The format jumped off Tumblr in early 2011. On January 21st, 2011, FunnyJunk user samansa posted the Back to the Future gigawatt version, and on June 20th an anonymous Canvas user uploaded the 'X-Man / Hugh Jackman is sooooo hot' entry that got picked up by the Canvas Blog two days later in a roundup titled '/nerdcore'1. BuzzFeed compiled a 'Best of' post on July 6th, 2011, which is where most later coverage traces its exposure back to2.

Uproxx writer the Cajun Boy piled on that November with a post arguing Idiot Nerd Girl was 'less nerd than idiot, but 100% annoying,' pairing it with a supercut of actresses claiming nerd cred2. Smosh ran its own compilation on February 9th, 2012, and by that September the Quickmeme page held more than 7,100 submissions while Memegenerator hosted around 6701.

The backlash catalyst hit on July 27th, 2012, when Feminspire published 'Nerd Girls are Real Nerds Too! (and Why This Meme Sucks),' arguing the format punished women for enjoying geek media while never asking the same of men1. On August 20th, 2012, Dark Horse Comics editor Rachel Edidin began posting inverted Idiot Nerd Girl macros on Twitter that recast the character as an authentic geek girl mistaken for a poser, and followed up two days later with a Tumblr set of ten1. The Atlantic covered the campaign in September 2012, quoting Edidin calling the original meme 'a pernicious reinforcement of a lot of things that go with the fake menace of the fake geek girl'2. Coverage from The Mary Sue, SkepChick, Bust Magazine, Comics Beat and The Daily Dot followed within the next two weeks1.