Peter Strahm

OOC:

Player Handle: Nicholas
Contact: orchidmantodea
Pronouns: they/them or he/him

Invite/Current Player: Former, just dropped a few days ago!
Other Characters: none at the moment, previously Takoda Akecheta


IC:

Character Name: Peter Strahm
Age: 48
Canon: Saw
Canon Point: Post Saw 5 ending after he dies

CRAU: n/a

History: History

Personality:

The most noticeable thing about Strahm at first glance is his presence. He enters a room and gets right down to business - gears turning the moment he steps foot onto a scene, or the moment he enters into a conversation. He acts as if he has zero time to waste and has no qualms with interrupting someone and dismissing them before they can even get a word out if he already knows they're going to waste their breath. He stands tall, exudes a confidence in himself and his work, and all in all has the demeanor you would expect from a federal agent.

While he has an impressive attention to detail and approaches everything with a meticulous eye, this can often lead to him having a severe case of tunnel vision, made worse by his stubbornness. When he's sure he's right, he's sure, and he will stop at nothing to bring it to light. He'll disregard the proper channels if it meant waiting too long and wasting time - going ahead to where he's sure the killer is without calling for backup, or disregarding his superior's orders to get off of a case and going at it on his own. While he gets results that are admirable, it also leads him into deadly situations, one of which finally ended in his demise.

Strahm has a serious case of emotional constipation and only seems able to express his feelings in the form of anger when they do bother to make an appearance. He and his partner had been working together for five years, and while he's a little closer to her than most, it's not something you see in their normal interactions. When Perez is hurt during their investigation, Strahm actually appears to lose his cool and has a moment in his office when he snaps and starts throwing things off his desk. She also touches his face as he holds her and calls for medical assistance, indicating their closer relationship, despite never showing that kind of closeness otherwise. He even makes sure that he's the one to personally call her family and let them know that she was injured, momentarily breaking that barrier he keeps up between personal and professional. That being said, he has to introduce himself to said family, indicating that after five years he has not once spoken to or met them. Perez is actually a great foil to Strahm's more abrasive personality, and once you look at the two together and you see that while Perez is professional she still has a softer and friendlier edge, it makes Strahm's brazen personality all the more apparent and difficult to merely dismiss as just an FBI thing.

Speaking of his anger, he is really fucking angry. The best showcase of this is his interrogation of Jill Tuck, the Jigsaw killer's ex-wife. At first, he lets Perez take the lead, but when her approach faces resistance from Jill, Strahm steps in. He increasingly loses his patience with her throughout the interrogation and gets into her personal space - but the most important show of his rage are the flashes that the movie utilizes to give the viewer a window into the character's heads. In it, Strahm can be seen pulling out his gun and pointing it at Jill, and at one point his own head as he screams. While he was aggressive with her the first time, these flashes don't occur until after he returns and Perez has been hurt. He goes as far as backing her up against the wall and showing her the blood from Perez's injury, and even threatening to put her away if she doesn't tell him what she knows.

Then there's the glass coffin. At the end, when Hoffman has Strahm trapped in a room while he's safe inside the glass coffin, the walls begin to close and the coffin lowers. Instead of using the gun he has to give himself a painless end, he's so pissed off that he shoots the coffin until he's out of ammo, wanting to exhaust every single opportunity to get Hoffman once and for all.

His brashness aside, he's incredibly intelligent and good at getting out of sticky situations. When Strahm gets too close to Hoffman's secret, the detective sedates him and puts him in a trap that was meant to be impossible, unlike true jigsaw traps that are meant to give the victims a chance at "redemption". He's sat down in a chair and gets a cube of plexiglass that fills up with water, meant to drown him, with all of his personal items put onto a steel barrel not far from him - but too far to reach. The cube fills up and in seconds Strahm is searching his pockets, finds a pen that Hoffman forgot to take out or just didn't find, and without giving it a second thought he preforms an emergency tracheotomy on himself, giving him enough time to breathe until help came along.

All in all Strahm is good at what he does, he's passionate (he kind of has to be considering it's his everything), but his stubbornness and tendency to get tunnel vision are his biggest (fatal) flaws.

Abilities: Skills that you would expect of a federal agent. A highly trained eye, possesses leadership skills and initiative, and he's extremely adaptable in life-threatening situations, quick to react and has excellent problem-solving skills as well as good judgement (when it's not clouded by his stubbornness and obsessive behaviors). More specifically, he's good with a gun and hand to hand combat.

Inventory: A gun with no ammo left in it, his wallet, and a wedding ring on his finger, but that's about it.

Eternal Reward: To go back and protect his partner from getting shrapneled to the face, saving her life. (Unbeknownst to him that that's not actually what kills her, rip)

Goals/Ideas: Since Strahm is the type of person who would rather swallow rusty nails than delve too deep into his own issues, that's exactly what I want to do. Have him forced into delving deep into his issues - not the nails thing unless??. It was his obsessiveness with the jigsaw murders and his own mistrust of anyone but himself that ultimately got him killed, so I would love for him to have to face that, and maybe sometimes leave him little choice but to put his life in someone else's hands once or twice. I want to break down every one of his issues and have him either come out with them worse or better, and see how that shapes him as a person far down the line. Whether he will actually be a better man for it or not remains to be seen.

Samples: Sample

Secret Code Phrase: "My curse is my redemption."