#I like my fair share of horrible villains. I love Rafe from Uncharted 4 & he’s a certified piece of shit.

[ziracona]

So last night I wound up reading Amanda's wiki and It made me kind of sad for her, because it very much sounds like she was suffering from stockholme syndrome of a kind there, to me, atleast. Which makes me wonder, what do you think of the pig/amanda? What's your Amanda like in your stories? Do you think she had any potential for redemption (with A LOT of work)? I guess I just wanna hear your thoughts on her character because ur always rly good at it?? - Sleepy

Yeah, whoever wrote the Saw wiki loves Amanda and hates Hoffman and it’s genuinely hilarious. They make a lot of assumptions (like that her motive for killing Adam after he won his game was mercy killing, which is a throughly unconfirmed opinion), and use the most sympthetic & extreme language possible. I’ve watched all the Saw films, and as a character, Amanda is a very enjoyable villain, but as a person? She’s a truly awful human being. (Side note—this typed last— So, mentioning certain Saw characters sends me flying into a rage like a D&D berserker, so this is gonna get angry as hell, but 0 of it is at you. I love you. This is at the Jigsaw squad. WHO I FUCKING HATE. Ahem. Anyway. Felt like the level of unbridled and sudden fury needed a heads up lol.) It’s not Stockholm syndrome. In Saw one, she’s a victim who is put in a reverse beartrap and forced to either die, or cut the key out of the stomach of a paralyzed by drugs but very alive (which she knew) other kidnap victim, whom she cut open and killed. After enduring that trauma and barely surviving, she immediately accepted John’s offer to join him. She was not forced, she was not tricked. He asked, and because she wanted to feel special and important, she agreed to inflict suffering she knew goddamn well the horrible level of on others first hand, and went willingly. She is self-centered to her core, and became dependent on and infatuated with John, and obsessed with his approval. She kidnapped Adam and Lawrence with him, who were kidnapped for fuckall reason (literally John just thought photography was pathetic) and for almost cheating on his wife (lol this was John’s ‘stated’ reason—his real reason was John is the world’s pettiest bitch, and Lawrence was the doctor who told him he had cancer. I’m not fkn kidding he’s that level of petty self-absorbed, self-righteous bastard) respectively. Then killed Adam after he won his game, which should have given him freedom but John reneged on like he always does like the pissy little bitch he is, Amanda killed him for reasons up to speculation. However, given John usually tests people who win a second time or tries to get them to join or some bullshit, it’s more plausible to assume her motive was seeing him as a threat than that it was mercy killing, and it’s only stated in-film to be an emotion based decision, not her actual movtive. Everyone’s opinion on this action is just that—opinion. With varying degrees of factual basis behind the educated level of educated guess.

In Saw 2, she helps John kidnap a bunch of drug addicts like herself who all got false arrests by the same officer at one time or another, along with a poor fucking 15 year old whose crime is having that cop for a dad. She then spent the next two hours watching people whose only crime was drug use, like herself, die horribly of organ deterioration, knowing at any time she could have stopped it and saved them all because she knew how to get the antidotes. Bitch even holds one girl in her arms and stokes her head and pretends to care about her while she hacks up deteriorated lung and blood and fucking dies, when at any moment she could have chosen to let her live. Literally no one should be more sympathetic to them than her. She knows how addicted to drugs feels, and the help you need. Anyway, she doesn’t, she lets them die and plays with them, and then when it’s to her, the 15 year old—who multiple times saves or helps her when hurt by other participants, and is nothing but kind—and one other man, the man shows up to kill her to get an antidote, and the poor fucking 15 year old child kills him with a saw to save her, traumatizing himself to a breakdown afterwords, and instead of being even thankful, she attacks and knocks him out, ties him up and attaches an oxygen tank so he won’t suffocate, and locks him in a fucking like tiny ass safe to be a game piece for another trial and leaves him there. His dad, who admittedly needs to serve jail time but isn’t a fucking murderer at least & does love his son, shows up distraught looking for his kid he’s afraid is dead, and she sneak attacks and takes him down, then leaves him chained up in a nasty lost bathroom to starve slowly to death, and doesn’t even do him the decency of telling him his kid isn’t dead. When he breaks his foot to get free and comes hobbling wounded after her, she sneak attacks again and he nearly wins, but she fucks up his broken foot and starts to leave, then comes back and beats him (she thinks) to death becuase he said she would never be Jigsaw, and she’s that petty and proud. Kid never gets to know what happened to his dad, and even alive, will definitely die young from the complications one, you know, gets from almost dying of chemical organ deterioration.

In Saw 3, the main victim is a man whose kid was lost in a hit and run. Jigsaw has Amanda kidnap his wife because she’s a surgeon and also was once not as sympathetic as he thought she should be when talking to him about his cancer at the hospital (I’m not even fucking exaggerating—side note, I will beat John Kramer to death myself with my huge fucking meat fists and laugh as I watch his bones crumble to dust). This poor bitch just lost a kid, then separated from her husband because he was a fucking mess consumed with revenge against the poor college kid who accidentally hit his son & totally withdrew from the world, and she wakes up with a collar filled with shotgun shells basically a 360 gun blow off your head collar deal on, and Amanda wheeling her around in the wheelchair she’s tied to. They tell her if she keeps John alive until the person being tested finishes his test, she can go free. The whole movie, Amanda keeps trying to convince John to kill the poor woman even though she complies just because she’s a throughly selfish, petty, conceited, self-pitying bastard with no regard for others, and wants this “Bitch” to die for fun. She feels she’s a threat for John’s attentions, and John isn’t even romantically inclined toward her, but she’s obsessed and doesn’t care. Amanda decides between Saws 2 and 3 that people aren’t fixable—even though she herself was supposedly “helped” by her Jigsaw game and this is hypocritical as fuck—and just starts straight up fucking torture murdering for fun. To the point even John thinks she has to be stopped. Like if John fucking Kramer thinks you’ve gone to far? Jesus help you because no one else can. She still does the torture, but instead of like, chopping off your own hand with a paring knife and getting to live, you chop it off and then still slowly get your head crushed between two beams being screwed closer and closer together. She kills Kerry for fuckall reason except she wants to (Kerry is a detective who did jack shit wrong—she was just on the case. It’s utter bullshit). Kidnaps her, straps a thing with hooks in her ribs that will tear out her rib cage when a timer runs out, and kill her that way, and had her hung up above the ground tied by chains, and tells her if she burns her hand up in a bottle of acid to get the key at the bottom which is hard period in the suit—never mind losing the hand—she can live. And Kerry fucking does, ruins her hand, unlocks the lock, and the suit won’t come off becuase the cunt rigged it. Then Amanda shows up to watch her die for fun just to smile smugly at her and watch her fear. Because she’s a fucking soulless, sadistic, evil, self-centered, self-important asshole.

Obsessed dad let’s a fucking bystander whose only crime was seeing a hit and run and running off freeze to death stripped naked and sprayed with water in a freezer slowly, saves a judge who gave too weak a sentence to the hit and run kid after the man begs, and then lets the poor fucking college kid who did it and already feels awful get his arms twisted till they snap off, legs twisted till the same, and then his head twisted around back so far it twist snap kills him. The rack is fucking beyond inhumane death. Amanda monitors this while threading Lynn (the poor doctor lady) for fun and crying over poow wittwe John who is dying of cancer (thank you god for doing what we couldn’t), and being miserable. Eventually, Hoffman sends her a letter saying if she doesn’t kill Lynn, he’ll tell John that she was one of the people there to steal drugs the night his wife got injured and miscarried (he probably already knew 🙄), and becuase Amanda cares about nothing more than Amanda, she fucking monolgauges at John about how special and sad she is how he needs to fix her and she’s a murderer but she doesn’t care because you know—she’s depressed : ( so she gets a pass for her self she’s UwU sad so her poor little crisis can have a massive torture body count bc she’s that special UwU and why is Lynn not gonna die even though she did her job!??? So unfair! No one changes kill them all but tell me I’m special I’m symapthetic because I’m sad and that makes it fun for me to tear people’s ribs out :’( —and then she fucking shoots Lynn becuase she cares less about an innocent woman’s life than the potential for John to be mad at her :’-( you know—such symapthetic stuff! And then John is like “Ok then fkn die :’(“ and Jeff/unstable dad/Lynn’s husband runs in and shoots her and then kills John.

Anyway! I fucking hate Amanda with a passion, and John. I cannot stand humans who hurt each other for fun, especially when they target those who most need help. But above all I cannot abide a person who is a sadistic, selfish, wholly self-absorbed fuck of a human, and refuses to take any responsibility for their actions or admit how fucking bad they are and has the goddamn nerve to act like a victim. Like if you’re going to be an evil son of a bitch, at least have the decency to admit it. If you’re a self-pitying “im uwu special and sad and better and more important than everyone else” —double points for “& becuase I am attractive I can get away with being a soulless shit without any being held accountable” from fandom or the media itself, tripple if from both—? I will kill you myself. I will rip out your eyes and chew on them. I will kill my self on a bomb to take you too. I will chew off my left arm for the sole purpose of getting to beat you to death with it. The wiki writer bends over back so bad they’re gonna need a brace the rest of their life to make her sound sympthetic, but they’re just a fan. She’s not. At all. She doesn’t have Stockholm, and I see people say “she got manipulated and used : (“ all the time, but without fail so far it’s people who think she’s hot and just want a reason to stan that because somehow a hot white woman with short hair even if canonically infatuated with John Kramer is somehow both a lesbian, and excusable for every horrible torture murder she ever did to feel uwu special in her depressed sad times. She wasn’t manipualated. It happened fast, she wasn’t courted into it, and she didn’t even hesitate to say yes. He offered her an out, made sure she was serious, and she stayed. And then she escalated to the point John took her out to stop her, because it was worse than what he wanted to do. I enjoyed her as a villain but as a person I fucking hate Amanda, and don’t really want to see her get another chance. Bastard doesn’t deserve one. I can’t say there’s no continuum in which she could never improve or be redeemed becuase who the fuck knows, and I like to think there’s a smidgen of hope for anyone, but that said, I do think the more evil you willfully do, the more you lose your humanity, and you can hit a point there’s just no person left. So. Anyway, hah, I don’t think she’s redeemable and frankly don’t want her redeemed. I want to burn her to death myself if I have to die that way too. Also! This was a wildly angry answer but none of it is directed at you. That wiki writer does make her sound symapthetic, I’ve read the wiki too—just I go into a blind rage any time John or Amanda is even mentioned and it takes me a half hour to come back down. I fly into a rage. If I ever go into anaphylactic shock, all a friend has to do is start mentioning the names of Saw villains and my adrenaline will start pumping like jet fuel and I’ll be fine. I just have a whole lot of righteously just rage at horrible awful self-righteous self-absorbed malicious manipulative dehumanizing self-pity bastards who take 0 responsibility for their evil or admit it, and Amanda & John are two at the way top of that rage list. It’s a dark but powerful headspace when I think of them. I become very powerful...but also very enraged. Lol, anyway, here’s the breakdown you didn’t need, but it is throrough!