Posted by 日本語版はこちら。
Are you “specialized” or “open”? “Headstrong” or “flexible”? If that made any sense to you, you might have taken the Which Touhou are You quiz, your go-to source for being kin-assigned a magical girl living in a Japanese wonderland.
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Personality quizzes are fun to make… if you feel like you know what you’re doing. Ever heard of Myers-Briggs? The rabbit hole of analyzing its legitimacy and usefulness can go pretty far down, but we can all say that Myers-Briggs is… somewhat interesting, as a way to put the things we do into context. What makes each of us weird. Why certain things make us feel certain ways. Questions no one ever bothered answering.
It’s because no one actually knows how personalities work that it’s so fun to act as if you know how it actually works. It’s forbidden knowledge that no one has the authority to refute.
If there’s one thing to owe the entire concept of Which Touhou to, it would be the Which Star Guardian are you quiz. (Lux, at the time, if you were curious. The first iteration of Which Touhou came out in 2017, so my last encounter with the Star Guardian quiz shouldn’t be long before that.) Whatever trick they used, someone out there was able to get me invested in the outcome. So I thought I’d dig into what made up the experience of taking the quiz: the questions. Questions that were weird. Questions that were obvious. Questions that made me reach far into my memories to elicit the necessary emotion that would back up the answer I chose. Questions that I fought a war over before being able to decide.
It had never occurred to me that the personalities of League champs were worth thinking about. (It’ll be my K/DA engraved on my tombstone, not whether or not I believed “love wins over hate.”) I read over every word of the character profile I landed, with intent. It wasn’t easy getting here. It was time for the chosen champ to deliver.
You see, I had the right to claim everything nice the character description had to say about me. That’s just how it was. The profiles were all tame, so there wasn’t anything not-so-nice. But if there were, they would’ve veered a little too close to my personal insecurities.
So what’s the take-away anyhow? Maybe that knowing who you are is more difficult than you’d assume. You’re not a caricature. And neither are the characters you encounter in fiction if the author knows what they’re doing. It’s only when you start kinning a fictional being that you realize the true amount of depth to their character.
And that’s why you should know which Touhou character you are.
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I came up with five metrics for categorizing personality, each of which is an axis in which a given character would be located (specialized vs open, headstrong vs flexible, innocent vs knowledgeable, isolationist vs intervening, and harmonious vs utilitarian). I knew settling on a system that works best for all cases wasn’t easy. This just happened to be the end result after spending days mulling over it.
Ideally, you’d want each axis to be independent of each other, so that you’d have a plausible personality type for every possible combination. Alas, human brains aren’t wired in such perfect randomness that personality traits have zero correlation with each other.
Every deliberate action has a thought or idea behind it, and I want each axis to reflect these ideas more so than the actions that come from them. (This could be why descriptors like “nice” and “mean”, “talkative” and “quiet”, and “bland” and “cool” seem iffy to me. They’re just labels slapped onto a person’s visible behavior.) No one end of an axis is better than the other – unless you intend to bake your own preferences into your analysis – so, there was effort to be spent looking for the most neutral-sounding indicators.
Let’s be real – applying this system to each of the 31 Touhous was… questionable. There was a limit to my attention span and my time, so I ended up working off of a few sample lines for each of them. As a rule of thumb, I focused more on their print work material (if it exists) than the in-game dialogue where they typically play the role of getting in our heroine’s way and then being taken out of our heroine’s way.
A number of times, a whole bunch of them just went and decided they’d have similar personalities, and I’m left having to figure out exactly what are the nuances that differentiate them from one another. In the end, I’m left with a distribution where a handful of personality types – that is, unique combinations of the five metrics – are overcrowded, while a whole bunch of other combos are left blank. Sorry if you’re specialized, headstrong, innocent, isolationist, and harmonious – I guess the Touhou that matches you best would have to be flexible, or knowledgeable, or utilitarian. Quiz-takers are not equally represented in whether or not their persona can be easily mapped to a character. Vexing, yeah.
But hey, at least it… works. The 2017 iteration had enough feedback where you guys decided that, yeah, you did see yourself in your assigned Touhou. What more could I ask for? This new version came about from me reviewing each and every profile to make sure I agree with kurantoB from four years ago’s assessment. I revised the questions and the scoring system too, so, hopefully, the whole thing holds up to standard.
As a writer, do I think this system would be a good reference tool for creating more compelling fictional characters? It’s hard to tell. If you interpret these metrics as simply a bunch of axes, it’s not much different from an alignment chart. You’ve seen the memes. Making personality memable isn’t exactly the direction I wanna go. Every personality has a degree of complexity that forbids it to be placed squarely in a 3×3, or a 2^5.
So no, a character shouldn’t be reduced to a set of metrics. Maybe personality assessments have no place in character-design. I suppose they’re a fun thing to do on their own. A simple reminder to notice a character for their inner vibes and not just for their actions.
As for the best way to actually design a character? I guess I’ll leave it to the author’s own judgement.
@ me here.