Behind the scenes on the Dark Dynamics quiz (+ try version 2)

Soooo I released a slightly-updated version of the Dark Dynamics Archetype quiz the other day — nothing major, but there’s a new possible result, a few new answer paths (so the scoring’s been tweaked a bit), and it now shows your two closest matches under your main one (and yes, if you’re that kind of person, you can absolutely go read all 23 of them now) — and I gotta admit, I’ve maybe been a tiny bit obsessed with watching people take it again??

Not for the numbers of it all. (Fun fact: I’m allergic to numbers, actually.) It’s really more for the patterns. I like seeing who gets which archetype this time; whose are different from their first ones and if it’s a better fit; if they feel like their second and third-closest ones add something; whether they come back and take it again right after with different answers just to see what else is in there. (A lot of you come back to do that, turns out!)

Building this whole dang thang was an exercise in trying to name something that inherently resists naming, and it’s been really cool to see how it’s… somehow actually helped y’all name stuff anyway. Like, that’s the biggest honor in the world to me, and I never could have guessed it would have worked so well. Thank you for sharing with me all your thoughts on your results this past week or so; it’s really touched me so much.

To give you a little peek of the mess that’s behind it all on the Type-A, spreadsheet-obsessed, chaotic-but-makes-sense-to-me gremlin-organization back-end of my laptop where I somehow made this all function (because I did indeed do all the thinky-thoughts and word-ing myself, though I got some major software- and friend-assistance on the tech wizardry (*hat tip @ Samara*)), were seven motivational drives I tried to put into different configurations which ultimately mapped into the different results. (I know that you may have to zoom way the hell in depending on what device you’re on; sorry about that!!)

And put together, these sorts of engines did indeed seem to work out for a lot of you to explain what makes intensity feel like yours.

Now, of course, nobody has just one archetype in any kind of category. Especially not kink! Any quiz like this is just finding the loudest one of a certain number of possibilities in a given category, and here, it’s finding the loudest of 23. (And if you’re counting, above you’ll see 22. Quiz version 2 added a new psychological engine which did adjust some things slightly, and that one’s not in the matrix above… but if you’re wondering, I’m calling it “provocation.”)

That’s… a lot of possible results. I know that. But I felt like it was important to have options. Because someone driven by sacrifice and someone driven by devotion are not the same person, even though they look similar from the outside. The Faustian Covenant and The Sacred Ordeal are both driven by both devotion and ruin, but the *why* is completely different — and the why can change everything about what that dynamic needs to be sustainable.

So this update is about the space between. When you get your result now, the quiz shows you what else was close. You can see your two runner-up drives below the risk profile portion, and it’ll tell you what might make you lean more towards one versus another. And to be clear, it isn’t that you see the two closest to that archetype somehow that everyone will get; they’re the two runner-ups for YOUR quiz answers and what might make them appeal to YOU. Like so:

And as mentioned, by popular request, you can also browse ALL 23, if you’d like.

Some people are going to find themselves in their primary result. Some people are going to find themselves in the gap between their first and second. Some will find themselves in a result they didn’t actually receive themselves at all. All of that’s okay! It’s just a silly little quiz, after all (:

I hope it makes you think and that you learn something interesting about yourself, or have a good time taking it nevertheless.

And anyway, it’s free! Sixteen questions. Works for tops, bottoms, and everyone navigating both. And if you took it last week, I do genuinely think it’s worth a retake… you’ll learn something from your runner-ups that the original couldn’t show you.

❤ Take the updated quiz here → https://kinkbeyondlimits.com/quiz.html

And by the way… my next class was just announced the other day. I’ll be doing Playing with Fear: Empowered Navigation of Thrills and Risks virtually with Praxium on Tuesday, April 14 and I can’t wait! I have definitely been going through a bit of a fear play phase. It’s (currently) my most top-friendly class, and it goes into a part of my life I don’t normally get to talk about in kink-world. You’ll definitely hear a bit more about that in newsletters from me in the next few weeks, though.

And not to give too much away just yet… but there’ll be at least three new class announcements coming up in not too long at all now, and two of them, NONE of y’all have ever seen before. I’m polishing up the descriptions to send off to my organizer friends over the next few days, but I can tell you that they include words like “desires decoded” and “horror movies” 👀 Besides that, my lips are sealed for now… 😘

I hope you get up to something awful, fun, or awfully fun very soon.

xoxo,

v