Spoilers for every Saw movie, Psycho (1960), as well as the nonexistant version of Project Eden's Garden. Structural spoilers for And Then There Were None.
On May 1st of 2026, following the cancellation of Project Eden's Garden (the golden goose of the Danganronpa fandom, now cancelled given the multiple cases of child endangerement within the developer team), a writer known on twitter by the alias of "Rebus" posted their draft for the backstory of the game's mastermind. It can be read here.
This writer claims to have had influence over many other plot points that made their way into the "final" game, even if the backstory described in the document was vetoed out by the other developers. For the sake of this analysis, I will analyze the backstory described within the document, given it not only is fully written out as the script for an ingame scene, but it is also a piece of art which led me to reconsider a topic that had been on my mind for a while.
The Culprit as The Arbiter
There is no such thing as a motiveless crime. Or a motiveless action by any human being for that matter. Even if the motive may be something as primitive as the desire to eat, people still act on motives and deliberate choices at every point in their lives. This becomes the basis of most mystery novels, in which the culprit's motive for comitting the crime is treated as a crucial element in regards to the full picture of what a mystery is. After all, the process of solving a mystery is the process of creating your own version of how the story played out, fabricating a version of the events in your head that can only be proven wrong by the arrival of new evidence.
And that is crucial in how the culprit is presented to the audience as a character. A culprit who commits crimes based on a petty motive such as an inheritance dispute will be interpreted as unjustifiable, while a culprit who commits a crime based on revenge for the death of their friend may be more easily understood by the audience.
Or, as I would like to reframe it, a culprit who commits a crime based on a noble motive such as securing the wealth to provide for their family may be seen as justifiable, while a culprit who commits a crime in revenge for the death of their criminal partner may be seen as wicked. A fictional narrative can only capture a small fraction of the diegetic reality of the text, how much of it is captured will depend entirely on the nature of the text: What its goals and its contents are, and how those are presented to the audience. A culprit can be given any motivation which can be displayed in any manner that can be sympathetic to any member of the audience, or all, or none of them. The author only has as much control on how the audience perceives its characters as it has on the lens on which the narrative is cast.
And it is in that dynamic that the detective plays a crucial role.
For the detective's role, mechanically, is to be a figure who presents a crucial perspective within the narrative that can be proven, disproven, or deliberately left ambiguous. Within the traditional mystery novel, the detective is the character who operates as the arbiter of the narrative itself, the force of god which appears as a crime is comitted and reveals the truth behind the incident. This expectation can, of course, be subverted as a manner of metatextual critique of the structure of a mystery novel. But any subversion operates on the basis of the audience's understanding of the detective's role as the arbiter of the culprit's sentence.
One of these subversions comes in the making of a closed circle, in which the culprit themselves is given the role of the arbiter.
And Then There Were None is a massively influential novel by Agatha Christie, which has as its core premise that 10 people are led into an island in which their fate is sealed. Our culprit, going by the name of U.N. Owen, has called them all here with the purpose of enacting justice against each of these people for the crimes that they have comitted. This is, of course, a deliberate inversion of the detective narrative. Similar to the previously described premise of a culprit enacting revenge against the victim, the cast of 10 different victims are all contextualized as being culprits of crimes that they comitted long before their arrival on the island, all of which serve as justification for the culprit to enact justice upon them in the form of their own crime. Just as the detective in a traditional mystery novel would expose the nature of the culprit and hand them their sentence, U.N. Owen exposes the nature of all of their victims before picking them off one by one, culminating in a final "deduction" sequence in which the truth behind the case is laid down by this mastermind, officially giving them the role which the detective is given as the arbiter of each character's sentence.
This structure has become massively popular and spawned its own subgenre within mysteries of ATTWN-likes, from novels such as The Decagon House Murders, which takes the novel's premise and applies it to a group of mystery enthusiasts from Japan being killed in revenge for the crime in which they are all seen as culpable of (but which none of them seem to remember), to the Danganronpa games themselves, in which 16 students are placed in a death game where the mastermind (using the guise of a bear-shaped mascot known as Monokuma, a comedic twist on the naturally ominous nature of the mastermind's aliases in a closed circle) hands motives preying on the characters' weaknesses in order to convince them to commit murder, and in turn force their peers to play the role of detectives in trying to figure out the culprit's identity. Of course, not all closed circle narratives fall into this category, but a large ammount of them play within the precedent of utilizing the mastermind as the arbiter in order to put them in a situation where the morality of a mystery narrative is deliberately muddied.
People are likely to be sympathetic on the idea of justice, and retribution against someone for the wrongdoings which they caused. Punitive justice is a tool which very few people in reality have access to, but which embodies the heroic ideals that people are taught to uphold in making sure that their rights are not disrespected by other human beings. It is the reason why most people believe some level of law enforcement is necessary, as the mere idea of punishment for those who enact injustice is seen as not only a tool of intimidation against potential culprits, but also as security for people who see themselves as potential victims. The idea that there is someone who will set things right when something bad occurs in your life is quite appealing, and it is for that reason that painting the person who enacts that justice as the mastermind behind a series of murders works well as a narrative hook. Because it shows you how an enforcer of the same justice that you might abide by is willing to do things that are equally as, if not more morally abhorrent than the crimes you may be a victim of. It is a reminder, however dramatized, that justice is, in of itself, a motive for crime.
With this in mind, lets analyze the character of John Kramer. Better known as The Jigsaw Killer.
The Jigsaw Killer as The Culprit as The Arbiter
Every Saw movie has some variation of the following premise: Someone is kidnapped and put in a deadly trap. The kidnapper speaks to them and gives a denounment explaining their failing as a person, how they have not "appreciated their lives", a phrase which is used as shorthand to refer to the victim doing something that is seen by the kidnapper as an affront to their status as a human being, be that falling into a drug addiction or extorting people utilizing the front of a legitimate healthcare business. In response to this person's (metaphorical or literal) crime, the kidnapper forces them to play a game in which they must escape from a trap in which they have been placed. This trap is usually an ironic twist of their crime, such as forcing the drug addict to dig through a pit of needles in order to obtain a key, it is the culprit's attempt to highlight the severity of their sin by making them experience something so awful that the outcome ends up as one of two options:
- The victim is killed in the trap, having failed to perform the task given to them and, in such, being deemed unworthy of continuing to live as they were.
- The victim escapes the trap, in which case the culprit congratulates them and hopes that this experience will allow the victim to "appreciate their lives". Letting go of their sinful ways as they return home traumatized, but hopefully able to rebuild their lives.
Of course, anyone who has any knowledge of human psychology knows that the second option rarely has its intended effect. In fact, the 7th movie itself highlights this by having a scene in which former victims of The Jigsaw Killer all reunite and share their traumatizing experiences, all speaking in a manner that makes it clear that the traps which they survived only had the effect of further damaging their psyche. The few people who seem to "improve" from experiencing the traps go on to become assistants or copycats of The Jigsaw Killer themselves, such as Dr. Gordon, the protagonist of the 1st movie who returns 5 movies later to act as the surprise mastermind behind the events of the current movie. What The Jigsaw Killer does is picking people who may sometimes be doing harm onto others, but are more often than not just self-destructive individuals whom The Jigsaw Killer is so disgusted by that he sees himself fit to act as arbiter in their fate. It has been made a joke within the community that The Jigsaw Killer's motives for going after its victims are extremely inconsistent and often disproportionate once the crimes of his victims are put in comparison. But in my opinion, that is the thing which makes The Jigsaw Killer a compelling take on the killer as the arbiter.
Lets talk about The Jigsaw Killer's backstory for further context as to why.
John Kramer was a talented engineer and architecht who worked on urban development, building low-income housing for the disenfranchised. One night, his pregnant wife suffered a miscarriage after a drug addict slammed a door on her, the first step that led him on a path of revenge against those who had let themselves go to the point they became a nuisance to the livelyhood of thers. Years later, he would get his brain cancer diagnosis, which would force him to come to terms with his own mortality and, in turn, seek to make others do the same. Hence his new identity as The Jigsaw Killer (a name he never used, but which others assigned to him), a man who would seek out those who did not "appreciate their lives" and force them to confront the same horrors which he confronted.
Its very important to John that others understand that, in his perspective, what he does it not murder. It is placing the victims in a position where they have the choice to either escape from their old lives or die with their own vices. There is a scene in Saw V in which, after capturing one of his copycats, he reprimands him for trapping the victim in a scenario in which no escape was possible. It was a deliberate murder, which John saw as something that went against his modus operandi. The copycat, in their imitation of The Jigsaw Killer's methods, had deliberately omitted any path to "redemption", because what that copycat saw was not choice, but a method of torture in which the victim struggles to free themselves from what traps them, only to be killed by said method anyways, never managing to pull off that last second escape which the editing leads you to believe is possible.
It is my belief that the copycat is right.
As I said, John's philosophy has been the subject of many jokes within the community. He will treat CEOs which profit off the systems created to exploit the poor in the same manner as the poor that have been exploited and have in turn gained a drug addiction. He will give some of his victims arduous, long-term tests in which they have the lives of others put at their hands, yet will leave those others with no methods to free themselves from their own predicment. If you look at the history of his victims, you will realize that as time goes on, his choice of victim becomes less impartial, as his "arbiter of justice" persona would lead you to believe, and more motivated towards anyone who has wronged him in his past. Such as the frequently-referenced healthcare CEO that denied him a cancer treatment (Saw VI); The man who made a career as an author out of pretending to be one of his escaped victims (Saw 3D); The man who sold a faulty motorcycle to his beloved, yet unnamed nephew (Jigsaw). Very often one of the protagonists of the movie will be given an extended flashback in which it is shown how they, in particular, did something which John took as an insult. It is my belief that the text intentionally presents this contradiction within John's character so that, we, as the audience, can see that his attempt at portraying himself as an arbiter is nothing but his own coping mechanism at his lack of power over his own fate. The Jigsaw Killer is the vice that consumes John Kramer's life, just as his victims are consumed by other vices. It is a justice he enacts in the saddistic manner of elaborate traps that have the goal of torturing the victim, in which escape is only possible after the victim commits an act that is usually so drastic that even death is preferable compared to the torment they would have to experience to stay alive. Despite his claims to the contrary, no one could design these traps to be as entertaining as they are if they did not enjoy the act of torture to some extent. Yes, it is a result of the genre of the Saw movies as thrillers made to shock and awe audiences with their gore and brutality. But that genre twist is what, in turn, characterizes the central antagonist of this story.
And yet, despite that, there is still the prevailing argument that Jigsaw is justified in his actions. That the justice which he enacts, sadistic as it may be, or precisely because of how sadistic it is, is a justified response to the crimes of his victims.
This is what I call the titular Jigsaw Problem. It is the result of the antagonist within the story having their described motives, which are often contradicted by their real actions, be seen as a valid justification for the disproportionate nature of their actions. It is not something that I would say is a result of a lack of "media literacy" per say, but more so the personal judging of an audience member, and often a writer, in taking a character's cotnradictory goal as the baseline for how their actions and its effects should be judged. The Jigsaw Problem is what happens when a story's interpretation takes an arbiter as a legitimate arbiter of the narrative's themes, rather than as a culprit made to evoke said idea in an attempt to deconstruct that interpretation.
Once again stating, I call it a "problem" in the sense that it is a question which one must come to their own answer of. There are many scenarios like this in which I stand by saying that the culprit is justified, and there are many scenarios in which I think the story's author is showcasing their own biases by portraying the culprit as justified. John Kramer, The Jigsaw Killer, is simply the most culturally relevant example to give in regards to the modern iteration of this discussion.
With that in mind, lets talk about the unused draft of Project Eden's Garden,
Cassidy Amber as The Culprit as The Arbiter
As I said before, Project Eden's Garden was cancelled earlier this year, and with only a single chapter completed, the leaks among the development team allowed the fanbase to piece together parts of the narrative that will never come to be. Among them was the reveal that Cassidy Amber, the Ultimate Pro Gamer who is loud, brash and serves as a play on the archetypical personality traits associated with both popular streamers and online communists, was none other than the mastermind behind the killing game. The one that was responsible for organizing the circunstances in which all of these characters would kill each other one by one.
It was a shock to some, not as much of a shock to others, and in the end, it was hard to say how much sense it made for the narrative, given how the audience only had 2/7ths of the planned storyline to work with. But in any case, a version of her backstory was given, and that version provided a very interesting lens to analyze the concept of this character as the arbiter of everyone's fate.
Cassidy Amber was a girl in a difficult financial situation, whose aunt had been killed in a tragic event and who grew up idolizing her role as the Ultimate Teacher's Aide, going as far as to create an imaginary version of her aunt in her head which she communicated with. She was eventually given the title of Ultimate (a title handed by the government to denote those of high prestige within their field), and in turn started to dream of building her own academy in which likeminded Ultimates could come together and hone their talents, as opposed to the unjust world she lived in where those with talent were stuck in their own financial situations. After proposing her idea, she met with two financers, who would provide her with the funding and assistance necessary for her to continue with the project of building her own Garden of Eden. Funding that, as she found out, came from her financers acting as anti-Ultimate terrorists who would assasinate other Ultimates before robbing them of their money and using it for their own goals. A truth that disturbed Cassidy, but only motivated her further to build an academy in which no bloodshed would be deemed necessary.
As time moved on however, Cassidy's plans for an academy of Ultimates would be shut down by the sway of her peers, deeming it that elite talents such as themselves should not open their reach any further. In that despair, she would come to the place in which her aunt died, in which she would discover a horrifying truth: Her aunt, alongside the two financers of her project, had come to a previous competiton of Ultimate Students and deliberately attempted to sabotage her competitors in order to secure their own win. With her aunt being the one who escalated things into what would become a massacre, with herself included as one of the 14 victims.
The truth about the twisted determination that her loving aunt had in trying to support her family would push Cassidy over the edge, leading to her confronting the imaginary version that existed within her mind, and ultimately deciding to follow through on the orders that imaginary figure gave her: Enact the same crme again. As punishment for the arrogance of the Ultimates, she would become the arbiter of their fate and force them to kill each other until their own lack of power was proven as they were reduced to being just as fallible as any other normal people which they saw as below them. With her two financers acting as hosts for the death game, she would join as an unassuming member of their group, and maybe, just maybe, find hope and friendship by living with the victims of her own crime.
Cassidy interests me as a character. Because the way in which The Jigsaw Problem manifests in her writing is something that I think is worth studying in regards to what the psychological makeup of this kind of mastermind is.
- She sees herself as an arbiter delivering punishment on those whom she deems corrupt, people that range from (would you look at that) wealthy CEOs to people simply employed in their regular jobs and careers. And yet, her motive for doing so, by her own admission, is to make others feel the despair in which she felt upon realizing that the things which she idolized were no more than childish dreams. It is a motivation that makes sense as a reason to put Wolfgang (the son of the third survivor of the massacre, who went into a spiral of self-destructive depression following his parents' death, not unlike the usual victim of a Saw movie) in the scenario that forces him to face the same disillusionment that she faced, but seems flimsy as a reason to force people otherwise unrelated to this history to fall into a similar pit of despair. After all, if they are meant to fall into despair by having their own perception of each other be broken, then the one who is causing those idealistic selves to be shattered is none other than herself.
- Going further on Wolfgang's character, Cassidy explicitly calls him a "little princeling" and often refers to him as a spoiled brat who could not deal with anything in his real life, and in turn turned his life to scamming others as a basic mean of income once his wealth was denied from him. This attitude seems to ignore the reason of why this wealth was denied, given that the ones who stole his father's money were none other than her own financers. Cassidy is going to the house of one of the victims of her plan, aware that person is one of the many victims of the crimes which her group commits regularly as they rob multiple people of their stable income, and yet the most she does is chastise said victim of her crimes for how disgusting his living condition and behavior is.
- The afternotes try to claim that it is important that Cassidy is portrayed as someone who has taken all these choices by her own volition, and yet the story puts a shocking emphasis on the tulpa of her aunt that she has created in her head. It is her companion, her assistant in solving the mysteries, and also the one who comes to her in moments of crisis to inspire her to commit the most drastic of her acts. If a usual take of The Culprit as The Arbiter has them placing themselves in a godlike position to remove themselves from the moral constraints in which they would judge others, Cassidy seems to use her imaginary aunt as a figure which compels her to act, in such a manner that she can both claim to desire a happy future with her victims-turned-classmates, yet also say that she is incapable of stopping the massacre that is about to happen, and that all she has worked will be for naught. Cassidy asks as if there is another god-like force that is employing her to commit these crimes, and that were it her way, she would have let go of this murder plan a long time ago. And yet, she is the one in complete control, ordering the murders of all these people. It is a contradiction that not only goes unchallenged by the narrative presented in the document, but further proven as a contradiction by the author's reflection of Cassidy as being someone in control of her own actions, but who is still seen as justifiable in her motives. It is understandable that the aunt she imagines in her head is meant to be read as metaphorical, and not a serious display of tulpamancy or sign of untreated mental illness, but within the context of a game where this kind of metaphorical storytelling is seldom used, the end result comes off more akin to a Norman Bates type character whose murderous acts are executed by forces they deem beyond their control, but which are figments of their own shattered mind.
- Cassidy's flaw comes from her idealization of the Ultimates (a system that is taken from Danganronpa, a series in which said system was used as a direct satire of the fascist-meritocratic ambitions of the japanese education system) as beacons of light, and her desire to build an academy that could foster these talents in others, thus creating an enviroment in which anyone with talent can rise through their societal position and be seen as an ubermensch in their field. Her disollusionment with the concept of Ultimate talent comes upon learning of how said title corrupts those who are branded it into thinking that they are above others, which led to the massacre crucial to her backstory. And yet, afterword still claims that this assertion of her is something that can be proven wrong, and that such a system can still be fostered in a positive way. It continues the trend within Project Eden's Garden of taking the original series' satire of the absurdity of meritocracies in an effort to expose the ridiculous nature of such a concept, and instead fully leaning on it as a fantasy where anyone can be allowed into the elite group of people whom are suited with the power of shaping the direction of society. Coincidence or not, it becomes quite damning that the main antagonist of a storyline which ends by saying that you too, can foster your own healthy group of elites, is none other than the character modelled after communist ideals.
As a whole, the end result to me was that Cassidy Amber, as a character, was a deeply interesting study on The Jigsaw Problem being put into full effect. By replicating the fundamental structure of The Culprit as The Arbiter, yet treating it independently of its social critique, it ends up making a character that, in its attempt to be sympathetic, comes off as self-contradictory at best and deeply hypocritical at worst. Cassidy Amber cannot be a culprit, or an arbiter, because either of these would make her too unpalatable as a heroine. Which was the original role her character was designed to fulfill, yet which the team abandoned for reasons that have yet to be made public.
This is a draft which will forever go unused. I cannot speak on if the final product would be better or worse, but I do think this was a read interesting enough that it warranted an analysis of it.
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