Robin: How now, spirit? Wither wander you?
Fairy: Over hill, over dale
Through brush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through flood, through fire;
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere.
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.1.1-9.
I.
Like the game of chess, which originated in India and then passed through — and was transformed by — Persian, Arabic, Spanish, French, English, American and Russian hands, Clefairy and Clefable combine influences from many different times and places. They reflect
the moon rabbit of ancient (and modern) Chinese mythology;
Japanese interpretations of this mythical figure;
the Japanese kawaii aesthetic;
The magical, soporific power of music in myth, such as Greek myth;
medieval European fairy folklore;
the once-numinous and dreaded fairy’s devolution into Tinker Bell;
and 20th century UFO sightings and the science fiction they influenced and were influenced by.
This post will try to untangle some of these threads in order to show that even these cutesy, cuddly pink little puffballs have an ancient, mythical ancestry. (To prevent this post from becoming longer than it already is, a discussion of mythical musicians, such as Orpheus, the sirens and the mermaids, will wait until I cover Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff.)
Clefairy and its evolution are clearly fairies, as reflected by their names in English and in French, where they are Mélofée and Mélodelfe, respectively. (Clefable’s original Japanese name, which it retains in most other translations, is Pixy.) Therefore this post will focus on the overwhelming topic of fairy folklore, with a few detours into outer space.
II.
Clefairy and Clefable are particularly unusual and special creatures even among the fantastical menagerie of Pokémon. In a world populated by dragons, electric mice, living rocks, plant-animal hybrids and other strange creatures, it is these small, pink creatures which are particularly elusive, particularly sought-after.
“Clefairy: this impish Pokémon is friendly and peaceful,” Ash’s Pokédex informs him in the anime’s sixth episode. “It is believed to live inside Mt. Moon, although very few have ever been seen by humans.” When Ash and his friends encounter Clefairy’s evolution Clefable later in the episode, the Pokedex notes that “these unique creatures are among the rarest Pokémon in the world.” In Toshiro Ono’s manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu, Professor Oak tells Ash that “no one has ever witnessed a Clefairy evolution.” According to the Red and Blue Pokédex, Clefable is a “timid fairy Pokémon that is rarely seen. It will run and hide the moment it senses people.” The Yellow Pokédex adds that “they appear to be very protective of their own world.”
In the third episode of The Electric Tale of Pikachu, “Clefairy Tale,” Ash trades one of his Pokémon for a ‘secret map’ of Clefairy habitats in the hope that capturing such a rare, prestigious Pokémon will improve his status as a trainer.
Finally, consider the Clefairy and Clefable cards I’ve used to illustrate this post. Both are holographic and sport a star symbol, which signifies the rarest kind of Pokémon card. (Circles represent the most common cards; diamonds represent moderately rare cards.) In the first generation of Pokémon, most holographic cards are either third-stage evolutions (such as Charizard, Venusaur, Machamp or Gengary) or one of a handful of designated ‘legendary’ Pokémon (Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Mewtwo and Mew.)
Another major difference between Clefairy and Clefable and most other Pokémon is that the former are exclusively associated with a single in-world location – Mt. Moon, possibly based on Gunma Prefecture’s Mount Akagi) – whereas the latter appear across more generic biomes such as caves, forests, grasslands and oceans. “Many strange and astonishing tales have been told about this place,” the anime’s narrator informs the viewer in episode six, “Clefairy and the Moon Stone;” he goes on to promise that Ash and company “will discover that all of them are true.”
Mt. Moon is where a meteor once fell on earth; fragments of this meteor have become known as moon stones and cause certain Pokémon, such as Clefairy, to evolve. As small, cute, mammalian creatures with an extraterrestrial connection, Clefairy and its evolution Clefable evoke a much older mythical character.
III.
On December 14th, 2013, China became the third country to successfully land on the moon; the Chang’e 3 spacecraft landed the Yutu rover, which proceeded to examine the lunar soil and discover a new kind of lunar basalt. The Change’e program has continued up the present day, with Chang’e 5 successfully returning lunar samples to earth in December 2020 and Chang’e 6 planned to launch in 2024.
Just as America’s pioneering moon program took its name from the Greco-Roman sun god, the names of the Chinese spacecraft and rover evoke ancient myths. Chang’e is an ancient moon goddess who dates back at least to the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BC) and has thus played a role in Chinese culture for well over two thousand years.
According to one story, she was originally a mortal woman, the wife of the archer Houyi who shot down nine of the ten suns that once scorched the earth’s surface, leaving one to more gently warm the planet. Houyi received the elixir of immortality as a reward for his heroic deed but was murdered by his treacherous apprentice Feng Meng before he could ingest it. Fleeing Feng Meng, Chang’e took the elixir of immortality and flew to the moon, becoming its goddess. Chang’e is very lonely on the moon until she meets her pet and constant companion, Yutu the moon rabbit. (This is my barebones retelling; this tale has many variations, including one in which Change’e herself steals the elixir.)
Human beings, the story continues, acclaimed the new moon goddess and burned incense in her honor, inaugurating the Mid-Autumn Festival still celebrated in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora.
As the Apollo 11 astronauts prepared for their historic landing, mission control called them and half-jokingly informed them about the possibility of meeting Chang’e and Yutu on the moon. “Okay,” Michael Collins responded, “We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.”
Whereas westerners see a man on the moon, east Asian cultures see a rabbit in the light and dark patterns of lunar seas, as illustrated above. In Chinese myth, Yutu mixes another batch of the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle, an image that appears again and again, in various media, throughout well over a millennium of Chinese art. The poet Li Bai (Li Po) uses this image ironically in his meditation on mortality “The Old Dust” (translated by Shigeyoshi Obata):
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain;
Fu-sang, the tree of immortality, has crumbled to kindling wood.
The moon rabbit also appears in Journey to the West (16th century), renowned as one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels.
Japanese culture has adopted the moon rabbit, albeit with one major change – instead of mixing the elixir of immortality, he is pounding mochi. Japanese artists and artisans have represented the moon rabbit in an incredible variety of media, including woodblock prints, paintings, sculptures, toys, dolls, netsuke, kimono. (I was lucky enough to see a few of these at LACMA’s fantastic Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art exhibition a few years ago.)
And, of course, in anime and manga. The title character of Sailor Moon is a reincarnation of an ancient, magical moon princess; her first name is Usagi, ‘rabbit.’ In an early episode of Dragon Ball, young Goku defeats a villainous rabbit-man and banishes him to the moon.
This brings us to Clefairy, Clefable and their relatives Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff. All are soft and furry, with prominent ears and a connection to the moon. (As I’ll discuss later, some characters within the Pokémon universe believe that Clefairy and Clefable actually came from the moon.) While most Pokémon evolve by accumulating experience points and reaching a certain level, Clefairy and Jigglypuff only evolve if exposed to a moon stone. Thus the moon rabbit is one of their mythical ancestors.
IV.
The dragon, as I’ve written before, has managed to retain some of its traditional sense of awe in modern pop culture; the fairy has not.
In The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C.S. Lewis writes that the word ‘fairy’ itself has become “tarnished by pantomime and bad children’s books with worse illustrations.” We would say Disneyfied.
The fairies’ relatives — the other descendants of the British Isles’ folkloric ‘little people’ — have hardly fared better. The word ‘pixie’ brings to mind an alt rock band or a woman’s short haircut much more readily than a mythical creature. (As a former Cast Member, my mind goes to Disneyland’s Pixie Hollow, a location on the Fantasyland-Tomorrowland border where children can meet Tinker Bell and her friends.) Gnomes are kitschy, ironic lawn ornaments, leprechauns appear on sugary cereal boxes or in schlocky horror movies, elves sit on the self or accompany Santa at shopping malls, kobolds, memetic for their bad grammar, are easily slain by the even the most novice World of Warcraft player. A sprite is a soda, not a nature spirit that can sometimes take fairylike form.
There are exceptions, of course, such as Maleficent, but on the whole modern-day fairies, elves, pixies and their brethren are at best harmlessly cute and only for children, and more often merely garish and low-rent.
Lewis’ close friend J.R.R. Tolkien makes a similar point in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” which begins with the observation that what we call ‘fairy tales’ almost never feature actual fairies. He draws a distinction between the realm of faerie, “which contains many things besides elves and fays,” and the shrunken, cutesy descendants of some of its inhabitants, which he admits to detesting. (His own elves, as well as Tom Bombadil, are much more authentic modern interpretations of the faerie folk.)
All of this cultural baggage makes it difficult to see fairies or their ancestors with ancient, medieval or renaissance eyes. It may seem ridiculous if I told you that Tinker Bell descends from actual gods, or that her more recent ancestors were so feared by Celtic peoples that their very names were taboo, replaced by euphemisms such as ‘the good folk.’ But that seems to be what happened.
Both Lewis and Simpson & Roud (in The Dictionary of English Folklore) note that these creatures in turn have clear ancestors in Greek mythology, in the various kinds of nymphs said to haunt the natural world.
Who’s Who in Classical Mythology defines nymphs as “female spirits of divine or semi-divine origin — often daughters of Zeus — whom the Greeks believed to reside in particular natural phenomena.” Authors Michael Grant and John Hazel note that “they resemble the fairies of later folklore, and, like them, could be cruel as well as kind” and list a number of different classes of nymphs, including the dryads and hamadryads, who haunted specific trees, the naiads who haunted the waters, and the nereids and oceanids who haunted the seas. Borges’ entry on nymphs in The Book of Imaginary Beings notes that “glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death.”
Where did a belief in nymphs come from? Some mythologists argue that they began as local nature gods, embodying unpredictable forces which modern technology has partially insulated us from. (For my Japanese and/or Japanophile readers, the kami are a good analogue.)
To an ancient farmer, fisherman, shepherd or hunter, nature’s fickleness must have seemed overwhelming. Good weather could produce a bountiful harvest, but too much or too little sun or rain could kill it, as could pests or disease or a blizzard. The fish or game could be scarce or plentiful; the flocks could wander off or be devoured by wolves; a seemingly random flood or fire or earthquake or epidemic or volcanic eruption could destroy an entire community. And, like many peoples throughout the ancient world, these ancient Greeks attributed these powers to unseen gods.
Then the growing worship of the twelve Olympian gods throughout the Greek world demoted these less popular local gods to a secondary status. As the god of the sea, Poseidon commanded respect and worship across the Greek-speaking world; any individual nymph’s role would now extend no further than that of the spirit of the local river, grove or mountain.
Lacking the necessary cache for temples of their own, they nonetheless lived on in folk belief and in tales of gods and heroes. The most famous individual nymphs in Greek mythology are probably the nereid Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and the mountain nymph Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus whose death by snakebite precipitated his ultimately futile descent into the underworld.
Simpson and Roud’s Dictionary of English Folklore entry on the word ‘fairy’ begins by emphasizing its loose definition:
A range of non-human yet material beings with magical powers. These could be visible or invisible at will, and could change shape; some lived underground, others in woods, or in water; some flew.
Like their ancestors, the nymphs, fairies came in multiple varieties. The knockers of Welsh and Cornish folklore were said to knock on the walls of mines, either to cause cave-ins or in some accounts, warn the miners of impending cave-ins; they were also said to steal the miners’ food and tools. (Their direct, similarly mischievous descendants called gremlins were blamed for aircraft malfunctions during World War II.) Hearing a knocker’s knocking outside of a mine was considered an omen of impending death.
Borges describes brownies as “helpful little men of a brownish hue” said to infiltrate Scottish farmhouses and perform domestic chores. (As he notes, the title characters of the Brothers Grimm tale Die Wichtelmänner or “The Elves and the Shoemaker” are close German relatives.) Elves proper, he writes, “are tiny and sinister… they steal cattle and children and also take pleasure in minor acts of devilry.” He connects the modern German word for ‘nightmare,’ Alptraum, to elf, noting that elves were said to cause bad dreams in medieval folklore. (Like incubi, they were said to do so by sitting on the sleeper’s chest.)
Medieval and renaissance fairy folklore could fill a library. Therefore, I will try to only summarize a few of the highlights here, focusing on four linguistic legacies of belief in the faerie folk. Again, we’re not dealing with anything necessarily winged and dainty but instead with a category of being which, as we’ll see a bit later, significantly overlaps with ghosts and demons. Neither ghosts, demons, nor fairies appear in the bestiaries; they were imagined as different order of being than the beasts, familiar or fantastical.
The sheer scale of bronze age Greek architecture, such as the citadel at Mycenae, astonished their creators’ descendants, who rediscovered the ruined cities centuries later. Only the one-eyed giants, these more recent Greeks imagined, could have moved those massive stones – some weighing up to twenty tons – into place. Millennia later, we still call this type of masonry cyclopean.
In the same way, Irish folklore credits fairies as the builders of the iron age hillforts still known in 21st century Ireland as ‘fairy forts.’ In addition to the requisite Wikipedia article, a quick Google search bring up a half-dozen Irish Times headlines featuring the term since 2017, including a quote from a reader who “would never dare disturb a fairy fort.”
“These circular embankments,” Manchán Magan writes in that publication, “are all that remain of the defensive structures that would have surrounded the farmsteads and lookout forts of our pastoral ancestors.” While ruins throughout history have been repurposed by builders, these ruins have not, “out of a deeply ingrained belief that they were entrances to the otherworld, where the Tuatha Dé Danann, the original semi-divine inhabitants of this island, fled upon our arrival.”
We still call the circular fruiting bodies of underground fungi fairy rings because premodern identified them as the magical traces left behind by fairies dancing in circles. In the quote I began this post with, for example, the unnamed fairy serves the fairy queen Titania by dewing her orbs upon the green. In The Tempest, the wizard Prospero’s famous concluding soliloquy about giving up magic includes an address to “you elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves… that/ By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make.” (“Elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves” beautifully evokes the animistic quality of the ancient Greek nymphs.)
In his famous Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson notes that the word ‘changeling’ “arises from an odd superstitious opinion, that the fairies steal away children, and put others that are ugly and stupid in their places.” He gives three definitions: “a child left or taken in place of another,” “an ideot; a fool; a natural,” and “one apt to change, a waverer.” Writing in the middle of the 18th century, well after the height of folk belief in fairies, Johnson is removed enough to call the possibility of child abduction by fairies an odd superstitious opinion; centuries earlier and across the Irish Sea, it was a very real fear.
“Mothers and babies were thought to be especially liable to be abducted by the fairies,” E. Estyn Evans writes in Irish Folk Ways.
protective charms were hidden in a baby’s dress or placed in the cradle… The old custom of dressing boys in girls’ clothes, in long frocks, until they were ten or eleven years of age has been explained as a means of deceiving the fairies, who were always on the lookout for healthy young boys whom they could replace by feeble ‘changelings.’
This superstition, perhaps the best illustration of the dread fairies once inspired, has left a significant impact on art and literature, from Shakespeare to the Clint Eastwood-directed film Changeling (2008). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the fairy queen Titania takes possession of “a lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king/ She never had so sweet a changeling.”
“Come away, O human Child!” in the words of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child.”
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Finally, any Arthurian retelling worth its salt includes Morgan le Fay, the grandmother of Maleficent, the White Witch and other dark enchantresses. She is Arthur’s sister (in some tellings), temptress, lover and, in more recent retellings, the mother of his son Mordred, who eventually grows up to betray and kill him. Her epithet of course comes from a mangled Anglicization of the French la Fée, ‘the Fairy’ and in early versions of the legend she is a literal fairy queen; later on, she is a witch or, in some accounts, a giantess whose black magic abilities earns her the nickname ‘the Fairy.’
Perhaps more than any other individual fairy, Morgan le Fay has succeeded in keeping her original power during the long transition from premodern folklore to modern pop culture. She remains a fearsome, alluring, otherworldly figure.
Medieval and renaissance folklore offered multiple explanations for the origins of fairies and their relatives. Simpson and Roud note a Cornish legend in which fairies began as “angels who refused to side with either God or Lucifer when the latter rebelled, and so, being ‘too good for hell and too bad for heaven,’ were thrown down to earth and lived where they happened to fall.”
C.S. Lewis mentions three other possibilities in The Discarded Image:
Fairies as “a third rational species distinct from angels as men.”
Fairies as ghosts.
Fairies as demons, which James I apparently believed (and wrote about in his Daemonologie.
Both Inklings trace the beginning of the fairy’s devolution from myth to kitsch to Elizabethan and Jacobean England. During this period and even later, Simpson and Roud write, rural England still contained “village healers seeking to heal children ‘haunted with a fairy’ by prayer and by magic measurements.” For Lewis, James I’s classification of fairies as a type of devil “goes far to explain their degradation of the fairies from their medieval vitality… a churchyard or brimstone smell came to hang about any treatment of them which was not obviously playful.” (He notes that Shakespeare’s Oberon identifies his group of fairies as “spirits of another sort” than “damnèd spirits” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
Tolkien identifies two other important factors.
First, as he notes elsewhere in the essay, the modern conte de fées or fairy tale originated at the French court and reflects its sophisticated taste; likewise, the early modern English fairy is “largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy” reflecting an English “love of the delicate and fine.” This taste has of course reappeared again and again in English children’s literature.
Second, he suspects
that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of ‘rationalization,’ which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.
The age of exploration had left no blank spaces on the map, no room for illustrations of fantastical creatures in remote lands and thus fairyland needed somewhere else to go. Therefore it shrunk down to a size that could be hidden in the local forest.
The key work here is of course Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1596), the iconic tale of mischievous, comical, less than numinous fairies. As befitting the play’s dreamlike atmosphere, the enchanted forest’s fairies are of an inconsistent, constantly shifting size, but seem to be generally diminutive: they can hide inside of acorn cups and are small enough to be wrapped in a snake’s shed skin; they make coats out of bat’s wings; the mischievous Puck is the height of a three foot-tall stool.
Tolkien describes the fairy poem Nymphidia, written by Shakespeare’s contemporary Michael Drayton, in words that conjure Disneyesque associations for the 21st century reader: “one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested.”
This lineage has continued, unbroken, up to the present day. Thus the titular character of Charles Perreault’s Cendrillon (1697), the definitive Cinderella story, is helped by her fairy godmother (“sa marraine, qui était Fée”). The Blue Fairy in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (serialized 1881-1882), Andrew Lang’s rainbow-colored Fairy Books for children (1889-1913), “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker (1892). (Disney, of course, would go on to adapt Perreault, Collodi, Tchaikovsky and more than a few fairy tales compiled by Lang.) The titular character of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and its sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910) is mischievous but ultimately benevolent, introducing two young children to Britain’s layered history.
In the English-speaking world, the fairy as an actual mythical creature did have one last gasp during the Celtic Revival and popular fascination with the occult in the late 19th and early 20th century. W.B. Yeats’ interest in fairies was more than artistic or scholarly; according to multiple sources, he sincerely believed in the existence of fairies and claimed that he did not so much write his poems but channel them from the faerie world.
The mass death of World War I inspired an intense but short-lived obsession with spiritualism, with seances, Ouija boards and other supposed methods of contacting the spirits of the dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, grief-stricken after the 1918 death of his son, became an active, evangelical spiritualist. In one book, The Coming of the Fairies (1922), Conan Doyle reprinted alleged photographs of fairies and vouched for their authenticity. The Cottingley fairies, he writes in the first chapter,
represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character. It is hard for the mind to grasp what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations.
(His most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, would have certainly seen the fairy photos as the obvious hoaxes they were; the Cottingley Fairies were illustrations from a children’s book copied on carboard cutouts.)
But Walt Disney picked up where the Victorian and post-Victorian illustrators left off and cemented the fairy as something essentially for children. (In this context, I feel obliged to note that the season-personifying nature fairies in Fantasia, as cutesy as they look, do effectively evoke the animism behind fairies and nymphs).
He was not alone, as seen in the C.S. Lewis quote about pantomimes and children’s books tarnishing the name of ‘fairy.’ Before it became a Coca-Cola soft drink, Sprite was a Coke mascot, a white-haired, red-cheeked elf boy with a twinkle in his eye. Two amusement parks named Fairyland predated Disneyland, one in Oakland and the other in Kansas City.
Only one actual, widespread folk belief in fairies remains, very young children’s belief in the tooth fairy, and they grow out of that pretty quickly. Like the broader fairy tale, fairies themselves have devolved from myth to children’s entertainment.
V.
“It’s rumored that Clefairys came from the moon!” A non-player character in Pewter City tells this to the protagonist in Pokémon Red and Blue, before adding that “they appeared after Moon Stone fell on Mt. Moon.”
In the tenth chapter of The Electric Tale of Pikachu, “Clefairy in Space,” Ash, Misty and other character watch a movie adaptation of a book called Chariots of the Pokemon Gods, an obvious reference to Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), which popularized the ‘ancient astronaut theory’ which the History Channel has devoted a truly ridiculous amount of airtime to.
In “Clefairy and the Moon Stone,” the sixth episode of the Pokémon anime, Ash, Misty and Brock meet a scientist who theorizes that not just Clefairy and Clefable but all Pokémon originated on another planet and that the moon stones are the fragments of their spaceship. (He imagines a cosmic, meteor-shaped Noah’s Ark flying through space.) At the end of the episode, the scientist decides to part ways with Ash and company and instead stay with the Clefairy and Clefable, hoping, à la Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), that they will take him with them on a voyage to their home planet.
Tolkien, as I previously mentioned, argued that the modern world’s filling in of blank spaces on the map pushed artists and writers to imagine fairies as tiny enough to hide, unseen, in forests; space exploration opened up new territory for their modern analogues.
Consider the similarities between fairies, according to medieval and renaissance folk belief, and UFO-piloting aliens, according to modern fringe belief. Both abduct human beings, occasionally returning them forever changed by the experience. Both steal livestock, both leave behind strange circles. Both often take the form of diminutive humanoids: ‘little green men.’ Both seem to be intelligent, but in a different way than human beings; both have ambiguous, perhaps unknowable motivations and can thus seem benevolent or malevolent. And indeed both are credited as the true creators of ancient architectural wonders which, according to the talking heads on Ancient Aliens and their Celtic counterparts, would have been impossible for human beings with relatively primitive tools.
In other words, by making their fairies also aliens, Game Freak et al landed on an ideal modern analogue for the otherworldly, unheimlich power fairies once held.
VI.
A brief summary:
In keeping with their real-world inspirations, Clefairy and Clefable are particularly mythic even in a world of mythical creatures, inspiring in-universe legends, including one in which they originally came from the moon.
Like Yutu, the moon rabbit of Chinese folklore and broader east Asian pop culture, they are cute, furry lunar creatures.
They are as elusive as real fairies and, as possible extraterrestrials, have something of their otherworldly quality.
In all of these cases, Clefairy and Clefable are diminutive, diminished versions of much more fearsome creatures; almost this entire post has told a tale of diminution. They have the cuteness of Yutu without any of the drama or pathos of the myth of Chang’e and Houyi. They haunt one specific place like the nymphs but have nothing of the nymphs’ litheness or fickleness. They are even softer, rounder, more toylike, more infantile than Disney’s direct-to-DVD fairies.
There is, however, one last aspect of Clefairy and Clefable that does speak to their deep fairy roots in its own small, gamified way.
They are, with one exception, the only original 151 Pokémon that can use their signature attack Metronome. (The only other first-generation Pokémon that can learn it is Mew, all but unavailable in the games themselves; as the ur-Pokémon containing the genetic code of every other species, it can learn every single attack).
What does Metronome do? If used, the game randomly chooses any other attack in the game and uses it. It can have the effect — or lack thereof — of Splash, Magikarp’s notoriously useless signature move, or knock out the opponent in one hit, or do anything in between.
Within the confines of a Game Boy RPG, then, Metronome does preserve one miniature fragment of the sheer unpredictability that Clefairy’s ancestors the fairies and their ancestors the nymphs once embodied.
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