The Personality File

Tessa aka Endalia over at Princess in a Castle recently posted on an interesting little personality match quiz thing. I had a little play around with it on the night Tessa posted it and then put it aside. I considered making a post around it, I’ve done a Gamer Motivation Profile thinger before and it could be a good addition to that. But a number of the properties it matches against I either had no knowledge of, or my knowledge was now very spotty with time-passed. I mean, who remembers DS9? ;)

Then I saw Bhagpuss’ take and thought to myself, ‘Now there’s an idea I can steal’. You see, he quite cleverly used the test’s capability to show by individual property to spice things up a little.

I thought I’d only bother doing the so called ‘short’ quiz, with 28 questions. Because the jump from there to the complete version at 121 questions, eesh! Who has time for that??

Turns out… I do. Because I started looking at the characters I was matched against from the short quiz and recognising fairly quickly that many of their top traits simply were not covered off in the short quiz, and I anticipated as a result there might be quite different results between it and the longer more complete edition.

Well… Tada!

The overall results.

I find it interesting too, that the indicated statistical matches on the complete quiz start at a lower confidence for the #1 spot in the complete quiz than the #20 spot in the short quiz. In fact, the first 74% match for the short quiz doesn’t show up until #41 (Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)).

Otherwise, there is an odd mix of consistency and change between the two lists too. At an overall property level, especially with lower confidence in the complete quiz perhaps this isn’t too surprising.

Let’s dig into a few of the individual properties! :D

Friends

Other than Ross and Monica flipping spots by a hairs breadth — the two lists present an identical ordering. Thank goodness it didn’t think I was like Phoebe though. ;)

Although like Bhagpuss, I could probably stand to do a rewatch of this at some point and see how it holds up. My wife has on occasion watched through old sitcoms from start to finish; and seems to quite enjoy it. Partly as a bit of mindless entertainment to have on in the background that doesn’t require a heavy degree of concentration, sure. But also in its own right from time to time.

For myself; TV (as with most things) I have so much else I’d watch which is new to me that going back to watch something old rarely surfaces up my priority list.

Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

Much greater shifting of character positions this time around, but perhaps the most significant drop being Tony Stark from #2 all the way down to #10 in the complete quiz.

I also wonder how much these results (which are fed in from other users, to harness the, ahem, ‘collective wisdom of the masses’) are being coloured by the comic source material vs. the movies. The intent of the site appears to be more at the movie universe but I’m sure there will be an element of self-selection bias at work here where those who most believe they have the necessary insight into these characters to comment on their attributes will also be those from the comic fandom.

And then my follow-up wonder is, just how many liberties were taken with the innate principles of the characters in the movies vs. their comic source material?

I know that some had their motivations changed (e.g., Thanos of the comics has a different set of goals, or at least different reasons for his goals vs. movie-Thanos), but fundamentally perhaps they’re the same entities, or perhaps not.

In any case — Bruce Banner seems like an alright top-pick for me. And looking over his attributes on the site, it doesn’t appear to be due to any issues of underlying seething rage causing Banner to be my top match. ;)

Game of Thrones

OK, if we ignore season 8 for the moment — heck, ignore the TV series entirely and return to the books, we can at least agree those were good right?

What?

You didn’t enjoy Book 5? Or 4? … well I suppose I can’t really blame you there. I found both of those to be a fair slog. Right; well — let’s constrain our thinking to the first three books then and we should all be happy.

Tyrion would probably have been my pick, if that was how this thing played out. So the short quiz makes me happy in that respect. There is again quite a plummet from the short to long quiz results here with Tyrion jumping from 1st to 10th. I’m going to go ahead and console myself by saying that probably it was the less… desirable traits… that caused that match to drop between the two quiz’.

And besides, Samwell Tarly is no slouch in his own right. When he is called upon to do what’s necessary he typically rises to the challenge. Perhaps with a bit of grumbling (that’s me all over), but in the end, despite the struggle, the job gets done.

Thanks for highlighting personality match test, Tessa, it was quite the diversion!

And thank-you Bhagpuss for illustrating a good way to extract a post from it! :D

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This was a post for Blapril 2020, the annual blogging event (albeit usually as Blaugust), brought forward to help bring a sense of community during the challenging time of COVID-19. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.

The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year round!

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