Normie

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About

Normie is a slang pejorative label for an individual who is deemed to be boringly conventional or mainstream by those who identify themselves as nonconformists. On 4chan's r9k (robot) board, it is often used to describe certain characters in greentext stories. Normies can be seen as the antithetic stereotype of hipsters and special snowflakes, both of which are derogatory terms for nonconformists.

Origin

Among the earliest known usages of the term was in the film The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, which was released on August 21st, 1987 (clip below).

One of the earliest written uses of the term comes from the book Treating the Alcoholic: A Developmental Model of Recovery by Stephanie Brown, where it is used to describe non-alcoholic individuals.^[23] A derivative of the English adjective "normal," the term "normie" first came into colloquial usage in the context of mental health-related discussions sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, with its earliest known mention dating back to April 1996 on the personal website of James L. Drush, an addiction recovery counselor, in a web page^[1] that explains the common characteristics of a "normie."

The earliest known Urban Dictionary entry^[1] that addresses the pejorative use of the word was submitted on February 15th, 2004, defining "normy" as "someone who is normal, bland."

Spread

Through the latter half of the 2000s, more than a dozen of additional entries for the term surfaced on the site^[5], with the majority of definitions placing a common emphasis on the unremarkable nature of the individual or group it is addressed to. On February 23rd, 2008, an anonymous poster used the term "normie" to describe the sudden and drastic growth of otaku in replying to a discussion thread about Tokyo's cosplay hub Akihabara district on 4chan's /jp/ (otaku)^[2] board.

On May 10th, 2009, DeviantART user TheAnimeGeek uploaded a demotivational poster based on a photograph of a woman in a business suit surrounded by anime cosplayers with the caption "NORMIES."

In June 2012, "normies" appeared for the first time on 4chan's /r9k/ board (shown below).^[3] In the following years, the use of the term became increasingly frequent on the site, particularly in the context of greentext stories.