Pouting about your Pottermore Patronus results? Try this quiz
Maybe you're unconvinced that a rat really best represents your spiritual protector? A new quiz offers all the Potter questions, and lets you retake it if you're not satisfied.
Online quizzes are meaningless fun, but when a quiz comes from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's own Pottermore site, millions of fans take it seriously.
And many of them were disappointed with the site's recently launched Patronus quiz, a beautifully laid out online offering that used just five questions to assign each quiz-taker a Potter-inspired ghostly guardian.
Yes, not everyone could be assigned Harry's elegant stag, but moles, rats, salmon and field mice just didn't seem very protective, and some actually came across as embarrassing. It's one thing to be assigned to Slytherin when you were hoping for Gryffindor, but to be told your spiritual animal is a rat? That can be tough to swallow.
Soothe your wounded ego by heading on over to this unofficial quiz. Pottermore's quiz shows each person only five questions, but they're selected randomly from what appears to be a list of 38. This fan-made quiz uses all the possible questions (they're really just pairs of words where you select a favorite) and Patronus assignments, as gathered on Reddit.
The new quiz isn't as visually pleasing as Pottermore's, which features a swirling dot leading you through mysterious woods. But not only does it gather more information by asking you more questions, it lets you take the quiz as many times as you like. Pottermore's quiz is only available to registered site users, and records your quiz result right next to your Hogwarts house assignment, so if you land a salmon, you're stuck swimming upstream forever. This quiz can be taken as often as you like until you're satisfied with your answer.
I took this quiz three times after being bummed out by my wild boar results on Pottermore. My crazy cat-lady side was soothed when my first Patronus on the fan quiz was a black-and-white cat, my second a Russian blue. But I really loved my third and final quiz attempt, which granted me a hippogriff, labeled one of the 10 "very rare" results, right up there with unicorns. (Potter fans well remember Buckbeak, the loyal hippogriff who was almost executed in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.")
Unlike Pottermore's version, I didn't get to see a ghostly version of my Patronus racing through the woods, but it's a thousand times better than a wild boar.