Main-Character Syndrome
Etymology
Built from the storytelling term "main character," it spread on TikTok around 2020, partly from a wave of "main character energy" videos encouraging people to romanticize their own lives. The label soon flipped to name the darker excess: forgetting that everyone else is the main character of their own story too. "Syndrome" frames it, half-seriously, as a diagnosable pattern.
noun phrase · /mayn KAR-ik-ter SIN-drohm/
The tendency to treat yourself as the protagonist of a story in which everyone else is a supporting player or extra.
What it names
A specific self-absorption — not mere vanity but a narrative framing in which other people exist to serve your arc — which makes it a sharp tool for describing performative or entitled behavior.
Example
He stopped the whole group photo to redo his pose three times — total main-character syndrome.
Related idea
Treating others as NPCs is the flip side: main-character syndrome inflates the self, while the NPC metaphor deflates everyone else.