How Quizzes Are Made
Most fandom personality quizzes on the internet are built around one of two bad approaches. They are either written by a real fan who doesn't have a strong understanding of how to make an accurate quiz, or they're written by a corporate employee who has no real interest or knowledge in the fandom. While I would never discourage a real fan from making a quiz (and in fact I hope learning from Fandom Haven's approach will help inspire other fans to make quizzes), my goal with Fandom Haven is to offer something new and different: fandom quizzes made by real fans that are accurate, fun, and surprisingly revealing.
For full transparency, here is how I approach the creation of Fandom Haven's quizzes.
Quizzes Start with Results
The first step in building any Fandom Haven quiz is deep character work.
Before a single question is drafted, I build a psychological profile of every result that a quiz-taker can receive. For most of my quizzes, this means creating detailed write-ups on the key characters in the fandom. These profiles are focused on the inner workings of those characters. I don't think it's sufficient to label a character as "brave", "loyal", or "determined". That's too simplistic, and it leads to simplistic results. Rather, I want to know: what drives this character, what are they afraid of, how do they act when under pressure, what do they want that they can't fully admit to themselves, and how does their behavior in key moments of the story reveal who they really are?
This work is grounded in the canonical source material, and I typically look at specific scenes, specific choices, or key moments of character growth. For example, when we see Shoto Todoroki refuse to use his fire in the UA Sports Festival in the first season of My Hero Academia, that tells us a lot about how he relates to his genetic inheritance at an emotional level. Similarly, Deku's choices during that same arc to encourage his rival to use all of his strength against him reveals a lot about Deku's convictions, which he chooses to uphold even when they can cause great harm to him and his own goals. These are the kinds of specific psychological truths I try to uncover with my research.
Once I have character profiles, I can then ask: what kind of person would match this character? What real-world behaviors and attitudes map to this character's psychology?
Questions are Designed Around Behavior
You will rarely find simple questions in my quizzes. I don't ask things like "what's your greatest strength" or "how would your friends describe you" because questions like these are lazy and uninteresting. They don't reveal anything meaningful below the surface about the people answering them, and they put the onus on the quiz-taker to essentially choose their own result. If you're taking a Jujutsu Kaisen character quiz, you know that saying you're "loyal" will get you mapped to Yuji.
To bypass the problem, most Fandom Haven questions are designed around specific situations and scenarios that have no obvious right answer.
A question like "Someone you care about is pushing you away while they're going through something hard. What do you do?" doesn't have a flattering correct answer. It has five messy, realistic answers that reflect five genuinely different relational styles, each of which maps meaningfully to a different character's psychology. The person who says "you give them space but make sure they know you're there" is not the same person as someone who says "you stay close without making it a big thing." Both of these results feel genuinely chooseable and will appeal to different types of people, which enables the quiz to accurately map quiz takers to different characters.
I also avoid the typical random questions like "what's your favorite color" that are often seen in internet quizzes. But that doesn't mean Fandom Haven quizzes aren't fun. I'll replace these random and not-so-useful questions with questions like "choose a slightly petty hill you would absolutely die on", which is silly, fun, and still gives me genuinely useful information I can use to map you to a result.
Weighted Scoring for Tiered Mappings
Every answer to every question in a Fandom Haven quiz is mapped to multiple quiz results. Oftentimes an answer is mapped to four or more results. But those mappings are not created equal. They are weighted based on how well the answer aligns with the result character's behavioral and psychological profile. This is a key feature that makes Fandom Haven quizzes so much more accurate than normal quizzes.
For example, if I've established that Shoto Todoroki's core psychology is about learning to define yourself outside the legacy forced upon you, then answers that reflect self-determination and guardedness against external expectations should score toward Todoroki. On the other hand, answers that reflect open-heartedness, active warmth, and community-building should score toward Ochaco Uraraka. But then we also have characters like Deku and Iida, who each care about community-building as well, even though it's not at the heart of their own ethos, so answers that indicate a strong inclination toward community-building will give many points to Uraraka, a few points toward Deku and Iida, and zero points towards a rogue villain like Stain.
Result Descriptions that Feel Like Emotional Truths
Fandom Haven result descriptions are written to be meaningful, specific, and emotionally revealing. I use an approach modeled after Motivational Interviewing, which is a technique that many professionals such as social workers and coaches use when talking to their clients. At the end of the day, I'm just a writer, but I have a basic understanding of this technique. And one of the ideas behind it is that most of us know who we are deep down. There's always a part of us that recognizes the core truths about us. But sometimes we need someone else to ask the right questions to help us arrive at the answer that we can't quite find on our own.
That's the idea behind the result descriptions on Fandom Haven. My quizzes ask questions to help you reveal certain aspects of yourself that you may not fully realize are there, and, once they have enough information, give a result based on the core truths behind those aspects. While I can't guarantee that my quizzes always get it right, I have had many people tell me they were surprised by how genuinely seen they felt by their results. This happens because the results are not random surprises. Instead, they are based on emotional truths that were lurking just below the surface of the person's psyche.
All of the result descriptions for Fandom Haven quizzes are written with this concept in mind. They aren't meant to be generally "good" or "bad" or to appeal to everyone. Instead, they are written to feel just a little too true for the specific people who are wired to arrive at that result in the first place.
A Few Things Fandom Haven Quizzes Are Not
Fandom Haven quizzes are not tests of your fandom knowledge or of whether or not you feel the same way I do about a particular fandom or character. Also, they are not clinical or psychological assessments. The results are based on a genuine personality framework grounded in the source material, but they are primarily for entertainment purposes. They are designed to be insightful and to produce results that feel accurate and help you self reflect a bit, but not to serve as clinical evaluations.
They are also not designed to flatter you. If you get a result you wanted, it's because the quiz genuinely found meaningful alignment between you and that result. And if you get a result you didn't want, the same rule applies.
Pre-Publication Review
Every Fandom Haven quiz goes through a rigorous review process before publication, including:
- Character Profile Accuracy: do the result descriptions reflect what the source material conveys about these characters?
- Question Quality: are questions varied, specific, and effective at mapping to different result types?
- Scoring Logic: does the score weighting produce results that match the intended character profiles?
- Result Description Quality: does each description accurately convey the archetypes and truths behind it?
- Spoiler Handling: does the quiz avoid any major spoilers and avoid requiring overly-specific fandom knowledge?
Each quiz is reviewed and revised until it passes all quality control metrics.
Questions & Feedback
If you have a question about how a specific quiz works, feedback on a result that didn't feel accurate, or want to know more about how you can make quizzes like these, reach out at contact@fandomhaven.com.