FNAF4 – Intro
Welcome to the 6th part of this massive FNAF4 Ultimate Guide! The stories are worth giving a little more space than I thought I would need to provide them; a summary doesn’t do them justice, so we will do these and then move along. I’m still keeping things as brief as possible; there is so much to go over in this game and so many interconnected threads!
To assist in finding what you want to look up, here is a quick and far-from-comprehensive list of the other parts and what they cover.
Part 1 – Timeline, House, Toys, I Will Put You Back Together, Fredbear
Part 2 – Foxy Kid, The Bite, The Box, Lally’s Game, Balloon Boy, The Immortal and the Restless
Part 3 – The Real Jake, The Doll, The Magician
Part 4 – Dittophobia, Cake, Happiest Day, Caught in a Loop, Desk Man, Afton Family, Fear Research
Part 5 – Security Logbook, Balloon Boy, Log Book Conversations.
Part 6 – Step Closer, Mike’s Habits, Fishing, Bad Luck, An Eye and An Arm
This part will be entirely devoted to going in-depth on Lonely Freddy, this story is one that I couldn’t skip over as – much like Step Closer – it sheds important light on the interrelationship between the Afton children and also potential insight into Mike’s personality and what set him up for failure as a kid.
Lonely Freddy
Unlike Step Closer, this story does not concern the relationship between two brothers, but in this case, it concerns the difficult relationship between a boy and his younger sister. However, when it comes to character parallels I don’t think gender matters one iota, it is possible to take this story as potentially shedding light on Michael’s relationship with his own younger sister or his younger brother, possibly with elements of both. We’ll look into what might make us lean one way or the other as we go along.
The protagonist of Lonely Freddy is a boy named Alec, one of the few characters in the frights who appears to have been born with innately diminished empathy. He stands out from his peers by his lack of qualms regarding self-serving behaviour and is tarred with the label of “bad” or “a bully” by those around him. No specific diagnosis is given for Alec’s behaviour within the story’s text. Still, I suspect he would fall under some umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, a disorder that I suspect William Afton also experiences due to his issues around emotions. I do want to stress that these personality disorders do not equate in any way on their own to a character being a serial killer or harmful at all. Regardless, the parallel in experience between these two characters is valid, along with a potential parallel with Michael’s experience if he inherited it from his father. The author portrays Alec in the story with sensitivity and care, he is not simply “mean” but a young boy who struggles to understand why the world treats him the way it does.
The story begins with Alec assessing what “Bad” means and how it is subjective according to someone else’s determined baseline. He remembers how horrified his teacher was when they told him he was bad and he didn’t understand that he was. He thoughtfully discusses how he learned what bad was by defining it as something established via comparison with others and was able to process this accordingly and get by.
We are introduced through Alec’s perspective to his sister who he considers too perfect, with blonde ringlets and who sleeps through the night without issue. We learn here that Alec has issues sleeping, something which immediately brings to mind Michael and the Afton kids who experience vivid nightmares through the games.
Alec’s nights were cleaved by nightmares and bouts of loud wakefulness.
He attributes the arrival of his sister to a breakdown of his understanding of the walls between good and bad, finding that much of his behaviour went undiscovered and unseen. He elaborates that when no one was guiding him or watching his behaviour, it was an afterthought at best.
The Plan
Alec’s parents struggle to deal with his complex behaviour and we come to understand that he is good at eavesdropping and often overhears discussions about him. Interestingly, some of this behaviour is reminiscent of Michael as we see him in the movie.
And he’s not aggressive. He’s just … I don’t know … he’s in his own world. It’s like the rules don’t apply to him.
In the movie, Mike openly tells people that he will “do his best” and then sleeps on the job, or quits after a short window. He does not seem to have much regard for other people’s rules. Vanessa challenges him several times, and he does not seem to value what she has to say on the matter. She tells him no more sleeping on the job and he just goes and replaces his pills.
There is an amusing joke in the conversation between Alec’s Aunt Gigi and his mother where Alec’s mother mentions that her son doesn’t seem to like people much.
“He’s ten, Meg. They hate everyone.”
“Not everyone,” his mom had argued. “Look at Gavin.”
“Who?”
“Becca’s son.”
“That kid who’s always smiling at everyone?”
“That isn’t a bad thing,” his mom had said.
“No, it’s a creepy thing,” Aunt Gigi had said. “Trust me, you don’t want more little Gavins running around the world. That’s the kind of kid you find standing over your bed one night holding a butcher knife. No, thanks.”
This feels like a nod to a character who does seem to smile all the time and who very much would be the kind of person to find standing over your bed holding a butcher knife, and subtly distances Alec’s behaviour from Afton’s personality, in my opinion setting him closer to Mike.
Alec’s eavesdropping means he overhears a discussion about “The Plan”
He frames this by explaining that he overheard this in April, Hazel’s birthday month. He explains gets one day on the 18th of August to celebrate his birthday, while Hazel gets thirty days of preparation for her birthday party. Alec resents this and refuses to encourage his sister’s excitement.
He overhears his parents discussing the literature they have been reading to try and better support and understand Alec, it appears that they haven’t been having much success with this, with numerous failed efforts. His father is approaching his limit on these efforts, and Alec’s mother challenges him about whether they should give up. Alec finds himself wishing that they’d try a different tact.
“Just ask me,” Alec whispered, and for just a second—for once in all of his fifteen years—his parents were both silent, and he thought maybe they’d hear him. “Just ask me what’s the matter.”
If they’d asked, he might have said, “I’m not like you, and I’m not like Hazel, and that should be okay.”
His parents resign themselves to reading the book’s next chapter, and Alec resigns to dealing with their efforts over the next week.
A Discussion and Alliance
Alec and Hazel share a bathroom and that night they have a conversation where Hazel tries to explain to him that she doesn’t care about the party. We experience the conversation through Alec’s perspective and the reader understands that perhaps his perspective is off and he is being unfair to his sister. As much as he wants other people to accept his behaviour as it is, he appears unable for the moment at least to extend this courtesy to his sibling, assessing her behaviour by his own standards.
Hazel comes into Alec’s room and Alec considers threatening her to leave, assessing different routes such as verbal intimidation, force or psychological trickery to get her to go away. However, she doesn’t back off but approaches him with the book her parents intended to use to deal with Alec, bringing him their copy of “The Plan Planner”
Alec is confused that she would take such a risk and come into his room, knowing how irritated he’d be about it and can’t process the concept of this being an altruistic or kind gesture, looking back through other times when she’d displayed the same kind of kindness. For a moment he almost accepts it as an overture of kindness before doubling down and convincing himself that she was trying to trick him and deciding to play along.
Later Alec proposes to Hazel that his response to the book should be to behave far worse than his parents expect and she is not on board with it. The whole conversation Alec is convincing himself that he’s somehow convincing his sister to trust him.
“So let me get this straight,” she said, rolling her eyes skyward. “Your big plan to get Mom and Dad to stop thinking you’re a total sociopath is to act like a total sociopath?”
Instead, she suggests Alec be good instead, with her taking up the slack and being worse.
Alec doesn’t know what to make of this either, constantly distressed by the depth of personality he comes to see in his sister but dismisses it as simply an inclination towards duplicity.
Hazel makes good on their agreement however and they both do as they planned, with Hazel upholding her side of the deal to misbehave and argue with their parents. Unfortunately, Alec finds this switching of roles threatening and is irritated at the possibility that Hazel could somehow be nastier than him. He continues holding out on his belief that Hazel is trying to manipulate and outsmart him with her plan, even as they listen to their exasperated parents bickering over the situation.
Alec’s only real option was to sit back and let Hazel show her cards. It was a matter of time before it happened, and though she’d proven herself more cunning than he’d originally given her credit for, she was no evil genius. That title was reserved for Alec.
Party Prepping
The family (including Aunt Gigi) attend Freddy Fazbears to plan Hazel’s party and choose the packages and options they want. Some fun references here don’t have much by way of lore but are fun anyway, with Alec’s mom trying to use coupons for a party package.
We see these same coupons in the Security Logbook.
“I have these coupons from the paper for Foxy’s Pirate Palooza special? Can I use those?”
The purpose of this scene however appears to be to introduce some critical features and characters. Alec and Hazel discuss Yarg Foxy, a Foxy plush figure who is there to take pictures with, and Alec internally thinks about how he is undoubtedly Alec’s favourite character.
I don’t need to re-iterate the clear link between Mike and Foxy and how choosing this particular character as the one that calls out to Alec is an immediate reminder of this connection. Alec even remembers pretending to be Yarg Foxy when he was younger and being spotted pretending to be him by Hazel.
The following important feature we are introduced to is the Lonely Freddy bears that are part of this particular Freddy’s location. These toys are bears provided to keep more antisocial children happy, though at first Alec is mostly irritated that one keeps following him around. As he looks the bear over, Hazel tells him the litany of things their parents have had to do over the years to try and deal with him, listing off even their present home and the fact that they moved there to be closer to Gigi who Alec seems to like better.
They discuss the wind tunnel game and how it can win a Yarg Foxy toy. Their mother gives away the fact that Hazel was aiming for one, embarrassing her and infuriating Alec, who assumes she wanted one to gloat over him.
The adults ask the Party Prepper about the Lonely Freddy and they go into detail about their function and come to realise their purpose.
Aunt Gigi leaned close to their mom. “Is it just me, or does ‘Lonely Freddy’ sound like the cure for the unwanted kid?” “Gigi!” “Meg, seriously, it’s a mechanical last resort. As in, no one wants to play with this kid, so here’s a machine that’ll do it instead.”
Alec finds this uncomfortable, aware that he would be the child that would have a Freddy foist on him at a party.
They end by confirming that the wind tunnel will be added to the package anyway.
You Made Them
Alec’s mother and Aunt Gigi talk about the sharp change in Hazel’s behaviour and Gigi makes a few odd comments. The first is quite obvious.
“Meg, you know I think it’s great how you and Ian are always working to make sure you don’t raise a couple of serial killers.”
I don’t need to comment on how this also is amusing in a series about a serial killer. They go on for Gigi to imply that perhaps the parents have created a self-fulfilling prophecy by ring-fencing both kids into roles. Something that is entirely accurate when we see things from the kid’s perspective.
“But, don’t you ever wonder if in all your efforts to make them normal kids—whatever that means—if maybe you’ve …”
“If we’ve what?” their mom didn’t sound so much defensive as petrified of the answer.
“Maybe you’ve made them what they are,” Aunt Gigi said, pausing for a moment before adding: “Hazel’s the easy one. Alec is the hard one. It’s like you put them on their own little islands.”
Alec hardens himself against his sister again as he departs the conversation he was listening in on, determined to enact a “counter-counterplan” against her. This is despite the fact that as they work together he finds himself warming more and more to her, any time he feels himself warming to her pushing those thoughts away all over again, afraid to fall for some perceived trick.
Still, Alec wishes her Happy Birthday and means it on the morning of the party.
It is worth mentioning here that this entire story is structured thus far as a countdown to a party is quite an obvious parallel to the countdown to the birthday party in FNAF 4, with each day marked by its proximity to the day of the party.
The Party
The party is described much as we might expect with Alec sulking and Hazel playing her more expected role as a well-behaved little girl.
Amid it, we do hear a mention of one party-goer whose name is incredibly familiar.
“Did anyone remind the staff that Charlotte can’t have chocolate? I should probably go remind them,” his mom said.
Charlotte, Henry’s daughter is one of the critical characters in the series, and I doubt that any of the authors working on the series would have missed the importance of her name. I am not saying this is her, but it is interesting that we find a main character’s name here. Whenever I find a canon name, I pay keener attention to the story.
The party goes off mostly without a hitch, but Hazel has avoided playing in the Wind Tunnel, constantly looking over towards Alec, unsure what she wants to do. Every time her mother would remind her that all she had wanted for weeks was to win that Foxy and send her scurrying off again.
Alec wants her to play because he has personally stolen the Yarg Foxy ticket out of the tunnel out of spite and is waiting for her to be “exposed” as a brat. He takes her aside and tries to convince her to play the wind tunnel. He gets impatient with her and almost makes her cry, which he realises he has seldom seen her do. She goes to the wind tunnel and barely attempts to capture anything.
Once again we see the girl called Charlotte spot that Hazel somehow has managed to capture a Yarg Foxy ticket in her hair.
“Wait!” screamed the girl named Charlotte who couldn’t eat chocolate. “Look in her hair!”
This outrages Alec, who realises that there had to be a ticket hiding in the leftover scraps from the previous wind tunnel run that he missed. He is furious, and even more furious when she seems to be relieved that she has won it. Fate seems to have intervened here in a remarkable way.
Yarg Foxy
Hazel unboxes the fox prize and looks at it but won’t play with it at all and Alec is furious, pitching a fit that she gets everything she wants and still isn’t satisfied. She doesn’t address him outright, but instead leaves briefly to go to the bathroom and when she comes back she informs her mother that she wants to give Alec the fox plush.
“Here,” she said and shoved the Yarg Foxy into his chest. “It’s for you.”
“Aw, sweetie, look!” their mom said, and their dad shushed her, but their parents and Aunt Gigi continued to stare.
“You can’t be serious,” Alec said. “I only wanted it so I could give it to you,” she said.
She reveals to Alec that she just wanted him to hate her less, that this was the whole reason she’d wanted the toy in the first place. Rather than take this with good grace, Alec is outraged, feeling she is trying to best him somehow, suspicious of her motivation.
And so he lashes out.
“Okay fine, I’ll take the fox.”
He ripped the toy back from his sister’s grasp hard enough to tear the arm, sending soft tufts of stuffing floating into the air.
Their mother let out an involuntary shriek, and Aunt Gigi put her hand on her sister’s shoulder.
“Meg, get a grip. You’re making it worse.”
Their dad tried to make it better. “Alec, come on, sport. Don’t do this today.”
“Oh, I see, because it’s so predictable that Alec would ruin the party. It’s so inevitable that Alec would spoil perfect little Hazel’s good time,” he said, snarling at his family, who could only look back at him in horror.
All of them, that is, except for Hazel. Hazel simply stood there, arms limp at her sides as she stared at him.
And there they were. The tears.
She hadn’t let them fall earlier. She had saved it all up for that moment, when she had the perfect audience. That’s when she let the floodgates open. And even still, she only let a few fall.
Even in this moment where he emotionally eviscerates his own sister, Alec cannot see that he is hurting her and that there is no real reason to do so. He doesn’t understand the perspective of others in the same way and simply sees everything around him as a threat.
The Yarg Foxy being defaced by having its arm torn off always seemed like a hint to me of one of the biggest unresolved mysteries of FNAF4.
What happened to the crying child’s Foxy plushie in the cutscene? It doesn’t have a head.
Did something similar happen between the crying child and his older brother? It seems completely odd that he has one plushie without a head and that this plushie is the same one as the mask his bother loves to scare him with.
In the story, Alec runs away from the scene of his outburst and passes by Charlotte again.
..barely registering any of it, including Hazel’s friend, Charlotte, who was about to puke because someone had ignored all warnings to the contrary and fed her chocolate.
Alec does get thrown up on later, but I think it is particularly interesting that there is this constant warning not to feed this Charlotte character chocolate. I think that there is a possibility that this is also a nod to the fact that William should not have “fed” Charlotte agony. This is not me simply making leaps, we see agony and remnant compared to food in the discussion between Mr Hippo and Orville. This contrast of dark and light is frequent and consistent. In this case, Charlotte is allergic to the dark-coloured substance, typically equated with Agony.
I would argue that William imbuing Charlotte with agony makes a dire mistake, given how active, mobile and aware she turns out to be.
Regret
Alec hides away in the backrooms of the Freddy Fazbear’s Family Pizzeria that he is at, all the while emotionally collapsing in on himself and realising that so many of his problems are his own doing.
“It’s not my fault,” he said, again and again. “It’s not my fault.” But the more he heard his pathetic words in his ears, the more he knew they weren’t true. It was his fault, all of it. He’d ruined the party, ruined Hazel, ruined his whole fifteen years by believing everyone was out to get him.
He tosses himself angrily against the wall, again and again as he works out his emotions, only to hear another loud thumping coming from the other side of the wall. He ventures into the storage room beyond and realises that he is still carrying the damaged plushie with him.
Its torn arm dangled by a few stubborn threads. Otherwise, the toy was shiny new, just as it had been promised to the kid lucky enough to get that stupid coupon. “You weren’t even supposed to be here,” he said to the fox, but he couldn’t muster the rage to give the words any bite.
He tries to convince himself of his own delusions again but is unsuccessful, crushed under the realization that his sister had simply wanted to do something kind for him, remembering the times when she’d done nice things over the last few years and realising that she hadn’t been out to hurt him.
He’d just assumed she was scheming. But what if she was just looking? What if she was just waiting for him to look back at her? What if she was just waiting for him to be a big brother?
He throws the Yarg Foxy across the room, only for it to be buried in an avalanche of toys and he goes digging for it.
He ducked behind the shelving rack and began sifting through the toys, throwing them back into the bin they fell out of while doing his best to locate the fox. After everything he’d already done, losing the toy she gave to him just wasn’t an option. Not if he ever had any hope of making things right.
We have every reason to believe that in the main line of games, Michael keeps the Fredbear plushie with him and that he could have been the one to bring it into the private room. Was he looking to make things right somehow with a treasured plushie too?
While he looks through, Alec hears the thumping again, coming across a dumpster with a padlock sealing it shut. He can’t entirely open it but is interrupted in his efforts to do so by the sight of a Lonely Freddy bear, watching him.
This scene, with Alec alone in the old abandoned and dusty storage area puts me in mind of Michael’s later encounter with Sister Location, where he runs into Ennard and Baby.
The bear tells him it has been waiting for him and that they should be best friends. Alec is hypnotised, unable to stand up or look away from the bear and its brightly glowing blue eyes. It demands questions of him that he cannot help but be compelled to answer for what seems like hours.
Most of these questions seem fairly benign but as they progress they pry deeper and deeper into Alec.
“Who do you admire most?”
“My aunt Gigi.”
“What do you fear the most?”
“The dark.”
“What would you do if you were asked to hurt someone you love?”
It is of remark that the last question Alec doesn’t answer. How would Michael answer this? We see him in the movie presented with the choice of handing over his own sister for his brother and he seems to do so without too much hesitation. How does game line Mike feel about hurting his own father?
The bear goes on to demand his biggest regret until he answers simply “Hurting Hazel”.
Again, I think that this is important, as it seems to be this utmost truth which unlocks Alec’s heart to the Lonely Freddy and enables the switch that follows.
He stared hard into the blue eyes that had burned through his soul, and he searched for answers of his own, but he only came away with more questions because the blue eyes of the bear had suddenly turned light green.
The bear’s eyes change colour, and this is important because we see this same colour change with possessed animatronics, most notably the change in colour between circus baby’s original blue eyes and the green eyes she demonstrates when possessed later on (which match child Elizabeth’s).
A Change
Alec realises that he can’t move properly or speak. Hearing voices approach he encounters his mother and sister, but they don’t seem to recognise him, instead heading over to find the Yarg Foxy. His sister is dismayed and he craves nothing more than to finally be able to tell her how sorry he is.
“He just … threw it in here,” Hazel said, and the pain in her voice was enough to make Alec feel like the smallest, most disgusting cockroach.
“Hazel,” their mom said, her voice so gentle. “He loves you. I know he does. In his own way, he really does love you. Just like we love him.”
Alec’s throat tightened into a knot, and this was the moment. This was finally the moment he would tell them how sorry he was, how wrong he was, how much he’d missed out on by wanting so badly to believe he was on the outside.
Alec can only look on as Hazel processes her feelings and realises his own deep emotions too late.
“He doesn’t hate you. He’s never hated you.”
That was the thing, though. Alec had hated her. It was the worst, most awful confession he never made, but he didn’t have to, because his sister had known all along.
What she didn’t know—what he hadn’t told her when he should have—was that he didn’t hate her anymore. If he was telling his own deepest, darkest secret, he’d have told her that he hated himself far more than he ever hated her.
And he’d liked himself more this past week than he had since the day she was born, and it was because he’d spent it plotting with her.
We find out that at the heart of all of Alec’s bitterness lies a form of self-loathing for who he is and projecting this outwards onto the world. He wants to set things right but is unable to, trapped outside of the world. He makes his way out of the room, despite encountering strange limitations on motion and height. He makes his way out onto the floor of Freddys where he is assaulted by some rowdy kids who play tug of war with him. Confused he makes his way to his family, where we receive an interesting description of his father.
Then there was his family—his mom in her dark jeans and his dad in his comfiest corduroy slacks and his flannel shirt,
If I had to say this was a parallel to an existing character I’d say it was Henry, who is described as being incredibly attached to flannel for whatever reason. Why we keep seeing a Henry-like figure as Mike type character’s father is something for other people to puzzle over for the moment and beyond the scope of FNAF4.
Alec’s family look happy, even Hazel smiling and content and Alec realises it is because he has somehow returned to them, dressed the same, with his same crooked teeth and lanky limbs, but he is smiling back at Hazel and no longer sulking and glowering. Alec panics about this, realising he has been replaced, striving to gain their attention.
He spots Charlotte, bent double and miserable and decides that if anyone will be able to help him, she will. He makes his way over to her, only for her to throw up on him and have him taken away to the men’s room where he realises that he has somehow become a Lonely Freddy himself. He has no time to do anything about his situation as he is taken and placed into the dumpster he failed to open earlier, surrounded by dozens of his fellow discarded Lonely Freddys.
The end of the story sees Alec realise that the other Freddys in the bin are not simply toys either but other terrified and lonely people.
“Help!” he thought he heard himself say.
Then he realized it hadn’t been him at all. It had been the bear beside him in the bin.
Then it was the bear on the other side of him.
Pretty soon, it was every bear in the bin, their thin, muted screams for help swallowed by the metal and darkness that entombed them. Alec and his new friends.
Dozens of the lonely ones.
Conclusion
This ending is brutal and quite hard to take as a reader; we instinctively want Alec to find catharsis and resolution with his family, only for him to be trapped somewhere else entirely, too late to make the change he wants to make.
I think this may be Mike’s fate in some way, looking to resolve things but finding it all just out of reach.
One potential interpretation of this ending for me is that Michael ends up as Glamrock Freddy in Security Breach and that his “new friends” are the other animatronics at the location.
Alec did say he wanted to be a pro skater as his life’s ambition, after all.
Of course, there’s no absolute way to know this now; it remains simply the most tenuous of theories. The fact he ends up as a Freddy and not a Foxy is something I find compelling. It would have been simple to frame things around a Foxy-oriented location, but the author did not.
As you can see, this story does a lot of legwork around the concept of the older brother. I think it is possible that Michael was one of the kids who inherited something of his father’s nature and was left forced to deal with what that meant for him and how he intended his life to unfold after that. This story may represent his relationship with his younger sister, whether this is Elizabeth or Vanessa. Still, I would argue that Hazel’s character represents a blend of two characters instead, showing elements of the crying child and the younger sister in turn.
Mike has a lot of regrets about his youth and who he was, which we briefly touched upon in the previous part when we looked at the movie novelisation. He grapples with no small amount of self-loathing either and avoidance and suspicion that stems from that.
This story is complex to include as it is far from as straightforward as Step Closer’s, but I hope readers here can understand why I felt it was necessary. These stories provide tremendous value around understanding characters that we only ever see the silhouette of in the game continuity. It is essential to get insight into Michael as part of the understanding of FNAF 4 itself.
Next Part
In the next part, now that we have come to understand who we think the older brother and younger brother are, we will have a look at Midnight Motorist.