Jeanie Bottle 675
Dec31
on December 31, 2021
at 12:00 am
and modified on December 30, 2021. at 1:35 am
And so ends the 9th Annual Christmas Week of Updates. The next page will be released at its usual time on Tuesday of next week. Hope you all had as much fun reading these as we had making them!
So how is Jean going to fix this I have no real idea how? Also, Jean’s mom has Radio station’s connections cool.
This page seems to confirm that Jean is, in fact, related to Les Nessman from WKRP. Maybe even his son (daughter?).
It certainly would explain where Jeanie’s cloudcuckoolander tendencies came from, though it’s really hard to imagine Les Nessman getting a date, let alone fathering two children.
Les Nessman, he doesn’t have to be Jean father, he could be an uncle or some other relative of the family, which is more likely the case. Jean Mother could have talked to her brother in law to help Jean land that DJ job at the radio station.
Really? No idea?
Looks like Selfcest is the only way to go for Jean.
Hopefully this won’t cause mental problems for Jeanie down the road.
Or at least creating the illusion of such. Jean only has to *think* he scored.
Guven that he was drunk, Jeanie just needs to get him more drunk, and then convince the other students that they did indeed sleep together. Teen Jean does not actually need to remember doing it, as long as everyone else believes that he did.
I think that ship has long since sailed. Very early on in the comic, Jean poofed Neil into his (Jean’s) male form to try to allay his GF’s suspicions, and forced Neil to go on a date in his stead. And said GF reported it was the best “he’d” ever performed in bed. Jeanie convinced herself all on her own to sleep with Neil to try to figure out what was different.
Her hangup is probably over doing it with Jean-as-a-different-person-instead-of-her-former-self, not the idea of sex-as-a-girl. I think she’s starting to get an idea of what a idiot/jerk she was as a guy.
Well… I was completely wrong. 🙂
So Jeanie got disgusted at the thought of sex with herself, and poof-ed *herself* back to the present. No timeline wibble-wobble or greater genie power forced a reset-to-the-present onto her.
Looks like she’ll have to come back right after she left, say it was something she ate, and take young Jean on a ride of a lifetime. (Or get him drunk, wake him in the morning, and *say* that’s what they did.) Then she needs to make sure that enough people know it, that his/her reputation is restored.
This page does unfortunately kill a theory I’d held, that Jeanie had accidentally poofed back to the present. I had thought that she poofed back to her bottle in disgust, but had unintentionally ended up back in the present, because her bottle isn’t hers in the past, as it’s still Rouyaa’s.
But she confirms here that she did, in fact, leave Natalie behind in the past as part of a terribly selfish desire to return to her present. Bad Jeanie. No cookie.
It may just be semantics but I think it’s thoughtlessness, not selfishness. It wasn’t that Jeanie wanted to strand Neil in the past, or didn’t care if she did, she just fled without thinking. Now the question is how much of that is due to being Jean (we’ve seen very little of Jean pre-genification) and how much of that is due to IDOJ genies being canonically impulsive?
The distinction is important because thoughtlessness is easier to address than selfishness: The thoughtless person doesn’t want to cause problems, the selfish person doesn’t care if they do.
She said she poofed herself back to the present, she didn’t say she did it deliberately. Either makes sense both grammatically and dramatically.
I don’t think it was disgust with having sex with HIMSELF as much as it was disgust with having sex with a HIM. Remember Jeanie still thinks of himself as a guy.
Jeanie was at one point perfectly willing to have sex with Neil, remember.
Ehh, that’s mildly debatable. She was delirious with lack of sleep, and also letting her ego heavily influence her actions. Once she got the sleep she needed, she completely dropped the “I need to learn how Neil managed to satisfy my girlfriend in bed so well!” thing.
So wait… this casts a pretty big implication as to how the time-line works. Jean remembers that Jeanie put out, but Jeanie instead poofed to the present, but she still remembers that Jean’s date put out. Everything else that happened that night lines up with what Jean and Neil originally remember, so… this implies Jean’s history already takes into account that Jeanie screwed up and had to go back to fix it.
I wonder whether Natalie’s command “And don’t forget me this time!” might mean that Natalie just accidentally condemned herself to remaining female from prom night until now. After all, if she doesn’t exist to shout the command, present day Natalie wouldn’t be there for Jean to remember.
Wonder how Jeanie’s gonna fix this one knowing exactly what she needs to do to fix it?
Possibly Danny Bishop gets poofed into a copy of Jeanie and told the only way to “break the spell” is to rock Jean’s world.
So what was Natalie’s job in the new timeline? And i’m surprised she wants Jean to change things, it seems like she made new life for herself with new friends.
Glitter in her hair – taking another girl’s shift – she works at a strip club!
All those involuntary trips to the Hiram club got to her…
She has tried not to upset the timeline while keeping tabs on Neil, so she probably took a job someplace he would never go. My guess is she works at a cosmetics store because, unlike librarian, it would require no degree and it also would be a nod to Barbara Eden’s role as Stella Johnson in Harper Valley PTA.
And i wonder what kind of mom Jean has. It sounds like she cares about her son.
No one has mentioned this – Natalie became a teenager with no family or home. How did she survive?
She had nowhere to go, no one to go to.
Yes! I thought about this too. And how Natalie spends the following years following Neil with no legal documents or I’d. That would be hard.
When you’re smart enough to graduate from Caltech, AND you know when certain future events will happen (like economic booms and busts, new companies making a big splash, and new electronics trends like bitcoin), it wouldn’t be that difficult to make enough passive income to live comfortably, much less survive.
Fake IDs and work documents are pretty easy to come by. Trust me, I managed a company which got a lot of illegal aliens as job applicants. The government only requires us to make a copy of their work documents, and it’s actually illegal for us to deny someone a job because we suspect those documents are fake. But every January we’d get a stack of letters from the Social Security Administration saying so-and-so’s SSN had been used in multiple workplaces at the same time, and could we please confirm that that was the SSN they gave us. (That’s why I can’t call them undocumented aliens – they had documents, just that the documents were fake.)
‘fix it’
Can’t wait to see how THAT turns out -eyeroll-
According to Many Worlds theory, this timeline won’t actually cease to exist. It’ll simply be moved aside for the new one similar enough to Jeanie’s old one…
Similar, except this pond has fish.
“Close enough.”
Im kinda curious that Nat had to say not to forget her this time … was it really that bad? Would she cease to be or merge with the divergent time clone?
For that matter why aren’t genie Lords having a chat with Jeanne?
She seems like she’s working a deadend job. She use to be a rocket scientist. Maybe she misses that.
> was it really that bad?
She’s been stuck as the wrong gender *and* the wrong age for almost a decade. That’s pretty bad.
I was thinking, if Neil joins Jeanie on enough of these time travel hijinks, he could end up having mentally lived 200+ years despite being in a 30-year old body.
Huh, that’s an interesting idea. Jeanie could potentially use her magic to repeatedly reset Neil’s age, making him effectively immortal as long as Jeanie’s magic holds out.
And even more interesting, Neil could also use that as an opportunity to try out different lives. Live as “base Neil” until he’s old, then have Jeanie poof him back to his 20s as “new Neil”. Then later, Neil might actually *want* to try being Natalie for a lifetime or two.
Fun times!
Excellent point – I’ve been wondering about this too – given the short leash she was on, how is it no one in authority has broken in to call her to heel?
Of course they didn’t appeared. They have too much problems with Blue Djinn.
I hope Natalie does not get fixed, I kinda prefer her stuck like that, makes things interesting.
I’m with Krishna on this one. If natalie gets poofed back with Jeanie then she will stay in existence.
Neil isn’t stuck as Natalie as long as Jean is stuck as Jeanie/Jeannie; Nat just needs to be transformed back into a guy again. I do hope that the past several years of life as Natalie can’t be undone, though.
Jean’s ego cannot abide the idea that any version of herself is a pathetic loser! Ha! 😀 But is new-Natalie going to be erased by whatever happens next? That’s kind of… sad. :C
I agree, and frankly the thought of this Natalie ceasing to exist is more than just kind of sad, not to mention any relationship Neil might have garnered without Jean’s dubious influence. All that life experience that Natalie picked up as she grew into an adult, finishing high school, following Neil to Cal Tech and then Coco Beach… erased. There’s no indication other than the phrase “I can cover your shift” that she’s in a dead-end job because many meaningful occupations use shift schedules. I really want to know what happened during those intervening years.
Honestly, I would have wanted to know more about this timeline, including the lives of Neil and Natalie.
Without Jean’s influence, is Neil more assertive? Is he with Zoey, or another girl?
What about Natalie? She seems pretty in touch with her feminity, not to mention gorgeous. While she clearly missed Jeanie, how good is her current live?
Wow, that was different, I wholly expected Jeanie to pop Natalie back with her rather than leave her again. Which would have caused even more problems. But, this may mean that if Jeanie does correct things that Neil will not remember the years stuck as a girl, as it will have happened for him. Still the changes he made with Zoey may have changed a few things.
I still not sure that Jeanie fixing things with her earlier self is not perfect. He becomes a horndog which is the opposite of what he was here, its too bad it was not a bit more in the middle.
There was no way that Jeanie could take this Natalie back to the prom or just after that prom, because she would have completed the time loop which might make Natalie a permanent person when we go back to the original time line. However, Jeanie should have at least sent Natalie back to Coco Beach where she live, before leaving for the past again.
For those of you that are still having problems with this story, let me see if I can explain it to you. The prom or time just before or after the prom is like a two way switch to going back to the original time line or we go to this time line where Natalie at the Radio Station when we flip switch the other way. If in fact Jeanie does fix things with Jean in the past and then everything go back to the original time line, than this time line will cease to exist, because, she will get that Natalie at the prom and turn her back into Neil and then come back to original future with virtually no changes in it. So everything from the prom to the Radio Station that Natalie is and did, didn’t happen, because, Natalie wasn’t there to do it. Now we have another paradox, if Natalie not there, then how does Jeanie find out what happened, because, Natalie not there to tell her what happened or pick up the bottle or anything else that Natalie did too. But, if we try to save Natalie, then we have to figure out on how we are going to shoe horn Natalie into the other reality to keep her.
Yes, Natalie will vanish from reality after Jeanie fixes everything. She won’t die, she just never existed even.
Jeanie could fix the Jean to Jeanie/Jeannie problem but still leave Natalie stranded in the past. That might undo the changes to the timeline but result in just Natalie existing at this moment as Neil would be gone from the present from when they went for burgers until Jeanie makes Natalie male again. It would be just a day or so tops where Jean and Neil were missing from the present but years of Neil living as Natalie in order to get back to present day.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “Go F Yourself…”
Looks like we’re headed towards another sitcom reset. Bye, Natalie. Oh well.
Judging from the studio door in Panels 2 thru 4, Jeanie just poofed out again, stranding present-day Natalie in Cincinnati. Hope she came with bus fare back to Cocoa Beach or she’ll miss her shift at the library.
It won’t matter. If Jeanie succeeds there will be no more Natalie, she will never have existed. (Gawd, that sounds depressing.)
Oh, well, Jeanie will turn Natalie into a dream girl that only exist when you go to sleep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbU3zdAgiX8
Technically, she did existed few days.
@HKMaly: No, if Jeanie succeeds in correcting the timeline (not a guarantee) then the entire Teen-Natalie gets left behind and grows up into adult-Natalie timeline is erased, she will never have existed. So, I assume you are referring to the two occasions that Neil spent as Natalie for an extended period (the weekend at the convention and the period in which she almost got down with Rodge). Those instances will still exist because Neil (let’s call him Neil-Prime) actually experienced them, and that timeline will be reestablished. Jean has a happy ending (reenforcing his self-esteem, such as it is) following prom and Neil goes off to Cal Tech. Neil getting with Zoey never happens and Jean moves to Coco Beach to become Jeanie.
Now, adult-Natalie’s last command to Jeanie, “Don’t forget me this time, might create an interesting side effect. Technically, if the alternate timeline is erased, adult-Natalie would never have been around to send Jeanie back in time and Jeanie would have no recollection of this entire exchange. She gets down with her younger self and time marches on. Adult-Natalie’s command would seemingly override logic in this case. Jeanie will remember what she’s done to screw things up but nobody else will.
A lot of people (not just on this thread) assume that changing history wipes out the future that was. I prefer to think that it just (at worst) makes that future inaccessible to the time traveller. Which would mean that that Natalie will still go on in a world with a Neil and a Jean but no Jeanie, their original timeline will go on with neither a Neil nor a Jean (nor Natalie nor Jeanie) until Jeanie finds a way back to that future… But unless Jeanie remembers to bring back a Natalie or a Neil, he won’t exist in that future after they went back to the past…
Because this is a possibility (I can think of no way to falsify the theory, even with access to time travel), if you are about to leave a future, you should be certain you’ve not left anything undone in that future (like poofing alt-Natalie back to Cocoa Beach); you may not get a chance to do it later. And while it may not matter to you, it could matter to them.
Another implication of this theory is that there is a possibility of a future where Jeanie and Neil went back in time and didn’t come back on their own… and the only way for Guano to succeed to Haji’s throne is for him to go back and find her (possibly using the link forged by the Habun Jadid?) But would Guano care enough to bring back her master?
It’ll take all day to ride the bus from Cincinnati to Cocoa Beach. It is about 950 road miles via the most direct route Interstate Highway 75), taking at least fifteen hours at the 65 miles-per-hour speed limit, not counting refueling stops or other stops.
Heh. You can read “And don’t forget me this time!” two ways. First is don’t forget teen-Natalie at the prom when everything is fixed and time to return to the future (present). Second is don’t forget COVID-era-Natalie in Cincinnati, and Jeanie forgot her again.
I wonder if Natalie realises that she pretty much just ordered herself erased from existence?
Which would be a shame because who doesn’t want to know how she’s spent the last ten years going from a teenage girl with no legal identity to a young woman living in the same town as her male self.
There are just so many unanswered questions about her life and about Neil’s without the influence of Jean or Jeanie.
I agree!
Agree. It’s a shame, but it was quite obvious it will be the only solution to the problem. Although I’m surprised it’s Natalie herself who wants to be erased. Probably her live really sucked.
Natalie didn’t want to be a woman these past several years; she was quite content as Neil and resents being trapped in the past as a girl. The question is whether that order accidentally requires Jean to alter what happened to Jean on prom night but prevents her from undoing the mistake of Neil’s being left behind as Natalie. Is the “me” who can’t be forgotten the girl at the prom or the woman who made the command? We know what Natalie meant, but how Jeanie applies it may differ– maybe she’ll think it tomeans not to leave Natalie stuck at WKRP.
I can understand Natalie being resentful of being trapped 10 years in the past and having to take the long road home, especially as she’s stuck as a totally different person without any sort of support mechanism. She had no friends or family she could call on, no place to live, no legal identity, and she’s technically a minor.
Yet despite that she seems to have a reasonably comfortable and successful life. In the few panels we see she has a nice apartment, a job, friends (Julia) and overall seems to be a confident and happy woman.
And I do mean woman. In the past when Neil was Natalie he/she knew it was for hours or at worst days, this time around though it’s been years, with possibly no chance of turning back. However she’s made no attempt at being less feminine, that hair and that outfit aren’t looks you rock if you’ve any sort of gender dysphoria, if you’re not comfortable in your own body. If Natalie was truely resentful of her life she would have made at least a token effort to defeminise it, It’s the 21st Century, women can wear short hair and gender neutral clothes without being given a second glance.
No, I think Natalie hasn’t completely grasped the implications of her order. She’s so focused on fixing the timeline and getting the life she had as Neil back she hasn’t realised that her past self won’t have to live her life but she won’t get to live his because she won’t exist.
Which is a real shame because there’s just so much backstory to her that we need to see.
Also, if Natalie had been desperate to be male again, she would have asked Jean to change her back before they headed off to the WKRP studio.
Looks like Jeanie has to do the nasty in the pasty.
Verily. And that past nastification is what shields her. She is the last hope of the timeline.
@ijuinkun
I dont know what’s the most disturbing part: Jeanie doing the nasty with herself, or being the very last hope.
> past nastification
This phrase sounds shockingly familiar for some reason.
@Dagor
@Robert
Both the “nasty in the pasty” line and my response were references to the Futurama episode “The Why of Fry”, from the scene in which Nibbler reveals to Fry that, due to being his own grandfather (he slept with his grandmother in an incident where he time traveled to 1947), he has an unprecedented mutation that renders him completely immune to all forms of telepathy and mind control.
@ijuinkun – yes, ya got it. Fun fact: Yancy’s line in another episode about being named after his grandfather is a sly nod to the fact that he, like his younger son, is his own grandfather.
@ijuinkun
Ahhhh, that’s why it sounded familiar! Thanks.
As long as a wicked powered isn’t pulled I’ll be happy
I had an interesting thought while driving home from work… (yeah, I do that). Jeanie may not be able to undo this mess. One of the genie rules is “A Genie is forbidden from killing, by action or inaction… “ as stated on the information page. Does this mean that, despite her best intentions she’ll be unable to undo the paradox? Jeanie cannot alter the past thereby causing Natalie to cease to exist because Natalie is a living person and correcting the past will in effect kill her.
She is only “killing” last 10 years of her life. From Genie rules point of view, Natalie is still Neil.
They are the same soul, if different iterations. From a “souls are more important than bodies in determining identity” perspective, Neil and Natalie thus count as being the same person.
I disagree, although it’s CD that will have the final say.
In this altered timeline Neil and Natalie are distinct beings with actual lives, one is an aerospace engineer while the other is a (dancing) librarian. What’s to say that Neil isn’t the simulacrum instead of Natalie, and which is it okay to erase? As the French philosopher, Rene Descartes once said (in French, of course) “I Think, Therefore I Am” and I feel that fits this scenario. They both share a common history, divided only by happenstance.
This scenario is more complicated that just the Neil duplicates, or Fat Jean. Right now, Jeanie is a time displaced, all powerful Genie, and we all know how little love the Genie Lords have for Genies being out of the norm. As soon as the Lords of this timeline realize that Jeanie just came out of nowhere, things could get complicated for her. Besides, we can’t keep Clarence on the Melvin Chronicles as an Evil Sorceress, can we?
Actually, I think he said it in Latin: Cogito ergo sum. 🙂
Just noticed something, I think. Can someone confirm that the Jean in the above strip is teenage Jeannie? Compare her height and slenderness to grown-up Natalie.
I think that Jeanie hasn’t reverted to default age since returning to the present. IIRC, Jeanie and Natalie are about the same height except when Jeanie bothers with making them otherwise.
I am fairly sure this is supposed to be “default Jeanie”. She returned to the present, so she doesn’t have any reason to be in her “teen Jeanie” disguise any more.
Of course, I’m curious if the Blue Djinn is going about unhindered and about to conquer the Djinn world if Jeannie never was around until she reappeared in Natalie’s room in the altered present. Heck, whoever the person with devil horns was, she or he was lazy enough to leave the timeline untouched until Jeannie got back.
That raises the question, could Blue have possesed any bottle genie, or was Jeanie the only one dumb enough to not take precautions and fall for his persuasion?
I’d say naive, not dumb. She simply wasn’t educated, and I doubt any of the genie Lords were expecting him to escape. They do seem rather arrogant in their power.
@Dagor: The Blue Djinn, tricked Jeanie into letting him come into her body. He made a promises to her and his ability to turn Jeanie back into a guy or something along that line, that was the bait in trap that the Blue Djinn set up to trap Jeanie in his taking possession of her body. By the time that Jeanie realized that she had been tricked by the Blue Djinn, he had already penetrated her body and was inside her now and was able to overpower her and take over.
Basically, Jeanie had to invite the Blue Djinn to come in. Most Bottle Genie aren’t that stupid or foolish as Jeanie was to do something like that.
@Dagor-it was the latter. If Jeanie does bring neil back from the past but doesn’t change natalie will we have a set of twins? I hope.
But do timelines reset, or just diverge?
Are these versions of Jean and Natalie going to continue to live, but now if a world without Jeanie?
Oof, back to the time lab again, not really that major a surprise; though I really liked the Abandoned Teen Nat – Present look, too :c.
You should check out the Discord that’s linked in the sidebar, then. There’s been a *bunch* of great fanart of “Alt Universe Natalie” shared there.
It certainly says something about the quality of this story when adult-Natalie, a character that has only appeared on 5 pages, garners such overwhelming attention and debate.
Yeah, CD really knows what he’s doing these days. He’s come a long way from when he first started SailorSun.org as a “test comic” to develop the skill he knew he’d need to draw WolfPac.
Some people believe that even if one were to change something in the past, it doesn’t actually erase the original timeline, but instead the timeline splits, one continuing as normal while the other reflects the effects of the changes in the past.
So even if Jean does fix his mistake, we might still have a timeline with Natalie and Neil existing as separate people. With the number of times Neil has turned into Natalie, Neil might as well accept his feminine destiny!
It’s possible. But how much energy does it take to create a whole other universe? And where does that energy come from?
Speaking of timeline inconsistancies:
JB291: Natalie wears a T-shirt to sleep in while staying over at Rodge’s place. It has “MIT” in front, but “Because not everyone can go to CalTech” on the back.
JB598: Neil (as Araceli) forgets whose body he’s in and runs into a fellow MIT student. JB608: Neil (still as Araceli) kicks same fellow MIT student in the balls and says that he plagiarized his (her?) final research paper at MIT.
JB673: In Panel 3, Natalie says that Neal “Just as before” graduated, went to Caltech, and moved down to Florida.
So what was Natalie doing all this time other than keeping a low profile?
She was primarily keeping taps on the Teen Neil by following him around as he graduated from high school, then followed him to CalTech in California and then either back to Cincinnati and/or to Cocoa Beach after for that job. She probably kept an eye on Teen Jean too, that how she knew that he was the DJ at WKRP Radio Cincinnati. Beside, keeping a low profile, she was trying to contain the disaster that caused by Jeanie by picking up the Genie Bottle and because, of her time travel into the past.
Beside doing this, what kind of education she may have gotten from high school forward, we don’t know. Beside what kind of job she got so that she could take care of herself, we don’t know. What are her interest and hobbies of what she does, we don’t know that either or if she has friends even.
If Neil went to CalTech, then I’m waiting for a reference to a Professor Hofstadter or Cooper.
but if he fix things adult female you cease to exist
No girl that looks like Natalie will ever be low profile.