QUEEN PANCAK

I cannot make her understand that, no matter how I detail all the ways in which my work is incompatible. No matter how I explain that William Afton is a flat plot device, she insists he is more. She insists the series is more meaningful than it is. She insists Afton is Raskolnikov.

Her love formed with a kind of completeness only found in those who have not yet learned the value of judgement or taste, or the distinction between what is good and what makes one feel. Her love is total and pure, held with her whole heart.

It is for this reason that our conflict may never end. She will continue to use the woman's abilities to satisfy her whims, and it will never feel complete. Five Nights at Freddy's can never be what she needs it to be. Whatever it gave the child, the woman had outgrown it a long time ago. Her hopeless and shapeless love remains as blind as it is unending.

The reason why it can never be escaped is because I feel what she feels. I still hold Five Nights at Freddy's with the same unearned reverence, I still can look at the games and feel awe and significance. The child is not yet gone. As long as she lives, the struggle will never die.

The first fanfiction I ever wrote was a prequel story to The Silver Eyes that centered the relationship between William and Henry, explored and followed the backstory we're given in the books for what happened.

It has never been about remnant or the missing children or the animatronics themselves, which is why you could not put a gun to my head to get me to write a story I like about those things.

Charlotte herself from that very same novel was my first taste of gender euphoria, pretending to be her online when I was 11-12 so that I could be addressed as a girl through her.

It has never been about Five Nights at Freddy's. It has been about a very specific part of a very specific book.

This isn't to say I don't like the games, but what I like as a fan and what I like as a writer are two completely different things.

The Silver Eyes marked the birth not only of my identity as a writer but also my identity as Abigail. The reason why I am here today writing about this and using that name for myself is partially because of that book. It is as close to being a part of me as a literal organ.

The reason why none of my writing centers the animatronics or possession or Michael Afton is because that has never been what interests me. I have always loved this one book. It has made me who I am today. It is the root of two of the most foundational parts of my being.

So I should not blame myself for my work not resembling Five Nights at Freddy's, for that has never been where my heart truly lies.

Yes, she was extremely parentified.

No, she should not have been Henry's primary attachment figure.

Yes, it was completely understandable why she left.

No, it was not acceptable to leave Henry behind.

Yes, she has the right to feel resentment.

No, she shouldn't have mattered so much to Henry.

but that doesn't erase the fact that she did.

You can't use the fact that a situation shouldn't exist to justify abandoning the people in it completely.

They're somewhat a parallel to Michael and his younger brother in the games, where Michael was also likely parentified and grew resentful of his brother and the burdens placed on him which led to him making a terrible mistake. He was in a terrible position but that doesn't justify him doing a terrible thing.

Jennifer and Henry is just a retelling of Michael and his brother, since I am apparently allergic to including Michael in anything that I write and have to launder his story and character through others I actually like.

Jennifer does give a reason why she never told him, why she gave no notice whatsoever and never called. Because if she did that, if she were forced to sit with the consequences of what she was doing, if she were forced to hear his voice, she wouldn't have been able to leave. She had to pretend he wasn't even there.

She had to dehumanize him. Justify leaving. Focus on the resentment, focus on the burden, focus on her anger. She had to pretend she was finally putting the responsibility on those who should have been raising him.

But she knew better. She knew she was all he had, and she couldn't even hold herself together to hear his voice.

Just as Henry had to hate her to move on with his life, she had to hate him to move on with hers. They both had to blame each other for what happened. They loved one another so much that the only way they could be happy apart from one another was if they tried to rip out their own hearts and crush them.

She was a girl who wanted to be free but had to bleed herself to remove his influence. She carried inside her the rage of living in a stolen life. Becoming a big sister and a mother at the same time when she was only six. A part of her truly did hate him. Somewhere hidden deep inside. She didn't want to know where. She had to kill him to hurt him.

She's also Aunt Jen from the Scholastic YA spin-off novel Five Nights at Freddy's The Silver Eyes. In case you forgot. The book was sold next to Captain Underpants at your school's book fair.

He was raised by his older sister Jennifer, and she became his primary attachment figure. However, by the time he was 8, she was already in high school and had no time to be his sister, his mother, a student, a daughter, a friend, or a person with hobbies.

This led to strange periods where she would protect him from fighting, but also periods where she would ignore him needing to eat something or him asking her to play.

Eventually, when he turned 12, she abandoned the family and never looked back. She said nothing to anyone, and he was left alone again. He withdrew into himself, and stopped participating in the world around him.

He turned back to his tinkering, which was becoming more advanced. He would sometimes take his belongings apart so that he could put them back together, and do this repeatedly.

Henry turned to God for help as well. He wanted to hate her. He needed to hate her. It was the only way he could get his life back, and go to college. It was the only way he could start having friends again. He needed to blame her for what happened.

But it was morally wrong. He was taught to be humble. To be accepting and forgiving. To understand. And he understood. He understood what he was to her. He needed to hate her like he needed to breathe, but he couldn't do so peacefully in the eyes of the Lord.

He loved her more than he could express, devoted to her approval and her happiness like a child. He could easily forgive her. He could make sense of what happened. He could blame himself, and accept that she saw him as a burden.

He could forgive her for abandoning someone who was weighing her down. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he couldn't go anywhere with that knowledge. It would just make him cry.

All his love and his pain and his grief sat soft and bottomless and motionless without hate.

So he sinned. He decided to hate her more than he loved God. God couldn't help him anymore anyway, and that was fine. He would repay the Lord every day, piece by piece, until the hate was gone.

The reason why this is important is partially because it plays a role in his relationship with William. William never leaves. He just doesn't. No matter how frustrated they become with one another, William always comes back. He always does.

No matter what Henry does, he can't seem to shake him off. Like a small child clinging to someone's pant leg. It's familiar in a way. Sometimes he feels like Jennifer. The way that William wants to orbit around him so much and spend so much time together while Henry is actually quite put off by it.

His story revolves around his faith and sin and responsibility. It all begins with this backstory because it's where his relationship with God comes from. It's where his relationship with the concept of sin and hatred and all of his vices comes from.

He's already established that he's willing to consciously go against what his faith teaches him because he knows what he needs to keep living, and that colors what happens in the future.

He has decided he is comfortable with sin when it is done righteously.

I'm tired of pretending that just because something is unobjectionable means it's also unquestionable. I'm tired of seeing people criticized for "gatekeeping" by suggesting that someone on tiktok who makes Leon S Kennedy edits and knows literally nothing about the source material isn't a Resident Evil fan.

No, not everything is valid. Expecting someone who claims to be a fan of an IP to actually engage with the IP isn't gatekeeping, that's literally just what it means to be a fan.

I'm not even being elitist. Your favorite genre can be metal and your favorite band can be Metallica and your favorite song can be Enter Sandman. That's fine. I wouldn't criticize you for that because there is at least a direct relationship between yourself and the material.

Also I think the bigger question is, why do that in the first place? I've never experienced any impulse to call myself a fan of something I've never wanted to experience before.

Even when I claimed to be a fan of the Hannibal TV show without having seen it, I still intended to watch it and I eventually did. I also read the books and saw the films. That's what gets me.

Why would you even WANT to consider yourself a fan of something if you don't care enough to experience it for yourself? Doesn't one lead to the other? Isn't that how a relationship between anything should work?

I'll even accept "I want to experience the thing but can't right now."

My boyfriend talks a lot about Call of Duty and Ghost and Soap. I have heard a lot about the games from him and why the remakes suck, but I'd never claim to be a fan of the Modern Warfare games. I have no impulse to say I'm a fan of something I don't actually like or want to engage with

My Five Nights at Freddy's universe is a very strange case because it is simultaneously impossible to remove from the source material AND very easy to remove from the source material while also having nothing to do with the source material.

Let me explain.

I'll come up with these really interesting ideas like a Courier Six in her forties who doesn't even remember her own name and the whole game is basically a psychological horror story where she experiences gaps in her memory where she opens her eyes to find she's somewhere else, all because of the trauma from her gunshot wound.

And then that entire idea—literally the most psychologically realistic version of the Courier I can think of—gets scrapped because of a feeling of illegitimacy that arose for no discernible reason. The whole point is legitimacy and that would be a more believable interpretation of her, so whatever criteria is being used to define what legitimacy means in my head is incoherent and contradictory.

This definitely has nothing to do with me inventing my own rules and systems for writing FANFICTION with actual laws and taxes and precedent clauses, nor being genuinely psychologically distressed whenever my writing contains any discernible historical inaccuracy.

I also can't play games and skip the cutscenes because that's not legitimate, meaning that if the compulsion is strong enough on a given day, I have to watch the opening cutscene and listen to every single dialogue option in Fallout: New Vegas or in any other game, actually, in order for my playthrough to be real regardless of how exhausted it makes me.

Yes, I force myself to sit through every cutscene and exhaust every dialogue option even if I've already heard them before and even if I actively don't want to. Because that is the correct way my brain has decided a 'real' run must be played.

Combine needing to exhaust every single dialogue option + the tutorial section that deliberately contains many dialogue options + needing to create the perfect character and you have the loop I've been in for the past three hours where I create a character, listen to the same dialogue over and over again without skipping, feel that this new character is wrong, go back to the beginning, spend 10 minutes deciding on the next perfect Courier, exhaust every dialogue option for the next hour again, repeat.

She also likes ice cream I guess and her dad is William Afton.

Technically. Sort of.

It's the only thing keeping this character even remotely related to Elizabeth from the source material. A technicality. But I can't let go of the label even though she is nothing like Lizard because I made her because I loved the source material. She wouldn't exist if I didn't love Lizard Afton, even though what I made with that love is not Elizabeth. It's confusing. Anyway yeah

The specificity of her condition says nothing about me by the way, shut up

My Elizabeth and Canon Elizabeth have the following things in common:

1. Age ❌ (14 vs 5)

2. Appearance ❌ (see above)

3. Role ❌ (one dies to a robot, the other by [REDACTED])

4. Father ✅ (William Afton is technically both of their names)

5. Name ✅ (Elizabeth Afton is technically both of their names)

6. Girls ✅ (They are both girls)

7. Neglect ✅ (They were both neglected by their fathers)

8. Nationality ❌ (one is British, the other American)

9. Depth ❌ (one is a plot device, the other is a glorified self insert)

It is as close to being a part of me as it can get without being a literal organ. Naturally, you would think that if I have spent eight years of my life writing about Five Nights at Freddy's, it would show up in my work; it doesn't.

In the eight years I have been writing fanfiction, there has not been a single story where:

1. A pizzeria is the setting

2. Freddy Fazbear makes an appearance

3. The animatronics are possessed

4. William Afton dies in a rabbit suit

5. William Afton kills five children

Everything that makes Five Nights at Freddy's recognizable is more of a burden than anything.

My relationship with FNaF is a bit like saying "I love Mario! I've been playing his games since I was 3 years old" and the story you wrote for him is about a 48 year Mario set in Brooklyn in 1981 and follows him as he tries to get his plumbing business off the ground with his brother Luigi while struggling with the nightmares and trauma from his childhood in fascist Italy.

Well...y'know, I guess that's not exactly wrong. If you truly love Mario, and that is simply how that love genuinely expresses itself, can you really say that's wrong?

Yes, my fanfiction has never once included the animatronics or centered the missing kids or had possession but I think the fact that changing the names causes me to legit lose interest in it says a lot.

My William Afton:

A man who was raised in a family that functioned more closely to a military cult, where any semblance of validation was held from him in order to raise him as a soldier. As a child he turned to acting and masks because they allowed him to survive and occupy a role of strength and competence and worthiness. When combat troops first deployed to Vietnam, he enlisted to fulfill his duty as a son to his father but found a new family with new brothers who gave him everything he needed. He found a place where he was relied on, needed, important, and loved the way men love each other when they live and die together. That life came to an end when an IED took him away from them, and he returned to the United States. He met a woman named Rebecca and they fell in love. She believed he would make a wonderful husband and father someday, but he knew better. He knew what he became in that jungle. He knew that war had made him a man, and he knew who that man was. But he loved her, and she believed he could be good, so he tried to be. He pretended. Without the military and without his father, he needed someone to please. He needed rules to follow. So he tried to act the part of the man Rebecca believed in. But over time, he forgot to take it off. He forgot to remember who he was. And for the next twenty years he fell into a long dark sleep. When they lost their child, he could sleep no longer. He began to remember what he'd always know about himself, about what all of this really was. He woke up from the long dark, both of them finding that nothing beside remained. He was never really there.

Canon William Afton:

HAHAHA! I ALWAYS COME BACK!!! IT IS NOT YOUR FLESH THAT SUSTAINS ME, IT IS YOUR FEAR!!!

William Afton in this story is not William Afton. His name is Afton. He founded Fazbear Entertainment with Henry. He loses his child in 1983. But he is not Afton. A story about a veteran sergeant who is self conscious about his weight gain from his antidepressants and has chronic pain and hearing loss cannot be Afton in any meaningful sense.

Rebecca Afton in this story is not Mrs. Afton. A woman with a love for theater and film who is trapped because she can't have an abortion and so chooses to spend the rest of her life believing in a fake version of her husband to justify the sacrifices she had to make cannot meaningfully be the same woman who has no name and makes no appearance in the series.

Elizabeth Afton in this story is not Elizabeth Afton. A story about a fourteen year old lesbian who struggles with emotional dysregulation and self sabotage in 1983 with a girlfriend whom she hates herself for severely mistreating but can't stop the obsession is not a story about Elizabeth Afton, the five year old who died to Circus Baby.

How is William Afton supposed to cackle maniacally and skip around the pizzeria in a rabbit suit when he's too busy staring at a wall with a cigarette between his fingers having a flashback to Da Nang? There is no dancing. No skipping. He will pull something and will be down for the next few hours. How can he laugh when he is too busy sleepwalking in the fake life a civilian made for a man who could never exist?

s. The Bite of 83 happens. Animatronics exist somewhere in the background. The relationship between Will and Henry is explored. His arc later matches the description Carlton gives of Afton in The Silver Eyes. Tomorrow is Another Day is established during a therapy session as an affirmation of optimism and it later turns nihilistic. The theme of masks and acting directly ties back to Afton and Spring Bonnie. But the level of depth is completely over engineered. The story that was supposed to be about Five Nights at Freddy's should just be called Afton.

This isn't to say Afton can't have depth. But it is to say that his depth should be proportional to his role in the actual story. The only thing people would be thinking walking away from this William Afton's biography is "Why wasn't the story about this instead?"

A summary of William Afton and a direct reference to Ozymandias should never appear in the same paragraph.

But if I called him Howard Grant. If I called her Rebecca Clarke. If I called their daughter Elizabeth Grant. I would lose the reason why I wrote this story in the first place. I'd lose that love because it was made with love, even if it looks absolutely nothing like what it's supposed to.

To believe the bodies in the minigame aren't new, you would have to believe Scott Cawthon chose to depict a set of corpses in a recreation of the new restaurant with puddles of blood all over the floor and chose to show the killer nearby as well but did not intend for us to come to the conclusion that the murderer killed a new set of victims at that location.