Exchange of Realities

One of the most popular elements in many games and stories is the mirror character or alternate self: a character who is notable for how similar she is to the character she’s supposed to be mirroring (henceforth known as the base character). They’re a fascinating tool for a number of reasons.

First, “What if?” is an innately fascinating concept. If we look at things that happen as a series of one or the other choices, any given event resolution means that one thing happened and one did not—and in many cases, will never happen. What will never happen, we can’t have. What we can’t have intrigues us, so we look for it elsewhere; why else do you think the alternate history is such a popular setting or subject in today’s fiction? The mirror self, particularly in its form as the alternate universe duplicate, is a chance to look at this could-have-been, seeing how one change at one point in the cycle could snowball into a whole other character.

On a similar vein, the could-have-been is good for unnerving the base character, particularly when the base is a hero and the mirror character works for the other side. In most of these cases, the mirror’s similarities to the base character are played up, save for one or two very important differences, which almost invariably relate to said mirror character being on the other side. For a particularly strong effect, some don’t make the differences technically opposites at all—instead, the dark mirror takes one or two traits which on the hero are admirable and pushes them to such extremes that they go beyond the pale and right back into the dark. These sorts of mirror characters usually emphasize either the inevitability of the base character becoming them or the pure luck/one good feature that kept them two separate people.

Another use for the mirror character, particularly in games, is to give the base character a good look at himself. In a narrative, this can allow for introspection and revelation. But in a game, it gives the base character’s player a chance to see how that character comes across to the game master by looking at where the mirror character is similar to the base. (In fact, many of the more curious will often ask the GM how the mirror character was created in a sort of metaphysical “Can you move that thing a few inches to the right?”)

Still another advantage of the mirror character, most commonly used in stories with a lot of fighting, is pretty thematics. Balance is, after all, one of the principles of art, symmetry and asymmetry are expressions of balance, and a confrontation between a character and her mirror incorporates both symmetry and asymmetry at the same time. This makes the confrontation, in that sense, beautiful, and this beauty means that people like to use it as a design element.

Another is that the mirror character’s path isn’t set. One might convince her base to be like her; another might find himself going through the change he’d hoped to send his base through, to the base character’s side. Still others might hang out in the middle, not necessarily protagonists but not antagonists either. This makes them nice and versatile, making it possible to create one for any role the story needs or shoehorn the same one into any of a number of roles depending on how things go.

The best part? A given character doesn’t need to have just one mirror and, in fact, probably won’t; the more detailed a character is, the more possible points of divergence and qualities that can be reflected or distorted there are, and thus the more mirror-characters that character could spawn. A note, though: while it’s possible to populate a world with some characters’ mirrors, that doesn’t mean one should. Like any other plot gimmick, the mirror character is best used in comparative moderation.

In sum, mirror characters are intellectually intriguing, versatile and thematically nifty when done well.