I Just Want To Be Normal / Western Animation

• The second episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, "Normal Boy", has Jimmy end up ticking off everyone around him (more than usual) through a series of mishaps and deciding that his Super-Intelligence is too much of a burden. To remedy this he invents the Brain Drain 8000 to depower himself, but a malfunction ends up pushing it too far and giving him Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity... right when a meteor is headed for the town.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Juke, who has a boombox for a head, can only speak (and write) in beatboxing because his arms are too short to reach the speech switch behind his head. He's been trying to tell that to everyone for a year. In "The Night", Juke dreams he can finally speak, but now everyone else speaks in music.
  • William just wants to be friends with Gumball and Darwin, but since he's a mouthless winged eyeball, they think he's a weirdo who just silently creeps up on people.
  • In the episode "The Night", Hector's dream reveals he hates being a giant, and he's so happy to be normal-sized, enabling him to roam freely without destroying the neighborhood, to hug people without hospitalizing them, to take the bus, to sit in the classroom like everyone else, to buy clothes, to use a toilet instead of a volcano and to have a girlfriend. It's so good a dream that he doesn't want to wake up. Unfortunately, he's a sleepwalker.
• American Dragon: Jake Long:
  • While having dragon powers are cool, Jake often wrestles with being the protector of the American magical community along with the issues it brings to his personal life (especially not being able to tell his dad cause he's a normal human and losing his girlfriend... twice) Even with having his friends, grandfather and animal guardian help, it often is a lot and why he is tempted to find shortcuts. It comes to a head in the penultimate episode of the series where he purposefully pulls a prank on the Dragon Council with his punishment being a week without his "dragon chi", all so he could enjoy his middle school graduation in peace.
  • His overachieving younger sister, Haley, ends up appreciating this about her when she had to take up the mantle in his suspension. The massive shift in her life wrecks her nerves a fair bit though she understands Jake more too, to where she angrily defends Jake and his reasoning against their grandfather when she accidentally confesses the reason why Jake pulled the prank after he got kidnapped.
• Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in regards to being the Chosen One. Even after being forced to accept the call, he still holds some desire to be a normal kid. In the third season, he goes as far as to take the huge risk of enrolling in a Fire Nation school just to experience what it's like being a normal kid, despite his friends' protests.

  Aang: You don't know what it's like, Sokka — you get to be normal all the time.

  • The funny things is that "normal" for Aang still involves Elemental Powers, just not being the Avatar.
  • Inverted in The Legend of Korra. Korra defines herself so much around being the Avatar that she can't bear the thought of being Brought Down to Normal — even "merely" an airbender, the rarest kind of bender in the world. Or even living a normal life with mom and dad, while still having all her powers. She does end up with this mentality to a degree as the various climaxes push her to her limit and causing plenty of trauma for her and her friends.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes:
  • Hank Pym would rather study science than fight crime as an Avenger, which conflicts with his Technical Pacifist beliefs. Opposite of his girlfriend Wasp, who loves being a superhero (and isn't happy that Hank doesn't feel the same way).
  • Colonel James Rhodes explains that he rarely dons the War Machine armor because he's not interested in becoming a superhero.
• Ben 10:
  • In the Original Series episode "Don't Drink The Water", the heroes come across the Fountain of Youth and the immortal Conquistador who has been guarding it for over 400 years. The Conquistador in question hates his immortality because it prevents him from having a normal life, such as starting a family. He is noticeably relieved when Ben is able to destroy the fountain as it means his immortality is gone (since you only remain immortal if you continuously drink the water) and he can now have a normal life.
  • Zig-Zagged in Ultimate Alien, where Ben either loving or hating his fame depends on the episode. While he manages to take his new-found fame in stride and seems to enjoy it after humanity finds out he's a superhero, he also admits that he wishes he could have his secret-identity back in "Absolute Power".
• In Danny Phantom, Danny tries to split his ghost and human halves to have some plain fun... with mixed results. Similarly, in the finale, Danny gets rid of his ghost half so he can be normal, though he does eventually get his powers back.
  • Not to mention in the pilot episode, he expresses the desire to be fully human again early on ("If my dad can invent something that accidentally made me half-ghost, why can't he invent something that turns me back to normal?!")
  • In The Movie, his future self has Vlad separate his human and ghost halves to help him deal with the death of his family and friends. It doesn't end well. At all.
    • That's more of an inversion; Danny explicitly wanted to remove his human side. Well... he succeeded.
• A main plot point of the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) cartoon was the kids wanting to leave their new sword-and-sorcery life behind and return to the normal world.
• Generator Rex, though Rex enjoys fighting, and helping people, he's not a fan of the life he has to lead when he's not on missions, which seems to consist of training and waiting around. He sneaks out often. Leading the higher-ups to hire a kid to be his friend.
• In one Gummi Bears episode, the whole kingdom is overjoyed when Sir Paunch the royal candymaker is coming back, only to be disappointed to find he's only there to say hi, as he's retiring. While everyone loves him and his famous taffy, he's tired of all the attention, claiming it's "the pits". Unfortunately, while he seems to get his wish, he still does not divulge his secret recipe, claiming he cannot do so until he finds a worthy successor. (And after Cubbi, Tummi, and Sunni copy it and nearly blow up the castle trying to make it, one can hardly blame him.)
• The Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law episode "Turner Classic Birdman" reveals that this is why Harvey Birdman became a, well, attorney at law: he was tired of the constant stress of being a superhero and desired a more mundane life. A pity all his allies and enemies followed him into law, ensuring his law career was as crazy as his superhero career.
• In Jackie Chan Adventures Jackie would love nothing more than to go back to his life as a quiet and unassuming archaeologist rather than his current life as a secret agent who routinely defends the world from demons and what not.
• The titular character of Kaeloo has a condition where she winds up Hulking Out whenever she gets too angry and does mean and sadistic things to whoever made her angry, which seem to be beyond her conscious control. She doesn't want this "power" and has tried numerous times to get rid of it, but she never can.
• In the Legion of Super Heroes (2006) episode "Legacy", Alexis dismisses her trillionaire heiress Lonely Rich Kid/Rich Bitch lifestyle with "I Just Want to Be Normal." As her first real friend apparently ever, she tries to hold on to her relationship with Superman, and thus normality, by scheming and manipulating and eventually going completely off the deep end into supervillainy, Luthor-style, giving up on normality in favor of Revenge.
• The title character of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee practically embodies this role. Being the magical guardian seems cool, but most of her free time is consumed and she is actually bound to live in her area, unable to leave.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot has this with the titular teenage robot, Jenny Wakeman. While she likes the amazing capabilities of her robotic weaponry, she also longs for the life of a normal teenage girl. Though this is mainly because she's the only robot in town, and thus it's more she wishes she could fit in with everyone else and have more sentient robofolk to relate too. Even with her human friends (and later her swamp monster cousin Glenn and sorta-friend Misty), she understandably still has the longing for robotic company. It's why she dates Kenny for a while and also her time with the Silver Shell. In the "Escape From Cluster Prime" special, she finally gets to achieve this and struggles with leaving since she finally has a place she feels she belongs. We also see that her heroic nature exceeds this, since she becomes a vigilante and helps overthrow Vexus when she helps restore the battle capabilities of the robots. Despite the offer to stay, with her mother's blessing no less, she remains on Earth to be with her friends.
• In one of the My Little Pony animated specials, Lily Lightly is the only unicorn whose horn glows when she's excited or really happy, so she tries to hide it from everyone else. She even has an "I Want" Song about it.
• The Cutie Mark Crusaders of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic suffer a bizarre mix of this and I Just Want to Be Special. They all want to have the Cutie Mark that every pony has in their flanks and that they themselves hadn't gotten yet. Problem is, a Cutie Mark only appears in a pony after they realize what his or her unique talent really is, so the poor fillies are Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life just to fit with everypony else. They finally get their wish in Season 5 when they realize their special talent is helping others find and understand their special talents. On top of that, one of them, Scootaloo, is a flightless pegasus who often wishes she could fly like others of her kind.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Don't you recall ... the most famous reindeer of all?
• Skull Island (2023): Charlie is the son of a marine cryptid-hunter who wants nothing more than to give up his father's pursuit and go to college.
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man Peter Parker tends to suffer from this. When Peter is caught having taken pictures of his alter-ego's battle with mutated geneticist the Lizard, after claiming he was going home, his friends and superiors at the ESU labs distrust him, and fire him from his internship. Stealing a gene cleanser from the lab, Peter briefly considers taking it before remembering his credo. He does, however, keep it hidden under his desk.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Peter considered quitting his life as Spider-Man on a few occasions, such as when a fight with Doctor Octopus resulted in a medical lab being destroyed.
• Spider-Man: The New Animated Series: As a result of being Cut Short, the series ends with Peter throwing his Spider-Man costume into the river, swearing he won't be Spider-Man again.
• In South Park, Craig is shown to be The Chosen One who will defeat the giant Guinea Creatures as foretold by an Incan prophecy, though he states throughout the episodes that he doesn't want to get involved in any weird adventures and just wants to stay away from the main characters (whose every schemes always ends up in Hilarity Ensuing). Subverted in that his attempts at Refusing the Call ends up leading him to fulfill his destiny and defeat the Guinea Pirate, with him noting that life is unexpected in the end (though he still learns to never trust the gang with anything).
  • Mysterion, a.k.a. Kenny, is tired of being immortal because no one remembers his deaths.
• In the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "The Deserter", Rex meets a clone deserter named Cut Lawquane. Cut left his battalion early in the war, having lost his taste for fighting. Seeking a normal life, he met a Twi'lek woman named Suu Lawquane and her two children. He married her and the family of four started a farm together. When Rex is offered shelter after being wounded in battle, Cut explains to him that he didn't leave out of malice for the Republic or any of their brothers: he simply wanted more out of life than being a soldier. Despite their differences, Rex accepts his choices and keeps the Lawquane family a secret from his superiors.
  • In Star Wars: The Bad Batch, it's all but shown that Cut and Rex remained friends all throughout the war, as Cut was one of the few clones Rex dared to seek out after Order 66 and warn about the dangers of the Empire.
• In Star Wars Rebels near the end of the series in the episode "World between Worlds" Ezra in a Shout-Out to a similar scene in Lord of the Rings wishes his life were different and that he had his parents back.
• In Steven Universe: Future, especially in the episode "Mr. Universe", Steven laments that his father Greg's extremely laidback parenting style (a reaction to Greg's stifling childhood) and constant training and fighting with the Gems means that he never got the chance to have a "normal" childhood.
  Steven: (To Greg) Maybe your parents weren't so bad. Maybe they gave you curfews and chaperones and meatloaf f-for a reason! I grew up in a van! I never went to school! I've never been to the doctor until two days ago! I could have done all that stuff! My problem isn't that I'm a gem, my problem is that I'm a UNIVERSE!
• This is how Teen Titans (2003) ends. After spending the whole episode trying to convince the schoolgirl/Terra that she is the Terra he thought he knew, she delivers what can be considered the saddest line in the series. "I'm not a hero. I'm not out to save the world. I'm just a girl with a geometry test next period and I haven't studied." As later revealed in the Teen Titans Go! comics, this is one of the few cases where Brought Down to Normal not only is permanent but regarded as a change for the better, even by Terra's own brother.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): For a couple of episodes, April tries to get on with her life and pretend that mutant reptiles and aliens don't exist. She succeeds and meets the first normal human boy, Casey Jones, but she's sucked back into the crazy mess she was trying to avoid. However, April not only realized that she can't control her life but also come to terms with the excitement and adventure she has come to have.
  • Several mutants in the show are former humans who were mutated by accident or against their will. While some like the way they are or have come to accept it, many of them dislike what they've become and will do anything to cure their mutations (as shown when Dogpound and Fishface kidnapped Baxter Stockman so he could cure them, under threat of being dosed with the mutagen himself).
• In Total Drama , Mike has a Split Personality. He views himself as a “freakish weirdo” because of this, and worries his Love Interest Zoey will too. At the end of the season, he learns to the message to Be Yourself and Zoey accepts him for his disorder.
• The Transformers: Rodimus Prime never really feels worthy of succeeding Optimus Prime as the leader of the Autobots and bearer of the Matrix of Leadership. When Optimus apparently comes back from the dead, Rodimus immediately hands over the Matrix and feels overjoyed when he reverts to Hot Rod as a result. He has to take it back when Optimus turns out to be an Ax-Crazy zombie. Though Optimus later comes back for real, and Rodimus is reverted back to Hot Rod for real, feeling no worse for wear about losing the Matrix permanently.
• In Transformers: Animated, Blackarachnia is obsessed with removing her organic side and becoming fully robotic again despite being both Cursed with Awesome and tremendously physically attractive to about half the cast.
  • Shortly after the reveal that Sari is half-Cybertronian, she is both upset that this has been kept secret for so long and terrified of what's happening, clearly wishing it had never happened. However, it only lasts for the first episode of season three, and by their next appearance Sari and Sumdac have made up, with Sari becoming more and more at peace with her Cybertronian half.
• In Transformers: Prime, once he learns he's been chosen by the Matrix to be the next Prime Smokescreen seems to want the position less and less as the series progresses (not that he wanted to be a Prime in the first place, he just wanted to be a great soldier). He even goes so far as to try and push the future responsibility onto Bumblebee.
• In the Season 2 finale of The Venture Bros., Dean ends up admitting this during a fit of delusion. It's become his defining motivation. By Season 5, Dean finally admits to his dad he doesn't want to be a scientist or boy adventurer. What he doesn't tell him is that it's because he knows that his brother and himself are both clones after they've died over 14 times in the past.
  • Deep down, this is all Rusty Venture really wants as well.
• Nightcrawler of X-Men: Evolution was like this, but you couldn't really blame him given that he looked like a furry blue demon. Unlike the other mutants, who were actually fairly good about being exposed as mutants, Nightcrawler was really reluctant to let go of the illusion that he wasn't a mutant, but eventually did, and never let go of the human appearance given to him by his image inducer (can't really blame him, again).