MBTI Type: ISTP

John Carter is something of a loner who doesn’t want anything to do with human wars, because they don’t “concern me” and he is traumatized after his own brief stint in a war allowed his wife and child to perish in his absence. Rather than be used by the army, he uses aggressive tactics (punching people in the face, diving out of windows and breaking them in the process, urinating in his cell so they come over to the bars to tell him off and knocking them out, stealing a horse, and running away from an Indian skirmish) to attempt to escape. Once zapped up to Mars, he makes numerous attempts to figure out how its gravity works, until he realizes he can “jump” effortlessly over long distances (when Dejah asks him to explain how he does this or teach it to her people, he shrugs and says he doesn’t know how he does it, he just does it). He was a prospector in search of gold in his “other” life and continues to be a high-level opportunist who throws himself physically into tasks in his new one on another planet, from his daring escapes and using his jumping skills in the arena to how he defeats the bad guys, sets up his own death, and manages to get back “home” to Mars after spending a decade back on earth. He can be impulsive but also single-minded; he first wants to get home, then wants to return to Mars and devotes long years of his life to crafting a plan to make it happen. He has flashes of intuition (he calls them a “father’s insight”) when he realizes the parentage of one of his companions, a truth no one has ever discerned before. Though somewhat callous in the opinions of others, John actually cares more about total strangers than he lets on – he has compassion for a dog being hurt by locals and intervenes on its behalf, he stands up for a woman he barely knows, he rescues the princes from peril, and eventually comes around to her way of thinking.

Enneagram: 8w9 sp/so

John does not like to be caged or prevented from doing whatever he wants, and he reacts to all attempts to do otherwise with unbridled aggression and combative energy. He challenges people to fights, he tells them off, he intervenes bodily, he makes escape attempts, he shoots people, he rushes into battle armed only with a knife, and he doesn’t always look before he leaps, yet somehow he winds up being heroic half the time, because he doesn’t care to admit that he has a tendency to stick up for people being abused. Though initially only concerned with looking after his own best interests, he comes around to showing heroism on behalf of total strangers, as he eases more into his 9 wing desire for peace and to have his friends happy with him.