Inspiration

“Gotham City.” 2022. Wikipedia. June 28, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City.

Wikipedia Contributors. 2019. “Saw (Franchise).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. September 22, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_(franchise).

Core Premise

Scientists at Gotham City’s tertiary educational institutions and research organizations struggle to secure funding. Luckily, the city has a parallel funding structure for mad scientists, created by and for supervillains. When Saw arrives in Gotham, he applies for funding for his next sociology project from the mad scientists' organization and receives a generous research grant. He hires assistants, and together, they get to work crafting an appropriately rigorous research paper for publication.

Additional Ideas

One of Saw’s assistants is a Gotham University PhD candidate in sociology. They have an agreement with their nominal doctoral advisor that they’ll prepare their dissertation based on the research they do with Saw. The other assistant is a postdoc from outside Gotham who aspires to become a supervillain.

The quest for an acceptably large sample size precipitates a massive hostage crisis.

Saw is conflicted about receiving funding as a sociologist and not as an artist.

The leaders of the mad scientists' organization are at loggerheads about whether to fund villainous humanities research. An application to fund a new translation of the Necronomicon has been stuck in the pipeline for months.

The mad scientists’ funding structure draws in an eclectic mix of aspiring supervillains and normal scientists who couldn’t fund their research any other way. Grant applications include traditional supervillain schemes, scientific inquiries like Saw’s that can only be pursued by unconventional means, and normal scientific research with unethical elements stapled on solely to secure funding from the mad scientists’ organization, such as Gotham University’s application for a new scanning tunneling microscope, which a professor submitted as a proposal to explore how improvements to scanning tunneling microscope technology over the last forty years have affected the instrument’s ability to torture small animals.

The mad scientists’ funding structure is buckling under the weight of its anti-ethics policy, which awards additional points to grant applications that attempt to deceive the board, such as Gotham University’s application to fund the scanning tunneling microscope. The organization’s debate over introducing conventional ethical guidelines, such as an honesty requirement, has turned violent.

Researchers from outside Gotham routinely farm out unconventional research to groups in Gotham funded by the mad scientists' organization.

Publishing unethical research conducted in Gotham specifically is a hot-button issue in the national scientific community, since so many conventional scientists working in Gotham have no choice but to accept funding from the mad scientists' organization and so many unconventional scientists from prestigious institutions in other parts of the country conduct unethical research in Gotham.

Gotham’s native ecosystem of scientific journals has an unusual range of ethical standards.

Special thanks to Anders Lokensgard for co-creating this concept.

If you have an AO3 presence, you can find Sawciology here.