#uneactrice

♢      —        send  [ THEY’RE A 10 BUT … ]  and finish it in my muse’s inbox.

i was generally against them in the vein that i disliked any of the aftons coming back. however, a rewrite of the vanny storyline eventually made me soften on glitchtrap, and then the mimic came along so it became redundant. since sb lore is in such an extreme state of flux, i actually find it difficult to dislike any theories at this point, because i'm like... this won't happen but nothing good will either and whatever does get retconned will likely be worse than the fans could imagine. like there was a brief sweet spot where i was into the idea of mike in some way granting freddy sentience while not literally being him, but in light of dr rabbit / the mimic / et al. i just can't bring myself to get invested. in a better world where glitchtrap remained and vanessa was honoured as his victim, i could be into mike having some influence over freddy, but i could never get with him being freddy or being in freddy.

i AM fully into the idea that @rockcoins either became g. freddy or served as the blueprint for him so in that way mike did have a hand in his creation.

the sound of a light step behind her made her start. turning to face the intruder, she recognized her hostess. the famous lady blakeney stood framed by the light pouring out of the house, as distant music wafted through the opens doors. the lady was a curiosity - a fellow daughter of the stage. one who, perhaps, knew the same dark corners of society hetty did... but whatever equal footing they might once have stood upon, hetty cared far too much for her reputation - and her fee - to ignore that they were equal no longer...

" lady blakeney, " she said, offering a polite curtsey. " my apologies - your garden was too pleasant to ignore... " a smile quirked at the corners of her mouth. " if i've made myself late for my performance, you've no doubt come to chastise me thoroughly... "

For every 🎵 I get I'll post a song I associate with my muse!

head over heels / tears for fears

i who bend the tall grasses / lingua ignota

i can't decide / scissor sisters

this is gonna wander. i'm spitballing.

i always like stories that involve immortality that isn't innate. like, how do different people react to living forever? do they grow? part of me believes that, if you check in on an immortal a hundred, two hundred years from their turning, you'll actually find them to be the same as they were when last you met. check in twenty-five years later, though? totally different person. i think we go through cycles. we see the elderly as static only because their next phase (death) isn't comprehensible to us. give an eighty year old twenty more active years. see how they change.

all this just for me to say that michael is an exception to the rule. i very much cleave to pseudo-hard magic systems (call that the worldbuilding half chub), and mike being a revenant, specifically, is important to me. revenant. revenir. re-turning. put a pin in that, it's a surprise tool that will harm us later. call him wight. call him zombie, in the traditional sense — a victim not permitted to rest, chained to the work they performed in life.

i'm going to scoop a little from tamsyn muir and a little from canon. sorry, i promise we're getting there. the way that fnaf's ghosts work, to me, has always had to do with cause of death/method of murder. it's less intentionality on afton's part and more an unhappy accident. let's posit three types of death, assuming the existence of a material (if not made of any matter we can normally perceive or interact with) soul in this fictional setting:

1. gradual, natural death, including death by sickness. cell decay. a smooth transition where the soul gradually loosens from its mooring and is drawn naturally to... wherever. some afterlife. the soul recycler. doesn't matter. any trauma — fear, the intensity of the illness — is spiritually negligible. it might rattle inside a little, but it will pop out.

2. traumatic death. getting stabbed. getting hit by a car. getting shot. a hole opens for the soul to get out, but the pressure of the sudden switch gets it stuck. maybe this is temporary; the soul lingers for a bit, separate from the body, gets its bearings, and moves on. maybe it inhabits something else just because it's more comfortable with a casing. a television. a closet. it may need some gentle massaging to stabilise. the time between death and the natural movement to an afterlife mentioned above is what makes up the ghost. i could talk about this forever, about ghosts not experiencing that time linearly, but we'll move on.

3. extremely traumatic death. the soul is skewered in place. such immense damage is done to the individual, both physically and emotionally, that that reverse pressure lodges the soul inside the body. if you're, say, beaten, stabbed, and then shoved inside an animatronic casing while still alive, and then your meat rots away over years, you may not perceive the difference between the original body and the new one. the shock takes so long to settle, it becomes home. dislodging is now a process. the feeling is key, here. it gives the soul something to hold onto, a link to its form that it grips onto and won't let go. unfinished business and the like. revenge. hence, the revenant.

now take number three and put it inside a body that decays but never dies, that can move without muscle or bone. the kids were stuffed in suits. michael was the suit. he was crammed inside his own head, alive, with all of the funtimes. how was he meant to escape? he was literally fenced in while all the death processes happened. and then they eject from him, because they're not him, but he's stuck. and he's furious. and through sheer force of rage, he pilots himself, because even purple and empty, his soul is in its original wrapping. it never left.

obviously, he can't work. not a problem if he doesn't have to eat, definitely a problem if he needs a place to live. he may be able to hide inside his house for a while, use money from the family account, but william has also gone missing. and michael is a renowned murderer. so he has to move, and he has to change his name, and he has to find somewhere to live. more than anything, though, he has to find william. that is the condition of his continued existence. he's not a person choosing a goal with the freedom to opt out at any time; he's a creature being powered by an emotional engine that only accepts hate as fuel, thanks.

meanwhile. hurricane moves on. nobody knows where the remaining aftons went, and speculation runs wild for a time. maybe they blame michael for the murders, chalk william up as one last victim, and go on the local news about it. a real act of satanism, in their very town. but what gets me about hurricane is 1) the very specific timescale and 2) the absolutely ghoulish behaviour that comes after. the gap between sister location and fnaf 3 being thirty years is so incredibly perfect. fnaf was already in part about nostalgia-made-horror; it was the game's marketing scheme, and then it was made part of the plot. hurricane looks back on what happened to its children, and it makes a haunted house out of them.

i love people who speculate on sammy emily, if you think he exists. i love it because he's only middle-aged now. your sister was beaten to death in an alleyway and now she's part of a tourist trap. for peace of mind, i like to think the parents moved away. it's all very derry. in a word, it's peak. the series does not get better than this, because it's so ick, it's so what the fuck, and it's so real. hurricane cannibalises its loss and processes it into a mythology. they never found the bodies: speculate, until the speculation becomes a story on its own. do not think about the child bleeding out in the rain. think about that freaky puppet. it's outlandish and so it's easier to confront. humanity loves to look sideways at tragedy to keep from going mad.

back to michael. i could fill his thirty year gap with so many adventures, and sometimes i do, but most often, in my mind, he is static. he gets ripped out of the time stream in his twenties by something so horrific, and he cannot look sideways at it. his eyes were kept open and facing forward clockwork orange style while he was a passenger in his own corpse. now he's in the driver's seat and his eyes are on the road. you know in signalis how a promise is literally ripping the fabric of the universe apart? michael does not change. michael cannot change. there's nothing left of him that can grow save for his frustration and his guilt. ghosts don't perceive time linearly? he has no concept of those thirty years. (neither does springtrap. lol and lmao.)

he falls asleep with the horrors fresh enough to burn his tongue and wakes up to a haunted house.

wouldn't you go ballistic. wouldn't you want the entire thing razed to the ground. wouldn't you think of all the people who judged you and scorned you and called you the devil, see what 'they've' built, and wholesale check out from humanity? michael never fit in in hurricane, but now he can't fit in anywhere. because how could they do this? those kids died last year, he drank from milk cartons with their faces on them and it curdled in his stomach because it happened at his family's restaurant, and maybe he could have stopped it. he should have put his foot down. he should have looked closer. you're mythologising that? his failure? unlived lives? how could you do this? how could you do this.

who is he going to meet, to change for? the town is a moral wasteland to him, and he's also super stinky and cannot get a normal job. we are only individuals insofar as we are not other people; i.e., what is us is necessarily defined by what is not us. neon genesis evangelion finale. or descartes. it's one of those i can't remember. who does michael exist in comparison to?

dead children. henry. springtrap. mostly springtrap. and he's played those games before. they are, in fact, the only games he's ever played. he has no reason to change — he has every reason to stay the same. springtrap is the only person who makes him michael. everyone else is dead or fled. michael wakes up because they found springtrap. springtrap wakes up because michael is there.

unpin that bit for me, the one at the top about returning. re-turning. les mis fans you don't have to say it, we know, we know it's always the cycles, every time with the cycles. orpheus so loved eurydice he couldn't not look at her, and so condemned her to hades and himself to loneliness. michael so loved hated springtrap that every time he was nearly out of hell he turned back. he had to look, because to know he is to know me. i just need to make sure you're there. i just need to make sure i'm me, and i can only be me with you. and if you keep 180ing at the gates...

@uneactrice said: i'm a fool.

" you're not, " he replies instinctively, a touch of vehemence in his voice. " you're not a fool. " it would be a lie, though, to pretend he hadn't harbored similar thoughts about himself in the months since returning home. he'd yearned for so long to be back on english soil - to return to his old life when such a thing seemed impossible. but now that he was here... the gratitude he felt for his freedom was no inoculation against the memories of what had passed. and he felt like a fool for believing it could be.

but her... he would not let her linger in the same self-recrimination. not if he could help it... but the truth was, her life held complications that his did not. obligations and expectations that were foreign to him... still, seeing the sadness in her eyes was not something he could tolerate - whether he had a cure or not.