I've recently fallen down a rabbit hole of FNAF lore theory videos on youtube and there's something that's been really bothering me about the way basically all of them are framed. pretty much every single one takes for granted the idea that the FNAF timeline is a tangible thing that can be solved, and that each game (and sometimes other media) is connected in a way determined by an original vision of the games' lore set out by Scott Cawthon when he released the first game in 2014, which is an idea that's always felt plainly ridiculous to me. the FNAF lore, especially early on, always felt like a cat and mouse game between Cawthon and theorists (or, let's be real, Cawthon and Matpat) in which fans would reach a popular consensus about what connection a game has to the lore and then Scott would release a new game full of things that directly contradict the popular interpretation. in my opinion, if the FNAF timeline ever had a clear vision, it coalesced around the time of Sister Location and was abandoned after the release of UCN (the last game before Cawthon handed the franchise over to a new team). I doubt that Scott had come up with the idea of remnant or the spring suit or even hammered down the specifics of how the kids were killed while he was making FNAF 1, if only due to the fact that he clearly wasn't intending a sequel before it blew up.
this is not a condemnation of FNAF, its timeline, or the people who like to theorize about it! once you accept that it's all kind of made up as it goes along, I think the theorizing gets a lot more fun! the reason that those lore videos bug me so much is that the rhetoric they employ worships the idea of the creator's intent to an extreme degree, which I think detracts from the ability to do interesting analysis. "why would the creator have included this detail if they didn't intend to pick up on it later?" is a question that has its place in literary analysis, but it should be a jumping-off point for more expanded analysis. instead, the videos I see mostly use it as a thought-terminating cliche, an invokation of God's name that proves his intent was always behind whatever the person speaking thinks. "what does the inclusion of this detail literally depict" is a much less interesting question than "what does the inclusion of this detail mean?" and yes, those are significantly different questions. the former shackles itself to the worshipped idea of the creator's vision while the latter allows room for types of creative interpretation that by and large does not exist in the "FNAF theory" space.
the thing that really bugs me about this, I think, is that these theorists are doing literary analysis without realizing, and crucially, because of this worship of authorial intent they are limiting themselves to extremely shallow analysis; it's a very "the curtains are fucking blue" way of thinking. one big sticking point people have with FNAF 4, for instance, is the presence of beaten up and broken toys based on characters in FNAF 2 (namely toy chica and the mangle), despite the fact that FNAF 4 supposedly takes place before FNAF 2 and exists within the psyche of the victim of the bite of '83. People have gone on to speculate, based on the presence of these toys, that the previous games were all that child's dream, or that the child in his coma somehow began to warp reality to bring those toy characters into being, or that they exist because the child's soul is trapped in Golden Freddy's suit, which subsequently was there to observe the previous games and thus add those images to the damaged psyche of the boy's spirit. These are all really fun but what I've seen nobody discuss is the thematic resonance that the presence of these toys have. the old, broken toys littering the memories of this child, whose life was ultimately taken by one of the characters those toys depict. their sad broken state as the wonder they were meant to instill has been replaced by dread. the way that the toys are broken but still picked up, continued to be played with, in just the way that the spirits of the children inhabiting the bodies of Freddy and co. continue to be wheeled around from location to location long after their souls should have been out to rest. I'm not saying that the literal theorizing isn't fun, it definitely is, but that level of literalism stops so many from thinking about the series on a deep, emotional level and coming up with more thematic interpretations. I would love to see an analysis, for instance, of what UCN might have to say about afterlives, or crime and punishment, or the idea of righteous retribution. or maybe an analysis of the underlying skepticism and mistrust towards corporate entities that permeates the entire series. I'm sure these analyses exist, I think they're quite obvious, but I have yet to come across them and I think it's a shame that they aren't as readily embraced as the literalist lore theory style.
this is a tendency I've noticed in other fandom spaces too, it shows up in basically any fandom space where one of the main draws is theorizing about lore, ARGs, or upcoming sequels. Deltarune is a good secondary example, so I'll use the popular trans debate about Ralsei as an example. I personally do not care at all if Ralsei ends up transitioning in some way in the later chapters of Deltarune, however, I do think that there are a lot of thematic elements of the game that support a trans reading. I feel like there's a lot of debate about this idea, as if having a trans reading of a character means that the person doing that reading thinks the character MUST be trans and will become so in a future installment, when really, it's a connection between a work's themes and symbols and ones' own personal experience.
back to FNAF, I think the insistence on literalism by the community when it comes to their popular analysis when paired with the mystery box style of FNAF releases (especially the later games, which love to include a bunch of disconnected lore tidbits just for funsies) make for an extremely unsatisfying overarching narrative for the franchise. inherently, everything must have a place and they can only keep building up that mystery with each new entry; it's why the franchise is still going in the first place. the result is that any kind of satisfying closure is ripped away from the fanbase by the time of the next game's release. a very simple, but fun to piece together story about a serial killer and some haunted animatronics becomes more complex as the list of that killer's victims grow endlessly. years later, it seems that killer was finally put to rest after the souls of his victims burn down the last remnant of his horrific crimes along with him inside it, except it turns out that he escaped somehow and we gotta find him again! his soul was supposedly finally put to rest and he's been trapped by one of his victims in his own person hell? guess what! he's in the computer now so he's still out there to do more murders!
I'm trying not to harp on the post-UCN games too much even though I really don't like them (note my restraint that only one of those three examples is from after UCN) but I think the problem was particularly exacerbated with the release of Help Wanted and the games that followed. fans of any serial mystery media (Lost springs to mind, and Severance is another recent example that I think is doing this as well) or any other media that took that mystery box approach will recognize that particularly unsatisfying arc immediately. you have to make new media and the main draw is how confusing disentangling it all is, so you make a new thing that confuses it all even more, often intentionally contradicting the popular consensus. you keep doing this until one day you run out of steam and it all fizzles out, at which point everyone who was strung along will collectively realize that there will never be a satisfying conclusion because there couldn't have been. The commercialized, corporatized product has preyed on their curiosity to produce something ultimately meaningless over and over again, leaving it soulless, yet haunted. Perhaps, actually, that's a fitting fate for the franchise that follows a callous corporate entity that just can't leave well enough alone.
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