On your last ask you mentioned tertiary Te is forceful and competent compared to inferior Te. SInce you have tertiary Te yourself how do you see your use of it compared to IxFPs? Does inferior Te lead to imcopetence and passivity? I ask because I'm trying to understand if my sister is ESFP or ISFP, and is easier to spot Te than Ni ina person.
Not necessarily incompetence (although it can) but more so... a reaction of ?!?!?!?! when things go wrong and you have to make logical decisions on the spot or have to figure out how to make something functional or create a system while in the middle of a crisis, so that you can accomplish your goal or meet a deadline. Inferior Te doesn't have to do that a lot, so it struggles with those tasks when it's put on the spot, whereas an EFP's Te just assesses the situation with Se/Ne and finds a rational "quick fix" solution, or tries one fix after another until something works. Being connected to the external world, EFPs can 'react' to things going wrong and find a solution immediately. They suck at long-term planning and execution of those plans, but can be pretty good at problem-solving as they hit roadblocks.
One of my IFP friends recently planned her wedding and was stressing because so many things demanded her to make decisions all at once; she had very little tolerance for anything else for about a month, since she had to think through everything and organize it properly. And if something she wanted fell through, it was frustrating because that meant rethinking her plans when she'd put such effort into them and wanted them to work out how she designed it. I've never planned a wedding but a plan falling through would not bother me all that much, since I could come up with an alternative on the spot / in a few minutes and offer different solutions.
ISFPs are harder to tell apart from ESFPs than INFPs are from ENFPs, because Se is so practical and concrete, but ESFPs have strong Te, yes. They want to do things RIGHT NOW and make them happen NOW, so they use whatever Te is required to get what they want. They also learn through experimentation on the spot, more than an IFP does. EFPs do their best work when they get there and see what options they have, and then they design something that functions based around that. And they are pretty comfortable doing it, too. "I'll decide when I get there."
I also feel like I am more comfortable not deciding anything while working on it (because I know the situation could change, and why do too much planning in advance if that happens?) whereas most of the IFPs I know like to have some sort of plan in mind for what to do with whatever they are working on.
1) First I wanna thank you for your Enneagram book, I was able to finally identify my type (7w8) thanks to it and it has explained so much about my life patterns. Now I wanna ask for your help regarding my MBTI type. I've read through your profiles of the types and I'm sure my strongest functions are Se & Fi, but I can't tell which of the 2 functions is leading. I used to have episodes that sound like Ni grip, when a problem showed up I'd jump to the worst conclusion imagining tragedies and doom
2) I also have no idea of what my next year is gonna be like, I have no goals or plans for the future, I just live day by day. That could be inf Ni. But I'm not nearly as adventurous or spontaneous as Se doms are described. I wouldn't try anything once for example, because I have strong boundaries and values and I'm aware of the possible consequences of my actions. My priority in life is to have fun, but I won't lose myself while doing so.
Are you sure there's no 6 wing? "Jumping to the worst conclusion, imagining tragedies and doom, aware of the possible consequences of my actions" is very 6ish and not at all "get out of my way" 8ish.
That being said, if you are a 7w8, you're for sure not an ESFP. Too much inhibition from Fi; 7w8s are double assertive, take-no-prisoners types who don't consider consequences, because they assume those things won't happen to them and they'll be strong enough to deal with them if they do.
Based on what you sent, ISFP.
If 7w6, ESFP is possible, but only if second-guessing and worrying comes secondary to direct action and "I'm gonna do it right now" energy. (ESFP 7w6s may fret, but they're also busy doing the thing they have concerns about, because ultimately they self-trust that it'll all turn out fine. There's a lot of negativity with ESFP 7w6s, but also a "I see it, I want to do it!" tendency with Se-doms that don't hesitate once they have an emotion or a physical desire to pursue.)
Holly is one of the most grounded characters in The Wolf Among Us. She owns the Trip Trap bar, spends her time around people who are usually being ignored or written off, and has very little patience for Fabletown's official structures by the time the game begins. Her sister Lily's been missing for weeks, the Business Office has done nothing useful about it, and Holly's already at the point where anger feels more practical than trust, which means her first impression is built out of real grievance, not simple abrasiveness. She's rude, defensive, and quick to hostility because she has very little reason left to believe that the people in charge will look after anyone she loves.
She also feels older and harder than a lot of the cast in a way that has nothing to do with age alone. Holly runs a place for the people who don't fit neatly into the polished side of Fabletown, and she carries herself like someone who's spent a long time dealing with mess, disappointment, and other people's weakness without much help. The game never presents her as elegant or especially diplomatic - it presents her as direct, suspicious, and very difficult to fool once she decides someone's hiding behind procedure or politics, which gives her a rougher presence than Snow but also makes her one of the more honest voices in the story whenever the game wants to cut through official excuses.
Lily's death sharpens all of that. Holly's anger isn't broad or abstract - it becomes intensely personal, and that's when some of her most revealing lines come out. She's furious that no one meaningfully looked for Lily while she was alive, furious at the way institutions only seem to notice women like her sister once they're dead, and furious at how often people around her want patience, procedure, and deference instead of truth. The game lets her be unfair at times, but it never makes her anger feel baseless. Holly is one of the clearest reminders that the victims in this story were already being failed long before Bigby arrived at the first crime scene.
Psychology
Holly comes across as someone who's built herself around endurance, loyalty, and distrust. She doesn't expect much from systems, doesn't offer trust quickly, and seems much more comfortable handling things herself than relying on formal authority, and that stance feels learned rather than temperamental. The details the game gives about her life - running the Trip Trap, looking after regulars with little to spare, dealing with Lily's disappearance while Fabletown drags its feet - all point toward someone who's had to become practical because waiting politely for help hasn't worked. Her anger has structure to it - it's the anger of somebody who's been disappointed often enough that suspicion now feels safer than optimism.
Lily is central to that psychology. Holly's emotions around her sister aren't tidy grief alone, but grief fused with guilt, protectiveness, frustration, and class resentment. Lily wasn't someone Fabletown valued highly, and Holly knows that - she knows the system would've moved faster for somebody else, and that's one reason she reacts so strongly when people ask her for patience or trust the official process. From her perspective, process has already failed. Lily was missing, vulnerable, and in trouble for a long time before anyone in authority took it seriously, so by the time Bigby and Snow arrive with news of her death, Holly's emotional baseline is already outrage. The game treats that as something earned.
There's also a strong protective streak in her that often gets hidden under hostility. Holly runs a bar full of rough people, but the game makes clear that she takes care of her regulars and is tied to the more downtrodden side of Fabletown in a very real way. Her protectiveness helps explain why she can look almost combative around Bigby and Snow early on and still defend them later when she decides they actually cared about Lily and the other girls. Once Holly believes somebody's on the right side of things, she's capable of fierce loyalty - she's just very slow to grant that belief, because she's been given too much evidence that official concern is usually selective and too late.
Her roughness also seems like a form of control. Holly can't control whether Lily is safe, whether the government acts, or the larger exploitation network destroying women like Lily - what she can control is her own directness, her own refusal to be placated, and the terms on wihch she speaks when people finally show up asking for calm. That gives her an abrasive edge, but it also keeps her from being passive in a story where passivity is one of the things that keeps getting women killed. Holly's hard to manage because she's already seen what happens when people are too easy to manage.
Strengths and Flaws
Holly's biggest strength is emotional honesty. She says what she thinks, reacts strongly when something matters, and doesn't soften herself much for other people's comfort. In a story full of glamours, staged civility, hidden arrangements, and people talking around the truth, her directness gives her real weight. Even when she's difficult, she usually feels sincere.
She's also fiercely loyal. Lily drives most of the obvious examples, but it shows up more broadly than that - Holly cares about her regulars, cares about the women who were trapped at the Pudding & Pie, and once she decides Bigby and Snow really did care, she's willing to say so publicly. Her loyalties are personal, intense, and not especially negotiable.
Another strength is toughness. She isn't easy to intimidate, and she doesn't fold just because somebody outranks her or expects deference. She has enough anger and self-respect that people around her have to deal with her as she is rather than as they would prefer her to be, which helps preserve her dignity in a city that often treats poorer and rougher Fables as disposable.
On the flaws side, Holly can be reactive, hard-headed, and openly hostile long before she has the full picture, especially when she's grieving. She doesn't pause easily, and once she decides somebody belongs to the side of authority that failed Lily, she can become very difficult to reach.
She can also let personal hurt narrow her judgment, which doesn't make her wrong in the larger sense but does mean she sometimes responds to the immediate emotional truth of a situation before she knows everything about it. The game treats that fairly - Holly isn't supposed to be the balanced institutional voice, but the person left with the human cost.
Relationships
LILY
Almost everything important about Holly becomes sharper through her sister. Her grief is obvious, but it isn't only grief - it's also protectiveness, guilt, fury, and the knowledge that Lily's life was treated as less urgent than it should have been while she was still alive. Holly's entire relationship with Bigby, Snow, and the case itself is filtered through what happened to Lily, which makes Lily less a backstory detail than the emotional centre of Holly's role in the game.
GRENDEL
Gren is one of the people Holly's closest to in the game, which gives her someone who's grieving Lily from beside her rather than just reacting from the outside. Their dynamic makes Holly feel less isolated than she otherwise would, because he's one of the few people who understands both her grief and her fury without needing either one explained to him. He also brings out the fact that Holly does let people in, even if she's generally suspicious and hard-edged with most of Fabletown - around Gren, she feels less like the angry owner of the Trip Trap and more like someone held up by an actual friendship in the middle of losing her sister.
BIGBY WOLF
Bigby gets some of Holly's harshest treatment early on because he represents both help and failure at the same time. He's the sheriff, which means he's the person who should have been able to do something, and he also arrives only after the damage is already done. Holly's hostility toward him makes perfect sense from her side. What gives their relationship more weight is that she's capable of changing her view once she decides he and Snow really were trying to help. By the end, if things go that way, she's willing to defend him publicly, which says a lot about her. She isn't unreasonable - she's simply much harder to win over than characters who have more faith in official power.
SNOW WHITE
Lily was glamoured to look like Snow when she was killed, which means Holly is forced to process her sister's death through a second layer of bitterness - the woman who was actually murdered was someone the system had ignored for weeks, while the moment everyone thought the victim was Snow, panic and urgency escalated immediately. That's why Holly lashes out the way she does and says it should have been Snow instead - it's cruel, but it comes from a very clear emotional place. But Snow is also the one who finally reaches her - when Bigby and Snow go to tell Holly Lily is dead, Snow is the one who gets through to her by giving her Lily's brooch, which shifts the dynamic. Snow stops being only the polsihed official attached to the system that failed Lily and becomes someone Holly can see as genuinely trying to treat Lily's death as real, personal, and worthy of care.
MBTI - ISFP
What points there most strongly is how personal and value-driven her reactions are. Holly doesn't approach Lily's death, the Business Office, or the investigation through detachment, procedure, or cool internal logic, but through loyalty, grief, anger, and a very direct sense of what's owed to the people she loves. Her line, "I don't give a fuck about the procedure! I have a right to know!" is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for that - it shows exactly where her centre of gravity is, not in whether the official process is being followed properly, but in the fact that her sister is dead and the people affected by that death are being asked to sit quietly while authority structures manage the information. That's a much more Fi response than a Ti one. Her anger is rooted in personal conviction and violated loyalty, not in frustration that the system is being handled irrationally. Holly keeps speaking from what feels right, owed, and intolerable.
Se also fits her very naturally. She's grounded, immediate, and concrete in the way she moves through the world. She runs a bar, deals with real people and mess, and responds to what's in front of her without much interest in abstraction or polish. Her presence in the game is physical, blunt, and rooted in lived experience. She isn't standing back trying to build a detached model of events, but reacting to the body in the morgue, the funeral, the people in the room, and the fact that Lily was ignored while she was alive. Her present-tense directness gives her a much more sensory and immediate style than a more internally analytical type would have.
I considered ISTP because Holly is tough, practical, unsentimental on the surface, and not especially expressive in a polished or openly vulnerable way, but her strongest scenes are driven by personal outrage, grief, loyalty, and a refusal to let procedure outrank the people harmed by it. She can look hard-edged and pragmatic, but the emotional core underneath that hardness is much more openly value-based than an ISTP reading really allows.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - True Neutral
She doesn't come across as someone strongly committed to order for its own sake, and she has very little patience for official procedure when it gets in the way of truth or justice. At the same time, she isn't driven by rebellion as an ideal either. Her problem isn't with structure in the abstract, but with structures that fail the people she loves and then expect her to stay calm about it.
There's real decency in her, especially in her loyalty in her later defense of Lily and the other girls, but she isn't guided by broad altruism in the way a cleaner Good alignment would suggest. Most of her strongest instincts are tied to her own people, her own community, and the harm done to them. Evil doesn't fit at all, but Good smooths out too much of her hardness and willingness to let personal anger drive the situation. Her moral life is very particular, emotional, and situational.
Conclusion
The game gives Holly real grief, real moral clarity, and a believable hatred of institutions that only begin caring once a dead girl forces them to. She's rough, suspicious, and often difficult, but none of that is empty attitude - it all grows out of a very clear emotional reality.
She also gives the story one of its clearest reminders that the case isn't only about mystery, but about who gets failed before they die, who gets listened to only afterward, and who's left to carry the anger once the official process finally starts moving.
ESFP #2: hey, we should all go to this queer strip club *points at the address on her phone's screen*
ISFP: ooo that sounds cool
ESFJ #2: OH YEAH LET'S GO! But don't forget to bring the tip you guys...
ISFJ: hey let's not forget to assign someone as the designated driver 😅
ESFP #2: well DUH, obviously it's gonna be YOU 💀
ISFJ: 🥲 *quietly to herself* why is it always me?, at this point I should probably stop bringing it up, I just care about everyone's safety and wellbeing 🥲
ESTP: are there men in there?
ESFJ #2: well it's a queer club silly 😅💀
ESTP: look I'm just asking, I feel like sometimes y'all forget I'm gay 💀
ESFP #2: 🫥 RIGHT... well shit...
ESTP: look if they mostly have women it's also fine 💀 I'll still tip them and root for them and all that 😂
ESFP #2: thank chuuu 🫰
ESFJ #2: awww thank you ESTP
ESTP: y'all are saying "thank you" a bit too much 💀 like I'm gonna pay the full tip- aaaand they're gone 💀
*group heads to the van*
ESTP: *sigh* oh well 💀 *heads out*
*at the strip club*
*they announce a couple of women and they do their performances, ESTP tips them all and his friends simp over them*
ESFP #2: 😍😍😍
ESFJ #2: 😍😍😍
ISFP: 😍😍😍
ESTP: pffft *drinks*
*after some time they announce another performer, and that performer goes on stage, the crowd gets a BIT extra excited for some weird reason, ESTP still has his back to the stage trying to focus on the stuff on the table*
ESFP #2: 😍😍😍 THEY'RE SO HOT!
ESFJ #2: GO GET IT GURL! ESTP TIP THEM!!!
ESTP: *turns and his jaw drops*
ISTP: *upsidedown on the pole, their head is super close to ESTP's head, they speak in a super low register voice* um hi there...
ESTP: *mouth still open, but he does have the money on hand*
ISTP: *closes ESTP's mouth* anyway I'll be taking this *takes the money from his hand* thank you *throws him a kiss and keeps dancing on the pole*
ESTP: *sweats and feels all sorts of things in many places 💀*
ESFP #2: *notices ESTP's face and looks back at ISTP* dang seems like you really like that one 💀🤭
ESTP: *gulps nervously and his voice cracks* mrhm...
ESFP #2: *looks at ISTP* honestly I can't blame you 😍 *then looks back at ESTP* pssst hey, HEY! *waves hand in front of his face* EARTH TO *inserts ESTP's name*
ESTP: *quietly at ESFP #2* you don't understand... if I was a cis man that thing would be walking on it's OWN...
ESFP #2: OMG 💀😂
ESFJ #2: I mean TECHNICALLY is still hard ;)
ESTP: SHHH STFU LOL
*ESTP hasn't noticed but ISTP has also been looking at him most of the time*
ESFJ #2: *takes notice* hey I think they like you too 🤭
ESTP: *scratches the back of his head* naaah 😅 look, I tipped most of the performers, if y'all want I can leave some more money with y'all and you can tip the last ones, but I'mma head out 😅 *whispers to himself* I HAVE to head out, I can't take it, IT HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN...
ISTP: *finishes the performance and instead of going back to the dressing room they follow ESTP* HEY!
ESTP: *looks back at ISTP up and down and gulps*
ISTP: *just realizes they're still basically naked* oh yeah lol... *looks down* OH FUCK *blushes a bit and covers their crotch*
ESTP: *sweating like crazy*
ISTP: *gets closer to ESTP* hey, I wanted to let you know, I also do these *hands ESTP a card that has a QR code, email, & phone number*
ESTP: *looks at the card and reads the small bullet list* *eyes go wide*
ISTP: *does a phone hand sign but gen Z style with the: 📱 shape* call me... *runs back and disappears*
ESTP: *quickly heads out and gets in the van* fffUCK 🥵🥵🥵 grrrr I need these gals to hurry UP, I gotta go HOME 🥵😭
