Most apps that try to summarize your taste in a chart use the same handful of categories for everyone. Whatever you've watched, the axes are fixed: comedy, drama, horror, and so on, the same shape every single user gets, just filled in differently. I didn't want WhatNext.'s Profile screen to work that way, so it doesn't. The radar chart you see is built entirely from your own ratings, and the shape it draws is different for every person who opens it.
Your Radar Chart Has No Fixed Axes
The genres on your chart aren't chosen in advance. WhatNext. looks at every movie you've rated, pulls the genre tags attached to each one, and sums how much rated weight you've put behind each genre across your whole history. Those sums get converted into a percentage of your total, and the strongest eight become your top genres. Whichever eight genres that turns out to be for you, in whatever order, is what ends up on the chart. There's no fallback list of "default" categories sitting underneath it.
That also means the chart genuinely doesn't render for everyone. It needs at least three genres with a nonzero share to draw a closed shape at all; with fewer than three, WhatNext. shows no chart rather than a fake or padded one. Once you clear that bar, each axis is normalized against whichever of your own genres is currently strongest, so your single biggest genre always reaches the outer ring. The chart isn't measuring you against a global maximum or against other users. It's showing the relative shape of your own taste, genre against genre.
To make that concrete: here's what the chart would draw for a hypothetical profile with six genres in play, drama leading at 22%, then comedy, thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, and romance trailing off from there. Six spokes, six labels, a shape unique to that mix. Someone whose ratings lean two genres instead of six gets a triangle instead of a hexagon, drawn by the exact same rule.
The Archetype Layer: A Best-Fit Label, Not a Score
Once you've rated 10 movies, WhatNext. adds something above the chart: a named line like "The Quantum Architect," with a short description underneath it and a note on how many ratings it's calibrated from. Under the hood, that name comes from checking your top three genres and your recurring non-genre tags against a set of 14 named rules, each built around a different combination of genre affinities and mood-tag bonuses.
Here are all 14: Quantum Architect, Nocturnal Witness, Kinetic Hero, Soulful Historian, Velvet Romantic, Whimsical Spirit, Truth Seeker, Urban Enigmatist, Rugged Frontierist, Enchanted Virtuoso, Grounded Dramatist, Sharp Wit, Genre Chaser, and Void Walker.
And then there's the fifteenth outcome, the one that isn't really a rule at all.
The scoring itself is a formula, not a vibe. For each rule, WhatNext. takes your top three genres, multiplies each one's percentage share by that rule's weight for that genre, and adds the three results together. Then it adds half a point for every one of your recurring mood or theme tags that also appears in that rule's tag list. Whichever rule ends up with the highest total wins, but only if that total clears a minimum threshold. Fall short of the bar for every rule, and you land on "Omnivore" instead. Its own description reads: "Your taste refuses to be boxed. You move between worlds, finding something real in every corner of cinema." It's a real, deliberate outcome, not an error state.
Because the formula runs against your top three genres rather than just your single biggest one, the winning archetype isn't always the one built purely around your #1 genre. Say, hypothetically, your top three genres came out to horror at 40%, sci-fi at 30%, and thriller at 15%, and "dark" is one of your recurring tags. That's a triangle, not a hexagon:
The rule for "Nocturnal Witness" is built almost entirely around horror, so it only picks up credit from your horror percentage and lands at a modest score. But the rule for "Void Walker" gives partial credit to sci-fi and thriller too, on top of horror, so even though horror is still your biggest single genre, Void Walker can out-score Nocturnal Witness once the sci-fi and thriller contributions stack on top of the same horror base. Run the actual formula on those numbers and Void Walker comes out at roughly 0.97 against Nocturnal Witness's 0.65, not a close call. The label reflects the whole shape of your top three, not just whichever genre happens to be in first place.
What Actually Feeds It, and What Doesn't
Both the chart and the archetype pull exclusively from movies you've rated, and specifically ones where that rating carries positive weight. Titles you've watchlisted or skipped are tracked elsewhere in the app, but neither one touches your genre percentages or your archetype score. Only an actual rating counts.
The same rated-movie pool also produces the "signature tags" pills that sit below your radar chart: up to six of your most recurring non-genre tags, the mood and theme descriptors, not genre labels, that show up disproportionately often in what you rate highly. They're computed the same way as your top genres, just kept separate from the genre pool and capped at six instead of eight.
None of this asks you to fill out a taste quiz or answer a survey up front. It's assembled entirely from the ordinary act of rating movies as you go, which is also why the chart's shape and the archetype label can both shift over time as your ratings pile up. It's less a fixed personality result and more an ongoing map, recalculated fresh every time you look at it.