Webcomic / I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle

Belle: I've seen how you look at Neil.
Jean: What do you mean?!...I DO NOT LOOK AT NEIL IN ANY WAY!

I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle is a comic series by CD Rudd (also the author of SailorSun.org), in which two male friends come across an empty genie bottle. One of them (Jean, an unabashed I Dream of Jeannie fanboy) opens it and is transformed into the bottle's new occupant while the other friend, Neil, becomes her master. As can be expected, Hilarity Ensues.

Because the comic is somewhat based on the iconic television series, expect many of the same situations to apply. The series also tends to cross over with other classic television shows, like Bewitched and The Dukes of Hazzard.

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I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle provides examples of:

• Acrophobic Bird: Jeanie is afraid of going into her bottle, because of how it has been used to trap her. Hilarity Ensues when her aversion to her bottle causes her to become sleep-deprived (she automatically returns to her bottle when she falls asleep).
• All Men Are Perverts: Played with. Neil has so far been an aversion, but Jean seems to wholeheartedly believe (or more to the point, fear) that this is true.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Unintentional example. Several peoples' skin shades (like Jeanie's) appeared as green for a while.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: As Jeanie, Jean is very attractive. But so far Neil has manfully resisted most temptation. The female form that Jean frequently imparts upon him, Natalie, is also quite gorgeous.
• Author Appeal: Obviously, but even more so than in the creator's other Web Comic.
• Bedlah Babe: Jean's new look after being turned into a genie. In pink, no less.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Inherent in the premise. Jean is a I Dream of Jeannie fanboy with genie fantasies. The beginning of the comic sees these fantasies come true... with himself (or herself) as the genie and his friend as the genie master.
• Becoming the Genie: The core premise of the webcomic.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Eva Braun was a genie. Oh, and Sidney Sheldon got the idea for I Dream of Jeannie from his personal experience with a genie.)
• Bigger on the Inside: Jean's apartment, and her bottle.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Lord Guano's view on what constitutes proper behavior for Genies does not conform with normally accepted concepts of good and bad, and is instead centered entirely on being properly submissive and fulfilling your master's wishes. He never punishes Jean for any of the Jerkass things she does; only for acting for her own benefit instead of her master's.
  • Any involvement in human space programs is considered a serious crime among geniekind and is subject to one of their harshest punishments.
  • Genies also see absolutely nothing wrong with humans being forcibly turned into genies against their will. They also don't see a problem in enforcing their rules of subservience onto someone who used to be one of the beings they serve.
• Butt-Monkey: Neil.
• Breast Expansion: A spy was discovered to be stealing company secrets after a sudden growth in her breasts caused her shirt to rip open and the flash drive she was hiding in her cleavage to fall out.
• Brought Down to Normal: The I Dream of Technicolor arc establishes this as the punishment for genies who defy the will of Haji (the genie leader). They are essentially turned into humans. This is shown with Eevi/Eva Braun when she interferes with the outcome of WW2, and Rouyaa herself when she gives NASA more money for the space program. Their totems remain, and the next person to possess the totem becomes the new genie of that particular totem. This is presumably why Jean became a genie- he took Rouyaa's totem.
• The Cameo: Grace shows up in one strip.
  • Murry and Lewy show up at the hot dog vendor.
• Cast from Lifespan: A genie's magic is this to an extent: they can die if they overuse their powers on a broad (read: "global") scale for too long, presumably at the behest of their master. It is heavily implied that the last known genie to suffer this fate was Eva Braun.
  • Though it later turns out that she wasn't. She interfered with the outcome of WW2 in spite of a decree that no genie was to do so, and was stripped of her power and immortality as a result.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Jeanie to Neil. She can't help it, it's build into the Master/Genie relationship. That doesn't mean she has to like it, prompting her response to Belle in the page quote.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Neil has two genies fighting over him, probably because he's a nice guy who does not try to take advantage of them as Jeanie fears and Aracelli has probably experienced.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Genie costumes are color coordinated with their bottles. When Jean trades bottles with Araceli, their costumes swap colors as well. When Boss Hogg gets control of Jeanie's bottle her costume turns white to match his iconic white suit.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Jean has little regard for the consequences of her actions unless they come to harm herself. Had their situations been reversed with Neal becoming the female genie, Jean would have been only too happy to use his wishes to "do" Neal. She turned a nerd into a girl and didn't bother to turn him back due to her obsession with her own problems and possibly even spite (it certainly looked like spite to him). While her reason for turning a fishing boat captain into a woman was understandable, her Disproportionate Retribution against another member of the crew was less so. She regularly abuses people, especially Neal, for her own needs without any respect at all for theirs. This trait of hers is usually Played for Laughs.
• Comically Missing the Point: Jeannie is mortified when Belle reveals that Neil, whom Jeannie had disguised as the male Jean, is a much better lover than Jean ever was (probably because Neil's a lot less selfish.) Her solution? Sleep with Neil herself to find out what makes him so good in bed. Of course, she was very sleep-deprived at the time.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The WW2-era strips.
• Didn't Think This Through: Jeanie challenging Samantha to a genie duel. The look on her face when Neil calls her out on it says it all.

  Neil: You do realize that she's been a genie a lot longer than you've been? And actually knows what's involved in a genie duel.

• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • Neil cannot control himself when Jean presses herself against him or if she is wearing revealing outfits / bikinis.
  • Inverted between Natalie (Neil) and Rodge. Neil discovers, to his displeasure, that Rodge pays a lot more attention to Natalie and actually retains the engineering concepts "Natalie" teaches him, forcing Neil to "play Natalie" in order to teach Rodge stuff he hasn't been able to teach him as Neil.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Minor case — Jeanie's costume was slightly more like Jeannie's earlier on (she later lost the veil).
• Exact Words: during the Hazzard County Arc. Boss Hogg wished "Make sure the Duke Boys and the General Lee won't bother me anymore." The wish turned the Duke boys into Duke girls and made the General Lee disappear. Apparently the magic decided on the second part and not Jeanie because she didn't know the 'General Lee' Hogg was talking about is a car.
• Failure Is the Only Option: As with all comics of this type, Jean will likely never be changed back no matter what she does. Made blatantly obvious by the fact that her powers are best summed up as "can do almost anything except transform her body back to being male", and the sitcom-inspired environment means Status Quo Is God.
• First Law of Gender Bending: No woman who wasn't a man to begin with has been transformed into a man so far in the comic's run. There are also several characters that are struggling to change back.
  • Jeanie cannot change her gender (although she can change her appearance)- it's too fundamental to her genie identity.
  • Red isn't likely to be changed back either. Changing him back is of no benefit to Jeanie, so she's already forgotten about him. The transformation spell is an active effect, so while human magic can interfere with Red's shape to a degree, overcoming Jeanie's spell is beyond the skill of most human magic users. Kazom cannot do it with his own magic, because two genies interfering with one another's spells results in unpredictable side-effects. Why Kazom can't just contact Jeannie and pressure her into changing Red back is never brought up, but it is implied that Kazom never liked Red to begin with, so he might simply enjoy watching Red suffer.
  • Magic is apparently under The Masquerade, so most transformation victims simply don't have any options.
• Gender Bender: Jean, who goes from a male human into a female genie. It's kinda his fault that he's a girl, though, since the genification process drew on his idea of what genies were like for his transformed self, and his mental image of a genie was the titular character of I Dream of Jeannie. Jean also does it to several other characters, most often Neil (though Neil's never stuck as a girl forever).
• Genie in a Bottle: All genies have 'totems', which they sleep in. Possessing a totem makes one the master of that totem's genie. While not all totems are bottles (Lord Guano's is a lamp), Jeanie's and Aracelli's are.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Jean's good angel is her genie self with a pink/white costume, wings, and a halo, and her bad angel is her genie self with a red costume, devil tail, and horns. Rodge also has a variation where he has apparitions of Neil as his original self and as Natalie giving him different advice as to why not to hit on ladies (Naturally, 'Natalie' acts as if she's Rodge's girlfriend he's cheating on).
• Historical In-Joke: Rouyaa, the genie who inspired I Dream of Jeannie, is brunette. The original intention was to have Jeannie be brunette, but then the only actress who really nailed the part was the blonde Barbara Eden.
• Hypocritical Humor: Jean is a prime offender in this category:
  • Jean, a male chauvinist turned into the genie of his own fantasies gets upset when Neal acts like... a male chauvinist with a genie fantasy.
  • Jean constantly uses (and abuses) genie powers while constantly complaining about being a genie.
• If It's You, It's Okay: inverted by Rodge. "Natalie" finally reveals she's a gender bent Neil and is shocked to discover that Rodge doesn't much care because he's primarily after her for her body anyway, making it a case of "It's Okay If It's You".
• I Was Quite a Looker: The I Dream of Technicolor arc shows Kazom (currently in the form of a cat) 70 years ago. He looked like a muscular young man with pointy ears.
• Jackass Genie: Jean, on more than one occasion, usually due to Comedic Sociopathy or in response to some slight, real or imagined. Once it was a clear-cut case of self-defense.
• Jerkass:
  • Lord Guano and Jean are both not very nice to each other, or to Neil. The former mistakes Neil for Jean and unjustly punishes him in her stead, while the latter blames Neil for everything that goes wrong and is more concerned about what will happen to herself if Lord Guano finds out she made a mistake than restoring her supposed best friend to normal. Neil has called Jean out on it though, and literally ordered her with a list of demands to try and set things right. Whether she actually does or not is another matter though, but this is the first time since the comic began that Neil has really stood up to Jean.
  • Neil himself is no saint, either. The second time Jean transforms him was because he made a tasteless "period" joke. You don't say things like that to a woman, especially one that was a man. He has also said some other pretty ignorant comments. Really, sometimes Neil asks for it.
  • There's also a good deal of Hypocritical Humor inherent in Jeanie's Irony Blindness, since all Neil is doing is living out Jean's own Genie Master fantasies.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jean, though given his situation it's understandable that he's not taking it well. Jean may be a borderline sociopath, but he does try to do nice things sometimes, like when he/she brought breakfast to Neil once and helped Neil turn into a man again.
• Karma Houdini: Due to the generally high level of Sitcom inspired Comedic Sociopathy many of the Wacky Hijinx are driven by the actions of cheerfully idiotic side characters who are never called to account for their actions.
  • Jean has transformed a lot of people, some of them permanently, and never gets called to account for it.
  • Rudd also plays with this trope as Jean's initial transformation is portrayed as an Laser-Guided Karma for his own genie master fantasies, but Jean's later punishments from Lord Guano are never for actions that the audience would find objectionable.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Rouyaa is made to forget who her master was.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Jean fantasized about having his own Genie. He finds the whole idea much less attractive from the other side of the coin. So far Comedic Sociopathy has prevented Jean from acknowledging the irony. The second strip has Neal point it out, though.
  Jean: Oh geez! Why'd this have to happen to me?
  Neal: You remember last month? When we watched that I Dream of Jeannie marathon?
  *Flashback to Jean saying that he'd "so do" Barbara Eden as Jeannie*
  *Present* Jean: I fail to see the connection.
  Neal: I don't know... maybe it's karma or something.
  • The reason Jean transforms to look like Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie is because he's a fanboy of that series and that's how he expected genies to look.
  • Jeanie's pride and refusal to accept her situation also gets her in trouble. In the I Dream of a Nerd arc, when she's in Genie Training with the former Genie Lord Kazom, she ends up losing her body because she meddled with free will. After she manages to get her body back, Kazom points out that she needs more training, as she doesn't know anything about being a genie and if not trained, will continue making newbie mistakes. Jeanie, however, persuades him to let her go to annoy Lord Guano. Jeanie returns home and immediately makes the newbie mistake of giving Araceli her bottle, which made them switch bottles. Araceli became Neil's genie and Jean was trapped in Araceli's bottle- at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.
• Lawful Stupid: Lord Guano blindly enforces genie laws, regardless of petty details like whether he has the right person, or if they're actually guilty of whatever it is he thinks they did.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Rodge at one point notices how much Neal and Jeanie's situation resembles I Dream of Jeanie.
• Literal Genie: As Rule of Funny demands.
• Loophole Abuse: Push comes to shove, Jeanie has to obey or fulfill her master's wishes. That doesn't mean she doesn't put her own spin on things (like getting rid of the Duke Boys by changing them into girls) either as a Literal Genie or a Jackass Genie depending upon what Rule of Funny demands. For example, when the fishing boat captain wishes for Jeanie to "Make a dutiful wife", Jeanie uses Exact Words to justify turning him into a dutiful wife.
  • Jean proves to be just as adept at this from the other side of the equation in the timeline where Neil becomes the genie instead of him. His second wish contains a catch-all "whatever I want, I get" clause, leaving his third wish unused and available in case of emergency.
• Lord Error-Prone: Lord Guano. "Obtuse" just doesn't cover it.
• Magical Girlfriend: More accurately, 'Magical Best Friend', at least for now.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Jean engages in a G-Rated cosplay version. More than once. And sometimes it's not entirely G-rated.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Jeanie, as a result of the internal battle between Jean's desire to return to manhood and Jeanie's Clingy Jealous Girl genie tendencies, the ultimate example being her sleep-deprived attempt to sleep with Neil to learn why Belle thinks he's so good in bed—strictly for research purposes, of course.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body:
  • Despite her insistence that she is not really Neil's genie, Jean shows some decidedly possessive Tsundere-ish behavior towards him.
  • Jeannie's reaction when she finds out that Belle thinks the disguised Neil is a much better lover than Jean was is to try and seduce Neil herself to learn what makes him so good. Clearly she didn't think through all of the implications of that plan, and more generally she starts to act more and more traditionally feminine as time goes on.
• Morphic Resonance: Jeannie can alter her appearance, but her gender is too integral to her genie identity and she can't change it. Her hat is an accidental version- she keeps forgetting that it's there, so she forgets to include it in her shapeshifting.
• Mundane Utility: Jean uses genie powers for everything to the point where one wonders how he'd go back to getting along without them.
• Ms. Fanservice: Jean, and apparently it's mandatory, as his I Dream of Jeannie obsession set the parameters when he obtained the bottle.
  Kazom: Oh, you're one of those genies.
• Never My Fault: When it becomes clear he's just bollocksed something up, Lord Guano doesn't hesitate to accuse other people.
• Nice Guy: Neal. He may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's shown no indication so far that he's even considered abusing the Power Perversion Potential inherent in being Jean's master. Jean fears this because it's exactly what Jean would have done had their situations been reversed.
• No Biological Sex: A genie is a Pure Magic Being, and their sexual attributes are purely decorative. A genie can produce a human child for a human partner with a spell, and a genie child with a genie partner using a magic ritual, but they don't have any specialized reproductive features built in. If a genie sleeps with someone using their reproductive organ analogues, it will no practical effect.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Jeanie and Aracelli are constantly at loggerheads over Neil, Jeanie because she's possessive and he's a "safe" master and Aracelli because she actually loves him... and he's a "safe" master. If they actually sat down and talked it over they could probably work out their differences in about five minutes. Especially since Aracelli's current master, Rodge's niece Caley, is a little girl and likely the safest master of all.
  • During the Bewitched crossover arc, most of the conflict comes from Samantha thinking that Jeanie is a witch Endora sent to watch her and Jeanie thinking that Samantha is a genie sent by Lord Guano. When Neil and Darrin do communicate, they solve the plot fairly quickly.
• Power Perversion Potential: Implicit in the premise, but acknowledged only to the extent that Jean fears Neal will succumb to it. That is until Chapter 14, in which we see an alternate timeline where Neil became the genie, and it's made clear that the alternate Jean regularly has sex with a clearly reluctant Natalie.
• Punny Name: The names of the characters correspond to the original TV show: Jean for Jeannie, Neil for Major Nelson, Belle Lows for Dr. Bellows, and an old woman is also named Ms. Eden.
• Prequel: The I Dream of Technicolor arc focuses on the previous inhabitant of Jeanie's bottle, Rouyaa.
• Running Gag: A couple of genderbending gags, with Neil on the receiving end of both:
  • Neil will invariably end up turned into a girl and transported to a strip club for annoying Jean in some way.
  • The strip club has taken a back seat in recent years, after Jean transformed Neil into "Natalie" to take her place on a date with Rodge. Ever since, her go-to punishment for Neil has been to turn him into Natalie and try to hook her up with Rodge.
• Screw Yourself: It turns out that Jean lost his virginity to his future self, and Jeanie trying to avert this creates several Bad Futures until she goes through with it.
• Sex Slave: In the timeline where Neil becomes a genie instead of Jean, this is Neil/Natalie's fate.
• Shapeshifter Default Form: Jean can shapeshift (to an extent- her gender, for example, is too integral to her genie identity for her to change), but her default form is a busty blonde Bedlah Babe quite reminiscent of Jeannie.
• Ship Tease: Neil and Jean, from an early strip, and after that, as the page quote shows. This intensifies as time goes on, as the series continues paralleling its namesake.
• Shopping Montage: Belle takes Jean on one of these.
• Shout-Out: In #470, when Natalie (Neil as a woman) and Roger go into a movie theater to hide, the movie being shown is An Extremely Goofy Movie as the bottom half of the screen shows the opening's gong.
• Stable Time Loop: Jean takes a "blonde transfer student" to his senior prom and ends up getting drunk and losing his virginity to her that night, which sets in stone his chauvinistic attitude and ultimately culminates into his Karmic Transformation into Jeanie. Jeanie, realizing years later that the blonde woman was actually her tries to avert it but it has the effect of turning Jean into a fat loser or creates an Alternate Timeline where Neil becomes the genie and Jean is much worse and keeps her as his personal Sex Slave. Jeanie then reluctantly has sex with Jean, both starting and ending the loop.
• Sultry Belly Dancer: Araceli temporarily transforms into Jeanie and begins to dance for Neil in strips 172 and 173. Kudos to the author for actually placing an animation inside a web comic.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Rouyaa is sympathetic to Eevi/Eva Braun, who in this comic was a genie and Rouyaa's half-sister. She keeps making excuses for Eevi and blaming her master (Hitler) for her actions, despite Kazom repeatedly saying that Eevi was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and made the choice to use her magic for him in defiance of Haji's direct orders.
• Third Law of Gender-Bending: The harem outfit comes with Jean's duties, but early in the series, she spent a whole comic using her powers to experiment with female clothing (including a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl, Rogue and Kim Possible's cheerleader outfit) in a "G-rated" Man, I Feel Like a Woman montage. This ended up being largely unsuccessful, because every form Jean tries to assume (even her former male appearance) tends to come out "genie-fied" (midriff-baring is apparently mandatory) and always includes at least one item of her genie apparel, usually the hat.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The I Dream of a Big Ball of Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey... Stuff arc — as you might expect from referencing the trope namer — contains this. It begins with an implied Stable Time Loop, before featuring the creation of multiple alternate timelines.
• Transformation Comic
• Tsundere: Jean is definitely a Type A, as befits the comic's anime influence. She's remarkably possessive of Neil even as she's constantly complaining about her situation, though this might just be a mandatory aspect of the master/genie relationship. Belle calls her on it as seen in the page quote.
• Undead Tax Exemption: Averted. Neil in girl form gets arrested as a suspicious person because "Natalie" doesn't have proper identification.
• Un-person: Rouyaa's fate is to be written out of the memories of all humans who knew her, and to herself forget everything about her master. It's implied that this was partially to keep her from pulling an Eevi/Eva Braun and committing suicide with her master.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: The writer, CD Rudd, is a less-than-perfect grammarian. Fortunately, he took on an editor some years ago, and the comic's grammar been stellar ever since.

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