The seven deadly sins become eight, each paired with its contrary virtue: exactly sixteen cells, one for each of the sixteen MBTI types. The sin side and the virtue side are opposite types: INTJ’s pride, turned over, is ESFP’s humility.
Status: one main film (16:9, 01:30) and sixteen shorts (9:16, about 01:03 each), completed 2026-10-22 to 23.
The films are the Chinese versions; pictures, characters and music are all generated in code. For how they were made, see From one character card to sixteen shorts.
Main film
Ninety seconds, cut to the beat. An eye opens at the centre of a disc, the title “Seven Deadly Sins” slams down, and its “seven” (七) cracks into “eight” (八). Eight face-offs follow, each sin card slamming in and flipping to its virtue. At the end the sixteen cards form a wheel that stops on the author’s cell: INTJ’s pride.
How the cells were assigned
| Sin | Type | Line | Virtue | Type | Line |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sloth | INTP | Once I’ve figured it out, it’s as good as done. | Diligence | ESFJ | It’s all arranged; just show up. |
| Gluttony | ESTP | We’re here anyway, so one more round. | Temperance | INFJ | Seventy percent full is just right. |
| Lust | ENFP | Every time my heart skips, I mean it. | Chastity | ISTJ | What we agreed on keeps counting. |
| Greed | ENTP | Choosing is for kids. I’ll take it all. | Generosity | ISFJ | I saved a share for you. |
| Envy | INFP | I’m not jealous. I just want to be seen too. | Kindness | ESTJ | I’m hard on you so you won’t take the long way round. |
| Wrath | ENTJ | I’m not angry. I’m solving the problem. | Patience | ISFP | Take your time. I can wait. |
| Vainglory | ENFJ | If I post this one, people will like it, right? | Sincerity | ISTP | No need for praise. As long as it works. |
| Pride | INTJ | Theoretically speaking, this is the right way. | Humility | ESFP | The lead? It’s more fun all together. |
Each sin’s line is written as something the type itself finds perfectly reasonable, not as a plain flaw. The INTJ line is my own catchphrase.
Radar charts
Each type has a 16-axis radar chart: the eight sins fill the upper half of the circle, and each virtue sits directly opposite its sin. The values are derived from the four MBTI letter pairs, which correlate respectively with extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness in the Big Five (McCrae & Costa 1989). Each sin gets a four-part recipe based on its description, and its virtue takes the reverse. So the charts of two opposite types are symmetric about the centre, and when a card flips, the radar turns half a circle and changes from one type into the other.
Each card lights two lamps: the main lamp is the card’s own item, and the second shows the type’s other side. A sin card lights the type’s strongest virtue; a virtue card lights its sharpest sin. INTJ’s sharpest point, for example, is pride, and its strongest virtue is temperance; ISTJ’s virtue is chastity, but its sharpest sin is pride.
This is an illustration, not a measurement; in the films the radar chart is always labelled “illustrative”.
Sixteen shorts
In release order, each sin is followed by its virtue. In a sin episode the flip to the virtue at 48 seconds arrives as a flash of light; in a virtue episode the turn to the opposite sin arrives as a falling shadow. Each short has its own score: the same melody, with different instruments and character.
01 Sloth · INTP
Sloth did not originally mean laziness: it was the “noonday demon” that fourth-century desert monks feared most.
02 Diligence · ESFJ
The Latin word for diligence comes from the same verb as “love”.
03 Gluttony · ESTP
Being picky counts as gluttony too: later writers turned Gregory the Great’s five kinds of gluttony into a one-line mnemonic.
04 Temperance · INFJ
The Temperance card in the tarot shows water being mixed into wine.
05 Lust · ENFP
In the 14th century the English word luxury meant lust; only in the 17th century did it come to mean extravagance.
06 Chastity · ISTJ
Married people can be chaste too: faith kept over straw is as much faith as faith kept over gold.
07 Greed · ENTP
The ranking of the sins follows the economy: some historians argue that in the centuries when commerce rose, greed caught up with pride.
08 Generosity · ISFJ
The root of generosity is “freedom”; Aristotle said that not taking is easier than giving.
09 Envy · INFP
Envy literally means “staring at”.
10 Kindness · ESTJ
The best-known humanist maxim comes from a meddling neighbour in a Roman comedy.
11 Wrath · ENTJ
Not getting angry when you should is a sin too.
12 Patience · ISFP
“Patience” and “patient” are the same word; in the Psychomachia, Wrath falls on her own javelin.
13 Vainglory · ENFJ
There is one sin that goes only after those who have won.
14 Sincerity · ISTP
The most famous story about “sincere” is false.
15 Pride · INTJ
“The head of the seven deadly sins” is meant literally. This cell is mine.
16 Humility · ESFP
Humility comes from “earth”; in the Psychomachia, Pride charges on horseback and falls into a pit dug by her own side.
Sources
Where the eight come from: the eight sins of this series correspond to questions 8–15 of Aquinas’s De malo: the seven deadly sins plus vainglory, which was later folded into pride. Their source is the eight evil thoughts of Evagrius in the fourth century (that list has “sadness” and no “envy”). At the end of the sixth century Gregory the Great raised pride above the seven and added envy; only the standard lists from the 12th century on folded vainglory into pride.
Contrary virtues: the common claim that the “seven virtues against the seven sins” come from the fifth-century epic Psychomachia by Prudentius fits only in part. Of the poem’s seven battles, humility, patience and chastity match, temperance and generosity match loosely, and kindness and diligence do not appear at all. Today’s tidy list is closer to the 19th-century Catholic catechisms (for example question 317 of the 1891 Baltimore Catechism). “Vainglory ↔ sincerity” is this series’ own choice.
Each short:
- Sloth: Evagrius, Praktikos ch. 12; acedia < Greek akēdia (a- + kēdos, “care”).
- Diligence: diligentia < diligere; Matthew 22:39; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 54.1 ad 1.
- Gluttony: Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 30.18.60; the mnemonic praepropere, laute, nimis, ardenter, studiose in Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 148.4.
- Temperance: Lewis & Short, s.v. tempero; tarot card 14, Temperance.
- Lust: Lewis & Short, s.v. luxuria; English luxury in the Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340).
- Chastity: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 151, 152; Augustine, De bono coniugali 4.4.
- Greed: Lester K. Little, “Pride Goes before Avarice”, American Historical Review 76 (1971). This view is contested.
- Generosity: Seneca, Epistles 88.2; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1120a–b.
- Envy: Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.9.20; Dante, Purgatorio canto 13, lines 70–72.
- Kindness: Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (163 BC), lines 75–77.
- Wrath: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 158.1, 158.8.
- Patience: Prudentius, Psychomachia lines 109–177.
- Vainglory: Evagrius, Praktikos chs. 13, 30, 31.
- Sincerity: the OED rules out the sine cera explanation entirely; Horace, Epistles 1.2.54.
- Pride: Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 31.45.87.
- Humility: humilitas < humilis < humus; Prudentius, Psychomachia lines 178–309.