analysis of wendie’s personality & mbti
Wendie is a character who is quite opaque and she is still developing. We haven’t really seen all of her personality, beyond her unhealthy and also her vulnerable side. Based on what we knew, I had previously typed her as ISFP here but I am retyping her as an INTJ. Specifically, a looping INTJ who overindulges Te.
Summary of previous typing changes:
I originally thought she was ISTP because she showed unhealthy Se (opportunistic, impetuous), and she seemed like a Thinker (critical, competent). I later thought she was ISFP because she shows a lot of unhealthy Fi (trapped in own emotional subjectivity, volatile) and unhealthy Te (aggressive with others, uses Te force to quash Fi feelings of inadequacy). I’m retyping again with a new understanding of her.
She has a mean streak. She doesn’t always see what is wrong with things that hurt others. She doesn’t care about others’ feelings and experiences, other than how she can use it to benefit herself. She internalized a dog-eat-dog view of the world quite young. She understands people and the world in terms of power. If someone gets hurt, she has no sympathy because she thinks the person is stupid for ending up like that.
Her mindset is a result of her personality and what she values. She is naturally drawn to power and control, and she is self-centered. She wants things her way, and she wants the power to be able to get her way. She is also observant. Since she was a very small kid, she watched what happened around her and drew her own conclusions about how the world worked: people who were tough and assertive got what they wanted (Ni-Te). She quickly learned the best ways to manipulate people. E.g., if she cries or acts injured, it works on Matthias and she gets the treat, present or behavior she was angling for.
Power is a key theme in her arc. She had begun a sort of one-sided power struggle with her mother since she was small. Her mother was the disciplinarian and authority figure of the parental unit. So, her mom was the one often coming down on her, disallowing her from doing certain things, stricter with her and critical of her for things she doesn’t give a shit about, like the fact that her actions were hurtful. (Why should she care when it doesn’t affect her?) Her mom’s attempt to correct the selfish and mean streak in her backfired because it alienated Wendie and Wendie then projected her issues onto Heather, seeing her as the enemy and as a threat to herself. In other words, the more her mom tried to correct her, the more she rebelled and went the other way. She would rebel because she wants to show that her mom doesn’t have power over her. She’s trying to establish power and dominance.
Aux Te means that one values power because of wanting to fix problems and make things smoother and more efficient. At their best, TJ types value responsibility to self and others; they are very competent because of being able to work with the facts of people and the situation, and they are good role models and leaders. When unhealthy, they tend to go the opposite way: wanting power to be able to get one’s way, believing the weak get what they deserve (her unhealthy mindset as discussed above), controlling, blaming others for everything.
She has an ‘ends justifies the means’ mindset; she values only the results and outcomes of her actions and doesn’t care how she gets there, which is why she does illegal or immoral stuff. E.g. in the Pokemon AU she taught her Pokemon to hide other moves within the registered 4 so she can win; she has no qualms about scamming someone of their life savings and doesn’t care about the devastation that might cause.
She approaches people and relationships with Te instead of Fi, leading to her exploitative attitude towards people, only interested in what they can give her, uncaring of other’s individuality or feelings, or a mutual relationship. It allows her to manipulate and use people.
She also chases accomplishments and success to fill the emptiness within her. In the canon world, she has done quite well financially and materially -- she got a nice place for herself in the city, she’s well-off enough to enjoy sensory (bourgie lol) pleasures like spas, resorts, fine dining etc -- but when she stops to look at her all achievements, she feels as empty as ever. She has defined happiness and success in a very shallow way, thinking that it means external achievements, hence she keeps chasing it when deep down, she wants to be loved. Despite the emptiness in her heart, she never stops to reflect more deeply.
Part of her arc is developing Fi/Se, learning to value individuality and emotional authenticity and connection, as well as learning to have gratitude and trust to become truly competent.
Unhealthy Te leads one to be overconfident, judgmental, and too proud to admit to weakness/failure.
A big part of her issues are self-generated. She wants love and connection but she doesn’t want to be vulnerable and in fact stomps on others’ vulnerability. She wants to feel less lonely and empty but she doesn’t want to treat others with care or to accept her own vulnerabilities (she has built her entire life around being in control, and so being vulnerable feels like losing herself).
She impatiently takes shortcuts that self-sabotages because of the desire to win at all costs. She rationalizes bad decisions away, e.g. she rationalizes that wanting older men’s attention is because she is valuable/special and so she deserves that attention because it confirms her specialness.
Her pride is her downfall; she can’t admit her own failings and mistakes so she never really learns. When things go wrong, she blames others. She has a victim mindset: she thinks that she does so much and nobody understands her or makes things easier for her or are fair to her. She only listens or cares about people she respects or likes, but she rarely respects or likes anyone. Even then, she isn’t truly kind. E.g. she likes her father, so when he chastised her, she would listen, but not because she saw anything wrong with her actions. It was more because she liked him and didn’t want him to be unhappy with her.
Unhealthy Te is also very sensitive to failure and is unable to handle it because of having very black-and-white thinking. This leads to her having very low frustration tolerance and being unethical to win. Inability to deal with failure also partly leads to her tendency to blame others and her inability to admit mistakes.
She needs to understand the big picture before she feels secure enough to know what actions to take and what her actions mean, whether it is about her learning method or her general approach in situations. She makes unconscious connections and intuitions easily, easily ‘gets’ things and situations, completely trusts and lives off of her instincts and takes them as ‘truth’.
She’s very distrustful and sees shadows in everything. Before she left, she often assumed the worst of others. After she left, her life on the streets hardened her and made her even more suspicious and guarded. Even if no one had any intention of hurting her, she would want to hurt them first so they can’t do anything to her.
She consciously or subconsciously thinks fairly often about her direction in life: where she's going, what she's doing, where that leads her and plans for the future instead of living each day as it is. After she left the Sheep family, her general direction in life was to survive and, more than that, to be at the top of the food chain. That guides her actions, hence her immorality.
Unhealthy dom Ni means she often has an (unconscious) idea or image in her head about how she wants situations to go or how she wants people to behave, even though her beliefs are unrealistic or even impossible. It makes her rigid and unable to accept things because life or people aren't the way she wants them to be. She in essence wants to control life and tries hard to do so. She is thus demanding and hard to please, presumptuous, and believes she knows what's going on with people, completely trusts her read and intuitions of things even if it is excessively negative -- finding fault and dissatisfaction in everything.
Ni-dom cynics have an air of having seen through everything, seen through all the bullshit to discover people and situations are lacking, and thinking they know everything there is to know, when actually, the problem is that their vision is too narrow. They’re unable to see the full truth of things and to hold onto something real and lasting. Part of Wendie's arc would be resolving her chronic dissatisfaction and cynicism.
She swings quite extremely between idealism and cynicism. There is an idealist and romantic part of herself, the more vulnerable part of her, that she usually expresses more with her father and he encourages that in her as well. It’s also seen in her relationship with Luna in the Pokemon AU. She became very cynical during her teen years and she repressed the part of herself completely after her life on the streets. With Fi being a lower function, it also means that her sensitive and tender side is very private, only expressed or let out occasionally, and is easily repressed.
Young Ni-doms also have the issue of having very messy inner worlds: a deluge of impressions, intuitions, perceptions... They assume that their perception of the world is the reality of the world, hence the messiness of their minds and lives because they are unaware of how subjective the way they see the world is.
She is Ni-Fi looping. She uses her feelings as justifications to support her beliefs and behavior -- to avoid responsibility and to avoid holding herself accountable. She dislikes her mom so whatever her mom says is bullshit and she doesn’t need to reflect on it. She is proud of her own way of doing things (’I know what’s best’) so she doesn’t take any feedback or criticism. She feels like the victim of the world and others, so she doesn’t care about treating others fairly. She hates being vulnerable, so she doesn’t consider an alternative approach to things.
She is trapped in her own negative emotions and experiences, unable to see beyond herself. She has never really thought about her mom’s side of the situation, or the perspective of others whom she easily dismisses or judges. Unhealthy Fi also tends to lead to a mindset of persecution or victimhood (she thinks everyone is out to get her), and self-pity. She also has double standards when it comes to how she treats herself vs others. She’s indulgent and has self-serving bias when it comes to herself, but is critical and harsh with others.
Her lower and unhealthy Fi is also why she lacks a healthy moral compass and it is easy for her to rationalize away doing the right thing as something that is a stupid move to make or something that is too difficult. In general, she is indifferent to most people, and only has a small ‘umbrella’ of people she really cares about.
Fi being a lower function also explains her difficulty accessing empathy and respect of others’ experiences. It becomes something she needs to learn to value, to learn to be more principled, empathetic, loyal, and accepting. She is already good at dealing with systems and impersonal, technical things. Valuing the human perspective would provide a balance to her harsh and categorical judgments and allow her to have much needed nuance and perspective on people and relationship problems.
Her understanding of her own psyche is poor. She has a position of moral superiority (on a high horse judging everyone else as less worthy, dumb) and thinks everyone but her is part of the problem of the shallow and lacking world around her, not realizing she is a part of the problem. She sees herself as special, different, insightful, someone who knows better than everyone else, but does not see that her own life is unfulfilling and her own actions contribute to the lack in the world.
She is very good at understanding systems and exploiting loopholes or flaws in them. She’s ambitious and likes to compete. She has a tough personality and thrives in competitive situations. She works smart, not hard. She has good instincts and is very good at coming up with (illegal/unethical) ways to win. She look for ways to improve her skills and excels at mastering technical skills, e.g. training her team in the Pokemon AU or learning to fight in the warriors AU. She see connections that might not be obvious to others and is able to turn them into solutions and actions. She’s strategic.
She is also good at problem-solving on the fly (which I initially thought was Se). In the warriors AU, she learns how to fight by observing others, using her observations to break it down for herself and having it come together as she attempts it herself (Ni-Te). In general, she is able to come out the winner if situations turn to shit because of her strong problem-solving abilities.
She has a good bullshit detector, she is skilled at learning complex and abstract theories and information because she is able to parse through the jargon and grasp the gist of it easily. She pursues knowledge she deems useful and has a fountain of (questionable) knowledge and skills. She is also very independent.
When she is older and more chill, she would be good at mentoring or advising others -- a detached but still caring role. She would show her care by giving her time and attention, advice, perspective, and solutions to someone’s problems.
Inferior Se & personality clashes:
Wendie sees implications and consequences quickly and naturally, allowing her to exploit people or situations. She has a tendency to overthink. Nolan on the other hand, is a simple person with simple needs and wants out of life. He takes things as it is, doesn't read too deeply into it. His easygoing approach allows him to be very chill and relaxed and thus enjoys life, but it's Wendie's blind-spot and she doesn't value his 'go with the flow and enjoy life as it comes' attitude, which is why she sees him as stupid.
He's emotionally driven, makes decisions based on how he feels and may ignore the consequences. He is a 'jump first, think later' type of person. She is the complete opposite, a 'think first, jump later' person. So she sees him as simple and dumb, because what he is blind to and doesn’t value is what she values and excels at. Nolan (Se): 'jump first, look at where I land after, figure it out from there' and 'Things will work out'. Wendie (Ni): 'Plan and think about a good place to land first before jumping', and, 'If I really have to land without thinking, I'll figure it out by problem-solving because I trust myself' (Ni-Te). Her wing-it behavior is a lot more calculated than Nolan's.
Inferior Se and dominant Ni means that Wendie's personality tends to be over-serious, negative, and sees only the lack in things. She basically doesn't know how to have fun. Her arc or personality growth should end in a place where she is genuinely more relaxed, able to see and appreciate the good, able to stop and smell the roses, more open to not planning everything and not everything going her way (Se).
Her inferior Se is expressed in a very controlled way -- bourgie pleasures as listed above -- and it's only one aspect of Se (indulging in specific sensory pleasures). It is also seen in her extreme and desperate attempt to regain control of the world after she realized she had daddy issues where she left the family and town without even a note.
Emily leads with dominant Se. As a teen, she was shallow and superficial, likes the thrill of the unexpected, spontaneous, adventurous and free-spirited, very okay with changing plans suddenly. She was also tactless and insensitive without realizing.
This led to a lot of Wendie and Emily’s conflicts. Emily thought Wendie was: rigid and uptight, missing the fun and point of life, very hard to understand (opaque) and out of touch with things. Meanwhile, Wendie saw Emily as: shallow and superficial, disorganized and messy, noncommittal, impulsive, critical and harsh.
As immature Thinkers, they both struggled with being mindful of their words and both would be dismissive or harsh in their judgments of each other. So, fights often worsened into judgment- and accusation-hurling and days of giving each other the cold shoulder. To handle misunderstandings and conflicts better, Wendie needed to be more expressive and better at showing her private side, and Emily needed to slow down and put more effort into understanding Wendie.
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