Introduction
Hello and welcome; I’m Cathures. Today, we will discuss Five Nights at Freddy’s 3, particularly the nature of the guard’s identity. My opinions on who this individual is shifted radically after reading What We Found in the Fazbear’s Frights, and I want to share my findings with you guys. This article is a conversion of a youtube video I made, if you want to watch the video, here it is below!
Even if you have your thoughts on FNAF 3 and what we see in that game, I ask you to look at things from a different perspective with me for the duration of this video. It could give you further insight into your theories.
For anyone who hasn’t read What We Found, it does deal with some discussion of cruelty towards children, so consider this a warning for content going forward.
FNAF 3
However, before we discuss What We Found, I want to review what we already know about FNAF 3 to refresh our memories and allow us to relate these facts to the new information we get from the short story.
FNAF 3 was released in March 2015 after a sequence of teasers on Scott’s website. These ranged from the initial “I am still here” image to the box of parts, which remained up for a long time. The following teaser only lingered briefly on the site. It showed the text “he always does” in William’s iconic purple colour before swiftly being replaced by the map of the location, remaining static for almost a month, before “Guess who?” appeared and “It’s all in your mind.” The final two teasers are Freddy’s hat on the floor, which vanished in the lead-up to FNAF 4.
The most exciting part of this teaser sequence is “It’s all in your mind.” We see this tagline again in the mobile port of FNAF 3, reiterating its importance to this particular game. We’ll come back to it later. The reference to William’s “I always come back” line also links directly into the teaser trailer released in January of that year, which was the first time we heard his now somewhat iconic catchphrase.
I want to review the teaser trailer to reiterate what we see.
The first shots are of the hallways with the children’s drawings, followed by the text “he will come back” and “he always does” in golden text.
The animatronics state, “We have a place for him.” This text cuts from footage of them on the stage, implying that we hear their voice talking about William in this trailer.
We see Springtrap thrashing on the ground as if having a nightmare, and the camera pans into his eye and potentially into his mind, where we cut to the office, the game’s title and a Springtrap jumpscare.
In FNAF 3, we play a night guard introduced by “phone dude” at night one as “returning for another night”, implying that they have been here before in some fashion. This is not their first night on the job, despite night one being an utterly dead night with no activity from Springtrap. The phone dude only talks to us for two nights before replacing his communication with some “vintage” audio cassettes that play for the rest of our time in the game.
Notably, these cassettes pertain to the employees’ safe use of the two springlock suits. They detail the spring locks within and their safe operation before delving into why the suits were decommissioned and the subsequent cover-up of a safe room on the property.
Every tape ends with a reminder to smile because we are the faces of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. This is a generic message to employees and a hint about who we are in this game.
Every night, the player faces off against Springtrap, who proceeds gradually towards the office unless distracted by audio lures. He does not speak, making only haunting groans. As Springtrap approaches, the player is also subject to attack from distracting “phantom” animatronics, which appear as hallucinations that startle and divert them from their task. These animatronics cannot harm the player but appear burned and damaged. They seem to be from FNAF 2 in appearance, implying that whoever the player is would have encountered these animatronics at some point in time in a similar state.
One of the most intimidating of the animatronics is the phantom puppet. She gets right up in the player’s face, precisely like the puppet did during the between-night hallucinations in FNAF 2. I argue that she has only one individual she would hate this much.
FNAF 3 has multiple possible endings, which have been the source of much discussion within the fandom. One is labelled “bad ending”, and the other “the end.” I have seen this called the good ending, but Scott’s decision not to label it as such was deliberate, so I will refer to it as the end.
The bad ending is achieved simply by playing through the game normally from start to finish. The end is accomplished by finding ways to glitch through the minigames within the location, bringing cake to the children, and results in a final happiest day party where the puppet seems to bring cake to a final child who wears a Golden Freddy mask.
The final images differ between the two endings in that the animatronic masks have lit or unlit eyes, and Golden Freddy’s eyes are present in the bad end but not the end.
Night six in FNAF 3 is known as “Nightmare” on the menu. I shouldn’t need to point out the correlation between this and Nightmare as William’s primary tormentor and creature of agony, alongside its double meaning as a conventional bad dream or night terror.
Multiple Springtraps can be seen simultaneously during night six, from office sightings to multiple camera appearances. Scott confirmed this to be the intended functionality, and he confirmed that these were canonical hallucinations in the wake of a ventilation error.
“Also, there is some confusion about Springtrap appearing on multiple cameras and people thinking it’s a glitch. It’s not a glitch, even though I should have explained this better when I released the game. As long as the red light is flashing after a ventilation error, you may see multiple Springtraps. These are hallucinations.”
Beating night 6 earns the player a newspaper clipping confirming that Fazbear’s Frights burned down. Springtrap looms in the shadows of the picture featuring this story, which tells us he survived the fire.
FNAF 3 is referenced one more obvious time in the Springtrap cutscene in sister location where we see Michael talking to his father. We see the burned-down Fazbear’s Fright in the background, followed by a shadowy version of Springtrap (missing his pelvis plating) who steps forward. This seems to confirm that regardless of any other endings or minigames in the game, the Night Six fire happened, and Springtrap not only survived but escaped.
What we Found
With this information established, let’s move on to What We Found.
I want to stress before we begin that I will be taking a non-literal approach to the reading of this short story; I am aware there are plenty of people who prefer a literalist interpretation, where everything we read in this story happened precisely as-is. There are too many discrepancies to take this approach, and we can glean a much richer appreciation and enjoyment if we permit ourselves to step back and think about what the shape of this story can tell us about the unknowns of the game canon and characters. Even if you disagree with this type of reading, for entertainment’s sake, it’s worth giving it a chance.
So, to briefly summarise it, this Frights short story is about a night guard working at Fazbear’s Frights who thinks Springtrap is pursuing him. He descends into terrified madness, culminating in locking himself in a lit industrial oven.
However, simplifying the story to this level does it a disservice. The narrative is a framework for exploring character motivation. What we found is a character study and one of the most brutal and unflinching depictions of physical and emotional abuse in any FNAF media. The main character’s descent into his past by proxy of Fazbear’s Frights is an absolute gut punch of a story I feel any fan of William Afton should read at least once.
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I’ll quickly recap the main characters so that you can follow along with who I am talking about. As this story is primarily a character study, there aren’t many characters. We only see around five characters in the present day.
The story’s main character is Hudson, a tall, gangly man with short blonde hair and blue eyes. He tells readers he looks “pretty normal” but, despite this assertion, has a devastating lack of self-confidence due to a prolonged period of abuse in his youth. This same abuse left him with damage to his wrist, fused discs in his spine and nerve damage in his legs. He considers himself “damaged goods” and has a defeatist attitude toward his life and worth. He harbours jealousy for his friends, who seem to be living a life denied to him.
He is far from an ideal protagonist, and despite feeling sympathy for the torment he suffered, we can see shades of learned behaviour in his thoughts about other people.
His best friends are Barry and Duane, who are both 23 years old and handsome, and both are going into the Navy to join for a spot on the SEAL team. They both did well in school and sports when Hudson fell behind. Hudson’s envy for their situations is not subtle, but despite this, they both take a kind stance towards him, making time for him, bringing him food from home, inviting him out to eat, and, without question, paying for half of the food he can’t afford.
Barry seems mindful of Hudson and scolds Duane several times for being thoughtless in his comments. Duane is a little more immature, but he can be honest. Duane warns Hudson about the power of suggestion and the direction his life seems to be taking.
Faith is Hudson’s coworker, whom he has a crush on. She is going to art school and helping design the attraction. She drives a classic car and understands car mechanics well, which Hudson considers perfect. They have a pleasant pizza date at first, but when she challenges him about his suspected crimes, he becomes aggressive and defensive, and she pulls away from him. Barry steps in to date her after checking if Hudson is okay with this, and even though he isn’t, he says he is OK with them dating. He thinks about Faith constantly, even though she is rarely present in the story in person.
Granny Foster is Hudson’s only remaining contact with his family and is an enormously distinct character in appearance and personality. She is five foot one, dresses in a men’s red-and-green plaid shirt with baggy jeans and has wild hair that turned white in her 20s. Her features are sharp and set alongside bright blue eyes. Her voice is startlingly deep and gravelly, and Hudson even goes so far as to compare her voice to a demon controlling her and using her body to speak to helpless humans. Her husband is dead, and she is dating various men from her loft apartment downtown.
Hudson’s friends know Granny Foster and think she can predict the future. Hudson says she’s experienced using herbs to heal whatever needs healing and that even if she knew the future, she never told anyone else about it. She has no specific faith but dabbles in voodoo dolls, which she uses to mete out justice to unpleasant people.
He jokes that he doesn’t think she can die.
However, despite this threatening reputation, Granny Foster is deemed “more wise than scary” and is kind and loving towards Hudson. She warns him firmly about his new job, but he declines her advice. She doesn’t press the matter, calmly telling him his path is his own. This pronouncement is one of the last things Hudson hears as the oven heats around him.
Hudson’s older coworker, Virgil, covers the other side of his shifts. He wears a threadbare cardigan made by his wife, drives a 30-year-old Ford sedan, and doesn’t seem troubled by Fazbear’s Frights. He even finds the building cold.
Springtrap is technically a character in this story, though he needs no introduction in appearance; it is worth mentioning that we have every reason to believe the found Springtrap never actually moves from where it is placed within the location.
The other characters we are introduced to are from Hudson’s past and give us the shape of what happened to him as we encounter them.
Hudson’s father, Steve, took his own life after a bad business deal, but before this, he was a good dad, happy to take him on adventures and play games with him. However, he notes that even before what happened, he had struggles with mental illness. Hudson worries he has inherited his father’s poor luck in life.
“Hudson also spent a lot of time asking himself if he was prone to the same bad luck as his dad. Maybe he was, or maybe he just let his dad’s fate seal his own.”
Hudson’s mother is never named, and he seems as if he wasn’t close to her even before everything went south, mentioning that though she was efficient and responsible, she had never been a particularly warm and fuzzy mom. After meeting Hudson’s stepfather, Lewis, she became addicted to pills to get through the day, and Hudson became severely neglected.
Mr Atkins was Hudson’s algebra teacher. He had a burr-like rasp of a voice with a southern accent. He called Hudson stupid in class, mocking him for falling behind when he needed support and care. Hudson seems haunted by the idea that he is stupid.
The final character is the one who looms largest over Hudson’s life. Lewis was his stepfather, a balding man with plaid vests who smoked a cherry pipe tobacco. He emotionally and physically abused Hudson relentlessly for ten whole years until the point where he pushed him too far and was killed in a house fire. He tells Hudson he is nothing but smoke, something he comes to believe and which ultimately comes to fruition.
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With all the characters accounted for, it’s time to get down to the meat of this discussion!
On one hand, we have FNAF 3; on the other, we have What We Found. When the short story came out, people were excited that it had Springtrap in it and wanted to see if it would shed light on the identity of the FNAF 3 guard. However, when they read it, many people took a literal reading of the character and, I think, missed the real point of this story.
What we Found needs to tell us WHO the FNAF 3 guard is. It tells us what we SEE in FNAF 3, what is happening and what it means. By taking this framework of understanding, we can comprehend the true nature of FNAF 3.
What We Found tells us that FNAF 3 is a nightmare in some ways, a guard surrounded by hostile hallucinations, pursued by Springtrap through the halls of a haunted house hung with the remnant parts of Fazbear’s entire legacy. We see this setup again later in a far more elaborate fashion, and Springtrap is there, too. Deliberately there.
FNAF 3 is our first glimpse into William Afton’s internal hell. It is “all in his head,” as the tagline says, and ties directly into the trailer, where we see the zoom into Springtrap’s eye. We are inside his mind as Springtrap, where he does not see himself as the monster but as a man eluding the monster he has become.
Hudson, in what we found, is a direct parallel to William. Just as “the guard” in FNAF 3 is how William sees himself, I think Hudson is a short story stand-in for William, and I have numerous reasons to support this. This isn’t a wild leap I have made; as stated, this is a non-literalist reading of what I feel is perhaps one of the most critical stories in the Fazbear’s Frights series. Scott knew people would pay attention to this story, and rather than give us a clear and straightforward tale about a man’s night at Fazbear’s Frights, we are given a stark and brutal character study that delves into the incredibly dark subject matter and one man’s internal landscape.
Hudson relives his past through the mindscape of Fazbear’s Frights, projecting his history onto the writhing walls of the location. We know this happens to William in Ultimate Custom Night, and I believe it happened before. He was captive to the one you should not have killed here, and he escaped through the fire. When they find him again, they remember him.
(Greetings from the fire, and the one you should not have killed)
On this basis, I would like to discuss what Hudson could tell us about William Afton. In the canon, William is a mysterious figure; we see him in the trilogy as Dave but hardly learn about his past at Fredbears, let alone anything about what led to his becoming a serial killer.
Looking at Hudson as a parallel to William is valid due to the clear links with FNAF 3 in this story, along with the brutality of Hudson’s eventual fate. Hudson comes from a background where he is harmed and tormented and yet ends up dead in an effort to purge himself with heat. This seems like an unjust end for a character. However, if we add the additional context this being William Afton’s story would bring, this ending does not seem quite so unjust. Even if he was abused or hard done by in his youth, William deserves his springlocking for his actions. It provides a reasoning and understanding, not an excuse for his behaviour.
William was likely subjected to an abusive childhood based on this parallel; it would connect to his resentful and jealous angle in his personality later in his story. He baulks at the idea that he is stupid, yet despite this, he does not lean into the egomania we would expect of his character archetype. In the fourth closet, he says.
“I am a brilliant man, make no mistake. But what you see before you is a combination of all sorts of machinations and magic. My only real accomplishment was making something that could walk.” And is also willing to attribute the illusion discs to Henry.
We also see Carlton’s description of William in the silver eyes in his Dave persona. Discussing him as –
“The other kind of petty tyrant, those who grew spiteful with their small scraps of power, feeling more and more abused by the year—by a family who did not appreciate them, by neighbours who slighted them in imperceptible ways, by a world that left them, somehow, lacking something essential.”
Hudson is a younger, softer version of this type of person, but we can see that thread of bitterness, the jealousy set against others, the lack of appreciation for his kind friends and the feeling that he is cursed by bad luck. It is not beyond possibility that William’s life took a similar trajectory.
It is a trivial matter, but also quite entertaining that Hudson doesn’t like children. Despite his poor treatment, he shows a penchant towards cruelty, thinking to himself when he sees the rotten prizes in the hallways.
“They were more like punishments. Maybe he’d be allowed to hand them out to kids who didn’t behave themselves when the place opened. Hudson, eyeing a headless baby doll, grinned. He would find a sick enjoyment in handing out hideous “gifts” to kids. Kids were nearly always mean to him. Maybe he could get a little payback.”
Again, we see a tiny sliver of cruelty in a young man that, left unchecked, could grow into something far darker and more bitter.
One of Hudson’s first traits that seized me while reading the short story was his fear of mirrors. We can directly connect this trait to William, as one of the songs in Ultimate Custom Night played on the main menu screen is called Eisoptrophobia—the fear of mirrors. I think this fear of mirrors is for two reasons. Hudson states that he doesn’t like looking at himself – not because he doesn’t look fine, but because his “features added up to one thing he never wanted to face: himself. Facing himself meant facing his past. He could only manage that in snippets.“
True to this fear, Hudson only recalls his past in snippets throughout the story. He faces himself in the mirror, which is Fazbear’s Frights. For William, this place would be a direct mirror of everything he had done, with his trophies on the wall and the rotting pieces of his empire strewn around him.
We even see echoes of William’s crimes in Fazbear’s Frights, which is to be expected given the nature of the location. Still, some moments fly close to depictions from other iterations of William. After their argument, Hudson shows steep disdain for Faith and bitterly complains, “Her mind was clearly twisted. How else could she have come up with the idea of a door opening and a hand reaching in to drag a little boy out of sight?” This is both a potential insight into one of the missing children and an echo of the scene Charlie in the novel trilogy relives over and over again where William steals away Sammy in her memories.
In the novel trilogy, William tells us that “the dead do forget.” They lose the memory of who they were and what happened to them. Through FNAF 3, we see William recollect what happened to him.
We see this in the between-night minigames, where he gathers the remnant from the animatronics, only to find himself trapped by the ghosts he collected and imprisoned within the springlock suit in the safe room. He had forgotten, but he remembers.
Despite remembering, he remains imprisoned, and it takes him glitching free of the minigames to escape his bonds finally. After all, they are his games. He helped make them and knows the codes, Easter eggs, and tricks.
This would also explain why there is a clear minigame which forces William to deal with Fredbear and Spring Bonnie on stage, while in the hacked version of the game, a child goes missing from the room.
The other reason William would be afraid of mirrors is something we gained insight into in the short story Hide and Seek, where we see that someone infested with a being of agony or with agony can sometimes see it in a mirror as Toby does. There is every reason to think that William, at some point, became able to perceive what he had created. Toby in Hide and Seek is sickened and eroded as a person by the presence of Shadow Bonnie and William, as Dave seems to be sickened and eroded similarly. There’s no reason to think this didn’t also happen to him in the game continuity.
Hudson’s fear of mirrors is rooted in his lack of self-esteem, and we also have good reason to think that William Afton is haunted by physical dysmorphia. He was a hefty man in Fredbear’s era. Still, despite this, he shows a clear taste preference in his animatronic designs toward slender and strange creations, deviating from Henry’s large, chunky designs towards cinched waists and long, slim designs.
We see him exert this taste upon the shapes he chooses for himself. Imprisoned within Springtrap, a Henry design with a rough, chunky shape, he moves on to his “Scraptrap” iteration and makes himself markedly thinner despite this looking somewhat off.
He then moves on to Burntrap, who has crossed a threshold into skeletal.
This self-consciousness, rooted as it might be in an upbringing littered with insults and abuse, might help explain why William is never satisfied and why he seems so willing in the fourth closet to surrender entire parts of himself to his experiments. He carves himself down but never seems to be satisfied.
Hudson resents his broken body, and William resenting his and seeking ways to fix what he perceives as “broken” in him would give a further and strenuous motive for his dogged pursuit of the remnant, even above and beyond the restoration of his son.
We see Hudson’s high school years were beset by torment, assaulted by bullies and picked on for his perceived weakness. He has a vivid hallucination of having his head flushed down the toilet, only to realise that he had to have done it to himself. I believe William also did not have a pleasant time in High School, as in Ultimate Custom Night, where he is subjected to his worst fears; we see Toy Chica’s high school years between each successful attempt. This is framed humorously for the player, but this might well be a cover for the genuine, very visceral torment William is experiencing in his own relived memories. The song for these scenes is titled “High School Days.”
Hudson mentions, “He was locked into supply closets before class and chased home after the last bell rang. He was pushed, shoved, punched, and almost drowned when his head was held in a flushing toilet. That happened more than once.” This bullying and near-death experience has stayed with him ever since, and there’s no reason to think William wouldn’t have recalled the same. Hudson grows up to want to victimise children because children victimised him, unable to reconcile the power disparity with this attitude now that he is an adult. He still feels like he is one of them.
We see parallels between William’s eventual cruelty towards children and Hudson’s relationship with his past. When he recalls one of the horrible things Lewis did to him, Hudson muses that “he knew from horrific personal experience that toys could turn from fun to instruments of torture in a heartbeat.”
William himself goes on to use toys as instruments of torture, as we see with his gas experiments in Dittophobia and the transformation of the plushies in FNAF 4 into the nightmares.
Hudson doesn’t have a car but appreciates cars a lot, mentioning Faith’s classic car as one of the prime things that drew him towards her. As I discussed in my midnight motorist video, William loves his car and cars in general but may not have much money, much like Hudson himself.
2:16 Timestamp
(Clara: Okay, well how’s this, I’m taking the car!
Vlad: The joke’s on you! It’s a rental. )
It’s yet another parallel among many for this character.
Hudson breaks off Springtrap’s tooth when he decides to face up to the animatronic (or at least hallucinates that he did)
“He felt a surge of anger, and he shoved his nightstick in the animatronic’s mouth. He heard a snap, a tinkle, and a clatter on the floor. He’d broken off one of the animatronic’s teeth. Or had he?”
William, who plays Dave in the trilogy novels, also has a broken tooth, and we are never sure how he got it.
Throughout this story, Hudson’s efforts to harm Springtrap are mirrored back onto him. It happens directly with the knife and some of his other weapons. Did he chip his tooth and didn’t notice?
While he feels under attack by Springtrap, Hudson frantically reaches for different weapons to protect himself, feeling that being armed will help keep him safe. He begins with a nightstick, then progresses to a hammer and finally, a huge butcher knife and rolling pin. The moment he reached for the knife, it was impossible not to see the parallels with William, who utilises a knife as part of his murders. We see him use this in the movie, and we see him use it in the novel trilogy. His special attack in the FNAF world is “Slasher”, where he throws a knife at the opponent.
The knife is the precipitating weapon that unlocks the memory Hudson himself seems unwilling to face. Throughout the story, he denies to other people and himself his part in setting the fire that killed his parents, but we see once he has the knife in his possession that Lewis came after him with a knife just before the fire.
“The knife was the reason the fire happened. Why had Hudson suppressed that memory?”
Lewis’s comment as he tries to swipe at Hudson resonates with his low self-worth and ties up with his sensitivity about his math: “Nothing divided in half is nothing.”
No matter how often William divides himself, he never feels like he becomes something more.
Hudson is haunted by the words from his past, from the “Stupid” of his teacher or “Nothing but smoke” from Lewis; he hears the words everywhere around him, inside his head and outside. Even Faith’s “I like you” is rendered unbearable as he twists it into a weapon to harm himself with, blaming himself for his poor handling of the encounter.
“That’s two things.” hits a raw nerve.
William Afton has clear indicators of past abuse in his speech patterns and choices. One of the starkest examples I would say is in the movie, when he finds himself cornered by the animatronics, he turns to them and screams, “Look at the NASTY things that you have become. Look how small you are, how WORTHLESS you are, you are wretched rotten little beasts!” This wording feels like a fearful projection of something said to him rather than the confident assertion of a man who feels in control of the situation.
This same phrasing and tone is found in the early Security Breach trailer, where I believe William, as Burntrap, addresses two individuals and says, “When I first found you, you were nothing. You were small, pathetic.” He progresses onto furious threats of the consequences of failure. William tells people they are worthless and pathetic because that is what he believes he is, too.
In the movie novel, we even see that his voice becomes crueller when he says these words, once again as though he is speaking the harshest words he can imagine, potentially spoken to him in some form.
The yellow rabbit took advantage of the animatronics’ hesitation. “Wretched, rotten little beasts,” he said, his voice even crueller than before. “Look how pathetic you are!” The rabbit looked at each animatronic in turn. “Look how worthless you are!”
The insults from Lewis are also very clearly tied to fire and smoke. He tells Hudson he is nothing constantly, but telling him he is smoke is a far stranger insult. Lewis is a figure wreathed in the smoke of his favourite pipe tobacco while telling Lewis he himself is smoke. Hudson retaliates against his father by burning down their entire house, almost killing himself in the process. Granny Hudson tells him that fire purges, and in the end, he becomes smoke by essentially cooking himself in the oven by mistake. So much of his problems are linked to and connected by fire. There is even an entire scene where Hudson reminisces about his abuse, only to be brought back to reality by the smell of his dinner burning.
“Lewis had a daily reminder for Hudson: “You’re nothing.” The word, nothing, was alternated between beatings. “You’re nothing.” Slap. “You’re less than nothing.” Punch. “You’re smoke.” Now, there was some irony, given what eventually happened. Granny Foster liked to say that heat and fire purged. And she was right … sort of.”
Hudson seeks refuge from his attacker in a fireplace and once again in an oven, despite how terrible an idea this seems.
We see William in the games solve many problems by fire. He even speculates on the information for the SCUP that when it comes to remnant “there is a possibility that overheating might neutralise the effects permanently”, this means that back when he was working on circus baby’s he speculated that fire might purge remnant.
If he was responsible for burning down Fazbear’s Frights, he likely didn’t know if it would kill him or not.
It seems that it didn’t. Henry makes the mistake of assuming that this would work later, too, only to be unsuccessful (as proven by the enduring presence of the tangle)
I also find it no small irony that Burntrap – who I consider to be William – finds himself subjected to fire at the hands of Gregory, something that would be traumatic if he shared Hudson’s backstory.
We even see fire used to “purge” a second time when it is used against the entity in much the same way it was used against Burntrap and earlier Scraptrap at the end of FNAF6.
We discussed earlier how the puppet has a unique vendetta against William, and in this story, Hudson is afraid of the puppet outright.
“And who came up with the black-striped marionette mask that was painted like a warrior? Hudson didn’t even want to know what the rest of that character looked like. Just the mask hanging over one of the doorways was bad enough.”
I think William came up with the puppet’s design as it has all his distinct hallmarks: slender design, horrifying gaping smile (as seen in the hand unit), and circus-themed cheeks. If we look at this from the angle of Hudson being a William parallel, it’s even a little tongue-in-cheek.
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Throughout the frights and in this story, we are once again reminded that agony has a smell. It is something beyond organic smells, though sometimes people mistake it as an organic scent. Hudson encounters this smell on the animatronic parts, but the story explicitly makes him doubt if it is coming from them or within him.
“Wait… Was that smell his? Or was it coming from the disembodied arms?”
This smell is consistently attributed to William (and sometimes Michael). We encounter it most significantly in the man in room 1280, where smell occupies a large proportion of the story, but what we found addresses it, too. She tells Hudson that she can smell it from him and that it is somehow tied to the job itself.
“It’s wafting from you like you rolled in excrement, Hudson. You have to let it go.” She says. Hudson mentions her opinion on these bad scents earlier in the story.
“Granny had told him scents have power, and when a scent is appealing, inhaling it will give you strength. “Don’t inhale putrid smells,” she warned him once. “They’re more than just smells. Everything is more than it seems.”
Hudson even has an odd encounter after recalling this where he is hit by the scent of something rotten, implying agony as a businessman passes him. William would also have been a “hip businessman” in his day.
“Just shy of the modern apartment building that housed his granny, Hudson caught a scent of something rotting. He covered his mouth with his hand and jogged into the building as some young hip businessman was coming out.”
This whole concept of agony possessing a bad smell ties back to abandoned medical theories of the past, such as the miasma theory, where the belief was that diseases were caused by miasma or bad air. This is why plague doctor masks were often filled with dried herbs, flowers or other pleasant-smelling items. Within the FNAF universe, scent has power, or at least is a primary indicator of negative emotional energy.
Within the Frights, the ball pit is one of the most contaminated objects, and we see it described as follows.
“Dusty and dilapidated. The plastic balls were covered with an unsightly gunk that had rendered them all the same indeterminate color. It smelled of rot and something worse.”
I think that in the games, Springtrap is infested with agony and would find his senses wholly consumed with the “smell” of agony. In FNAF 3, we focus entirely on combating the ventilation and keeping down the “bad air” that makes us hallucinate.
For me, the moment we realise that Hudson in the story is more than just a simple guard is when his hallucinations lead him to crawl into the vents. Springtrap is the one who crawls through the vents in the game, and immediately, this blurs the lines. It was the moment when I started paying attention to the parallels between these characters and went back to re-read.
In the vents, Hudson jokes about an old Freddy head that evokes Fredbear.
“It was Freddy Fazbear himself. Not really. It was a Freddy costume head, an old, nearly threadbare one. Or was that threadbear? Hudson giggled again, and he had to admit the giggle was too childish sounding.”
It is worth pointing out here that his laugh as a strange giggle is interesting. He is losing his grip on reality at this point. Still, William Afton is also prone to having his laughter described not as a supervillain-esque laugh but a giggle instead, specifically when he is Springtrap in the twisted ones.
“When Charlie was almost close enough to touch them, the one nearest sputtered and faded out. She ran on, listening for the sound of Springtrap’s maniacal giggle, hoping that it was enough to guide her.”
Hudson even finds his laugh distressing.
“Hudson giggled at his joke. Did his giggle sound a little demented to his own ears?”
In the vents, things only progress towards pointing out that Hudson parallels William. As he goes, he passes a Chica animatronic with a shoulder, arm and hand; he leaves it behind on the hunt for Springtrap; however, on the way back, he believes that Chica seizes his foot. He freaks out about this, trying to shake her grip off.
As he struggles, he finds himself being spoken to by Faith instead. Rather than mockery, he finds himself reminded of kindness and of a moment that mattered to him.
“What she actually said was “I like you a lot, Hudson. You’re a nice guy.” And then she reached across the table and touched his hand. Her fingers were so smooth and warm. And when he turned his hand over and took hers in his, she didn’t protest. She just smiled at him in a way no one had ever smiled at him before. It was the best moment of his life.”
Chica moves from his foot to his hand, and instead of remembering the moment he felt love, he remembers when someone else stepped in to warn Faith about him and ended the relationship in its tracks.
In a horrifying moment, we see Chica consumed by the costume parts and utterly torn to pieces. However, the chilling part is not that she is torn to pieces and destroyed but that we have every reason to believe that Hudson did it.
“ Chica had been reduced to almost nothing … just like Hudson. Faith’s rejection had torn his heart and his hope into little bits. He looked at his hands. Was that yellow fuzz under his nails? Hudson wiped his hands on his pants several times.”
Hudson denies what he has done to himself, but this is a moment reminiscent of William’s destruction of the children. We know Susie trusted the yellow rabbit, and the kids in the movie trusted the yellow rabbit.
To me, William feels that he has been reduced to nothing by the injustices of his life and turns that into a malicious hatred towards everything else. Carlton looks at Dave in the silver eyes and sees him for who he is.
“Before him stood someone who had spent so much of his life fighting like a cornered rat that he had taken on the mantle of bitter sadism as an integral part of himself. He would strike out against others and revel in their pain, feeling righteous that the world owed him his cruel pleasures.”
Hudson crawls through the vents with the rats of the location and presents a tragic figure. Still, there are moments like this with the Chica animatronic where we see a glimpse of something else, a side of him that even he will not permit himself to remember. On this basis, we have every reason to think that William in FNAF 3 only partially remembers what he did until the end of the game, when all the cutscenes have played out.
After his time in the vents, Hudson finds himself caught in outright warfare against himself. He is thrown, and his wrist is broken by nothing but a memory, forcing him to drop his knife. He is alone at this point, and there isn’t even an insinuation that Springtrap is present while it occurs. He relives the torment from Lewis, subjected to insults and mockery for wetting himself and as he sits there, he remembers being told to stand up and being called a “sissy”.
This was an essential moment to me as it gave us harrowing insight into the nature of some of the abuse that Hudson sustained, implying that not only were the insults diminishing and destructive but emasculating too, intended to demean him for a lack of masculinity, however, Lewis defined this. I think this also would have been something William had to deal with without question; his tastes for garish clowns, theatrics, flamboyant attire and intentionally ambiguously gendered bunnies would have set him at odds with a world that demanded he adhere to stereotypes of masculinity.
He sees Springtrap repeating Lewis’s words, and in that moment, I think we are intended to understand that Hudson, in his spiral of agony and terror, has projected all his hatred onto the animatronic. However, I believe for William, this kind of coping would also involve him struggling to reconcile what he became at the end of his journey.
He looks at Springtrap and sees only his abusers, unable to understand that, in the end, he became every bit as terrible as they were in a cycle of magnified abuse.
We know he wasn’t a good father to his sons or daughter. He might have set out to avoid repeating the mistakes that wrought him, but ultimately he failed. Springtrap is the monster in him, separated.
And it is here when we relive Lewis telling him that “Nothing divided in half is nothing”, that we understand what he means. It doesn’t make enormous sense when we apply it to Hudson; why would he phrase it this way?
But when we apply it to William Afton, split into the man and the monster, we understand the phrase’s meaning. Even divided into two halves, both are still him, and in the end, he is judged against himself, but he is still nothing.
And so he increasingly realises that he is fighting nothing but himself. Any harm he does to the monster only harms himself.
“Well, it wasn’t empty. A bloody butcher knife lay on the floor near where Hudson was when the animatronic slashed him. Or did it? Had he imagined it? He looked down at his arm. He sure hadn’t imagined that. A sickeningly wide gap in his skin ran from his upper bicep to just above his elbow. Blood was still gushing copiously down his arm, over his busted wrist, and dripping off his fingers. He had to stop the bleeding. He started to put his right hand over the wound, but he paused. Why was his right hand bloody? He hadn’t touched the wound yet. It was bloody like it had been splashed with blood when it slashed— No. He did not just slash himself. Did he?”
Desperately bleeding and in complete agony, he staggers towards the gift shop, and it is worth realising here that the closer he comes to understanding his true nature and sins, the more he is in a more grim state. The closer he gets to the truth, the closer he gets to the unbearable springtrapped agony of the animatronic he has become.
As he reaches Pirates Cove, Hudson sees Foxy’s hook tear through the curtain, only to find that Springtrap is doing it. This seems like a strange and random moment, but it connects in many ways to William himself; we know without question from FNAF 2 that he had something to do with a murder in Pirate’s Cove, where Foxy GO GO GO happened. There seems to be good reason to assume that William blamed Foxy for this set of murders as he is the main animatronic set as “out of order” and replaced. He is also the animatronic other than the puppet who is most furious at William after this point. We see Foxy representing the FNAF 3 guard in the logbook, likely connected to this moment.
Foxy is the villain in the in-character FNAF universe; he is represented as an antagonist, either a pirate villain, someone chasing the gang around with his hook or the fox antagonist to the bear of vengeance. Michael is associated with Foxy when he takes on the mantle of a villain, but the core of that villain is /his father/
Some of these later scenes in the short story represent William beginning to remember his actions and the murders. Hudson throws up as he gets to the gift shop, presented with a barrier of toys in his way, preventing him from leaving. We know the toys and plushies from Help Wanted 2 represent the children’s souls and numerous other places.
Faced with this final hurdle, Hudson is thrown clean across the lobby and relives the agony of his damaged spine once again. He remembers crawling to hide in the fireplace, crawling to hide in the oven instead, grasping for the memory that Heat purges and fire heals.
Within the oven, he remembers the truth of what he did. Throughout the story, Hudson has been denying and fleeing from the fact that it was he who killed his parents. Even when he first argues with Faith, he mentally thinks, “Where did she get off judging him for something he might or might not have done?” in apparent denial. But there, with the door closed, he remembers.
“Hudson hunched over in the fireplace, and he listened for Lewis as he looked at Lewis’s lighter. When had Hudson taken it? He didn’t remember, but it was his now. Hudson could feel Lewis’s lighter in his hand. He could feel his thumb on the little starter wheel. Flames started crawling up the curtains next to the fireplace.”
The oven lights, and we can only assume that Hudson has chosen to repeat the same path in reliving his vengeance against Lewis. Granny Foster offered him the choice to take another path by quitting the location, but he did not take it.
It is also telling that Hudson hears Granny’s voice in the oven with him.
“Her voice wasn’t coming from outside the oven. It was inside, with Hudson.”
Because at this moment, she feels distinctly reminiscent of Henry, listening to Hudson’s cries for help and telling him only, “Your path is your path.” When Old Man Consequences tells the bear to “leave the demon to his demons”, he is not talking solely about literal agony demons; he is referring to the demons of his past who only need to be shut in there with him to put him through a relentless and unending loop of his own hell. It might be entertaining to remember that Granny Foster’s initials are “GF”, like golden Freddy.
We see that this is possible in the Fright’s stingers where Jake takes Eleanor’s very self into him and then places her within a moment of intense anguish to essentially calm her.
“Jake concentrated until he was able to access Eleanor’s memories … if they could be called memories. Using the ability that Jake had discovered after his confrontation with the trash rabbit, Jake reached into those years and found a moment of seething anger and anguish. He figured if he could stuff Eleanor into a bubble of that moment, he could subdue her. He was right. With that one intention, Eleanor was defeated, contained. Her foul spirit folded in on itself and was silenced.”
This accomplished, he takes her down with him into the ball pit at the end, and even when the ball pit is liberated of its trapped spirits, we don’t see him move on.
In some ways, this is the ultimate solution that results in ultimate custom night later. FNAF 3 represents the spirit’s less elegant efforts to keep William tormented within Springtrap in the safe room, guarded by them. But this doesn’t last; the fire happens in the game, and he is freed.
So, do I think Hudson is the guard in FNAF 3? Not in a literal sense, but if we use him to understand William Afton as the guard in FNAF 3, then yes, in some ways, he is.
Years after the release of FNAF 3, we were handed the key to finally understanding whose mind we are in, and in a truly Fight Club twist, Hudson is the one who has done all of this to himself. He is alone, and Springtrap has not moved. He is the one who killed his parents; he is the one who harmed himself, and Hudson was always the only threat to himself in the FNAF 3 location. In turn, only William Afton is fighting Springtrap in FNAF 3, the monster to the man. He even hints at this in the fourth closet.
“I gave you a monster.” He gestured toward the collapsed doll that had been Springtrap. “But I assure you, I’m very, miserably, human.”
Ultimately, the true legacy he cannot escape is that of William Afton.
THE LOCATIONS
Before we conclude, I want to examine the central locations of this story briefly. Hudson spends most of his time at Fazbear’s Frights, which is fleshed out in great detail as he moves through it.
One of the main aspects of the location is that it becomes a landscape projection of Hudson’s horrible memories, bringing him closer and closer to the truth of what he did. The location itself becomes darker and darker as his time working there progresses, too, reflecting the progression of his mental descent, with new elements added every night.
However, the central aspect of the Frights location that is of note is how it is presented to us. It is explicitly described as “Not a true representation of any one of the actual old places; this attraction spliced together aspects of the infamous pizzerias with all the murderous history.”
This sounds familiar.
A fun little detail of the Fazbear’s Frights location that I found curious and might be a coincidence is that the bathrooms are bright red for some reason.
This immediately put me in mind of The Shining, where we see the main character of that particular movie in a red bathroom only when he is speaking to the previous custodian of his hotel. This man killed his family and is undeniably dead. I would assume this was a coincidence if The Shining wasn’t about a man losing his grasp on his sanity throughout a movie and repeating the mistakes of those who came before him.
Of course, it might well be that the bathrooms are just red for no reason, but I thought I’d share this association regardless.
Finally, the other location I found of note is an old-fashioned soda and ice cream parlour that Hudson and his friends visit at the beginning of the story. It is a wood-panelled location, and they visit occasionally to try to remember “an innocent time they had all left behind.” It has old red leather stools and booths, a chrome jukebox, and black and white checkerboard floors.
I think it’s impossible to miss the early family diner location similarities here, along with the milkshake and ice cream vibe of Circus Baby’s. This is fitting because this particular location doesn’t have some silly name, as locations often do in the frights.
It is called “Charlies”
CONCLUSION
And so, I hope you can see why I had what I can only describe as a minor revelation when reading What We Found. It is genuinely one of the best stories in the frights and sheds light on one of the most mysterious games in the series.
What happened in FNAF 3? We helped William Afton escape from his springlocked prison. We do it again in UCN. There is a reason why, in Ultimate Custom Night, William can go up against Springtrap and Scraptrap despite both of them also being himself. It is another nod to FNAF 3, where he was last up against his own nature. Springtrap does not speak in the game because he cannot; if he spoke, it would eliminate the mystery of what we see.
When we encounter William next as Scraptrap, he is eloquent, talkative and “awake”, no longer trapped in a prison that moves towards sound in the same way it used to.
FNAF 3 would loop endlessly, with William facing himself in an eternal nightmare if he didn’t eventually (with our assistance) find the glitches in the system, slipping into the spaces between the minigames and bringing the children cake. He even sneaks beneath the watchful gaze of the puppet herself.
She is watching him in the hall 08 cam she appears on, and in this hallucination, is intact and not burned at all.
She is not the only one; the easter eggs hint that William is being watched by other spirits, with a chance for shadow Freddy to appear in the office, cupcake to appear on the desk, and both paper Freddy and Bonnie from FNAF 2 to also show up.
The multiple Springtraps make perfect sense in a world that is beginning to break down, where William is falling deeper and deeper into a nightmare. We see something similar happen in In the Flesh, right before the tortured and tormented Springtrap uses his jailer and tormentor as a vessel to escape.
On cam 02 and cam 10, if someone refreshes enough, the Freddy posters could be replaced by posters of Spring Bonnie. Once again, it seems odd for a random night guard to witness these things, particularly as none of these objects are present in the location, but William hallucinates them instead, which makes perfect sense.
While playing the game itself, there is a rare chance to be presented with a screen of Springtrap from the game, and though people are very familiar with these screens, I have yet to see many people asking what they show. In these screens, we can see the corpse within Springtrap, but in two, he appears to be trying (presumably in vain) to escape the Springtrap suit.
All along, the true nature of FNAF 3 was staring us in the face. When Dawko asked Scott which ending was canon in FNAF 3, he declined to answer, stating, “The answer is very interesting. The answer is complex.” And I think that he is right. I believe that the answer is that in the end, William escapes, using the puppet and taking Golden Freddy with him, along with the souls of the children, presenting them with a false happiest day to put them into little pliable memories he can control.
In the movie, we see him using the children in a similar state; it is not the first time he has done this in the canon.
The end is THE end, the one that happens before the fire. It is not a “good ending” but simply the one that occurred. The heads are empty because William has taken them, because now they belong to him, and Golden Freddy is no longer in the background because, finally, FINALLY, he has managed to bring him into the fold.
Dave even talks about it in the silver eyes.
“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 happiest day we see at the end of FNAF 3 is the same happiest day Jake is presented within The Frights, the same false happy birthday we see in Under Construction.
“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. Jake needed to wake up. He wasn’t safe where he was in real life, and this dream had lured him into a false sense of security.”
In The Stingers, Jake eludes the happiest day and wakes up. I think in FNAF 3’s ending, he wasn’t quite so lucky.
In FNAF 3, William Afton is the guard, and he ultimately wins.