Main Character Energy
mayn KAR-ak-ter EN-er-jeenoun
What it means
The delusional confidence required to treat a public coffee shop as the set of a cinematic montage.
What it actually means
Everyone else is an extra in your film.
How it is used in a sentence
"She walked in with such main character energy the whole room looked up."
Why this one is here
Borrowed from film criticism, where the main character is the one the story happens to. Applied to a person, it describes the assumption that the room is a set and the strangers in it are extras. What keeps it in circulation is the compliment buried inside the insult: everybody half wants it.
Filed under
Social Dynamics — The unwritten rules we invented online and now enforce in public without irony.
Diagnosis — The phrase already names a real problem. We define it properly.
Related entries
Parasocial
Social Dynamicspair-uh-SOH-shuladjectiveDiagnosis
Describes a relationship in which one party has no knowledge of the other and both have strong opinions.
Real meaningI feel like I know them.
Influencer
Social DynamicsIN-floo-en-sernounEuphemism
A person employed to be perceived, whose labour is the perception itself.
Real meaningTheir job is that you know their name.