Minor spoilers for the FNAF movie and… for FNAF 4. You have been warned. Content Warning for subjects of abuse and trauma. That’s a lot of lore. Aka, don’t come for me At this point in time, it is no surprise that the FNAF universe has an unbelievably extensive lore. One search for the game lore on youtube brings up hundreds of videos, and even those that claim to “summarize” the lore mostly run well over an hour long. As such, writing a creative interpretation of the games is bound to run into issues with the official lore - whatever that official lore may be (with the story is so convoluted and astray at this point, I would not be surprised if Scott Cawthon himself no longer knows what is canon and what is not, let alone the rest of us). This theory is more an interpretation than anything else. It is not meant to be an attempt to uncover a “truth” behind the story, but rather meant to explore a dimension of the game through a particular lens and play with ideas that I either have not seen spoken about extensively before, or, in case that I have, have promptly forgotten about after years of watching and losing myself in Matpat FNAF theories. I am not aiming to make these ideas make sense within the rest of the lore because I do not know that lore, nor do I claim to. The main sources of interest here are FNAF 1 and FNAF 4. Both 2 and 3 I have left out because that I have barely played the games or looked into their respective lores. Both 1 and 4 feel most relevant when thinking about the lore in any case: FNAF 1 introduces us to the FNAF world, and FNAF 4 ties up the (official?) tetralogy of the time. And with its out of place setting, FNAF 4 also brings a lot of new theories to the game, especially with the minigame between nights which of course are indispensable when thinking about FNAF lore. I nevertheless also wanted to wait to watch the movie before sharing this little idea, in the hopes that it would get me more material to work with. And while it did not really go in the direction of this interpretation, it definitely explored similar themes. In this extremely serious blog essay, we will be looking at how the FNAF games, in particular FNAF 1 and 4, can be seen as a child’s trauma response, with the games themselves representing the child’s subconscious nightmares. First, we will look at Freddy's bite, the origin of the trauma, and the consequential situation of the boy, stuck in a semi-conscious state in a hospital. This is represented in the games through the player’s inability to move, and the logical problems of the security guard job. Then we will finish off by talking about how the games represent the boy reliving, struggling with, and fighting his trauma(s). |