Kimoi Girls - キモーイガールズ

About

Kimoi Girls (Japanese: キモーイガールズ), roughly meaning “It sucks!” girls, is an exploitable picture and reaction image depicting two girls laughing at one’s failure described in their speech bubbles. Their first usage as a reaction image, close to Girls Laughing and further on as an exploitable similar to Gedô Beibî on Japanese imageboards then exploded beyond those websites when Japanese and Western users alike started portraying famous characters in similar fashion poking fun at their favorite themes.

Origin

The original panel reused in the meme comes from a pornographic manga called Pay Back by artist Jun Nitta (にったじゅん), in which two schoolgirls are making fun of a boy when they find out he is a virgin:

Transcript:

えーマジ童貞!? (What, really, you’re a virgin!?)
キモーイ (How pathetic!)
童貞が許されるのは小学生までだよねー (Being a virgin is totally unacceptable past grade school.)
キャハハハハハハ (Hahaha!)

The initial adult manga was released on July 2002.
One of its earliest archived instances on the Japanese Web is from November 2003 from the following thread. There are also two articles, one from April 2004 and the other from February 2006 revealing that it was first reused by Futaba Channel (2chan) users as a reaction picture in its Shift-JIS art form:

Titled as Kimoi (キモーイ), meaning It sucks!, How lame! or How weak!, it was mainly used to mock on one’s failure at doing something right, keeping the “virgin” mockery involved.

EEEHHH?! Easy Mode?!

In 2006, IOSYS, famous doujin circle working on Touhou related material, released a flash animation entitled 患部で止まってすぐ溶ける 〜 狂気の優曇華院 (Kanbu de tomatte sugu tokeru ～ Kyouki no Udongein, meaning Stops at the affected area and immediately dissolves ～ Lunatic Udongein) and based on the Reisen Udongein Inaba character from the series as an arrangement of her theme song: Lunatic Eyes ~ Invisible Full Moon from Imperishable Night. The remix is also known as Overdrive to English speaking people.
According to one of their blog posts from December 2006, the animation has been uploaded as a Youtube video but has then been taken down.

Another version would be uploaded to Youtube on February 13 2007, garnering more than 1 600 000 views to date:

Between 00:49 and 00:56, and appearing again further on in the animation, the viewer can witness the original panel modified to feature Touhou characters making fun of people who would play Touhou in Easy Mode.

Here is a translation from it:

A Nico Nico Douga upload would eventually showed up in April 2007 [Registration Required], gathering more than 2 200 000 views there to date.
Within Nico Nico Douga, the video itself would spawn its own MAD phenomenon as shown by the following Nico Nico Douga list and article.

For more information about that particular phenomenon, please check the KYM entry for Overdrive.

Outside Japan

Gaining appeal among Touhou fans, both Japanese and Western, catchphrases such as Easy Modo?! and Only kids play in Easy Mode! popped up on the Western web, mainly gaming websites such as GameSpot (2010) or GameFAQs (2008).

A single-serving site was even created, as well as more image derivatives:

MAD Videos

Here is a selection of the MADs reusing modified versions of the initial panel:

Blank Template

The Internet is Leaking

Although not as notable as the meme itself, photos of the streets of Japan show some stores reusing the exploitable as an advertising tool to sell their goods, as posted on Flickr (2009) or even Twitpic (2010)

Additional Links

• Pixiv list of pictures for キモーイガールズ (Starting in 2007).
• Mention of the meme and its derivatives on a green-oval.net /a/ board.
• A meme explanation from Hijiribe.donmai.us.
• Exploitable template from Pixiv.
• Google image results for えーマジ? (Eeh? Really?)
• Macro generator and its list of derivatives.