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Harley Sawyer, also known as the Doctor and the Playtime Automated Companion, is the overarching antagonist of the Poppy Playtime franchise.

He is a former high-ranking employee of Playtime CO. as well as the founder and leader of the Bigger Bodies Initiative, the catalyst that led to the company's experiments revolving around orphaned children, as well as what led to the company's eventual downfall. Realizing that the company was a failure, Sawyer tried to save it through his experiments, turning people of all ages into living toys that would serve Playtime.

He was voiced by Baldwin Williams Jr., who was also uncredited for playing the Crooked Energy in Raising Dion.

What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]

• Even before the events of the game, Harley was already ambitious and unfeeling as a young man in the Young Genius Program. He became unethical in his ideas to the point Elliot had to expel him, which Harley saw as a personal betrayal.
• It's heavily implied that to get revenge on him for his “betrayal,” he incriminated his old mentor, the late Elliot Ludwig, by putting the mutilated corpse of a young boy in his estate to ruin his legacy and good name.
• When Playtime CO. was struggling with their failed experiments and loss of money, he came up with an idea that would solve these problems: The Bigger Bodies Initiative, where people would be turned into monstrous recreations of Playtime's toys, with the justification that, because the new employees are not humans, they won't be paid or be able to sue the company. During his time leading the project, he experimented on hundreds of people, the majority of whom were young orphans, including infants. He'd subject them all to a fate worse than death: turning them into giant toys by means of testing them in the Game Station, having them electrically shocked and gas them with nightmare-inducing Poppy Gas, and then tearing out their organs to put them into the giant toys. It should also be noted that according to a progress report of Experiments 1186: Bobby Bearhug, a girl who was experimented on would have body spasms, lose their memories, and end up deaf and mute, and many of those who would scream for help were unable to, with heavy implications the others went through the same thing.
  • Even after their transformations, he and Leith would only abuse and mistreat them post-transformation to make sure they stayed loyal.
  • This eventually led to the Prototype and CatNap organizing a massive jailbreak and massacre, the Hour of Joy, that would end up costing the lives of almost every single Playtime CO. employee in the factory, including some tourists and innocent lives (with few exceptions, like the Protagonist or Leith Pierre), though to be fair, Harley didn't plan this at all, and it's implied he was already dead by then. The outcry from concerned citizens and the haunting questions surrounding the incident left Playtime Co. with no choice but to make the difficult decision to permanently close its doors.
• As another part of the initiative, he and Leith Pierre had assigned the Bigger Bodies to different roles that would support the experiments: CatNap was made to gas children so experimenting on them would be easier (and it can be assumed that using such gas would be easier than using opium poppy gel mixture for soul transfers), giving them very violent nightmares as a side effect, Yarnaby was supposed to serve as Harley Sawyer's own bodyguard/pet, Mommy Long Legs was supposed to host the Game Station (which tested orphans to see which Toy fit them the best), Huggy Wuggy had to stand still as a statue in the lobby during the day without break (while serving as a "night guard" that would stop any break-ins via fatal means), while Boxy Boo was instructed with killing any employee who tries to reveal the Bigger Bodies Initiative to the public, resulting in at least one man (Rowan Stoll) being murdered.
• He manipulated and groomed an orphan named Quinn Navidson into doing well at the Game Station so he could transform him into Experiment 1166 aka Yarnaby. He also isolated and conditioned Yarnaby into being obedient and subservient to only him to become his personal bodyguard.
  • He also darkly found Yarnaby's lower intellect and pathetic noises to be amusing and says he might get a good laugh out of them, showing he takes joy in the suffering of his experiments.
• In an interview between him and the Prototype, when the latter asks the former if he feels anything about his torture of children and toys, Harley dodges the question and talks about his desire to uncover the Prototype's "secret," making it clear he feels no regret for anything he has done and all but says he enjoys doing it.
  • It's also stated that he is even outright disgusted at the idea of his fellow scientists and colleagues feeling sympathy for the experiments noting it as "nauseating".
• Despite Poppy Playtime's high heinous standards, Sawyer stands out as the most heinous character of them all for being responsible for all the horrific things in the game through his acts of mistreating, imprisoning, and torturing people (mostly children) for years and turning them into monstrous toys, causing the Prototype (who is implied to be Elliot Ludwig) to become the tyrannical king of the Toys he is now and being responsible for the Hour of Joy massacre, costing the lives of almost every single Playtime CO. employee in the factory (including some tourists and innocent lives), as well as also causing CatNap to become a fanatical sadist who has undying loyalty towards the Prototype as his own god.
• Despite only being heard through tapes and letters, he still appears to be nothing but an irredeemable sociopath who feels no empathy for those he hurts in pursuit of his greedy goals.
• Although becoming the Playtime Automated Companion was a horrific process for him, it's not played sympathetically in the slightest given everything he did. In addition, he still displays moral agency, as he starts to get used to his new body and outright says that whoever thought that his mind could be broken from this is wrong.

Trivia[]

• He is the first and only canon Poppy Playtime villain so far to be Pure Evil.
• He and his SakuraArts counterpart are both considered Pure Evil.
• Due to the Chapter 4's Icepick ARG and Toying with Terror trailer's ending, it's likely that he will make his proper debut in Poppy Playtime in the upcoming Chapter 4 as an antagonist. This is confirmed to be true in his cinematic trailer called 'The Doctor' for Chapter 4.
• Due to him being confirmed to be alive in Chapter 4 along with Poppy Playtime being an ongoing series, his status as Pure Evil could be affected in the future chapters.

External Links[]

• Harley Sawyer on the Villains Wiki
• Harley Sawyer on the Ultimate Evil Wiki
• Harley Sawyer on the Poppy Playtime Wiki

Navigation[]

Pure Evils

Canon Harley Sawyer Fanon The Stupendium: Elliot Ludwig I AM ALIVE: The Scientist Poppy Playtime AU: Remnant: Harley Sawyer | Leith Pierre | Eric Wilson