Five Nights at Freddies. FNAF. A cultural phenomenon. A novel way of telling a story.
And.... complicated.
Really, really complicated.
This is a story told through games, where the plot is revealed through occasionally appearing newspaper articles, secret tapes, cut scenes, books, more books, kids puzzle books, vr games...
It's a story that no-one, apart from the creator Scott Cawthorn, actually knows in it's entirety. There are points that are highly contested, there are mysteries that are yet to be solved. In this series, I want to try to break the story down into something that is, hopefully, easy to follow, and moderately comprehensible.
Let me start off with a few ground rules:
1: This is based on my understanding of the story. I know some people will disagree, I understand that, my opinion has changed multiple times already, and there are some things that I haven't truly settled on yet. If you want to discuss a choice I have to make while trying to make this comprehensible, please just be nice about it!
2: This is a story where some characters have names, some don't have names, and some have their identities hotly contested. This is just something you have to accept when you try to understand FNAF.
3: I am getting a lot of data for this blog from variosu Youtube channels, including GTlive, Game theory, Dawko and others. This is because.... I am terrible at FNAF. I haven't completed a single game myself, so trying to play them all through enough to gather the data necessary to understand the stories would be impossible, given contraints of time and talent. I'll also be using pictures here and there. I will try to cite the sources of these as and when.
So, that said... let's begin.
The story begins with a murderer. This murderer is a man by the name of William Afton. He has three children, Elizabeth, Mike, and another son, whose name is unknown. He also has a wife, Mrs Afton. She might be dead, she might not be. But she definitely is no longer present in the family at the time in which these events unfurl.
I mentioned that William Afton was a murderer. He is, in fact, one of the worst kinds of murderer. He kills children. Lots of them. Why does he kill? Well, the reasons are very wide-ranging.
It's difficult to know when he first killed, and who those victims were. It's also difficult to know exactly how many deaths he has now been responsible for. So, for simplicity's sake, I will start by telling the story of one of those murders. Although it doesn't seem that this was the first, for reasons that will become clear, but it may be a defining moment in William's killing.
To begin, I must introduce a couple more characters, and a place. The first is Henry. Henry is a businessman, and has gone into partnership with William. The business they have created together is known as Fazbear entertainment. This is a surprisingly large and complicated company, and you will be learning much more about it. For now, however, it is enough to know that it is an entity that owns several restaurants, populated by animatronics who dance, sing and delight children. These are Freddy Fazbear, who was likely the first created as the entire company is named after him, Chica the chicken, Bonny the bunny, and Foxy the.... can you guess? Fox. Pirate fox, to be precise.
The business seems to have begun with a family diner, but now has branched more into pizza. Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria is a thriving business, but already one tainted by tragedy.
Already, there has been a terrible crime commited. Children had gone missing. Four of them. They had vanished, one by one, and everyone was baffled.
Although the true horrors behind these dissapearances were, as yet, unknown, it was enough for Henry to worry about the most important person in his life- his daughter Charlotte.
Charlotte spent a lot of time around the Pizzeria. It was, after all, a fun place to be as a child. There were ball pits, and slides, and, of course the animatronics. But Henry was worried about her. Bad things had happened to children who spent time at Freddies, and he wanted to keep her safe. So, he created the Puppet. The Puppet was an animtronic, but appears less rigid in design than the others. It was, after all, designed to fold up inside a present box, and latterly spent time around the prize counter in the restaurant. It would come out of the box and give presents to the children around it.
Henry, however, had programmed another purpose into it. It was there to protect children. Specifically, his own daughter, Charlotte. The Puppetover her, and keep her safe from harm.
And it worked. The puppet watched faithfully as Charlotte played with her friends. It was a silent guardian. It kept her safe.
Until one day, it couldn't.
It was folded up inside it's present box. Children were nearby, and it's programming told it to get up, to unfold, to push open the lid and give out it's gifts. But when it tried, it found there was resistance. The lid wouldn't open, no matter how hard it's endoskeleton strained. There were children outside the box, talking, laughing. In it's unfeeling, robotic way, it knew Charlotte was out there too, and it knew it needed to protect her.
But it was trapped. Someone had weighted the lid closed, and the Puppet couldn't push it's way out.
Meanwhile, Charlotte was not locked in. She was locked out. Outside the door to the restaurant, in the rain, on her own. She jumped up and down to see through a window, trying to attract the attention of the children playing inside. Trying to attract the attention of the Puppet, who she knew would protect her. But the Puppet could not be seen, and none of the children gave her any attention.
A car pulled into the alley at the back of the pizzeria. It was dark in colour, purple, perhaps. A shadowy figure climbed out of it, and walked towards the cold, damp child.
That shadowy figure was William Afton. He did something terrible that day.
It probably wasn't the first time he had killed. It was, however, the first time that he picked a specific victim, for a specific purpose. He chose to murder Charlotte. He planned a way to get her alone, outside the restaurant. He trapped the Puppet inside it's box, preventing it from coming to her air.
Why did he target her specifically? Well, it seems likely that it was because she was Henry's daughter. William was Henry's business partner. And Henry had done something that upset William very, very much.
Henry was a clever man. He suspected that, although the law had so far been unable to find the one responsible for the vanishing children, it might be a member of staff. It might even be his partner, William. And so he had banned William from entering any Freddy Fazbear premises. In doing so, he denied William from entering his favourite hunting grounds.
And William decided that he had to pay for that. And he did, that wet, miserable day. William made him pay. Then he got back in his car, and drove away.
The Puppet was still trapped in his box, but the noises outside had faded away. The children had moved on. It's programming was echoing louder and louder, the urge to fulfill it's primary purpose growing stronger. It had to protect Charlotte. And in that moment, it didn't know where she was. How could it protect her if it didn't know where she was?
The Puppet's joints tensed. It devoted every Joule of energy it could muster into unfolding itself, into pushing against the lid of the box.
And finally, it gave way. The Puppet straightened and looked around. The cameras in it's eyes focused on the faces of every child in the pizzeria in a moment. It compared every face to it's database. Charlotte was not there.
Slowly, the Puppet turned to the door. It wasn't meant to leave the Pizzeria, but nor was Charlotte. And Charlotte wasn't there.
And the door was locked. Why would it be locked?
The Puppet walked over to the door, and pushed it open. It was raining outside. The Puppet was programmed to avoid water. But then it saw something, a little way down the alley. Among the bins and the bin bags.
It's primary programming was activated. Protect Charlotte. The Puppet stepped out in the alley.
The rain began to do it's work almost immediately. Electrical circuits began to short, it's head began to lol, it's eyes became dark. It dropped down onto all fours, unable to summon the power to stand. But it continued to crawl forwards.
Until finally it reached her. Charlotte, lying on her side, her dark hair wet and messy. Abondoned among the rubbish.
The Puppet collapsed beside her. Moments away from total system failure, a final understanding dawned upon it. It's primary objective had failed. Charlotte was dead.
The Puppet's last motors wound down. Every function that had been so carefully built into it failed.
They lay beside each other, Charlotte and the Puppet. Quite what happened next is hard to understand. Perhaps Charlotte's soul, deprived so prematurely of it's body, latched onto another. Perhaps it wasn't her soul, but her agony that found a home in that hunk of metal.
What we do know is that Charlotte's body was found. It was buried on a hill, close to a tree.
And the Puppet... the Puppet was taken to a workshop. Perhaps it was Henry himself who worked, tirelssly and meticulously, to put it back together. But if it was, he didn't discover the truth about the Puppet. Not until much later. No, it would be many years before he learned that part of his daugher had survived within that body.
The Puppet would always be different to the other possesed animatronics. Perhaps the one most like her is Baby, whose story I may tell next. Unlike Baby, she isn't given a voice in the first games she appears in. Perhaps The Puppet was simply designed without the ability to speak.
But eventually, we do get to hear her voice. Eventually, William Afton is made to pay for his crimes. His body all but destroyed, he is held in a place between life and death, and in his nightmares, he is trapped in a Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. He has to try to defend himself as wave after wave of his victims come to torment him. The Puppet is one of them. She has several things to say, all of which are important. But perhaps the line which most completes her story is this:
"I recognize you" she says to the man who killed her, "but I'm not afraid of you. Not anymore."
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