catfish arc

A personal character evolution — real or perceived — where someone gradually becomes more catlike in their behavior: increasingly independent, harder to read, more selective about who they give their time and energy to. A cat arc often follows a period of over-giving, burnout, or social exhaustion, resulting in someone emerging cooler, quieter, and significantly less available. Online it's used to describe both personal growth journeys and fictional character developments where the character stops trying to please everyone.

A recognisable stretch of time in an online personality's or community's history defined by an escalating pattern of provocative, reaction-farming behaviour. The bait arc is usually discussed retrospectively: fans or critics notice that every major moment during a period was engineered for controversy, drama, or dunks. Some bait arcs are calculated; some are chaotic self-destruction. Either way, people will draw up timelines.

The narrative trajectory of someone who transitions from trustworthy to completely fake — the visible story of a person's descent into snake behavior that, looking back, always had the signs. A snake arc is most often spotted in retrospect: the small betrayals you dismissed, the loyalty that started slipping, the gradual shift in energy right before the knife went in. It's become a staple of social postmortems and group chat autopsy sessions where everyone traces exactly when things went wrong.

A cap arc is when someone goes on an extended streak of lying, fabricating, and embellishing — a narrative phase where every interaction seems to add another layer of fiction on top of the last. Unlike a one-off cap, a cap arc has structure: it builds, escalates, and eventually collapses under its own weight when someone pulls the thread. The term borrows from storytelling vocabulary to describe the tragicomedy of watching someone spiral deeper into their own constructed reality, dragging their online reputation with them.

The extended narrative trajectory of someone going through a prolonged loss streak — a story with a beginning, escalating failures, and hopefully a redemption end point that friends are still waiting to see. An L arc isn't a single bad day; it's a multi-week or multi-month saga of compounding setbacks that the people around you have started mentally charcing as chapters. The arc framing implies potential for growth, which is the internet's way of being almost kind about watching someone's situation get worse before it gets better.