I’ve found that I have to rethink the next chapter of one of the fanfics I’m currently working on. So in order to help do that by taking my mind off it for a bit I thought I’d do another Character Salute post. For this salute I thought I’d talk about two groups, or rather families of characters, the clans of Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny.
The Jenny and Joy clans are a pair of extended families, and in each family the female members all look alike. Furthermore, all the women of the Joy family all become Pokemon Nurses, while the women of the Jenny clan all turn out to be dedicated if somewhat incompetent police officers. Both the families seem to be, as Bulbapedia put it, “on good terms with each other”. But the big mystery is how all of the Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys look alike. I mean this goes a little further than simple family resemblance.
There are of course a few theories out there among the fans. One of the more plausible theories I’ve heard is that there’s some method of cloning involved. There’s another theory out there that suggests that each Officer Jenny and Nurse Joy out there are Pokemon themselves, but I think that’s a pretty big stretch. I’ve actually come up with a couple theories of my own, though they’re probably not original. The first one is an extension of the cloning theory.
It could be that the all the Jennys and Joys have some sort of genetic trait or mutation that causes all of their female children to essentially be clones. One problem with this theory and the whole cloning theory in general is another theory from Star Trek known as replicative fading. According to this theory (at least I’m pretty sure it’s just a theory), when you make a clone from a clone certain flaws start to appear, and after a few generations you end up with a defective clone. A good real world example of this is making a photocopy of a photocopy, and then making a photocopy of that photocopy, and so on and so on. Eventually you end up with a document that’s unreadable.
The only thing that could explain away the replicative fading problem away is that the Jennys and Joys do marry, so their “clone” children could be receiving fresh genetic input. But I’m not a genetics expert, so I’m probably wrong. The other theory I have (and again I’m probably not the first person to come up with this), is that the Jenny and Joy families are aliens, or the descendants of two alien races who settled on the Pokemon version of Earth thousands or perhaps millions of years ago. Another factor that complicates things is that the Jennys and Joys from Unova look distinctly different from their Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh counterparts, yet all look like each other. It could simply be that both families have a different branch in Unova, but it does screw up a few theories a little bit.
In the end though, I think if one were to corner one of the writers of the Pokemon anime on the street and ask them why all the Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys look alike, that writer would probably stammer for half a minute before pointing and shouting “Look over there!” and running off. In other words the writers probably don’t even know. They probably weren’t thinking that far ahead when one of them came up with the idea for this odd “family resemblance”. It’s sort of like in Star Trek when the Klingons had flat foreheads in the original series, but then had ridged foreheads from the movies and onwards. Sure that was because cosmetic methods weren’t as advanced in the 1960s as they are today, but it was years before the Star Trek writers could come up with a decent explanation for the change (which they did in Star Trek Enterprise).
There is one thing I don’t like about the Joy and Jenny clans (aside from their Unova redesigns). And that’s that while each Joy and Jenny has her own individual personality quirks, there’s not a lot of diversity among them. Just once I would’ve liked to see a corrupt Officer Jenny, or a Nurse Joy that was not necessarily evil (that would be a little scary actually), but at least rebellious or amoral, or indifferent, something that made her the black sheep of the family. I mean they all kind of blend together. Just because they look alike doesn’t mean they have to act alike too. But then I am asking a lot from side characters from a kids’ show.
In the Games: The Joy and Jenny clans are more or less exclusive to the anime. The only time they have appeared in the video games is in Pokemon Yellow, which is based more on the anime. Each Pokemon Center in Yellow has a Nurse Joy (complete with Chansey). As for Officer Jenny, there’s one that appears in Cerulean City and one that appears in Vermilion City. But other than that, the Jenny clan doesn’t show up much in the game at all.
So that wraps it up for this character salute. I’m not sure when I’ll do the next one, but I have a few ideas about which character I’ll do next. So until next time then.
