Actually another tiny nitpick of mine is that Adam and Lawrence aren’t bitchy enough for me in a lot of fanfics. I love reading about them being emotionally sensitive and raw after their experiences, they are very empathetic and caring people under their shells. But they are also both stubborn and assholes in their different ways and I just don’t feel like a lot of fanfics really cover it well

As much as I might joke about the character and fanon interpretations of him, I think it’s important to realize that in canon, John Kramer is highkey ableist (this post will mostly reference the first three movies, especially the first, but if anyone would like to add evidence from later films you’re more than welcome).

Trigger warning in advance for ableism and mentions of suicide, abuse, and self-harm.

First of all let’s look at the elephant in the room: his treatment of Amanda. He abuses her so severely that she develops Stockholm Syndrome, by threatening her life multiple times, making her harm/kill others, forcing her to face the man who ruined her life in the first place, making her emotionally dependent on him then neglecting her as soon as Lynn arrives, and finally, something so awful that I still shake whenever this scene comes up- he sits there and watches as she cuts her wrists open. You can see from her flashbacks- she cuts deep. Probably not deep enough to kill, especially the direction she was cutting, but enough to cause her serious physical and emotional distress as well as probably do some permanent nerve damage (wrists and hands are VERY delicate y’all). And he watches approvingly (as approving as he gets anyway). There’s almost an implication that he told her to do it. Whether she was already self-harming or whether that was the start of her self-harm, we don’t know. Either way this is horrifying, especially since she looks up to him as a father.

(worth noting also that John practically sets up Amanda to be killed, by making her hate Lynn enough to harm her so that Jeff would come in and kill her. Seriously if you think canon!John loves Amanda you need to think about what he does way more carefully.)

Now let’s look at the victims he chooses. If we’re leaving out the events of Jigsaw, that would make his first victim Amanda. Why did he choose her? She was battling drug addiction. Okay, so he wanted to help, right? By... telling her that unless she cut open a human body (which he told her was dead, but was very clearly alive), she would die in less than a minute. She’s so traumatized and surprised to have survived that she dedicates the rest of her life to him.

His other victims, namely Paul and Lynn, he punished simply for being depressed. Paul (razor wire trap- first movie) was taken because he had self-harmed, and John blamed it on him wanting attention? Forcing him to cut himself on barbed wire again and again for a chance to stay alive? What if he was recovering from self-harm and knew that if he crawled through the barbed wire that would be enough to trigger a relapse? And as for Lynn, the crime she committed to earn being tortured with a shotgun at her neck for hours, having her child and husband kidnapped, being forced to perform surgery on her own without the proper equipment or else she would die- was, get this- having depression. That’s the reason she was picked. John cites his particular disgust in her taking depression meds to stay alive- ironically before demanding medical care of this same person.

John’s double standards are truly revolting. He tried to kill himself once, so he dedicates the rest of his life to torturing and killing people who have attempted or considered suicide or self-harm. He doesn’t think he’s doing the right thing either, that’s just what he wants everyone to think. He knows what he’s doing. He’s imposing his twisted morality on the world through his torture experiments.

Okay I know I said I’d stick to the first three but we need to talk about VI. In the first few films, nearly every character had some reason to be trapped (yes many of these were completely bullshit reasons but at least he made some up). In Saw VI, all the traps are set up to test one person, yet ten additional people are placed in traps with their lives in his hands. Many of these people are disabled and placed in such a trap that they wouldn’t be able to survive (for example, the man with COPD being forced to hold his breath longer than a man with healthy lungs).

Now I’ve saved my favorite bit for last. If you’re reading this, you probably know how I feel about Adam. Long story short Leigh Whannell is the light of my life for creating and playing him.

In the original script, John suggests that Adam was suicidal. But this isn’t in the final film, so what is his crime? In the final film, John describes Adam as being apathetic. But if anyone in the room is apathetic, it’s Lawrence, right? Adam is highly emotional and reactive to his surroundings. It’s obvious that he’s not apathetic at all, unless you don’t realize that-

Adam is strongly coded as autistic. I could go into this, but for the sake of all your eyes I’m going to save it for another post. So the moments when we the audience see him at his most emotional, he’s shutting down to process it.

Adam’s crime, that he pays for with his life, is being visually autistic. He’s given no chance to live and used as a pawn to torture Lawrence for the sole reason of not being neurotypical.

So that’s today’s hot Saw discourse it’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m going to bed now.