#what was her commute like? did the subway exist at that point? great question! you're never gonna guess the answer:

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

Pls tell me your ideas about their maybe-mom. And also any other ideas you have been playing around with that you are willing to share. Submas homelife hcs are always so interesting and fun esp if they're ones I've never heard before

WAH OKAY!! under a cut because. oh god i talked so much. i didn't realize that was gonna happen oops.

actually the funny thing is i have so many things i'm really solid on abt this character except for her uhhh. name. my first thought was anita virosa joy as a shortened form of amanita virosa (we'll get to why) but there's already a character in unova named after amanita so it feels... weird... and then i was also thinking about shepard joy, bc i think shepherd/shepard is a sort of fun thing to call both her and the subway bosses, and also bc it sort of nods to the only unovans with a full canonical name, the harmonias, who are named after musical tones (ghetsis specifically is named after a tritone), as a reference to shepard tones. but then idk if i want to change anita.

and uh. oh god this post is gonna be 50% talking about names, fuck. but unovan names are generally three parts. they use the roman tria nomina, so it goes first name-last name-last name part 2. which is why AVJ/ASJ, and not just AV/AS or AJ. the majority of the time, the last last name denotes a branch of the family, generally stemming from one person who was notable enough to earn a new one.

anyway, the last part of her name is definitely Joy. this is... getting into the region of hcs where i always sort of stop and go "dude this is pokemon. where are we going with this." but anyway, Pokémon Center Nurses in this hc are also generally referred to as "Nurse Joy," like the anime nurses, because their actual legal name is, always, Joy. this is bc the Joy Nursing Order is very intense as an organization, and it's kind of a requirement to adopt the name as a symbol of dedication. this is also why they all look the same like, down to the hair. Nurse Joy is almost like a character you adopt during work hours. most regions just have the family name and personal name, so you'd be XYZ Joy or Joy XYZ, but since unova has three names, it's not uncommon to see people preserve one part of their family name alongside Joy. i guess she could also be joy shepard? hmm.

...anyway. so yeah. she's a pokémon center nurse! or, a retired one, by the time of bw. and the reason why i'm not sold on her being like their, birth mom? or "adopted through normal legal channels" mom? is i don't think she intended to have. kids. being a nurse joy is kind of a demanding job and she's also super single (albeit pretty extroverted with a large social circle, but not really anyone that's like, coparent-with-me close). this is one of those things i keep going back and forth about, but right now what i'm thinking is that maybe the twins were originally the kids of friends of hers, who were very not prepared for having twins or kids as uhh. demanding. as they were. it might have originally been a temporary thing, where said friends went "hey anita i'm sooo super sorry to do this to you but can you watch them for a while while we uhhhhh leave. thx." and then she was like fucka you i'm keeping them. and they were fairly young but not like, babies at that time, probably somewhere in the 8-12 range. but this is all maybe things. if this IS the scenario, i think they're still vaguely in touch with those people (bc extended family interactions with other bw chars maybe) but probably don't consider them family. anita is their mom, thanks.

outside of being a nurse and their mom, her main hobby is pokemon fostering/rehab. she does both. her home's always overrun with little guys. she'll take more or less any of them, as long as they fit physically in her home lmao, but SPECIFICALLY she really likes poison types. her main partner's probably an amoonguss. (this is why the amanita virosa connection.) her one major deviation from the Nurse Joy Uniform is all of the bandaids and such because her hands & arms are perpetually fucked up. it's fine tho. she's used to it. a small price to pay for poison type.

relatedly i think the garbodor on the subway boss teams is actually from her originally. one of her major life goals has been a campaign to get larger unovan cities to shift from trubbish eradication efforts & perceiving them as pests towards actually treating them as worker pokemon, and giving them better care, with alolan grimer and muk and galarian weezing being a major source of inspiration. garbage pokemon are a known phenomenon! if you treat them right they will not be deadly!! she's actually been making pretty good progress on this one, esp. after she retired and could devote more time to it, and esp. in nimbasa city for no reason in particular.

while a lot of it is their own personal thing, i think she also encouraged parts of the twins' specific attitude towards responsibilities and like, general life philosophy. like, "you always have a duty to work with the task or the problem that's in front of you, to improve things for the people around you," etc. which is also sort of a joy nursing order attitude but she takes it to heart and applies it to the rest of her life in a very specific way. and then they took that and put their own spin on it.

i think she lives in anville town, maybe? somewhere where she can have a big enough house and yard to have two kids and a rotating cast of pokes, so not the city, lol. she's close with them still, and they visit pretty frequently (it helps that it's so easy for them if she's in anville) and also sometimes have pokemon for her or will help rehome some of them. and then she's friends with quite a lot of the town, and has established favor exchanges with them (mostly consisting of "anita my purrloin has a cold" or "anita i have a cold") so she was able to lean on quite a few other people to help look after these twins she'd... acquired... when she was busy with work. although they would have probably also come in to the pokemon center with her sometimes!

aaaaaand that's pretty much the whole character brief i think! there are other more minor things but i don't want this to be a mile long, lol, and most of it is "idk maybe" stuff. if you read this the whole way uhhh. thanks! i hope you enjoyed. like i said i had a lot of thoughts about her lmao.