#i'm not tagging this w character names because i feel like its kind of deranged

[sputnikodin]

this might be a silly question, but i just watches saw iii for the first time and im wondering if youve ever talked about amanda and johns relationship? id love to hear your take on it, as an amanda scholar

hi! congrats on the first saw iii watch, hope you're doing all right, and no, not a silly question at all! in fact i've wanted to talk about this for a while now. i am very tired and this topic makes me very emotional so do not go into this expecting it to be particularly intellectually driven. or organized

shawnee smith has talked about seeing amanda and john as more of a partnership of equals than an apprentice-mentor relationship, and despite the fact that i largely find her takes on amanda solid additions to the character (the self harm, the childhood abuse) i just .... can't agree. once she said she and tobin would take walks discussing philosophy together because they thought that's what john and amanda would do. as interesting as the thought is it's never felt right to me because

i mean. i have to start with the bible verse john wrote on the wall in the reverse bear trap room. matthew 10:39: "whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." (what's actually written on the wall might be different, i quoted the niv, i do not want to go back and look at the wall to check the wording/translation) i think it's really um, interesting, the implication that amanda, specifically, won't actually get her jigsaw-trap-promised new appreciation for life if she just wins her game & survives: she has to lose her life for john's sake in order to actually "find" it. she hasn't actually won when she stumbles outside, newly murderous and bleeding from the mouth - john has moved the goalposts & she'll only really be "saved" if and when she joins and loses herself to him (you will give everything to me / every cell in your body ...)

so like ... start from this. he chooses her to bear the unique burden of his attention, teaching, & eventually legacy. she accepts, thinking ... ? i'd like to think she really thinks he helped her, i'd like to think she wants to help people. i think (& i know this is my own interpretation and not necessarily evidentially supported) she is desperate for a way to comprehend the singularly horrifying experience of waking up abducted and about to die & being made a murderer in a few short minutes, and i think she is also, at this point in her life, craving guidance: any kind of structure, code, role to which to attach and make sense of the world. & i think john saying, hey, think of it this way: i helped you, you can understand this as being helped, and furthermore, you can help other people because of what i put you through, which was, may i remind you, helpful ........ I think it crystallizes in her mind into self-evident truth, the one way forward. may we also remember she is the first known jigsaw survivor & utterly alone

this is the backdrop against which i view her relationship with john. i uh ... god. he wanted a follower and an apprentice specifically so he'd have someone to carry on his work after he died, and also so he'd have some help while he was still kicking. he wanted someone who'd follow his instructions to the letter (notably: NOT someone who would attempt to rise above the jigsaw philosophy to assert their own) and i think he saw amanda as directionless & dependent enough that he could mold her into just that. if i'm being generous then maybe he also saw her stubbornness and ferocity, it'd ... be really nice if he did. BUT regardless.

he chooses her, and he chooses her because there is a role he wants her to play. she accepts, because she wants to play that role but also because she is desperate and alone and trying to shoulder something almost no one has ever dealt with before. to her he says you're exactly what i want, you're not there yet but i see "there" in you; we will bring it out together, you're capable of it now, you're better now. to him she says thank you, i will, i will, i will.

are they father and daughter? kind of. as i mentioned, shawnee & leigh have both said amanda was abused by her father, & obviously john characterizes himself as a father without a child. i see their relationship as acting on all these lost & dropped threads of paternality the way you'd expect it to .... i think the father/daughter bent is one of the most compelling aspects of their relationship and one of the most fucked up ones, too. are they mentor & student? yes, absolutely. something something the old astronomer to his pupil, you have learned the worth of scorn ... there's another dynamic, too, that i find hard to describe dyadically, but it shows through the way amanda in saw iii so often comes so close to outburst or violence & then john commands her to stop and she does. that ... level of obedience. raw power and fury holding itself back meekly for someone who's bedbound & frail

this relationship, with all its weird tenderness, all its care, all the thought and effort john put into its cultivation, into being kind to her, into directing her, into manipulating her, into "saving" her, is predicated on the belief that amanda will successfully transform into Jigsaw 2: Still Jiggin' and become exactly what john wants her to be.

the problem is that it doesn't work like that. amanda is still herself, and she knows it, and john knows it. nobody fucking changes nobody is reborn .... god, the agony of thinking you're a new person now & then every morning you wake up and realize a little harder that you're as miserable and lonely and flawed as before! trying not to look straight at the creeping doubt in the belief system you gave up everything for, because beyond that doubt there is the same old chasm, bigger & darker now. the rifts and uncertainty don't surprise me, the rage doesn't surprise me, the fact that she goes rogue doesn't surprise me at all. i don't know why it surprised john.

i think. what kills me. more than anything. is that he chose her knowing exactly who she was & then deemed her a failure for being exactly who she was. going back 2 the bible verse on the wall ............... john was the arbiter of this change, this "rebirth"; he was the one who undertook the responsibility of remaking amanda in his own image. & in this way he is the one who failed

but the way he frames it, she failed. wayward daughter? mediocre student? beast that snapped its chain one too many times? or woman with decades of trauma behind her, charged with the crime of failing to extinguish herself for an ideology that she does not believe in anymore, for a man who styles himself a father, mentor, adjudicator but is really just a man?

i want to think john loves her. i don't know if he does. he cares for her, certainly. their relationship was at the beginning predicated on amanda carrying his legacy: i WANT to think that, at the end, he cared about more in her than just her instrumentality to his plan. but in the end i care so much less about that than about the woman who dies alone on a cold floor minutes after realizing the person she has put so much trust and faith into has judged her & found her unworthy. who promised to save her & then blamed her for her inability to be saved