James personality type: ESTP

James wanted Bella for one reason: the Cullens were protecting her, and that made the game interesting. He is a tracker who hunts humans and vampires for sport, and when his nomad coven stumbles onto the Cullens’ baseball game, he locks onto the one human girl standing in a field of vampires and decides she is his next challenge. He does not hate her. He does not even need her. She is simply the hardest target on the board, and a hard target is the only kind he respects. Everything that follows is him playing to win.

That is ESTP at its darkest. Extraverted sensing makes him come alive in the hunt itself: scent, movement, the chase across states. Introverted thinking gives him tactics. He reads the Cullens’ defenses and finds the soft spot, which is Bella’s love for her mother. He calls Bella pretending to hold her mother hostage, using audio taken from old home movies, and lures her to the ballet studio she knew as a child in Phoenix. Then he starts filming her, because the point of a trophy is to make the people who lost watch it.

His type 7 side is the restless appetite. Sevens chase stimulation and hate being bored or boxed in, and James has built his whole existence around the next exciting target. There is history too. Years earlier, Alice escaped him only because the old vampire at her asylum turned her before James could get to her. He lost that prey once, and he seems to love nothing more than a fight with the odds stacked against him. This time the odds win. He bites Bella, then Emmett, Jasper and Alice destroy him, and the venom leaves a scar on her hand for good. In the film he is played by Cam Gigandet and even gets a surname, Witherdale, which the book never gives him.

But: some readers type James as ENTP, a strategist toying with an opponent. We see the appeal. Still, every plan he makes serves the physical hunt, never an idea for its own sake. ESTP.