About

JROTC Students is an image macro series featuring screenshots from various television shows captioned with jokes mocking middle and high school students in the United States who are enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program.

Origin

On October 2nd, 2015, Twitter user @realDonFigueroa tweeted the joke "Niggas in JROTC be hugging their girlfriends in the hallways long as hell like they about to go to war in Afghanistan" (shown below, left). Within two years, the tweet gathered upwards of 12,000 likes and 10,000 retweets. On September 25th, 2017, Instagram user @czechoslovakia.ball^[7] posted an image macro featuring the character PC Principal from South Park with the caption "JROTC niggas walking pas their useless fucking civilian classmates to get to their Algebra 1 class" (shown below, right).

Precursor

On May 3rd, 2014, Twitter user @spookydicck^[1] tweeted a photograph of several armed United States soldiers captioned with the joke "Niggas in ROTC be walking around school feeling like.." (shown below). Within four years, the tweet gained over 8,000 retweets and 4,300 likes.

Spread

On September 26th, 2017, Redditor TrapperCentury reposted the PC Principal image macro to /r/teenagers.^[2] That day, Instagram user nooseantz posted an image of the character Jorgen Von Strangle for "Fairly Odd Parents": with the caption "Get out of my way civilians, imma be late for my JROTC meeting" (shown below, right).^[3]

In the coming days, several posts speculating that JROTC memes were increasing in popularity were submitted to /r/MemeEconomy,^[4][5][6] featuring both PC Principal and SpongeBob Squarepants examples (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References