negative carry

To be disproportionately responsible for a team's success or for counteracting teammates' underperformance.

An L carry is the brutal scenario where you gave everything — you genuinely carried in terms of performance and effort — but still lost. The L carry is often considered the cruelest outcome in competitive gaming because the asymmetry is so painful: maximum input, wrong result. It's different from just losing; it's losing despite doing the thing you needed to do, because variables outside your control betrayed you. The L carry has migrated into everyday use to describe anyone who worked harder than everyone else in a failing situation: the one excellent employee at a collapsing company, the partner who held everything together in a doomed relationship.

A mega carry is a performance so dominant and comprehensive that it single-handedly determines the outcome — not just winning a few key exchanges but controlling the entire flow of a match or situation from start to finish. A mega carry player doesn't just compensate for teammate errors; they make those errors irrelevant. The 'mega' intensifier signals scale that goes beyond a regular strong carry game: this is a one-person takeover, a total suppression of the chaos around them through sheer output. The term celebrates this almost absurd level of individual dominance while implicitly questioning why anyone else even bothered showing up.

To single-handedly win a game when your team is underperforming. "He hard-carried that match" = did most of the work. Extended into everyday English: "I carried that group project." The best carry player makes it look easy; nobody else gets to claim they helped.

Carry szn — carry season — is the period when one player, person, or entity is clearly doing all the heavy lifting while everyone around them coasts. It might be a gaming ranked season where a single player is propping up an entire team, or the stretch of a group project where one person stops waiting for help and just handles everything. Carry szn has a flavor of exhausted pride: you're good enough to carry, which is a flex, but you're also doing it alone, which is a complaint. The 'szn' framing gives it a cyclical quality — seasons end, and eventually the weight gets redistributed.