Michael: Into The Michaelverse

I suppose my main deviation from popular opinion is that I view his “atonement” as being interpersonal rather than individual. What I mean by that is that yes there can and should be consequences for his actions but I view the issue as being something that should just be between him and his brother rather than this being some indelible crime that brands him a “bad person” forever and that he needs to complete the twelve trials of Heracles to atone for. Yes he absolutely owes it to his brother to make it up to him but to be honest it’s really nobody else’s problem over whether or not they need to forgive him because CC is the only one he hurt.

In my time in the FNAF fandom there have been many theories where to be honest I don’t have a very strong opinion on them and one of them is whether or not CC would forgive Michael. I have seen very good arguments to either side and can confidently say that I’m neutral on this matter. I don’t think CC owes Michael his forgiveness so whatever he decides to do would be fine with me and I just don’t feel that I know enough about CC as a character to make a firm judgement either way. Although at the end of the day, and I don’t want it to seem like I’m being cold by saying this but, does it really matter? CC is dead in canon and as we’ve seen multiple times with ghosts in this series they’re not typically able to make sound judgement in their incorporeal state especially CC who is seen in pretty much every source we have of him to be in a state of confusion and dwindling consciousness (Logbook, TWB) And seeing as he is in fact dead in canon what way is there for Michael to actually atone? He can free his spirit, sure, but there’s no way to actually bring his brother back from the dead.

Many people in the fandom tend to view Michael helping to free the souls of the MCI kids as being his atonement to the point where those who don’t believe that he was actually intent on helping them view it as him being “selfish” I disagree with this sentiment as not only has he been shown to have every intention of helping the MCI kids (Ticket to Fun, Happiest Day Minigames) but even if he didn’t how would that make him “selfish”??? He had nothing to do with the MCI and it’s not his responsibility to put his life on the line to help them. Why should he have to atone for the crimes of his father? The mere fact that he is trying to help the MCI kids speaks to his tremendous unselfishness in my opinion.

As to how Michael views his own atonement I believe that it’s actually very similar to public opinion. I think Michael believes that all that he’s doing is to atone for the unforgivable sin he believes he committed several years ago. I believe that Michael has an extremely warped view of himself and believes that he is unworthy of happiness no matter what and the only think he can do is try to make up for his sins by doing whatever he can to free the souls of his siblings along with his father’s victims. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Michael Afton is Michael Afton’s number 1 hater. (Maybe number 2 hater though because William exists)

Hello! I’d had that video recommended to me but hadn’t actually watched it until just now.

I thought it was alright I don’t really agree with all of it but it was interesting for sure

As it pertains to Michael I obviously don’t agree with everything (I’ve already made 2 different metas about my opinions on MikeCouch lol) but I really liked the idea that he was trying to help out the missing kids by making sure their bodies were found. Overall I found it to be a pretty refreshing take on him as the public consensus nowadays is mostly that he was willingly assisting his father so I like that there are people that disagree with that notion still.

Hi there thanks for the ask I’m happy to answer even if we don’t agree.

I personally never interpreted this line as an order

Technically all we have here is a just a line. Unfortunately we don’t really know the tone he’s using or how he’s saying it because we’re just reading the text without anyone actually speaking. There’s not even any dialogue blips for us to guess what this character sounded like. I’ve never really interpreted this line as an “order” maybe more like a “suggestion” or even a “plea”?

I definitely understand why it wouldn’t sound that way to most people though, after all it kind of stands in contradiction to the way Michael speaks to his father in the end of SL speech but in my personal interpretation of Michael he would’ve drastically changed after the events of 1983 and his way of speaking, especially to William, would have too.

In my view teenage Michael speaks very directly and doesn’t really use words like “please” because he doesn’t want to appear weak. Michael’s whole thing in my interpretation of him is that he feels powerless so he feels like he has to appear strong to fight that feeling of helplessness. I think he picks on CC specifically because he is a reminder of everything Michael doesn’t want to be and all the traits he is angry at in himself that he once had. So bullying his brother, maybe even subconsciously, is kind of his way of helping him out. He needs to toughen up because he’ll never survive the way he is now. But he personally believes that his bullying is just harmless pranks he doesn’t think he’s going too far which is why he’s against what William is doing here. William, especially in this moment, is scary as hell. He’s just come home belligerently drunk after killing a child and breaking numerous traffic laws. Who knows his clothes are probably still covered in Charlie’s blood as he probably hasn’t had time to change or anything and her murder wasn’t as planned as the others. Michael probably thought whatever he was going to do to his brother he was probably going to die that night and as we know from his reaction to CC actually dying Michael is against that so he tries to stop him. But because Michael is probably understandably scared of William he does the only thing he knows how to do when he feels threatened and tries to act more in control than he actually is and the way he does this is by emulating the most “powerful” person he knows, that being William himself. Talking to him as if he were an equal, in my mind, was his way of trying to gain control in a situation where he felt like he had none.

I also don’t think that at this point in his life Michael is really acting subservient to William. I think part of why he acted out as a teenager was to act in a way that William wouldn’t like on purpose to piss him off. William wants him to be “presentable” and “polite” and Michael is doing everything in his power to be Not That. The teenage Michael that exists in my mind really wants to act like he doesn’t care or isn’t scared of William at all. And this kinda goes back to my interpretation that he doesn’t want to seem “weak”. This is why in my timeline CC never learns that Michael helped him out this night. He is constantly trying to outrun the “caring about his family” allegations on account of it making him seem “soft”.

Anon it’s so interesting that you ask this because MikeCouch is actually one of my favorite FNAF theories involving Michael and I actually had a draft about this I was already working on before you sent in this ask but I was hesitant about sharing it because of how weirdly unpopular it is even though I think it has a very high chance of being true.

I’ll be splitting this conversation into 2 parts the first is why I think it’s true and why I like it because for me those two things aren’t necessarily always connected as I have both hated theories that have a very high likelihood of being true and liked theories that are almost certainly false it just so happens that I both like this theory and also think that it’s very likely

Why I think MikeCouch is true:

My argument for MikeCouch mostly hinges on the principle of Occam’s Razor which is that the simplest explanation is most often true. I think a lot of the problems with Midnight Motorist that allowed it to become so widely argued about is that people often over-complicate it and think it just has to be something different than the most obvious situation but like…y’all…I don’t really think Scott knows how to play 4D chess 😭. Sure he adds hints and things here and there but I don’t think it’s going to be something as convoluted having Midnight Motorist just be about some random family when every other 8-bit FNAF 6 minigame connects to something actually important in the lore. So I think the best way to figure out Midnight Motorist is to find the interpretation with the most amount of evidence.

Obviously, then, we have to operate under the assumption that the yellow guy is almost certainly William. Five laps at Freddy’s basically confirms this and like I alluded to before it makes no sense for this minigame to inexplicably be about some random family or even about Henry/Edwin when the Aftons are literally the main focus of the games (at least in the ScottGames era which is when Fnaf 6 takes place)

Now that we’re done with the Yellow Guy who are the Runaway and the Couch Person most likely to be?

The reason I think the character most likely to be the couch person is Michael because out of all of the theories for who the couch person could be, the theory that it’s Michael just has the most evidence whereas the evidence for the other theories is mostly just guesswork. Let’s look at the evidence for MikeCouch

1. The couch person looks very similar to Michael in terms of character design (grey shirt, tan skin) 2. Both characters text colors are a shade of grey

3. The couch person is pictured as watching TV which could allude to the Sister Location end of the night segments where Michael watched The Immortal and the Restless on his TV

4. This may just be my interpretation but it seems to me that the person on the couch in MM seems to be in some sort of “caretaker” or “babysitter” role to the runaway kid similar to how Michael was presumably often left alone to take care of CC during the FNAF 4 minigames

And then obviously, if Michael is the couch person this would leave CC as the only possible option for the runaway.

Oh by the way and for anyone thinking “but tumblr blog the-michaelverse! You’re using couch persons appearance as evidence while saying that yellow guy is William even though William doesn’t look anything like the yellow guy at all everyone knows that William’s signature color is purple not yellow”

Y’all…

William is, in fact, heavily associated with the color yellow. The games go out of its way to call attention to the yellow color of the SpringBonnie suit, which is heavily associated with William to the extent that he becomes one with it in his death. In fact, in the movies he’s referred to almost exclusively as the Yellow Rabbit. He is just as much associated with the color yellow as he is purple if not more.

But anyway I understand if you may be thinking that this isn’t much evidence at first glance but I would argue that it is much more evidence than any other explanation for who the couch person is.

There are a couple of other theories for who the couch person is but I’ll go through a couple of the most common to give you some idea of what I’m talking about (keep in mind I’m only using the theories that could still be true if the yellow guy is William)

The two most common theories I’ve seen for who the couch person is other than Michael are HenryCouch and MrsAftonCouch however neither of these have as much evidence as the clear parallels between Mike and the couch person. Allow me to elaborate:

1. HenryCouch: This may just come down to my personal interpretation of Henry’s character but this one has always seemed a little far-fetched to me because why on earth would Henry be at Williams house babysitting his kids during his own daughter’s birthday party????? Like, I understand he wasn’t the most attentive father but from every iteration we have of his character in the Games, Movies and Books it seems to me like he actually loves Charlie he just is kind of neglectful to her for the sake of his work so you’d think he’d be doing something more important than watching TV at his business partners house if he was skipping out on his daughters birthday to do it. Also if he’s too busy to watch his own child than what is he doing babysitting William’s kid? I guess it would make more sense if you think Midnight Motorist doesn’t take place the night Charlie died but I’m sorry but I find that very unlikely. The minigame is called “Later that Night” in the FNAF 6 code and that in addition to the similarities between it and the “Take Cake to the Children” in FNAF 2 (i.e. William’s purple car, the rain etc.) and the fact that the other minigames with lore importance in FNAF 6 (Fruity Maze and the Security Puppet) both depict important events in the timeline it doesn’t make sense to me that it could be just some random day. Regardless of anything I’ve said here, the fact that the couch person sprite resembles FNAF 4 Michael as well as the TV connection means that there is more evidence tying Michael to the couch person than Henry. The only connection I could think of to tie Henry to the couch person is the grey color of the couch person’s shirt potentially tying back to the grey man in FNAF World. But that would mean that the only evidence for this theory is another theory with very little evidence and I’m sorry but I just don’t believe that that’s very conclusive.

2. Mrs. Afton has never been directly mentioned in any other piece FNAF media so there’s nothing to tie her to the couch person. Sure you could say that it’s her but it’s not really something that you can prove one way or the other. At least it makes more sense for her to be there taking care of William’s (and presumably her) child but once again the resemblance between the couch person and Michael is just way more evidence than anything this theory could have

Pretty much all other theories are more of the same. None of them really have as much evidence as MikeCouch so my question is why do more people not believe in MikeCouch? Well, for some of them, I can probably guess why, it’s because they don’t want to.

One thing about me is I actually really enjoy watching FNAF theory videos. I know some people don’t because some FNAF theorists (not all but some) can get pretty opinionated with their theories and weirdly aggressive with people who don’t share their extremely inconsequential opinions on the lore of a video game series about haunted animatronics but when they’re normal and chill about it I actually really enjoy seeing other people’s interpretations of FNAF even if I don’t agree. And although maybe this is just me, one thing I’ve noticed is that throughout a lot of the videos I’ve watched about Midnight Motorist there’s been an underlying theme of people desperately trying to prove their theories as right for no other reason than that they don’t like the alternative. I’ve seen people utterly lose their minds over the prospect that Midnight Motorist was probably about the Aftons the whole time even though it’s been fairly obvious from the beginning in my opinion. It’s too simple a solution for them to get behind and because they prefer an alternate explanation, then AftonMM must be untrue. It’s the same thing with MikeRunaway, because they want Michael to be the runaway they will accept no other explanation.

Another thing is the death order problem. For some reason, FNAF fans are obsessed with finding out the correct answer for who died first in the timeline despite the answer not really mattering that much in my opinion. But people get really really mad about this to the point where it causes them to reject certain theories in favor of other ones that may have less evidence just because they want their view on the lore to be correct. It’s the same with Midnight Motorist. See the problem with Midnight Motorist to them is that it’s heavily implied to have taken place the night of Charlotte Emily’s death and if MikeCouch is true than the only person who could be the runaway is CC and that is unacceptable to them because, in their view of the timeline, CC dies before Charlotte. Any theory that implies CharlieFirst to be true has to be false because they’ve already decided that BVFirst is true. So they reject any possible theory that could dispute what, to them, is indisputable fact.

But it’s not only theory opinions that people treat as undisputed fact but character opinions as well. Because they’ve decided that Michael was just 100% a bully all of the time and wanted nothing to do with his brother ever at any point, then MikeCouch must be out of the question because it would be “Out of Character” or at least out of the character that they presume that he has. It’s the same thing with CCRunaway, arguably even more so because there’s this ridiculous notion that the runaway breaking his window and running away from his home while his abusive father was actively hunting him down to “make him pay” was an act of “delinquency” and ummmmm last I checked running away from a dangerous situation isn’t delinquency that’s like normal self-preservation I fear. What do you want him to do just stay and potentially get seriously hurt or whatever William was gonna do to him???? It’s equally ridiculous whether it was CC or Michael. The runaway didn’t break a window (in his own house mind you) because he was a vandal he broke it because he felt like he had no other option to escape his situation. It wasn’t an act of delinquency but of desperation. But since only a “delinquent” character can be the runaway it has to be Michael the no-good rapscallion rather than pure sweet innocent CC because anything else would just be “OOC”

Why I like MikeCouch:

Listen, for all my yapping about people refusing to believe in MikeCouch just because they don’t want to I honestly couldn’t care less. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t matter if you reject theories just because you don’t like them, in fact I do it all the time. It’s completely harmless and it really doesn’t matter because at the end of the day this is all just about forming your own personal opinions and theories about the timeline of a video game series that is not real. All you have to do is admit that that’s what you’re doing and not be a jerk to people who don’t have the same opinions as you. Don’t take your subjective interpretation about a piece of media and try to force people to believe it just because it’s what you personally believe and we’ll be fine. I really hope I don’t come off as someone who’s doing just that in this post. If you don’t like MikeCouch, or if you aren’t convinced by the evidence I just laid out, that’s completely fine. I don’t even believe that’s the only reason people don’t like it, I just mean some of them don’t like it for that reason. You are not obligated to believe any of this. You can believe whatever FNAF theories you want and that’s ok. Because truthfully? The reason I like it is actually kind of similar to the reasons people might not like it. I like it because it reinforces my personal interpretation of Michael.

I love MikeCouch because I love the juxtaposition between his behavior in the FNAF 4 minigames and his behavior in Midnight Motorist under MikeCouch. Confirming that he wasn’t always awful to his brother all the time adds a lot of complexity to their relationship that I can’t help but adore as a lover of nuance and moral ambiguity.

Thank you very much for the kind words anon!

Older Michael? Huge nerd. Anyone who creates an entire bucket of popcorn every night so they can sit in front of their tv and watch their favorite vampire soap opera and then writes in their work-required activity book that they relate to the main character of said vampire soap opera has to be a major nerd

Most of the time when I see people reducing Michael’s character to being pure evil it’s because they’ve forced him and his brother into these narrow roles where Michael can only be seen as the ‘Abuser’ and CC his ‘Victim’

And because Michael is in the ‘Abuser’ role he’s apparently not allowed to have a single redeeming quality. He’s not allowed to be sympathetic. He’s not allowed to have actually cared about his brother in any capacity. And he certainly is not allowed to have been a victim himself. Looking any deeper at his character is a luxury he can never be afforded due to him being written off as a ‘Bad Person’

And while I understand the propensity against thinking about characters you dislike I believe there’s a difference between that and the downright refusal to acknowledge nuance.

It also seems that recently people have become so quick to brush off Michael as being an intrinsically evil character because of a perceived lack of information in the actual canon itself. A belief that is easily proven to be false after looking into it for more than 3 seconds. With the survival logbook alone you could actually make the argument we know more about Michael’s personality in the games than over half of the other important human characters in the franchise. And that’s not even counting other information we have about him which is NOT as few and far between as people would have you believe. And while, yes, there is still plenty of room for interpretation (every Michael fan I’ve seen has a different interpretation of him) the same could be said for literally every other character in this entire franchise including William who we’re allegedly supposed to “know the most about” according to popular opinion but despite that people still can’t agree on what his motivations even are.

But anyway, let’s look at what information we can uncover about Michael from this “lack of evidence”

Firstly, it’s obvious to me that he was abused by William, this much is evident not just from his speech at the end of SL but also from other materials such as What We Found being a clear parallel for Michael. Given this it’s logical to assume that he was acting out due to his treatment at home.

Also looking closer at his character reveals that there are multiple things that suggest a more nuanced view of his relationship with his brother such as Step Closer, Midnight Motorist if you’re a MikeCouch believer (which I am) and the TV scene from the FNAF World drowning ending. Things like this make me hesitant to believe that he was nothing but horrible to CC all the time. It’s more complicated than that.

But with that being said he wasn’t blameless either. And this is where I’m afraid I’m going to lose those of you that were following my logic up to this point. Because on the other side of this argument you have the people that have taken these sympathetic qualities to the extreme, using them to effectively eliminate his guilt in the Bite. Because while everything I’ve said up until now is true that still doesn’t make it okay. Because at the end of the day the way he treated his brother was objectively terrible and I’ve seen a lot of Michael fans struggle to acknowledge this. He was a bully and he was cruel to CC and I’m sorry but that’s the truth and it is still the truth no matter how sympathetic he may have been. None of this should be an excuse for his behavior just an explanation.

I understand sympathy for a character can sometimes blind you towards accepting they weren’t always the best person and I do think that this is intensified by the fact that some people seem to over exaggerate Michael’s treatment of CC. Some of the things people say Michael did are just straight up fabrications but that still doesn’t change the fact that he was in the wrong for the way he acted. For example: I don’t think Michael intended any physical harm to come to his brother with the bite but that doesn’t change the fact that he planned to upset and humiliate him on his birthday.

And honestly, I think I’m just as annoyed with the sanitization of teenage Michael as I am with him being overly villainized because they both destroy what I believe to be the most interesting thing about his character which is that he has an arc. He grows. He becomes a better person. This is just as impossible if he was always evil as it is if he was always good. Denying that he bullied his brother feels wrong to me because it removes his nuance just as much as if you said he was only evil the whole time.

I sometimes think of both extremes of the conversation around teen Michael as being two sides of the same coin. I think that at their cores both stem from the annoyingly prevalent idea that you absolutely cannot like a character who has done anything bad. You either need to condemn them in their entirety or try to cover up or excuse their mistakes thereby effectively destroying any nuance they have by making these two ridiculously rigid moral extremes the only two things they can be.

Because, truthfully, nobody really knows what’s going on so imo everyone can basically just believe whatever they want. But that being said there are some theories that are incredibly unlikely. And guess what? You’re still allowed to like them. If that makes the story better for you then I don’t really see a problem with having a view/rewrite of the timeline that’s probably not canon. Go crazy.

The problem for me is when people start insisting that their view is the One True Canon and everyone has to subscribe to it. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen one of those Canon vs. Fanon comparison things with FNAF that pisses me off. Like, bro, is the Canon in the room with us????? This is FNAF we don’t do that here. And you always look at their supposedly completely true and infallible “Canon” information and it’s like HudsonGuard or something. That’s when I will start dunking on people’s theories, when their attitude about it is just a bit too insane. But otherwise I’m pretty much fine with whatever people want to believe.

I am the last possible person to start getting all upset about other people’s theories because I have several theories that make no sense whatsoever but I like them anyway just because I think it would be interesting. Do I think that they’re true? Almost certainly not but the idea is intriguing to me, sometimes more so than what probably actually happened and that’s ok. The difference is, I don’t go around acting like my interpretation is canon, especially when it can be easily disproven. Even with theories I do have sufficient evidence for I would never say with 100% certainty they’re canon and I’m pretty much always gonna respect when others have a different point of view. Usually my arguments come from a place of annoyance because if I’m even making an argument in the first place it’s because people have grown too arrogant about their theories being true and I think I kinda get in this mindset where I feel I have to correct them. I’m working on it, guys.