If you don’t keep up with the Five Nights at Freddy’s theorist community… Well, I don’t blame you. What started as a fun guessing game has become a series of mismatched red string boards and clickbait-y “I SOLVED the lore!” thumbnails. The latest movement in the franchise, a minor update to VR game Help Wanted 2, has stirred everyone back up. Why? Because this update changes everything.

Except it really doesn’t.

For those not in the know, one of the biggest points of contention in the FNaF community recently is whether Scholastic’s line of tie-in books—specifically the Goosebumps-alikes Fazbear Frights and Tales from the Pizzaplex—are “in continuity” with the games. (According to series creator Scott Cawthon, all officially-released media is “canon,” but across different continuities.) This new era of FNaF veers away from dead kids and haunted animatronics and into the dangers of AI. Specifically, Steel Wool’s line of games has been slowly introducing the Mimic: an AI-powered animatronic created in the late 1970s that became murderous due to abuses it both witnessed and suffered.

The Help Wanted 2 patch mainly exists to promote the upcoming game Secret of the Mimic, but one of the most notable additions is this little tiger plushie:

^{Source: Hyper Droid}

Without going into a full deep dive, this tiger plushie evokes two Tales from the Pizzaplex stories that give an extremely specific source and trajectory for the Mimic. And given the stories the plushie and the Mimic animatronic suit Tiger Rock appear in, acknowledging these elements as “in continuity” allegedly means accepting many other events that complicate the timeline of the story. But is that really, really the case?

YouTube channel GiBi’s Horror Homestead has already made this point as well, and it is almost certainly not the only person in the FNaF space to do so—but outside of these games, a lot of franchises steer their many adaptations and installments in wildly different directions. Why? Because it enables the telling of more stories. Because it allows writers to do things they might not have thought to do a decade ago. Because it’s fun.

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was never the same across its many installments, and that was by design. Revolutionary Girl Utena has at least four different timelines that mirror each other in key ways. In his video, GiBi names many more franchises, from Star Wars to Dragon Ball, that thwart and play with continuity for the opportunity to tell stories.

At the beginning of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted, it was implied that a “rogue indie game developer” (who looks like Scott Cawthon) had made every preceding game. To me, the implication was obvious: Cawthon wanted the AAA era of the franchise to have some wiggle room. “Cling a little less fiercely; I might want to tweak some things.” Not to mention we’re in an era when stories about the horrors of AI learning models are becoming relevant. It makes sense to want to tell those stories where they’ll be seen.

So, what has Help Wanted 2‘s new DLC proved about FNaF? Mainly that the community at large is still having trouble treating this like a work of fiction rather than like God’s perfect puzzle box. Fiction can be flawed; fiction can change with its author; long-form serialized stories can hop tracks. Alternate versions in a different medium can be different just for the hell of it. Just because there are secrets to uncover doesn’t mean everything is a secret to uncover. If debating whether William Afton canonically exploded really is your idea of a good time, keep doing it. But perhaps it’s time, at least a little, to begin viewing this fiction as a fiction—not just for a strict timeline, but for themes and ideas. Because FNaF may not be high art, but it’s still someone’s art.

Boss Rush Podcast – A Podcast about Video Games

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Image Source: Scholastic