People & Characters
Television
Firefly
River Tam MBTI Personality Type

River Tam MBTI Personality Type

River Tam Personality Type

Personality
Biography
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Traits and Characteristics

Personality

What personality type is River Tam? River Tam is an INTJ personality type in MBTI, 8w7 - - 852 in Enneagram, in Big 5, in Socionics.

Dominant Function: Introverted Intuition (Ni) - River’s most apparent cognitive function is her abstracted worldview. She sees things in a different way from the rest of the crew; to her, a gun could just as easily be a tree branch, as they are both objects that are assigned meaning. She claims the cattle on board Serenity did not truly become cows until they were back in their natural environment, implying that their environment is part of their identity. As is common among fictional introverted intuitives, River also has a psychic gut instinct. She can sense the violent psychic energy remaining after Reaver attacks and will often predict events right before they happen, including the moment Petaline goes into labor (and the specificities of her baby’s sex and state of health) in “Heart of Gold.” She can sense the Alliance agents that are tracking her, despite not having any evidence to believe they’re really out there, and elliptically refers to them as “two by two, hands of blue.” She also displays unnerving insight into bounty hunter Early’s character, despite having no prior knowledge of his background or even having ever been in the same room as him (”It’s why you took the job. Power, control, pain. Your mother knew… Saw darkness in you. You’re not well.”). Often River’s Ni is on point, but the trauma she suffered at the hands of the Alliance can also cause it to go haywire and overwhelm her tertiary introverted feeling (Fi) and inferior extroverted sensing (Se) functions. Auxiliary Function: Extroverted Thinking (Te) - River is incredibly logic-minded, and often stubbornly so. A natural problem-solver, she becomes frustrated when unable to accomplish a task or make sense of something, whether it’s eating from food on a string (“my food is problematic”) or functioning normally “like a girl” without getting bogged down by Simon’s medicines and the aftereffects of Alliance experiments (a frustration she expresses in an abstract way: “The sun grows dark and chaos has come again”). River rips apart Shepherd Book’s bible in an effort to fix it, because many of the stories are “contradictions” and “false logistics” to her. But instead of rejecting the Bible as a whole, she tries to edit it so that it makes sense using multiple systems of logic: River: So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah’s ark is a problem. Book: Really? River: We’ll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat. River is also more likely to be factual than tactful (“You’re afraid we’re going to run out of air. That we’ll die gasping. But we won’t. That’s not going to happen… We’ll freeze to death first.”), though she does have the capacity to be sensitive and understand the emotional motivations of others - see below: Tertiary Function: Introverted Feeling (Fi) - As she recovers from her imprisonment with the Alliance, River struggles with the fact that she can no longer manage her emotions the way she used to. Her enhanced introverted intuition forces her to bear the emotional weight of various psychic echoes, including brutal Reaver killings. When feeling overwhelmed, she begs to be made “a stone” and despairs that she shouldn’t have to “carry” whatever isn’t hers (regarding memories and suffering), telling Simon to “put a bullet to me; bullet in the brain pan.” While an extroverted feeler like Inara Serra (ENFJ) might not struggle with tuning into the feelings of others so directly, River’s feeling function is naturally internalized, and it does not take kindly to being forced into direct contact with other people’s pain. However, it’s important to examine the way River deals with emotions on her better days, as trauma can absolutely skew the way a Myers Briggs type looks and operates. River prefers logic and rationality over emotion, so her feeling function is definitely lower in her cognitive stack. But her intuition can feed her emotive function in such a way that also makes her aware of other people’s feelings and motives, more so than some of her other crewmembers. She recognizes Simon’s various romantic missteps with Kaylee and reprimands him in her typically blunt fashion (”you are such a boob”), and she seems blissfully unconcerned with what other people think about her feelings and behavior. River struggles with chronic guilt over having caused Simon to abandon his life as a rising star physician and become a fugitive from the Alliance, as well as over the fact that her presence on Serenity constantly endangers her fellow crew members. There are times when she is willing to turn herself in because she believes it would be best for everyone: “Everyone could just go on without me and not have to worry. People could be who they wanted

Biography

River is the aforementioned precious cargo, and Simon's little sister. She's stone cold crazy. With good reason, though, and she gets a bit better. She's also a prodigy par excellence, taking to difficult subjects with ease (considering university-level physics to be a "challenge" when she was fourteen, for example). She's enough of an asset to the crew at critical times that it makes up for being the load when she's freaking out.