Five Night’s at Freddy’s – A Father’s Fall from Grace

Five Nights at Freddy’s, a video game released in 2013 by a man named Scott Cawthon. That one game would spark a decade-long franchise, many, many spinoff games, and even a movie that was set to come out in late October of this year. But I don’t want to talk about the movie, I want to talk about the story. I want to talk about the rise and fall of a man who was once a loving father, husband, an exceptional animatronic engineer, but turned into a monster obsessed with putting his lost child back together, trying to find a way to make himself immortal and, stitch together a broken family. This is the story of the main protagonist of Five Nights at Freddy’s, William Afton.
This story doesn’t start with the original game, in fact, it doesn’t start within the first three games at all. Our story begins with the 4th installment in the franchise, aptly named Five Nights at Freddy’s 4. The gameplay isn’t all that different from the other games: look through the doors and watch for animatronics, trying to survive until 6 AM. But the story isn’t in the game, it’s in the cutscenes and minigames that litter the spaces in between the nights. That is where all of the good stuff is.
The fourth game’s cutscenes center around a character named the crying child later confirmed to be the child of the main antagonist, William Afton. The crying child’s childhood is littered with events and happenings that would traumatize anyone of his age. First of all, Afton designs a sort of nanny cam device hidden inside of one of the CC’s favorite plushies, a golden teddy bear modeled after the golden fredbear from the Freddy’s restaurant that Afton owned and operated. It is repeated throughout the story that the crying child has to ‘remember what (he) saw’ and to remember what happens when he catches you. The pronoun he is used in just about every cutscene in this game, probably referring to the crying child’s older brother and Wiliam Afton’s first child, Michael. Michael terrorizes his little brother, hiding under beds only to jump out and scare him, using a mask of one of the main animatronics to further scare the Crying Child, etc. But one day, Michael goes a bit too far, using the CC’s phobia of the animatronics that his father created to create an all-new nightmare.
The scene begins at a children’s birthday party at Freddy’s, the CC’s birthday party to be specific, and the environment is set for an average children’s birthday party, balloons, paper plates, paper hats, streamers, everything one could think of when it came to a kids birthday, except there was one thing that CC wasn’t too thrilled about, the animatronics on stage. sure, they looked harmless, but due to the torture inflicted by his older brother, they were anything but. Michael and his friends had started off mostly tame, taunting the CC and holding him up to the golden-colored Freddy’s mouth, until they decided to go too far. They throw the child into the mouth of the animatronic, its springs and bolts digging into the child’s skin and creating bruises. The child cried and cried and cried, hoping that someone would come and rescue him from his brother’s torture, until chomp. The boy’s head had been crushed by the animatronic’s mouth. The spring-lock mechanism had failed due to the moisture caused by CC”s tears, making the jaw snap shut and the teeth bite into the young child’s skull. There was blood staining the stage and the fake fur of the Freddy animatronic, crimson rivers flooded through the endoskeleton. The party was promptly concluded, and the CC was sent to the ER.
Not much is known about what happened shortly after the bite, or even what happened before CC’s death, but we get glimpses. We get to have small snippets of what William and Michael are saying when they speak to the CC. michael gives a half-assed apology, asking if CC can hear him, then simply saying ‘I’m sorry’. But William gives CC a promise, he promises that he will ‘put (him) back together’ which is a promise that he will carry out, one way or another.
William started his rampage with a simple killing, a single child, a child that would spawn an obsession. First, he would stuff them into the animatronic suits, no one would surely find them there, right? No one did, but they all had their suspicions. Everyone had seen the golden bunny mascot, the one known to be the costume of choice by Afton, luring kids into back rooms and never seeing them again. The suits reeked of death, and the stench of dead children permeated the air of Freddy’s. But the bodies were never found, so the police never had enough concrete evidence to convict Afton of anything. But his business partner, Henry Emily, ostracized him from his business, he could no longer work as the owner of Freddy’s. But he would continuously sneak back into the restaurant to hide bodies, until eventually he realized that somehow, for some reason, the animatronics had been possessed by the spirits of the children he had slaughtered. He had an epiphany, what if he could find a way to use the souls of these children, the remnants of their lives, to bring his son back to life? It was an insane idea, sure, but Afton had already killed kids and been kicked out of his own company, this would just be the icing on the cake. He started to create suits specially designed for capturing and killing kids, they were labeled the Funtimes. The Funtimes were the four characters, Baby, an animatronic modeled after his precious little girl Elizabeth, the daughter that could do no wrong in daddy’s eyes. The second was Ballora, modeled after the love of his life, Mrs. Afton. Her eyes were closed indefinitely, a symbol of the fact that she was blind to her son’s anguish and the bullying happening within her own family. But the other two were just creations of WIlliam’s. Funtime Freddy, modeled after the mascot of the franchise he left behind, and Funtime Foxy, another animatronic reminiscent of the restaurant he was kicked out of.
The Funtime animatronics were used to conduct experiments on children, using them and their remnants to bring these animatronics to life. But these were different. They weren’t alive like the others were, they were created using the anguish and agony of the children’s souls, they were monsters. All they knew was destruction, so they transferred that into the animatronics they inhabited. Afton’s plan had failed. He hadn’t figured out a way to bring his son back. So he decided to sneak back into the pizzeria he had left behind to try and retrieve the parts that were inhabited by souls that weren’t as violent as the ones that had been captured by the funtimes. He entered the now abandoned pizzeria, hoping to find the animatronics he had come for. But instead of finding decommissioned endoskeletons, he found souls. He found the real souls of the kids that had haunted these robots for so long. He lured them back to the back rooms one by one, one day at a time, disassembling the costumes in order to get the remnant from their endoskeletons. It wasn’t until the last day that the souls retaliated. He had led the last animatronic into the back room, but the souls were back, and they were back with a vengeance. They cornered Afton in the back room, keeping him in the room he had taken their life in all those years ago, wanting him to feel the agony they had felt on that fateful day. But Afton saw the golden bunny suit, he was going to use it to kill them off one final time, he was the mastermind, he was the smartest one among them. Those children were stupid, they didn’t know what they had done. Afton was smart, he was cunning, he was superior. He got into the suit, not realizing that the springlocks were rusty and old. He stood up, cackling as he stood over the souls. The water dripped, dripped, dripped, onto his suit, and in the middle of his maniacal laughing- CRUNCH. The springlocks had failed, causing all of the robotic parts to spring back into place. The springlocks dug into the flesh of Afton’s limbs and torso, the blood was streaming down his body and the fabric of the costume. He writhed and screamed, hoping that the souls would help him. But they didn’t. They stared blankly at the newly dead corpse of their murderer. It was poetic, actually, a father and his son, leaving this mortal plane because of the same errors in the father’s own creation. Afton’s body was found by his business partner, but Henry did nothing, simply closing off the room indefinitely for Afton’s corpse to rot for the rest of time.

(I left out a lot of details, but I’ll go more into depth in my next fnaf post :))