Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
Are you saying that an artist uses a character’s appearance to tell us something about their character?

Wouldn’t that mean that appearance and character are related in a non-random way?
In a fictional work yes, but narrative devices might be different from real life appeareances, furthermore if someone is not "playing" a specific aesthetic it's unreasonable to see appeareance matters as determinant for personality (or impersonation).

If some artist is setting predefined boundaries for types of people and within those boundaries he observes certain physical traits, and then when trying to build up his characters he uses these type categories, and if we have a similar frame for reference to see these categories, then it would be "somewhat justified" to use VI on fiction. Then you run into the impossibility to verify if the type categories are correct definitions of "types" or the physical trait correlations are accidental or imprecise for example. It's not a weird occurrence that the experience with people is different depending on the person.

If you take a look at VI you'll also notice different socionist work with very different traits for type, sometimes even contradictory, and these are all within the same typology
The problems and the lack of validity of VI are more pronounced than they seem. Socionics itself is vague and different interpretations of it contradict each other daily.

Although I recognize there's a bit of validity on VI and similar people sometimes share physical traits and mannerisms, I think it's unreliable for definitive typings.