Basic Trope: One or more characters who are obsessed with normality and think everything normal is good, while everything abnormal is bad.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are a married couple who live in a house with a white picket fence and a neat lawn that has no decorations or noteworthy aspects to think of with their three children: Charlie, Diana, and baby Edwin, and a dog named Fido. They also are obsessed with "normalcy" and always take Charlie or Diana to a therapist and Fido to the vet when one of them does something even remotely strange. They also hate the Quirky Household of neighbours who live opposite them.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice and Bob go so far as to kill (or attempt to kill/consider killing) people who are even remotely abnormal.
- Even Fido and baby Edwin are obsessively normal.
- Everyone in the society Alice and Bob live in is obsessed with being normal.
- Alice and Bob have sold their souls to "normalcy" demons who have given them the power to manufacture "codes of conduct" contracts that have astonishingly brutal punishments if broken. The other characters will point out that this is hypocritical as hell, but Alice and Bob, if they are actually not too far gone to care, will just label it as "fighting fire with fire".
- Downplayed: They let a few abnormalities slide, but disapprove of anything too goofy.
- Justified:
- Both of them were raised like this.
- They have a genuinely pathological fear of abnormality.
- They have their own set of abnormality that they're deeply ashamed of and are desperately trying to hide it from the rest of world.
- They have had a pretty bad experience regarding abnormality. It's a bit harder to accept quirky and friendly rednecks living next door after (barely) surviving a retread of The Hills Have Eyes.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob hate normality and try to be as abnormal as possible.
- Subverted: Alice yells at Diana for wanting an iguana for a pet as "Normal People don't keep iguanas as pets", but it turns out that she was possessed.
- Double Subverted: When she's not possessed, she's still as obsessed with normalcy, she just doesn't yell.
- Parodied:
- Alice and Bob are obsessed with being normal but their ideas of what constitutes as "normal" (e.g. demanding guests knock on a door precisely 34 and a half times before they'll answer, and meowing at cars while walking feral refrigerators) are seen as completely abnormal by the rest of society.
- Alice and Bob are well aware that what counts as "normal" changes depends on where and when they live. As such, they are constantly and radically changing their worldviews and lifestyle habits in order to conform to whatever is considered normal according to the time period and country/region they're living in.
- Bob has gone to such funny lengths as changing his name to "Mr. Smith", wear gray all the time, and talk in such a non-threatening fashion that makes even the natives of the Bad Future in Demolition Man sound like a Cluster F-Bomb.
- Zigzagged: Alice and Bob sometimes are obsessed with being normal and sometimes they don't mind abnormality.
- Averted: Nobody is obsessively normal.
- Enforced: Alice and Bob: The Series has the titular couple, which during several seasons has stopped being an example of The Everyman and are full of crazy quirks because they embraced their neighbors'. Executive Meddling wants a Foil for them, a Logical Latecomer that hates their guts, so why not have him be one that wants to remain "normal" even if that means waving a shotgun in Alice and Bob's faces while screaming that he doesn't wants anything to do with the Zany Scheme of the week?
- Lampshaded:Charlie: "Normalcy doesn't really exist, so how can Mom and Dad be so obsessed with it"
- Invoked: Alice and Bob try to raise Charlie, Diana and Edwin to be obsessively normal too.
- Exploited: Evulz wants Alice and Bob dead... so he sells them that house over on the Stepford Suburbia where the last owners were massacred by some guy (who was never caught) that apparently (from the bloody Room Full of Crazy he left behind) absolutely hated them leaving the little flag on the mailbox half-raised.
- Defied: Alice and Bob refuse to obsess over normality.
- Discussed:
- One of the Quirky Neighbours: "The neighbours are so obsessed with being normal, but what is normal?"
- Conversed: "Why do those characters try so hard to be normal?"
- Implied: Bob is seen giving the quirky neighbours the stink eye for no obvious reason other than they are acting funny.
- Deconstructed:
- Charlie and Diana's creativity is stifled.
- Alice and Bob are so obsessed with being normal that they’re viewed by their neighborhood (even by the aforementioned quirky neighbours) as a bunch of freaky weirdos because of it.
- Reconstructed:
- They are determinators and still keep their creativity regardless of what their parents say.
- Alice and Bob simply choose to ignore them. Simply choosing to view themselves as normal people and the neighborhood as the odd ones.
- Played for Laughs: A sitcom about a rivalry between Alice and Bob and the quirky neighbours, with Charlie and Diana sometimes being on one side, sometimes on another, and sometimes not taking sides. Of course, Fido is a dog and Edwin is too young, so they don't take sides, but sometimes Alice and Bob act as if they do (i.e. "Even Fido knows normal people are not like that")
- Played for Drama:
- The children don't want to be normal, but the parents do, making them a Dysfunctional Family.
- The Fantasy-Forbidding Father of the Kids' Wilderness Epic hears that his child survived being lost in the woods for a week (and learnt some valuable life lessons) because of benevolent elves and gets his hands on a shotgun, because how dare they get close to his child and fill his head with nonsense (even if they are the only reason the kid survived and it's stuff like "next time leave a note telling where are you going to go")? The third act then involves the kid trying to prevent Humans Are the Real Monsters from becoming manifest.
- Played for Horror: Alice and Bob murder people because they don't like whatever quirks these other people have. They ignore the fact that being a Serial Killer or Spree Killer is not "normal" by any means of the imagination.
Back to Obsessively Normal because it's the only normal page on this Wiki.
