In this next part we will be focusing on one of the newest stories in the Tales from the Pizzaplex series and what it tells us about FNAF4. This story finally really made people sit up and pay attention to the evidence which had been mounting up for some time about the game and give credence to what had been considered “outlier” theories within the collective fandom consciousness. For me this story was exciting validation of so many theories I had been carrying for some time, alongside some new information about William’s technologies and things that he has potentially been investigating.
As always, I might refer back to previous parts, you can find these below. The guide is broken up for convenience as to not be too unwieldy.
FNAF4 – Dittophobia
The first factor in Dittophobia that we are presented with right out of the gate is the name of the protagonist. Rory is very close to the name Gregory, and he is not the only protagonist in the Frights and Tales with this kind of similarity. Every individual might vary on what they consider important in terms of names, but I feel like it cannot be outright dismissed that we have so many characters who touch upon the name of the Security Breach protagonist whose origins and true identity elude us.
I made the below infographic half as a joke and half to illustrate this fact, but since making it I’ve remembered other characters in the short stories who align with this trend (Rory from Sea Bonnies for e.g) and I’m certainly of the opinion that it is a little more than coincidence, particularly when we have a story as on the nose as GGY to be going on with.
Rory wakes up in a space that is described almost on a 1:1 likeness to the bedroom from FNAF4. There are some minor differences but the similarities are stark.
The room, though dim, was light enough that Rory could take in the closet door opposite the foot of his bed and his bedroom’s two doorways, which faced each other from the left and the right of his bed.
However, like I say there are some differences, the kid in Dittophobia has an analog clock when as you can see above, the FNAF4 bedroom has a digital clock on top of the drawers that loudly beeps between nights.
He couldn’t see the small blue-gray nightstand that held his little red alarm clock with the two bells that looked like ears on top of the clock’s face. – Dittophobia
I won’t go into every single discrepancy, but I just thought it was important to point out that some of the elements differ, from colours to objects, to patterns. Rory in Dittophobia has a green plastic fish and a rabbit toy, while the FNAF4 protagonist has what we see in the screenshot. I’ve gone into this in more depth in Part 1 so we won’t dwell here too long.
Cake
Much like in FNAF4, Rory is beset by an evening of animatronics coming after him. We assume that he is seven years old in these moments, just past his birthday party. He recalls having a big chocolate birthday cake, which is of interest primarily because we find that Jake in the real Jake loves chocolate too, and chocolate or vanilla is a choice the player must make in the pizza party minigame in Help Wanted. It wouldn’t be of remark if it didn’t come up so often.
Rory had turned seven just a few months ago, although his memory of his small party—just him, his parents, and his friend, Wade, with the balloons and the big chocolate birthday cake he’d thought had too much icing—was so vague that it seemed like it had happened years ago instead of just weeks. – Dittophobia
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know where he gets his food. But yesterday, we talked about what kind of cake we like. He likes chocolate, just like I do.” – The Real Jake
In Pizza Party, Freddy is on the side of chocolate, while the child and Shadow/Spring Bonnie (with his single eye and agony tears) are on the side of Vanilla.
You can end up with a chocolate cake, or (as I did) a vanilla one.
This sightly sinister chocolate cake comes up a few times in other stories too, often in strange places. Aimee in Find Player Two even sees it in the ominous hiding maze.
Some kid must have brought chocolate cake in here. He (she guessed it was a boy) had even left a broken red plastic fork behind. – Find Player Two
In Security Breach, there is a whole area full of party rooms in the daycare. One of the rooms is different from the others though. Room 4 has “YAY 40” on the wall outside and has an unusual birthday party laid out inside.
As you can see, there are no place settings for the band (with Monty sent away from the table) only a Pizza which has been eaten.
The head of the table has a piece of birthday cake. This model is identical to the one from Help Wanted which we receive as the final giftbox gift after all others have been exhausted, and as you can see it is also the flavour associated with the side that the “child” from the paper pals chooses, along with Shadow/Spring Bonnie.
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I wasn’t sure where else to mention this, as the theme of cake is one which comes up again and again, even with the minigame where we see William kill Charlotte commanding “Take cake to the children”
Jake finds himself in a false birthday party in the epilogues of the Frights.
Blow out the candles!” Jake’s friends, wearing pointy cardboard party hats, surrounded him at the table. Right in front of him was a round, white-frosted cake decorated with nine rainbow-colored candles. Somehow Jake knew that the cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting, his favorite. Jake laughed at his friends’ cheers, took a deep breath, and then huffed and puffed like the Big Bad Wolf in “The Three Little Pigs.” He extinguished all the candles at once. Jake’s heart was full of happiness. There were smiling faces all around him, smiling faces that were soon to be stuffed with cake and ice cream. But wait. None of this was real. It wasn’t even a memory.
We know from living Jake’s discussions with Margie that he likes chocolate cake best and that this instant is false. Jake realises the same. This false memory tries to compel him to fall into this imitation birthday party, Eleanor pulling him away from the world and trapping him there. William also creates fake “Happiest Days” for the children to pacify them, and it is fair to assume he did the same with the crying child.
In Under Construction in the tales, the protagonist Maya ends up trapped in an AR booth after seeking out a perfect and ultimately false birthday party.
Cake is also very overtly present in a page of the Security Logbook where we see the puppet offering a cake to a child.
Note here that this entire page is devoted to the “happiest day” of the reader’s life, with “new difficulties” replaced emphatically with “certain death”.
William refers directly to this “happiest day” many times and we will go into this in more detail in a later article on remnant.
“They are home, with me.” Dave’s voice was coarse, and the large mascot’s head slid forward and tilted as he spoke. “Their happiest day.”
—
The dead do forget. All they know is that you are here, trying to take away their happiest day. You are intruders.” He lowered his voice to a hush. “You are grown-ups.”
Cake is important, and though it might not be pivotal to Dittophobia, Rory remembering a distant birthday party as one of his few memories is quite, quite sinister.
FNAF4 – Caught in a Loop
Rory is pursued by Nightmare Bonnie at first, or at least what we can assume is Nightmare Bonnie based on the description, however we see quickly that Rory’s nights are almost always closed out with a nightmarish Freddy leaning in to bite him.
And I say nights in plural because this story is rooted in a cycle for much of its duration. Rory goes to bed, is hunted by the nightmarish creatures, wakes up, prepares to go to school, has something to eat, tells himself his parents are showering or at work and then before he can find the exit to the house, becomes so tired that he must go to bed. Every night he is terrified, every day he goes through the same cycle of waking and then confusion.
Dittophobia as you might imagine means the fear of repetition. Rory is caught in a loop, trapped in an artificial day which is not so different from the artificial memories that William has utilized on other people previously as we see above.
We see this same concept in Security Breach and Ruin where the princess quest theme tune is literally named “Caught in a Loop” and there is a very real possibility that the concept of a game that we as players play over and over again is the literal manifestation of that loop.
You can see the looped tunnel the player goes through on the way from Bonnie Bowl to Fazer Blast, a tunnel that we hear the princess quest theme in. We find her trashed arcade at the end.
We saw in FNAF world that the player is being kept somewhere by games and ultimately break out. Desk man tells them he “didn’t know what else to do” when confronted with the reminder that he put them there.
This is probably a good time to discuss the conversation with desk man in FNAF world. Some people consider him to be Scott himself, but I strongly beg to differ, Scott puts himself in troll games but has made very direct comments that he and his family are not in the game as-is, only parallels to them.
“The question is this: Is Scott Cawthon now a part of FNAF lore? The short answer is: No. My name is never actually mentioned in the game. The game says that an indie developer was tarnishing the brand of Fazbear Entertainment by making video games about them, forcing them to rebrand and try to reclaim their good name by making a VR game that made light of those crazy stories. (Or was it all part of the plan?) Yes, I used my own picture for this indie developer because it’s an obvious parallel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actually me in-universe.”
“So no, I’m not canon, Freddit isn’t canon, the fangames aren’t canon, YOU aren’t canon. Only the existence of a game developer that supposedly made video games based on actual events that may or may not be a cover up by Fazbear Entertainment is canon.
Along these same lines, keep in mind that I DO tend to use pictures of me and my family in the games just because they are so readily available. My little boy, Jason, is the face of “The one you should not have killed” in UCN. I’ll share the original sometime; he looks sweet as an angel in the original picture and I turned him into a monster! In FNAF4, I used a picture of a mountain range that I took while I was a truck driver in West Texas. I used a picture of a snowman that me and my older sons made together. I used a picture of a pet Mockingbird that we nursed back to health one year. Do these have lore significance? Well, you probably already know the answer.” – A post from Scott on Freddit
After the player defeats Chica’s magic rainbow, desk man speaks to the protagonist one final time and says the following
“I’m impressed.
What are you doing here? Can’t you see that I’m busy?
You deactivated my games?
I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t want to disappoint people.
But my mind isn’t right. I’ve made something terrible.
Her name is Baby.
It’s too late to deactivate her.
I’m sorry.“
This has a lot of connotations for Baby and The Silver Eyes which are not applicable in this discussion, but what is applicable is that it appears the games (including Chica’s Magic Rainbow) were designed to keep the individual we play as in the world of FNAF world.
The game has a “normal” narrative line we can follow and an alternate secret line led by the glitched Fredbear plushie and foreshadowed to us by the eyes we see in the intro.
After following the instructions from the glitched Fredbear, the player comes back to these eyes which tell them the following.
We are still your friends.
Do you believe that?
The pieces are in place for you.
All you have to do is find them.
Rest.
And as we’ve discussed, the trophy for this is a no longer crying version of the crying child.
I’ve seen people assume this voice is circus baby because the eyes appear in the scene where desk man (who I speculate to be Henry) dies, and Baby’s voice is played. However I would argue that given the weight of evidence about who is behind the Fredbear plushie itself (as we discussed in an earlier part), it is William who guides the crying child out of the FNAF world sanctuary that Henry has placed him in.
He says “We are still your friends” because he considers himself one of the animatronics.
In the opening lines of Felix the Shark we see the following interaction between two characters, with a female twin stuck in a loop of perpetual check with a character with some distinct parallels with William or at least his ambitions.
“How long are you two going to do that?” Jenny’s twin, Gordon, asked. He was lounging against a pile of red pillows on the big black sectional sofa behind Dirk. “You two are stuck in a loop. Isn’t there such a thing as a perpetual check?”
They are essentially trapped in a game that neither can win, much the same as many of the previous examples.
“Okay, but you could agree to draw,” Gordon said. Dirk frowned. “We could, but giving up is a sign of weakness.”
William certainly never deigns to give up on anything.
As you can see though, overall this concept of repetition and being stuck in a constant, endless loop is linked to the crying child thematically, and therefore it makes perfect sense for it to play a major part both in title and contents of this story.
The House
A ton of the real estate of the story is focused on the house around Rory. He goes into deep descriptions of the home itself, down to the colours of the walls and the decorations around it, borrowing more complex descriptive words from his mother’s real estate background, understanding what a chair rail is and that a door is louvered. The descriptions are in depth and vivid and the reader is given the sounds, smells and textures of the space as Rory perceives it.
We can imagine the layout of the space, and it is clear that the circuit of the house is almost identical to what we see of the location in FNAF4 and Help Wanted. The main difference is that we also get to see the open plan living room and dining area at the other side of the house itself. The whole house itself is shaped like an inescapable loop, as we can see from the map in Sister Location (on the top right.)
Of course, we find out that Rory has been hallucinating the whole time due to gas that is pumped through the vents. The house is artificial and has been decaying for years.
As he listened to himself breathe, Rory realized that the sound of his breathing was a gentle percussion beneath the steady whisper coming from above him. Rory looked up. Right. The vents. Their usual hiss comforted Rory. The night was over. All was well. – Dittophobia
All Is Well
While we are here, I thought it would be worthwhile to point out a turn of phrase that comes up time and time again in the short stories. “All is/was well.” I find that generally when this phrase shows up, we are dealing with a short story with some relevance to the Afton family. It sounds strange, but it happens startlingly often. When I finally read this story, knowing it had something to do with FNAF4, I laughed aloud when I got to the last words of the excerpt above.
Where does this phrase come from and why does it matter to me? I’d like to point out the below song from 2017
Scott is almost certainly aware of this song and its catchy chorus.
All stay strong, we live eternally.
All is well in the Afton family.
Lives, they fell to pure insanity.
All is hell in the Afton family.
Some examples of this phrase and where else it shows up.
Bob didn’t know, but he did know that for these cherished moments holding Cindy, he could convince himself that he had good things in his life. He could talk himself into the “all is well” mentality Wanda lived out every day. – Bunny Call. Bob is a clear William analogue who brings the dreaded “Bunny Call” on his family in an act of ill advised anger, only to regret it later. He has two sons, exactly like Afton.
The import of that hit him. They were still sleeping. All was well. – Bunny Call again. As if it wasn’t clear enough with the one!
“This too shall pass,” and “All is well,” and “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” She had like a gazillion smiley-face T-shirts with various hats or outfits or expressions. – The Real Jake – Margie, this one is familiar to us of course.
The orderly returned with a small yellow cup, and Mr. Devereaux took it from her roughly before turning on his side, his back to her and to Oscar. Marilyn poked an ear up to be sure all was well before resettling into her coil. – The crotchety Mr Devereaux gives Oscar a lot of cryptic advice, this story directly features Plushtrap chasing the kids, and plushtrap is a critical character in FNAF4
Tag-Along Freddy and, interestingly, a woman dressed like she worked in an office, looking at her wristwatch and smiling like all was well in the world. – Lonely Freddy – A kid is given a friendly bear companion and ends up replaced by the bear who was supposed to be his friend. Definitely Afton family dynamic hints here.
It was so much fun to bring out the eels once you got others to relax and think all was well. – Together Forever – Jessica is horrible to some cute kids but ends up springlocked inside an old character suit for her karmic retribution. Need I say more?
She’d had her big party and her traditional party. All was well in her world. – Under Construction – Maya ends up caught in a loop, like I mentioned earlier in this very part!
Life was like that, Tony thought. He’d learned that from his investigations, too. One second, all was well. The next second could bring surprises of the worst kind. – GGY, this story is as close to discussing the pizzaplex Gregory as we get!
And I’m sure there are others I missed. But you get the point. When I see this turn of phrase, I pay attention.
The Truth
Rory is pulled out of his looping circuits of the house by a knocking sound in the walls as a generator fails and breaks. The gas no longer pumps into the house and his nightmares cease. He wakes up to a house as it truly is, decayed and falling into open disrepair. The moment I read this I was reminded of the level with Nightmarionne in Help Wanted, which always interested me due to its damp infested and collapsing ceiling.
He realises to his horror that he’s far older than he remembers, with a grown up voice and body to match. He panics as he realises the many differences and the changed face he sees in the mirror. He is now seventeen years old or thereabouts.
A closer look at the bathroom, however, just made the mystery worse. The bathroom was a mess. The sink, toilet, and tub all had rusty-looking stains, and the tiled floor was scuffed and scummy. Paint peeled from the walls. The bathroom looked like one you’d find in a haunted house. Why?
Rory has been going through the motions of living his life every day for what seems to be ten years and finds himself in a position where he has been a prisoner in this imitation of a home without realising it.
Rory realized now that those footprints must have been his own. They were the same size as his feet. Had he been walking in his sleep?
He realises that he has been eating packaged wafers rather than actual food and it has been tailored for someone much smaller physically than he is. He has food and water to sustain him but everything else is fake, the doors all slabs of wood and the sound of his mother’s shower simply noise pumped through a speaker.
Following tracks on the floor he realizes that the animatronic nightmares he’d been seeing were simply tattered machines. They do still look fundamentally the way he sees them in his nightmares but are simply costumes hung on flimsy metallic skeletons which couldn’t move on their own, not quite the horrific creatures that thudded towards him in his nightmares.
He seeks each of the other animatronics out and finds the same thing.
At this point he’s faced with the dilemma of what to do next and chooses to leave the confines of the house and see if he can escape.
He finds himself in a room full of what looks like scuba tanks and realises that they are pumping gas into the house and one of the fans has stopped.
Fear Level : Nine
The first thing Rory saw on the top sheet of paper was a date. It was a date just a month after his seventh birthday. He read a handwritten entry next to the date. “Subject continues to react with fear,” Rory read aloud, “to what he perceives to be creatures. Fear level: nine.”
Rory finds an observation log which appeared to record a whole month after his seventh birthday.
According to the papers on the clipboard, the gas in the gas tanks were hallucinogens. These were drugs that made him think he was seeing and doing things he wasn’t seeing and doing. The gas was what made him think he was living in the house with his parents. The gas made him think he had to go to school. The gas made him think he was eating real food when in fact the whole time he was eating the awful wafers. (The wafers, the papers said, were freeze-dried sources of all the nutrients a human body needed. That might have been true, Rory thought, but given how skinny he was, he didn’t think the wafers were enough for him anymore.)
He discovers the whole thing is an experiment to study the effects of ongoing fear in children and what would happen if a child faced the same horrors over and over with no real life to counterbalance the nightmares. The dates on the log confirm to him that he appears to have been abandoned to his fate ten years ago.
He unfastens one of the hoses and looks to flee the whole place and stumbles out of his confines into what is unmistakably sister location.
It is work raising here that we receive numerous indications that William is running fear experiments, both in the novels and the games.
“The most terrible accidents sometimes bear the most beautiful fruits,” he said, as if to himself. “Re-creating the accident—that is the duty and the honor of science. To replicate the experiment, and obtain the same result. I give my life to this experiment, piece by piece.” – The Fourth Closet – William refers to an accident he is seeking to replicate, the largest accident of his life is the death of his son and likely the death of his daughter later.
We see him mention his pursuit of fear or at least his Springtrap rendition mentions it in FNAF AR.
“It is not your flesh that sustains me, it is your fear.”
“Your fear will consume you.”
And of course this line that once again ties William to the “put you back together” line,
“Let’s see how many times you can be pulled apart, and put back together again.”
Sister Location
Rory makes his way through Sister Location.
The rooms were disturbing. One was obviously some kind of observation station. It had slanted glass walls that looked out at a darkness Rory couldn’t see into. Above one of the glass walls, there was a panel of unlit colored lights. Even though the lights weren’t on, Rory could see that the four lights were different colors—one blue, one green, one pink, and one yellow. On an adjacent glass wall, a poster of a wild-looking girl with red pigtails had the word CELEBRATE printed across the top.
I still can’t believe that I missed the importance of the gas canisters.
William even DIRECTLY addresses the gas canisters at the start of Sister Location when he addresses the board.
She can dance, she can sing! She’s equipped with a built-in helium tank for inflating balloons right at her fingertips. She can take song requests. She can even dispense ice-cream.
Those fingertips almost certainly weren’t for inflating balloons but also a chilling dual purpose if this story is anything to go by.
He moves next into the Ballora Gallery
Not long after he found the observation room, Rory entered a room that looked like a big dance floor with a stage. On the stage, a metal ballerina was frozen in place with her arms above her head. She wore a purple metal skirt, the stiff kind that stuck out from her waist.
He wanders into the breaker room and starts flipping switches but does not run into Funtime Freddy in here at all. Once again though, note the pipes.
Some of the places that Rory goes are not in the game itself. He finds himself in what could only be described as a parts and services room full of animatronics parts. He finds the tables near the shelves reminiscent of the tables in doctor’s offices and recalls that he doesn’t like doctor’s offices.
Funtime Auditorium has Foxy there at least, even If we don’t see Freddy or Baby in person.
He finds himself in the main control area with the distinctive masks and proceeds to rummage through and find blueprints to Sister Location itself, identifying it as what many speculated it was, an underground testing facility.
He decides the elevator is his way out, only to find that nothing seems to turn the elevator on.
He returns to the drawers and finds a two way radio. This very possibly gives us insight into where the matching radio to the one in the Fredbear plushie might be at this point in time.
On the off chance that he can find his friend, Rory attempts to switch on the radio and against all odds, he finds that his friend has been carrying around a compatible walkie talkie for ten years.
Wade says that he’s kept the walkie talkie because it reminded him of their friendship. To me this is definitely a parallel for what could be the case with Michael who very possibly has been carting the plushie around with him, we never actually know if he put it in the private room or if it was always there.
I think that it is possible that at some point Michael was contacted by his brother and this is what added additional motivation for him to go back to Sister Location.
This is obviously similar to Security Breach : RUIN where Cassie finds a walkie talkie radio that lures her down to an old underground testing location with a scooper in it.
Rory catches up with Wade and realises from the conversation he has a sister now and remembers his dog, who he had forgotten about. Rory tells Wade that he’s being held prisoner and explains his ridiculous situation. Wade sounds horrified but rather than doubt him, instead believes his words and together they try and find a way to leave. Wade suggests finding a generator that powers the house and using it to power the elevator instead.
He laments that it isn’t possible to trace the radios they have, dispelling it as a method to pursue in bringing Rory back.
Rory goes back to try and find a generator and actually finds one behind the fridge in the house, surrounded by sound insulating rubber.
It looks like he might actually escape.
The Voice
From the ceiling of the house, a speaker directly addresses Rory by name and tells him not to disrupt the generator.
He challenges the voice to say who they are but they simply continue to speak.
The voice coming from the speaker was a man’s voice, maybe a man about Rory’s dad’s age. It was a very nice voice. The voice was low and smooth. It was calm and soothing.
This immediately brings forth the mental image of William Afton, who is described when he speaks properly as having a pleasant convincing voice.
“I helped him create.” The voice came from inside the mask, but it was not Dave’s, not the pitiful, sour tone they would have recognized. The voice of the rabbit was smooth and rich, almost musical. It was confident, somehow reassuring—a voice that might convince you of almost anything. – The Silver Eyes
True to this assertion that William’s voice might convince someone of almost anything, he manages to slither into all of Rory’s insecurities, telling him the gas is always there for him to escape.
He tells him that he ran away from home, saying that he didn’t fit in at school and the girls thought he was wimpy. He reassures him that he came there because he knew he’d been taken care of there. I will address this part in the next part of the discussion when we move onto Midnight Motorist, but for now bear in mind that Rory ran away from home.
The voice continues to twist his thoughts, turning him against the world outside and reassuring him that he is safe here, telling him this is his special place.
Rory starts to doubt himself and finds his confidence and will to leave eroded.
He turns to reset the generator and switch the machine back on.
It is worth noting here that the reason it switched off in the first place was that the power cord was loose. This could be a result of intentional tampering or just wear and tear, but I find it interesting it is a reversible flaw.
Regardless, Rory returns to his prison, he returns to his loop, returns to his endless cycle of nightmares and waking and surrenders to the gas.
The story ends with the below paragraph.
At the end of the concrete corridor filled with gas tanks, the gas pump rumbled steadily. In the ceiling above the pump, behind a metal grate, a tape recorder clicked. It then whirred loudly—the sound of a cassette rewinding. Another click. The cassette was once again ready … for the next time Rory wandered too far.
I cannot have been the only one who was immediately reminded of our most significant encounter with a “cassette recording” in this franchise. We literally have Henry known primarily as “Cassette Man” and he communicates in this fashion throughout FNAF6 right up until his final speech where he speaks directly to the protagonist and Baby.
I am not saying that the voice on the speaker in the ceiling is Henry, I think the similarities to William’s voice are too significant for that. It’s just interesting that they seem to use the same outdated methods of communication.
The most important takeaways I got from this closing paragraph were the fact that there is an implication this is not the first time Rory has “run away from home” in the labs, having wandered away from the house previously and been sent back. It does feel like he might have gotten further this time than before, as Wade hadn’t spoken to him before – IF he managed to get hold of Wade. The ambiguity of this ending raises a lot of questions about how planned his escape was and how controlled the situation was.
The other thing we can take away from this is that if the voice on the tape is William, he is not present at this point in time. In fact it seems like he vanished from Sister Location a month after the captive’s seventh birthday for some reason.
It seems like William “disappears” from the main games when he goes out to retrieve remnant from the remaining animatronics and fails. This could very well be linked. There isn’t much reason he wouldn’t return to his secret lair if he could.
Conclusion
Dittophobia had a LOT to unpack but was an absolute atom bomb of a story when it dropped, finally giving people who had been saying for years that FNAF4 was some kind of experiment a bit more evidence to point to. It is obviously linked to FNAF4 in so many ways, and I think it has given us hints towards many of the franchises most persistent and compelling mysteries.
In the next part we will loop back towards Midnight Motorist and its potential connections to FNAF4 and see where we go from there. This part ended up much longer than I expected!