MBTI Type: ESTJ
Anya is a very tough character to type, because she seems introverted and yet has serious inferior feeling issues that plague her throughout the story. She’s in such a bad place, that these emotions are often all that we see—and you could mistake her for a feeler if her feelings weren’t so immature. ETJs tend to neglect their emotions and not be sure of how to deal with them when they do arise, and that’s what Anya is struggling with the most—her fatal diagnosis, the fact that she is “still dying” despite all the herbal cures she tried, and the fact that she has lost hope. She is brutally honest and logical, pointing out how others are wrong a lot of the time and reminding them to face the facts about their situation. She clashes with Ilonka because she has zero tolerance for emotional games or all that “happy shit.” ESTJs are very factual, and so is Anya. She argues that if the afterlife exists, and she gets there first, she is going to “give them a tangible sign.” She stresses the fact that it has to be unmistakable and leave no room for doubt; and if she doesn’t send one of these messages, they can all know that sweet oblivion awaits them after death. Anya does wind up giving them a sign – she repairs the ballerina she leaves to Ilonka in her box of stuff, giving it a new leg and therefore signaling that there is “more” after all. ESTJs like to base their stories in something they know, and she loosely has her horror story based on her life—a ballerina who wants to both do the boring stuff like practicing and live a hedonistic lifestyle (this is what Anya did, which eventually ruined her career). Most of the story, however, shows Anya in what’s known as an inferior Fi grip—where she is emotional and self-centered, lashing out at other people instead of processing and dealing with her feelings in a healthful way. She has to reach rock bottom before she will talk about what’s going on inside her head (her guilt for “killing my parents,” her anguish about never reconciling with Rhett, and her fear of dying). She is so grateful that her friends are willing to make sacrifices for her that she breaks down in tears when they perform the ritual for her.
Enneagram: 8w9 sp/so
Anya’s Enneagram type is the most obvious thing about her personality—she is unapologetic in being abrasive and alienating. She is “the toughest person” anyone at hospice has ever met—8s can put on a tough act so that no one thinks about taking advantage of them, but in the process tend to alienate people and drive away the ones they most care about—for her, that means Rhett. She had a best friend who got tired of her self-destructive behaviors and dumped her after a fight, and she has never apologized or tried to reconcile with him. But truthfully, Anya wants and needs to be vulnerable, the journey every 8 must take—she has to learn to allow others to care about her, to admit how much she doesn’t want to die, and accept help from her friends before she passes away. But most of the time, she is angry—furious about her diagnosis, about losing her leg, about the career in ballet she will never have, about wasting her time pursuing hedonism and “ruining my life.” She admits that her parents gave up everything for her to move across the city so she could attend ballet school… and then she went on to ruin it by doing drugs and acting out. She also has a strong element of withdrawn to her nature—she comes across as introverted in how she pushes everyone away, but in reality that’s just her 9 wing grounding her in a sense of “I don’t care. And I can do this by myself. Leave me alone.” She pushes people pretty hard, but will back off sometimes if her friends gang up on her, which is her 9 wing’s way of dealing with things. So much emphasis on solitude and doing things herself strongly indicates a self-preservation dominant, but she also finds comfort in her friends, so she’s not social-blind.
Funky MBTI 