This is the second part of my discussion of FNAF4, if you haven’t already, please check out Part 1 here, as there will be some concepts and comments I might reference in this part!
Starting off, I think that we should probably begin with an overview of the teasers in and surrounding this game. I’m incredibly grateful to thefnafarchive.org for cataloging these teasers over time. The teasers around FNAF4 are a good example of how entwined this game and FNAF world were in terms of development and Scott’s interaction with the fandom. For those of you not familiar with what a teaser is in this context, during the early days of the franchise, Scott had a lively and active presence in the fandom, replying to comments on reddit, some emails and uploading videos onto his youtube channel to tease the next game or releasing images or hidden text on his website, these would often obscure hidden details that could only be spotted when lightening the image or would have additional context in the name of the file itself.
I think that it is fair to assume that this text is questioning who did the bite of 1987, as this was a prime source of speculation within the fandom at this time after Phone guy’s speeches. However, it is also relevant that these characters represent the four kids involved in carrying the child to Fredbear.
We ultimately find out that it is the Foxy masked kid who is the one who torments the child in the cutscenes. From the game we learn that this kid is the older brother of the child in the cutscenes.
It is worth mentioning that characters and speakers are primarily denoted by their text colour here. This is a consistent method Scott employs throughout the series. The Chica masked kid (blue text, like their shirt) is the one speaking here. The Foxy masked kid has grey text and is also the same person we see jumping out on the crying child in a previous cutscene.
I think it’s very possible that the subject of the game is reliving elements of this day over and over again and the inescapable moment where he’s placed into the jaws of Fredbear is part of this. This would explain why the parallel between the kids and the animatronics exists in the first place. I found myself asking why he was so afraid of the animatronic characters themselves if he had harmless plushies of them in his room by choice. This element of the scenario being woven into his fears makes this make more sense to me, after all one of the ultimate things he comes up against is Fredbear himself, despite the fact that his Fredbear plushie is a guardian and companion to him in the cutscenes.
The other teasers are predominantly focused around Fredbear and the Plushtrap hallway. The plushtrap hallway states “Terrible things come in small packages” potentially nodding to the fact that the Nightmares aren’t as large and horrific as they appear in whatever literal reality there is. Nightmare Fredbear is monochrome in his teaser, but this could potentially just have been to avoid giving away his identity too much.
While we are looking at these, I think that it is important to look at the FNAF world teasers that came out in between FNAF4’s release (in August) and the Halloween update (in October) For the most part these depict a “Thank you” page with the various animatronic models.
FNAF4 The Hint Teasers
Over time the animatronics are replaced by their FNAF world alternates and the text replaced by the words FNAF WORLD. However, of note is that in the middle of this process, we are presented three text boxes that give clues as to the nature of FNAF 4 itself.
The first of these is “Four games. One story.” This comment is one of the most curious to me. It is clear that there is a cohesive throughline to the games from 1-4.
The next concern is which character whose “story” it might be discussing. One story we could speculate is being depicted is that of William Afton himself, he is theoretically present in each game, whether this is as a looming presence in the background. literally sighted in a back room or as a shambling husk, he is a contender for the “main character”. The other possibility is a popular depiction and is Michael Afton, the Foxy masked older brother in the cutscene minigames. It is my belief that he is in pursuit of his father and seems to be carrying a burden of guilt over his actions in his youth, he shows up more often later on, playing a strong role in Sister Location and FFPS. Finally, the last character I would consider a possibility seems like an obvious one and this is the crying child themselves, whose death might have been the catalyst for everything that came after. There is a possibility that his death was the driving force between William’s veering off into very poor choices. FNAF world is almost certainly a story about him, along with FNAF 4, and we could speculate that he is present in FNAF 1 and FNAF 2 in the form of Golden Freddy.
Of course, all of this we will go into in greater detail later, but it is still worth bearing in mind that as of FNAF world, the Crying Child is described as “still sad”, he does not seem to have moved on in any way.
The last hint in the FNAF world teaser set asks the reader why the toy of Chica would be missing her beak. This was a difficult question for a long time, but since untangling exactly what I think the different sets of animatronics are and when they originate, this makes far more sense. You can read more on this theory here if you check under the animatronics heading, but I will sum it up here.
The toy animatronics were not created when people think they were. People place them incorrectly at the time of FNAF 2’s gameplay, which would be far removed from 1983, which is when the crying child’s events take place (we know this from a date on tv in a cutscene). Instead, I believe that William designed and probably built the toys very early in the timeline of FNAF. I am of the belief that a Mangle animatronic was constructed at this time, we see a Mangle toy in the bedroom of the house and know that Mangle existed at the time Phone Guy recorded his message (in the summer prior to FNAF2’s winter gameplay.) The Toy Animatronics were created after Fredbear/Spring Bonnie and the Original four but before the Withered animatronics were even conceived by Fazbear Entertainment.
In 1983, merchandise of the toys existed. This is why the toy of Chica is literally Toy Chica with her removable beak. This fact does not have enormous implications for FNAF 4 itself but has enormous implications for the interpretation of FNAF2 and assumptions we make about the animatronics and their respective creators.
A toy Bonnie also features in FNAF 2 as an unlockable.
In the Twisted Ones novel, Charlie finds herself in a Circus Baby’s location created by William Afton and Baby, and one of the things that she and the other teenagers note is that there are images on the walls of Fazbear characters. They discuss how the branding would be how kids would expect to see the Twisted Ones and therefore how they would see them if they visited the location, Charlie expected otherwise and saw their horrific and nightmarish forms. This provided a perspective on how the toys might possibly work, we don’t have direct evidence of this in the game, but it’s certainly curious to think and would align with why they are the first set of furless plastic-like animatronics, a trend that William continues into Sister Location. The plastic material he uses seems to be receptive to illusions in some way, when it is damaged, it distorts what people see.
“It’s—it’s some kind of transmitter, embedded in a disc,” Charlie said. “It scrambles your brain, cluttering it with nonsense so that you see what you expect to see.” “Then why don’t they look like that?”
Clay pointed to posters on the walls depicting a very cheerful Freddy Fazbear with rosy cheeks and a warm smile.
“Or that.” John had found another, depicting Bonnie jovially strumming a bright red guitar so shiny it looked like it was made from candy. Charlie looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Because we didn’t come here first.” She walked toward the posters.
“If you were a little kid and you saw the cute commercials, then saw these posters and toys and all that stuff, then I think that’s exactly what they would have looked like.“
– The Twisted Ones
Not everyone is intimately familiar with every easter egg of FNAF4, so which Chica toy is this referring to? It is entirely possible to miss the girl in question when playing the minigame as the crying child. On one of the nights, we follow the protagonist’s journey as he walks home from Freddy’s and encounters various other children along the way. We find out in this process that the birthday party is his. Around halfway, the player can choose to go north rather than following the path and find themselves in a play area with a set of swings and a little girl. This little girl has what appears to be a minus on her shirt and is also a twin to the boy we meet outside of Fredbear’s with his “finger trap” Spring Bonnie toy. I’m of the opinion that this girl is Charlie, with the boy being her twin brother Sammy (we find out about Sammy in more detail in The Silver Eyes). Her having the toys under her control in this flashback feels like a very clever narrative nod to later in the timeline, where in FNAF2, she leads the toy animatronics on their assault against William Afton.
In this encounter in the minigame she asks the kid “Why are you crying? Don’t you like my toy collection?” and appears to be a neutral and indifferent force when compared to the other kids that the crying child encounters.
As you can see, at this point we are able to address these teaser questions now and understand their reasoning, despite them initially being considered impossible to parse.
FNAF4 Halloween Teasers
The final set of teasers were specifically centred around the Halloween update and focus on the new Jack-o animatronics and Nightmare Balloon Boy. We will get into these characters in more detail later. However, the most interesting image from this set is the one which features a small Freddy plushie against a dark background. If you lighten the background on this image, you can make out the bed from FNAF 4 with the unmistakable shape of Nightmarionne at the head of the bed. This image is called “dontwakethebaby”, which is also interesting for several reasons. One of the first things that comes to mind for me with this phrase is the fact that Markiplier in his initial playthrough of FNAF 2 for some reason decided to call the puppet “the baby” and this connection seems clear given that Nightmarionne appears to be linked to the Marionette in appearance. I find the plushie itself of note though, given that the plushie we interact with in the game is a Fredbear plushie and not Freddy. I will confess to not being one hundred percent on why this teaser image plushie is what it is, but it does bring to mind the fact that in FNAF world, the player starts out as Freddy and that as they go further down the “levels” of the game glitches, they become a small bear. This is the same bear shape that speaks to desk man. Is crying child connected to Freddy Fazbear himself? This is entertaining given that generationally, Freddy Fazbear feels like the “child” design of Fredbear, with William masquerading as Fredbear in the game.
Just to give an idea of the hive of activity happening over the duration of these teaser releases it is worth looking at the sheer creative output Scott was driving at this time. The FNAF world teasers are interspersed with the release of the first novel, the Halloween FNAF4 update, the FNAF world graphical update and then proceed straight into teasing and giving breadcrumbs for Sister Location.
Though these other games/creative works are not directly tied to FNAF 4 as a game it is important to consider Scott’s reaction to the fan reception of FNAF4 in what he chose to create next. When faced with a perceived vagueness of lore, his response was to branch out into FNAF world and Sister Location. I don’t think The Silver Eyes was a reaction to FNAF4 but possibly one of the precipitating events for FNAF4s creation. It takes significantly longer to write a book than this teaser span so I would say it is fair to speculate that it was Scott getting his thoughts in order about his characters and timeline for the silver eyes trilogy that prompted FNAF 4 to be so difficult for a casual player to parse and why he then worked to give additional context. He might have lined up his thoughts, but this did not transfer through the narrative he created.
Understanding the surrounding circumstances is very important to understanding the game and its intentions. These circumstances lead us into the complex issue of the mysterious FNAF 4 box.
FNAF4 The Box
On completion of night eight in FNAF 4, the player is presented with a silver box with two padlocks. It is not possible to open it and it sits beneath the text “Perhaps some things are best left forgotten, for now.” The contents of this box have been a subject of endless debate over the years in the FNAF community, but I believe we finally have all the metaphorical “pieces” to put it back together.
However, as always, lets start with the context of the box and what Scott has said about it in the time before and since its inception. One of the comments that people lean on most of all when discussing the box is the below quote from the steam forums, released alongside the Halloween update to the game.
“I released part 4, and somehow…. no one, not a single person, found the pieces. The story remains completely hidden. I guess most people assumed that I filled the game with random easter eggs this time. I didn’t. What’s in the box? It’s the pieces put together. But the bigger question is- would the community accept it that way? The fact that the pieces have remained elusive this time strikes me as incredible, and special, a fitting conclusion in some ways, and because of that, I’ve decided that maybe some things are best left forgotten, forever.”
Scott never did make the box accessible, but his statement here is very telling “What’s in the box?” “It’s the pieces put together.”
It has been right in front of us forever. I want to draw your attention back to our previous discussion in Part 1 under Fredbear where we investigated the acute importance of the phrase “I will put you back together.” This phrase is said directly to the crying child.
Who is put back together? The Crying Child. What is in the box? The Crying Child, or whatever was reconstructed from him.
Now this concept might sound outlandish, but I would not make an assertion like the above based solely on a Scott comment and some lines in the game (though they are undeniably compelling evidence).
So, let’s look at the other places that a box appears after this point within the franchise and consider them for their value to this theory.
As I’ve stated previously, the events of FNAF4 are deeply entwined with the creation of the novel trilogy which came out just after its release and therefore must have been being written in tandem with the game. Scott was intimately involved in these books and confirmed as much.
“I’ve had some writing experience before but I have some serious weaknesses. I picked a writer who excelled at writing dialogue and was good with character interaction. Most scenes outside the pizzeria were written by her, while most scenes inside the pizzeria were written by me. Even the scenes that I wrote myself, however, were edited by her afterward to clean them up.”
I’ve seen plenty of arguments over the years that Scott does not take an active interest in the stories or novels without any evidence whatsoever to support this. He is a thoughtful storyteller, and though he is not a professional writer in regards to character interaction as he states, he clearly was involved throughout.
FNAF4 The Box – The Silver Eyes
Before we delve into the Silver Eyes I feel like it is important to explain the nature of this trilogy for those who might not be familiar with it. This series of books is one which is set in an alternate universe with a slightly different order of events than what we see in the games. Events are pared back and simplified to create a clear and compelling narrative and new characters are added to propel the story forward. In this series, there is only ever a single missing children’s incident which ends in murder, and though we see some other children taken captive, they are ultimately saved. Events unfold differently and with clear verifiable deviation from the facts we know from the games. Does this mean that the story is not valuable to understanding the games themselves? Far from it, these novels presented many of the first times that readers encountered facts about the series. It might seem common knowledge now, but this was the first instance of hearing William Afton’s name and even with this confirmation people would continue to fiercely debate its “canonicity” until the confirmation in the credits of FNAF 6 two entire years later.
I believe this novel gives us incredibly important insight into the characters, technologies, and events of the games, and that they represent the fandom’s least favourite thing, a grey area where they cannot be entirely dismissed but cannot be taken as literal translation of the game events verbatim.
Scott himself explained his reasoning for this decision in another steam forums post below.
“The truth is that after a while lore can become so dense that there isn’t room for a story anymore. Another truth is that what makes for a good game doesn’t necessarily make for a good book. Sometimes a timeline gets so full that the only way to tell a real story is have the story set in a different timeline, an alternate universe, a different location, or perhaps from a vantage point that isn’t entirely what it appears to be.”
The vantage point within the novels is not at all what people expected it to be, the books unfold from the perspective of Charlie, the daughter of Henry, one of the co-founders of the franchise, but we find out at the end of the novels that the protagonist we initially took at face value is not at all what we thought.
Charlie in the novels is instead the murdered daughter of a Freddy’s co-founder, reanimated with a combination of mechanical technology and the agony of her father poured into a ragdoll “vessel” that was once important to the original Charlotte as a child.
People were blindsided by this revelation, but for me it provided the first piece of valuable context that I felt we’d been lacking for FNAF 4.
To understand FNAF 4, we must take the time to understand what the trilogy is telling us in a broad sense. So, I will try to summarize.
Charlie (the robot, often referred to as Charliebot) was created by Henry in a fit of grief after his daughter’s murder at the hands of his business partner William Afton. Attempting to bring his daughter back to life, Henry found himself presented with the issue of replicating aging and resolved to create four significant life stages which could contain the ragdoll that was so precious to his daughter that appeared to contain her “soul”. These life stages would be stored in four closets and as she grew, she would be compelled to return to these to hand over the ragdoll and “grow” into her new body. Charlie in the novels is the third life stage Henry created and the previous two appear to have handed over their “soul doll” without major event. We learn through Henry’s writings and flashback memories and recollections that during the frenzied construction of this final adult body for Charlie, that Henry started to deteriorate.
The book provides a good description of the different Charlies as below in the words of Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the fourth and unused vessel who came to be inhabited by an unintended soul after the body was abandoned by Henry and stolen by William Afton. She accidentally killed and contained the little girl when she came to visit her father’s new obsession. She sums up the life stages as below.
“The littlest Charlotte was made with a broken heart. She cried all the time, day, and night.”
This description is certainly reminiscent of the crying child for whatever reason, with the explicit connection with crying. This could be coincidence, but I felt it was interesting anyway. Which emotion does this seem to represent? I’d imagine grief and despair.
“The second Charlotte he made when he was at the depth of madness, almost believing the lies he told himself; she was as hopelessly desperate for her father’s love as he was for hers.”
This Charlie appears to have been created out of love or desperation and for the most part appears to have been successful to a point, though evidently this is when the cracks began to show. We come to understand that Charlie was in this life stage when Henry finally snaps, and Jen has to take her under her care.
“The third Charlotte he made when he began to realise, he’d gone mad, when he questioned every thought he had and begged his sister Jen to remind him what was real. The third Charlotte was strange”.
This Charlotte is the protagonist of the novels, and it is difficult to ascertain exactly which emotion she represents. It is possible she represents a combination of doubt and curiosity, perhaps some amount of denial. She is raised by Henry’s sister and activated after Henry’s apparent death. I find myself asking sometimes if there’s a possibility that something of Henry himself remains in this Charlie.
Charlotte asks Elizabeth about the fourth but is told that there was no completed fourth body. “When Henry began to make the fourth, his despair turned to rage. He seethed as he soldered her skeleton together, pouring his anger into the forge where he shaped her very bones. I was not Charlotte-drenched -in-grief. I was made alive with Henry’s fury.”
Unmistakably, the fourth vessel was imbued with anger. However, the novels point out that anger and hatred seem to do something unexpected when poured into a vessel. The fourth vessel appeared to be sentient or aware, even without the ragdoll or any association with Charlotte’s soul, this implies that anger (or agony) seems to be able to lend a life to an inanimate object and William suspects as much. It seems that Henry realised this or felt something of it in his creation. Elizabeth continues.
“He tried to fix the flaw he saw in me, at first, but what was wrong, as Henry saw it, was the very thing that made me alive. “
“Rage,” Charlie said softly.
In this situation rage is correlated with life.
Within the novel trilogy, there is an entire period of time where the narrative switches to the perspective of John, Charlie’s childhood friend and the novel’s Charlie is “killed” by one of the twisted animatronics. After this, Elizabeth/the fourth vessel replaces and pretends to be her, during this period of mimicry where she is being actively imitated, the original Charlie robot is rescued from beneath the old house and stowed away in a large, locked box by Henry’s sister Jen.
The main takeaway from this whole discussion is that emotional energy can imitate life and that the “true” Charlie (with the doll) is stored in a locked box very reminiscent of the box we see in FNAF 4.
The transfer of sentience via rage also seems to be something which is internally consistent within the series, we see this happen again later in the Tales from the Pizzaplex short story collection where a man named Edwin transfers his rage into a robot her created for his son and the results are as catastrophic and murderous as Elizabeth ends up being.
So, this is our first non FNAF 4 instance of a transferred consciousness into a machine being placed into a box to keep it safe. It is also worthwhile mentioning that Charlie herself is experimenting with creating “sentient” machines, and keeps them in a box too.
People like to argue that the novels are their own silo, seperate from the games and impossible to relate to them, but there are numerous overlaps in the games with the things we learn in the novels. One particularly disturbing example is “Egg Baby” William’s data storage that Henry obtains in FNAF 6. It has a large creature with a smaller version of itself inside, with an egg inside even that. This is reminicent of the “vessel” with the “doll” within it, with the core energy or soul within that in the novels. It contains the schematics for the SCUP (Scooper) for extracting remnant and the RASC (Remote Activated Simulated C.) that can pretend to be a child to lure targets to a location.
We see egg baby again in UCN in William’s sister location office, alongside various other attempts at creating children (the bidybabs) and the strange mask like faces.
Lets look at some of the other literature while we are here, beginning with what I consider one of the most obvious stories we could relate back to the fate of the crying child. Lally’s game.
The Box – Lally’s Game
Lally’s game is about Selena and Cade, a couple due to be married and Cade’s strange secret. Selena Is smitten with Cade, but when they move into their new home, she spots the movers dragging a huge trunk she does not approve of.
A couple seconds later, Bailey stepped into the house with a big brown steamer trunk propped on his shoulder. Selena scowled at the dirty and scarred old trunk with the aged leather straps and the tarnished and dented brass clasps, lock, and edging. She wrinkled her nose at the trunk’s musty odor, which she could smell even from several feet away. “What’s that doing here?” she asked.
And just to be fairly explicit about this not being some grand leap of logic, this is the type of box which comes up when you search “steamer trunk”.
Selena demands Cade get rid of the trunk but Cade refuses to do so. She asks what is in it and he asserts that it is simply “old stuff from (his) childhood”, she insists it is creepy, but he charms his way out of it in the moment. Before the wedding, Selena is living with Cade’s mother and while there finds an old photo album with Cade In it. She realised that Cade is at a birthday party and there’s a photo of him with Freddy Fazbear. She realises he’s in “Freddy’s Pizzaplex” one of the first family fun centers built in the state. She sees photos of him in front of a location called “Lally’s Game”
This is a good point to mention that this is not the first time we have heard the name “Lally”. The Tales novels came out long after FNAF 6 where one of the sponsors is Lally’s Lollys. This sponsor incidentally has the same mascot as a toy William Afton has down in Sister Location. Scott showed this model on one of his behind the scenes images where it was originally named “LittleJoe” It connects this story indirectly to FNAF 6 and Sister Location. Lally seems to belong to William and this connects him in some ways to the sinister element of this Freddy Fazbear’s attraction.
In the story Selena speaks to Cade’s mother who tells her that Cade befriended a robot named Lally who was designed to be a friend for children who didn’t have friends to play with. This isn’t even the only time we encounter this concept, another short story in the Fazbear’s Frights short story called “Lonely Freddy” describes a similar scenario where solitary or antisocial children are assigned a robot Freddy companion to keep them company. In the case of Lally’s game, Selena observes that Lally appears vaguely possessive of Cade and his mother says that one day, Lally was stolen and that when he was stolen Cade wasn’t sad, but scared instead. She does not clarify why this might have been but changes the subject.
Lally is described as below –
“Lally looked to be somewhere between three and four feet tall. Mostly white and smooth—with a plastic or rubber outer shell?—the bald robot had articulated arms and legs, and at each bend of its limbs, the joints were black. The same blackness joined its neck and torso. The robot’s outer shell had been given some vaguely humanlike definition: it had small ears and a small nose, the faintest raised trace of eyebrows over the lidless black eyes, and some subtle muscular definition in the torso and limbs. Its mouth was a barely-upturned curve, thick-lipped.”
Selena challenges Cade on why he never mentioned Freddy’s or Lally’s Game and he gets defensive, saying he had bad memories from that time and that someone got hurt.
After the wedding Selena finds herself suspicious and paranoid, upset about the trunk and “the unpleasant little robot” and she resolves to find and open the “hideous trunk”. She struggles to find it, realising that Cade has hidden it in an out of the way closet. She rips the lock off of the trunk but as she is about to open it, Cade returns, interrupting her. He panics when he realises she has opened it and both run upstairs only to find it completely empty. Cade is devastated but puts a brave face on his panic.
At night, he doesn’t sleep well but instead wakes to hunt the room, looking under the bed and in the closets, going through this searching routine for most of the night with Selena pretending to be oblivious the whole time.
This whole scene with him hunting the room is strongly reminicent of the gameplay of FNAF 4. When Selena finally challenges him he simply says “I never wanted to tell you about any of this. I just wanted to forget it.”
He confesses no one stole Lally, there was a construction collapse during a round and Lally went missing. He followed Cade home and Cade saw him everywhere and that he seemed to be playing a perpetual game of hide and seek.
The FNAF4 trailer alludes to something being brought home.
Cade tricked Lally into the trunk by forcing him to hide there by offering him no other place to hide, forcing him to hide there as he “couldn’t resist”.
This behavior is incidentally the same behavior the Mimic robot displays in the epilogues for the tales, where it is defeated by being presented with only one viable suit to hide in and cannot help but ultimately hide in it.
Selena does not believe Cade’s story and he is completely dismayed by this. She asserts it was all in his imagination.
“Cade, honey, nothing was in that trunk. You were a little boy, a traumatized little boy, and you reassured yourself by telling yourself Lally was locked into the trunk. That’s why you stopped seeing it. It’s basic psychology.”
This doesn’t last long though as before Selena runs into Lally in her garage when she goes to get drinks for a BBQ. She retrieves Cade but when they get back Lally is gone. Selena reaches out to Cade’s mother to ask about Lally’s game and his mother speculates that he liked it so much because it made Cade feel like “he was the chosen child” but also that maybe he really wanted a brother.
She mentions a boy called Daniel who snuck into the game and then died in a horrible accident. Selena is harrowed when Cade’s mother mentions that Lally didn’t move, the kids just had to carry him around and hide them himself and that he couldn’t move at all.
Getting back to the house, Selena tries to hunt down Lally, chasing a set of faint sounds that lead her through the house, but along the way she finds Cade who is hiding behind the sofa and behaving very strangely, his features distorted and “tinged by something dark and menacing” He warns her.
“If you upset Lally,” Cade whispered, “you’ll end up in the trunk next.”
As they sit tense on the sofa, Selena accuses Cade of killing Daniel. He says that it was Lally as “the game was only for two” Selena, terrified of Cade as much as Lally hits him over the head with a brass lamp and runs to hide, finding herself in the same place as Lally who finally speaks.
The whisper’s message was short, but it was filled with meaning.
“Hi.”
This is a line I can almost hear and I don’t think the similarity to a very familiar figure is accidental.
We can only assume that she was killed, and in the next scene we see Cade wake up and run to the trunk too late, repulsed by “the grisly contents” and devastated at what has happened. Lally simply reminds him
The whisper contained five familiar words: “The game is only for two.” The hissed words drifted down to Cade like the spray of a toxic mist. They engulfed him, and then they left him in silence.
This reference to toxic mist is directly relatable to Dittophobia, where gas is used to manipulate the child prisoner.
When we next see Cade he is with a new fiance who asks him about his strange trunk. He looks back at it as he leaves.
This story ends with explicit reference to pinpoint light eyes.
Thunder rumbled as the skies darkened even more. The attic was swathed in somber shadows. Nothing but blackness could be seen in the vast space … until two small pinpoints of light peeked up over the top of the old trunk.
FNAF4 Balloon Boy
Lally’s Game also ties back to the Silver Eyes trilogy we discussed previously. Once again we are presented with child robots with sinister intent. Lally is not a friendly figure to anyone but Cade. Nodding to Balloon Boy with his behavior seems intentional and designed to remind us of him thematically. The Twisted Ones does this same nodding to Balloon Boy when Charlie visits Circus Baby’s
In the Silver Eyes we encounter Balloon Boy-like robots in William’s employ
Hello? A voice called again. She put her hands on her head, forcing it back, and looked up to see several children standing around her, all with plump little bodies and broad smiling faces. Sammy? She moved toward them instinctively. They were blurred, and she couldn’t see their features. She blinked, but her vision didn’t clear. Don’t trust your senses. Something is wrong. – The Twisted Ones
Charlie encounters these as essentially Balloon Boy clones. When Larson shoots out the illusion, she sees them as they really are.
The children were no longer children. They were wind-up toys, plastic boys in striped shirts, wearing plastic smiles and propeller beanies, and offering balloons.
and
He was perhaps four feet tall, with a round head and a round body, his arms almost as long as his stout legs. He wore a red-and-blue striped shirt, and a matching propeller beanie on his head. He was made of plastic, but his shiny face had something old-fashioned about it. Its features mimicked fairy-tale dolls carved from wood. His nose was a triangle and his cheeks were made rosy with two raised circles of dusky pink. His blue eyes were enormous, wide, and staring, and his mouth was open in a grin that bared all his even white teeth. His hands were fingerless balls, each gripping an object. In one he held a red and yellow balloon nearly half his size on a stick. In the other he raised a wooden sign reading BALLOONS!
While the illusion is active she sees them as floating children.
She turned her face to the side. One of the children stared back—it was under the cloth and gazing at her with a fixed grin and motionless eyes.
Also given the parallels between the crying child and Balloon Boy, it’s pretty brutal that Charlie kicks the thing over and its head comes off.
She pushed over a balloon boy, and it toppled easily. Its head popped off as it hit the ground, and it rolled across the floor. Hello? it muttered, much quieter than before.
John encounters robot children in the Fourth Closet too and these ones are described in a similar fashion to the bidybabs in Sister Location as somewhat malevolent.
“Are you okay? Where are your parents?” he asked breathlessly, then his mouth went dry. The children were not human, or alive. Their animatronic faces were painted like clowns, their features absurdly exaggerated: One had a round, red nose that covered half its face and a white wig of synthetic curls; another had a molded smile on its face and a painted red grimace. The third, a red-cheeked, smiling clown with a rainbow-colored wig, looked almost cute, except for the gigantic spring that replaced the middle of its torso, boinging up and down each time it moved. All of them had black eyes, with no iris or pupil, and they did not appear to see Carlton.
These kids also have black pupilless eyes, exactly the same as how Lally is described in Lally’s Game.
Bidibabs
The Bidibabs are a strange force in Sister Location and one I don’t see examined very often either. They seem to fall under the same “it’s uncannily human so I hate it” category that Balloon Boy does. But they are worth focusing on as an extension of this “robot children exist a LOT in this series” tangent. Their name actually more or less includes BB as part of its construction.
There are two of them in SL and they differ in subtle ways, with one having very pale blue-ish eyes and the other slightly green. They have a slightly English accent when they speak, though we mostly hear them speak in whispers. They are sneaky and malicious, with cold attitudes towards emotional or human events and are easily frustrated. They sound feminine when they speak and their motivations seem connected to Baby. They can follow you home too, which as we’ve discussed, something “following you home” is the very premise of Lally’s Game and implied to play a part in FNAF 4.
They appear in UCN too, in the SL office, in Help Wanted briefly and show up on the Funtime Fantasy arcade cabinet in Security Breach.
The main reason I bring them up is that once again they demonstrate that intelligent, sentient appearing child robots are not at all outside the purview of what William is capable of creating. We have no reason either to really believe they are possessed directly as they refer to Baby as “her” and seem to be a little afraid of her.
The Immortal and the Restless
Another element of Sister Location that I have to get into here, probably in closing for this part, is the show which Mike watches during his off-work hours. He seems to exist in a cyclical loop not dissimilar to the protagonist of Dittophobia, going to work at night and then coming home during the day. I’ll no doubt go into Sister Location and Mike’s time there more in another article, for the time being we are mostly concerned by the show that appears on television over the course of the game in the post-night scenes.
The Immortal and the Restless is a show which subtly links us into Midnight Motorist, which I’ll discuss later in that there is a character in the house in that scene who is watching television. We don’t know a large amount about Mike, but we do know that he likes to watch television, as Sister Location establishes watching this soap opera as a key part of his routine and possibly escapism.
The show concerns Vlad and Clara, a vampire and what appears to be a normal woman and their various arguments over their child and tempestuous relationship. I have seen various fans interpret Clara as William Afton’s wife, even to the point of using her name as a canon interpretation. I’d argue against this personally as even on a logical level, Vlad is not William’s actual name, so it seems to ignore this to assume its counterpart is the real name of his wife.
Secondly, I believe that Vlad and Clara don’t represent William and his wife at all. Clara is outright described as Vlad’s mistress. A mistress implies adultery, not marriage and therefore sets their relationship either an illicit or complex situation. Personally I feel that there are more similarities between Vlad and Clara’s relationship and that of William and Henry than anyone else.
Just to add a little context I’d like to look at the character concepts for the two characters.
Now let us contrast this to concept art two, produced the next day, almost certainly off the back of feedback from Scott. What has changed? Vlad now has William’s hairstyle, with his sideswept bangs. His outfit has become dominantly purple across the board, and even the pose he’s in here, coincidentally or otherwise, overlaps with the “you can’t prove anything” pose from FNAF 6 later. Clara too has changed, now dressed entirely in green.
Henry is associated with green, it is the colour he chose for Charlie’s retrieval band in FNAF6, it is the colour of the trunk Charlie ends up in in the fourth closet and it is the colour of Henry’s favourite flannel shirt.
Daddy. She opened the box, and saw it—on top was an old, green plaid flannel shirt, worn down as thin and soft as cotton. She picked it up as if it were something delicate, and pressed it to her face, inhaling through the fiber.
The relationship between the two characters also unfolds with several key narrative points that overlap with Henry and William’s relationship. Even if you don’t personally adhere to the belief that Henry and William were in any sort of intimate relationship, it is undeniable that they had a close friendship. Henry, even in his final speech bitterly calls William “old friend” and William in the novels talks about literally no one else, constantly demanding other people know who Henry is and comparing his own work to Henry’s. This isn’t a one off, he does it through every single book, from demanding Carlton know who Henry is to at times showing humility about his role in creating certain things to at others boasting about his own animatronics being better (waterproof, unlike those of his partner).
William’s dabbling in fear studies and remnant could certainly be considered vampiric, and it features many similarities with the traditional vampire. He seems to crave remnant or fear and we even see him literally state this in his voice line from FNAF AR.
It is not your flesh that sustains me… it is your fear.
Both characters are creators in the FNAF world, generating animatronics and semblances of life and represent the “fathers” of the animatronics in a metaphorical sense. This metaphor is also witnessed in the story In the Flesh, a short story about a man infested as a host for a child version of Springtrap which is a metaphor for Springtrap or William’s escape from UCN. There is no requirement to believe that there was a romantic relationship at play here in order to interpret the soap opera for its value in understanding the narrative.
I personally do believe that William’s obsession veered into the romantic and obsessive, but that factor is neither here nor there.
The first discussion of the series is between Vlad and Clara, where Vlad asserts that the child isn’t his. Clara says he’s the only vampire she has ever loved and that the baby destroys his bottles.
She mentions that he sleeps on the ceiling fan, a throwaway comment but with some meaning to anyone who has ever counted the number of fans we see in the games and everywhere else in relation to William Afton and the Afton family in general. They are literally everywhere, from the ceiling of the Sister Location elevator to Circus Baby’s stomach, to almost every desk he has ever worked at.
Clara demands that Vlad needs to be part of his son’s life, but he protests against it, with her demanding that he at least pay his child support. There is some implication through the games and the books that William inflicted financial hardship on Freddy’s, either through poor money management (building underground lairs isn’t cheap) or outright embezzlement.
The next night begins with the same argument with Clara stating they had difficulty controlling the baby at the nursery. Vlad decides that he has to leave, unwilling to deal with it. Clara brings up that “they” are going to dock his paychecks, presumably to pay for the child support that he has been avoiding. He says he’s a vampire who doesn’t get paid and Clara calls him out, saying that he works night shift at the “Fry Me Taco” and is lying.
This night has obvious parallels with William’s situation where he has definitely been doing night shift nights at Freddy’s as part of the murders and his retrieval of remnant later on. Once again we are given the impression that financial hardship was a problem for William, and this makes sense as he is forced at some point to resume his efforts to run a restaurant in Circus Baby’s, either the rental service or the restaurant itself.
On night three, Mike is actually trapped in the location and so potentially has missed an episode in there.
The next night begins with Vlad arguing the usual, only for Clara to insult him, which doesn’t work, before going after Vlad’s car. He counters that it is a rental and Clara snipes that she set the thermostat to 90 before she left, with Vlad saying he likes it warm and the argument escalating to the house being set on fire.
This episode once again seems to align with William’s priorities. Clara goes after pride first, which doesn’t work, before going after Vlad’s car. We can infer from William’s purple car basically being its own character in the series at this point that the car was precious to him, he drives it when Charlie is murdered and it is deemed important enough to feature predominantly in the arcade cabinet of midnight motorist. The revelation that it is a rental to me gives us a hint that William might have been presenting a front of wealth but actually was not doing as well as one might imagine, in line with the previous night. Foiled in regards to the car, Clara goes for discomfort, talking about making it warm. This is also rather entertaining to me as we get every impression that William does not actually like it warm at all. He lives in Utah and almost everywhere we see associated with him is covered in fans and highly focused on keeping temperatures down.
Incidentally, the burning house we see is also an isolated house on a hilltop, akin to the house on the hill from FNAF 4 and Help Wanted.
The fact that things escalate to the point of burning the house down is the most important part for me. There is an unseen fire in the timeline of events, not the fire that consumes FNAF 3’s location but something earlier and implied. The FNAF 3 guard sees already burned versions of the animatronics before the fire. In FNAF 4 we first encounter the Jack-O versions of animatronics
In Ultimate Custom Night Jack-o-Chica’s voice lines give us a little more insight into what they might represent, and once again seem to remind us of a literal fire, in addition to the obvious parallels with fire and hell. Other animatronics also reference it either directly or indirectly.
- “I am a burning reminder of your misdeeds.”
- “Did things get really hot in here? Or is it just me?”
- “Come and burn with me!”
- “The fire within me burns eternal and now you shall as well!”
- “Greetings from the fire and from the one you should not have killed.”
There is a subtle question inherent in this if the crying child was at some point caught in a house fire, though I’m not sure what I feel about that. There are so many threads of meaning, it is possible for people to draw their own conclusions.
On night five, we see what appears to be a “fake ending”. This is deemed a fake ending due to this night being deemed labelled as such at the end. We see the “final episode” of The Immortal and the Restless where everything is forced into reconcilliation.
Clara states that Vlad’s house was more like a morgue, which though obviously nodding to the vampire thing also presents a grim picture of William keeping either bodies or the remnant souls in his possession. Clara says the baby ate the cat and Vlad protests its from Clara’s side of the family, this is a pretty brutal condemnation if we consider the baby they are arguing over a machine they built together. Henry’s Fredbear robot is what started it in the first place, so it was “his side of the family” who caused damage first.
Clara threatens to “keep the diamond ring” which could theoretically represent the fruits of their research, only for Vlad to snipe that he found it in a kid’s meal, potentially jabbing that the power all came from children’s souls. Clara’s response is odd and out of place, delighted that he bought a kids meal and reconciling immediately.
The episode points out that the child support owed still hasn’t been paid, and that the baby remains an outstanding issue.
I think that though it seems like an unrelated fun little cartoon, this soap opera gives us insight into some kind of conflict between William and Henry. Now the interesting part about this is, the argument in the Immortal and the Restless is over a “baby”. This could literally represent the situation with their strange custody battle over Charlotte Vessel 4/Elizabeth in the novels, or it could in fact represent another custody battle over the crying child. Did they make him together, only for William to disown what resulted?
In B7, one of the hugely important Tales stories, Billy’s father leaves when his son veers away from presenting as a normal human being and has little left to do with him. In the follow up story, Billy as an adult recovering from his traumas ends the story by deciding to find him again where he is working cutting down the rainforest(!).
I think that inadequate attention is given to the Immortal and the Restless, with people wanting to take it at face value without even paying attention to things like the “mistress” element or the design choices of the characters themselves.
End of Part 2
I think this is likely another good stopping point for this part, in the next part of the guide, we will be looking at the more human side of the crying child, his family and sibling and the real jake short story, with what this tells us about the character himself. I’ll see you then!