About
Harambe is a great example of a normie meme.
Normie is a 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
One of the earliest uses of the term comes from the 1987. 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 that explains the common characteristics of a “normie.”
The earliest known Urban Dictionary entry that addresses the pejorative use of the word was submitted on February 15th, 2004, defining “normy” as “someone who is normal, bland.”