Transcript for:
Five Nights at Freddy's Timeline Overview

Today we end the torment. 19 books, 11 games, 8 whole years. All leading to this moment. The ultimate FNAF timeline is finally complete.

The pieces are in place for us. Now all we have to do is put this story of tragedy, jealousy, and loss back together. Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory! The show that feels like a kid revealing the class project that he's been working on all year.

Except here, it's the class project that I've been working on for the past decade of my life. This one is big, my friends, and I gotta admit, kinda nervous. I haven't attempted a timeline video on this franchise since 2018, back in the days when Mike was the crying child. Afton coming back was actually a surprise, and Fazgu wasn't a phrase I'd ever thought I'd have to utter. But since the last time I did something like this, we've had three more massive games, the death and revival of the FNAF movie, and more robot kids than you can shake a staff bot at.

It is exhausting trying to keep track of this whole franchise, which honestly is why I'm here today. The lore at this point is complicated. It is full of speculation and theory, so to hopefully make it a little easier for everyone, and to give us all a baseline to talk about this franchise moving forward in- into the future, it's time to reveal my current working FNAF timeline. But just before I do, I just want to explain a couple of things.

First, this timeline is massive. Seriously, it is huge. This thing towers over any video project we have ever done on the channel. But when you look at the totality of this franchise, the story of FNAF really boils down to the story of one man, William Afton.

His successes, his failures, his rise to becoming co-owner of one of the most successful restaurant franchises in the world, and his eventual fall to the monsters he helped to create. create only to then be reborn in a new digital form later. So sit back grab some popcorn or your pitchforks if you're the type to get upset when I say something controversial and make sure that you subscribe since this is going to be a video that you're going to want to come back to a few times in order to fully dissect.

Without any more waiting I present to you the story of a loving obsessive father who slowly descended into madness and along the way discovered the secret to eternal life. Our story begins not in the 1980s, or even in the 1970s, but all the way back in the 1930s. It was the throes of the Great Depression, and people were in desperate need of cheap entertainment, especially in Utah, one of the states hit hardest.

Fourth highest unemployment in the nation, and full of transients. People looking for work in Salt Lake, finding none, and ultimately moving on to find their fortunes out in California. People were tired, and they were hungry. But as they traveled, there was one thing that could lift their spirits.

A simple roadside attraction called Fredbear's Singin'Show. The ads were plastered all over town, featuring an animated bear drawn in the popular pie-eyed cartoon style for characters at the time. He resembled cartoons like Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Betty Boop.

It immediately said that this, Fredbear's, was a place where you could bring the family. And the price? honestly couldn't be beat.

For 50 cents you could get food and entertainment as you watched the local trained real-life dancing bear perform on stage. Normally you only got to see dancing bears at large traveling circuses like Barnum and Bailey where the tickets would go for about a dollar. That's a dollar without food.

But this was a smaller show like the type from the Vaughn Brothers or the Robbins Brothers where tickets would sell for just a mere 50 cents. Watching that bear do tricks on stage brought a glimmer of joy at a time when so much was wrong with the world. The simple show would go on for years, bringing happiness to hundreds of travelers passing through looking for a quick meal.

But it left a permanent impression on one little boy, capturing his imagination in a way that nothing else had. One little boy named Billy. That was his nickname at least, but his parents liked to call him William. William Afton.

The bear could dance. It could sing. For decades, William dreamed of recreating that moment of bringing a musical bear to life, but how? William was smart, without a doubt, and he had a keen mind for business, but he wasn't the most creative. How do you make a singing- dancing bear come to life.

The best he could do was using rudimentary costumes. We know, based on the retro poster that was hidden in Security Breach, that at least at one point, Fred Bear was an actual bear. Dancing bear shows were a real form of entertainment. The only problem is that, timing-wise, none of our main characters would be the people in charge of that business in the 30s and a series of pizza restaurants in the 80s without him just being extremely old. Best case scenario, if Afton's running the singing show when he's 18, that still puts him at nearly 70 when the first pizzeria opens and his murder spree begins.

That just doesn't make a lot of logical sense, because he doesn't become immortal until his first death in Springtrap. That's why I suspect that Fredbear's singing show was either a family business that Afton then carried on to a new generation, or something that he saw as a kid and just wanted to recreate when he grew up. William was inspired by the work of Walt Disney.

who throughout the 50s and 60s was pioneering the use of mascot suits throughout his theme park. The big innovation? Suits with five fingers. This allowed the performers wearing the suits to use their natural arms and hands to interact with the guests, as opposed to the older models where the arms would just hang limply by their sides. Finally, with a simple mascot suit, he would be able to re- His childhood dream he would be able to bring Fredbear to life to appeal to the kids and for copyright reasons He changed Fredbear from a realistic brown animal to a cartoonish yellow bear with a purple hat and bowtie But feeling like one character wasn't enough He added another friend a yellow rabbit with a purple vest and matching tie named Bonnie the bunny Well Fredbear was certainly his first love Bonnie was extra special because that was his it was an original character that he had created from Scratch and I do mean scratch Williams hand-sewn costumes were rough with seams and stitches visibly showing.

It's a handcrafted suit. You can see the seams and everything. It even has five fingers for the performers hands.

It is very much not a spring-trap suit. This is something much more rudimentary. It came at a time before animatronics were a part of the story. That's why I suspect that it was actually the first, predating literally everything.

It's also a suit that is very personal to Afton. He put his digital consciousness in that form. It's his personal avatar.

It's the way that he sees himself. There's also a whole separate discussion to be had here about the habits and rituals of serial killers. So the fact that he's choosing to lure kids and kill them in this particular suit actually says a lot about his emotional attachment to it. So while Fredbear seems to have started as someone else's creation, Golden Bonnie was uniquely- Williams, giving him a personal connection.

And that's not all. In this whole franchise, only one set of characters have themselves five fingers, the Nightmares. Even Golden Freddy, Fredbear was a five-fingered wearable suit at one point in the story, as we see in this shot from the graphic novel, before he, like everyone else, was turned into an animatronic. This seems to imply that all of the main characters had similar wearable mascot outfits at least at one point in time, and that whoever is having the FNAF 4 Nightmares, if they even are Nightmares, saw those mascot suits speci- Specifically, Bonnie and Fredbear would perform on stage to small but enthusiastic crowds. Finally, he was able to deliver fantasy and fun to all the kids, delighting and inspiring them in the exact way that he had been delighted and inspired so many years ago.

Afton, despite eventually falling to become the heartless serial killer and mad scientist that we know him as, began as someone with good intentions and a love of entertaining kids. He wanted to bring things to life from the very beginning, a theme that recurs a lot for him throughout the rest of the franchise. And things... could have ended there.

That could have been the end to his story. It could have been perfect, had it not been for one thing. Other people saw the success of his idea, and they wanted in. Enter Chica's Party World, a rival restaurant starring performing animal characters. His idea, except they did it better.

William may have been the first, but obviously he wasn't the best. It hurt the prideful William Afton to admit it, but this restaurant was able to do the thing that he always wanted to do, make the animals. actually come to life.

All of the performers in this restaurant were robots, simple metal skeletons that were powered by battery packs, but all of them able to freely turn and talk and dance on their own, no human required. It was like magic, magic that came from the mind of a brilliant creator named Henry Emily. This Henry, in some small way, had been able to harness the power of life itself.

Afton admired him. He was jealous, to be sure, but he also looked upon this man with awe. Off to one side of Chica's party world was a small cabaret stage featuring an elephant magician.

On the other, a hand-picked, A hippo known to ramble on and on. That one was more of a joke for the parents. But it was the main stage that was for the kids. A rocking band of characters featuring a yellow chicken thing with a southern drawl named Chica, backed by a band of other country-themed characters, including a pig with a banjo, an upbeat frog from the local swimming hole, and a brown bear with a heavy southern accent. Wait, a- bear?

But bears were his animals. Why not a cow or a horse? Something to fit the country theme a bit better.

Why'd it have to be a bear? And adding insult to injury, they had the nerve to call this thing Nedbear, a direct copy of his own Fredbear. Whoops, that's gonna leave a mark. I've suspected that the mediocre melodies played a much more important role in the story than just being a bunch more animatronics to fill out the roster. Especially Nedbear, which is just so suspiciously close to Fredbear.

And yet, there are two key details that we're going to have to justify with any mediocre melodies mentioned. One, they're very rudimentary with external battery packs, implying that they come very early in the timeline. And two, we know that, at minimum, Mr. Hippo does eventually become an official member of the extended Freddyverse.

But if these things are supposed to be cheap, generic rip-offs, why would you be trying to rip off yourself? You wouldn't. You would be stealing someone else's ideas.

So if Afton created Fredbear, there would have to be some rival franchise. The only other person who would likely be ripping him off? Henry.

We've talked extensively about how the mediocre melodies are clearly Henry's design aesthetic. So it just has to be him. I don't think Henry's doing this maliciously.

He doesn't strike me as the type. He was likely building the robots at the orders of someone else that was running a rival restaurant franchise. But that's enough motivation to start Afton down a path of jealous rivalry, but also begrudging admiration.

As the Freddy Files Ultimate Edition says, important to revisit the beginning of Henry and William's relationship, so here you go. I think this is where it begins. Also, this is future MatPat here coming back to add this one in. And seems like the recently released character encyclopedia has backed up all of this speculation.

I've had this timeline written for about a month now, but I've also been holding off a bit to see what wrenches this character encyclopedia might throw into it. And on this particular point, I gotta say, it seems like we might actually have nailed it. They actively call out the suspicious similarities to the main Fredbear crew. Quote from one of the pages, Nedbear looks like an imitation, altered just enough to avoid copyright.

issues. I don't know about you, but that seems to imply that we were right on the money. Knowing all of this, at one point, the franchises had to have merged. That's really the only way that you get Mr. Hippo from the rival franchise as part of the Fazbear crew. This also mirrors a lot of what happened in the real-life history of Chuck E. Cheese, with two rival restaurants, each with their own casts of characters, merging to become one unified brand.

Again, we've gone into that in detail with other videos, just wanted to remind you all of that here. But why would I call out the rival restaurant as being named Chica's Party World? Few things- things actually. First, we know for a fact that a location named Chica's Party World exists. It is mentioned in the source code teasing sister location, so it is out there somewhere and doesn't fit cleanly anywhere.

Second, in the story The Puppet Carver, Chica is very explicitly looped in with the book versions of Pigpatch and the Puppet Carver. and Nedbear, implying that she started as a mediocre Melody. Thirdly, her design just fits better with the theme of down-home country animals with southern accents playing the banjo and eating with bibs. And with her being the headliner of the show with her name on the restaurant, it would make sense then that when the restaurants merged, she was the one that was added to the main cast of characters while all the other mediocres faded away. It's also why when Freddy's closes after William's killing spree, she's the one to branch back off into her old franchise and is therefore missing in sister location.

A detail that's bothered me for years at the this point. It might also explain why William decided to stuff his first dead kid into Chica. That one was Henry's creation, not his.

Iston's jealous admiration turned to hardened bitterness. A bitterness that would only grow over the next couple of years as families continued to choose Chica's party world over Fredbear's. William just couldn't compete with the appeal of the robots.

Eventually his restaurant would go bankrupt, only to get bailed out by, of course, Henry Emily. Another insult. Another humiliation that William wouldn't soon forget.

Ninth 1979. Despite being bitter, Afton couldn't deny that what came next was a period of massive success and expansion. With the two franchises now merged into one, it was the best of both worlds. Afton's ideas with Henry's robotic expertise.

The two men decided to launch under a new name, Fred Becker. Family Diner, a pizza chain that would eventually come to feature a mix of humans in performing suits as well as onstage animatronics. They decided to stick with Fredbear as the headliner considering the yellow bear was easily identifiable as a brand because he was the original performing animal mascot.

Afton appreciated that. This new restaurant would also see a mix of characters as the two franchises merged into one, with Pigpatch and Happy Frog performing right alongside Fredbear and Bonnie. And, as part of this one big Fredbear family, they even got themselves official merch that were released ranging from masks to magnets. The crappy Mr. Hippo fridge magnet? Oh, I am sorry, Gregory.

That said, not all the characters were winners. The reception to some characters was just mediocre. So they faded away into the dumpster, storage units, and retro budget tech stores of lost nostalgia, waiting for their chance to step back into the limelight if and when a headliner went out of commission. Others, though, would fare much better, like a new Pirate Fox, as well as a blue guitar-playing variant of the yellow Bonnie Bunny.

Ultimately, the franchise would get so big, it would spawn its own cartoon show, Fredbear and Friends. Business was- booming. In the end, Fredbear and Bonnie's popularity would be so strong that they would be able to support the Fredbear's Family Diner franchise all on their own, while also spinning off a new sister location dedicated to their friends.

In 1983, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza launched, giving a dedicated home to all this new supporting cast of characters. Chica the Chicken, Bonnie the Blue Bunny, Foxy the Pirate, and of course the headliner, a brown Freddy Fazbear. Business was good, and Afton was happy, mostly. It did- bother him that the one original character that he created, the one that he himself played, Golden Bonnie, got passed over for inclusion in that cartoon show. The only character in the roster of regulars to get ignored for the show, but other than that, things were going smoothly.

He had himself a wife, two sons, a daughter. He had a thriving business, and best of all, he was able to learn the craft of robotics from the man that he both loved and hated, Henry. Together, they were constantly pushing the limits of what these characters could do. Because it was quick and easy, new characters introduced into the roster would be given a simple hand-sewn suit with five fingers that any performer could wear. Eventually, Henry would design one of his signature animatronics for that character, utilizing a divided mouth with either a hinged or sliding jaw design.

This was the first generation of animatronics. But why stop there? Afton had big ideas. What if the animatronics weren't just locked to the stage, but could freely roam the restaurant and interact with the kids? What if his mascot suits could become animatronics?

What if you could use more than just rigid metallic skeletons? Might not experiment with tubes and wires that would give the animatronics fluidity. and flexibility while still providing structure. The possibilities for this technology were endless. Afton fell in love with robotics.

He had started with a dream of bringing one simple singing bear to life, but with robots, he had stumbled across the tools that gave him the ability to control life itself. And thanks to Henry, he was practically speedrunning his way to an engineering degree. And while William wouldn't admit it out loud, one other thing that kept pushing him forward was the desire to beat his former rival, to prove himself smarter and more capable, to surpass the man who everyone else considered to be a visionary genius.

But pride cometh before the fall, and tragedy was about to strike. 1983, business was booming with two whole restaurant franchises running, Fredbear's Family Diner and the newly opened Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Together, William and Henry had been able to take the hybrid suit idea and make it into a reality. They called their new invention the Springlock. suit.

And fittingly enough, it was symbolic of the partnership between these two men. A human suit, as designed by William, that could become a freestanding Henry-style robot. But because it was still new tech with kinks to work out, the rollout was limited.

Restricted only to the Fredbear's family diner location. All of this meant that William was busier than ever. He didn't have time to be a full-time parent, so he designed a nanny cam system where cameras and speakers were hidden throughout the neighborhood, as well as in his youngest son's favorite toy, Psychic Friend Fredbear. I mean, plushie Fredbear.

But since cameras just weren't enough to raise a kid, he also left childcare duties to his eldest son, Michael. There was just one problem with that. Michael was far from the best babysitter.

He tormented his younger brother by jump-scaring him with a foxy mask and constantly left him behind. William watched all of it from his cameras. Kids would be kids. Tomorrow was another day, after all. Except Michael's torment didn't stop.

Bitter, angry thoughts would run through Michael's mind. Why did he have to be the one to take care of this whining crybaby all the time? It just was.

wasn't fair. It was time that he got even with his brother by playing the ultimate prank. A prank that just so happened to be on this crying child's birthday.

He and his friends would take his scared little brother and make him do the one thing that he was terrified of doing, getting close to the animatronics. That would be embarrassing for the kid that was such an embarrassment to him. His brother squirmed, screamed, kicked, and fought.

But just as they were putting that small squirming boy up to Fredbear's lips, the mouth snapped shut. The sensitive spring locks inside the body had been triggered by the boy's movements, and they'd immediately clamped down. The wriggling stopped. The boy went limp.

But it was just a prank. It was meant to be funny. The boy was taken to the hospital and was immediately given an IV. Flowers and pills filled the nightstand next to his hospital bed. But the damage was too severe.

He couldn't recover. As the younger brother's consciousness began to fade, he could hear Michael's last words. A small and flimsy apology.

But his father, Williams, through the voice of the Fredbear plush, were a firm and committed promise to a dying son. You're broken. I will put you back together.

This would not be the end. No matter what, William's son would live again. It would just take time.

Time that, right now, he just didn't have. His young son's heart flatlined as the boy faded into the inky unknown of the afterlife. In the aftermath of the tragedy, changes started happening around the restaurants.

Kids were now required to wear security wristbands to prevent anyone from getting outside without parental permission. Any kid who approached the exit without permission would have to answer to the security puppet, a marionette on strings that could fly around on rails across the restaurant to stop kids in their tracks. It was William's idea, inspired by Michael constantly leaving the restaurant without his brother.

In the wake of Fredbear's springlock failure, all the hybrid suits were getting retired, locked away at the nearby Freddy Fazbear location. It was yet another tough pill to swallow. swallow after all the hard work that he and Henry had put into them. William would eventually bury the boy's small body in a remote location out in the woods right alongside his drive into and out of work every day.

The death of this little boy sent the family spiraling. His wife, crippled with grief, was so distraught that all she could do was sit and watch TV. But his son Michael was far worse. Complaining of seeing hallucinations of a golden bear standing outside of his window, the boy was so wracked with guilt that he was convinced that he was being haunted by the ghost of his brother stuck inside the suit that took his life.

The suit's three-toed feet digging into the wet earth. The words, it's me, ringing through Michael's ears. Some nights, Michael would even go so far as to break out of his room to check the gravesite and ensure that his brother was still there. As for William himself, he disappeared into his work.

and his drinks. Juniors, the local bar, wasn't far from his son's gravesite. He found himself going there more and more frequently, spending longer and longer amounts of time there. The bar gave him a place to think, to remember, to reflect and stew on how Henry had stolen his idea for an animal-themed restaurant.

How they'd cut his character out of the cartoon when everyone else was there. How Henry had humiliated him by buying him out of bankruptcy. And now, now there was his son.

Henry had taken his son from him. The robotic part. was the part that failed after all. William ordered one more drink, but it was one too many. The bar turned him out and told him to go home, but William didn't go home.

Drunk and angry, William raced back to the restaurant to give Henry a piece of his mind, only to find someone else waiting. Henry's daughter, Charlie, locked outside of the building, bullies laughing at her through the window. Fine, some other problem to fix.

But then, Afton got an idea. A beautifully awful idea. This.

This was his chance to get back at the man that had humiliated him all those years ago. Henry had killed his business, and now Henry's robotic suit had killed his son. It was time for William to do some killing of his own.

Let Henry feel what it's like to have something you love get ripped away. While parties continued inside the walls of the pizzeria, William attacked Charlie in the back alley. It felt good.

He felt free. The years of resentment and bitterness trapped in his heart finally released in a moment of pure unapologetic evil. He would make Henry hurt like he hurts! And in that moment, William became a killer. He dropped Charlie's lifeless body and drove home, forced to confront his family problems later that night.

Appalled, but also a little excited by what he had just done. Charlie's death would remain on the books as a random act of violence. And though Henry had suspicions about William, there was no physical evidence. Nothing that could link him back to the crime. In the weeks that followed, Fredbear's Family Diner would close for good.

Two high-profile deaths around the restaurant with two grieving owners in such a short period of time was just too much bad press to handle. Besides, Freddy Fazbear's was still open, and it was the newer restaurant anyway. All the equipment from the diner, including the old yellow suits and security puppet, would get retired to that location.

And there they would sit for two- uneventful years. The rest of 1983 and 1984 were spent quietly grieving. Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and the new cast of characters were a hit. Tragic memories of their yellow predecessors quickly faded.

Afton kept a low profile and buried himself in work and research, quickly reaching Henry's level of engineering and even surpassing him. And while Henry slowed down to grieve, Afton kept going. Even starting his own company, Afton Robotics, for all those pet projects that were a little bit too experimental for the regular operations of the pizzeria.

The first of these experimental projects was a secret workshop under his house. A veritable bunker, which allowed him to work while still monitoring his kids via hidden security cameras. 1-9-8-3. A passcode that served as a constant reminder of why the cameras were so important. why he was down there in the first place.

This was all to fulfill the promise that he had made to his son, right? I will put you back together. This was for him.

All for him, right? But cameras weren't enough. He needed to solve the runaway Michael problem.

He had to keep him in the house. He couldn't have another one of his kids wind up dead inside of an animatronic suit. So why not run a little experiment on Michael?

You see, all this work with Henry had gotten Afton to start learning more about life. Robots. The human mind.

And what a fallible machine we as humans were. Our reality is so easy to manipulate with a few sensory deceptions. Deceptions like sound.

With just a few sounds, he had discovered that he could alter a person's vision. He could transform blank, smooth, plastic robots into lumbering, twisted nightmares. Nightmares far scarier than he could create with actual materials. They would appear organic, rotting, putrid, terrifying. These would be his means of keeping his son Michael in the house where he belonged.

Was it extreme? Maybe. But then again, this was the boy who had killed his son. He would make him sorry. And so Michael would grow up not only dealing with the memories of his own guilt, the hospital room, the pills, the flowers, the death of his brother, but also facing literal nightmares, illusions created by sound.

Michael would never forget these either. Years later, as a security guard, he would still draw pictures of them inside of his logbook. But all of these extra projects meant that his home life suffered even more. He was an absent father and a non-existent husband, leaving his wife cold and alone. Why do you hide inside your walls when there is music in my hall?

All I see is an empty room, no more joy, an empty tomb. And despite her repeated demands that he leave his office and engage with the family, he refused time and time again, leaving her no choice but to leave. You burned down my house. You call that a house? It was like-Baby isn't mine.

Well, how's this? I'm keeping the diamond ring. And through it all, there was one lingering feeling. William wasn't done. He had gotten a taste of what it felt like to be unleashed.

what it felt like to be free. Charlie's murder had unlocked something in him, and he wanted more. June 26th, 1985. Putting on the golden Bonnie suit, he lured children one by one to the back room of the pizzeria when no one was looking. At first, he was cautious. He would lure them with promises of cake and cookies.

He told them that their dog had died. He would ask for help with homework. Susie was the first.

You never truly forget your first. I was the first. I have seen everything.

But where to hide the bodies? He couldn't sneak out. out, someone would see him. He had to hide them in a place where they'd never be found, and where they'd never leave the building.

They had to be stuffed. Stuffed inside of the suits. No one maintained those things anyway, except for him. And so Susie would go into Chica.

Fritz, Jeremy, and Gabriel would come next. But it was easy. It was too easy. And with each little life he snuffed out his life.

Lies got bigger. Their house was burning. They're just being kidnapped. Until the last one where all pretense was off.

He let himself get violent. Too violent. I'll just wait for him after school, throw a bag over his head, hit him with a shovel, and drag him into the back of my car.

The body of Cassidy was far more bloody and broken than any of the others. He'd let himself go too far. That one, that one he shouldn't have killed. With no more active animatronics left, he shoved the body into the one suit that remained backstage. The long-forgotten yellow Fredbear, now broken and discolored with age.

Broken, like Cassidy was broken, like his son was broken. Newspapers reported on this disappearance, naming the whole thing the missing children's incident. Police would even charge William with the crimes after finding security footage of the golden mascot suit luring kids to the back.

But they couldn't convict him. They had no bodies, and his face had been hidden behind the mascot suit the entire time. What they had was circumstantial at best.

And so he walked away a free man. But Henry knew the truth. In these murders, he saw his daughter Charlie all over again. So he threw Afton out of the company and shuttered the doors to the old pizzeria. Henry would keep the franchise quiet for two years.

This would not happen again. This could not happen again. How could he protect the kids? Finally, he developed a solution.

He would implement an even more extreme security system in the form of new animatronics. Toy animatronics. Inspired by the toys that they had been selling years ago. But these guys, these were special. They were a new breed of robot with facial recognition abilities.

But most importantly... All the original animatronics, now withered with age, were moved to the new location. With a plan in place, it was time to try once more. The year was 1987, and the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was making headlines in local newspapers.

Headlines that just so happened to catch the attention of William Afton. Freddy's was back? Without him?

That... was his idea his character henry was yet again trying to cut him out of the picture no as long as these restaurants stayed open william would always come back then he noticed the phone number to apply at the bottom of the article hundred dollars a week to apply call afton would go back not as an owner or co-founder, he would go back in the one place that they would least suspect him, a lowly day shift security guard. And there it was, buried in the back of parts and services mixed in with the old withered animatronics was the golden rabbit.

With the yellow security badge still on his chest, he used his crank to pull open the spring locks. It was time for Bonnie to give an encore performance. We had a spare in the back, a yellow one.

Someone used it. Now none of them are acting right. From what I understand, the building's on lockdown.

No one is allowed in or out, you know, especially concerning any previous employees. When we get it all sorted out, we may move you to the day shift. Our position just became available.

1987, five more kids. He didn't know what felt better, getting back into the suit after two long years of waiting or knowing how devastating this would be to Henry the next morning. He didn't even try to hide his crime this time, just meant more blood on Henry's hands. He'd failed to protect the kids again. The restaurant had only been open for a few weeks, but William was sure that this would get it to close.

Good, if he couldn't have Freddy's, no one would. Whenever a new pizzeria opened, he would be there. But as he sat in his bunker, something else started to linger in William's mind.

He had seen something strange. The old withered animatronics. They had been wandering around the building, spurred on by the puppet. It was almost like those old robots were trying to save the kids.

Save them? They couldn't, obviously, but still, how were they moving? It was almost like they had been given life somehow.

Did he have something to do with that? The following day, the news would report a security guard getting bitten by one of the animatronics during the day shift. Was that bite meant for... for him?

William's curiosity was stronger now than his bloodlust. He had to learn more, but how? There was no way he'd ever be able to get inside another Freddy's pizzeria. Heck, there was practically no way a Freddy's would ever open again.

He needed to create something new. Something brand new. He needed to create his... own pizzeria. Due to the massive success and even more so the unfortunate closing of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, it was clear that the stage was set, no pun intended, for another contender in children's entertainment.

Circus Baby's Pizza World. This. This would be the place where he could continue his work.

No longer just murdering, experimenting. He needed more kids, and he needed them. alive.

And knowing that he couldn't show his face on the restaurant floor, he needed a way of remotely capturing his victims and preserving them for his work. With that goal in mind, he designed a new breed of animatronic. They're endoskeletons, fluid and flexible. He equipped them with sound lures that could mimic voices. They could isolate children.

They could incapacitate and contain them with zero direct input from him. It was brilliant. He was brilliant.

Far beyond the simple bars and wires of Henry's designs. And the characters he chose for this were uniquely his. His new roster was a gonna be tainted by Henry's disgusting barnyard bird. Instead it was back to his characters, his creations.

Freddy, Bonnie, Foxy. As well as two special ones. The first, Ballora, was an homage to the woman who Left him now she would never leave him again the second the titular baby was designed with his baby in mind Elizabeth his youngest child she would always be daddy's little girl the one that listened to him the one that obeyed Until the day that she didn't The day before a Circus Baby's pizza world opened, she disobeyed.

She didn't listen. Left alone with Baby, she got too close. The animatronic ripped in half and swallowed her whole. A scared and confused child fading into eternal darkness. By the time Afton found her, it was too late.

She was gone. He immediately cancelled the launch of Circus Babies under the guise of a gas leak. But wait. As he sat there at the foot of the stage, he noticed that something was different.

The eye color of the robot had changed. Baby had been built with blue eyes, but now... they were emerald green, the same color as Elizabeth's.

Was she in there? Could this all be connected to the free-moving animatronics that he had seen at Freddy's? He had to know more. His morning turned to excitement. He had to return to where it all started.

1993. Pathetic. This place was pathetic. Henry had clearly tried to reopen one final time with those old original animatronics from so long ago, but William's damage to the brand had been permanent.

These things stank of death. They hadn't been washed in decades. But even if they had, nothing could wash away the stink of murder that haunted these halls. One night, then another, then another.

William repeatedly snuck into the old, broken restaurant to lure the living animatronics to him, one by one dismantling them, robbing them of their endoskeletons. The metal had to be the secret. It had to contain the remnants of life itself. But he had to know for sure.

Leaping out of a room that was invisible to the animatronics programming, he dragged the oversized robotic skeletons back to his underground workshop. Back to where Circus Baby watched on with glowing, curious eyes. Eyes that somehow felt alive.

Not knowing what else to do, William melted. the robotic parts down. Five animatronic endoskeletons reduced down to one silvery puddle of goo. Could he transfer this living metal to his own creations? He had to try.

He picked up a syringe and filled it with the molten metal and injected the goo into Funtime Freddy's twisted, wiry endoskeleton. And suddenly, the coils came to life. Like snakes writhing in a pile, what had once been cold, lifeless metal moved and jolted on its own. He'd done it!

He had unlocked the secret to life itself! Except something was clearly wrong. The movements were- erratic.

They were violent, angry. Baby didn't act this way. She had been calm, collected. This was clearly something else, something mindless and frantic.

Perhaps by mixing the souls and then portioning them out, he had created incomplete beasts. He would need to keep testing to truly understand it. He needed more of this remnant. As he searched the old pizzeria one more time for any remaining scraps of metal, the ghosts... attacked.

His past victims come to collect their due, all led by Cassidy. The five lined up and blocked the door, and Afton's mind reeled. The scientific implications of this were incredible. Ghosts, real ghosts that he could see all standing against him. But what could they do?

What couldn't they do? He panicked as Cassidy approached. How do you stop something that's already dead? Maybe with the thing that resulted in their death in the first place. He would get into his suit like old times.

He would regain his power over them just like the day that they died. He was the genius. He was.

was the one in the suit. He was the one in charge. The spring lock snapped into place.

Maybe it was his frantic movements. Maybe it was the leaky abandoned restaurant. Maybe it was just fate coming to collect its due.

He didn't know. The only thing he did know was that his brain was suddenly filled with searing white hot pain as hundreds of metallic pins and gears stabbed into his body from all sides. All he could do was collapse, blood slowly oozing out of the suit and pooling onto the floor around him. It couldn't end like this. It wouldn't end like this.

His work was unfinished. Unable to move, his only option was to survive. To live. To keep living.

It took days lying in his own blood, but eventually someone found him. A security guard making a normal report. When he saw the animatronics torn apart in the middle of the party room floor, it caused him to file an immediate report of a break-in. An owner would have to come in and claim the damage. And who else would it be other than Henry?

Hope jumped in Afton's heart. Henry would see him. They were partners, after all.

He would be the one to help save him, to get him out of this suit, to relieve him from this tremendous pain. Henry entered the secret room. His eyes fell on Afton, sitting there in the pool of red. And Henry, saying nothing, turned and walked away....form all locations beforehand, so if you left it, it's your own fault.

Management also requests that this room not be... or insurance representative. And so there, Afton would sit, hanging on for 30 years, trapped behind the walls with an iron will that refused to die. Most of this is things that we already knew, stuff that's been established and re-established time and time again by the games. That said, there are two things that I absolutely have to address.

The first and biggest... is the placement of sister location, or more specifically, Elizabeth's death. To me, evidence in-game seems to suggest that it was meant to come before the crying child's death in 1983. The biggest clue to this is that the crying child saw something.

Remember what you saw is the phrase that's repeated over and over again by psychic friend Fredbear, aka William Afton speaking through a walkie-talkie in the Fredbear plushie's stomach. But what did he see? Well, I think we can tell based on how the nightmare animatronics are visualized. They have mouths in their stomachs, just like- baby ripping in half at the waist to swallow a kid. There's also the empty girl's room, one presumably left behind by a dead sister.

And lastly, it explains why he's scared, and more specifically, why Afton wants him scared. He needs his kids to stay away from the animatronics. He doesn't want them getting too close, because the last time one of his kids got too close to a robot, his daughter died. That's then why he sets up the nightmares, to scare both Mike and the crying child away from the animatronics from that point forward. That's why books like the Character Encyclopedia outright suggest that we play as the crying child in FNAF 4. That's why he has a nanny cam following the crying child everywhere, so he can keep tabs on his kids when they're out of his sight.

He can't let- another Elizabeth situation happen. The death of Elizabeth also gives William Afton extra motivation for killing. He's a grieving father. His daughter was taken away from him, so Charlie should die as well. He's lashing out at the world after losing his kids.

And again, we know that at least one of his children had to have died prior to Charlie's death, based on the mound of dirt that we see in Midnight Motorist. It also allows circus babies to open and close earlier in the timeline, which is how you wind up with Funtime Foxy appearing as Mangle in the FNAF 2 location. Basically, Elizabeth dying first has everything it needs to fit, except for the most important thing, the murder weapon.

Why would Afton be building an animatronic with a giant claw on its stomach so early in the timeline? At this point, he just has no motive. It just doesn't make sense prior to 1983. At this point in the story, he hasn't killed anyone, and we know for a fact that the missing children's incident is 1985. So Elizabeth's death coming before any of those events just doesn't work, hence why I placed it where I did in the narrative timeline. Afton's death here is also a bit true. tricky.

We know that he returned to the FNAF 1 location to break down the original animatronics in order to harvest their remnant. We know that he melts down five things to become one thing. Candy Cadet makes that very clear. So the five things are the five endoskeletons from the various animatronics.

That would be totally fine if it weren't for one huge problem. On his fifth visit to the pizzeria, Afton gets springlocked. So either the five becoming one starts in 1993, but then finishes 30 years later when he reemerges from the wall to add the last endoskeleton to his pile, OR he's had himself some reason to return to the original location after harvesting all the stuff that he can. It's not ideal, but it's the one angle that makes the most sense.

William still wasn't back. Weird. Michael knew his father sometimes traveled for work, disappearing for days on end, but usually there was some sort of notice. A phone call. A post-it.

something. It's not like Michael and his father were close, far from it, but as a household of two suffering men coping with years of tragedy and loss, there was at least some element of communication between the two of them. They were united by a name and a shared pain. This time though, things felt different.

William had left nothing, his absence was longer. There were no check-ins, no updates, just silence. Something had happened.

If there was one thing Michael knew about his father, it was that he had contingencies, safety checks, backup plans. His father was a careful and guarded man. He held his cards close to his chest, and as such, William had prepared him in the event that something like this ever happened. Normally, his father kept his home office locked, but in the event of an unexpected, prolonged absence, Michael had been instructed to enter his father's office and look behind an empty set of shelves mounted in the corner of the room.

Rolling his eyes, Michael entered the office. Never fully understood how William was able to spend so many hours of his days locked up in here. There was just- nothing to do.

Most of this place was empty. He dragged himself over to the shelf in the corner, expecting to find an emergency contact list, a family safety deposit box. But what he actually found there was completely unexpected. Father, it's me, Michael. I did it.

I found it. It was right where you said it would be. The shelf swung open and revealed a giant industrial elevator, one that led straight down into an underground bunker. But that was impossible.

Hidden inside is child. home was a secret entrance to an enormous underground science lair? It didn't make any sense.

Seriously, it didn't make any sense. And yet here it was, mapped directly underneath the floor plan of the house that he'd grown up in, lost his brother in, been tortured in. Michael thought that he'd known his father, a prideful, sad, angry man with petty everyday problems, but clearly, he'd been living with a stranger this entire time.

His father had secrets. Suddenly, the days of William being locked inside of his office made sense. He'd been here the entire time.

Where was here, though? Was this Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rentals? The Circus Baby restaurant always did seem to be a deeply personal project for father.

A failure of his that cut unusually deep, especially after that first location had to be closed prematurely due to the gang- guests After that day, father really did seem to change, to lose himself even more in his work. Clearly the entrance he had found was some sort of secret back way into the facility, one that required crawling through vents to navigate. His father had been working here, but in secret. Why?

And that's when he found her. At the end of the facility, Circus Baby. His father's pride and joy.

Except something was different about her. She wasn't like the others. The way she talked, the stories she told. This wasn't just a robot. She was alive, somehow.

And not only was she alive, she also felt familiar. There is something bad inside of me. I'm broken. I can't be fixed. Will you help me?

Was this his sister? William's baby girl? But how?

Why? What was this place? He dug around some old files and found blueprints outlining the features of these animatronics.

Storage can be used to store things. containers, voice mimicking, parental tracking. And was that a child in Freddy's stomach?

Was his father collecting and experimenting on kids? Were all the rumors that he'd heard throughout his past actually true? That the animatronics came to life at night? That there were murders done in all the pizzerias? That his father had somehow been the prime suspect in all of it?

Suddenly, Michael's mind flashed back to his persistent nightmares throughout his childhood. Had he been experimented on too? Tears. Stung in his eyes as anger, fear, and confusion filled his body.

His father's secrets were pouring out. William wasn't just a lame, overworked father. He was a monster, toying with life itself.

Suddenly, everything clicked. He frantically looked around the room, blinking human heads on poles, staring back at him. Green eyes, his sister.

Blue eyes, his brother. Closed eyes, his mom. All just staring, expectantly.

These were meant to be human. William was working down here trying to make believable humans. Literally re- building the family that they had both lost.

The small little girl robots with their British accents roaming the hallways of this underground facility suddenly took on a whole new context. Were those meant to be his sister? A replacement for her? A clone?

Was William building clones of his sister? They seemed to know him, after all, to react to his presence. They were all there. They didn't recognize me at first, but then they thought I was I was you.

He always did have a bit of a resemblance to his father. Michael's mind reeled as the reality of his world crumbled to dust. No, no, he had to get them out of there. If this really was his sister, heck, if any of these things were human, souls, whatever remnant of the humans that they once were, they needed to be rescued.

They always put us back inside. There's nowhere for us to hide here. Led by the voice of Circus Baby, he marched through the now-empty halls of the Funtime Auditorium.

He would lead them. He would protect them. And finally, he would be able to forgive himself for the killing of his brother so many years-You are in the scooping room now. The scooper only hurts for a moment.

Scooper? That violent extraction arm? Michael had seen that one in the pile of blueprints.

Something about heat rendering the magical silver metal inside useless. In reality, prior to getting himself spring-locked and put behind the wall, William's methods had become increasingly sophisticated. With a mechanized arm that could infuse new bodies with the soul, William could finally give and take away life. The only thing he needed were the bodies. But William wasn't the only one looking for bodies, as Michael was about to learn.

But if we looked like you, then we could hide. If we looked like you, then we would have somewhere to go. Michael was going to be the hero to help these animatronics, alright.

He was going to help the haunted tubes and wires of these animatronics escape, just not in the way that he anticipated. His sister had lied to him, another game of pretend. The scooper plowed forward, digging its extraction arm into his body.

As he heard his bones ripping through his flesh, Michael blacked out. But something is wrong with me. I should be dead.

But I'm not. For the next several months, Michael's life was not his own. He was forced to comply with the tangle of wires and spirits that lived inside of him. His body felt like an overfilled balloon begging to burst as day by day, week by week, his flesh began to sag and disintegrate.

color. He was a walking, talking, rotting corpse. Alive, but wishing he wasn't.

He was a puppet, a walking shell. And while he did his best to conceal his fate, there was only so much a man filled with robot spaghetti could do. The entity in his innards would eventually leave, but...

By that point, the damage had been done. His decaying flesh stank, turning him into a literal purple guy. But still, even with no bones, even with rotting purple flesh and begging to die, Michael continued to live.

That silvery metal remnant injected by the scooper meant that he couldn't die. His anger also refused to die. What he had seen down there in his sister's location had rocked him to his core.

His father had killed and captured dozens. His experiments had killed his sister and then tortured him throughout all his childhood. He was actively trying to build human replicants. He didn't know.

know where his father was, but Mike Michael knew that he was out there somewhere. I've been living in shadows. There is only one thing left for me to do now.

I'm going to come find you. Michael had to correct for the sins of his father. He had to make things right. Michael would burn Fazbear Entertainment to the ground.

I mean... What else could you do when your skin was permanently purple? Michael's strategy was simple.

He would apply for night security guard positions at the old defunct pizzeria locations. That way no one ever had to see him or smell him during his shift. And all these old shuttered locations did need guards.

Teenage vandals and squatters were always looking to get inside these abandoned buildings, and yet no one ever really wanted to work an overnight graveyard shift unless they were practically out of options. Enter Michael. One by one, he would take on the job of security guard, changing his name each time to ensure that no one was able to follow his paper trail.

Once inside, he could tamper with the animatronics and figure out how they worked, writing about his experiences in his security logbook. While there, he would listen to the old tapes where upper management awkwardly awkwardly welcomed new recruits to their summer jobs, even though he was working there nowhere near the summer months. He heard the gory details of his father's franchise from the outsiders looking in, confused and afraid about what was happening in the walls around them. Sometimes, he would see his brother in the form of the Golden Freddy suit.

It's me appearing on the walls around him. Except now, there was something else there. He was no longer alone.

Another, angrier presence was also in the suit, as if two spirits were forced to share the same body. And Golden Freddy would attack him now. It was aggressive. Its vengeance wanted to lash out at out at anyone with the Afton name, anyone who wore a security guard outfit. Over time, Mike worked his way through the old restaurants, the original pizzeria, the bigger, better Freddy Fazbears.

He spent weeks there looking for clues as to his father's whereabouts, and each time at the end of his week shift, he would then set the location on fire. Remnant can't survive high temperatures after all. So burning away whatever spirit-laden animatronics that still existed inside seemed like a winning strategy. All this revisiting of his past, though, was causing the nightmares to begin again.

Hallucinations that brought him back to his childhood. The guilt around killing his brother. His dreams were oddly mixed with the shrill phone calls of the security guards. But it would all be worth it in the end. The goal was to eventually, eventually stumble across the one location, the one job that would finally reunite him with his father.

Little did Mike know that that day would come sooner than he expected. 2023, an advertisement came across Mike's TV. Fazbear Frights, a new horror attraction inspired by the awful crimes that occurred around Freddy Fazbear's pizza so many years ago. It made Mike sick.

People looking to make a quick buck off the tragedy of others. off his own family. This wasn't a joke or entertainment.

Regardless, he had to be a part of it. If this team was combing through his family's history, they might stumble across something that could be useful. And if his father was truly still alive as he suspected, there would be no way that he wouldn't show up here.

Maybe finally. Finally, this could be the final chapter in his family's marathon of tragedy. Mike applied for the job and was immediately handed the keys. Years of doing this had taught him that security guards rarely receive thorough security checks. They also liked how creepy Mike looked.

They thought it was a costume, on theme for the job. What little they knew. Hey, glad you came back for another night. I promise it'll be a lot more interesting this time. For weeks, there was nothing.

But just as Mike considered giving up, he received the call that he'd been waiting for for years. You're not gonna believe this. We found one. A real one. Could this finally be him?

Sure enough, there he was. William inside his iconic golden Bonnie springlock suit. Only now it was green and decaying with age. And there they were. A small family of broken men finally reunited.

It's been a long time, Dad. Mike had always struggled with the phantoms of his past haunting him, but now, all the animatronics he'd encountered over the past months hopping from pizzeria to pizzeria suddenly sprang to life. Their burned faces haunting him as he tried to keep track of his father on the cameras.

It would seem that William's mere presence had put the spirits on high alert. Ultimately, they were harmless, more annoying than anything else, but there was one that felt different from the others. One that was more than just a mere phantom. The security puppet. If he looked at the cameras at just the right moment, he could see it floating there through the halls.

He could even see its reflection. in the water pooled on the ground. It would seem like he wasn't the only one there on a mission.

While he was dealing with Springtrap, Michael assumed that this one was likely dealing with the spirits of this place, finally setting them to rest. Hopefully this means a happier day for all of us, Mike thought to himself. And in that moment, he felt the air around him release, like pressure being let out of a bottle. The building sighed, as if five spirits had finally been allowed to move on.

He had the sense that his brother was a part of them. He rigged the wiring inside the building to misfire, and the dry, desiccated walls erupted in flames. flames. It is finished. Except it was not.

Somehow, through sheer force of will, Afton remained. He had survived, and Mike would need to find a new way of finishing off his father. Luckily, the solution would present itself later that year.

Not from Mike, but from another victim that had been left in his father's hands. We're talking about becoming a Fazbear Entertainment franchisee. Restaurant ownership and management. Something almost anyone can do with a limited degree of success.

You are now the face of the newly rebranded Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Fazbear Entertainment as a brand has been closed for years. William had been stuck in a suit and a wall.

The only person who legally could bring the franchise back was Henry. But he'd largely pulled out of the franchise around the time of his father's disappearance. Something was up.

Surely this had to be some kind of a trick, right? Mike, doing what he did best, applied for a franchise and immediately got the job. There was just one thing out of the ordinary.

Paragraph 4 If you are playing this tape, that means that not only have you been checking outside at the end of every shift, as you were instructed to do, but also that you have found something that meets the criteria of your special obligations under Paragraph 4. No employment contract he'd ever signed required him to keep special lookout for independently moving animatronics outside the restaurant. Now he knew something was up here. Henry was luring them all back. Rather than trying to go to them, like Mike had done for years, Henry was doing the opposite. He was putting them all under the same roof.

roof. He was finishing them off for good. Mike knew this wasn't meant to be a restaurant. It was meant to be a prison, a containment vessel, a locked box meant to trap them all in so they could finally end the madness. It took a few nights, but eventually everyone was there.

His father, the puppet, the robot spaghetti that had once violated his body, and his sister, now hopelessly devoted to serve the man that had once gotten her killed. It was time. He had been instructed to seal the doors and leave, but while he locked everything down, he didn't move on. If this was truly meant to be the end, if the remnant needed to be washed away, He needed to be a part of that.

This is where your story ends. And to you, feeling that you are to be. And to you, monsters trapped in the corridors.

Be still. And give up your spirits. They don't belong to you. For most of you, I believe there is peace.

And perhaps more waiting for you. Don't keep the devil waiting, old friend. And with that, it was over. The Afton legacy died with all of them trapped inside of a literal box. As the flames danced around the office, Mike, for the first time in decades, was happy.

But William wasn't gone yet. Although the darkest pit of hell was open and waiting for him, something or someone wouldn't allow him to move on. Instead, he found himself locked in moments from his past.

The pizzeria. his son's room, his underground bunker. It was as if his brain's neurons were all firing at once, overloaded, mixing and matching all his biggest fears, regrets, failures.

What was this place? How did he get here? He called out into the silence. Then they started coming. Without warning, animatronics both new and old began to jump out at him.

Bite him. Rip him limb from limb. The pain was immeasurable.

Make it stop. Make it stop! William, for the first time, longed for death and end to this torture.

Just as it felt like he couldn't take it anymore, everything was quiet again. It was as if the world had been reset. There was a brief moment of quiet, and then the onslaught began again.

Dozens of faces from his past all focused on him. A waking nightmare that he couldn't escape from. More! pain, more ripping.

It was his own personal hell, but why? Why couldn't he just die? And then he saw them, a group of characters he never thought he'd see again.

Those janky, stolen characters that had started everything. The mediocre melodies. It had all started to go wrong once they showed up, once Henry had made them. But mixed in with their obnoxious southern drawls, William heard something else.

It was barely a whisper, but He could just make out the words. He tried to release you. He tried to release us.

But I'm not going to let that happen. I will hold you here. I will keep you here. No matter how many times they burn us.

That voice. He knew that voice, but from where? Greetings from the fire and from the one you should not have killed. The one he shouldn't have killed.

William Thorpe. He'd done a lot of awful things, but there was always the one that stood out. Not Charlie, his drunken act of revenge. Not Susie, his first true murder, no.

Instead, it was the one that he had lost control with. The one that he had broken beyond repair for no good reason other than because he could. The one that he'd stuffed inside the golden bear that his partner used to wear. Cassidy.

They were back, and now they were trying to punish him. To make him suffer like he'd made them suffer. It was almost like William and Cassidy's souls had been locked together, fused by a collective rage and spite, each refusing to move on.

But while Cassidy was so focused on taking revenge, they actually did the one thing that would be the downfall for so many others. They kept William alive. Even though fire should have destroyed the remnant that was coursing through his being, Cassidy kept William breathing, paving the way for his escape.

William's will was so strong. His soul so powerful that he managed to put a part of himself inside the circuitry that housed the Springlock suit. And there, his consciousness lay, inside a single circuit board, waiting. Waiting for someone to find him and set him free. A person that no one would suspect.

You might have noticed that I was vague about the dates, and there's a good reason for that. I don't know him. There is no good way for me to make him fit in. Here's what I do know.

We know with a high amount of certainty that Michael Afton is the character that- play as up until Ultimate Custom Night. Mike Schmidt and Fritz Smith, the security guards for FNAF 1 and FNAF 2 respectively, get fired for, quote, tampering with the animatronics and odor. So weird connection between the two of them, right? But now, look at the phantom animatronics that are haunting us in FNAF 3. They use models from both FNAF 1 and FNAF 2, meaning whoever is sitting in that security guard chair of Fazbear Frights, they have to have seen both locations and their animatronics. And that's not all.

Their designs are burned. It's a weird detail in the game, and it's something that the character encyclopedia repeatedly calls attention to. The burned texture for these phantom animatronics.

Why is that so unusual though? Fazbear Frights is the first time in the franchise that we hear about anything burning down. From that point on in the story, it's like the characters turn pyro and are suddenly setting fires left and right, but for the first three games, nothing ever catches fire.

The animatronics are just moved or repurposed in some way. So when did they burn, and why would our security guard see them as being burned? Someone has to have been going location to location. setting these places on fire, purging the sins of the past. We know we're definitely playing as Mike in Sister Location in FNAF 6 based on the in-game dialogue.

And in FNAF 4, there's an easter egg where we can hear the phone call from Night 1 of FNAF 1, meaning that whoever's in that bedroom has heard the recording as a security guard. We also know that Mike has seen the Nightmare animatronics based on his drawings in the security logbook. So overall, there is solid evidence that connects all of FNAF's 1 through 6. You'll also notice how the character encyclopedia doesn't have a page for Mike Afton. This thing has a page for Chuck. Bunny Bonnie, but not Michael?

Some tells me they don't want us to confirm how many games he's been in, because that would confirm too much of the theory. In short, this gives us an incredibly compelling and complete narrative. Mike as our protagonist and William his father as our antagonist.

Mike accidentally kills his brother in Fredbear's mouth, which begins our story and sets William down his pathway of destruction. Mike... is then haunted by the guilt of his past and is looking to make things right across the rest of the games.

In Sister Location, he learns what his father's been up to and realizes what he has to do to correct it. After failing to finish the job in FNAF 3, he ultimately helps Henry end it all in FNAF 6. It is great. It is a clean narrative.

There is just one problem, timing. Mike's quest can't really start until he's been down to Sister Location, seen Baby, and gotten himself scooped. That's when he finds out about Afton's secret life.

It's also when he's gonna start to smell, because, you know, he's a walking, talking, rotting corpse. And we know that he's not not going down into the bunker until the Funtime animatronics have been made, Freddy's has been closed, and Afton is out of the picture. That- all should be happening post-1993, after William is sealed behind a wall. But that then presents us with a few problems.

Afton has already dismantled the original animatronics as we see in the FNAF 3 minigames. How are those things getting burned if they're already deconstructed? But more importantly, we see FNAF 2 paychecks with the date 1987. That is way earlier than I think it can be.

To be fair, Fritz Smith's pink slip on night 7 doesn't have a date, but it's a bit weird to say that the first few nights are in 1987, then employee number 3 is hired on years after the restaurant closes. Fazbear Entertainment was dead. There is no need for you to return to work next week, as Fazbear Entertainment is no longer a corporate entity.

All debts had been paid. All assets redistributed. The company was outright dissolved. Even the memories of the horrors that had happened there started to fade away in the public consciousness. The people were gone, too.

William was dead. Henry was gone. A whole generation of young Emilys and Aftons had lost their lives to the horrors of the pizzeria. All of them collateral damage to the man in the bunny suit. Everyone the company had ever touched was dead and gone.

Well, all except one. Pay your child support, you deadbeat! I'm keeping the diamond ring. I also set the house on fire! Clara Afton.

She'd been there in the early days, back when things with William were good. They'd had the perfect home, a thriving business, the ideal family. But shortly after their youngest son died, things started to change. William had become distant, lost in his work, obsessive. She had watched him change from this irritatingly brilliant man that she had fallen in love with to a drunken monster struggling to hold himself together.

And despite her trying to reach out to him in those desperate days, he was just too far gone. Why have I been so lonely? There's music in my heart.

All I see is a little truth. No, Julia, I need to. Admit it, you wanted to let me in. For her sake, she had to leave the relationship. And from there, she largely faded into obscurity.

A mystery from William's past. A footnote in his history. And that was fine for her.

She wanted to leave that part of her life behind. She tried to move forward, never wanting to hear the name Freddy Fazbear again. I'm sorry. A time defined by mistakes and broken promises.

But then, the paperwork started to arrive. As Fazbear Entertainment began to close as a corporate entity, suddenly her mail was flooded with notifications, requests, obligations. She had been there since the beginning, helping William in the early days of his business. And now, as a shareholder and sole living member of the Afton family, all copyrights and trademarks of both Afton Robotics and Fazbear Entertainment passed on to her.

Memories of- of this past life that she had long left behind. Looking at the blueprints, the contracts, the memos, she felt old wounds begin to reopen. The regrets of a happy family that had been torn away from her. William had always been brilliant. That's what had attracted her to him in the first place.

But he'd also been too blinded by obsession and pride. He was too jealous, too petty, too unable to actually see a bigger picture. But now, holding the paperwork that contained decades of heartbreak and trauma, she realized it was her turn. She was holding the power. This was her chance.

And one thought resonated in her head. I will put them back together. I will put them all back together. She would be the one to rebuild this family. To rebuild the pieces of that shattered life.

To reclaim the kids that Fazbear had stolen from her. But how? Looking at William's work now laid out before her, she knew that he had been onto something.

Collecting remnant. Robotic humanoids. Digital conscience transference.

The pieces were all in place. They were just... scattered, fragmented.

It was almost like there were too many ideas going in too many different directions. It was such an important idea that she reiterated that point to herself. There were too many ideas going in too many different directions.

That said, there had to be a way to save it all. She just needed to put it all back together. But how? To rebuild her family, she would first need to rebuild the franchise that had stolen them away from her.

With ownership over the characters, licenses, the technology patents, and the Fazbear name, she converted the corporation back to an LLC, a structure for smaller businesses that are usually family-owned. The irony was fitting. From there, she would need Remnant, and lots of it.

Remnant was the key. Clearly, in the later years of his life, William had been using circus babies, entertainment, and rentals as a Remnant farm, sending robots to kids'birthday parties in the hopes of nabbing bits of the stuff here and there. But clearly, it wasn't enough.

He had, what, like four, maybe five animatronics going out every week? No. It was a decent idea, but to get the Remnant they required, it needed scale. Dozens, hundreds of animatronics all out there, all gathering remnant from unsuspecting customers.

But to do that would require help, something William would never ask for. William had kept everything in-house. His obsession with control limited him.

Clara, though, she wasn't nearly that precious. A plan like this required partners, people outside of Fazbear to do the heavy lifting. So she contacted a mid-sized delivery company, DLZ Shipping Solutions, to help.

build replicas of all the original animatronics. And with meal delivery apps being all the rage, why not an animatronic delivery service? Order one to celebrate your birthday, your Halloween party.

How about a 4th of July picnic? We'll invite Liberty Chica and 4th of July Freddy on over. She would make sure that they made skins for every occasion. Chocolate Bonnie's for Easter, Shamrock Freddy's for St. Patrick's Day, Dia de las Muertos Chicas. And thus, the Fazbear Funtime Service was born.

That's right! With the Fazbear Funtime Service, you'll never be alone again. You'll always have someone watching your back.

Was it ridiculous? Absolutely. Was it a sellout? No doubt. It was exactly the sort of thing that William would have hated.

But it needed to be done to get enough remnant. Normally, the novelty of ordering an animatronic wore off after, like, what? One? maybe two times, but with new skins for new holidays, suddenly you had yourself an animatronic perfect for every occasion. It would keep people hooked, it would keep them ordering the latest and greatest that Fazbear Entertainment LLC had to offer, and all the while they'd be collecting and returning the remnant back to her.

In a word, it was brilliant. There was just one problem with it. No one trusted the Fazbear name.

The company's brand was still mud in the public eye. No one would want to hire animatronics from the restaurant franchise known for murdering children. Nothing kills a party quite like the threat of death, you know? So, she needed to find a way to discredit the stories that had come before. She needed to win back the public's affections, reactivate some nostalgia for the spooky stories of their childhoods.

She needed a game. Multiple games. In fact, they lied to us.

They lied to all of us. They told us that the whole point of this VR game was to undo the bad PR done by a rogue indie game developer. But that's not true at all. Those indie games were designed to conceal and make light of what happened. This isn't just an attempt to rebrand.

It's an elaborate cover-up. Struggling game developers were a dime a dozen online, most working on their magnum opus between shifts at the Dollar General. So, she found one. Steve just picked him out of obscurity. The right mix of desperate and doofus willing to- to say and do anything for a couple extra bucks.

And he fell right in line, as expected, delivering stupid little things with dumb generic names like Mangle's Quest, Balloon Boy's Air Adventure, Five Nights at Freddy's, bad gameplay with even worse graphics. But hey, they got the job done. People were suddenly talking about the clues inside of these things, searching for the hidden lore. They were actively making jokes about dead kids at pizzerias. Her husband's twisted history of serial murder had suddenly been reduced to a mere Nancy Drew mystery to be solved.

The plan had worked. Freddy Fazbear's was suddenly more popular than ever. Things were going shockingly well. Her takeover and reboot of the franchise The franchise was full and complete.

Suddenly infused with cash, she built the largest, most ambitious project yet, the Mega Pizzaplex. William had always been so visionary, but always thought so small-scale. He was careful to a fault.

Not her, though. She knew that this latest pro- needed to be big it needed to be flashy it needed to be a palace for children a place that got people talking and checking out the latest and fazbear products with a steady supply of remnant flowing in it was finally time the stage was set it was time to get to a real goal literally rebuilding a family March 2035 the first was obvious a crying child her little boy the one that was the first to get ripped away from her She'd seen down in his bunker that William had gotten very close to replicating artificial humans using animatronic technology. And so that's exactly what she would do. Rebuild her boy from the ground up using robotic parts.

His shaggy brown hair, his favorite striped shirt, even down to small details that no one would notice, like the band-aid on his left knee. William's research had even found ways of making animatronics that could bleed and process food, making them virtually indistinguishable from a typical human. He would never have any idea of what he actually was unless he was explicitly told. The The only things that could possibly ruin the illusion were any overrides to his internal systems.

If something were to, say, interfere with the cameras that he had in his eyes, or cause some sort of a core reboot to his hard drive, or x-ray his metallic bones, then yeah, he would be exposed. But otherwise, to the outside world, he was just your typical, normal human boy. She worked down in the bowels of the pizzaplex, giving him life.

But it was one thing to build him. It was another to help him remember his identity. He died so young, so early in their history, that there was no preserved memories for him.

No documentation that she could just download into his digital brain. So bit by bit, she trained him, forcing him to remember who he was. In a corner of the room, she even made a makeshift dinner table, a reminder of their happier days. The family recreated two brothers, a sister, a father, and the mother at the head of the table. The one in charge.

The one in command. The one bringing all of this to fruition. But his progress was admittedly slower than she would have liked. At first, he could only communicate through simple ones and zeros, then rudimentary drawings and crude letters. But bit by bit, images of his past life started to come through.

Balloons. Colors. Houses, bears and faces, birthday parties.

All for me. Gregory was alive. As the robot boy embraced her, she felt a warmth that she hadn't in decades.

This. This was the joy that she'd been working towards. This was what it was all for. Her son, back in her arms again. The plan was working.

She had to keep going. Next was William. If the family was truly going to be put together, she would need him.

And she knew exactly where he was. In the ruins of that old Freddy Fazbear's Pizza place where Henry had trapped him. In fact, that's specifically why she insisted on building the pizzaplex there over the sinkhole.

It was the best place to hide what her true intentions were with the entire operation. Digging through the wreckage, she found him. He was right where she thought he'd be.

Seeing the putrid shell of the springtrap suit, though, was not something she was prepared for. The rotting corpse of William Afton was disgusting. Scorched flesh fused into the fur lining.

Hollow black sockets where eyes once were. A smell that reeked of burned carbon and bloody iron. He was no longer f- flesh. It was just the tangled sinews of a creature that was once called human. How far this brilliant man had fallen.

It was clear that her work was cut out for her on this one. Afton was practically lifeless. The man may not have been able to die, but he was about as close as you could come.

And his body would need a lot of reconstruction. Replacement arms and endoskeleton reinforcements were the top priority. Maybe he pulled from their new line of glam rock animatronics.

She'd have to see if they had any spare Bonnie parts lying around that they could steal. In the meantime though, she threw the husk that was once called the Man of Steel. once her husband into a life support pod infused with aerosolized remnant to help keep him stable.

But more important than recovering his body was recovering his mind. In his current state, he was comatose, an empty shell. Severe brain damage starts at temperatures over 108 degrees Fahrenheit, 42 degrees Celsius, and years of repeated fires had burned his brain to goo.

Gone was the brilliant, frustrating mind that had drawn her to him in the first place. But she had a plan. Unlike her darling boy Gregory, Afton had found ways to record his consciousness.

Fundamentally, the brain is only a series of electrical connections after all, so why couldn't you replicate that in the form of a standard circuit board? In essence, you could create a digital consciousness. And one thing she knew about William, he was nothing if not cautious. A planner. Someone who had backup plans to his backup plan.

And sure enough, there it was, buried in piles of old animatronic CPUs, a record of Afton himself. But she needed someone to test it. Someone was definitely here during the night. It had to have been the client.

I mean, they sent us that stuff in the first place with no explanation, told us to scan it, said it would expedite the process so we wouldn't need to program any pathfinding ourselves. Unlike the other games that she'd paid to have made in the past, this one had a different purpose. This wasn't about PR, it was about getting William back up and running, spreading his virus to the masses. You acknowledge that Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for accidental digital consciousness transference, real-world manifestations of digital characters.

She hired a new developer, Silver Parasol Games, to scan the boards and bring her husband into the system. And because of the immersive nature of VR, William's consciousness would be able to merge with the player, giving him a new body, a new agency. There was just one complication. Afton's hold wasn't as powerful as she had hoped.

He wasn't able to gain complete control. The first trial run, Jeremy was so desperate to escape from his grasp that he sliced his own face off with a paper shredder. Messy. Afton's followers were reluctant, to say the least. But it was the second attempt that looked like it had the potential to kill two birds with one stone.

Enter Vanessa. Mrs. Afton wanted a surrogate daughter. Her darling Elizabeth would have been a young woman at this point if she had lived.

Clara wanted someone who wasn't Elizabeth but could be just like her. Could she have just rebuilt her like Gregory? Sure, but she decided against it because she wanted an actual human mother-daughter connection. Well that, and it would be redundant and narratively unsatisfying to have two robot kids in the same family. What could she say?

William had put a lot of tools on the table for her to use, and she was planning on using them all. Plus, Elizabeth had always been so loyal to- daddy. It was time to give her a second chance, a true choice, and Vanessa seemed to be the perfect candidate to fill the role.

She started as a QA tester at Silver Parasol Games, a VR game development company that was part of her plan to bring back William. But more importantly, Vanessa checked all the correct boxes. Right age, blonde, green eyes with a fondness for flowers and the outdoors.

In many ways, it was her daughter all over again. Except it wasn't just looks and personality. What really mattered was Vanessa's mind. Underconfident, coming from a broken home, motherless, able to be manipulated. Yes, she would do nicely.

She would be the one to save dear old daddy. Just as the real Elizabeth would have wanted. I will make you proud, daddy. While testing the VR game, William's digital consciousness merged with Vanessa. Oh!

Oh sure, she fought, fragmenting Afton's code into a series of tapes hidden across the game, trying to do web searches to regain control over her life, but it wasn't enough. She was weaker than Jeremy. She was a thrall that, despite occasional moments of lucidity, had to obey.

And with Vanessa, it was a two-for-one deal. She was getting a daughter back, while also bringing her husband one step closer to reactivation. She just had to make sure that Vanessa was headed the right way. The reborn Gregory was an expert hacker, part of the benefits of being an Afton and a robot. So Clara had him keeping tabs on- Vanessa, hacking into her emails and trailing her therapy sessions to ensure the future Elizabeth was falling in line.

If any of the therapists started to ask too many questions, they were promptly dismissed from their positions. And while Gregory kept tabs on Vanessa's personal life, Mrs. Afton made sure to clear a path for her professionally. With Silver Parasol's collapse at the hands of the anomaly, she then had the possessed Vanessa bring the contaminated circuit boards to DLZ shipping and the Fazbear Funtime service. More glitches, more Remnant, more Afton. But it was her last move that was the best.

In a true masterpiece of poetry, she brought Vanessa over to be chief security officer at the Pizza Plex. A true family tradition to don the hat and badge, and all it took was a recommendation from the top as well as some emails marked for deletion. Sure, Vanessa didn't have relevant experience for the job, but when it comes directly from the CEO, does it really matter? Husband, son, daughter. A corpse, a robot, a human.

All that was left was Michael. Poor troubled Michael. The boy that killed her youngest.

The one that would spend years trying to make his guilty conscience right again. A self-professed protector. While she knew she needed him to complete the family, something told her that the problem had already solved itself.

Something had shifted when using Glamrock Freddy to excavate the buried pizza place. I have been here before. I found myself for the first time when I cleared the path. I have changed. My friends are here.

But I can protect you. I am not me. Maybe it was the remnant that had coursed through Michael's veins. Maybe it was the spirit of Michael living on as a protector. But he was there, somewhere inside of Glamrock Freddy.

She could feel it. And just like that, she'd won. She'd done it. Sure, there were still some kinks to work out, some final brainwashing of Vanessa, some rehabilitation of William, but they were there, finally, all together again under one roof. The Aftons reunited.

A happy ending. That's how it could have ended. That's how it should have ended, had it not been for a few unanticipated developments. For one, something was just wrong with the pizzaplex. Almost as if the entire building was haunted, possessed.

Puppet plushies hiding on ceilings, behind crates, places that they had no earthly way of belonging. Staff bots with greasy tears down their eyes, acting like they were being puppeteered. by some sort of a nightmare. Even their sounds had the echo of nightmares long past. It was as though a guardian spirit of the past refused to move on.

As long as her husband was around, it too would linger. Only now, it wasn't just in one body, but it was in the essence of the building itself. She had seen stories of houses built on burial grounds getting possessed by angry spirits but she'd never assumed that it could be real then again in a world of living spirit metal and mind controlling glitches who was she to be so judgmental the whole thing was ridiculous why would this be the line that she refused to cross after all the pizzaplex was built over the burial ground of angry spirits but it was the power chords that finally convinced her that something was wrong suddenly these chords were striped black and white like the security puppet from generations The very foundations of this place, the materials and wires that constituted it, were rebelling against her, against the Aftons, against the quest to bring them all together again. And it was being helped by something else, something slithering through the building. Maybe they were connected, she couldn't be sure, but a blob of living wires could be heard oozing through the walls, stealing pieces and parts of the old animatronics showcased in Rockstar Row.

She could only assume that it was a- byproduct of all the remnant they'd been collecting. From Afton's testing, she knew that both light and dark remnant existed, one of positive emotions and the other created from anguish, anger, agony. Perhaps this, this thing, was an amalgamation of all the darkest parts of the pizzeria's history, a collection of the hatred still housed inside these defunct endoskeletons and exosuits. As long as it was left alone, it seemed to be harmless, but if any Afton outside of Michael got too close, it would lash out wildly.

Even young Gregory, looking to pu- punish the family that had been complicit in its horrible creation. Little did she know, though, that Gregory should have been her biggest concern. That bringing the family together would have some unforeseen consequences. Gregory was normally the goodest of boys. She had literally built him that way.

But lately, he'd been disappearing more and more often, disobeying her orders... requests. She knew that he loved playing on the arcade machines once the pizzaplex closed, being so good as to top the leaderboard on practically all of them. But lately, he was nowhere to be found.

She suspected his absence had to do with Glamrock's... Freddy's failed performance the other night, when he malfunctioned live on stage. Almost as though the core programming of Freddy responded to seeing this rebuilt small boy.

Almost like it awakened something inside of him. She'd have to make sure that Vanessa was on the lookout for him, but she'd soon come to learn that Vanessa wasn't enough. Whether it was the influence of the nightmare puppet or a reawakened hatred of animatronics seated deep in Gregory's code, something had caused him to rebel. To rip apart each animatronic in the pizzaplex. Bit- Bit by bit, this boy was tearing down the empire that she'd so painstakingly built, freeing Vanessa from her mind control, destroying the remains of Afton in the basement, setting Glamrock Freddy loose.

As her carefully created world crumbled around her one more time, she began to plot her revenge. She would have to bring them all to ruin. And there you have it, my friends, nearly a decade in the making, my FNAF timeline for where the franchise is here in 2023. The year of Fazbear Frights, by the way.

As always, it wouldn't be right for me to finish without going over- over some of the more controversial takes that I just handed out. I think we can all agree that this part of the timeline was always going to be the hardest. So let me just break down some of the major points.

First of all, the biggest swing, and obviously the one that everything else rests upon, Mrs. Afton being the CEO of Fazbear Entertainment LLC. Here's why I went with this route. Now, first and foremost, the head of Fazbear Entertainment is the single biggest mystery that we're meant to solve at this point in the lore. The ultimate guide brings it up repeatedly.

Who's running the show? Who is okaying these decisions? And in the security breach memos, we get multiple mentions of someone manipulating the show.

things from the top down. Whoever this is, they are the person driving forward every other facet of late-stage FNAF lore here. They're the puppet master who's hiring the indie dev.

They're the ones relaunching the brand, building the pizzaplex over the burial ground. So everything at the end of the timeline relies on this one singular answer. Now as I see it, there are two possibilities here. One, an adult Robot Elizabeth, like we see older versions of Robot Kids in the fourth closet, or Mrs. Afton.

Could it be someone completely new to the franchise? Absolutely yes, but in a game with so many returning faces and repeated themes, it would be pretty random and arbitrary. So, between these two girl bosses, who then would it be?

Well, Elizabeth always wants to please her daddy, so she'd be most likely wanting to bring him to life. But then, what's Vanessa's role in all of this? Vanessa is clearly meant to be a parallel for Elizabeth. Same hair, same eyes, similar backstories. But if the main goal is getting the Afton family back together, which seems to clearly be the case in Security Breach, then there's no need for Vanessa to be involved at all.

We already have Elizabeth running the show. It would also mean that we suddenly have two robot kids running around, which feels narratively repetitive and, quite frankly, kind of dumb. Now look at Mrs. Afton. We know next to nothing about her, outside of any clues that we can get from Immortal and the Restless and Ballora's song.

But what her being head of Fazbear does is make every other piece of the lore fit. Suddenly, you can have one of every other type of character. One robot kid in Gregory, one brainwashed human in Elizabeth slash Vanessa, one OG corpse in William, and one possessed animatronic in Mike. Narratively, it makes everything else cleaner.

Legally, it's also the option that makes the most sense. As I call out in my narrative, she'd likely have some stake in the original company and all of its assets. So as Fazbear folds as a company, I'd suspect a lot of it would return back to her.

But there was one clue that really sold me on this particular direction. And that was this right here. In the post-it room.

The big lore central of Security Breach, a dinner table scene with the whole family, including the mother. And not only is she there, she is at the head of that table. The position of highest honor and responsibility.

responsibility. She is the one in charge, with William being relegated off to the side. That one scene shows that we have to include Mom in there somewhere, and the only place it makes sense for her to be is at the top. Now, there is one big dilemma with my interpretation of all this. The Ultimate Guide really seems to point out that the head of Fazbear doesn't want the glitch trap virus to spread.

They call out one particular email in FNAF AR where the legal team calls a cease and desist to all action about scanning the circuit boards. And even in FNAF VR, we're told that the boards get stolen back by the client, presumably once they realize what danger is on there, trying to stop Glitchtrap before he spreads and gets out of hand. Here's the problem with that though, if the head of Fazbear doesn't want Afton to rise again, why'd they restart the company in the first place? Why'd they build over the FNAF 6 pizzeria?

Why'd they go through an elaborate cover-up to make the possessed Vanessa an important part of the company? Just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It would be the most inconsistent series of actions ever, but I did want to call attention to it since it seems to be the route that the official guide is trying to steer us towards. Moving on to minor point number one, the The Five Nights at Freddy's games were made by the rogue indie developer.

Here's the thing, FNAF VR opens with this line. That's why we have recreated many of these completely fictitious scenarios, lies, that you've been fed over the last several years into a hilarious VR game. It's recreating the lies told to you by the indie developer. And since Help Wanted has direct recreations of FNAFs 1 through 3, it means the games must be part of the fabrications that this developer made up. Also, all of this is heavily implied in the story of the same name, Help Wanted and Tales of the Pizzaplex, hence FNAF 1-3 canon games within the lore of the series.

Big swing number two, the elephant or ghost in the room, Charlie infecting the Pizzaplex. John from the channel FNAF has made some great findings about Charlie's influence over the Pizzaplex. The cables that looked like the striped arms of the puppet, the nightmarion plushies that you find hidden across the Pizzaplex in weird places, the staff bots with creepy smiles and in your dreams written on the front, all of these things scream. Puppets plus the puppet mask not having tears in the blob seems to imply that Charlie's spirit exists elsewhere She is still in play and she has an important role Especially in Gregory's post-it room the doors to the post-it room in the game's code are called Charlie doors and inside We see a bunch of lit up nightmare staff Bot-heads suspicious to say the least the channel ID fantasy did a great theory looking at the post-it notes concluding that the crying child slash Gregory isn't alone in this room, but rather might be communicating with someone.

A spirit, Charlie. Charlie's spirit seems to have pulled a poltergeist. Instead of controlling one thing, she's affecting a lot of little details. Foundational elements of the pizzaplex. And this isn't the first time that we've seen this in the franchise either.

We've seen spirits communicating with people through physical writing in the survival logbook. So we know that this is an established means of spirit communication within this franchise. And I suspect that to some extent it might be Charlie's influence making Gregory go haywire. Which brings me then to my final and probably biggest controversy in recent FNAF history, Gregory as Patient 46, the evil robot mastermind. Now, I know when I first came out with this theory a year ago, people were mad.

But here's the thing, you don't have to take my evidence points for it anymore. The recent tales from the Pizzaplex story, GGY, basically goes and just outright proves it. In GGY, we find out about a boy named Gregory who's getting all the high scores in the Pizzaplex arcade machines. When therapists start to go missing, it's confirmed that GGY is the one that's working to bump him off. And when animatronics start getting corrupted by a mysterious glitch, G.G.Y.'s letters are found inside the code.

He even chooses the code name Dr. Rabbit for crying out loud. But obviously, by the time of security breach, Gregory is working against Burntrap, Vanessa, and the animatronics. Why?

How? Well, it's not really clear. I tend to believe that something must have happened to cause him to either lose his memory or be reset in some way.

Maybe it was Charlie talking to him in his post-it room. Maybe he hit his head. Maybe it was the connection that he made with Mike on stage in Glamrock Freddy. Not a- exactly sure and I don't think we have enough clues to solve any of it yet. But it makes sense from a story perspective why he'd start off evil on Afton's side and then switch to trying to destroy him and not knowing who he is in Security Breach.

And with that, my friends, I'm wrapping this thing up. Congratulations, we are on page 40. 22,000 words of FNAF, baby. Practically just wrote myself a Tales of the Pizzaplex short story. Have I answered everything?

No. Does everything fit cleanly? No. But does it feel like the best and most cohesive narrative for all these characters that addresses most of the evidence?

given? Yeah. For me, honestly, it really does. And let's be honest with ourselves, the DLC will probably come out later this year and prove me completely wrong.

Wouldn't be the first time. Then comes the movie, whatever, my descent into madness continues. And with that, my friends, we can finally rest. I can leave the demon to its demons with one final reminder that it was all just a theory.

A GAME THEORY. Thanks for watching. Alright, hey everybody, my name's P-Man.

I just want to say good job to Game Theory for making all those videos. I just combined all those videos that you just watched. Good job Game Theory and subscribe to Game Theory.

Subscribe for more FNAF gameplay on me and FNAF theories on Game Theory. Like I said, those videos aren't mine. They're going to be in the link down below. They're all in the link down below.

um yeah like and subscribe we'll see you guys next time