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 as well as clarifications.
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
A Mob team in the official PPT Discord server confirms otherwise, and Isaac—the original creator-said the same thing until he was attacked and forced to retract his statement to appease this insufferable fandom, which behaves exactly like the TADC fandom when things don't go their way. It's never been stated publicly or in-game. Amber's statement doesn't count either; she got in trouble for saying they're forever children and the mods had to make an announcement in the official Poppy Playtime discord about not taking the headcanons of the Mob team too seriously. That's just her headcanon. The toys, as they stand, are neither children nor adults-they're open to interpretation, which is how it should be (both perspectives can work can work by the way).
In fact, you can do anything with these characters—make them forever children, adults, aliens, or kaijus. Like Undertale, there are no limits to the imagination. Alternate Universes (AUs), headcanons, and aging up characters for ships or OCs have been normal parts of fandom culture for a long time. It’s fiction; it isn't that deep.
Critical thinking and media literacy matters here.
Engaging with aged-up or reimagined fictional AUs is not the same as engaging with actual children. Most people are responding to who these characters are now, not who they used to be or the designs. As long as appropriate boundaries are in place and no lines are being crossed, then it’s fine.
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.”
And then of course, there’s this song: Wrongside Out by CG5
Make what you will with it.
What we can examine are the bones he has in his final official design (not counting the ribcage, since that doesn’t belong to him). The radius and ulna are present in the final Prototype design, so we can theorize that those bones are from his original body. In a height comparison (from the experiments), Proto’s upper half shares the same height as an average human (in this case, the Player). This could indicate that Proto is no longer a child, given that the radius and ulna are the length of an adult skeleton.
Now, is it possible? Well, let’s remind ourselves that Elliot’s Poppy Gel — used only on Proto and Poppy — was capable of stimulating cell regeneration and reviving deceased organisms, as well as encouraging cellular regeneration and tissue growth (bones being living tissue), granting immortality to both Proto and Poppy.
It’s unknown whether Elliot’s PG allowed this growth to happen passively over time. We know Poppy’s organs remain inside the porcelain doll, which keeps her from physically “growing.” But Proto may be a different case, if we take these details about his bones as a sign of his growth.
All speculation as of right now.
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) as well as that Q&A with her and Giblet with her screaming at him “He loves me!” 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 herself, and this just proves it. If Mob does hit us with the “forever children”, these lines immediately become 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.
Sentient entities who are psychologically warped, mentally stunted, or prone to trauma-induced regression still fundamentally deserve a level of personal agency, autonomy, and the right to consent to their own relationships and actions. This holds true even if their complex mental state requires patience, or requires concepts to be reworded and explained slowly so they can process them.
Having deep-seated trauma or a fractured psyche does not erase a person's underlying maturity or turn them into a child. To look at their coping mechanisms, hyper-energetic behaviors, or moments of trauma-driven regression and label them as entirely incapable of consent or inherently 'predatory' is deeply harmful. It completely infantilizes them, strips them of their lived experiences, and unjustly denies them their agency. This principle applies strictly to individuals and entities who are communicative and cognitively functional, and does not include those suffering from animalistic, feral regression or complete, uncommunicative cognitive erasure aka severely intellectually impaired (this is for those who are into shipping or are concern about shipping).
To be absolutely clear: visual presentation still matters here.
•Poppy: I am fundamentally against anyone sexualizing Poppy. Her visual design is explicitly child-coded. Even if her mind has aged across decades, her aesthetic remains that of a young girl doll. Doing so is completely wrong.
•The Other Toys: Entities like The Prototype, Mommy Long Legs and so on look nothing like children. They are massive, abstract, biological creatures. So, I don’t have any issues when others portray them in certain aspects or situations unless otherwise.
With that being said: The few toys that we have actually 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). 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. We can take The Prototype into account, but we never knew how his transformation happened, so we cannot know for sure. So no, these toys aren't forever 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.
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.
If Mob goes ahead and says all the experiments are "children forever" for whatever bs reason, everything will fall apart immediately.
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.
Listen, the writing and lore aren’t bad. It’s good and I truly enjoy it, but you have to admit, it is all over the place and certain things have not been addressed nor cleared yet. And yes, I know it’s fiction so the science and whatever shouldn’t “matter” too much, but once you establish rules in your fictional world, those rules matter. You don’t get to build an internal logic and then selectively ignore it the moment it stops supporting the interpretation you want. That’s not how storytelling works. If the lore/writing and science are actively contradicting a claim, you can’t just hand-wave it away because of whatever. Either you stay consistent and stick with what you have presented or you don’t, you can’t have it both ways just because you refuse to admit the writing/lore isn’t consistent or desperate for shock value. I’m just saying. 🤷🏻♀️
For more info on this topic as well as the controversy surrounding it, go here: Link
This is all personal interpretation. Make of it what you will.
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! 🚫
