Jason Schuyler

"After a while complaining about everything that Jason did just got tiresome.

 It wasn't really personal.  He pushed his luck with everyone."

- Anita Blake, Blue Moon

"Jason had a streak in him that made him enjoy yanking someone's chain. 

He liked to stir the pot  and see what happened. 

Someday he was going to do it with the wrong person, and he was going to get hurt."

- Anita Blake, Blue Moon

Jason is a new and inexperienced werewolf when we first meet him.  He works very hard at not being human.  In his early twenties he works as one of the strippers at Guilty Pleasures and lives at the Circus of the Damned.  Anita notes that he likes dressing in leather and other more outrageous outfits, with shoulder-length straight blond hair and sky blue eyes she describes him as someone who cleans up good but is out of the league of Jean-Claude and Asher.

Jason does not make a very good first impression on Anita.  Trying to eat her at their first two meetings is not a wise move.  However he would risk his life to save hers even when he barely knows her. 

He is more afraid of Jean-Claude than he is of Anita but he does eventually admit that Anita is dominant to him when she withstands his show of power.

As one of Jean-Claude's wolves to call he is later promoted to his "pet" and pomme de sang.  He willingly lets Jean-Claude feed from him and actually enjoys the experience.

Jason tries to tease Anita has he has seen Richard and Jean-Claude do. 

Jean-Claude has told him that Anita is off limits to him.  This does not stop him flirting with her, although as Anita points out, he will flirt with anyone or anything female, it is more habit than personal.

It is early on though that Jason surprises Anita by offering to take the place of the human Lisa and her friend with Bettina and Pallas.   He is forced into a public ménage à trois with them.  The experience of them rotting over him terrifies him and affects him throughout the later books whenever he comes across this type of vampire again. 

He had been made a werewolf by Raina who had attacked him and did not care whether he became a wolf or died.  He had gone to Jean-Claude to escape her. He had refused to be in any of her movies.  Prior to becoming a wolf he had been a college student.  Now he is a bodyguard and breakfast entrée to Jean-Claude - bit of a come down.

Anita believes he has "a fascination with danger, pain, and simply being an all round pain in the ass".  But all in all he is not a bad guy. She believes that he "would grin on his way into hell".

However the more that we see of Jason the more complex his character becomes.  We start to see behind the image he sets out to portray.  For example, when Anita finds out he likes to read he is embarrassed and swears her to secrecy.

Jason was understanding of why Anita left Richard.  Even though he does not think she was right to do so he understands and does not judge her.

He is friends with Richard's family and is very upset and angry with the torture of Charlotte Zeeman (Richard's mother).  When he says that he could torture Deputy Thompson it makes Anita think that she does not know Jason at all.  That Anita is the one who actually tortures him later is pure irony and Jason is rallying of Anita.  He shows her that he actually knows her very well when he lectures her that life goes on and knows exactly what is bothering her.

After Anita has merged the marks and finds herself needing to feed the ardeur Jason is the one who stays with her so that she does not go to far and injure Nathaniel as she satisfies the hunger.  With her new abilities Anita looks into Jason's heart and is surprised by what she finds there, pure desire for her, but unlike everyone else, there was no agenda to his desire, he simply wanted her.

It is in Cerulean Sins that Jason shows even more of the other side to him that he keeps hidden.

When the ardeur rises in Anita and there is no one else available she takes Jason to her bed to satisfy the hunger.  Afterwards Jason is very open about his feelings and reveals more to Anita than he ever had before.  He comes across as a young man with pretty much the same desires as any other and admits that he wants a relationship with a woman who will love him as much as those around him love each other.  Anita sums it up in one word - Jason is a romantic.  Furthermore he does not seem to mind being seen as one.

Jason also comes across as very vulnerable when he comes up against Dolph and his prejudices against werewolves.  He comes frighteningly close to being locked up in a secure facility.

Thankfully Anita rescues him from that and it is in the car after leaving the poice station that Jason delights in finally showing up on Anita's guy-radar.  He describes himself as having felt like the court eunuch when Anita was noticing all the men except him.  Anita, of course had noticed him in the past but had studiously ignored him rather than act as expected.  

As Anita begins to notice how Jason is finally starting to grow up she wonders if he will always be satisfied with being Jean-Claude's pomme de sang or not.

Personally I don't think that he will.  I actually think that Jason would make a very good Ulfric, if not right now, but certainly a few years down the line.  He is fair, surprisingly wise but also, as he has fewer morals than Richard, he does not squirm from the messier side of being a werewolf.  Jason is unquestionably my favourite character in the series and I believe he has a lot of potential as leader of the wolf pack.  And providing Jean-Claude does not hold him back I think that as Ulfric Jason could actually make a powerful allegiance with the vampires of the city.  But then again, maybe that was Jean-Claude's plan all along, after all he too has seen what Anita has seen in Jason's heart.

Text in this colour denotes that it is a spoiler for Incubus Dreams

Unfortunately in Incubus Dreams we learn very little that is new about my favourite werewolf.  However he is still on hand with advice and Anita continues to take notice of his opinions.

It is Jason who finally gets Anita to see Nathaniel as someone who is not a child or a pet.  Nathaniel had confided in him and asked for advice on how to get Anita to have sex with him showing quite nicely that it is not only Anita who has noticed that Jason is useful for advice.

In this book, even more so than Cerulean Sins we see that Jason is someone who seems to be forever on the outside of the group of men who gravitate around Anita.  I certainly got the distinct impression that he is jealous of not being included and would like to be a part of things more often than he is.  When he watches Anita and Nathaniel and sees how much they do love each other Jason appears as very sad and the romantic side of him surfaces again. 

Here is hoping in the next book that Jason has a much larger role.

"I'd always treated Jason as lesser than a friend, young and amusing, not serious.

Jean-Claude's ardeur let me see into his heart,

and I found it the most pure of any that I'd looked into in a long time."

- Anita Blake, Narcissus in Chains