Ok. Is it just me, or is the lore in SOTM absolutely insane?
I can't be the only one who thinks this is ridiculous. I mean the sci-fi bullshit thing was already overstaying it's welcome with the whole remnant collection stuff in SL, then it got weirder with the illusion disks and especially the gas chamber thing, and now this? It's like the lore just keeps getting crazier and more absurd.
Don't get me wrong, I like this game. I have a few gripes with it, but overall I like the gameplay and the storytelling throughout most of it. It's really towards the end where it's giving me an aneurysm.
Like, can we all agree that the underground pizzeria thing doesn't make much sense? This is 1979, right? FNAF 1 comes after FNAF 2 in the timeline, yet they have the FNAF 1 designs for the characters? At the very least, wouldn't it be the Withered models in prototype form?
Also, why would he need this underground pizzeria to create character prototypes? It would be one thing if they were just in a storage unit or something, but this dude built a whole pizzeria underneath the building. How?? And why?? Did he do that??
It feels like they're trying to compensate for the total confusion that was created with the underground pizzeria in SB, but they just added a new layer to the lore that made it even more confusing. Then there's the whole thing with the house and how apparently William took it from Edwin, so now he owns the house, and I guess that's how he got ownership of the place that would become Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental? Again, why would William have any interest in Edwin's house?
There are two things that really peeved me when I saw them: one, adding in Edwin and giving him the title of "guy who actually made most of the stuff"; and two, the crazy ass backstory with Edwin and the Mimic.
I'll start with the character creation thing first. I don't mind Edwin being the original creator of the SB animatronics, it's just the originals that feel weird. It doesn't make much sense to suddenly add in this new character and assign him a role in the story that was previously, for many years, filled by a different person. I know I'm not the only one to ask this, but what the fuck does Henry do then? Henry has been set up for years, starting with the novel series, as the robotics side of the company and the one who made all of the robots, specifically the main 4 and the springlocks. All of that was Henry's domain; that wasn't something they needed to create a new explanation for. We had a guy to fill that role already, and instead of using him at all, they vaguely name dropped him twice to be like "oh yeah he's still here" without clarifying any of the specifics of what Henry actually did. It feels like he's even more invisible than he was before, and now lacks a chunk of the relevancy that made him so important to the franchise. It's left unclear whether Edwin actually made the original cast or if they were commissioned, but he does freak out at one point and said all his stuff was stolen. Even if it was the commission option, it still feels kinda weird. Again, Henry was supposed to be the guy who made the characters, so what happened with that? It would make more sense (to me at least) if their partnership with MCM was for the recording stage and the MCM designs were for Fredbear and Friends or the record album. Now we don't even know if the ideas for the characters belonged to Henry or not, which was something that seemed cut and dry before.
It's not that I don't like Edwin's character, they actually did a nice job of characterizing him compared to the rest of the ones in the franchise, but that's also part of the problem. Instead of elaborating on characters that already existed prior and delving more into them, they just introduce new ones and give them the character depth and lore relevance that is lacking in the original cast. Edwin and his family are given the privilege of having rounded personalities, backstory prior to the main events of the game, and even real human faces to put to the names. Why can't we have that with William and Henry? Henry was in one game. He was unreachable the whole time, dropped a few tidbits of lore about his daughter and his relationship with William, and then he died and was never mentioned again until now. He didn't even specify that his name was Henry, it's implied in the blueprints and assumed from the novels.
Speaking of the novels, Edwin is literally just the novel version of Henry with a new coat of paint slapped on it. They're both neglectful dads who are too absorbed in their work to actually interact with their children, they both made their child cry and had very weird tone-deaf responses to it (Edwin when he scared baby David with the puppet Roxy and Henry when he just took apart that frog toy for Charlie and she freaked out even more), they both ended up as single parents (Edwin's wife died and Henry's wife left and took Sammy), they both live in secluded houses that connect to a goddamn underground pizzeria where the Funtimes were kept, they both built fucking robots to replace their dead child/family member (Edwin did that shit twice), they were both absorbed in their grief and projected that grief onto the robot they built to replace said dead child to the point where the robot learned anger and resentment, and they were both eventually killed by their creation (Henry on purpose and Edwin as an unintended consequence). I thought we left that robot replacing a human thing behind, but here we are again.
The Charliebot thing was weird as hell when it happened in The Fourth Closet, but apparently Scott really likes the idea of a depressed dad rebuilding his child as a robot as their weird form of coping. Honestly, I think the Mimic stuff is worse. The Charliebot thing was already strange with the "four versions of Charlie where one is her doll and one is Circus Baby" nonsense, but now there's a robo-wife who used to be the og Mimic who's now trapped in a computer, and the current Mimic was a replacement for David. I thought the whole point of the Mimic was that it was basically David's best friend and Edwin destroyed it because it kept copying his son after David died, which also happened in the game, it's just that the M2 was supposed to be a new David, and it wasn't even finished when he destroyed it because he had the Henry Emily experience of discarding your batshit project after finally realizing it's not gonna fix your loss.
He kept a robo-wife for like a year and actually treated M1 like it was his dead wife, and now it's trapped in a computer (also M1 is MXES too now so how does that work exactly)? Plus it turns out Fazbear Entertainment wasn't forcing the technicians to get the Mimic because it was M1 the whole time? Did Fazbear Entertainment not notice that a lot of their technicians were being called on projects and then going missing? How long has M1 been doing this? How exactly did M1 manage to call all of these people and know their names ahead of time? I don't understand what the hell is going on here.
Also, what happened to the Mimic after the game? I'm guessing the canon ending would be either the one where you hand the Data Diver over or the Parachute Ending, but then what happened to the Mimic? It stole the blueprints to create more of itself or adapt or something, right? So did it just go back down to MCM and sit there for a while? Oh yeah, that also means that MCM is where the Pizzaplex will be at some point. So not only is that spot both the MCM and the Pizzaplex, but it's also the FFPS location, the SL rental service, and they all connect to the house in SL which was Edwin's but now William owns it or something. It's very over the top and unnecessarily convoluted.
I don't know, it just feels like everything is wrong. It's not like this exact storytelling issue hasn't happened before, this type of shenanigans has been a staple of the FNAF story since FNAF 4 and SL. When Scott makes a game with too many questions that don't have concrete answers or don't make sense, he uses the next game to switch the clarification on parts we thought we understood pretty definitively instead of actually filling in the parts that were needing more information. It's a cycle of trying to fill holes in the story with even crazier stuff that ends up opening even more holes until it's like a slice of mutilated cheese that was run over by a bus ten times.
