this straight, when Mamo reveals towards the end that even his methods of cloning to reach immortality come with their limits.


Lupin: But you are always distorted by your obsession.

Dying Mamo clone: But is it not... everyone's obsession?



  • This is how Bizarro is often depicted in the DCU.
  • Spider-Man: Every clone created by the Jackal was subject to this. Some of them were almost identical to the originals but aged / disfigured, while others would last so long and then spontaneously collapse into a pile of mush - Jackal triggered this in his "mini-me", Jack, as punishment for giving Ben Reilly information. It even drove one, Kaine, insane. Ben Reilly succumbed to it when he died. (And in Spider-Girl, passed it onto his kid.)
  • Slo-Bo from Young Justice admitted to suffering from this near the end of the series. He would have died soon anyway had Darkseid not Omega Beamed him. Might have been preferable.
  • In a crossover of The Simpsons and Bartman, Celebrity Troy McClure gained the radiation explosion created identity of "The Sequelizer". His sequel-generating powers allowed him to create duplicates of himself, but each copy was only half as strong as the previous one.


  • The Nexus 6 generation of replicants in Blade Runner, though potentially physically and mentally superior to humans, have four year life expectancies thanks to kill switches designed into their genes. Their creator describes it as a "light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly". The androids of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the movie was loosely based, have a similar life expectancy, but this is due to technological limitations.
  • This is probably why Boba Fett is an effective bounty hunter instead of a simple stormtrooper- as the first clone of Jango Fett, having been raised as a son, he maintained a unique spirit.
    • However, it was explicitly said that the clone troopers had been slightly modified, most notably to be more obedient and age twice as fast. Boba Fett was explicitly an unmodified clone of Jango.
    • However he still gets cancer because of this and even with the treatment he gets has at best five years.
      • Five years from his diagnosis with cancer, mind you, closer to sixty-five years after his production.
    • In the Star Wars Expanded Universe comic series Dark Empire, The Emperor died with the second Death Star, but had clones stashed away somewhere, and about ten years later he reemerged as head of The Empire. Since he was skilled with the Dark Side and all, he could Body Surf through the clones, taking up from where he left off. However, his stored genes had been sabotaged, making it so that none of the clone bodies could last very long. And it got worse for him when some traitorous Mooks killed most of the stored clones.
    • Shows up in The Rise of Skywalker, a Whole-Plot Reference to Dark Empire, though in this case, it was because the clone simply hadn't matured enough to properly contain Palpatine's power, Vader having betrayed him sooner than expected. Through leeching power off of Rey and Kylo Ren however, Palpatine was able to heal the cloned body.
  • The Michael Keaton film Multiplicity, about a man who has himself cloned, has one of the clones cloned, and he came out rather... special.
  • "GEFs", clone bodies used for hazardous occupations in the movie XChange, have a life span of only three days, after which they begin rapidly decomposing. Naturally, the protagonist gets stuck in one that's already been alive for two days. The villain ends up in this body just as its time runs out--then appears not to dying at first because its timer is a few minutes off.
    • Same with the clones in the original novel Mindswap by Robert Sheckley, on which the movie is very loosely based.
  • Word of God for Primer states that doubles created via Time Travel are imperfect copies. This is the reason for Aaron and Abe's earbleeds and the degradation of their handwriting when they begin altering their past.


  • Invoked in F.M. Busby's Rissa Kerguelen series. The Hulzein clan learns through painful experience that they have to alternate cloned generations with ones produced the normal way, or else they wind up with mentally unstable kids—which, given the resources and intelligence levels that all the Hulzeins possess, is just a bad idea for everyone.
  • Though technically not because of being a clone, (and not actually being a "clone" in the strictest sense) Bean of the Ender's Shadow series is this because of Anton's Gene being activated in him, which makes him smarter because his brain and body never stop growing at the cost of becoming a giant and eventual death
  • Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Literature): Toons can make duplicates of themselves for doing stunts, but the duplicates are very short-lived.
  • The novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang centers around this, in a way. A post-apocalyptic society rendered sterile by disease discovers that, though clones do display Clone Degeneration in the form of sterility after a few generations, they actually reverse the trend after a few more. The society uses this to attempt to set up a sustaining population of fertile humans.
  • The Styx Drones from Colony are this. Each batch suffers from further deterioration of intelligence, leaving the present batch Too Dumb to Live.

Live Action TV

  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Up The Long Ladder", the Enterprise discovers the Lost Colony of Mariposa that was founded by five colonists (thanks to the colony ship suffering a hull breach) who populated their society by cloning themselves en-masse in order to have a sustainable population only to fall victim to replicative fading (each generation has more and more genetic drift reducing the viability of their DNA). They initially tried to solve the problem by introducing Riker and Pulaski's DNA into the mix but the only real solution was ultimately to introduce a large amount of non-clone DNA into the population.
  • Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis love this trope. The Asgard, O'Neills clone, Beckett's clone, take whatever you want.
    • Though Beckett's cellular degeneration issues were eventually solved, effectively making him the original Back From the Dead.
    • Also note that in the case of O'Neill's clone, the degeneration is a case of having You Have Outlived Your Usefulness literally encoded in his genes. In fact, he's overcome with pain within minutes of being recovered by Loki.
    • Kull Warriors are created in nonliving form and animated via Ancient technology They live for several days or weeks, though they're extremely hard to kill before their time.
    • There is a bit of Fridge Logic there, as the Asgard should've anticipated that their clones would degrade after millennia of copying copies. Apparently, in a case of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, they did not keep an original DNA somewhere. This is actually a plot point in a later episode, where they recover an original Asgard and try to gain his DNA. This fails spectacularly.
  • The single-clone degeneration is addressed but ultimately averted in Farscape. When Crichton is "twinned" during season three, the Mad Scientist Kaarvok claims that the resulting duplicates are "equal and original," with no defects or imperfections. However, in a later episode, one of the two Crichtons experiences spontaneous bleeding and blackouts, leading him to believe that Clone Degeneration is at work: fortunately, it's just the Villain of the Week causing chaos across Moya. As one of the Crichtons has died in a Heroic Sacrifice and the other has suffered no ill effects it can be assumed that Kaarvok was correct. However, the multiple-clone degeneration is used in the episode Kaarvok was introduced in, specifically in the form of the feral, degenerate remains of the crew of the ship he'd been imprisoned aboard. Apparently after "twinning" the twin of a twin and so on a certain amount of error did emerge.
  • In an episode of the Honey I Shrunk the Kids TV series that seems to have been loosely based on Multiplicity, Wayne creates a molecular duplication machine that has the side effect of making the target's molecules unstable, causing them to create more duplicates whenever they are bumped hard against something or jolted. This results in a good number of extra Waynes, nearly all of which are a bit dense. "Why are my clones such dorks?"

Tabletop Games

  • The fetches of Changeling: The Lost are always missing something of the personality they were meant to replace. It could be a negative trait (quickness to anger) or a positive trait (dedication to a task), but there's always going to be something missing.
  • Paranoia XP has this as a mechanic in order to convince characters to try not to get killed quite as much (if the GM is letting the PCs buy clones rather than simply going through a 6-pack and then handing out new sheets.) After the first seven or so, things start to go south in a hurry, with extra fingers, hideous deformity, and (worst of all in Alpha Complex) colour blindness. Luckily, BLUE-clearance PCs can pay to have the template cleaned up. Others have to depend upon secret societies and underhanded business that may well result in termination for treason.

Video Games

  • This is the reason you don't make copies of AIs in the Halo universe. In the First Strike novel, Cortana used alien technology to create new (slightly flawed) instances of herself in a Covenant warship so she could be in two places at once. The copies made copies. The copies of the copies made copies. The quickly-growing swarm of AIs started forking off copies for specialized tasks, having those copies be overwhelmed by Covvie AIs, and spinning off more copies. Eventually the alien ship filled its computers to the roof with Cortana clones, segfaulted, and blew up. It was pretty awesome.
    • Though the "blowing up" part was entirely deliberate. Even as flawed as the copies were, they still managed to complete their mission.
    • This also applies to human clones. Individual organs can be cloned and used for transplants without a problem, it's when you clone the whole body do things go south. The flash clones (which are the only method of cloning seen in the Halo universe) is where the clones are aged up to the person who supplied the DNA. The clone will have the mind of an infant, given that it has zero memories, and the body will deteriorate and quickly die within a couple months. Apparently the cloned body's metabolism just can't stabilize itself correctly. The procedure is highly illegal.
      • Clones are used to cover up the Spartan II project. ONI took the children, and gave the parents flash clones. As far as any of the parents could guess, their children inexplicably went into a vegetative state and died from an unknown disease.
      • Flash-cloned brains are the only way of making "smart" AIs. Cortana, for example, was created by scanning the cloned brain of Dr. Halsey, the creator of the Spartans. This gets a little weird in one novel when Cortana mentions to Halsey that she thinks John-117 (Master Chief) is cute. Halsey knows that this must be what she thinks as well, even though she is the Spartans' mother figure. Of course, since he never takes off his helmet, we'll never know.
    • Don't forget that Cortana got the copy program off of a heavily degraded yet "somehow familiar" Covenant AI. Along with the presence of a time-manipulation device, its insinuated that she got the program from one of her own (completely insane) time-lost copies.
  • Solid, Liquid, and Solidus Snake from Metal Gear Solid are clones of Big Boss. Liquid and Solidus got killed off prior to degeneration, but by Metal Gear Solid 4, Solid Snake's aging has accelerated to the point where characters who were adults in the 1960s look younger than he does. Compounding this, he goes through a truly horrific gauntlet throughout the game. And yet, he still gets the job done.
  • Tales of the Abyss features this, along with everything else from the Cloning Blues vat. But since this is a Tales game, it plays around with the trope too: it turns out that getting a clone made can cause just as many problems to the original as it does to the copy. In the best case, the original develops severe health problems after a while. In the worst, the original dies as soon as the data required to create a clone in the first place is extracted.
  • This is the premise of Destroy All Humans!. The Blisk had mutated Furon DNA so that they can't propagate due to lack of genitalia. Fortunately, they perfected the art of cloning, rendering them virtually immortal. Unfortunately, each new clone has degraded Furon DNA, making the results more unpredictable and eventually leading to the extinction of the Furon race. Fortunately, this could be fixed via infusion of uncorrupted DNA, and a Furon mothership happened upon another planet eons earlier and frolicked with the planets' inhabitants, giving the their descendants Furon DNA. Unfortunately for us but fortunately for them, that planet is Earth.
  • This may explain why Taokaka from Blaz Blue is so very odd. Though the rest of the Kaka clan, also clones of Jubei seem more put together.
  • Alluded to in Republic Commando whenever the player performs some suicidally dumb action.

  Scorch: Maybe 38's a copy of a copy of a copy...

  • Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core is a prequel, giving us background on stuff like why Sephiroth went crazy and destroyed Cloud's hometown. A huge part of it turns out to be the emotional blows he suffered when losing his two closest friends to Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal against Shinra; the primary mistreatment in this case being that Shinra had created them via genetic hacking and then, at some point in their thirties, their bodies started to break down. And that was when they found out they weren't just naturally talented best friends from Banora, where the scientist running the project apparently retired after Hojo got all the funding in order to make Sephiroth.
    • Genesis, the one who actually went Ax Crazy, may have minded that Sephiroth was perfect and the project that wasn't abandoned as much as the dying part. Never mind that Project G being mostly-canceled meant he got a childhood; he had a Green-Eyed Monster problem.


  • Lampshaded in this strip from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, where Molly's clone Galatea insists on using Molly's tissues for an experiment rather than her own.
  • In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja the doctor uses this to explain why killing off all his clones wasn't as bad as it seems, because the clones created with the old process were highly unstable. To illustrate this he shows a video where clone of Benjamin Franklin made with that technolgy accidentally kills himself by biting too hard into a sandwich. Which causes the top of his head to fall off
  • In Kevin and Kell, Corrie's clone, Dolly, begins aging rapidly as a result of being a clone. Dolly becomes concerned about how her adoptive parents, the Canids, will feel about this so Corrie (who had originally been adopted before Dolly took her place) switches with Dolly, who poses as her birth mother. An accident with a time machine results in Dolly being de-aged to a baby, which gives her a fresh start on life even if her rapid aging resumes (which is somewhat unlikely to happen, given the nature of how time progresses in the strip).

Web Animation

  • In The Demented Cartoon Movie, this problem plagues Evil Blah's Auto-Damsel-Maker, ultimately resulting in a damsel who's a little... weird.

Western Animation

  • In the nineteenth episode of Superman: The Animated Series, Lex Luthor clones Superman. But the clone soon starts to degenerate and becomes Bizarro.
  • This happens to Thailog and the other Manhattan clan clones in Gargoyles: the Goliath chronicles. They begin to suffer from degeneration and, despite an attempt to cure them it causes them to permanently turn to stone.
  • One Treehouse of Horror special in The Simpsons has Homer with a cloning mechanism which results in him creating duplicates who are progressively dumber than he is. Eventually they get to be so stupid that one of them is Peter Griffin.
  • This seemed to be inherent to present-day cloning in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the fourth season of the show, it was revealed that Agent Bishop's body was slowly degenerating, and therefore needed to transfer his mind to a new one, which eventually happened, dissolving skin and all. Later on, Baxter Stockman cloned himself a new body to replace the one he had systematically lost during the course of the series, only to find it decaying as well.
  • In Exo Squad, Neosapiens ran a risk of contracting a disease where their bodies decompose, seeing as it's entire species is a clone race, it made coming Back From the Dead via implanted memory recordings a bit of a gamble.
  • The Ring of the Nine Dragons from Xiaolin Showdown can divide one person into at most nine, but their intelligence is also divided, so in the end, you have nine people with only a ninth of your intelligence... and getting them back together is really hard.
  • In the rather bizarre miniseries House Of Cosbys, the Bill Cosby clones get increasingly bizarre defects, however the main character keeps making them as every tenth Cosby has superpowers. Unfortunately, Cosby #100 happens to be pure evil.
  • In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frylock reveals that he's been cloning televisions every time the other Aqua Teens destroy one. Eventually the latest television they make turns evil. Later in the episode the Aqua Teens clone a dollar bill and eventually end up making George Washington out of dollar bills.
  • Men in Black had Quick Clones. Each clone was indistinguishable from the original, but after time, the clone would begin speaking nonsensically before melting into a pile of goo. The time until melting varied based on stress and physical exertion. Alternatively, any clone could be terminated by pushing a button located behind the ear.
  • Danny Phantom's Opposite Sex Clone Danni Phantom melts whenever she uses her superpowers. She gets better.
  • An experiment in Lilo & Stitch: The Series has this when Stitch get hit by it duplicating ray making extra copies of himself. His creator, Jumba, explains that the more duplicates there are the more their strength is divided between them. Lilo uses this later against Gantu when he get a hold of the experiment and tries to create an army with the experiments hes captured. But they're all pathetically weak that the heroes easily waltz right through em.
  • Drakken tried this in Kim Possible making "clones" (the show admits it isn't really cloning but called that for simplicity) of Kim, Ron, Rufus and Bonnie and modifying them to be mindless attack drones. It works till its revealed they're weak against soda, dissolving into green puddles when its sprayed on them.
  • A very Squicky version happens in Family Guy. Stewie has decided to clone himself, creating the Humanoid Abomination known as "Bitch Stewie," a hideously deformed, moronic servant to the original. Later, Stewie delegates Bitch Stewie to make a copy of Brian which is even more messed up to the point that it can't function without Brian's constant supervision. Eventually, both clones melt into a pile of disgusting, fleshy goo, made even worse when Brian says he's not proud of it, but he has to lick up the mess.
  • Pinkie Pie's clones in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic don't suffer from any physical impairments but they undergo more and more Flanderization the longer that they exist.
  • Hordak suffers from this until the fifth season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Even cybernetic augmentations only slowed down the genetic defects.
  • An Implied Trope with the Predacon clones in Transformers Prime. The original batch died out sometime in the last five thousand years contrasting the Cybertronians' usual status as The Ageless.

Real Life

  • Truth in Television: Some speculate that this occurred with the cloned sheep Dolly, that she died early due to being born with a genetic age of six. The Roslin Institute disagrees, however.
  • Most parthenogenetic species in nature do retain the capacity for sexual reproduction, often resorting to this method of breeding when conditions become harsh. It's thought that species which lose this ability usually get wiped out by infectious diseases that can easily spread among genetically-identical hosts, or by changes in their environment they'd otherwise lack the diversity to cope with: thus, while individual clones may thrive, all-clone species decline over time.
  • This is what happens with photocopying. Each copy isn't quite as sharp or pristine as the original so as you keep copying copies the end result is an unintelligible mess.