#cassidyvictim

[mkaftonn]

a promise

[emeraldart]

not to be that guy but I think I solved FNAF. It involves MikeTOYSNHK.

I’m Bored - Let’s Do a MikeTOYSNHK Doc

Introduction I’m going to keep this as brief as possible. FNAF is built on theory Jenga, which means that to make any point I have to prov

Descend into hell with me it’ll be fun I promise

[screechingunknowncycle]

Another headcanon I have is that Cassidy/Michael's second favorite animatronic is Mangle! He always liked their colors and thought they were cool. He'd ask his sister if he could play with her Mangle toy a lot. He ended up holding onto it after she went missing...

Cassidy/Golden Freddy grows to relate to Mangle a lot after the events of 1983 due to his similarities to the animatronic, growing to hate when the kids tear her apart.

[shinewonder]

único cassidyvictim br que eu vi em mt tempo... eu nao acredito na teoria mas eu acho ela mt boa narrativamente entao tenho uma apreciação imensa por ela e quem acredita nela

eu e os outros 2 defensores dessa teoria no Brasil agradecemos

a gente agr ^ depois de receber carinho

[debrisyume]

Ok here's the second part of my fnaf theories post, I'd recommend reading the first part before this one. This also isn’t that much shorter than the first one so I also recommend taking a break in between haha. Most of the topics I go into here deal with the continuity debate and TOYSNHK, aka my least favorite talking points in the fnaf fandom lol (fnaf world is cool though). First I'm going to start this off with my take on Midnight Motorist since I don't think it warrants its own post, and yes I dislike MM too. Unnecessarily vague ass minigame.

[midnight motorist] 3000+

I was originally going to give a brief overview of why I prefer MCIMM and think aftonMM is flawed, but Five Laps at Freddy’s, the racing game, made my life more difficult by giving stronger evidence to AftonMM. There’s a purple car with a Spring Bonnie antenna called Midnight Motor. I’m not completely opposed to aftonMM, it’s just that MCIMM was so much easier to work with. We learn that one of the missing kids has an abusive family, which fits with William targeting vulnerable kids like Susie and her dead dog, ‘that place’ is Freddy’s, a place he’s attached to because of his home life, the animatronic footprints are Bonnie, and the mound is just a dirt pile. It has an outline of a house around it, like there’s something being built, or a house was torn down.

An unmarked grave was unlikely to me because Cassidy’s death would be public, we have no reason to think Mrs. Afton is dead or would need to be kept secret (if William killed her that’s very important info to just imply in a small little detail), or Elizabeth somehow died before Charlotte, if this is the night of her death as it’s commonly believed, which is pretty wacky. William referring to a restaurant he owns as “that place” like he resents it never made sense to me either.

I doubt anything else will be implied in the racing game, not the mound, not who the runaway is, or the animatronic footprints, unless there’s environmental details in the midnight motorist course or some secret lore in the full game, which I find unlikely (I’d be happy to be proven wrong though). This would kinda suck because those are the most debated upon elements of AftonMM because of how ambiguous everything is. It’s so ambiguous that it’s hard to tell what’s even the point of it existing and what it adds to the narrative. My only hope is that the name ‘Midnight Motor’ will be replaced with something else, so we can take it as just the same car from Take Cake to the Children, but for now I’ll just have to deal with this.

Despite my issues with AftonMM, it can imply some interesting things under certain circumstances. The other option is BVRunaway, one of my least favorite theories in the history of forever, which is partly why I’m not too happy with AftonMM being practically confirmed. Ok I’m joking lol, but I have a lot of issues with this idea that I’ll get into.

First there’s how this is a completely different house from fnaf 4. Instead of being in a neighborhood within walking distance of Fredbear's, the Aftons are in the middle of a forest. People often point out how it matches the fnaf 4 minigame map, pointing to JR’s as Fredbear’s, but no other identical maps in the series need you to rotate them to see the resemblance, and the distance has vastly increased, to the point you need a car to get through it. Not only that but the shape of a street is compared to the road, even though there's a road right under the street in the fnaf 4 minigames. This cannot be chalked to just pixel art inconsistencies, it is way too different from the minigame house. The house in the fnaf 4 menu screen is surrounded by a forest too though, which we see again in Curse of Dreadbear. So it seems like the Aftons were always intended to have two houses?

I've been starting to think that Cassidy has two bedrooms (the purple telephone is his according to the logbook, but his minigame room looks very different, and I doubt that William would use his teenage son's bedroom as a reference when he's mostly focused on younger children, especially if Cassidy himself was the direct inspiration for the experiments), the Fnaf 4 gameplay one being where he was taken home for hospice care (the fnaf 4 bed is also depicted as a hospital bed in Ruin), so that fits well here. Maybe the Aftons are divorced and Mrs Afton owns one of them (I’d think William would own the house closer to the diner but maybe she won it in the divorce case?), maybe they just have two houses, or they only moved after Cassidy was bitten.

I lean towards the last option: I think it’s even possible Cassidy was in a coma for a few months, bitten in the summer but died in October around fallfest, maybe in the beginning of the month while Charlotte died at the end, as indicated by him possibly being represented by the already undead Dreadbear (or it implies that William succeeded in helping Cassidy possess something by Halloween 1983 which I dunno how to feel about, would kinda explain why he’s occasionally linked to Halloween stuff though). This is just my opinion, but I think Cassidy’s injury prompting them to move to a more isolated area while he’s in hospice is just the best explanation for why they have two different houses, especially if Fredbear’s Family Diner closed down and William can’t live close to his job anymore.

Anyway, this causes some issues with BVrunaway if they only got this new house after he was bitten, as I doubt he was both conscious and strong enough during his bedrest for him to escape through the window. And if he was, this puts in question how exactly he died if the bite didn’t kill him and he’s at least partially recovered from it. It’s weird, but it does remind me of a theory I heard once about the nightmare experiments being used on Cassidy to help him regain his emotions after losing them because of his head injury (which is absolutely crazy but I wouldn’t put it past Fnaf at this point lmao). To be fair, the pills on Cassidy’s bedside are very odd for a patient who’s comatose, he wouldn’t be able to take those unless he was semi-conscious… wait was that supposed to imply that William actually pulled the plug on him?? Wtf

There’s also how Cassidy hates being locked in by his brother, but all of a sudden he can lock his dad out in MM. That’s… not really how locks work. I also don’t see Michael being the couch person, if William is mad enough at Cassidy for locking him out to go out in the rain and try to get in through the window just to yell at him, then Michael “backtalking” him should send him into a rage as well. Mike going from trying to protect his brother from their dad to making fun of him because he’s upset over seeing a corpse is also just insane to me. Siblings can be bullies one day yet protective in the next, but this would make for some VERY unnatural character development. Michael turns into such an asshole in this scenario that it doesn’t even feel like the same person.

Another problem I had with aftonMM is how the Aftons are all established characters at this point yet couch person is as generic as the various NPCs we’ve seen before in the minigames like in FoxyGOGOGO, Stage01, the people in Michael’s neighborhood, and even the Security Puppet in the very same game, but now I’m supposed to think this is Michael, who’s been portrayed in detailed sprites before? It’s not even clear if they’re wearing pants or a robe or have a blanket over them.

This is part of why I dislike MM, stuff like this feels like obfuscation just for the sake of it and it’s annoying af (why does William, our main villain, comment on nothing interesting like the mound or the footprints so we can get a better idea on if this is him or what’s going on?) Maybe it’s Mrs. Afton, who as a peer I can see William not being bothered by standing up to him, but after all the times she’s been absent I struggle to think this is her one appearance, I wish it was more clear this is her. I kinda lean more towards Henry tbh. If this is the same night of Charlie’s death that could explain why the Puppet was assigned to her that day. I can see the Puppet being meant to look after children whose parents aren’t present at the pizzeria, and she was colored in gray in the same game so you can probably associate it with her father too?

So yeah I only really accept AftonMM under MikeRunaway, but this barely helps with anything else. If ‘that place’ is the mound then why isn’t Michael there when we find it earlier? Why would he be going to Freddy’s? Tf is up with the single set of animatronic footprints? William also implies that his kid “ran off” to that place more than once, what is this place supposed to be for either of the Afton brothers?

If I’m going to be honest I’m stuck between two different ideas on what’s going with AftonMM depending on what night this takes place in. I was never completely convinced by the minigame having to take place the night Charlotte died, but I will be considering it since that could be the intention with the rain and the car. I prefer it taking place after GGGL so that Golden Freddy can be the footprints instead of Shadow Freddy, which I have some problems with unless he has a specific origin I will talk about later.

I honestly think Golden Freddy fits better as the footprints here, this is very similar to what happens in the movie, and Golden Freddy doesn’t move while Shadow Freddy can (follow me), so the single set of footprints make sense. Cassidy visiting his old house over anything else also works (while Shadow Freddy doesn’t have much of a reason to), it would even go well with what happens in Coming Home as Chica constantly visits Susie at night and eventually sees her sister.

This would also let the mound be where Lizzie’s corpse is buried, as I believe she was already dead by then. ‘That place’ could be Cassidy’s grave in a real graveyard. Maybe Michael tried to go there. I’d also like to point out that MM being about the Aftons yet necessary for the lorekeeper ending implies the obscured grave belongs to CCassidy lol. Susie representing the whole MCI with fruity maze, Charlotte and Cassidy as the blurry/covered up gravestones because of Security Puppet and MM.

Actually I wonder if Coming Home could explain MM further, with the Gretchen doll referencing Fredplush. Gretchen is a doll Susie and her sister shared that looks like gameline Susie with the blond curls (she has brown hair instead). This reminded me of the Ella ragdoll in The Silver Eyes since that’s Charliebot’s ‘real body’ like how Gretchen resembles what Susie looks like in the game timeline, but it might also relate to Fredplush. Susie isn’t sure what her unfinished business was, but it ends up having to do with finding her doll. Was Cassidy looking for his Fredbear plush? It would be where his actual ‘body’ is, Golden Freddy being a projection while the plush has the soul. It could still be at the house at this point or he just assumes that’s where it is.

That’s my 1985MM interpretation, so I’ll talk about my take on it being the night of Charlie’s death now. I think certain details are harder to explain if that’s the case though I believe I figured out how to make it work.

First there’s the mound, at best only Cassidy should be dead by now, so if there’s a dead body there it has to be his. We have nothing on Mrs Afton so her corpse being buried there would be very random and not properly hinted at. I used to be very against him being the mound, but looking up laws regarding burials I think William could get away with it? You’re allowed to bury a family member under private property as long as you’re given permission. The outline of the building could be there to imply that it was an old Freddy’s/Fredbear’s location that William owned and was torn down, or maybe even the barn from Curse of Dreadbear, something like that.

I guess he could have also not cared about the law and buried his son in the woods because he’s that controlling. Something I only realized recently that didn’t quite work with MCIMM is that the mound is in a secret area that you have to go out of your way to find, so it heavily implies that Mustard Man is very familiar with this area and decided to visit it for whatever reason. It’s pouring rain out and you have to be quite specific in order to enter this area, this suggests that he didn’t come here randomly. A corpse being buried there fits very well in that context, otherwise why bother leaving the car if it’s not something that interests him? If it was just the parent of an MCI victim, what significance would this hold to them?

So Cassidy’s body isn’t a totally bad option for the mound, but what are my problems with Shadow Freddy? Well first there’s how my original theory for him put his origin at 1987, to explain why he looks like Withered Golden Freddy, I also don’t really see a good reason for him to go straight to the Afton house. He’d likely be born from Charlotte’s agony (they have a lot of connections with each other) and him leading Michael to her corpse is also random. I don’t know if that was even his intent, the animatronic footprints don’t really go anywhere, it looks more like he’s just standing there and it encouraged him to leave, or he even showed up after the runaway left.

While it’s very likely that Michael knows who Charlie is, there’s been little connection established between them like Cassidy & Charlotte with happiest day, or Lizzie & Charlotte with their parallels & The Fourth Closet. It makes it harder for him finding her corpse to feel meaningful when this is their only real connection. I guess this could be when Mike finds out that his dad is a murderer and be coerced into working for him?

Then there’s how it’s unlikely that William killed Charlotte past like, 8pm at best (and it was probably earlier than that), yet it takes him at least 4 hours to get home. What was William doing all that time? He has enough time to go back to Freddy’s and get Charlie’s corpse to bury it in that stupid mound lmao (…maybe MM is getting to my head because this is starting to seem plausible to me?? At least it makes the fact that this is the day Charlotte died more relevant). Hell why hasn’t Michael come back home yet? Wouldn’t it have been hours by now? I used to take this as good evidence that the runaway was kidnapped, but I guess Mike decided to have a sleepover at Freddy’s or the graveyard lol. Maybe he just didn’t want to go home and possibly stayed at a friend’s house after he went to ‘that place’, that would make sense to me.

Something that bothered me about Shadow Freddy was the question of why Charlotte’s agony would form a Fredbear at her death. The SAVEHIM bear looks more like a Freddy, and Security Puppet made the Puppet far more relevant to her death, so why didn’t it show up as Nightmarionne instead? Another thing is that Shadow Freddy could possibly be connected to the Bite of 83, the shadows show up in Fnaf 4 and he has a broken jaw in Fnaf world, but then what’s up with all the Charlotte connections?

Shadow Freddy in follow me paralleling the Puppet in SAVETHEM, Lefty being a black bear, PizzaBear spawning Shadow Freddies in the minigame that’s clearly referencing SAVEHIM, Shadow Freddy in the novels leading Charlie’s friends to her location when she’s missing, etc. That Shadow Freddy is also implied to be Michael Brooks’ doing, aka the kid who possesses Golden Freddy. So… do Cassidy and Charlotte both have a hand in creating Shadow Freddy?

Currently I have two different ideas on what caused Shadow Freddy to form. One explanation is that Charlie saw the bite happen, and it scared her. Her agony took the form of Fredbear when she died because it became her own personal boogeyman for a while; the incident ruined the fun of animatronics/springlock suits for her, or at least the character of Fredbear specifically. This would also explain why he goes to the Afton house first of all things—his origin does relate to the bite in some way.

Another possibility is that Psychic Friend Fredbear became Shadow Freddy after Cassidy’s death (possibly ‘leaving’ the plush to allow room for Cassidy to possess it), and the connection to Charlotte comes from their shared desire to put Cassidy back together through happiest day. I suppose he could be looking for Cassidy’s ghost/body (sort of a reverse of Cassidy as Golden Freddy looking for his plushie, if I could compare this to Coming Home again), and Michael just happened to see him at the right moment. Maybe he was even following Charlotte beforehand (the PizzaBear minigame possibly says he was present at her death location?), wanting her help to put Cassidy back together, but after she died he tries to get Michael’s attention instead? Or he wanted to freak Mike out for what he did to Cassy lol.

I’m still not sure what to make of Shadow Freddy or what his exact origin is (I’m becoming pretty fond of him being the plushie though), but I like the idea of him being relevant to both Cassidy and Charlie, which is why he possibly shows up as the footprints in MM. We do learn in The Week Before that the bite was a public event, so Charlotte could have been a witness to it.

There’s my ideas for MM: depending on the timeline Cassidy or Lizzie could be in the mound, and either Golden Freddy or Shadow Freddy are the footprints. Michael is probably visiting his brother’s grave or went to Freddy’s after seeing a freaky animatronic outside his window. Uh, who’s on the couch? Mrs. Afton or Henry or even Phone Guy, idc. Can we stop talking about MM now?

[FNAF World] 3800+

Now I want to go over fnaf world. There seems to be some confusion on whether or not it’s still canon, but Scott’s wording of ‘regretting that he tied it to a canon game’ sounds like it’s still relevant. I think part of the regret comes from how the meta elements and fourth wall breaks makes parsing lore from it very confusing. Glitchbear talks about ‘someone pulling the strings’ and getting in the way of you helping Cassidy, which sounds very significant… and then it’s just Scott’s fucking self-insert lol.

I’m not quite sure what to make of deskman, his dialogue is pretty confusing when you try to apply it to an in-universe character like Henry or William, which are the only ones who can sorta fit. He mentions you deactivating his games and is aware about Baby and thinks that she’s evil, though he doesn’t actually admit to being her creator (edit: bro I looked up his text on the wiki because I prefer reading over watching videos and they cut out the line saying he made Baby lol, so ignore me on that), and then he literally dies in front of you. I can kinda see it being some sort of distorted memory of the player character, who’s having trouble processing things properly as a ghost— but it’s still difficult to explain this scene, so I just go with him being a representation of Scott. I’ll be focusing on the clock sidequest and Glitchbear/Spooky eyes instead for lore.

First of all I think Glitchbear and Spooky eyes may be different people. It’s probably more likely/simpler that they are the same person, but they sound different enough from one another that I consider them to be separate. I don’t think it’s a case of them acting different depending on who they’re talking to, as even Fredplush can be rude towards Cassidy. They also directly contradict each other, spooky eyes says that this is a safe place, while Glitchbear claims that there is no safe place, as if he’s mocking their words.

This can be explained as him not wanting to worry Cassidy, but Fredplush doesn’t tend to sugarcoat things. A more funny piece of evidence is that when you play as Fredbear when talking to the main version, both glitch out with text from spooky eyes saying that two Fredbears can’t occupy the same space at the same time. If Adventure Fredbear is just glitchbear without the glitches, yet when he ‘dies’ spooky eyes can still speak, that implies they are different people. Though maybe you’re not supposed to take that literally.

Glitchbear acts more like normal Fredplush so I think he’s the imaginary friend that Cassidy created. Spooky eyes is Charlotte who’s taking Fredplush’s words to help Cassidy, maybe even being aware that he wouldn’t recognize her so she tries to act like someone familiar. Would this make her the final speaker? Maybe, particularly if the Fnaf 4 minigames are some sort of looping memory Cassidy has in the afterlife, but I strongly prefer the idea that William overheard Fredplush say ‘I will put you back together’. If she is the final speaker in some sort of time loop I can see it happening right as GGGL is about to occur.

The reason I think spooky eyes is Charlotte is for a few different reasons. I already pointed out how they’re kinder than Fredplush usually is, taking on a softer tone, but there are other interesting details as well.

“Something very bad happened, that’s why I’m here. But I won’t let the same happen to you. I will put you back together.” This is talking about an incident that didn’t personally affect Spooky eyes, I think it has to do with the MCI. In the context of just fnaf world, probably the follow me minigames where they lost their bodies, and after the other games came out, probably MoltenMCI and the children’s souls being broken like Cassidy’s was. I want to point out that Fredplush doesn’t really have a reason to be impacted by the MCI in such a way that he feels the need to do something to protect Cassidy, like I don’t think he would care about the other kids like Charlie does.

The referenced dialogue from Fredplush also goes a bit differently, with him saying “I’m still here. I will put you back together.” This is similar to Spooky eyes telling Cassidy ‘that’s why I’m here’, but it actually implies different things. Fredplush is assuring Cassidy that he hasn’t left, while Spooky eyes is saying that they came just now to help him.

Another problem with this is that fnaf world is talked about like it’s something that has existed for a good while before things have ‘went wrong’, so it’s strange for Fredplush to leave Cassidy alone for a while only to suddenly come back and say that he’ll put him back together again. He might have needed more time/had to wait for a good opportunity, but to me it also means that these don’t have to be the same character, as the context is fairly different. I don’t really believe this, but perhaps Fredplush even means something different when he says he’ll put Cassidy back together, such as helping him become more ‘whole’ in the Fredbear suit or similar, but then changing his mind about the possession and wanting Cassidy to move on.

The Puppet is the one we see that sets up happiest day in Fnaf 3, so Charlie being involved in fnaf world makes the most sense to me. Their phrasing positions them as someone who’s here to help, and the animatronic that’s always trying to do something for the other kids is the Puppet at this point, while Golden Freddy takes the most effort to save in fnaf 3. Some smaller details that might not mean much would be the fnaf 2 dreams where you see the pupils of the Puppet stand out when he’s staring directly at you in a dark background, which feels pretty similar to spooky eyes gazing at you, Security Puppet being depicted with yellow pupils, and finally the Nightmarionne teaser that showed him with the Freddy plush.

I also think Adventure Freddy is an avatar controlled by Charlie, similar to how she controls the other main characters in the Fnaf 3 minigames. “This is a safe place, this is a sanctuary, the truth is there is no safe place. But you don’t understand that. You were made for one thing.” can be seen as directly mocking her, with the last line being more metaphorical (such as referencing the Puppet’s initial purpose in giving Cassidy cake for his birthday when he was alive, now needing to do that to help him move on) or talking to the avatar instead.

Now what exactly is fnaf world and what is being done here to help Cassidy? The fnaf world map is notably shaped like a brain, and it’s based on Cassidy’s memory in some way. It can be seen as some sort of post-death dream world/purgatory for Cassidy. I think he’s the creator in some way since it’s in his head, with perhaps Fredplush and Charlotte also having some responsibility for its existence, making it more comprehensible while Cassidy’s soul is broken. If I’m right about my “LeftyDuo” theory (GoldenLefty? Idk), I think Fnaf world could be taking place inside him, especially if Lefty got his hands on the plush. So Cassidy, his imaginary friend, and Charlotte would all be in the same place (and if Fredplush is Shadow Freddy the black coloring in Lefty could be a reference to that). This might be why Charlotte is always able to find Cassidy in the party room, even when no other child is there, they’re already together.

We are told to leave breadcrumbs for Cassidy, to “help him find his way”. After we find all the clocks and set up the minigame hints (sans the happiest day party) spooky eyes tells Cassidy that the “pieces are in place” for him to find, but also tells him to rest. I always find this a bit confusing as resting and finding the pieces should be contradictory. I also don’t agree that finding the pieces involves Cassidy playing the minigames and giving cake to the children, I don’t see how the two can relate and it contradicts with him resting (I also don’t like how it takes away from Charlie’s role in helping the kids, if she only gave Golden Freddy cake while Cassidy did the others then what’s like, the point of it being her instead of Cassidy lol).

I’ve seen people try to compare this with Jake giving a happy memory to Andrew to help him move on, but this doesn’t involve Jake changing a crappy memory of his own into something more positive. A ghost is able to move on when they feel genuinely positive emotions, and it looks like Cassidy is the one who needs to be given those positive emotions like Andrew was. It doesn’t quite work as a narrative to me for Cassidy to be the one to save others, when he doesn’t seem very equipped to do it. We don’t see him happy in life or in death, unlike Jake who was loved and wants to help others (and we are shown/told about Charlie being compassionate even as a ghost, so her setting everything up makes more sense to me).

After thinking about this for a while it clicked in my head when I read the word breadcrumbs again. What are breadcrumbs for? I immediately think of Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs when they walk into the forest so they can easily find their house when walking back.

Leaving breadcrumbs for Cassidy implies helping him go to a specific place, to somewhere he’s already been. The one memory that doesn’t need a clock because he still remembers it (The party was for you/It was for me). The birthday party where he died, aka happiest day. The pieces are a trail for him to follow. What you set up with the clocks are hints on how to access/find the fnaf 3 minigames, it’s telling Cassidy where to go and how to find the party room so he can wait for Charlotte to help him.

Perhaps the crying shadow characters are even impressions left behind from his presence there earlier? After every child is given cake, they also go to the party room and give Cassidy back a piece of his memory/identity (this can be considered their present for him lol? giving back his plushies), putting him back together little by little until he’s finally ready to get his cake.

This can also tie into why the answer to which ending is canon being ‘complex’. The bad ending did happen, but future events such as ennard forming & Molten Freddy/Fredplush/maybe Fredbear (as Lefty) burning together gave him back his memories in a different way. However, he can’t move on yet, because he’s still upset about his death. It’s not just fire that helps a soul move on, they need a happy memory to be put at rest. Maybe the party happens after UCN, or he moves on without it when he drowns himself as Redbear.

When you drown yourself in fnaf world, you get a picture of an older person hugging two younger kids with them, this pic being called happiest day. These three people might be Michael with his siblings, or Charlotte with her twin and father. It’s different from the fnaf 3 version, but it could be the same overall destination. Perhaps the fnaf world version has fewer spirits put at rest because it happened earlier than usual, before the minigames were even set up. I think this could add to Charlie being the player character as she seems to be a ghost that can move on whenever she wants, but is waiting to help the other kids first. And then getting trapped by the lake forces her to move on before she finishes her task, which would make this ending kinda sad. In UCN when Cassidy drowns himself he could be going to the party room or just letting his anger go and moving on, which in turn sets the others free from UCN. A form of happiest day still happened, but the journey to get there was different.

I like ennard playing a part in creating Cassidy’s happiest day because it enhances the parallels between Charlotte and Elizabeth. Both are the leader of their respective animatronic group, both look at the others in a condescending way (Charlie calling the others animals and less aware than herself, while Lizzie mentions how Ballora can’t pretend while she can), both get shocked by their dads, and both set up happiest day in their own way. Charlie makes the party, while Lizzie was behind the plan to combine everyone into one, making it easier to put her brother back together later and therefore allowing the others to find their peace when it’s time (since they can’t move on without Cassidy). I just think it’s kinda neat.

Might be a good time to mention how Circus Baby’s main and only appearance in Sister Location has her doing the Golden Freddy pose, complete with the empty eyes. Feels like she’s matching her brother :)

She also calls herself ‘broken’ during this scene and Michael talks about putting her back together in his speech; there seems to be deliberate parallels drawn between Elizabeth and Cassidy. The similarities go even further if you think Elizabeth had her remnant in the other Funtimes as well, as bringing them all together in ennard puts her back together just like how Cassidy needs his pieces back from the MCI.

Something interesting about fnaf world is its connections to UCN. Many of the fnaf world exclusive characters show up there, you have a whole cast of animatronics to play with, and drowning yourself in either game gives you the same 8bit Freddy trophy for the other game too. This to me suggests that UCN takes place in a similar realm to fnaf world, perhaps even being a direct sequel where animatronica village turned into UCN, or it’s happening concurrently with it. This is partly why I lean more towards Golden Freddy being the Vengeful Spirit and/or behind UCN.

If Cassidy in charge of UCN/FNAF World’s realm, perhaps with the help of his Fredplush, then I really don't think UCNDissent works. This theory claims that Golden Freddy is in UCN to convince the VS to stop torturing Afton so he can pass on, and is getting the conversation about ‘leaving the demon to his demons’, the demons in question being TOYSNHK. I don't like this idea because 1. It turns Old Man Consequences into a jackass (TOYSNHK is a demon for being angry at his killer??) who's overly biased towards Cassidy and 2. if Golden Freddy is in charge here, then he can easily nuke UCN at any moment. So some form of UCNDuo (Afton being tortured by two different spirits who are in charge) makes more sense, though that has its own set of issues, but that's for later.

Note: I wrote the following two paragraphs before Scott revealed that the box essentially contains a dropped plot thread, I still want to leave this just to explain my thought process. I don’t really have much idea on what he might have been building up to beyond what I said here. Presumably it’s something that involves Cassidy and his brother. Or it has to do with happiest day never occurring and it needs to be redone in the modern era, I dunno.

I might as well talk about the box. If I’m going to be honest I never actually cared much about what’s in it? Idk it just never interested me that much. I do have thoughts about it though. When we first see the box we are told ‘perhaps some things are best left forgotten, for now.’ In the Fnaf world files there’s a picture of the box being open, and there’s a line elsewhere in the code of a teaser image for update 2 that says “he put the pieces back together.” The ‘he’ here could be Cassidy, Fredplush, or beta Charlie (who was likely still male back then), personally I lean more towards beta Charlie because it’s “I will put you back together” not “I will help you put yourself back together”. Scott mentioned how the contents of the box have changed and that it’s the pieces put together.

I think the whole thing with the box is very metaphorical. Whatever is in it has to do with Cassidy’s memories, he can’t move on until he’s put back together, and he’s not ready after fnaf 4 ends because the pain is still too raw. Him getting all his memories back then would have probably just made him more upset, you have to wait for the right moment to put him back together in order to truly help him. The contents have changed because the story has changed, the pieces put together is the whole story coming together, so there’s more to his memory now and/or there’s something different about them (like Charlie is now a girl his sister/proto-Elizabeth has a different arc his dad is now the killer I dunno insert your favorite theorized retcon here). The box being open in fnaf world symbolizes Cassidy being ready to accept his happiest day.

If I theorize more specifically about the contents, I can see it being the gifts he was supposed to get for his birthday and/or his Fredbear mask. If we take this as something that literally exists, it’s possible that Michael owns it and is hiding away stuff related to his brother’s party out of guilt— like he was the one that was supposed to give Cassidy his Fredbear mask, and he’s not ready to confront anything about that day yet. Actually if I think about it, Cassidy and Michael reconciling in some way makes a lot of sense as part of that dropped plot point Scott was talking about. After fnaf 4 we don’t see them interact in any meaningful way, which feels like an obvious story beat, so it being an unused idea Scott never got the chance to go into seems plausible to me.

Before I go more into my thoughts on TOYSNHK, I want to discuss some interesting things about Nightmarionne. He’s the face of UCN, which is interesting when Golden Freddy is clearly in charge. Most of his voicelines are just him talking about nightmares and threatening the player, but one of them goes like this: I am the fearful reflection of what you have created. Taken literally, this would imply that William created the puppet. If he’s talking about Charlotte instead, he’s saying that he’s not Charlotte, but a reflection of her.

Eisoptrophobia, fear of mirrors/reflective surfaces, is also the name for the main menu theme. The background of this song has the sound of a ticking clock, and clocks are associated with both the Puppet and Cassidy (the grandfather clock song and the clocks in fnaf world). So we have ‘fear of reflections’ being treated as an important theme, enough for a song to be titled after the phobia, and we also have a character who calls himself a ‘fearful reflection’. It makes it seem like Nightmarionne is actually pretty important in this game.

I would also like to point out that ‘eisoptrophobia’ could be relevant to Cassidy in other ways, as he’s asked about what he sees in a mirror in the logbook, and after death he ends up possessing the animatronic that scared him so badly. All of the nightmares are designs he specifically finds creepy too, so he’d be disturbed by his own reflection no matter what form he takes as a ghost (and metaphorically of course we have him being scared of being similar to his father with how violent and selfish he’s become after death).

Nightmarionne isn’t canon to fnaf 4, meaning this game (and I suppose Fnaf world) are his first official appearances, so his origin is that Golden Freddy/TOYSNHK made him. If Goldie is upset about Charlotte’s death, this would explain Nightmarionne’s appearance and his emphasis on being based on Charlotte, it could be some sort of secondary persona. Nightmarionne in UCN also fades away in the office like Golden Freddy does, both he and Nightmare have the same face close-up Golden Freddy uses as a jumpscare, while also crashing the game like he does, perhaps connecting them together (I also headcanon that he’s an evolved form of the Shadow Puppet from the Fnaf 3 minigames).

This is going to sound pretty wacky, but there is certain dialogue in Fnaf world that makes me wonder about a possible connection between TOYSNHK and Nightmarionne.

“The one who pulls the strings is always watching. He allows you to progress.” This is something we hear from Glitchbear, he’s talking about the puppetmaster/Scott Cawthon’s self insert here. I know it’s a fourth wall joke, but why does this line sound so similar to “He’s here and always watching. The one you should not have killed.”?

‘The one you shouldn’t have killed’ has a similar cadence to ‘the one who pulls the strings’. TOYSNHK is also ‘always watching’ and someone so confident that they just let you do whatever because they don’t think you can meaningfully affect anything fits the person in charge of UCN, who's in complete control. Then there’s how Nightmarionne is the only other character besides Scott’s self inserts and Chipper/his glitchy counterpart who can use the very powerful 4th wall move. And the name puppetmaster obviously brings to mind the puppet, which Nightmarionne is based on. The Nightmarionne teaser for the Halloween edition kinda makes it look like he’s ‘pulling’ Fredbear plush’s ‘strings’, especially when paired with the Freddy plush teaser for fnaf 6 that literally has the plush on strings.

Also also there are Nightmarionne plushies that are all over the pizzaplex who are “always watching” the player and a plushie following you around is oddly similar to Psychic Friend Fredbear, UCN gets compared to a nightmare very often and the staff bots with the Nightmarionne faces have IN YOUR DREAMS painted on them. Am I the only one seeing this.

(We also have the staffbot family table, that represents Cassidy with a headless staffbot, in the same room where there are a bunch of decapitated nightmarionne-bot heads lying around, if that means anything).

I’m not saying Scott is TOYSNHK somehow lol, I’m just wondering if perhaps Scott looked at old dialogue talking about the puppetmaster and used elements of them to develop an actual in-universe character in TOYSNHK. I just think it makes a lot of sense if Nightmarionne is another persona for Golden Freddy, especially if Goldie is CCassidy, he’d be making up a form that resembles his father’s first victim, someone he’s likely familiar with, and it’d based on an animatronic that’s always been very similar to him. The implications of Nightmarionne being associated with his Fredbear plush fits very well with this too. Also it weirdly makes sense to me that whoever doesn’t want you to save Cassidy (the one who pulls the strings/the one you shouldn’t have killed) would be… Cassidy himself not ready to let go yet.

Alternatively under Goldie letting TOYSNHK torture William in UCN, Nightmarionne might be TOYSNHK’s persona. Would be pretty fitting under SammyTOYSNHK actually, or TOYSNHK being an experiments victim.

[TOYSNHK/UCN] 6200+

I’ve wasted enough time let’s finally talk about TOYSNACK. Even without the theory that Golden Freddy is CCassidy this little guy is confusing.

Let’s go over some meta info first. Scott made a post on Reddit saying that this distorted picture of a child is TOYSNHK. Not only is this a picture of a boy, but TOYSNHK is referred to with masculine pronouns. There’s something a little bizarre about this though, and that’s the voice casting call. ‘The gender shouldn’t be immediately clear’, but the voice actor ‘can lean one way or the other’. The actress ended up giving the character a rather feminine voice, though child voices can sound pretty high-pitched. So did Scott have a gender in mind, or didn’t he? Why wouldn’t he have a set gender for this character already?

Then there’s how the player is referred with they/them in the casting call itself, and like… absolutely no one thinks the player isn’t male. So Scott is aware that ‘they/them’ is a valid pronoun to use (as opposed to using he/him in a gender-neutral sense, which is outdated and sexist) but TOYSNHK wasn’t referred with they/them? I also want to point out that it would likely be TOYSNHK making the others refer to them as ‘he’, so those are likely the pronouns he prefers, though I can also see him just not caring about gender if they’re a girl whose possessing a male animatronic. The puppet is still ‘he’ while possessed by Charlotte.

I’m guessing Scott just wanted to enhance the mystery of the character’s identity until it’s more clear what’s going on. You end up dying to one of the mediocre melodies, hear a weirdly ominous voiceline, then hear about someone called the one you shouldn’t have killed and go “oh, that’s who was talking through them”. Another option is that it doesn’t matter because UCN is fucking weird and goofy and there’s no real answer. That would make my life easier because this debate is annoying, but I think it’s more productive to take it seriously as part of the lore.

I think the game makes more sense if Golden Freddy is TOYSNHK— we are constantly told that TOYSNHK is the one in charge (The voice casting call describing them as in control, "I am remade, but not by you, but by the one you should not have killed"), and then it's heavily implied that Golden Freddy is in control.

When you use the death coin on Golden Freddy, you get a jumpscare of Fredbear, with his purple bow tie and all, trying to bite you it looks like. Golden Freddy being immune to the death coin indicates a higher level of power than the rest. Various voicelines indicate that other spirits are present, and we know from happiest day that the MCI can’t/won’t move on without Golden Freddy, so if he’s currently too stubborn to do so then that explains why they’re stuck here. Beating the game on 49/20 mode (Scott didn’t think anyone could beat 50/20 so I doubt the fact that it’s the second hardest level means anything) shows Goldie twitching angrily in the darkness as he slowly fades from view. It’s obvious to me that he’s pissed about you winning, I don’t really get the interpretation that this shows him resting.

This could have been achieved through his twitching coming to a careful stop where he seems to calm down, not him continuing even after it starts to fade to black. His eyes are also glowing white, indicating possession, when they should be turning off if he’s at peace. This would also be a very odd time for him to rest, Redbear drowning himself sounds like a more fitting time for this cutscene to show up, since that's already commonly interpreted as Goldie choosing to rest/leave UCN. If both the 49/20 cutscene and the OMC minigame are about Golden Freddy moving on, why is this being depicted twice?

Before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about the OMC minigame. In this minigame, Redbear talks to Old Man Consequences, who tells him to leave the demon to his demons and to rest his soul. Then he drowns in the lake that goes to some version of happiest day according to fnaf world, finally choosing to let go and this crashes the game, putting UCN to an end. If TOYSNHK is the one in control, why would Golden Freddy leaving end UCN if they’re not one and the same?

I also think UCNDissent takes an interesting scene where the VS chooses to let go of their anger and makes it weirdly dark and bitter. A child victim is deemed unsalvageable by a supposedly objective deity (and considering his behavior in Princess Quest I don’t really think OMC is the type to play favorites). He is left behind by the only person who tried to help him find peace and now has to stew in his anger forever. I think this is just really depressing, and OMC, who seems rather calm and mature, approving of the VS's revenge quest is just, weird to me?

Also really think about this scene: Old Man Consequences is present when someone is dealing with the consequences of their actions. In fnaf world you go too far in the code, in Princess Quest he only appears after Vanny is born (ending of PQ1) and when Cassie’s dad is about to get stuck in the VR world. In UCN the VS has been torturing the player for a while now, holding himself and arguably other ghosts back from resting. But if Redbear isn’t TOYSNHK then it’s… uh, Golden Freddy trying to help another kid move on and failing? The stakes are so much less serious here. Why does Golden Freddy get so much more focus than TOYSNHK himself in his own game?

The only way this works for me if this is like, Henry talking to Charlotte, who he’s incredibly biased towards (and he doesn’t seem to be aware Golden Freddy even exists during fnaf 6). It actually sorta makes sense with my theory that Charlie is controlling Adventure Freddy, so that’s being kept consistent here (though if Adventure Freddy is an avatar he can arguably be controlled by anyone), and she literally died in a bear suit, so it also fits for her to be represented by a bear. Her drowning herself can be her forcing happiest day to happen since Cassidy is being a little shit, and if she has any power over the realm of fnaf world/UCN as spooky eyes then arguably she has the power to end it if she leaves and make Cassidy listen to her. And heck, in the books the puppet ends up in a lake, presumably finally resting after defeating Afton, which would be a pretty good parallel to that.

However I’m not really convinced by Henry being OMC. But if we’re going with the whole “someone is trying to stop TOYSNHK” angle then Charlie makes more sense to me, especially with her “I don’t hate you, but you need to stay out of my way.” line. I think fnaf world could be happening at the same time as UCN, or right before it, which makes sense since fnaf world is all about helping Golden Freddy rest, this feels most appropriate when he’s in the middle of lashing out. I’ve also often seen people explain Cassidy’s role in UCN as them wanting Afton to die for good, but I think this goal fits Charlotte more as she’s literally the one who kills Afton in frights. It would have been pretty good UCNDissent evidence if that was Golden Freddy instead.

I suppose what really bothers me about this idea is this attitude of dismissing TOYSNHK as ‘too far gone’. This is the exact opposite of how Andrew is framed in the frights epilogues, Jake is consistently sympathetic towards him and helps him pass on, so this even ends up being inconsistent with how we're supposed to view Andrew. Shoutout to Jake for having more empathy than this bitter old loser ig (sorry OMC I don't think you're that bad but this theory makes me dislike you lol). What exactly is the point of showing that Golden Freddy failed in helping Andrew and how he needs to learn a lesson in helping himself if Andrew can be saved?

The phrase “leave the demon to his demons” is actually pretty interesting if you look at it in a different way. Usually under UCNDissent TOYSNHK is the “demons” torturing William, but what if TOYSNHK is the “demon” instead? Someone having demons usually means that they’re struggling with something: past trauma, mental health issues, having done something they regret or feel guilty for. TOYSNHK is obviously very unhappy since he’s not letting himself move on and is dedicating his afterlife towards putting his killer through hell. He doesn’t want to leave William alone, he has to put him through the pain that he put TOYSNHK through. It’s honestly very sad when you think about it.

If CCassidy is TOYSNHK, I think he’d be very upset over his dad becoming a serial killer after he died, and feel that he needs to punish him for it. Perhaps feeling guilt because it’s his own dad that killed Charlotte and the others (not to mention any abuse Cass could have gone through when he was alive). I can also see him blaming William for not protecting him from Michael, leading to his death. He’s responsible for the bite in his own way even if he didn’t technically kill him (this isn’t me trying to argue that Cassidy fits the TOYSNHK title because of William’s bad parenting lol, I’m just pointing out how Cassidy does have reason to be angry at his father over the bite).

I really hate TOYSNHK being the ‘demons’ part here and just considered a rabid dog that is just going to torture William forever, they have the right to be upset and are likely not enjoying this as much as they thought they would. Also personally I just like Redbear being TOYSNHK because it makes for some nice character development that makes TOYSNHK more nuanced and not just grrr angy.

So yeah, I think TOYSNHK is either Golden Freddy or being endorsed by Golden Freddy, if the former is true, the only question is how this works if Golden Freddy is CCassidy. If Cassidy is just the fifth victim, then William is clearly the player. I don’t like how little we know about Cassidy in this scenario, and that the logbook where we got his name was all about CC as opposed to characterizing and learning more about someone who's relevant enough that a script following their story was going to go over the whole lore. Hell UCN itself could have had some interesting minigames that focused on Cassidy. But oh well, at least it makes UCN easier to figure out.

[Unnecessary tangent but if I’m going to be honest I’d be a lot more okay with fifth child Cassidy being TOYSNHK if they weren’t also faded. I just don’t get the personality/character arc here. They are trying to help CC recover his memories, which leads into happiest day, yet during UCN they also hold everyone back from resting so they all can torture William together which is ??? That doesn’t gel well at all, why are they simultaneously pretty compassionate yet super selfish.

Not to mention the theory that they’re the crying kid being given cake during happiest day yet in the logbook they’re just as aware as Charlie who doesn’t need cake…? So what causes them to need extra help while Charlotte doesn't? Shouldn’t they be like Charlie and have the presence of mind to move on whenever they want, they’re just staying behind to help more? Not even getting into the weirdness of Cassidy supposedly being another kind ghost that looks after the MCI and/or CC yet it’s Charlie who has the line about the others being under her protection. This character is so confusing to me I’m sorry lol]

Real quick I want to discuss the idea that Cassidy was springlocked by William and that’s why they’re so vengeful. If I’m going to be honest, I find this to be a very unsatisfying explanation for why they’re ‘special’. I understand why people think it’s the case, Golden Freddy is either Fredbear himself or similar enough to likely be another springlock suit, it’s poetic for the villain and his adversary to have the same death, especially since Cassidy springlocked William like he springlocked them, but not only do I find this idea unlikely, it’s also just boring to me?

I don’t mind the police not finding the bodies in the suits despite how unrealistic others find that, but it’s a much harder pill to swallow for me if there’s a puddle of blood left behind after Cassidy got springlocked. If Charlotte has nothing to do with Cassidy being Golden Freddy than the five keys story doesn’t make much sense; Golden Freddy is too ghostly for Cassidy to possess it in a normal way like the others imo. The timing of the Golden Freddy jumpscare could also imply that Cassidy was in the middle of dying while Charlotte was helping the other kids which is a little… off. And Golden Freddy isn’t in the Springtrapped challenge even though that’d be a good hint towards Cassidy being a springlock victim.

That makes it seem like Cassidy wasn’t springlocked or it’s not overly important to them (which would sorta make sense if they’re CC as the fact that it’s his own father who killed him would arguably be more horrifying/significant, though I don’t believe that theory either because of my personal take on CCassidy’s possession). I also don’t like this being why they’re vengeful because it doesn’t flesh their character out in any meaningful way, it more serves as a random fun fact (so to speak) about them than anything.

Like apparently being TOYSNHK is only dependent on if you get springlocked or not which feels rather… arbitrary. You’d expect them to want to torture William no matter how they died. I would never think Charlotte would be a completely different ghost if she was springlocked instead of stabbed (or however William killed her), her death is already painful enough with how she likely cared about William beforehand. If a particularly brutal death is the only thing that makes Cassidy TOYSNHK, then that makes them seem kinda bland. I want to know more about them as a character.

Anyway, I do think Golden Freddy is CCassidy so things get a little complicated. I don’t have an answer that I’m fully satisfied with but I do have a few ideas.

An easy way to have CCassidy be both TOYSNHK and Golden Freddy is through having Michael be the protagonist. This would explain the phrasing of the one you shouldn’t have killed, Michael only killed a single person, and I think there’s actually some interesting evidence pointing to MikePurg. The nightmare animatronics constantly reference the fact that they aren’t fake anymore, as if the player encountered them in a dream before, which obviously applies to Michael but not to William. Charlotte tells the player that she doesn't hate him, which makes more sense if she’s not talking to her killer. “I recognize you, but I’m not afraid of you, not anymore.” can be about Charlie being scared of Mike when he was a bully terrorizing his little brother. It’d honestly be weird for Charlotte to not know Mike at all before she died.

“Time for your controlled shock” from Scrap Baby references something Mike did to her, and “You won’t die, but you’ll wish you could” from Circus Baby is her quoting back what she said to Michael. The Bear of Vengeance fits best when it’s about Cassidy and Michael, and that title is very telling. I believe it’s showing that Cassidy and Michael’s relationship used to be more playfully antagonistic before Cassidy saw the springlock accident.

Foxy is always winning, so Foxy being William and Freddy being TOYSNHK doesn’t fit, William is constantly at a disadvantage in UCN. Freddy being Henry doesn’t work because Foxy and Freddy have a longstanding rivalry where they’re always going against each other, Henry specifically said that he didn’t do anything to stop William when he could have, and only worked against him more recently in FFPS, which is decades after the MCI happened. Michael as Freddy instead of Foxy is just kinda weird, and Sister Location tells us that that he did everything there because his dad told him to.

He has been on his side for a good while back then, and he doesn’t even show much anger directed at him during his monologue until the last line (I put her back together, just like you asked me to, is phrasing that suits a scared child wanting to placate their stern parent). His voice actor also describes him as someone always seeking his dad’s approval, granted this is more just his interpretation of the character, but given he voiced the guy and was given direction from Scott, he was probably told how exactly he should make Michael sound and formed his opinion from there. So yeah Michael doesn’t work for me either.

Cassidy being Freddy and Michael being Foxy is something I’m pretty sure about. It involves the animatronics they’re associated with, and the rivalry is very low stakes, which suits a brotherly relationship more than a serial killer and the people trying to stop him.

Foxy forces Freddy to do his laundry, to make him breakfast, to wear a symbol of humiliation. These are all things an older brother would do to mess with their sibling if they lost a bet or something. Freddy targets Foxy on his (Freddy’s) birthday, he targets him when Foxy is watching his favorite show (Mike watching TV in SL), both of these have been associated with the Afton brothers before. Heck even Mangle can reference Lizzie and her perhaps taking Mike’s side so she won’t be bullied.

Even the real dialogue can point to this being about Cassidy and Michael. Somehow it’s even more bizarre than the fake subtitles, but Foxy’s bullying of Freddy is elaborated on more, with him secretly being responsible for some pranks he goes through. Freddy sinks into a lake where he sees ‘a vision of his ancestors’, which sounds like Redbear drowning in the lake. Then there’s how Foxy wants to post humiliating pictures of Freddy online, but makes it a private post (? the wording is a bit confusing) so only his friends can see it, because he doesn’t want ‘weirdos’ to find them, which is oddly protective for sworn enemies, but is fitting for an older brother.

The story Step Closer might even add to this, it seems to parallel Michael and Cassidy with Pete and Chuck (who even have a father named Bill). Pete is annoyed at having to look after his brother and tries to bully him/scare him with Foxy. What’s interesting to me is how Chuck is willing to stand up to his brother and is even snarky with him on occasion despite the bullying. This is how I can see Cassidy acting before fnaf 4, shy with strangers but more comfortable with family members, and not afraid to argue with his brother. If Cassidy did use to stand up to Mike, I can see his sudden change in attitude really bothering Mike so he starts being harsher until he “snaps out of it”, like if he pushes him hard enough he’ll go back to normal, and/or he enjoys his brother’s newfound helplessness and is taking advantage of it.

(Wait I just realized something, is Chuck named that way because of Chuck E Cheese, the mascot of the franchise that inspired FNAF, so the equivalent here would be naming him Freddy, the character that Cassidy is connected to through Fredbear… sorry for the non-sequitur I only just thought of it and it’s kinda blowing my mind, watch it not even be intentional)

The cartoon is a joke and initially seems nonsensical, but if the Toy Chica cartoon is referencing Willam’s crimes, why can’t this cartoon mean something as well? While Cassidy didn’t win because his brother is older and everything, the power dynamic was less severe and Mike’s treatment of him wasn’t always so harsh.

I feel like the whole point of UCN is that TOYSNHK needs to learn to let go of his anger, this arguably makes more sense when it’s not about a serial killer and just someone who made a terrible mistake when he was younger. Most pushback against this theory I’ve seen comes from this idea that Michael doesn’t “deserve” this after all he’s done to redeem himself. But the game isn’t saying that the player being tortured is a good thing, since one of the endings has the VS choosing to let go. And for how dark the premise of the game is, UCN does not take itself seriously. Half of the voicelines are jokes, the Funtime Chica jumpscares… exist, it’s connected to fnaf world which is a pretty goofy game. It gives off the impression that TOYSNHK is not taking this that seriously and just trying to have fun. Michael is perfectly suited for this type of thing too, as he’s been up against the animatronics more than once.

Also I feel like people sorta overestimate how heroic Michael is. Most of the time he’s just trying not to get his ass killed, the SL speech implies that he’s been working for his dad most of the time, the logbook depicts him as tired and somewhat aloof, coping with dark humor. The only time he possibly does anything helpful is if the fnaf 3 guard has something to do with causing happiest day to happen, but that’s not canon anymore since HD either doesn’t happen or occurs later in a different way. I think he’s more concerned with his siblings over the other ghost kids, honestly.

There’s even a line in the logbook where he makes fun of the bite, “He tripped and fell on Freddy’s teeth, not our fault.” in response to a prompt about a child getting bit by Freddy. We know Cassidy was in the logbook, meaning he saw that and I doubt he had the best reaction to it. He is no position to realize that his brother didn’t actually mean it like that, all he would see is that after saying ‘sorry’ he apparently decided that he actually doesn’t give a damn. I can definitely see that leading into him wanting to get revenge.

People often point to the background of the OMC minigame having William yell out “MIKE, HENRY, HELP” as proof that Michael can’t be the player, but distorted voices are rather finicky as proof imo. It’s easy to hear anything if you’re looking for it, I personally can’t even hear the “Henry”, and if anything this would imply William is experiencing a worse torture than Michael? He sounds like he’s in constant pain, while Michael only dies for like, the minute it takes for the animatronic to kill him.

Recently an unused Pigpatch line has been released by the voice actor, you can listen to it through the link.

“Have you began to realize yet where you are, or who I am? Or are you still so delirious and confused, that you still think you’re a nightguard? You’ll understand, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter to me either way.”

I’m not going to use this as strong evidence for anything, this wasn’t even in the game files. But I’ve seen quite a few people say this makes sense for Andrew, being a ‘forgotten victim’, and I just wanted to discuss my own take on this line.

I don’t see Andrew as a forgotten victim, I don’t think that works when the only reason we didn’t know about him was because we got no hints of his existence prior to the books. The other victims not knowing about him doesn’t mean he was forgotten, you could make the same argument for the experiment victims never interacting with the MCI. If William doesn’t remember Andrew, that’s probably because he doesn’t really give a shit about his victims in general, at least not enough to remember exactly what they were all like. There wouldn’t be anything special about him not remembering Andrew. He’s “forgotten” because he didn’t exist until the books, but that only works in a meta sense, not if the quote is supposed to be about William forgetting him.

He might be the sixth victim in the Into The Pit story, which would mean he was an extra kid added to the book continuity, and in that story everyone is freaking out because they saw the dead bodies, they know that he was dead and he would be talked about, even if his parents didn’t report him or whatever (and if they didn’t report him they’d get in trouble). Does Andrew even care about being forgotten by the public or by William? The voicelines in UCN and his dialogue in the books don’t really imply that.

The reason the player can’t figure out who TOYSNHK is yet is because he’s not even making it obvious who he is. The player can’t see Golden Freddy talk to OMC, he’d only know about the death coin if he personally tried using it on Golden Freddy, and he can’t see Golden Freddy shaking in anger until he beats the game in the second hardest difficulty. How would he be able to figure out who this is unless he’s done these two specific things? And hey, someone who often says IT’S ME sounds like a person who wants to be recognized… Thinking about it, Pigpatch also makes it sound like it should be easy to figure out who the VS is, it’s just that the player is too confused to really think about it. They don’t even realize that they’re in some sort of nightmare state.

I find this line interesting as it implies that the person suffering through UCN doesn’t even know that this isn’t ‘real life’, which is very common in purgatories. The person doesn’t realize that they’re dead because the purgatory has them going through the same routine in their life, just more nightmarish, and hey, this sounds a lot like Michael with his many experiences as a night guard. Maybe this adds more to the never ending nightmare interpretation with the player being ‘delirious and confused’. But this line was cut, so it’s not the best proof. I just wanted to explain why I find taking it as Andrew evidence flawed.

(Also I’m aware some people are really strict about how UCN is a nightmare instead of a purgatory but when it comes to ghosts I don’t see why it can’t be both? Like fnaf world to me works the same way, it’s both a dream world and a realm for spirits. Dreams are often seen as connected to the afterlife anyway).

Another line that I think is important is the “This is how it feels…” line from Neddbear. I believe this is significant because it’s not just talking about death, William/Michael have already experienced dying before. I think this is either referring to dying directly to an animatronic (like the bite of 83) or perhaps the nightmare experiments if TOYSNHK is the experiment victim instead, as UCN would be quite similar. Maybe it's also referring to how helpless TOYSNHK felt in life (being bullied to death or tricked & killed by an adult), which the player is feeling right now as they're forced to go against these animatronics again and again.

This is how it feels to be a victim, I’m the one in control now, that kind of thing. Frights even has Andrew be terrified when he realizes the one holding him back from moving on with Jake is William, who tries to force Andrew to stay with him instead, so the idea that the point of UCN is for the player to feel as scared as the VS did when he was alive makes a lot of sense to me. I also feel like a good point towards Cassidy being involved here and him being Golden Freddy is how using the death coin on him has Fredbear straight up biting you like how he died.

The best proof against this theory is all the voicelines saying that the player is Super Duper Evil, which doesn’t work for Michael unless it’s the other souls present thinking that he’s William or even his brother thinking that he killed people, and the frights book showing us that William is being tortured. As much as I like this theory for giving us better closure between the brothers, I do think William is a more likely candidate for the UCN player, unless there’s something crazy going like Michael and William switching spots every so often lol. Another problem I have is that I view the nightmares Michael goes through as a ‘proto-UCN’, and Cassidy putting his brother through hell twice is a… bit much, even if he’s still angry at him. So overall I prefer Michael to not be the player, even if it would make things easier for me.

A version of this theory I initially believed in way back when was that UCN is a hell of Michael’s own making, meaning everything is in his head and his brother isn’t actually torturing him, that’s just what he thinks is happening. That’s why the animatronics treat him like he’s William, in his own torture he expects to be confused for his dad and blamed for what he did. After Redbear goes through the lake (which I saw as Michael being told not to worry about his dad), UCN ends and Michael is reunited with his siblings, realizing that Cassidy wasn’t the one putting him through that, it was himself. I still like this idea quite a bit, but I think there’s more evidence that there is a real TOYSNHK torturing the player.

[I realize me advocating for MikePurg seems pretty pointless when I don’t actually believe in it, but I wanted to take the time to defend it because I don’t really agree with many of the debunks against it. I think it’s a pretty valid theory prior to frights showing us that the player is likely William]

Another possibility is Michael himself being TOYSNHK. This isn’t a theory I believe in because it doesn’t quite jive with my interpretation with Michael (I agree with him turning against his dad post SL, but I generally view him as wanting everything regarding the Fazbear tragedies to just end already), but I can see the reasoning for it. It makes sense to me for Michael to be involved in UCN whether he’s TOYSNHK or the player, since he’s been the player in many of the games. It’s a great reversal of roles for Michael to put his dad through what he went through with the animatronics, it makes a lot of sense for him to be the VS with just that alone. You can hear dual process theory’s take on it and decide if you believe in it or not. I think their video is pretty cool in general.

My main issue with it is Golden Freddy being present in UCN, even if Cassidy is angry at his father I think he’d still be pissed at Mike and wouldn’t let him have so much control, but maybe Charlie trying to help him move on while he’s resistant is keeping him occupied enough for Michael to take over. Or he’s satisfied enough with his revenge through the nightmares he gave him before to let his brother torture dad, I dunno. Admittedly it’d be kinda funny for Michael to get nightmares from his brother haunting him, go “wait Cass is onto something here…” and use the same method to punish dad.

William as the player is much tougher to explain because it’s outright told to us that whoever is behind UCN was killed by him, which doesn’t apply to Cassidy. I can’t really see William pulling the plug on him for whatever reason, especially since it hasn’t been implied anywhere. It feels more like an assumption than a theory. If William experimented with his soul this might be considered killing him…? If he further broke it apart, but that’s quite misleading.

The only other option is that he caused Cassidy’s death through making him possess an animatronic, which is plausible if he was brought home to be taken care of, especially when paired with the Curse Of Dreadbear DLC implying that he did something to Cassidy, but I personally think that’d be him messing with his soul/corpse, not killing him directly. I honestly don’t know if Cassidy would even be aware that his own dad killed him, nor would he want to define himself as one of his dad’s murder victims when his brother was the one who put him in a coma. Though if he was semi-conscious like the stupid pills imply then he’d likely know what he did to him? It’s possible, I just think we need more evidence to be sure.

*Grasping at straws* Mayyyyyyybe he put a comatose Cassidy through the nightmare experiments and this ended up killing him because his body couldn’t handle it? Would be a pretty screwed up way to go...

One possibility is that Cassidy isn’t TOYSNHK and he’s letting TOYSNHK torture his dad in his little spirit realm. The real TOYSNHK would be the fifth/experiments victim who he shares parallels with. Since I theorize that this kid could possess Balloon Boy, I think that he might be directly controlling Deedee/XOR, a variant of Balloon Boy that makes your life harder by adding another animatronic, which implies a higher level of control.

This would be kinda cool with the death coin resulting in Cassidy as Fredbear coming up to kill you, he’s revealing his presence here. He’d probably be speaking through Nightmare Fredbear too, those voicelines feel rather personal. His line about ‘putting William back together’ just to ‘take him apart again’ also perfectly encapsulates what happens in UCN, let me bring you back to life so I can kill you again (wait this is just more GoldenTOYSNHK evidence, dammit lol).

However TOYSNHK also has a lot of power over the animatronics, ‘remaking them’, and the OMC minigame would imply that only one of them has moved on. I’m not completely into UCNDuo for these reasons but it might be my best option anyway. I feel like Sammy Andrew Emily (or whatever his last name is) (for legal purposes this is a joke) is Deedee anyway since it fits very well with BB’s antics in fnaf 2.

I suppose I’ll have to see it as Cassidy 'passing the mantle' of authority over fnaf world to TOYSNHK, allowing him more control and rallying the animatronics together to punish William. Eventually Cassidy is ready to move on, and when he chooses to sink in the lake, this causes UCN to end after he leaves since he's still the creator. A bit too convoluted for my tastes, but I might just have to deal with it.

One last thing I want to mention about TOYSNHK in this section is his connections to shadows: the voice casting call describes him as speaking "in a whisper from the shadows", half of his face is hidden in shadow, "I've always been living in your shadow" from Nightmare Freddy is a line, though there's also "The shadow fears me" from Nightmare (that I honestly don't understand at all lol it just seems edgy, are we supposed to think Shadow Freddy or Shadow Bonnie are scared of him?), Fnaf 3’s ending screens has Golden Freddy in shadow, Fredbear’s face in one of the UCN teasers as well as his jumpscare is shadowed, and Andrew is consistently described as a shadow in TMIR1280.

I'm not really sure what to make of this? The Shadow animatronics' connections to various kids are very subject to debate, so it's hard to pin down who TOYSNHK is from fixating on this. The only thing I can figure is maybe another connection to the experiment victim, as my theory that the experiments are meant to form new agony beings like the shadows could be relevant here. I suppose Cassidy could be argued to have the most consistent association with the shadows: there’s the shadows in the fnaf 4 minigames, the livestream hint about him seeing something in the shadows, all the crying shadows in the fnaf 3 minigames (Puppet, Balloon Boy, Cupcake) that are centered on his memories, the last night button in fnaf 4 being named Shadow Freddy, as well as his broken jaw, but none of that tells us he’s Literally Shadow Freddy/Bonnie somehow. I know I don't have a good conclusion from this I just wanted to talk about it real quick since it’s kinda interesting.

[frights books] 2700+

Let’s talk more about Andrew. Assuming that stitchline isn’t in game continuity and that Andrew is an extra sixth kid added to the MCI, while in the games TOYSNHK is still Golden Freddy, what is the purpose of this? Why make an extra MCI kid be TOYSNHK in a different timeline instead of Golden Freddy? Is this implying that Golden Freddy is separate from the MCI in some way, just like how Andrew never possessed an animatronic and instead latched onto William? Or is TOYSNHK an extra victim we didn’t know about before?

I’m not entirely sure, I suppose it would make more sense under CassidyVictim, as he and Charlotte would both be the unofficial fifth/sixth member of the group. But then it kinda doesn’t seem like Andrew is Golden Freddy either? There’s a kid with black curly hair in Golden Freddy in The New Kid, which feels like it should be saying that’s Andrew’s corpse, but Kelsey’s behavior in that story doesn’t seem to match Andrew’s character. He explicitly says that he didn’t want to hurt innocent people, yet Kelsey frames a kid for murder, deliberately baiting him so that he can kill him. I guess he was just biased and didn’t see Devon as ‘innocent’, or is even lying, but that seems way too malicious and calculated for him.

However he is noticeably more sadistic in his own story, nearly killing a nurse and giggling a lot like he enjoys being a little shit. It’s pretty different from his brooding/angry self in the epilogues. The only thing I can think of is he had more memories then and is different as a result, but if that’s the case then I don’t think he would speak so confidently about not having a friend or not wanting to hurt others, he seems to remember his time as a ghost clearly enough (going over quite accurately how he tortured William, then was brought to the distribution center and splitting apart as a result). Maybe it’s just inconsistent writing, or we’re supposed to think Andrew isn’t being fully honest/doesn’t want to admit to doing more wrong than he should have.

Jake doesn’t have his ‘pieces’ scattered about and his memory is terrible too, remembering stuff only vaguely. He can recall ‘having someone to talk to’ when he was angry about being sick but doesn’t identify who this was, he remembers being upset about no longer going to school but not what his sickness was and the years he dealt with his cancer. He never brings up Margie or Simon. The only other memories he has is of going to a baseball game with his dad and some angry kid at school who Andrew reminds him of. So I think it’s more of a typical ghost thing than from the explosion.

I think even if The New Kid doesn’t take place in the same timeline as the rest of frights (since the Freddy’s location doesn’t take place in Utah iirc), it could be hinting that Andrew was stuffed inside Fredbear after he was killed by William, the black curly hair just feels very notable. I don’t think he ended up possessing it since he didn’t die in the suit/wasn’t given life by Charlotte. Maybe Charlotte connecting the kids together with Cassidy’s remnant even kicked Andrew’s spirit out of the suit lol? I’m not very sure about this because we don’t have a lot to work with though. We don’t know when Andrew attached himself to William, I’d assume it’d be right after he died (though it does make me wonder why he seemingly doesn’t do anything to him until he gets burned), but maybe William dismantled whatever animatronic he possessed and that’s when he attached himself to him.

I think there being six victims in Into the Pit is less of a random addition and more showing a different way the MCI could have gone, similar to the novels having Brooks and some random black haired girl in the MCI. Charlie being killed two years later, the fifth victim not being kidnapped and instead killed at Freddy’s, Cassidy not being Afton’s son so he’s part of the MCI again like in the novel trilogy (and therefore wasn’t inspired to do the nightmare experiments because of Fredplush, explaining why the fifth victim wasn’t kidnapped for them), etc. Any two of these could work together to explain why there’s six dead children. So Andrew doesn’t have to be the extra kid here, it could be Cassidy or Charlotte.

I want to talk about The New Kid since I already mentioned it. It’s the main Golden Freddy story in Frights, and I think it has a lot of interesting implications.

The main character is Devon, who’s sort of a delinquent, and his nerdy friend Mick. There’s a new kid in town named Kelsey who Devon quickly becomes jealous of because he’s instantly well liked by many people. Devon is a bit of a creepy weirdo tbh, he writes a story about his crush’s little sisters getting killed because she said they were annoying, and he doesn’t understand that she’s upset about that and doesn’t like him in general. A crow poops on him and he kills it without hesitation. This offputting behavior is why Kelsey seems to target him.

Kelsey to me is almost certainly not a real person. After he gets accidentally springlocked on Devon’s urging he’s randomly alive again at a new school, talking to some random kids who seem to be asshole teenagers like Devon was, asking them about cool places to hang out like he asked Devon and Mick. He’s also particularly interested in justice, saying that he wants to be a “real judge” someday, which Devon notes as strange, implying that he is some sort of judge currently.

The classic “lesson relevant to the plot/theme” in this book is about justice and how someone perceives it. A classmate says that she thinks justice is payback, and the class laughs when she says “accidents happen” after being questioned about it going too far. Kelsey is noted be one of the few not to laugh, which makes Mick shiver (I’m going spoil my take and think Devon killing Kelsey just blatantly parallels the bite of 83 lol, like wow I wonder why Kelsey doesn’t like the idea of accidents).

Kelsey’s take on justice is also interesting, he talks about it ‘balancing the scales’ and makes it so the ‘downside doesn’t outweigh the upside’. If I’m going to be real the phrasing here confused me for a good while, because when I hear about downside/upside I think about outcomes that are generally good but have a negative side effect—like staying up late to study for your test tomorrow, which results in you doing well (the upside) but also becoming exhausted the entire day (the downside). That kind of thing doesn’t seem very relevant to ‘justice’ for me, but I think what Kelsey is doing is justifying his wrongdoings.

Killing someone is usually wrong, but killing a bad person is ‘okay’ because you’re enacting justice. If you’re doing something evil for a ‘good’ reason or towards a ‘bad’ person, it’s no longer evil, the downside to murder or other acts of harm no longer exists. The scales he mentions could be about karma and how being a bad person leads into you being punished later, but since Kelsey is hurting the ‘right’ people, his actions no longer generate bad karma for him. It’s explaining TOYSNHK’s mindset in UCN basically, torturing William is a net good in the VS’s eyes, because he deserves to suffer, so the ‘good’ of that act outweighs the negative consequences of preventing the other souls from being at peace. “I will hold you here, I will keep you here. No matter how many times… they burn us.”

There are many times Devon and Mick think Kelsey is odd and suspicious, such as how he’s too perfect or how there are moments when he seems to evaluating Devon or reading his mind. These all occur before he dies, so I think he was just never real (also I think if he was completely innocent/oblivious he’d go back to his old school after Devon died as opposed to a new one, it’s like he wants them to still think he’s dead/missing, which is very deceptive).

He also gets compared to Golden Freddy, saying that they look alike. And Kelsey looks quite a bit like TOYSNHK with the blond hair. Devon gets mad at Kelsey and decides to pull a prank on him, just to scare him. He finds a Freddy’s location and tries to set it up so he’ll get stuck inside the suit for a while before Devon lets him out. He didn’t mean for him to get springlocked, he didn’t know how they worked, but Kelsey ended up bleeding out and dying. Devon comes back later and gets his arm bitten, and when he looks inside the suit it’s the corpse of a child with black curly hair. I say ‘child’ because Devon thinks that he should have been able to see Kelsey after just taking off the head, but the corpse ends up being much further down, like they’re not tall enough.

I think he’s some sort of projection of Golden Freddy, a humansona you can say lol (this is why the TOYSNHK face looks like that imo). He targets douchey teens and “tests” them, seeing how they react when they accidentally springlock him, and if they feel remorseful and try to take responsibility, he leaves them alone. If they worry too much about getting caught and don’t tell anyone (he tripped and fell on Freddy’s teeth, not our fault), he gets angry and “punishes” them. The reason I think it’s a test and not that he always means to hurt them is how he acts around Devon, the way he seems to be constantly analyzing him and his actions. It’s like he’s considering whether to actually kill him or not.

This story feels very relevant to the bite of 83 and TOYSNHK to me, Devon didn’t mean to hurt Kelsey with the suit, but it happens anyway. It was a prank gone wrong. Fsr Devon’s story in the beginning is about a pair of kids dying at a birthday party, so there’s that. He specifically targets teenagers who aren’t very popular or well liked, ones who are assholes or just not good with people. This is strange for a dead child (as we usually see them only disliking adults), unless they’re, you know, a bully victim who fixates on any teen who he sees as ‘mean’, and wants to take his anger out on them as a way to have revenge on the person who bullied him through a proxy. I don’t think the black curly hair necessarily debunks the idea that this is some alternate version of Cassidy because Garrett in the novelization of the movie has ‘tousled black hair’ and Susie in frights has brown hair, hair colors can change between different timelines.

If Cassidy is CC who’s Golden Freddy and TOYSNHK I think this story explains quite a bit about UCN. Kelsey sounds quite similar to Cassidy, and they’re both gender-neutral names that are more popular for girls but used for a male character. TOYSNHK seeing himself as William’s personal judge, jury, and executioner makes a lot of sense to me too.

There are a couple of issues with Kelsey being a lure though. While there is clearly something up with him, he’s registered at the school like he has an official identity. There’s this older man called George that he’s friendly with and seems to have known for a bit. The police are called in when he’s dead for a week and are concerned about what happened to him. He also mentions some old friends and his parents, but I don’t consider that too important since he could just be making stuff up since they are never seen.

Maybe there’s some weird supernatural bullshit going on, like how everyone sees Spring Bonnie as Oswald’s dad in Into The Pit. If Kelsey has existed for a while then him knowing George isn’t that weird, he just keeps in contact with him after “moving” and going to a new school, and will probably stop talking to him once he starts to look suspicious. The parents could easily not exist, and someone else reported him missing to the police. The Silver Eyes trilogy has a similar plot contrivance with Charlie having a gravestone and using her real name, yet no one identifies her as the girl who should be dead instead of her brother (she even has a driver’s license which I don’t think makes any sense if she’s legally dead??). It could just be another thing to handwave.

There are still a lot of weird moments with Kelsey noted by the other characters, and his body is completely gone from the suit and replaced by someone else like it never existed. I also find it interesting how he immediately recognizes Golden Freddy as a wearable animatronic suit (ie springlocks), and claims that his dad worked on animatronics at an amusement park. Not everything in his backstory fits Cassidy, but there’s enough that makes me think.

The implications of Golden Freddy in UCN possibly faking his identity are really interesting to me. Is he doing this on purpose, or did he forget what he looked like? Is there something important about himself that he wants to hide? If it’s a made up face, then William wouldn’t recognize the kid, and here’s the thing, William likely doesn’t know about Golden Freddy either, since he’s an apparition that doesn’t appear too often. And if I’m right about him never stuffing a fifth kid in a Fredbear suit, he would be confused at Golden Freddy’s very presence. So when he hears about a 'one you shouldn’t have killed', and sees the blond kid and Golden Freddy, he likely wouldn’t be able to tell who this is at all. There are multiple layers of “who the fuck is this?” going on, which sounds very frustrating. Though a yellow colored Freddy suit might be enough for him to connect the dots eventually.

This would be pretty ironic if pigpatch’s voiceline about knowing who he is still existed… as if that’s the point. What if Cassidy is pretending to be a victim of his father’s just to mess with him even further in this torture dimension? He makes up a new identity so William can’t know who’s behind it all until much later. Heck, this might not even be a recent thing, we know Cassidy was ‘broken’ upon death; he likely has a worse grasp on his identity compared to the others. He can’t remember what he really looks like, so his ghost form is based off of the animatronic he possesses.

This ‘Kelsey’ identity might have been what the other kids have always known him as, hence Mangle and Chica identifying the blond kid as TOYNSHK. And even after he remembers more about his life, would he want to admit that he’s the only ghost here who wasn’t murdered by Afton, or that his father was the person who killed them all? Either could make him more of an outcast than he already is. And by the time he finally has the opportunity to punish his dad, he decides to put the fake identity to further use. The New Kid is even about Kelsey tricking someone into thinking that they killed him so that he can have a proper excuse for hurting them back.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Golden Freddy kid from the movie, who finds William’s death ‘satisfying’ in the novelization, looks a lot like Kelsey/TOYSNHK’s face. And unlike the others he doesn’t have any accessories indicating what animatronic he controls, as if the blond hair comes from him being Golden Freddy and that’s not his real face.

I find this idea very funny, but it’d be rather trolly/misleading if true. I feel like there should be a better tell about TOYSNHK lying about being someone the player killed in the game itself as opposed to future material (ig Scott has to clarify stuff this way a lot but still). The only real indication of this is the face matching Kelsey from The New Kid, so it comes across as a projection, and the evidence for GoldenVictim, but it’s never been confirmed so it’s hard to use that either. This is the only way I can see BVTOYSNHK working under William as the player though, unless we get some crazy reveals about CC’s death later.

[stitchline continuity] 2700+

After reading most of the books and all of the epilogues (I stopped after book 7 and read a couple other stories past that) I didn’t come to believe that stitchline is canon. I don’t really want to get into a huge continuity debate, fans have discussed the various contradictions and what ‘directly connected’ means endlessly, but I will explain why I don’t really believe in it.

My main problem comes from Andrew and Eleanor, not because I don’t want them to be in the games, it’s just that both very much feel like placeholders/AU versions of an already established character.

Andrew, as a character, feels like an afterthought. He doesn’t get a backstory, we don’t learn when he died, how he died, if he was stuffed, and how he relates to the other ghost children. What the hell is up with the alligator mask if he never possessed an alligator animatronic anyway? Did he wear it when he died? (I think that would imply he was at a birthday party or something, hmm…). If frights was supposed to reveal who TOYSNHK is, then I really don’t understand why Andrew has amnesia, and why he doesn’t have an origin story like Jake did. Because of this it’s impossible to place him on the timeline. He doesn’t get any fleshing out, nor does he have even one POV. He’s not really a main character, Larson and Jake are the real protags of the epilogues.

I think this is people’s main problem with him, we barely know anything about him yet he’s apparently a very important character (this is my problem with Cassidy too lol, their story feels more complete when they’re also CC or even Charlie). I think he’d be more well-received if it was more clear he was part of the DCI or went through the experiments or anything else. Even him being Shadow Freddy or possessing Spring Bonnie would have helped a lot with inserting him into the games, but we have nothing to work with. Our only real option is ‘retconned in sixth victim that somehow was never found in the games’, which doesn’t make much sense, but since there’s so little to him any other speculation about his death just reads as a headcanon more than a theory.

He has one story where he’s more of a background menace, and is present in three epilogues (which are very short compared to the main stories) and even then sometimes the epilogue is mostly about Larson or Jake, while Andrew barely says or does anything. He gets kicked out of the plot very quickly after he shows up, this is a very bizarre way to treat a main character… unless he just isn’t one (which sucks since I think he easily could have been a really interesting/cool character if the story just elaborated on him more). Which, frankly, I think makes more sense if he isn’t in the games.

This is odd if the books are meant to teach us about TOYSNHK, unless the point of Andrew is to nudge us in the right direction— like how some people interpret TOYSNHK/Golden Freddy as noble when Andrew is more selfish and the one being helped by Jake. This doesn’t discount the idea that Andrew is still TOYSNHK in the games, I just think his story/character would be pretty different like how the novels/movie characters work. In one timeline Charlotte plays an important role as the Puppet, in another she's just dead.

Personally I think it’s more similar to the Michael Brooks vs Cassidy situation though, as Brooks is a similar character not really focused on much or given a lot of depth. He mostly exists as a reason to bring Charlie’s friends back to Hurricane and to add some emotional depth to Carlton helping the MCI (as they were best friends). Who even knows what’s going on with the blond kid in the movie and his relationship with Garrett, who’s not Afton’s son like CC is (Garrett replaces Blondie in the drawing of the kids being killed, and his face is pasted over someone in the drawing William made to trick the kids, so I’m betting that he’s covering Garrett’s face). Roles/identities don’t always have to be the same across different timelines.

Andrew is also very disconnected from the other victims, he doesn’t seem to be aware that William killed other people, yet TOYSNHK recreates the other victims and references facts about them such as Susie’s “I was the first” and Charlie’s “I don’t hate you”, or they’re straight up in UCN since I don’t know how else to take Bonnie’s “What is this new prison? Is it me trapped, or is it you? Perhaps it’s us both.” This line to me is clearly Jeremy comparing being trapped in an animatronic (Henry calls them prisons right before this game) to now being trapped in the weird nightmare William is having and unable to pass on. TOYSNHK himself feeling ‘trapped’ is a bit strange since he’s also going on about torturing the player forever, so it’s his own choice to keep going. If he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he can just choose to stop, unless… idk Golden Freddy is the one making him torture Afton even when he doesn’t feel like it anymore, plot twist! (Does anyone else have better ways to make UCNDuo work? I’m dying here)

Golden Freddy has a strong presence, OMC exists, “We know who our friends are, and you are not one of them”, yet Andrew “hasn’t had a friend in a long time” and the nurses only notice two separate brainwaves. Not to mention how the brainwaves are described as ‘vying for control’ with them trying to ‘torment each other’, but in UCN William is the only one being tortured, and the voice casting call refers to the VS being in control and toying with the player ‘who is helpless to change their situation’, meanwhile in TMIR1280 William does, in fact do that lol. This kind of leads into how differently they talk as well. If you compare their dialogue, Andrew sounds more childish and defensive, while TOYSNHK seems more composed in his anger.

This is all very odd. Even if everything didn’t fit such as Andrew’s speech not reflecting how the VS acted in UCN, it would have been easy to make the other aspects line up more with the games by modifying/adding a few lines. It really doesn’t help that the HW2 graves don’t reference Andrew through having a poppet with an alligator mask even though it would have been the perfect opportunity to confirm him in the games. The gator mask in itself might just be a reference to UCN through Old Man Consequences. But we know from the game that OMC and the VS aren’t the same person, so this is purely meta and could hint at some discontinuity.

The amnesia thing makes more sense to me if it’s supposed to relate back to CCassidy, whose amnesia is emphasized in the logbook, with Andrew’s personality contrasting with faded so people can realize that Golden Freddy isn’t the faded text if he’s also TOYSNHK. Maybe even him “not having a friend” is supposed to reference how lonely Golden Freddy is, who’s often excluded from the others and only talked with someone in the logbook more recently (depending on the timeline). I’m not saying they should be exactly alike, but being the VS is very different from like, possessing Bonnie instead of Chica. That’s not going to fundamentally change the character. I think it takes a certain type of person to be TOYSNHK, someone who’s willing to torture William for a long time at the cost of his friends’ peace. That requires a certain level of selfishness.

Then there’s him not matching kidface, I don’t agree with the common assertion that what the face looks like doesn’t matter, I feel pretty certain about the face deliberately looking like a human version of Golden Freddy, so TOYSNHK is essentially hiding their identity. This doesn’t quite work with Andrew unless he is Golden Freddy, which many people don’t agree with. I’m somewhat open to the idea because of the corpse in The New Kid, though I think that only works if he takes the role of Golden Freddy in frights and not the games.

Also it’s just kinda funny to me how the VS will assert himself as ‘the one you shouldn’t have killed’ yet Andrew in the books doesn’t even remember what William did to him. He never actually describes him as his murderer, he just said that he hurt him very bad and he wanted to get back at him for it. “I remember I wanted him to suffer, the way he made me suffer. But I don’t remember what he did.” If you didn’t already know he’s talking about William you could assume he’s talking about his abusive dad. It’s honestly a really strange contrast between the game and the book? And it’s another reason to why I’m hesitant to think Andrew is TOYSNHK. At this point all the differences seem purposeful as to make it clear stitchline isn’t in continuity. Almost everything about Andrew contradicts with the game version of UCN.

Like I said earlier there’s no one conclusion on TOYSNHK I’m completely certain on, maybe there’s some perfect idea out there I haven’t come up with yet, but there are multiple options here if CCassidy is Golden Freddy.

Eleanor is very similar in not getting fleshed out very well, particularly in terms of her origins. We only really have hints as to where she came from. However my main issue with her is that she just screams AU Circus Baby to me, particularly the novels version of Circus Baby. I don’t think she’s necessarily a modified Charliebot, but she shares so many similar elements that I can’t buy her existing with Circus Baby in the games. It’d be like if Michael Afton (with his game backstory) and Mike Schmidt both existed in the movies as separate characters. Let me go over how she relates to Circus Baby/Adult Charliebot.

—She isn’t described as looking exactly like Baby, but many of her features are the same: pink cheeks, red hair tied into pigtails on top of her head, green eyes, etc. She’s close enough to work as a Baby variant. Her name is also similar to Ella (Charlie’s doll) and Elizabeth.

—She steals Sarah’s identity after replacing her body parts with scraps in To Be Beautiful. This is analogous to Ennard (who’s mostly led by Baby) stealing Mike’s identity/body in sister location. We also learn later on that she’s fixated on hurting teenagers in particular.

—She has a very odd relationship with Renelle and her father, Talbert. She pretends to be Renelle and introducing herself as Renelle sounds like a ‘half-truth’. Eleanor is essentially Renelle backwards. She knows a lot about Renelle and Talbert, but doesn’t know what Renelle looks like, nor does Talbert seem to recognize her (though he has been looking into incidents related to her). She had the remnant pendant that Talbert made for his daughter with her the whole time.

—Talbert and Renelle are similar to Henry and Charlie, the mom is absent (Charlie’s mom left after she died, so Charliebot grew up without her mother, Renelle’s mom died when she was younger), Henry grieved strongly over his daughter’s death, Talbert worried that his daughter would die when she was very sick, and made her a pendant to still have a part of her around if she died. He doesn’t elaborate on what exactly he did to create it, but it sounds pretty morally dubious since he dodged the question iirc. There’s also a random picture of him with Taggart, a fellow scientist who’s focused on agony, we are given no other details on their relationship besides this picture, as if it’s just supposed to make them seem similar to Henry and William (who also have a picture taken together in the novel trilogy).

—Eleanor pretending to be Renelle but having a genuine connection to her is very similar to Baby pretending to be Charlie in the novels, while actually being her adult body and having her memories. Half of her is Charlie… like how half of Eleanor might be Renelle (though that’s speculation). Charlie herself is only an agony entity based on the real girl, as opposed to being possessed by her ghost. For what it’s worth, the name Renelle means ‘rebirth’, which I think is pretty interesting with all this other context.

—This part made me laugh for how blatant it is, but in one of the ball pit dream sequences Larson has (yeah) he finds Eleanor curled up in a trunk and then he hits her face with a paperweight. This happened within two paragraphs of each other. In the novels teen Charlie is found curled up in a trunk, and during the climax she hits Baby’s face with a paperweight.

—There are just a lot of similar themes regarding grieving parents, fake daughters, clone robots, stolen identities, and agony entities that are strangely similar to someone else but are still their own, unique person. I feel like Eleanor was made from either Renelle or Talbert’s agony, and/or Renelle using the remnant pendant birthed Eleanor in some way. Talbert probably used remnant from the ballpit to create the pendant and gave it to his daughter, whose emotions started mixing with the remnant present in the pendant. (I’m not sure how to word this part but) The remnant in the pendant started gaining its own sentience from connecting with Renelle, starting to see itself as Talbert’s daughter. Jake actually feels genuine loss and love when “Renelle” talks about being kicked out by her father, I think her uncharacteristic attachment can be explained if the source of her sentience came from Renelle.

In fact I think it’s very possible that Renelle did die from her illness (or was close to it) but was revived from wearing the pendant, similar to the shavings of the pendant in frailty saving a dying child’s life. Being healed from the pendant might be what caused the connection instead. Renelle was supposed to be very ill yet she’s alive in the present, there’s no references to her still being sick, and we don’t get an explanation as to why.

Perhaps William made her body and that’s why she resembles Circus Baby and seems to have a connection with him. I think it’s pretty likely that they have some sort of relationship because of how upset he gets when she leaves the agony amalgamation in the epilogues. He’s described as staring at her ‘almost pleadingly’ and has a look of despair when he realizes she won’t come back. It’s a weirdly sincere moment for him, if he’s only concerned about her presence making him stronger then the reaction comes across as unnecessarily sentimental. He usually throws tantrums or gets angry when someone disobeys him like this.

I think this attachment makes more sense if he had a hand in creating her body, because in his mind that’d mean she’d belong to him. He could have stolen the pendant after finding out it has remnant and gave it to the robot he made in order to power it, and thus Eleanor was born (or maybe the opposite happened where the android found Renelle on her own and stole her pendant, becoming sentient as a result, sorta similar to how Circus Baby killed Elizabeth which led to her possession).

You can compare this to him wanting to take the Ella doll from Charliebot. We NEVER see Circus Baby in the books, not even in the Room for One More story which has every other Funtime show up. She fills in for her absence. Honestly Eleanor to me feels like a ‘what if’ character based on the idea of Charlie from the novels being evil, like if the Ella doll was moved to the rage-filled adult Charliebot instead of it being possessed by Elizabeth, and/or William succeeding in getting his hands on her and having her as his daughter.

Do I think there’s no chance of stitchline being canon? Of course not, I’m just explaining my reasoning for why I’m so hesitant. I’m not necessarily huge on parallels in a way that everything is a strict one-to-one (Jake and Andrew aren’t just copies of Charlotte/Cassidy/the fifth child), but frights being a way to tell us about the story without giving direct answers does make a lot of sense to me.

[Into the Pit] 3900+

Into the pit was really good, I loved playing it! I was looking forward to finally getting some sort of idea of who exactly ‘Cassidy’ is, only for the MCI to never show up outside of being dead, lol. Didn’t feel like it did much for the stitchline debate besides muddy the waters further. Oh well, at least it was fun to play.

Overall I lean more towards it not being in continuity, but I’m open to the idea of the mega cat games adapting the frights books into the game’s continuity with various differences to make it fit better, or just to make a better game. The minigames we see that reference the frights stories all have noticeable differences with their novel counterpart.

My problem with the game being in continuity is that it was meant to be a smaller, spin off game at first, with Scott only checking on it every once in a while. It sounded like he gave them a lot of freedom to do whatever, not worrying about continuity (which makes sense as otherwise it’d be a lot harder to make a good game). Certain things were cut out or rejected, but Scott did go out of his way to make Elizabeth still Circus Baby in the novel trilogy, and to change Charlie’s death date, even though other things weren’t canon such as Brooks being Golden Freddy.

Just because certain things line up doesn’t mean everything will. Even when things take place in different continuities, Scott seems to try to make things stay relatively close to canon, with the MCI being most subject to change, whether it’s changing the characters or adding a sixth victim. I think he’s very aware that the fandom takes everything pretty literally lol. My previous problems with stitchline continuity still apply, but let’s talk about my problems with the game specifically.

Out of all the ITP adaptations, this one comes across the most like ‘normal’ time travel, and doesn’t do much to make you think otherwise outside of the monster Spring Bonnie (it doesn’t have Oswald randomly having tokens appear in his pocket, for example, which was a good indication of this not being typical time travel). There’s nothing really saying everything else is inaccurate unless you believe it’s in the game continuity, in which case it can’t be nearly one-to-one as it contradicts too much. I would like to point out that this is a pretty common trope in horror (some sort of haunted area letting someone access and even change the past where something terrible happened) so I don’t think it’s too out of place even if it might sound silly.

The doors get broken in the past and they’re boarded up in the present, Bonnie’s guitar gets fixed in the past and is fixed in the present, a rat time travels from the past to the present where other people can see it. Previously the inconsistencies with the game timeline were waved away as just being a screwed up agony recreation of the MCI (six dead children that were noticed by literally everyone and drove people to a panic, which doesn’t make any sense for a ‘missing’ kids incident, nor does it fit with how only two kids were known to be lured away at first), and while that’s still possible, I wonder if the game is the exception here and has it as more literal time travel, mixed with a memory. After all, the series has shown to us that it’s possible.

In the epilogues Larson saves someone’s life this way, in the original story of Blackbird Sam seems to die and becomes the Blackbird to haunt his friend, but is suddenly alive at the end of the story, even though he’s been in a ditch for days and likely would have died of starvation/thirst by that point. I think he was originally dead but Larson interfering with Eleanor’s memory(?) of killing Sam saved him and brought him back to life.

He stood and tried to shake off his disorientation. He was standing a few feet away from a railroad track. A figure was visible, standing on the tracks.

He moved closer.

Wait. There were two figures.

One was the horrible monstrosity he’d been chasing in whatever alternate reality or break with reality he was experiencing. The other, held in the arms of the first, was a kid in some kind of costume. Eleanor spun him around, no doubt making him dizzy and disoriented. The kid struggled and fought, kicking his long legs—was he dressed as a bird?—but he was tangled in his costume and couldn’t get himself free.

In the distance, Larson heard the whistle of a train.

He ran to the tracks. Eleanor turned her head and locked eyes with Larson. She let go of her victim, jumped up, and took off across a nearby field. The kid in the strange bird costume was still on the tracks, tangled in his weird bird suit and disoriented.

Larson pushed him off the tracks. He landed in a ditch, but at least he wasn’t in the path of the train.

Larson waited while the train roared past, then started running across the field where Eleanor had headed. But soon it was apparent that it was too late. She was gone. Larson stood in the dark field unsure of where he was or when it was.

In the original story there's blood present on the rail, but Eleanor here was only going to push him towards the train, she's not described as making him bleed. I think he only bled in the original timeline where the train hit him.

Paul held Molly with one arm and offered his other hand for Nole to shake. Holding Molly close, Paul said, “Because of the way the feathers of his costume are scattered, they think he was probably grazed by the train and then thrown clear, but they haven’t found him.”

Nole frowned and watched a black feather scuttle over the ground near the rails. That’s when he noticed blood on the rail, on the opposite side of the tracks. Not a lot of blood. Just one smear. But it was a big smear. A police officer was taking a picture of it.

If something similar is going on in the ITP game, that would call its continuity with the games into question imo because of the sixth kid. There’s really no reason for him to be there unless he was there from the start, which doesn’t make sense with how the MCI works. 5 kids were reported missing, and the bodies were never found. Everyone is freaking out in the story likely because they saw the dead bodies. I want to emphasize that Andrew’s parents not reporting him missing would land them in some deep shit, they’d be the first suspects for whatever happened to him. I’m not sure if anything is really different from the original event beyond Spring Bonnie being a monster.

And for what it’s worth, the scrapped (yet apparently still canon according to the book description) story You’re the Band describes the MCI as being found lined up with party hats, just like in Into The Pit. Idk if this story is still in continuity with the others, but this seems to imply that the original intent of this scene was to be accurate to what actually happened in the past, yet it also directly contradicts how it went in the games, showing that these are different timelines. Maybe it was cut for this reason, but it’s interesting to consider when trying to figure out what’s going on with the books’ continuity.

There are a lot of weird details now if it is genuine time travel: people being aware of kids being killed when the MCI was meant to be a quiet event, the animatronics freak out as the kids are killed, which implies they are already possessed, the Fredbear suit is always empty so that Oswald can hide in it, even after the Yellow Thing gets rid of the bodies, Golden Freddy not being possessed is also strange since it’s clearly possessed in the Fetch minigame, the Puppet is absent even though he should be active/present at this point and at least have some merch. Otherwise how did GGGL happen? Not to mention how there’s a camera directly for the party room where all the kids are dead, the whole point of the MCI is that people weren’t sure what happened to them or if they are even dead, but the camera would show their bodies. The layout is completely different from fnaf 1, which I’m willing to not take too seriously (follow me’s map is just a reskin of SAVETHEM despite them not being the same building), but earlier builds had it as more accurate.

There’s also how Foxy is suspiciously absent the entire game and Oswald apparently possesses him in the bad ending. His eyes glow and he slowly forgets his name as he stops right in front of pirate cove. There’s a great video speculating that Oswald was possessing Foxy the whole time and the game is him being in denial of what happened. I think there’s a lot of cool evidence pointing towards it, but if it’s canon in any way then that means this game has to take place in a separate continuity.

I’ve been considering something similar where, like how the yellow thing takes the place of Oswald’s dad, Oswald took the place of Fritz unintentionally, with Foxy GOGOGO always being some sort of metaphor of Fritz finding his own corpse and realizing that he’s dead. Not that he found the bodies of the mci literally (maybe that happened in the stitchline continuity), but he could be hallucinating a normal party of five kids as actually having the corpses of himself and his friends, perhaps after seeing William who wanted to check if the animatronics were haunted? Idk it made more sense in my head lol.

As much as I’m harping on this point it’s still possible that the ballpit is showing an altered memory, mainly because I think Return to the Pit has a much more supernaturally affected ballpit, parts of that book only make sense to me if Oswald is having an agony-induced nightmare (which I’ll go into more detail during the RTTP section). I think it’s possible that the game could have more literal time travel while the interactive novel has it more agony-based, but admittedly it’s cleaner if it works the same way in all timelines.

However, it is interesting how they come across pretty differently for whatever reason, like I don't really think Oswald is stuck in the ballpit in the original book. It's the interactive novel that has more evidence for that idea. My other problems with the game being in continuity still apply as well. I do get the impression that Scott gives the writers/creators he works with lots of flexibility when it comes to making new fnaf media, so I can see something like the game devs having a different interpretation of how the ballpit works compared to the interactive novel author.

I think I talked enough about why I think it isn’t canon to the games, but if it is canon I don’t think that would mean stitchline is canon because of the various contradictions with the stories.

First there’s Fetch/Pick Up Balloons, this one is pretty weird in many respects. The map is of Jeff’s pizza where Golden Freddy is present in the exact same spot he’s in during 1985. It seems to be an ‘updated’ version of his SAVETHEM sprite. I noticed a cool detail where his eyes only glow when the protag is far away enough, he doesn’t seem to want to be noticed. Can we also talk about how funny it is that a kid gets mauled to death a room away from him and he doesn’t do shit LMAO

So the protag collects six balloons and gives them to Fetch, who proceeds to kill him while saying C U. This is absolutely nothing like the original Fetch story. Greg never dies, much less gets killed by his robot dog (the horror comes from the dog doing terrible things for him, not Greg himself being in danger), Golden Freddy isn’t there, and his presence in the first place is strange because Andrew only possesses Fetch post TMIR1280 which is after FFPS/UCN, when Golden Freddy shouldn’t even be around as a suit.

This taking place in the same location as Jeff’s pizza is also weird—Greg found Fetch, possessed by Andrew, in an abandoned Freddy’s restaurant. The location does seem abandoned, but Jeff’s Pizza should still be active at this point, and since when is there an evil robot dog here? Greg’s design is also off, his hair isn’t black, it’s blond. He looks more like Andrew if anything, I suppose in this continuity Andrew could have been killed by Fetch and that’s why he possesses him? I’m not completely certain that he’s Andrew, though if this game takes place earlier (after Freddy’s was abandoned but before Jeff or anyone else took over) that would explain some things. I actually wonder if he’s supposed to be Devon, the main character of The New Kid.

Greg’s(?) design really bothers me because the game is actually pretty good at making the designs look like official art or like their book descriptions: Eleanor, Henry, and Stitchwraith have their ladyfizsi designs, William looks like his graphic novel self, Millie is goth, etc. I think Fetch’s design was changed so that he could look more like a robot, if he kept his brown colored fur it might have seemed like a more normal dog instead. The Pick Up Balloons MC has black hair like Devon, and in The New Kid graphic novel he wears a red shirt like him too. I’m thinking this minigame could be a mix of Fetch and The New Kid where Devon goes back to the pizzeria like how he does in the story and gets killed. That’s why Golden Freddy is present and just lets him die.

Then there’s To Be Beautiful/Grant Her Wish, this game is actually pretty good about metaphorically showing how Eleanor switches out Sarah’s body parts for scraps. The problem is the ending where she gives her the pendant and she transforms into scrap metal, this is the opposite of how it works in the story. I’m willing to give this one more leeway, minigames aren’t supposed to be literal, but the other two really don’t help. Eleanor’s design here also isn’t helping the AU Circus Baby vibes lol.

The last minigame is for the story Count the Ways. It references the various deaths Funtime Freddy suggests to Millie, the weird part is the ending where Bonbon is shown on his hand—Bonbon doesn’t exist in Count the Ways, Funtime Freddy isn’t even supposed to be that pink because of how old and dirty he is. They didn’t need to show Bonbon so we could know which animatronic this is, it even seems to imply that Millie possesses Bonbon or something, which is interesting. My current theory for this minigame that they’re changing the story up a bit to where Funtime Freddy was rented out for a party dedicated to Millie’s younger cousins, and that’s why she falls victim to him. It would fit the timeline better and explains why he seems pristine, as opposed to her grandpa getting a random extra Funtime Freddy in his garage when that doesn’t make much sense.

There are enough differences here and between the ITP game & the original stories that I think this is just an AU version of the frights books. Maybe it’s an AU version that will be in the game’s continuity. I don’t think I would mind that too much? Though I think it’s a bit too early to tell. I might consider it more when the Fetch game comes out, hopefully it’ll explain what tf was going in that minigame lol.

To be clear I’m not against the game being in continuity because I hate the very idea of it or smth, if anything Andrew existing in the games will make my life easier as I now have a candidate for TOYSNHK where I don’t have to figure out how CCassidy fits in the role, and the game is changing enough stuff about the Fazbear Frights stories that Andrew can be adjusted accordingly to actually make sense with how UCN works in the game, but I need better evidence for it. There’s no ‘only two brainwaves’ and ‘have never talked to another ghost in my (after)life’ contradicting the game’s UCN yet, and maybe there won’t be so Andrew can fit in better.

I will say I don’t think the game is saying that Andrew is some super secret sixth victim, the two minigames where the number six shows up can be explained in other ways imo.

First there’s the Collect The Hats minigame (I think this arcade game has my favorite songs!), in it you play as Balloon Boy who finds 5 party hats, with a secret area having Purple Guy give you the last hat, counting as 6/5. Then there’s 6 balloons in the fetch minigame. I think this is just referencing Charlotte & Cassidy, not Andrew. The image where the dead kids are lined up has one of them grayed out like Charlie while the rest are in red. Collect the hats feels SUPER happiest day coded, the secret area has a bunch of tables with party decorations and balloons, just like the happiest day minigame and the bite of 83.

I think the last hat William gives represents Cassidy, who’s the odd one out as Golden Freddy and his son as opposed to someone he murdered (and going by the happiest day order, the kid closer to the end of the room is the birthday kid/Golden Freddy). The six balloons in Fetch again feel like a happiest day reference because the children moving on are represented by balloons floating up, and red balloons are what Balloon Boy collects in BB’s air adventure (BB5th confirmed lol). It doesn’t have to be about the MCI, it can just be referencing the six main animatronics we know of: The main band + Golden Freddy + Marionette

IF the sixth child is somehow some weird mistake of the ballpit memory, as opposed to adding some random dead kid who shouldn’t be there, or being a retcon, I think it makes far more sense if Oswald himself is the sixth victim. This would be the ballpit making a threat, warning him that he’ll end up like the others.

He’s already out of place by time traveling/interfering with the memory in the first place. This arguably better explains stuff like the 6/5 in the Collect The Hats minigame (though I still find the happiest day imagery notable), Yellow Thing talking about him joining the other kids, the cut drawing where he seems to be part of the MCI or the unused OMC dialogue telling BB (being controlled by Oswald) that he could end up trapped like the others if he’s not careful. There’s this constant implication of Oswald joining the MCI. This is a pretty common horror trope too, someone getting involved in the supernatural and getting some sort of future vision of their own death. In this case Andrew could be the fifth victim/an alternate Golden Freddy while Oswald is the out of place sixth child.

I think the final thing I should talk about is a scrapped drawing of the MCI. I have seen so many people say this was in the games only to give no evidence which is kinda funny to me. Since then I still haven’t seen any proof of it not being cut so I’m pretty sure that it went unused. The reason I want to talk about this picture is because there are 2 girls and 3 boys (sometimes 4 depending on the version), which possibly means that Cassidy is a girl. I want to explain why I disagree.

Usually when I see people talk about this picture they think the girl towards the left has ‘black hair’, even resembling the logbook girl because she has the ‘yellow hair beads’ and pigtails, and I don’t agree. The ‘hair beads’ are her ears, and the yellow on her head is supposed to indicate that she’s blonde. Just compare to all the other kids. When their skin is colored in, it’s orange, and she has noticeably orange hands that are the same color as her ears, indicating that the yellow isn’t for her skin. It's not consistent because it's supposed to be a shitty kid's drawing. All of them have black lines for hair, with whatever color is used for their head showing what kind of hair they have.

These kids are suspiciously generic, honestly? All the boys have reddish brown hair, and both of the girls are blond with pink skirts. The longer hair girl’s back is facing us, that’s why she has no eyes or mouth, and why her whole head is colored yellow. Tbh the longer haired girl reminds me of more of Susie than the smiling one, Susie’s hair isn’t supposed to be short and spiky, it’s shoulder-length and curly. The little swirl the other girl has looks more like curls to me. I wonder if it’s inspired by the movie drawing.

If we don’t have to take this picture literally beyond “4/3 boys and 2 girls”, then one of them is could just be Charlotte, since there are times where Golden Freddy/Cassidy is excluded from the MCI when the Puppet is present. If we do, then one of them might be Elizabeth, she has strawberry blond hair and also wears pink. This even kinda fits with Eleanor being associated with the ballpit because of her and Lizzie’s connection to Baby (RTTP even has a little Circus Baby doll show up near the pizzeria that could add to this). This would just be another universe where Elizabeth isn’t William’s child and he targets her, similar to Abby. I think this adds more to her possibly being associated with the MCI as the fifth missing kid. If it’s Cassidy, then apparently she’s been blond all along, which is kind of a weird retcon, or the designs aren’t supposed to be that accurate.

That’s even considering that this picture is still relevant, which it likely isn’t. We don’t know why it was cut, maybe it’s because the MCI are inaccurate, maybe it even represents the kids Oswald saves (boy at the far right looks like him and the blue hat brings to mind Mike, also it was supposed to be them who give you the pieces of this drawing) but they changed their designs so it’s not usable anymore, or they didn’t want people confusing it for the real MCI if it’s meant to be those kids instead, or they just didn’t think it was a necessary mechanic. Either way, I don’t think it really debunks Cassidy being a boy, not only was it cut but ITP has questionably canonicity—this isn’t the first time we’ve had the MCI be different between other timelines.

I’m willing to believe Cassidy isn’t CC, I just need better evidence and not really vague, cut content. Can we pls get a proper impression of this character/who they are already, I'm so tired lol (RTTP if that girl was Cassidy why didn’t you just say she had black hair?????)

[Return to the pit] 6400+

OF COURSE this book made the continuity debate even worse why am I surprised lmao

I don’t even know what to think anymore having three different versions of the same story is really confusing in trying to figure out what’s relevant or not. Should we look more to the original book, the game, or the new interactive novel? I will say this book was actually very fun to read (outside of Oswald having more of an attitude at the beginning, that was annoying but he gets over it once shit starts going down) and I enjoyed it a lot despite the insanity. It was more entertaining than like half the frights books I’ve read so like…

The ITP game has a lot of emphasis on six victims, while the interactive novel has five mentioned repeatedly. I… don’t know why this is a thing. Being CassidyVictim-pilled I want to say the ‘extra kid’ is now the fifth child therefore leaving room for CCassidy to be Golden Freddy lmaooo, but that’s a big leap. The thing that makes this hard is that it’s not even certain who this ‘sixth child’ was in the first place, was it Andrew? CC? Charlie? Oswald? Any of them can work, so it makes it hard to determine the significance of the interactive novel having five. The middle two would be the ballpit showing an inaccurate depiction of the MCI (unless it’s alternate timeline where CC or Charlie were part of the MCI) so cutting them out seems pointless?

I mean, it’d be inaccurate either way. The book does move the kids from the party room to the storage room, which is more in line with the kids being lured to the safe room, but it also keeps everyone freaking out about the bodies, which doesn’t make any sense with the newspapers only noticing two kids being gone at first. So like, is it because Andrew isn’t game canon…? Well, I tend to have him as the fifth MCI member as opposed to the sixth, so this doesn’t affect my take on him much, but that’s assuming he’s in the MCI here, which is impossible to determine because of how little description the kids get.

The best way I can make sense of this is that Oswald is the sixth member like I talked about earlier. He gets grouped with the kids quite often, both in the secret ending route and him also being mind controlled by the birthday hat that they all get to wear. This book just takes a different approach to the idea, no longer showing Oswald his body and just associating him with the MCI more directly (interacting with the kids and literally joining them in one ending).

There’s evidence towards the time travel in this book being more literal and also evidence that makes it seem agony-related. Oswald gets tokens out of nowhere which hints towards a dream-like quality to his jumping back and forth (this was present in the original book but absent in the game). An older Chip remembers who Oswald is, so Oswald’s actions in the past affect the present. There’s an ending where time moves forward outside of the ballpit and Oswald ages into an adult, and the yellow rabbit monster is a thing. It kinda reminds me of a time travel trope where you have someone altering someone’s memory of an event, so even if that didn’t actually happen they remember it differently. I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on here but it’s an option to explain some things.

I’m not quite sure if this book is in continuity with the games? If it’s literal time travel then it can’t be because of how the MCI goes, the way everyone notices that some kids are dead, and the general lack of the Puppet. If it’s an altered memory where the yellow rabbit and Oswald are changing what actually happened, then it can theoretically work in the games’ timeline as it’s not going to fit what actually happened, though that would also mean it’s not particularly relevant timeline-wise, as it’s not showing us anything that accurate.

I've seen people try to say this book confirms Eleanor is in continuity with the games now, but the little doll in that one ending seems to be a plushbaby instead of Eleanor, considering the red nose (which Eleanor doesn’t have), the red cheeks (which only Plushbaby has, Circus Baby and Eleanor have pink), and that fact that it’s a toy doll of Circus Baby instead of a mannequin. I mean, why is she here as a small doll instead of her robot/mannequin self? She only shapeshifts into other teen girls, unless we're trying to say the plushbabies are some game equivalent of Eleanor, being animated by agony, which sounds kinda interesting. But that'd be pretty divorced from her frights self without the heart pendant, relation to the Talberts, mannequin appearance, etc. Which is probably the best way to include her lol, but I wouldn't think of her as 1:1 with the Eleanor from frights.

It took me a while to make sense of this book, but I think I’m satisfied with my current take on it, being that Oswald is straight up having a agony-induced dream in the pit (She’s Always Nervous has a great video on this topic!). It just explains a lot of the weird stuff that happens, and doesn’t make the ballpit so powerful as to undo the MCI entirely. Like, Larson saving Sam isn’t that egregious to me because I think Sam was only dead for as long as the Blackbird was around, which wasn’t longer than a week iirc. This is saving dead kids from decades ago, which should have far bigger ramifications. But I’m sorta getting ahead of myself, I want to go over some strange details that make more sense with this theory.

—The supernatural aspects are amplified in this version of the story, the original book had the magical tokens and the agony monster; this one has bunny ears that brainwash you, party hats that make you docile and give you memories from a dead kid, Chica randomly showing up in the present, an arcade that Oswald literally transports into that can save the MCI two days before the kids even die, etc. The arcade especially makes the ballpit come across less as time travel and more of a memory centered on the MCI specifically.

—The ‘Chip route’ as I’ll call it, where Oswald finds Chip in the future and joins his team in order to take down the Yellow Rabbit, contradicts other parts from the book. I’m not trying to argue this is too weird or ridiculous to be canon, I don’t think that’s a good argument, but this route straight up doesn’t fit in with the others. And that’s because Oswald’s dad is the LEADER of this group but this fact isn’t referenced at all in the other routes.

First, there’s Oswald talking to Chip about how his dad was taken over by the yellow rabbit, and Chip nods along like he’s heard about this before. Except he doesn’t seem freaked out at all that his own leader was replaced. Later when Oswald is with the team at the barn, the yellow rabbit comes in and everyone calls him the leader. No one takes Oswald seriously when he says it’s the yellow rabbit, even though they’re apparently familiar with its ability to replace people and be perceived as them outside of one person who can still recognize its true identity.

It’s also very strange how Chip doesn’t know that his teammate has a son and that he’s even the kid he hung out with a long time before. That can be explained as him just not knowing Oswald’s dad super well, and maybe no one believing Oswald or considering what he says is just for the plot, but what about how Oswald’s dad acts like in other endings? In the ending where Oswald ages up to his forties, he tries to tell his dad who he is but is dismissed as a crazy person, despite his dad being familiar with time travel. THEN in the ending where the yellow rabbit is killed just like in the book, he looks at that thing confused and asks what it is. He’s part of a team to defeat this guy and doesn’t know what it is!

All of this, along with how this route always leads to a game over instead of an real ending, makes more sense to me in the context of Oswald dreaming about being in an action movie of some sort. It just fits very well for a child’s mind to make all of this up, which would in turn explain why it doesn’t fit with the other routes, because everything is a dream already. It doesn’t need to fit into continuity and keep Oswald’s dad consistent with him being familiar with the rabbit.

—The route where you save the MCI is also a weird one. Throughout the book you can give two halves of a gold Freddy token, and once you have them you can do a ‘new game+’ route. You go back to the beginning with this gold token and insert it into this arcade game called 8bit escape which has a picture of a yellow rabbit flashing on it. Like I pointed out earlier, you play this game and save the MCI kids a whole two days before it actually happens, it takes two more days of jumping in the ballpit for Oswald to actually see the dead kids. He can only play the game the first day he actually enters the past.

You explore the arcade and eventually come across 4 tied up kids, with the yellow rabbit bringing in a 5th one (a boy) to tie up on the chair. Oswald has to help them escape the pizzeria by leading them to the entrance. When Oswald finds a birthday table the kids immediately go to sit down there and demand to have some cake, not listening at first when Oswald says that they have to leave (if you keep insisting they listen but this leads to a bad ending where leaving the restaurant makes them all float in a void). Oswald cuts up the cake in the table and gives each kid a slice, eventually giving the last one to ‘the girl with curly hair’ (she is the only one singled out during this scene).

He goes back to the present and finds, for some reason, a framed newspaper of the kids not dying to the yellow rabbit. On the wall beside where you're standing is a framed newspaper article. You read the head-line: "Kids Saved from Certain Death! Whole Town Rejoices!" There's a picture of a person in a mascot suit being handcuffed by police. And five kids watching with their parents. There is a date, too. 1985. Jeff’s pizza is also a lot more popular and has more employees, and fsr the ball pit is gone too. I guess that William killing kids somehow spawned a time traveling ball pit.

This is bizarre on many levels, even though this ending is obviously non-canon, being able to save the MCI feels too overpowered, it makes more sense to me as Oswald dreaming of a happy ending where he could help these dead kids he was traumatized to find. This newspaper existing at all is just weird too? Keeping a newspaper of that time your restaurant nearly had kids die just sounds ridiculous and a good way to turn off some customers. Why would you flaunt the fact that some kids were in danger here?

The fact that it’s still there after the pizzeria changed owners is strange as well, and the title is phrased in an odd way. How do they know the kids were supposed to die instead of being kidnapped or something else? Why does it talk about five victims being saved when they were picked off one by one (outside of maybe the last two), so if William was stopped the first time it’d only be protecting one child from him? Even the part about the whole town ‘rejoicing’ sounds like something from a fantasy. I think it really only exists for Oswald’s benefit, so he can know he helped out and feel good about saving some kids. Perhaps playing the arcade stopped the children’s ghosts from being hostile while in the animatronics, or it purified the ball pit like what Jake does in the epilogues.

Now about that curly-haired girl— this is the best evidence I’ve seen against CassidyVictim, we got a girl being served cake last in a happiest day-like scenario, who’s also part of the MCI. There’s also how there is an emphasis on five kids being involved here, so it’s possible that this book is the ‘most definitive’ version of Into The Pit. However, I have a few issues with that idea, if this book is literal time travel then it shouldn’t be in continuity with the games with how much it contradicts the MCI.

There’s also the RTTP description, where we’re told it’s the basis for the new game. Something being the ‘basis’ for a story is usually not canon compared to the final product, and I already went over why I think RTTP is an agony-induced dream, which puts everything we see into question. Either way, this gives CassidyVictim more leeway, as the book either isn’t in continuity or has an inaccurate MCI. However the Golden Freddy kid possibly being a girl is still pretty good evidence for Cassidy being a girl in the games too imo. The reason I’m still hesitant is that we don’t know if this girl is supposed to be Cassidy or possess Golden Freddy. There’s no hints towards this at all outside of being given cake last, so it’s uncertain who she is.

First things first, this doesn’t quite fit into being happiest day. CC isn’t referenced here at all despite his memories being important for happiest day. The kids are all together as opposed to stuck in different rooms, they get a slice of cake instead an entire cake to themselves, none of them are crying, in fact they’re excited and smiling in a very tense situation (the rabbit being after them), no one is wearing a mask, there’s no balloons, there’s no Charlotte, there isn’t a strong emphasis on the fifth child like in happiest day, with the kids waiting for them to get their cake and them being the hardest to save, and the purpose of it is to save the kids as opposed to helping them move on.

It even kills off the Yellow Rabbit, while doing happiest day in fnaf 3 doesn’t stop Springtrap from escaping the fire. Sure there’s cake being given to the MCI, but that’s pretty much the only similarity it has, it’s all the other little details that make happiest day what it is and connect it to the bite of 83. I think all of these differences could have been excused if the arcade itself was named Happiest Day, so we’d know what exactly is going on here, but instead it’s called 8bit Escape. I also find it significant how the arcade kids here don't seem to involve the actual ghosts, they act really generic and come across as NPCs, whereas happiest day has the real ghost kids present and freed.

Honestly, I’m kinda reminded a bit of Take Cake to the Children, you have multiple kids in one room asking for cake, Cakebear has one cake to give out so it can be seen as him giving out different slices to each one, and then there’s how Charlotte never got to have her cake because she was locked out. It’s even very possible that was a birthday party she was excluded from. Thinking about this made me realize that happiest day has her giving out cake to kids like she never got to have, which is nice of her.

It’s also similar to Rescue the Children from the ITP game, to the point I wonder if the resemblance was on purpose. In that game you have to find the children in a maze and lead them away to safety while the Yellow Rabbit chases you, just like how Oswald leads the other children away in order to prevent the Yellow Rabbit from getting to them.

Then there’s the girl, my thing about this being Cassidy is that zero depictions of girls who are or are thought to be Cassidy have curly hair. Novels girl is questionably Cassidy in the first place and has ‘long black hair’, graphic novel Cassidy has straight hair, logbook girl has straight hair, fnaf 4 ruin bed girl has straight hair. But this girl is only described with curly hair (not even a hair color) and we’re just supposed to instantly know this is Cassidy? What about Susie, who is constantly depicted with curly hair?

And there’s the picture of the three 8bit kids while they’re sitting down waiting for cake. Two are boys, and one is a girl with hair buns. People are comparing this to the logbook girl, but her hair isn’t anywhere near dark enough to be black, it looks more brown or could even be some other shade, like ginger or dirty blond. If this is the same girl that Oswald gives the last slice to, why doesn’t he bring up her pigtails/hair buns? Unless there’s only one girl present, I think these have to be two separate girls. So either the pigtailed girl is Frights Susie with her brown hair and pigtails from the movie (so the book would be more aligned with the frights timeline instead of the games) or the curly hair girl is Susie meaning this is completely separate from the actual happiest day, while Cassidy randomly doesn’t have black hair anymore (because this isn’t Cassidy? Who knows, honestly). I am considering that this is Susie pretty strongly because the way it’s worded implies that there’s only one girl with curly hair.

Logbook girl isn't even the only kid we know of with short pigtails (we literally have a character called Pigtails Girl in fnaf 4), it's a pretty common hairstyle for little girls, so idk about being so sure this is meant to be her specifically and not just a typical young girl design. Also if you’re someone who cares about the MCI death order and thinks that Golden Freddy was the fifth kid lured by William, then this book says that was a boy. I personally always thought Gabriel and Jeremy were lured together last so it doesn’t matter to me, but I know some people think the death order has Cassidy as the fifth child killed because of pizza party in Help Wanted, the number balloons in SB with the 5th one colored yellow, Toy Chica order, etc.

I think it’s even possible the curly haired girl is Charlotte. This arcade is accessed before the kids are even killed, so it’s before the kids are even stuffed and come to possess the animatronics. I see GGGL as a depiction of how the kids are connected to Golden Freddy through being given CCassidy’s remnant. So this memory takes place before that happens, and Charlotte ends up being lumped in with the kids as another victim of Afton’s while Cassidy’s ghost isn’t ’awake’ yet (I personally don’t like any interpretation about a kid magically being there when they shouldn’t outside of Oswald though lol, if Charlotte is present I prefer this meaning that RTTP is an AU where she was killed around the same time as the MCI, heck maybe it even relates to Eleanor’s connection to the Ella doll).

I already brought up the connection to SAVEHIM, and with that context it makes sense for there to be a timeline where Charlotte is given cake to make up for what happened to her in that minigame. It even matches with the Puppet’s gravestone being the last to get lit in Princess Quest 4, which is an arcade that kills Glitchtrap for good just like the Yellow Rabbit with 8bit escape. I just find it really hard to justify both her and CC’s absence. It’s also very possible that Charlie has curly hair. Her hair is described as frizzy in the novels which happens more often with curly hair. Ella, who is her child body, gets described with curly hair in frights and is frequently depicted with curly hair in art. When Charliebot sees blueprints of her creation she literally thinks they’re all just various Ellas, which makes it seem like Ella looks enough like her for the two to be confused for each other.

Overall I lean more towards this girl being Susie though, because of a specific game over. I wondered for a bit why this is the only kid that Oswald describes any features for and why he gives her the cake last. It sounded like there’s something about this girl that sticks out to him, and I think I know why. If you follow the yellow rabbit the first time you time travel, he gives you a birthday hat that causes Oswald to feel like he’s experiencing ‘someone else’s dream’, where he walks into the storage room and sees a dead child, only to be killed himself. This seems to be him acting out the memory of the second MCI kid finding Susie’s corpse (I kinda want this to be Fritz’s memory for Oswald’s Foxy connection lol).

If Oswald is in some sort of dream while stuck in the pit, then he could subconsciously remember finding Susie’s body, hence him noticing her in particular while he gives out the cake. Finding her body alone would make her the most notable kid to him. There’s also The Week Before scene where Ralph hands Chica a cupcake and sings Happy Birthday to her, so in the same book series we already have birthdays being associated with Susie.

And guess who’s the only other animatronic that really does anything in this book? It’s Chica, who shows up in the present and helps the yellow rabbit kill Oswald. Freddy and Bonnie are just kinda there in the 1985 pizzeria, and I don’t even think Foxy is mentioned. If all the weird stuff that’s happening is because it’s in Oswald’s head, then Chica apparently stands out to him more than the others. Maybe this can even relate back to Susie playing an arcade game right before her death, just like how Oswald plays an arcade game to save the kids.

Combined with just how often she’s mentioned over any other MCI kid, and it makes this girl being Susie pretty likely to me. If the curly haired and pigtailed girl are the same person, this would also combine all of Susie’s alternate designs together too: curly hair from the games, brown hair from frights (assuming that’s the color), and pigtails from the movie. I also think it’s possible that the curly haired girl is Susie while the girl with vaguely colored pigtails is Charlie, as it matches previous designs of hers.

But honestly, she doesn't even have to be someone we know. Considering how the book doesn't bother to make the kids distinct from each other, it feels almost pointless to fixate on who's who when they barely give us anything to work with (it's really hard to figure out which boy is which in the 8bit picture above, for instance). Especially if the book isn't 1:1 with the games, then it almost doesn't matter who the kids are since they can be anyone.

I’m thinking the pigtailed girl could be a reference to the sprite from Rescue the Children, their hair is even designed similarly with the pigtails not laying flat and instead appearing to float because of the simplified style, or they’re not even pigtails but hair buns (only pic of the sprites I could find lol). I would also like to point out that this is the author’s first fnaf book, and Susie is the only MCI kid with an official design for the games, so that might be why she’s the only one who gets any kind of description (though that’s obviously very speculative, we don’t know what kind of input she got from Scott, I’m guessing he came up with the arcade sequence at the very least).

I realize that this all probably comes across as me being very stubborn and that’s fair, but part of the reason why is that Cassidy is not a well-established character. The only confirmed appearances they have is in TFC (which is not that clear on which kid is Cassidy) and the logbook (which doesn’t tell us what they look like), everything else is just speculation. You cannot signal to us which character this is by pointing out a trait of theirs that they never had before. Would it have been so hard to say the girl has curly black hair so that we can know this isn’t Susie?

Imagine if we got confirmation on who the runaway is in Midnight Motorist, it’s a boy with dark hair and a striped shirt… and it turns out that this is supposed to be Michael, even though CC is our resident striped shirt kid. How were we supposed to figure that out? Like yes, technically Michael can wear whatever shirt he wants, it’s not like it’s unrealistic, but in fiction character designs don’t typically change like that for no reason, or at the very least when they do, we can be sure that it’s the same character in some other way.

In the context of many fnaf characters where we barely see them or they’re not even named, it’s especially important to keep stuff like this consistent so we can be sure which character is which. This is why arguing that curly hair can be straightened doesn’t work for me. When I hear about an MCI girl with curly hair, I’m always going to think of Susie first, because that’s something iconic to her, not Cassidy. If it’s some other character, then make it obvious through indicating which animatronic they possess. Being served cake last is not distinct enough, especially when Oswald isn’t being forced to give them in a specific order like in fnaf 3.

To be clear, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if this girl is Cassidy and we get a more definite appearance of Cassidy in the future where she’s a little girl with black hair, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t Cassidy and they end up being completely different. My whole point here is that it’s too vague to be sure and I want something just a little more concrete. There are many odd details in fnaf that make the most sense to me if CassidyVictim is true, and something as ambiguous as this isn’t enough to be a dealbreaker for me. I’d be happy to believe otherwise if the series goes more into detail about Golden Freddy and CC/Cassidy with a different interpretation that fits well together, but as of right now it’s very hard to for me to figure out a narrative here that doesn’t make certain characters feel redundant or inconsistent.

Now if the ball pit contains a memory, there's the question of whose memory this belongs to, and I actually think the source is William, in order to explain the Yellow Rabbit (probably from the Spring Bonnie suit absorbing agony while he killed people). Everything is warped according to his perception of reality, he wants to be seen as an intimidating monster that terrified the public, hence the scary depiction of the yellow rabbit and how everyone is screaming and knows exactly what he did. In reality the incident was far more lowkey, but he likes how much more dramatic this is.

The five missing kids from the MCI are all here just to streamline things. He didn’t actually kill them all in one day, but two corpses is far less “impressive” than all five together. All of them being present is just more convenient and sells how evil he is, even though the others were likely already stuffed by the time he killed the last two (we see something similar in pizza party). The way they’re displayed as being part of a party (in the other ITP stories) just makes the incident more grotesque, even if it’s inaccurate to how the MCI actually went.

The memory has to come from SOMEONE, and I just think William makes the most sense. It feels too nebulous to ascribe it to a group of people (either the public or the MCI kids), and no one would know the incident better than he does. Ironically he’s also the best explanation for why it’s so different, as he’d be very biased as well and want to come across as formidable as possible.

What makes me believe in this idea is how the rabbit already seems to have William’s memories, quoting him with ‘I always come back’, or having similar lines ‘I’ll make you suffer just like I did’ which sounds like a Springtrap quote from fnaf AR ‘I’ll make you suffer like the others’. He also reacts strongly to a picture of William and Henry, which he has no reason to freak out about unless he has some connection to William.

In fact, I think the yellow rabbit could be relevant to Glitchtrap, as they’re very similar characters. They’re both William-adjacent characters who aren’t exactly the same person as him. Both of these versions of Into The Pit tell us interesting things about the yellow rabbit that could be compared to Glitchtrap. The original ITP has him as the most passive, he doesn’t try to attack Oswald until he tries to save his dad, when Oswald doesn’t go along with his little happy family fantasy. He’s actually pretty normal for a while and even does various household chores, hilariously enough.

The game is where we learn that the yellow rabbit actually has some of William’s memories, and we see him wave in the same pose as Glitchtrap. In RTTP he similarly doesn’t react badly unless Oswald doesn’t listen to him, and he seems happiest when Oswald puts on the bunny ears and sits peacefully with the rabbit and a bunny-eared mom as a family, forever under his control. Isn’t this ‘bunny family’ exactly like Glitchtrap and his followers Vanny and Dr. Rabbit? Another pair that are controlled by a William-like figure? Heck, aren’t they both defeated by arcade games too? I think the Yellow Rabbit is being made as a deliberate counterpart to Glitchtrap so that we can learn more about him, such as him likely holding William’s memories.

I want to take this a step further and compare Oswald to CC, the unofficial ‘sixth’ victim who the Yellow Rabbit sees as a son and gets angry when he doesn’t listen to him. I’ve seen people compare the ITP story to Michael or Cassidy coming to the realization that their father is murderer, with Oswald’s dad being replaced by a rabbit monster who kills kids. Oswald has to pretend everything is normal but he doesn’t recognize his dad anymore, it’s like he’s a stranger. Most people finding out that their dad killed someone would have trouble reconciling with that fact, refusing to believe that he would do that.

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I don’t think this is something Cassidy knew when he was alive, as I believe he’s the first death. Instead, I think this could parallel Cassidy’s ghost finding out about William’s crimes, who William is even trying to get under his control like the yellow rabbit with Oswald, but it never works out the way he wants it to. There’s also Oswald possibly being secretly dead and possessing an animatronic (Who am I ending) or trapped in the ballpit, which we never see him escape from so he’s basically dead anyway. And Oswald’s first hiding spot, that gives him a good look at the Yellow Rabbit, is even the Fredbear/Golden Freddy suit. There’s also the idea that the Fredbear suit was left in the safe room, meaning Cassidy might have even seen his father killing the children. Yes I know this is cracky even for me but I couldn’t stop thinking about it lol.

One final note, I’ve spent a lot of time yapping about what’s in continuity in this post but honestly? I don’t think it matters that much, and I don’t think we’re supposed to be overly concerned about it either. When Scott finally responded to the whole debate he gave a jokey non-answer, saying that it’s both canon and not. The first ever fnaf books took place in an AU with similar characters and scenes. Literally every new entry we get seems to contradict previous information (ITPG makes stitchline seem canon, but TWB never mentions the ball pit essential to stitchline’s continuity and RTTP apparently takes out Andrew/leaves the sixth kid out altogether, SOTM keeps Edwin as the mimic’s creator, but it also changes the part about him being a struggling inventor with money issues, etc).

This is all a bitch to keep up with, but if the books are more of a blueprint at best, meant to be fun stories that can give lore and worldbuilding, that’s not too bad. It explains why things are never completely consistent, yet there are plenty of similarities between the books and games too. This is how a lot of other media work too, picking and choosing what’s actually canon from the stories made by other creators. Schrodinger's continuity basically, it’s both canon and not, exactly like what Scott told us. Also for practicality’s sake it’s wayyyy easier to make spin-off material if the creators don’t have to worry about sticking to the main timeline, it explains why Scott is frequently hands-off with this stuff too. You don’t need to be concerned about everything fitting together when it’s not in continuity.

I think the fnaf fandom could benefit from having less of an ‘us vs them’ mentality about this whole thing, tales not being in game continuity never meant Edwin still didn’t create the mimic, after all. And I really don’t agree that the books are ‘useless’ if they’re not in continuity, they can still tell us more about the world and they can just be enjoyable as individual stories too. They have value either way. I adore Charliebot despite her technically not being a game character, and Coming Home is probably my favorite frights story despite it not working with the games timeline.

Also plenty of the frights/tales stories already aren’t relevant to the games and many argue that only a select number are in continuity, which is rather arbitrary and not really the impression you get from reading them—many stories outside of a few exceptions seem to be part of the same timeline. I never bought that as an explanation for what ‘some are directly connected’ means, I think that has more to do with relevancy to the games, not what’s in the same timeline or not. Coming Home is more ‘directly connected’ to the games than To Be Beautiful imo since Susie is a MCI kid while we don’t have any hints that Eleanor exists in the games, much less is an active force. Honestly, I kinda think it doesn’t matter or not whether talesgames is in continuity when it’s already been confirmed that Edwin made the mimic.

So yeah overall I’ve decided not to worry too much about what’s in continuity or not, otherwise this series will drive me crazy lol. It also just makes sense to me with how other franchises work when it comes to extra material and Scott’s own treatment of the books. I think it’s kinda impossible to figure out if the books are in continuity or not until we get a more clear answer from Scott anyway. Unless there are some really egregious differences between the games and books in SOTM, almost anything can be excused as just a retcon or mistake.

But I have a feeling Scott hasn’t answered this debate yet partly because 1. the answer is complicated or at least difficult to explain, like if only certain books are canon, which ones aren’t? What’s the most definitive version of Into The Pit? If all three are canon than what’s relevant in each version? If What We Found is considered canon then are we supposed to take the book literally despite retconning fnaf 3 by being fewer nights, or are we just supposed to see Hudson as the fnaf 3 player? What if he’s supposed to work in Fazbear Frights before/after Mike instead and we don’t know because Scott doesn’t go into depth about this?

These are just a few examples that can’t be answered just by saying ‘yeah the books are in continuity’. A lot of people will also see the books not being canon as meaning we shouldn’t use them for lore at all too, plenty of people dismiss The Silver Eyes trilogy altogether because they’re not in continuity, despite it giving us a lot of basic yet important info, like who exactly Henry is, Charlotte’s name, our first explanations/examples of agony and remnant, etc.

And 2. because whichever side ‘wins’ will definitely just be jerks about it. I know fans see having the debate end as some magic button that will fix the toxicity in this fandom, but many people will just be complete assholes about being right the whole time too, if anything it will lead to an explosion of more dickish behavior before dying down much, much later. Every time something is actually debunked, the wrong theory is usually dismissed as completely invalid and its believers as idiots for ever considering it, even though it likely had some points going for it. It won’t really change unless the fandom itself acts better and stops treating the whole topic as a matter of life and death, though obviously telling any fandom to behave itself is a tall ask.

And that’s it! I appreciate anyone who tried reading either of these posts, I know I go on for wayyyyy too long. I think part of that is because I’ve been working on this post for over a year, and I just kept finding new stuff to talk about. I’m also just bad at being concise though lol. I hope I was able to explain everything in such a way that you can understand my thought process even if you disagree. Fnaf can be frustrating but it’s also fun to theorize for, even if I’m totally wrong I’m just happy to talk about my thoughts. Thank you for reading!

[sparklerzii]

yk the theory goldenduo, that cassidy and the crying child share the golden freddy suit?? what if their just the same person this whole time...

[walking-fnaf-encyclopedia]

cassidyvictim thoughts/headcanons (which become story-esque so. yeah):

cassidy honestly didnt start off vengeful; they were just.. themself.

but you can only really cry so many tears, especially after more and more and more kids show up and share their stories, the small bits they remember.

it may take years, many years, but for ghosts thats nothing. cassidy doesnt grow spiteful, not really. just…. mad. these are their friends. their friends, who miss their families. miss their lives before this.

they didnt deserve this. none of them did.

cassidy and charlie help them warm up to their afterlife. to their new bodies. cassidy cant do much to help them with controlling their bodies (theirs doesnt move well. or much at all.) so charlie helps them. cassidy lets them talk, hears their distress over everything that happened.

cassidy doesnt really miss anyone. it didnt have friends, really. acquaintances at best. and its family didnt like it. or didnt care for it. michael hated it. elizabeth was too preoccupied with their father - with wanting his attention - to notice it. and its father…..

……

it observes mike, after their father- after williams death. it observed him for quite a while.

it learns why it never saw liz.

it learns more about remnant, and fire, and how the two work.

it does not move on with the others. susie waits for it. charlie does as well.

it does not answer the call to the pizzeria. it tries to warn charlie ahead of time when it finds out. she goes anyways. she trusts henry. hes her dad. of course she trusts him.

when it found out what henry did to charlie, it was frustrated that it couldnt do more.

did william really just get to leave? just like that?

……no. its not letting that happen.

and, god, does it have the strength to dig its claws in keep him here. for as long as it fucking has to.

it brushes off susie and charlies concerns. they stay by its side anyways. their friend needs them, and getting back at william is, admittedly, cathartic. but god, cassidy is wearing itself out.

it wants him to suffer. it doesnt care if theres a price to itself. its grip wont slip until its satisfied.

none of its friends deserved this. it didnt deserve this.

(it knows mike is at fault for its death. it knows all too well. it never could let go of that. but it was so much easier to pretend the man it kept here was at fault, given how much else he was at fault for. how much its friends had hurt.)

charlie and susie are more worried than ever. cassidy gets to a point where it can hardly keep this up.

you can only really stay angry for so many years.

it misses the other kids.

it misses liz.

its so tired.

[mkaftonn]

afton family 1983

william

marianne

michael(13)

vanessa(11)

elizabeth(3)

cassidy(7)