The FNAF Timeline (plus Steel Wool Studios being bad at continuing the story)
This is about to be an insane ramble of information that will make zero sense to any normal person, but hopefully it's at least enjoyable to read. The FNAF (Five Nights at Freddy's) timeline is quite possibly one of the most confusing and incomprehensible stories ever created - probably because it was made over a period of many years so certain facts and ideas were mixed up and lost or changed - but I find it fun and interesting to try and piece together what the hell it all is supposed to mean. The first game isn't the beginning of the timeline unfortunately, the story starts with 4 when you play as the "crying child". This character is actually Evan Afton who is the son of William Afton who founded the Freddy's franchise with his friend Henry. In the game you are essentially trying to survive night terrors where you find out that Evan is the victim of the "Bite of '83" on his birthday when no one showed to his party. His brother Michael Afton and his friends push him into the Fredbear animatronics mouth as a prank but ended up having Fredbear bite down on the child's head.
The next game in the timeline is game 2 which has a lot of secret story elements but nothing too important to the story. The next game is FNAF: Sister Location where you begin to play as Michael Afton who you will be playing as for the rest of the games. Sister Location is essentially Michael finding William's work - which is essentially robots designed to kidnap and kill children - and being hired to fix the place up some. At the end of the game you are "scooped" and become the host of an animatronic called Ennard which is actually a conglomeration of every animatronic in sister location. Eventually Michael's body is so deteriorated and rotted that Ennard leaves and leaves Michael somehow alive because of this thing called "remnant" that is explained in the books but I don't know anything about remnant other than that and it keeps people alive when they should be dead. Finally the first game comes into the timeline, but the only story elements are very hidden. After that comes game 3 where some people decided to reopen the old restaurant as a horror attraction with one of the animatronics being stuffed with a dead - but not really dead - William Afton. William tried to escape the souls of the kids he has killed by putting on a springlock suit, but the suit malfunctions and tears him apart inside and kills him. Michael finds this place and decides to work there and attempt to kill William by burning the building down. He is unsuccessful and brings us to the next game, FNAF: Pizza Sim. This game you are in charge of building your own branch of Freddy's Pizza in collaboration with Henry, William's old friend. You're goal is to gather every animatronic that has a soul of a child trapped in it as well as William Afton then burn the building down to release the souls and kill Afton.
At this point, the original creator decides to hand off the production of future games to a studio name Steel Wool. This makes the story so much more confusing now and it was already horrendous to understand. Technically there is a VR game next, but all that adds is an introduction to a character that isn't really explained. The next game that gives story, and is where I will stop this post, is FNAF: Security Breach. This is a completely different style from the rest of the other games and puts us far into the future (we think). You play as a kid named Gregory - there's also some theories that he is a robot but I'm not going to get into that - and you're stuck in a big mega-complex mall-thing. Underneath this complex is the old building where Pizza Sim took place and where William is still staying. Now we have gone over most of the (alleged) known story - most of the story is based on theory still. Hopefully the upcoming movie will answer questions to the story from when the original creator was still making the games. Now that Steel Wool is in charge, anything and everything can and will happen to the story and I don't have much faith in their continuation of the series, but hopefully I'm wrong and the studio can add on to the story without making the original story even more convoluted.
I really enjoyed your insight into the timeline, but I will say I have a bone to pick with your dismissal of FNAF VR. I'm assuming the character you reference in your post is the one commonly referred to as "glitchtrap," and its existence is actually vital to understanding Security Breach. In the game, it's commonly believed that the character Vanessa/Vanny is under the control of glitchtrap. I admit that, as you said, it isn't thoroughly explained, but it's implied by one of the endings to VR that glitchtrap escapes the VR game and gets into the real world by taking over the body of the player, as it did to Vanny. Something similar happens in Security Breach: Ruin, where you play as Cassie, and she wears a kind of Vanny mask as she navigates the "big mega-complex mall-thing". The interface in the mask is oddly able to interact with both Cassie's perception of the digital world around her and, as it seems, actually change things in the real world. That isn't really the point I'm trying to make, though--all this is really just to say that VR laid some of the groundwork that the Security Breach games built upon, so I think that dismissing it out of hand like you did is a little unfair and doesn't do the game justice. Loved the rest of your post though!
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