John Kramer

He is a former civil engineer who after helplessly watching his wife be assaulted by a drug addict, which resulted in the death of his unborn son,decided to become a serial killer who targeted those who harmed others. John's philosophy is that those who damage and harm others do not deserve to live a fruitful life themselves, and must be stopped at any cost. He thus makes murder machines and traps, in which his victims must either mutilate themselves or die.
He is aided on his schemes by his many apprentices, including Amanda Young, Mark Hoffman, Lawrence Gordon and Logan Nelson (but few of his apprentices betrayed and deceived him like Amanda Young, who shot Dr. Lynn Denlon by letting her mental health issues take control of her after she helped to keep Jigsaw alive by removing the tumor from his brain and have a brain surgery and not listening to Jigsaw's orders, thus failing her second and last test after her first test, The Reverse Beartrap). John is ultimately killed by his final personal victim, Jeff Denlon, who slashes his jugular open with a saw.
== History ==
John Kramer was a successful civil engineer and architect. Along with his friend and lawyer, Art Blank, he founded the Urban Renewal Group, a foundation dedicated to property development for low-income people under the motto "Four walls build a home." The company bought up abandoned real estate and renovated them into low-cost housing. The first building purchased and fixed up by the group was the Gideon Meatpacking Plant at 11235 Blake Drive. At one point in his life, John married a woman named Jill Tuck and supported her work at the Homeward Bound Clinic, an ambulant recovery clinic for addicts under the motto "Cherish your Life." During a party at the clinic sponsored by an insurance company named Umbrella Health, he became acquainted with William Easton, Umbrella's manager. As they talked about their work, William presented him with a mathematical formula he had developed to decide which people would get insured by Umbrella. While William was visibly proud of it, John questioned this business policy because it put William in a position to decide about his clients' life and death. According to John, this business practice completely ignored the clients' will to live, which he deemed the most crucial element of human nature. However, despite their disagreements, John himself eventually became a client of Umbrella.
Besides his professional career, John's private life took a happier turn in 1994 as he and Jill were expecting their first child. John, who had already meticulously planned that their son should be born during the Chinese Year of the Pig, also gave him his name, Gideon, inspired by his first building. Sometime later, John obtained a workshop, which he proudly presented to Jill. On this occasion, he also showed her an old clock, which was a part of a deal he had made. The clock greatly fascinated him because it still worked, even though it was almost 300 years old. As a surprise for Jill, he also presented her two homemade gifts for their son - a child's bed and a wooden ventriloquist puppet. Despite their happiness, John soon started to worry about Jill's safety, who continued to work at the clinic even during the late months of her pregnancy. During an incident at the clinic, John had to interrupt a brawl between two patients named Cecil Adams and Gus Colyard. The two of them got into an argument when Cecil vociferously complained about the long waiting time, subsequently causing Gus to slap him in the face. After having been separated from each other, Cecil pulled a knife from his pocket. Therefore, John tried to calm him down. When Cecil angrily asked him about the reason for his intervention, John merely answered that Cecil would soon become a problem for everyone around him due to his reckless behavior. Even though Cecil finally put the knife away, John's worries about Jill's safety would soon turn out to be justified.
One night in the fall of 1994, John sat in his car and waited for Jill outside the clinic when he was approached by Addison Corday, a young prostitute, who offered him her company. However, John declined her offer and told her to go home as a beautiful girl like her should not do such work. Shortly afterward, he suddenly noticed how Cecil stormed out of the clinic and ran away after he had tried to rob Jill. John immediately entered the building and found Jill squatting on the floor after Cecil had accidentally slammed a doorknob into her stomach. Even though he took Jill to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, where one of the nurses, Deborah, immediately took care of them, the doctors could not save their unborn child's life. One of them, Dr. Steve, eventually delivered John the sad news. While John sat at Jill's bed and held her hand, she told him that she only wanted to help the people at her clinic. John, however, bitterly answered that they could only save themselves. After Gideon's death, John suffered from severe depression, which ultimately caused him to withdraw from his wife and the Urban Renewal Group. When Art Blank asked Jill about John's whereabouts, she helped him look for her husband, and they went to the latter's workshop together. While Art curiously looked at some blueprints and drawings on a table, Jill suddenly saw John sitting on a chair in a corner and asked him not to get angry with her for bringing Art to the workshop. When turning towards his partner, Art accidentally knocked the wooden ventriloquist doll that John had built for his unborn child off the table. He asked John about his condition and offered his condolences to him. However, he also tried to convince John to continue his work for the Urban Renewal Group because forty low-income families were already waiting to move into the houses they planned to restore. John, who was angry about his visit, told him to leave. After initially hesitating, Art gave in and asked John to call him once he felt better. Moments later, Jill left, too, and reminded John that she also suffered from the loss of Gideon. Once he was alone, he picked up the wooden puppet from the floor and stroked its hair, wistfully thinking about his lost child. His blunted affect eventually led to his divorce from Jill. Furthermore, he asked her not to come back to him again.
Shortly afterward, John's physical condition worsened. When he went to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, the renowned oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon diagnosed him with colon cancer and a frontal lobe tumor. However, during an earlier visit to the hospital, one of the residents, Dr. Logan Nelson, made a careless mistake and inadvertently mixed up John's x-rays with those of another patient, Alex Rubinstein. Therefore, his cancer had further evolved and was no longer curable at the time of its diagnosis. Thoroughly depressed, John ultimately tried to end his life by driving his car off a cliff. Contrary to his expectations, he survived the crash. At this moment, John decided he wanted to live. Severely injured, he crawled out of the wreck and pulled a jagged piece of metal out of his body. Thereby, he realized that he had only learned to cherish his life when his death had been imminent. Because of this, John chose to spend the remaining time of his life testing other people's will to live, hoping that this would convince them to value their lives and the lives of those around them. However, his newly discovered will to live could not reunite him and Jill again, and therefore, he continued to ignore her attempts to contact him.
He has caused pain and death to many others, taken in many apprentices, and made many traps. After he got killed, the legacy of his devices have been none other than deadly....
== Personality ==
John Kramer believes that human beings have an instinctual will to live in the face of death and that years of evolution have caused their survival instinct to dull and now, people are unable to appreciate their lives. After losing his unborn child and getting diagnosed with cancer, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, which, as he claimed, opened his eyes about the human race. Now a changed man, he vowed to test everyone's will to live for the greater good. As Jigsaw, Kramer targets those he considers to be ungrateful to live, including criminals and people with extreme personal issues.
Though the nature of his tests are incredibly brutal, Kramer shows no enjoyment in the suffering of his victims. Instead, he believes that it will help them re-evaluate themselves, as most of his victims have already hit the rock-bottom in their lives. He is deeply sympathetic to surviving test subjects such as Lawrence Gordon after he amputated his leg to escape and roots that they live. This sympathy was also shown when he was saddened by Cecilia killing Gabriella, despite Gabriella having passed her test and his wish for her to be taken to the hospital.
However, Kramer takes a small amount of enjoyment in his tests as he smiled when hearing the screams of the imprisoned detective Matthews (who previously beat Kramer to near-death, so maybe he was happy to hear him screaming for assaulting him) and targeting the corrupt William Easton for his apprentice Mark Hoffman to test after his death when he refused to treat his cancer despite just claims his mission could never be personal (though it might not have been and he simply wanted to break Easton's biased philosophy, as John wasn't the only victim of William's policy). John also targeted the Pederson Group after they had scammed him, to prevent them from targeting anyone else, though the consequences of this game did seem to reinforce his views on the Games never being personal.
Kramer is also deeply distasteful for killing as he does not consider himself a murderer due to always giving his victims a chance to escape their fate. On a technicality, Kramer became too weak to even put test subjects in their tests and relied on his apprentices to do most manual labor for him such as abducting and implicating victims, so he rarely participated in even second-degree murder.
Though John saw his games as his life work and wished for them to continue after his death, his main reason for recruiting his apprentices, he also showed that he was ready to abandon his new work if he believed he could survive. When he was tricked into believing his cancer had been cured, he disposed of one of his sketches of traps that he was planning for future games and showed that he truly did value the new lease on life that he thought he had been handed. The discovery that he had been scammed, and other innocent people had died because of the con that they had fallen for, reinforced his desire to continue his work and reverted him to his previous mindset.
== Powers and Abilities ==
N/A
== Appearances ==
* Grand Theft Auto: Fast and Furious (Mentioned)
* The Fry Cook Games (Mentioned)
* Justice League: Terrific Titans (Mentioned)
* Dragon Ball Super: Cooler (Mentioned)
* Batman: The Long Five Nights (Recording)
Category:Characters