Dere Type Quiz: Which Anime Archetype Are You?

What This Quiz Is Measuring

A dere type is an anime character archetype built from two halves. The second half never changes: dere, clipped from deredere (デレデレ), an ordinary Japanese word for someone visibly, embarrassingly lovestruck. The first half is the mask. Tsun for prickly, kuu for cool, dan for silent, yan for unwell.

So every type on this quiz is the same feeling wearing different clothes. What the twelve questions actually test is not how much you love people. It is what you do with your face while you love them.

The scoring is simple on purpose. Each answer adds points to one or two types, some answers to a blend of two because real people do not sit neatly in one box. At the end the type with the most points becomes your result card, and the bars underneath show the full spread. If your top two are close, that is worth more attention than the winner. A high tsundere score with a high dandere score means the sharpness is nerves. A high kuudere score with a high kamidere score means the calm has a strategy behind it.

What Each Result Actually Means

Tsundere (ツンデレ) is the famous one, sharp on the outside and warm underneath, insulting you while walking you home. The full pattern lives on the tsundere page.

Yandere (ヤンデレ) comes from yanderu (病んでる), to be sick or unwell. This one is written as devotion with the limits removed. It is thrilling in fiction and alarming in life, and the better stories treat it as a threat rather than a compliment.

Kuudere (クーデレ) takes kuu from the English word “cool.” Flat, level, unbothered, and then one unguarded moment that reads as enormous because the baseline was so still. More on the kuudere page.

Dandere (ダンデレ) comes from danmari (黙り), silence. The difference from kuudere is the reason for the quiet. A kuudere sees no need to talk. A dandere is frightened. See the dandere page.

Deredere (デレデレ) is the base case, openly sweet with no cold mask and nothing to uncover. In ensemble casts they are usually the character who cracks everyone else open.

Himedere (姫デレ) is from hime (姫), princess. Affection delivered from a throne, with the comedy coming from how much work everyone else has to do.

Kamidere (神デレ) is from kami (神), god. A god complex worn as a personality, usually written for antagonists, with the love arriving as a favour granted from a great height.

Why Fans Sort Themselves This Way

The vocabulary grew out of Japanese online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially around visual novels, where players kept noticing the same emotional structures repeating across different games and needed shorthand for them. Once tsundere broke into mainstream Japanese usage in the mid 2000s, the -dere slot became productive and fans started coining new ones by bolting any mask onto the front.

What holds the whole system together is one idea: the gap. Every dere type describes the distance between what a character shows and what a character feels, and closing that distance is the plot. Fans call the pleasure of that gap gap moe (ギャップ萌え), and it is the reason a single half smile from a kuudere lands harder than a full confession from a deredere.

Which is also why a quiz like this is fun rather than diagnostic. You are not being sorted by personality. You are being asked which gap you recognise in yourself. Most people already know the answer before question three, and the interesting part is the runner up. For the full taxonomy, including the rarer types this quiz leaves out, see the dere types guide.

FAQ

What is a dere type?

A dere type is an anime character archetype formed by attaching a surface attitude to dere, clipped from deredere (デレデレ), the Japanese word for openly lovestruck. The first half names the mask and the second half names the feeling underneath it. Tsundere is prickly plus affection, kuudere is cool plus affection, dandere is silent plus affection. The affection is the constant.

How many dere types are there?

There is no official count, because anyone can coin a new one. Roughly seven are widely used: tsundere, yandere, kuudere, dandere, deredere, himedere and kamidere, which are the seven this quiz scores. Beyond those, fan lists run to twenty or thirty entries including sadodere, bakadere, mayadere and hinedere. Our dere types guide covers eighteen of the attested ones.

Which dere type is the most common?

Tsundere by a wide margin, both in how often it appears in series and in how many people identify with it. It is the only dere type that fully escaped fandom into mainstream Japanese vocabulary. Deredere and dandere tend to be the next most common quiz results, because openly warm and quietly shy describe an enormous number of real people. Kamidere and yandere are the rarest outcomes.

Is this dere type quiz accurate?

It is accurate about the thing it measures, which is how you behave around affection, not who you are. There is no clinical instrument behind it and no validated scale. Treat the result as a description of your default surface rather than a verdict, and pay attention to your second place score, since most people are a blend of two types rather than a clean example of one.

What is the difference between tsundere and yandere?

Both pair hidden feeling with a difficult surface, but they run in opposite directions. A tsundere hides real warmth behind coldness and softens as trust builds, so the arc moves toward openness. A yandere starts out loving and spirals into obsession, jealousy and often violence, so the arc moves toward danger. Tsundere is about guarding love. Yandere is about love losing its boundaries.