>>54268883>>54268939NTA but I'm pretty sure he's talking about Nob Ogasawara, who was the main localizer for the older Pokemon games. I think he actually said something to this effect on Twitter a while back, and it makes sense. Real clones aren't just synthesized by scientists, their DNA is implanted into a compatible mother and they need to be physically be born. I know that the famous image of Mewtwo in the stasis tube from the movie is quite iconic and potentially contradicts this (though not necessarily - Mewtwo could have been born before being placed in the tube), but it's worth noting that the anime's canon is independent from the games and I think it'd be a hard sell to talk very much about (let alone show) the specifics of childbirth in a film aired in theaters where kids' parents would be present.
Genders for Pokemon weren't really a thing in gen 1 outside of Nidoran or mons like Mr. Mime, so it was more or less up to the player to determine, if we're ignoring external media. It wasn't until gen 2 that Mew would become genderless, and that's probably because breeding was now in and Game Freak didn't want what was meant to be a special event legendary able to be freely distributed. The line regarding Mew giving birth was removed way later, in LGPE, so it seems to me like the retcon was the (misguided, imo) intent to sanitize the concept and make it more digestible for children, in a game that was meant to reboot the R/B games if not soft reboot the franchise.
Due to all of this, I don't think it's unfair to assume that the Mew mentioned in the journals was indeed originally intended to be a literal mother and not a metaphorical one.
