Having a nuanced take on FNAF 4 Michael is so hard when the two prevailing opinions are that he’s either a misunderstood baby or evil incarnate
Most of the time when I see people reducing Michael’s character to being pure evil it’s because they’ve forced him and his brother into these narrow roles where Michael can only be seen as the ‘Abuser’ and CC his ‘Victim’
And because Michael is in the ‘Abuser’ role he’s apparently not allowed to have a single redeeming quality. He’s not allowed to be sympathetic. He’s not allowed to have actually cared about his brother in any capacity. And he certainly is not allowed to have been a victim himself. Looking any deeper at his character is a luxury he can never be afforded due to him being written off as a ‘Bad Person’
And while I understand the propensity against thinking about characters you dislike I believe there’s a difference between that and the downright refusal to acknowledge nuance.
It also seems that recently people have become so quick to brush off Michael as being an intrinsically evil character because of a perceived lack of information in the actual canon itself. A belief that is easily proven to be false after looking into it for more than 3 seconds. With the survival logbook alone you could actually make the argument we know more about Michael’s personality in the games than over half of the other important human characters in the franchise. And that’s not even counting other information we have about him which is NOT as few and far between as people would have you believe. And while, yes, there is still plenty of room for interpretation (every Michael fan I’ve seen has a different interpretation of him) the same could be said for literally every other character in this entire franchise including William who we’re allegedly supposed to “know the most about” according to popular opinion but despite that people still can’t agree on what his motivations even are.
But anyway, let’s look at what information we can uncover about Michael from this “lack of evidence”
Firstly, it’s obvious to me that he was abused by William, this much is evident not just from his speech at the end of SL but also from other materials such as What We Found being a clear parallel for Michael. Given this it’s logical to assume that he was acting out due to his treatment at home.
Also looking closer at his character reveals that there are multiple things that suggest a more nuanced view of his relationship with his brother such as Step Closer, Midnight Motorist if you’re a MikeCouch believer (which I am) and the TV scene from the FNAF World drowning ending. Things like this make me hesitant to believe that he was nothing but horrible to CC all the time. It’s more complicated than that.
But with that being said he wasn’t blameless either. And this is where I’m afraid I’m going to lose those of you that were following my logic up to this point. Because on the other side of this argument you have the people that have taken these sympathetic qualities to the extreme, using them to effectively eliminate his guilt in the Bite. Because while everything I’ve said up until now is true that still doesn’t make it okay. Because at the end of the day the way he treated his brother was objectively terrible and I’ve seen a lot of Michael fans struggle to acknowledge this. He was a bully and he was cruel to CC and I’m sorry but that’s the truth and it is still the truth no matter how sympathetic he may have been. None of this should be an excuse for his behavior just an explanation.
I understand sympathy for a character can sometimes blind you towards accepting they weren’t always the best person and I do think that this is intensified by the fact that some people seem to over exaggerate Michael’s treatment of CC. Some of the things people say Michael did are just straight up fabrications but that still doesn’t change the fact that he was in the wrong for the way he acted. For example: I don’t think Michael intended any physical harm to come to his brother with the bite but that doesn’t change the fact that he planned to upset and humiliate him on his birthday.
And honestly, I think I’m just as annoyed with the sanitization of teenage Michael as I am with him being overly villainized because they both destroy what I believe to be the most interesting thing about his character which is that he has an arc. He grows. He becomes a better person. This is just as impossible if he was always evil as it is if he was always good. Denying that he bullied his brother feels wrong to me because it removes his nuance just as much as if you said he was only evil the whole time.
I sometimes think of both extremes of the conversation around teen Michael as being two sides of the same coin. I think that at their cores both stem from the annoyingly prevalent idea that you absolutely cannot like a character who has done anything bad. You either need to condemn them in their entirety or try to cover up or excuse their mistakes thereby effectively destroying any nuance they have by making these two ridiculously rigid moral extremes the only two things they can be.
The appeal of Michael to me is that he was an unpleasant jerk who made a lot of cruel and impulsive decisions that ultimately end up going way too far which leads him to experience the crippling guilt that will be his main motivator for the rest of his life. To me this guilt is the most interesting thing about him and completely loses its weight if you deny the gravity of what caused that guilt in the first place. I kind of don’t get the appeal of his character without it. But at the same time if you make him too ridiculously evil then his redemption doesn’t feel like it’s something that could really happen. His growth has to be plausible and if Michael is this purely irredeemable monster then why would he even feel guilty in the first place? And you absolutely cannot deny the guilt he feels because that just removes his entire character motivation. You have to acknowledge his nuance in order for his apology in the ending of FNAF 4 to have any weight. The denial of his guilt is, in my opinion, just as bad as the excusal of it.
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