Typing Your Characters

[Raspberry_cordelia]

Hello, lovely perusers of HPFT!  I hope you're all doing well! 

I noticed from your About Me pages, a lot of you seem to be rather familiar with Typology.

Now, with regards to myself, I absolutely despise personality typing.  It usually works out like this for me: I get a different answer every time, I have an identity crisis over it, and then I take another test.  It's a vicious cycle, which is why I choose to conveniently ignore the Sorting Hat Chats system for myself and sort myself based on more superficial qualities that do not hinge on my terrifying lack of self-awareness.

We're not here to talk about me, though.  We're here to talk about all your lovely characters! (And JKR's, of course.)  Although I know your personality type isn't the be-all end-all for your personality, I think it's a pretty useful tool.  It's a hecka lot of fun to type your characters, so I suppose I'll start first with my Main OC in my Second Wizarding-War Muggleborn fic that may or may not see the light of day, without giving too much away.  I'll be using two systems, the Myers-Briggs (MBTI), and Enneagram.

Obligatory disclaimer that your personality type is not an excuse for being a bad person.

Descriptions below:

Spoiler

 

Myers-Briggs

Your Myers-Briggs type consists of four letters (E/I, S/N, T/F, J/P).  Taken straight from the website:

Quote

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Each type also has cognitive functions, of which there are 8: Extroverted Sensing (Se), Introverted Sensing (Si), Extroverted Thinking (Te), Introverted Thinking (Ti), Extroverted Intuition (Ne), Introverted Intuition (Ni), Extroverted Feeling (Fe), and Introverted Feeling (Fi).  I don't want to drone on, so read more here.

Enneagram

There are nine personality types in the Enneagram, taken from the Enneagram institute:

Quote

Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.

Type Two is generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.

Type Three is adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.

Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.

Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.

Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.

Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive, and scattered.

Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.

Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, complacent, and resigned.

 

So, with that out of the way, let's move on to my OC:

MBTI: ENFJ (Fe-Ni-Se-Ti)

Friendly and reliable, but rather naive and sensitive to criticism.  Can be indecisive and become an over-thinker.

Enneagram: 6w7

Sociable and caring, but again, can be indecisive.

Unfortunately, I'm only really familiar with Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram, but if you have other interesting ones, please feel free to share!  Obviously there's more to it than the extremely short descriptions I gave, but I just wanted to get the discussion started.  How would you type your characters (or the ones from Harry Potter)?  Do you ever use them as a tool when writing?