Genwunner

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About

Genwunner is a pejorative term used within the Pokémon fandom to describe those who only appreciate the first-generation of video games for GameBoy, namely Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, and tend to bash the sequel titles and monsters in the franchise. It is also used to describe Transformers fans that have the same feelings about anything past the 1980's transformers series.

Origin

While it was first used for certain transformers fans on TFArchive, it is uncertain when or where the term for pokemon fans was first used, it was referenced on DeviantArt^[2] as early as March 4th, 2012 in an image of the first generation character Charizard with the caption “Stealth Rock.” Introduced in the Generation IV games, Stealth Rock^[3] is a move which causes the opponent's Pokémon to take damage upon entering the battle. The damage taken is based on the Pokémon's weakness/resistance to Rock-type moves. Because Charizard is Fire/Flying, and thus 4x weak to Rock, Stealth Rock causes it to lose 50% of its total health upon switching in. Because Charizard is a favorite of Genwunners, the image is meant to annoy them by pointing out Charizard's flaws. In the description, creator KKtheProphet explained that the image was representative of people who were tired of Genwunners arguing the first 151 Pokemon are the best.

Precursor: Geewun

Some members of the Transformers fandom share a similar sentiment for Transformers characters created after 1985. Like Pokemon, the term is often mocked by the community. These fans are also known as Geewunners, with the generation itself known as "Geewun," short for "G(eneration) 1." The term appeared as early as January 2003^[4] on the TFArchive message board and became popular in 2004 as it began to spread to the alt.toys.transformers newsgroup.

Spread

On March 13th, 2012, a comic criticizing Genwunners who did not like the look of newer Pokémon was posted to Pokememes^[5], pointing out that the first generation also had some odd-looking Pokémon. Ten days later, the first definition for “Genwunner” in the context of Pokémon fandom was shared on Urban Dictionary.^[6] On March 31st, a Yahoo! Answers^[7] user inquired about what made a person a Genwunner.

In April 2012, the phrase became a topic of discussion on Pokémon message boards including Pokemon Elite 2000^[8] and Serebii.^[9] By June, the term had spread to 4chan's /co/^[10] (Comics and Cartoons) board. Throughout the rest of 2012, additional references to Genwunners could be found on deviantART^[11], 4chan's /vp/^[12] (Pokémon), the official Sega forums^[13] Gamespot^[14], Reddit^[15] and Tumblr.^[16]