Bendy and the Ink Machine ENDING: EXPLAINED
I’ve seen a few theories floating around about the ending to BATIM. And while I do agree with a few of them… I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to story analysis, and certain pieces haven’t been adding up.
So I thought about it… and thought about it. And thought some more. And I believe I have come up with a decent working theory which covers almost all plot threads (that I am aware of) of Bendy and the Ink Machine.
OBVIOUSLY, SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT.
Henry Stein is dead. But the Henry we play as… is not Henry Stein. He’s a fictional character based on Henry Stein (possibly possessing of Henry Stein’s spirit, which I’ll explain in a moment) created by Joey.
Joey, who ran the company into the ground.
The REAL story of Joey Drew Studios is that it became wildly successful on the surface… but was suffering horrendous financial trouble. The Bendy cartoons were thriving, but the workers were unhappy. Things were crooked. In Joey’s own words, a “crooked empire.”
Henry left the studio thirty years ago. We aren’t told why, but we do know he valued his family more than the work at the studio. So he raised a kid. I would wager that this kid is Linda. Linda, Henry’s kid, I believe, is the child at the end of the game asking “Uncle Joey” to tell another story.
EDIT: This has been countered by @clauseart, who pointed out that Linda is mentioned in Henry’s Chapter 3 tape from 30 years ago! Linda is then likely Henry’s wife, not his daughter. Still, I do believe the child speaking is Henry’s kid, even if it’s not Linda.
Now, as for the story we play through.
We see on Joey’s home desk a bunch of storyboards and concept sketches. Joey has told this story before. In so many, many different forms… never satisfied with it. It’s his way of coping, of rationalizing what happened in the studio. He is CONSTANTLY living in the past, knowing he made mistakes…
…trying to find a solution to them.
But he’s going about it all wrong. He’s convinced himself that the REAL evil all along… was the Ink Demon. Bendy. The character on whom all of this hinged. So Bendy is the evil villain Henry, the hero of Joey’s story, confronts. NOT Joey.
Joey would never truly cast himself as the true villain.
As for why it’s Henry going through all this and not Joey… Joey says it himself. Henry was always there, pushing Joey to do the right thing. And Joey tells Henry point blank at the end: “you should have pushed a little harder.” He wants to blame Henry for not fixing his mistakes, cleaning up his mess. And with the ruins of a crooked empire as his legacy… Joey is obsessed with how to fix it.
Henry Stein is dead. But Henry is the only one who can fix it! If only he were here!
So Joey does what he knows: he tries to turn it into a story – a story about black magic and a demon, and a hero who arrives to put an end to the demon. But again… it’s never enough. It’ll never be enough, because Joey refuses to realize that the real villain isn’t Bendy. It’s HIM.
So Henry plunges into the studio again and again, leaving messages behind.
Henry is the one leaving the hidden messages. He actually remembers each time the story is told, which is WHY he sounds so TIRED AND RESIGNED. He’s never fazed, because he knows.
AS FOR WHY HENRY IS DEAD:
Most coffins in the game are labeled through the looking glass. And then… there’s a coffin shape drawn on Henry’s cot in Chapter 5. Now, this could just be Henry realizing that this repetition is his fate. But the finality of all the other coffins suggests otherwise.
Henry Stein is dead. The only characters whose names are NOT on coffins… are present on the pinup board in Joey’s house. All the characters who are marked as perished in Joey’s story have passed on in real life.
In Chapter 5, we get an interesting audio tape by Joey Drew, which claims that the Ink Machine (the one in the story he’s telling) uses souls to work. That’s the one in the story Joey’s telling… but there’s also a REAL Ink Machine, in Joey’s living room. I believe the juxtaposition here suggests that, once again, Joey is – knowingly or unknowingly – once again using real souls in his creations. This time, he’s trapped Henry Stein’s soul in the story he continues to tell.
(Interesting to note is that the letter from Allison Connor mentions that Thomas is still sore about somebody stealing one of Thomas’s machines from the old studio… and we see the Ink Machine sitting in Joey’s living room. Hmm.)
BUT WE CAN GO EVEN DEEPER.
Just as Henry is unfairly cast in the role of the “hero” in Joey’s story, without any choice in the matter (just as the messages in Ch1 say), Bendy is unfairly cast in the role of the “villain.”
Throughout the game, Bendy’s motivations are unclear. He chases Henry, then he saves Henry, then he chases him, then he saves him… in chapter 1, you could even see Bendy knocking Henry to the ground as a “get out of here, don’t do this!” rather than an attack. What is Bendy even doing throughout the story? He’s just kinda wandering around.
Bendy doesn’t actually HAVE a villainous motivation. Joey just cast him AS the villain.
Joey won’t take responsibility for what he’s done. Oh, he’s aware he made mistakes. But in Joey’s mind, it was HENRY’S responsibility to fix them, but Henry wasn’t there for thirty years. And why, if it weren’t for that blasted little demon character, none of this crooked empire would have ever existed!
The final boss in the story SHOULD be a confrontation with Joey for Joey’s own sins. But because Joey is telling the story… he chooses Bendy for the villainous role, instead. Bendy, the demon… who has done nothing wrong but be the cartoon character he was designed to be, the living cartoon in the story he was created to be.
Hell, in the Ch5 audio where Joey talks about sacrificing souls to the Ink Machine, it’s straight-up explained that the first Bendy created by the machine has no soul and is simply wandering around… probably HARMLESS. He probably wasn’t a threat until Joey demanded he be locked up.
The only thing Bendy actively does in the story is kill Sammy, whose motivation is still admittedly obscure to me (I’ll update this post as soon as I can figure it out)… and then Bendy kills the Projectionist. What does a projector do? Why, it plays reels. The Projectionist was capable of playing Bendy’s end.
Bendy is just… trying to stay alive.
Bendy doesn’t really wanna play this role. But he’s gotta, because that’s how he’s written by Joey in this story. And quite frankly… he’s tired of being slain at the end of the story. So he fights Henry every time, but he can’t resist the fact that the story always ends with THE END.
Just as Henry has the dichotomy of being the unflappable hero that Joey portrays him as – both for the sake of painting a heroic picture to Henry’s child and for the sake of seeing Henry as the fix-it-all man for Joey’s own problems – and as the tired, bitter old man who’s forced to go through this again and again… Bendy is both the cartoon character who just wants to be the cartoon he was made to be, AND he is the villain without motivation other than simply being “a demon” that Joey makes him out to be.
Joey continues to cast Bendy in the role of the villain and Henry in the role of the hero, duking it out forever in a story that Joey will NEVER be satisfied with because it never properly solves his problems… because he’s never facing them himself.
So the story changes a little each time… and then Joey tells it again.
“Tell me another one, Uncle Joey.”
There are a few things I still have yet to figure out… namely, Sammy’s motivations, and whatever the Hell Wally did that he’s so afraid of people finding out about (as well as the cake he apparently ate??? that recording was really out of place in Ch5), but this is what I think I’ve figured out so far.
BADA BING BADA BOOM, DID I LEAVE ANYTHING OUT
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