Clefairy, Clefable, Cleffa

Our first extraterrestrial pokemon - Clefairy is supposed to have arrived from the moon and is associated with Moon Stones. It is also retroactively the first Fairy type pokemon. The little sprite bounces around singing and pointing and was associated with the move Metronome - a perplexingly named move that would call on a random move from a specific pool so you could do anything from Splash to Explosion. Younger me thought this was way cool so I did use it a decent amount back in the day. This was also one of the early game “rare” pokemon you had to search Mt. Moon for ages to encounter. Unfortunately for the moon man pokemon, I would usually use my Moon Stones on Nidorina and Nidorino, so I rarely ever got Clefable.

It appropriately looks like an older Clefairy, tho I don’t know why it loses its claws. I do like that the Clefairy line resides in quiet mountains. That’s a beautiful, mystical quality to these aliens that I don’t really associate with them often. It’s fun to imagine them as sort of Totoro-like creatures that people rarely encounter as they go about their mysterious moon-business.

Cleffa is one of the cutest designs in the entire series. It’s just a little star buddy that dances throughout the night and drinks morning dew to recover. Again, encountering these while out on some midnight hike in the middle of nowhere would be so magical and precious. This line doesn’t initially scream “alien” to me, but they are strange enough.