The Aging Debate: A Full Breakdown (Updated)
Science, Lore, Psychology, and Real Talk
Disclaimer: This is a theory and discussion post. Nothing here is confirmed outright. All of it is speculation and interpretation based on available lore and science.
So, we all know there’s been drama regarding the aging process of the Toys and the Prototype. I figured I’d give my two cents and hopefully provide some clarity for those stressing out about it.
Do the toys and the Prototype age? Well, yes… and no. It’s complicated. From what I understand, their bodies do not physically grow like normal human bodies. Some speculate they do, citing the Huggy Wuggy memory scenes in Chapter 5 — which allegedly show him getting bigger in each scene — but take that with a grain of salt and form your own conclusions. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible. That said, some people call what Huggy experiences “mutation” rather than aging — but if his body is doing something now that it wasn’t doing before, that is still development over time. Calling it a different name doesn’t change the fact that change is happening, and change happening directly contradicts the idea that they don’t age at all.
Psychological aging is where it gets genuinely interesting. Since these experiments still have their original human brains, those brains should still be developing. You can’t really stop biology. The brain is the only organic part of them that should still be growing, especially since these toys are biologically organic. This isn’t FNAF — there are no souls stuffed into machines. These are real human brains inside real biological bodies.
Here’s the catch though. Due to the trauma, abuse, and violence they’ve endured — living in a hellscape for years — many have suffered severe psychological damage. Some have regressed to a childlike state; others are so far gone they’ve become animalistic. Considering some of these toys (especially the Critters) were turned into toys as toddlers or young children — and some as pre-teens or teenagers, like Matthew — they never had a proper environment to mature. They are stuck in minds that are either regressed or stunted.
Then you have characters like Mommy Long Legs, DogDay, Poppy, Gilbet, and the Prototype who are either in-between maturity and stunted, stunted, or mature. I’m not saying they were “taught” anything or had any real-world experiences — aside from sacrificing themselves for “science” and Gracie Green’s brainwashing — but they have psychologically aged, albeit in a warped way. It wouldn’t surprise me if their environment forced them to “grow up” faster either. The toys’ psychological states vary significantly from individual to individual, and the narrative does not confirm that all of them are children. Many may be — but not all. Giving certain toys adult-coded traits while insisting they’re all children feels more like shock value than consistent storytelling.
On What the Developers Have Actually Said
Isaac once said the aging process is complicated but later retracted that — likely due to backlash — saying he believes them to be “always children.” The artist Amber said the same. However, while Isaac is the original creator, he is no longer part of development, and Amber is not a writer nor a developer. She’s an artist. She has been contradictory before, and Mob Entertainment has even stated that some team members insert their own headcanons. Mob themselves has stayed deliberately vague on this topic, likely to avoid drama in an already toxic fandom.
The claim that Stella’s speech or Ms. Gracie’s ASMR lines in Chapter 5 confirm the experiments are children is speculative at best. These are thematic elements, not hard lore. Stella’s monologue is philosophical, not literal, and Ms. Gracie’s “stay a child forever” rhetoric is clearly part of a psychological manipulation tactic — not a biological fact about the experiments. That was the entire point of her role as a conditioner. That’s her method, not a statement about the science.
The lore is intentionally ambiguous right now. MOB has been vague on purpose, either because the story is still developing or to avoid conflict. Some things have even been retconned, like who drew the Poppy flower on Poppy’s door. If MOB wants to convince us that the majority of the toys are still children, they’re going to have to address the science — because right now, the lore and the biology are actively contradicting each other. If they want people to believe that interpretation, they need to say it publicly, directly, and back it up in the actual game itself.
The Discord moderation enforcing the forever children interpretation carries no weight outside that space. Not everyone is on Discord, not everyone is in that server, and a moderation call is not canon confirmation. The one moment that came closest to an official statement — Isaac’s comment — wasn’t even specifically about age. All he said was that the experiments are mentally warped beings who will never get to experience anything due to what was done to them and the environment they’re trapped in. That’s it. No mention of forever children. No mention of adults. The door is completely open. People are treating a retracted statement and Discord policy as gospel, and that’s not a solid foundation for any argument. Until it’s confirmed in the game itself or in an official public statement, it simply doesn’t count. The forever children interpretation appears to have spread primarily through the server environment — not through anything explicitly confirmed. Once you build rules into your fictional world, those rules matter. They can’t be selectively dismissed when they become inconvenient for a particular interpretation.
It’s also worth noting that the game’s lore has a weird habit of writing what reads like stunted adults and then trying to walk that back. What we see in the toys goes well beyond typical childlike behavior in media. Trauma doesn’t equal child. Childish and children are two entirely different things, and consistent patterns in writing are intentional choices, not accidents.
The Biology Doesn’t Support “Forever Children”
Unlike FNAF, these characters are organic biological beings with their original human brains. The science actively contradicts the forever children interpretation. We have no confirmation in the lore that the scientists (and developers) removed any of the following:
• Neurotransmitter regulation
• Environmental stimulation
None of that is stated anywhere in canon. In fact, Huggy Wuggy is supposedly confirmed to still have a thyroid — don’t quote me on that though — and Thomas/Bron’s thyroid glands were devoured in the RESTRICTED_restoration.mp4 tape, meaning he had them to begin with. Thyroid glands produce hormones. So the “they stay children forever” idea doesn’t hold up when these biological factors are on the table.
If the toys still have their original human brains, organic biological systems, and the ability to think, learn, and adapt, they cannot be permanently locked into a child’s mind unless one of three things is confirmed:
1. The devs explicitly state all hormonal and neurological development was removed
2. The brain was artificially frozen in a prepubescent state
3. The experiments were specifically designed to suppress all cognitive maturation
None of this is confirmed in canon as of now. And following that logic through — if every hormone needed for brain maturation had been removed, the toys would have no emotional regulation, no long-term planning ability, no impulse control, be unable to perform complex tasks, and be cognitively frozen at the age they were turned. That directly contradicts what we actually see from the Prototype, Poppy, Mommy Long Legs, DogDay, and Gilbet. The biology and the behavior are telling the same story. The forever children argument is not.
On the HeLa cells parallel that sometimes gets brought up — while creative, it doesn’t actually map onto this situation. HeLa cells are cancer cells that continue replicating in a laboratory setting outside the body. Henrietta Lacks herself was not immortal — she died at 31. The “immortality” refers to the cells surviving in culture, not a person being frozen in time or stopped from aging. That parallel doesn’t hold up when applied to the experiments. The game has also leaned heavily into establishing its own internal science and lore — once those rules exist, they matter and can’t be dismissed when they become inconvenient.
Childish Behavior ≠ A Child’s Brain
This is the core of the argument, and it needs to be stated clearly: childish behavior and being a child are not the same thing.
Biologically speaking, a person becomes an adult because their brain matures — not because someone teaches them morals or social rules. A person raised in complete isolation would still develop a frontal lobe. Their reasoning capacity would still increase. Their impulse control would still improve. Their cognitive abilities would still reach adult levels. They would lack social skills, but they would not be a child. Lack of schooling or social development makes someone unsocialized, not underaged. Schooling teaches social norms, not biological maturation.
Psychological adulthood is about executive function, long-term planning, emotional regulation, and complex reasoning. These develop through brain maturation, hormonal development, and experience — including traumatic experience. A healthy upbringing is not required to develop an adult mind. People who grow up in abusive, isolated, or deprived environments still become adults. They become adults with trauma, stunted emotional development, or maladaptive behaviors — but adults nonetheless. Those traits occur across the adult population all the time.
A traumatized adult ≠ a child. A feral adult ≠ a child. A mentally unstable adult ≠ a child.
Trauma, isolation, and lack of education can cause emotional stunting, poor impulse control, difficulty with empathy, and maladaptive behavior — but these are traits seen in traumatized adults, not exclusive indicators of childhood. Adults who grew up in abusive or isolated environments do not magically remain children forever. They become adults with trauma, which is exactly what many of the toys resemble.
An experiment can be traumatized, impulsive, lonely, morally warped, lacking empathy, lacking restraint — and still be an adult cognitively. Emotional immaturity does not erase cognitive maturity. These are two separate tracks. Adults can regress, throw tantrums, act immature, behave impulsively, and function well below their age — that describes behavior, not biology.
In short: childish behavior ≠ being a child. It just means someone’s behavior is underdeveloped, not their age.
The only thing that might reasonably have been removed in the transformation process is puberty — which would make sense, since they’re toys. But that’s a far cry from claiming their minds were frozen in childhood forever.
Why the Prototype Cannot Be Read as a Child
If the Prototype’s brain were truly frozen at a child’s cognitive level, he would not be capable of surgical precision, mechanical engineering, complex manipulation, long-term strategic thinking, grasping the concept of immortality, coordinating attacks, or maintaining control over other experiments across decades. These are not child traits. They require developed frontal lobes, executive function, long-term planning, emotional regulation, and high-level cognition.
The dialogue alone makes this hard to argue against. Media has been writing children for decades — we know what it looks like. Simpler sentence structures. Concrete thinking. Limited vocabulary. Emotional directness. Ollie’s line — “Compassion is the discarded gem of the forsaken, a relic of innocence left behind like a misfit toy” — is not something any writers’ room in the world would put in a child’s mouth and call it a day. That is a fully developed internal world being expressed in elaborate, philosophical language. That is not a child. And it’s consistent across the toys, which means it’s intentional. Consistent patterns in writing are not accidents. They are choices.
The Prototype being childish at times while being simultaneously hardened by torture just shows that behavior varies based on how individuals process trauma. Same environment, different outcomes. That is not what permanent biological childhood looks like. That is what unprocessed adult trauma looks like. Childish behavior does not equal a child’s brain, and nothing in canon supports the idea that the Prototype’s cognitive development is frozen at a prepubescent level.
If Mob is trying to convince anyone he’s still a child, they’re doing a poor job. Based on the lore, the science, and his behavior, he reads as a traumatized, mentally stunted adult man with severe anger issues and violent tendencies that needs a lot of therapy. Yes, he was a child once. But he is now a grown adult — albeit a deeply warped one — hell-bent on his goals. It doesn’t scream “child”, especially when he told Poppy directly: “You act like a child because a child is what they made you.”
The Lord of the Flies Example
In Lord of the Flies, the boys are canonically children and they still act like children throughout everything. They’re terrified of an imaginary beast. They cry. They have tantrums. Their power struggles are playground dynamics that just happened to turn lethal. Even while committing murder, they are unmistakably children. The naval officer at the end is visibly horrified precisely because he sees children. That’s the whole point.
Now flip it: when adults cry, throw tantrums, or act impulsively, we call that behavior childish. It’s a descriptor. It doesn’t reclassify them as children. Behavior doesn’t determine age in either direction. The toys are acting like adults with childish tendencies — adults who are mentally stunted and traumatized. That’s a completely different thing from actually being children.
On Specific Characters: Lily, Doey, and Poppy
On Lily Lovebraids — she is absolutely still an adult. A grown woman having her mind completely destroyed does not retroactively make her a child. It makes her a traumatized, psychologically devastated adult. There is a significant, clinically documented difference between those two things. Dementia patients lose their sense of functioning. Severe trauma survivors can lose basic cognitive ability. People with extreme PTSD can become nonverbal and unresponsive. Nobody looks at those people and concludes they must be children. That would be deeply disrespectful in the real world, and the logic doesn’t hold up in fiction either.
The fact that it took significantly longer to break Lily than the other experiments is actually direct evidence that adult cognitive function was present and had to be systematically destroyed over a long period of time. The end result of that destruction cannot be used as proof she was never an adult to begin with. Severe amnesia, dissociation, and loss of identity in adults who have experienced prolonged psychological torture is documented and real. It makes them adults with catastrophically damaged minds — not children. There is a clinical difference between a person who is cognitively a child and an adult whose mind has been shattered beyond recognition. Lily falls into the second category.
Loving tea parties and dolls is also not exclusive to children. Neurodivergent adults love those things too. Beyond that, those interests exist within Lily’s conditioned environment — they are her coping mechanism inside the only world she now knows. That is not childhood. That is the result of years of calculated isolation reshaping whatever was left of her. Lily’s current state is the result of prolonged isolation, starvation, and targeted psychological warfare carried out against her specifically by the Prototype. That is not what the transformation did to her. That is what years of deliberate, calculated abuse did to her. Her condition is not a template for how toy conversion works.
Broken beyond recognition is still not a child. It is just broken.
Not only that, but in the game Lily, despite being a mentally broken adult woman, had a line of dialogue where she tells Candy Cat she wants to lay out candles for “mood lighting” in case the “special guest” arrives early. This in-game dialogue (and the fact that she goes and does it) DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS the narrative that some of the toys including the Prototype here is still a child. The Prototype is an adult man and Lily is an adult woman who may have REGRESSED to a childlike state, but she is not a child, and this just proves it. If Mob does hit us with the “forever children”, this line immediately becomes EXTREMELY problematic.
On Doey — calling for his mother and expressing fear while traumatized and dissociating is not evidence of permanent childlike status. That is what trauma does to people regardless of age. Adults in extreme psychological breaks regress. Adults cry for their parents. Adults become incoherent when their mind is fracturing under pressure. That is a trauma response, not a confirmation of biological or mental age. Though he is a complex case, so this is all that will be said about him for now.
On Poppy’s youngest personality sobbing and begging to go home — that is a trauma response and a dissociative system. Not a child. A shattered adult mind trying to cope.
On Psychology, Trauma, and What They Actually Mean
The entire stunted adult argument is built on psychology. That’s the foundation of it. Adults with trauma, isolation, or psychological damage often behave irrationally or emotionally. That does not make them children, and it does not revert their brain to a child’s developmental stage.
Acting childlike because of trauma is real and well-documented — nobody is dismissing that. But acting childlike because of trauma while being an adult is literally the definition of the stunted adult argument. Trauma does not equal childhood. Adults experience trauma too, and it can absolutely cause regression, emotional dysregulation, and stunted behavior. That’s not exclusive to children.
Neurodivergent adults, particularly those with trauma histories, can absolutely act childish at times. That alone doesn’t prove anything about age. What’s seen in the toys goes well beyond that pattern. The behavior varies based on how individuals process trauma. Same environment, different outcomes. That is not what permanent biological childhood looks like.
Lily being broken into acting like a child after years of targeted psychological warfare, isolation, and starvation is not proof that becoming a toy makes adults into children. It’s proof that what was done to her specifically was devastating enough to destroy her completely. Broken adults and children are not the same thing. Child doesn’t equal childish. Trauma doesn’t equal child.
Poppy’s dissociative system, Doey’s regression under extreme psychological stress, the Prototype’s emotional outbursts — these are all symptoms of severe adult trauma. They are not evidence of permanent biological childhood. The difference between a cognitively childlike person and a traumatized adult whose development has been warped or arrested is a real and clinically meaningful one. These characters fall into the second category.
Also, adults who are intellectually disabled still deserve a level of autonomy and the ability to consent to things, even if that may require assistance of concepts being reworded or explained slowly so that they can understand. Adults who are mentally disabled still can and do have adult desires, they want relationships, want intimacy, and treating them as incapable of consenting infantilizes them and takes away their agency.
The Narrative Weight Argument
There is a genuine difference between killing adults who are consciously coming after someone because of what was taken from them versus killing manipulated children who don’t even fully understand what was done to them. Both are tragic, but they’re completely different kinds of tragedy with completely different moral implications for the player.
The thought of murdering literal children who had no say in what happened to them and no control over their current environment is genuinely disturbing. If the team is sticking to the forever children route, “but it’s a mercy kill” doesn’t make it any less messed up. That framing matters and the story can’t have it both ways. It also puts the actions and morals of the Player as well as the celebration from certain toys like Giblet into question. Though I assume it’s for shock value and nothing else. It is a horror game after all.
It’s also worth noting that most people in media — don’t know how to write children. There’s a long-standing pattern of writing children who sound unnervingly mature and adults who act like toddlers. It’s confusing and it muddles these kinds of discussions significantly.
On the “Jury’s Still Out” Argument
It’s possible the team has differing opinions internally and decided to play it safe by going with the forever children route — possibly out of fear of backlash, which would explain why Isaac retracted his statement during the Chapter 5 Q&A thread on X. The forever children route hasn’t been explained or explored in the game itself, and the science/lore actively contradicts it. That alone makes it very difficult to accept that interpretation when everything else is working against it, especially given how scattered the lore already is.
The few toys that have actually been met — Gilbet especially — do not behave like children. And it’s genuinely hard to understand why adult attributes would be given to characters who are supposedly children. At the end of the day, none of this is truly confirmed. It’s all interpretation. And right now, the interpretation being treated as gospel is the one with the least in-game support (for now anyway).
What’s most important here is that the lore and science contradict what’s being pushed in certain spaces, and no one has addressed that publicly or in-game. This isn’t FNAF. AUs exist. Kids grow up. The mascots can be separated from the people inside them (like silverus-kvassus Mascots!AU or varlagimler’s AU for example). They’re just fictional characters, not real people. And certain terms are being thrown around loosely against innocent people who are just engaging with the fandom normally — with self-appointed morality police acting outraged in ways that often don’t even line up with their own stated belief systems or stay silent on actual real life victims.
There is also the question of why the Discord shuts down all discussion on the topic entirely. Most official (and even fan) servers for franchises and series of any size allow open discussion, including shipping, as long as it stays SFW. That kind of conversation isn’t dangerous to minors within appropriate boundaries. If the case is airtight, why get defensive? Why refuse to push back or elaborate? Every server has the right to run however they want — but the refusal to engage and being highly defensive with questions this openly contradicted by their own writing is, at minimum, odd.
If Mob goes ahead and says all the experiments are "children forever" for whatever bs reason, everything will fall apart immediately.
Plus it generally doesn't work, because the people who were made experiments NEVER DIED before the procedure. They aren't souls possessing those bodies, those are full living, breathing humans who were given essentially a full-body surgical reconstruction. They were never resurrected, the only one who was resurrected is Poppy, who, mind you, is the ONLY CHARACTER in the entire game ever referred to as a child by The Prototype of all people. So no, these people aren't kids. There is an aspect in biology that science simply is incapable to interfere and that is our brain, no matter the circumstance it is put into, the brain still grows and develops into the adult stage no matter who tries to interfere with or without our consent.
A Theory on Oliver’s Age (Speculation Only)
Please note that this is just a theory and is not yet confirmed. All speculation.
Based on how Oliver behaves in the voice tape between him and Elliot, he was likely around 13 when he was turned into the Prototype. Assuming this happened somewhere in the 70s–80s, his birth year would fall roughly between 1957 and 1972. The personal lean here is somewhere in the late 60s to early 70s, so probably born around 1960–1965. If we’re going the “some toys are adults” route — which the science supports — depending on where in that range things land, he’d have been somewhere in his mid-20s to late 30s by the Hour of Joy. Which means by 2005 he would’ve been around 42–43 years old.
As for Poppy, she likely died at age 12 from an unknown illness or disease, then was brought back still 12 by Elliot after the Prototype experiment was a success. Born March 7, 1949, she died sometime in the 1960s. Counting from birth, by the Hour of Joy in 1995 she would have been 46, and by 2005 she would have been 56. But if we count from when Poppy actually came back to life — somewhere in the mid-to-late 70s to 80s — then by the Hour of Joy she’d have been around 22–32 years old. And by 2005 she’d be somewhere between 32–42, which actually makes her younger than the Prototype even though she was born decades before him.
This is all personal interpretation. Make of it what you will.
On the Fandom and What Actually Needs to Be Said
This topic is sensitive, and that sensitivity is understandable. Bad people exist and will always target childlike or mentally vulnerable characters — that is disgusting and deserves to be called out. But throwing around terms like “predator” and “groomer” this loosely is causing real damage to real innocent people. There is a massive difference between calling out something genuinely dangerous and harmful and going on a witch hunt because someone finds a fictional character compelling. Using heavy accusations inaccurately dilutes the meaning, muddies the conversation, and makes it harder to identify and address actual harm when it happens.
And don’t come lecturing about morality and the protection of minors while throwing serious accusations around carelessly like they mean nothing. If someone is genuinely attracted to something that is clearly wrong and harmful, that deserves to be called out and taken seriously. But most of the time, these terms are being thrown at innocent people without a second thought — and for what exactly? To act like you have a moral high ground or virtue signaling? If the concern for minors is genuine, where is that energy for real children? Fighting against predators? Helping real victims? Because the loudest voices in these arguments are often the same ones who go completely silent when it comes to actually helping real victims and stopping real predators or treating fiction like is real and reality like it’s fiction. Sorry, not sorry.
There is also a meaningful difference between a character who was once a child and a character who is currently, functionally, and canonically a child. Trauma, warped development, and stunted psychology do not equal childhood. A damaged or mentally vulnerable adult is not a child. Engaging with fiction — including AUs where characters are aged up or reimagined — is not the same as engaging with actual children. Most people engaging with these characters are responding to the design and the character as they exist now, not the child they once were. Those two things can be separated. AUs exist for a reason. These are fictional characters. Critical thinking needs to be applied here, because words have real consequences for real innocent people. Please go and read this post as it goes into more context on the sensitive subject matter: Here
I just wish people would focus more on the lore and the science instead of obsessing over the “child” aspect — because right now that obsession is causing unnecessary drama and harm, and MOB being intentionally vague or refusing to outright state it in-game or publicly isn’t helping anyone.
That’s the full breakdown. Feel free to share your own thoughts and theories — but please, keep it civil. No arguments in the comments. Any deranged lunatic foaming at the mouth will be blocked and not be engaged with!
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
areudirty
gummygunk
