Taste Buds field guide

The twelve archetypes

An archetype is a name for a pattern in how you rate. Taste Buds scores every film, television show, book, album and game on 14 dimensions of character, from how bleak it is to how much it asks of you. Your ratings turn those scores into a taste vector: what you reward, what you punish, and how strongly. We then read that vector against the twelve patterns below and pick the closest, with a probability for each. The card shows the winner; the profile shows the runners-up.

Leans are measured against every other Bud, so an archetype means you care about something more than most people do, not that the things you watch are unusual. Profiles are recomputed as you log, and archetypes can change.

Which one are you?

Rate a handful of things you have seen, read, played or heard. Five is enough for a first reading, and your archetype appears on your profile.

Find yours

How common each one is

The Comfort Seeker15%
The Provocateur12%
The Sincere12%
The Thrill Chaser11%
The Genre Devotee10%
The Prestige Hunter8%
The Empath7%
The Archivist7%
The Cartographer6%
The Ironist5%
The Formalist4%
The Omnivore3%

Across 649 curators with a profile, including the research dataset used to seed the community.

The Formalist

Rates on craft and structure.

4% of Buds

Three who fit

Stanley Kubrick
Composes every frame; story is what the frame allows.
Brian Eno
Made the studio an instrument, the process the point.
Frasier Crane
Sends back the wine, the opera and your sentence.

What you love: You fall for how a thing is made. A cut, a sentence, a mix, a level layout: when the execution is exact you will follow it anywhere, plot or no plot.
What you avoid: Sloppiness, even in service of a big heart. A moving story told without care leaves you cold, and you feel slightly guilty about that.

Where it goes wrong: You can mistake polish for meaning, and miss the rough thing that is actually alive.

Signature

rawmeticulous
classical in formformally daring

More about the Formalist

How you rate: Your stars track craft more than feeling. You are one of the few who will give five to something you did not enjoy.
Good company: You get on with Prestige Hunters and Archivists, who share your respect for the made thing, and you argue happily with Empaths.
Against the crowd: You part ways with the crowd on crowd-pleasers that are built carelessly, and you rescue chilly, precise work the audience found cold.

Not for people whose loved works are well-crafted but who mainly react to story or feeling.

The Empath

Feeling and character predict everything.

7% of Buds

Three who fit

Ted Lasso
Believes in people before the evidence is in.
Sally Rooney
Whole novels of two people not saying the thing.
Roger Ebert
Called the movies a machine for empathy.

What you love: You want to feel it. Character, interiority, a face holding something back: if the work makes you care about a person, you are all in.
What you avoid: Detachment. Clever, cool, mechanical work reads to you as a closed door, however admired it is.

Where it goes wrong: A work can move you without being good, and you will defend it anyway.

Signature

cooloverwhelming
character-ledplot-driven

More about the Empath

How you rate: Your stars are a record of how much you felt. Reviews describe what it did to you, not what it is.
Good company: You pair well with the Sincere and the Comfort Seeker; the Ironist finds you earnest, and you find them evasive.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to small, tender work and harsher on spectacle that forgot to have a heart.

Not for people who like intense works mainly for their spectacle or darkness rather than their feeling.

The Cartographer

World-building is king.

6% of Buds

Three who fit

J.R.R. Tolkien
Wrote the languages first, then a story for them.
Hidetaka Miyazaki
Lore in item descriptions; the map is the plot.
Hermione Granger
Read Hogwarts: A History. Twice. Before term.

What you love: A world with its own rules, history, and weather. You read the appendix. You want to know what is over the next hill.
What you avoid: Thin settings and stories that could happen anywhere. If the place is a backdrop, you drift.

Where it goes wrong: Lore is not story. You can spend a hundred hours somewhere and not notice nothing happened.

Signature

sparerichly built
intimateepic

More about the Cartographer

How you rate: You reward density and scale. A middling story in a rich world gets a pass; a sharp story in a cardboard one does not.
Good company: Genre Devotees and Thrill Chasers share your appetite for the big; Formalists share your patience for detail.
Against the crowd: You are generous with sprawling, uneven epics the crowd found long, and impatient with tidy chamber pieces the crowd loved.

Not for people who like epic scale but do not care about lore or world detail.

The Provocateur

Suspicious of comfort.

12% of Buds

Three who fit

Lars von Trier
A film should be a stone in your shoe.
Nick Cave
Murder ballads sung like hymns.
Rust Cohle
Time is a flat circle; he explains it in the car.

What you love: Work that unsettles: bleak, open, demanding. You trust discomfort more than reassurance and rate the thing that made you argue.
What you avoid: Comfort, closure, and being told how to feel. Warmth on its own reads as a sales pitch.

Where it goes wrong: Difficulty is not depth. Sometimes the cold thing is just cold, and you rated it up for the chill.

Signature

warmbleak
resolvedopen-ended
effortlessdemanding

More about the Provocateur

How you rate: Your five stars go to the difficult. Your one star goes to the smooth. The middle is where you are bored.
Good company: The Formalist respects you, the Ironist enjoys you, and the Comfort Seeker is your most productive opposite.
Against the crowd: You are the reliable spicy take: harsher than the crowd on beloved warmth, kinder to the punishing and the strange.

Not for people who tolerate darkness but do not prefer it.

The Comfort Seeker

Warmth, resolution, rewatchability.

15% of Buds

Three who fit

Paddington
Marmalade, manners, and it all turns out fine.
Nora Ephron
Wrote the films people rewatch when sick.
Taylor Swift
A bridge you can sing along to, and a cardigan.

What you love: Warmth, resolution, a place you can return to. The rewatch is the point; the third time is the best time.
What you avoid: Cruelty for its own sake, endings that withhold, homework. You do not need to be tested by an evening in.

Where it goes wrong: Comfort can be a wall. The work that would have changed your mind never gets past the first ten minutes.

Signature

warmbleak
effortlessdemanding
gravecomic

More about the Comfort Seeker

How you rate: You rate on how something leaves you. Reliability earns stars; ambition without kindness does not.
Good company: The Empath and the Sincere feel like home. Provocateurs baffle you, and you are the one they most need to hear from.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to gentle, unfashionable work and cooler on acclaimed bleakness.

Not for people who enjoy light works but also rate dark or difficult ones highly.

The Genre Devotee

Pulp over prestige, judged on genre terms.

10% of Buds

Three who fit

Quentin Tarantino
The video-store clerk who never left the shelf.
Stephen King
Sixty novels, no apology for a single scare.
Randal Graves
Defends the trash on its merits, from behind the counter.

What you love: Pulp done right. You judge a heist film as a heist film and a doom metal record as doom metal, and you know the rules well enough to know when they are bent well.
What you avoid: Prestige for its own sake, and anything that apologizes for its genre. A thriller ashamed to thrill is dead to you.

Where it goes wrong: Loyalty to a form can become loyalty to its clichés.

Signature

unpretentiousprestige
contemplativerelentless

More about the Genre Devotee

How you rate: Your stars are relative to the form. A great B-movie gets five; a respectable drama that does its job gets three.
Good company: Thrill Chasers and Cartographers are your people. Prestige Hunters disagree with you at every turn, usefully.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to the disreputable and harsher on the well-behaved.

Not for people who like genre work but rate prestige work just as highly.

The Prestige Hunter

Follows acclaim and the canon.

8% of Buds

Three who fit

Anton Ego
The critic who admits the new needs friends.
Harold Bloom
Wrote The Western Canon and meant every word.
Miranda Priestly
Cerulean was chosen for you by people who know.

What you love: The canon, the acclaimed, the made-to-last. You want the thing that will still matter, and you are usually right about which one that is.
What you avoid: Disposable pleasure. If it will not be talked about in ten years, it is hard for you to care now.

Where it goes wrong: Reputation can rate the work before you have. Watch for stars you gave to the name.

Signature

unpretentiousprestige
rawmeticulous

More about the Prestige Hunter

How you rate: You rate close to the critics and a little above them for craft. Your surprises are rare and worth reading.
Good company: Formalists and Archivists share your shelves. Genre Devotees think you are missing the fun, and sometimes you are.
Against the crowd: You are harsher than the crowd on populist hits and kinder to the austere and the slow.

Not for people who like acclaimed work but also champion disreputable genre pieces.

The Ironist

Sincerity reads as naive.

5% of Buds

Three who fit

Daria Morgendorffer
Sincerity is fine, in other people, at a distance.
David F. Wallace
Footnotes on footnotes, and a plea for sincerity.
Randy Newman
Sings as the villain so you notice you agree.

What you love: Wit, distance, a raised eyebrow. You like work that knows what it is doing and lets you in on the joke.
What you avoid: Unguarded sincerity. Earnestness makes you reach for the exits, even when it is earned.

Where it goes wrong: Irony is a defense. The thing you are protecting yourself from is often the thing worth feeling.

Signature

earnestironic
gravecomic

More about the Ironist

How you rate: You reward cleverness and dock the heartfelt. Your reviews are the funniest on the site, and you know it.
Good company: Provocateurs and Formalists are good company. The Sincere is your mirror image; you two should compare notes more often.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to the arch and the dry, and harder on tearjerkers that worked on everyone else.

Not for people who enjoy comedy but respond most to sincere work.

The Sincere

Earnestness moves them.

12% of Buds

Three who fit

Fred Rogers
Looked into the camera and meant it, for decades.
Hayao Miyazaki
A soot sprite and a bathhouse, drawn without a wink.
Jo March
Writes what she feels and sells it anyway.

What you love: Earnestness that lands. A straight face, a real feeling, a work that means it. You are moved by the attempt as much as the result.
What you avoid: Smirking. Work that hedges its own emotion reads as cowardice to you.

Where it goes wrong: Meaning it is not enough. You can forgive too much for a good heart.

Signature

earnestironic
cooloverwhelming

More about the Sincere

How you rate: You rate the heart. A flawed, honest thing beats a slick, guarded one every time.
Good company: Empaths and Comfort Seekers stand beside you. The Ironist is your opposite, and the argument is the good kind.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to unfashionable feeling and harsher on the knowing and the cool.

Not for people who like sincere work but also enjoy irony.

The Thrill Chaser

Pacing and spectacle first.

11% of Buds

Three who fit

Furiosa
Two hours of chase; the plot is the road.
Nathan Drake
The building is collapsing and he is quipping.
Lee Child
One Reacher a year, each a train you cannot leave.

What you love: Momentum. Set pieces, stakes, a story that grabs you by the collar and does not let go until the credits.
What you avoid: Drift. Contemplation without event feels like a waiting room, whatever the critics say.

Where it goes wrong: Speed can hide emptiness. Some of your five stars are adrenaline, not admiration.

Signature

contemplativerelentless
intimateepic
character-ledplot-driven

More about the Thrill Chaser

How you rate: Your stars follow your pulse. Pacing and spectacle earn them; interiority has to bring an engine.
Good company: Genre Devotees and Cartographers ride along. Formalists find you impatient; you find them slow.
Against the crowd: You are close to the crowd on blockbusters and much harsher than it on the acclaimed and unhurried.

Not for people who like fast works but also rate slow cinema or quiet novels highly.

The Archivist

The past rates higher.

7% of Buds

Three who fit

Martin Scorsese
Started a foundation to keep old prints alive.
Jay Gatsby
Of course you can repeat the past.
Bob Dylan
Hosted a radio hour of 78s and knew every one.

What you love: The past. Older forms, older voices, the thing that has already lasted. You are happiest twenty years behind and see no reason to catch up.
What you avoid: The merely new. Novelty on its own is not an argument, and you are suspicious of this year's consensus.

Where it goes wrong: Nostalgia rates the memory, not the work. Some of the old things are not as good as you remember.

Signature

contemporarynostalgic
unpretentiousprestige

More about the Archivist

How you rate: You rate the old above the new, more than most, and your reviews place things in a lineage.
Good company: Prestige Hunters and Formalists share your shelves. Thrill Chasers think you are in a museum; you think they are in a mall.
Against the crowd: You are kinder than the crowd to the dated and harsher on the current.

Not for people who like some classics but whose ratings do not favor the past.

The Omnivore

No strong lean, high variance.

3% of Buds

Three who fit

Matilda Wormwood
Read the whole library by six and kept going.
Anthony Bourdain
Ate everything, everywhere, and rated the company.
Questlove
A record collection with no genre, only good.

What you love: Almost everything, on its own terms. You move between forms without a grudge and your favorites do not resemble each other.
What you avoid: Very little, which is the point. You lack the strong lean that would tell you no in advance.

Where it goes wrong: Range can be a way of never committing. Your best reviews are the ones where you finally take a side.

Signature: none. No single lean stands out; the spread across all fourteen is the signature.

More about the Omnivore

How you rate: Your stars are hard to predict, and that is a compliment: they are about the work, not the category.
Good company: You get on with everyone and are the useful tie-breaker in any argument between two strong leans.
Against the crowd: You track the crowd more closely than most, with surprises scattered rather than patterned.

Not for people with even one strong, consistent lean.

Want to know yours? Rate a handful of things and it appears on your profile.