Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: vaulted

Def.: A descriptor for a fictional character, usually a woman, who is killed off in a way that is needless and/or perplexingly unfounded.  Not to be confused with a character who gets fridged, because while the fridged character provides the hero with angst that lasts, the vaulted character will likely not be mentioned again after the instance in which they are killed off.  Obviously this term comes from the fate that befell my poor Doreah at the end of last season.

Usage: Doreah’s getting vaulted was upsetting because it made no narrative sense, among other things, whereas when last week Ros was vaulted, it was mostly awful because of its gratuitous nature; that this happened once makes me sad, but that it happened twice makes me legitimately frustrated for reasons.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: fictional overemoting

Def.: Those times when you are sometimes irrationally moved to feelings by fiction.  Different than just standardly having feels, because this is sometimes disproportionate (it has little rational basis, it hits you in the middle of nowhere or prompted by completely unrelated things, etc.) and rarely explainable to outsiders.

Usage: “Calm down, it’s only a book/show/movie” is something I am frequently told in response to my fictional overemoting.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: describing a problematic night at the theater, featuring my urban dictionary

(I will also be discussing this problematic night on Thursday, never you fear.)

I was hoping that the evening would not turn out to be a disaster, or if it would be a disaster that at least it would be a triple trainwreck, but just as a precaution I made sure to get myself well on the way to hamsters drunk before we took our seats, and I was most certainly also doing voices as another preemptive coping mechanism.  When one of the characters came onstage wearing a douchapeau, I knew immediately that I would not like him.  Many of the show’s problems were not trigger topics in the conventional sense, as that usually implies being emotionally invested in the specific material at hand, but they definitely pinged me in ways that I am familiar with from other material; unfortunately, perhaps because of the source material or perhaps for another reason, much of the plot of the show was like zombies and I was very cranky.  Some of this was rational brain at work, and some of it was just common sense.  Luckily, we had our phones on us afterward, so though doing a bit of research about the source material was a phonecessity, it did not go undone.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: doing voices

Def.: When one consciously taps into the posturing, thought process, and/or verbal tics of another (usually a famous person or fictional character, though I suppose you could do it with real-life acquaintances as well, to mixed effect) in order to better make a point/deal with a troubling scenario/handle a problem/etcetera; though it is usually a largely verbal/mental thing (hence the “voices” part), it can involve a certain level of physicality as well.  (Note: it is different than imitation, as it is not just a parlor trick and is often subtle and unrecognizable to others, whereas an imitation is done to amuse and even if outsiders don’t get what you’re imitating they can usually tell.)

Usage: I recently decided that the best way to get through one of my classes would be to go through the entire term doing voices; though what it says about my overall personhood is debatable, I have found that doing Margaery Tyrell during a partner-dancing class is one of the best decisions I could have made.

See also: motivated mimicry (n.)

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: trigger topics

Def.: Topics that someone is so terribly emotionally invested in that, should they be questioned about them, will spur either a lengthy rant or a harried exclamation of “no, no, I’m just not going to talk!” so as not to freak the questioners out.

Usage: I am luckily conscious enough of my trigger topics to be able to stop myself from going off when friends who are going through the show for the first time ask me about the relationship between Dany and Jorah, or anything to do with Dany and Doreah (though for the opposite reason) but that does not prevent me from ranting at friends who have been through the show before and are at the same points in the books as I am about the topics later.

See also: warning label topics (n.)

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: HBO season

Def.: As I have said before, this is those months during which Game of Thrones and then True Blood run on Sunday nights on HBO and I have difficulty recreationally thinking about anything else.

Usage: I did not really celebrate Easter today, but I did celebrate the beginning of HBO season with friends, cocktails, and homemade lemon cakes.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: mnemonic nerdery

Def.: Associating (usually academic) subjects with things that are varying degrees of nerdy in order to remember them better.

Usage: When studying foreign languages, I sometimes write clumsy sentences about nerdy things in order to recall vocabulary and conjugations; this could account for how I have three pages of a Word document written full of sentences like “Dany recordó la casa con la puerta roja”  and “Doreah supo cómo hacer felices a los hombres.”

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: cosplay season

Def.: That period of the year where all of one’s free time, should they choose to partake of this hobby, is devoted to insane preparations for various cosplays.

Usage: My cosplay season has a winter hiatus built into it; it begins in the weeks prior to Halloween, then pauses, then resumes again in February before Emerald City Comicon.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: going to ground

Def.: In keeping with the trend of many of my personal slang terms, this derives from fiction, here (as with others) from True Blood; within the show, going to ground is the act of a vampire retreating while the sun is up.  The first night after a vampire is made is going to ground in the literal sense, with the maker and progeny being buried together in the ground, and the term is also used to refer to vampires going to their sleeping places sometimes, because though many of them are properly furnished to some extent or at least aren’t holes in the earth, they are usually underground and always, for obvious reasons, light-tight.

Anyway, this is a lengthy bit of background, but when used in the context of real life, it just means consciously taking a nap or passing out for a given period of time while the sun is up.

Usage: Being much more a night person, if I have the option I prefer to stay up late and then go to ground some time the next day if I need more rest.

See also: vampire nap (n.)

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Saturday :: my urban dictionary: lady-tinted glasses

(Leave me alone.  I’m on a weird vacation schedule, I know I’m going to the movies tomorrow, so I’m doing the switch thing.  Also, I get an illicit thrill from posting about this kind of thing in the place that I am.  And I keep using this phrase, so I figure I should define it just in case.)

Def.: what one is often theoretically wearing when one partakes of films, television programs, plays, books, comic books, or anything else fictional and cannot help but see (largely subtextual) romantic relationships or at least feelings between female characters; also what one is theoretically wearing when they are intensely invested in (much rarer) canon female romantic relationships.

Usage: Rarely are the things I observe when wearing lady-tinted glasses ever made official, so as I have before said, the Nora/Salome kiss in 5×11, “Sunset,” was a victory for me.

–your fangirl heroine.