“How old are Jessie and James?”
alright i’m making a masterpost because i’m so tired. these never get notes. please give this one notes. i’m going to run through every single parroted argument. i’m going to run through every thought anyone engaged in this discourse has ever had. please give me notes. not because i want clout, i’m just so tired. so many of my posts get notes. i would trade them all for this post to get notes.
But I thought they were teenagers? Lots of people have told me they’re 15/16.
so i’ve heard! i’m pleased to tell you exactly where that comes from.
1. this post, for some reason:
i have been on tumblr for 10 years now, and i never saw anyone debating their ages before this post started circulating. as you can tell by the low res memebase screencap, it was screenshotted and reposted all across social media until it became legend.
the ages you see in this bulbapedia screencap were edited. bulbapedia has either omitted their ages entirely, or put them at 25 for reasons we’ll discuss at the end of this post.
because i’m a petty bitch, i googled the tumblr username of the person who added that bulbapedia screencap, found what their current URL was, and searched team rocket’s names on their blog. here’s what i discovered.
OP claims it wasn’t them who edited the ages–that they just found it like this. NOT sure i buy that, because I looked into it, and right around the time this post was made (January 8th, 2014) there was a random, unprecedented edit that erroneously put their ages at 15.
this resulted in mods locking the page, because this person was relentless. they would go on team rocket’s pages every day and try to edit the ages back down. again, i can’t prove this is the same person, but these edits happened within 24 hours of them adding to that post. this is, in my professional opinion, the biggest shift i ever saw in people talking about team rocket’s ages. but there are other things people bring up…
2. “Jessie said she was a teenager!”
she does this sometimes. here are the times she does this.
- In episode 218 of the original series, Plant It Now… Diglett Later, the following exchange happens:
This would make Jessie 12. This is a joke. A running gag in the show is younger characters calling Jessie variations on ‘old lady/old bat/old hag,’ and James gets this treatment to a lesser extent. Jessie, however, is incredibly vain and obsessed with youth/beauty, so she often lies to great extent about her age. When Jessie says something like “Oh, I’m 13 years old ;3c” it is meant to carry the same feeling as “Aren’t I the most gorgeous creature walking this very Earth?” To Jessie, calling her old = calling her ugly. Calling herself young = calling herself beautiful. This trope is common with her particular anime archetype–it is more of a Japanese thing, so while I understand it being lost on american audiences, it is NOT proof of her age.
Right after this, Meowth calls her out on it, asking her where she learned that math, and Jessie angrily threatens him. It’s a joke.
- In episode 56 of the original series, The Ultimate Test, Jessie is in disguise at a Pokemon League qualification exam. When Ash starts giving her the ‘she looks vaguely familiar’ side-eye, she panics and starts muttering information about herself aloud. I will be using the original Japanese line for this one:
This is quoted constantly as proof that Jessie is a teenager–but she is blatantly stating false information about herself here because she’s in disguise and Ash is onto her. This is a false identity she’s crafted, marked even further by “I work as an idol.” That’s an actual profession she’s talking about, one she doesn’t work. Since Japanese Idols weren’t widely unknown to westerners at the time of this dub, her dub line is simply “Age: 17. Profession: Diva.” which makes it a little harder to read that she’s lying about who she is, but she is. The information she’s stating here is that of an alias. It is not her actual age or profession.
3. You literally just posted a screencap of James saying he should get a driver’s license.
Okay, smart guy, that’s also jokes. The joke isn’t that he’s too young to drive–the joke is that he was a runaway at five years old and had his childhood & all his milestones taken from him because he defected from his abusive family in kindergarten. Also, he’s in the mafia and he just drives his damn balloon everywhere. The joke is that he’s a criminal driving without a license. The joke is breaking the law because he’s James. Its the same as when Jessie will casually say things like “Oh, that’s a good book! I’ve been meaning to shoplift one!” (EP157)
Also, it’s a dub-only line.
“Okay, I guess I see where you’re coming from. But why are you so sure they’re 25?”
You might notice the Bulbapedia article up there says “as of M02.″ M02 is the fandom shorthand for the second pokemon movie: Pokemon the Movie: 2000. It’s referring to one scene in particular, one that had its dialogue massively changed in the dub. Here, Jessie and James are addressing Ash & co.:
The subber condensed the point of what James/Kojirou actually says here–his sentence when translated literally is more like:
Jessie: You’re ten years too early.
James: And us, your elders, are five years too late.
this is… a very Japanese expression, but because Ash & co. are 10 years old, Jessie’s basically saying “You really don’t need to be thinking this deeply about romance until you’re 20.” and James is saying “And we’re past our prime at the tender age of 25…”
Some other times this expression has been used, regrettably, is when older men are perving on the female kids in this show–they’ll say things like “I’ll look forward to you in ten years.” Gross, I know, but the point is it’s a thing people say. 20 is considered the age you’re supposed to settle down and marry. 25, especially for women, is considered the age when you’re “off the market”–you missed your window and now no one wants you.
That ties back into Jessie’s thing about youth and beauty and how other characters call her an old lady. What they’re calling her originally is usually some variation on ‘oba-san.’ This term is so widely used in anime that there’s a TVTropes page on it. An english equivalent would be rolling your eyes and sarcastically uttering ‘whatever, grandma’ or, if you really want me to one-shot kill you, ‘ok boomer.’
Another derogatory term you hear in Japan for this age is ‘Christmas Cake.’ Simply put: Delicious to a point, but no one wants it after the 25th.
“That line is still super vague. Their ages could still be ambiguous.”
I regret to inform you that I am very autistic and I have prepared timelines and flowcharts for you.
Allow me to introduce you to The Birth of Mewtwo, an audio drama that released alongside the first movie and was never given an english localization. TBOM (the book of mormon) was about Mewtwo’s Origins that weren’t expanded upon in the movie. But, in order to get to the bottom of Mewtwo, the story had to get to the bottom of how Team Rocket got their hands on Mew’s DNA–and that all started with a Class-A Rocket Agent known simply as ‘Miyamoto.’
if you didn’t know, she’s Jessie’s mom.
TBOM is fully translated and available to listen to in multiple parts on youtube. It opens with Giovanni placing it in the timeline:
Twenty years prior to Pokemon: The First Movie, when this radio drama is said to take place. It then goes into a flashback, where we get to see Jessie’s mom in her pursuit of Mew.
Jessie’s already been born by the time of this flashback, meaning, with 100% certainty, that Jessie is at least 20 years old.
As time passes, Miyamoto stays on her quest to find Mew. Lost in the Andes mountains, she never stops sending reports back to Rocket HQ. Every few years, they trickle back in, detailing her progress. She keeps a picture of Jessie with her, often meandering aloud about what she anticipates Jessie is doing–the milestones Jessie is hitting, the life Jessie might have that her mom was never able to see. The last report she gives says “The daughter I left behind’s an old hag by now…” the word she uses here is, again, ‘oba’–25 years old and unmarried. Again, this is Jessie’s mom. She might be stranded in the mountains with little concept of time, but it’s clear Jessie is the one thing she never truly loses sight of.
“Okay. That sure is a lot of convincing evidence about Jessie. But Team Rocket has another human person in it you’re ignoring.”
Yeah nah I was prepared for that. I actually could’ve just whipped this out at the beginning but I am feeling incredibly spicy so I wanted to lay the law down and not deal with easy arguments about my special interest tonight. Here ya go!
- In episode 87 of the Sun & Moon anime, Filling the Light With Darkness!, Necrozma places an aura across the Alola Region. This blight makes Alolans lethargic, depressed, and unmotivated. This aura also ONLY affects the adults in Alola–leaving the burden on the kids & pokemon to figure out what’s going on. Ash & everyone in his class–including some who can be argued as teenagers–are entirely unaffected.
“Alright, one last question…why should I care?”
Because ever since that tumblr post started circulating, it’s been Stressful as all hell to be a Rocketblogger. I know that we all had a lot of fun watching the pokemon anime when we were kids, and we probably all have a lot of shared and fond memories of it. But, weirdly enough, because of that shared joy… Pokeani is the only fandom where people who don’t even watch the show anymore will try to explain to members of the fandom what our own lore is. And a lot of the time, they won’t listen to us when we correct them on their misinformation.
The reason this matters is because Rocketbloggers still to this day get called pedophiles & perverts for drawing/writing smutty art of our funny bad people. And when we try to shut them down pulling all this evidence out, people who have seen a handful of episodes of the show but understandably don’t have the time to watch 1100 episodes will pull the doth protest too much card. It’s annoying but more than anything, it’s exhausting.
So this is a masterpost I made with my autistic superpowers. I hope that, in the future, this one gets spread around more than the one claiming them to be kids. And I hope that maybe, if you’re a rocketblogger, when someone comes in your inbox trying to explain your favourite anime to you… you can quietly link them to this post and no longer have to rehash all the arguments we’ve been rehashing for years.
Thank you for reading. Reblog to save a tired Rocketblogger’s life.
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