Game Theory!

The Clue That SOLVES FNAF!

Warnings:

Same as all the other Fnaf chapters

Confusing lore

Dream Theory (I know, terrifying)

Hello, internet!  Welcome to Game Theory, where I'm back after months of intensive therapy to finally put the original Fnaf tetralogy to rest.  It's done.  No more Halloween updates, no more Fnaf 5 rumors, and no more FAN.  Suck on that you multi-bladed propeller of air!  So shortly after my last Freddy theory, I arranged a live stream with some fellow Fnafers to close the book on the series, and what happened was something that none of us expected.  N-no, not the stream issues!  Scott started talking to us.  Well, kind of.  He kept updating his site, Scottgames.com, with cryptic messages as to the true meaning of the game.

"What is seen in shadows is easily misunderstood in the mind of a child."

"In the Fnaf4 minigame, why would the tiny Toy Chica be missing her beak?"

"Four games.  One story."

It was incredible!  After a year of taking shots in the dark, finally, we were, in a way, hearing back from the man who knew all the answers.  Scott Cawthon, the creator was reaching out of the shadows to give us, for pretty much the first time ever, concrete leads as to where to look, but what did these cryptic clues mean?  At the moment the best I could do was this:

"Is it possible that Fnaf2 didn't actually happen?"

But in the days that followed, those three clues led theorists on Reddit, Steam, and Youtube to completely throw out everything that they knew about the franchise.  What if we were looking at the franchise all wrong?  Instead of counting animatronic toes, calculating minimum wage rates, and tracking Purple Guy's work history, maybe we needed to take a step back.  What if, everything in Fnaf was just a dream?  That's right, a Fnaf dream theory, that everything we play through in these games was created in the mind of the Fnaf4's crying child.  It sounds like a cop-out, right?  Like a lazy storytelling cliche.  Maybe, but stay with me.  Even if you think you've heard parts of this theory before, you'll want to stick around.  I've unearthed the clues that finally put our year and a half of speculating to rest.  

Of the three clues Scott gave us that day, the most damning one was the last one: "Why would tiny Toy Chica be missing beak?"  Uhhhh.... what?  In the Fnaf4 minigame, you can talk to a small girl on the playground, with toy versions of Bonnie, Freddy, and Chica, but her beak is missing...?  During the stream, we were all like "Scott, puh-lease."  But when we looked, sure enough, there it was.  A few orange pixels laying on the ground.  What Seriously?!  THIS was the crucial detail all of us had missed.  And yet, as absurd as it may sound, those five pixels changed everything.  Upending a year's worth of theorizing.  Because that missing beak directly parallels Fnaf2's new version of Chica, who loses her beak when she goes on the attack.  It was something we all had written off as a graphical glitch or a design choice, not as a clue to the meaning of the entire franchise!  And yet, here it was, from the creator's mouth.  And that is when it started to click.  

Fnaf2's shiny new animatronics.  What are they called?  Toy animatronics.  And that's not just a cute name that the community came up with like "Freddles".  It's right there in the custom night menu.  It's canon.  That's a strange name for a bunch of robots, right?  Unless it's meant to be taken literally and then they're just a bunch of- oh my god!  What if they are toys, and this is all just a dream scenario inspired by these little guys?  Well, let's keep going with this toy clue.  I mean, obviously, the toy animatronics are shiny, plastic-looking, and fake, just like a small plastic action figure would be.  But it explains a bigger question about Fnaf2.  The look and design of Mangle.  I mean seriously!  The story we're told to believe in this game is pretty absurd, that kids just rip apart and put it back together again?  And so the employees just leave it as a mangled collection of parts for small children to play with.  What parent would ever be comfortable letting little Timmy touch that thing?!  But if we assume Fnaf2 is in the mind of a child who has seen all these toys, Mangle makes a whole lot more sense.  It's just a dismantled toy.  In fact, note that Mangle appears in the girl's room in Fnaf4.  An insignificant detail?  I don't think so.  The Chica beak shows that this girl's toys fall apart, just like mangle, the tear apart, put back together, toy.