Game Theory - Another FNAF Mystery SOLVED!

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he SOLVES the mystery of FNAF 4 FoxyBro! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: Forrest Lee, Koen Verhagen, Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

You can be a pirate. But first, you'll have to lose an eye and an arm. You can be a pirate. To lose an eye and an arm. First, you to lose an eye and an arm. Lose an eye. Lose an eye. Lose an eye. Hello internet.

Welcome to Game Theory. The show that is, without exaggeration, thinking of reaching out to Scott Cawthon so that we can jointly buy Chuckie Cheese's quickly dying restaurant franchise so we can transform them into what they were always meant to real-world fanaf experiences. Heck, they've already got the terrible pizza taken care of. Earlier this month, the latest Fazbear Fright book, Step Closer, hit store shelves,

and even though it has a super forgettable name, the stories inside of it are epic. Not just because they're some of the most gruesome in the series. I mean, page one literally starts with a dream sequence where a kid's eye gets popped by Foxy's hook, but because of the lore drops that are happening in this thing, they are huge. Up until this point, the Fazbear Frights books have given us interesting concepts to chew on. Fleshing out the world of FNAF and giving us new insights into events that we already had a pretty good handle on. It's been useful, certainly, but nothing too earth-shattering. Animatronics can have people stuffed inside of them.

Confirmed outright in book 1. People can have animatronics stuffed inside of them. Confirmed in book 3. Everything is powered by human agony, the missing children's incident probably happened in 1985. Animatronics can steal identities. Humans can be body swapped with animatronics. Golden Freddy might have multiple souls trapped inside of him. Ghosts might be able to escape from their animatronic prisons to lure more people to

them. Like, there has been a lot across all of these stories, hence why I've been covering these books so much. But Step Closer's lore drops are attacking some of the biggest lingering questions still in existence from these games. The ones presented to us by the two most frustrating games in the franchise, Fnaf 4 and FNAF 6. Questions that are still hotly debated by the FNAF community. So today we're looking at the first of those debates, the ones related to FNAF 4, looking at what those answers mean for the rest of the series. Today, we confirm the identity of this guy, the older brother, Foxy Bro. Real quick though, before we get to the meat of this theory, let's quickly speed our way through probably the least important story of this new trio, the middle one titled Dance With Me. In it, we cover Casey, a young woman who's coming from a tragic childhood.

She lives on the street, picking pockets, and nabbing purses. One day, she robs a mother and a young girl outside of Circus Baby's Pizza World, which we're told, has itself a big red door. Woooo! Potentially important detail alert. Anyway, one of the items that she nabs is a set of cardboard glasses. When Casey puts him on, she sees a hologram of Belora spinning in the distance. Weirded out by this, she has other people try the glasses on and no one else manages to see Belora. From that point onward, each time she puts on the glasses, the hologram gets closer and closer.

Which begins to freak her out to the point of her leaving town and trying to put her life back together in hopes that it gets Belora to leave her alone. A couple cities and failed jobs later, Casey eventually decides to return the stolen items to the mother and the daughter, hoping that it'll make amends. The family welcomes her in and forgives her, but when the little girl Isabella puts the glasses on, she not only sees Bolaura, but she immediately begins dancing. It's a very vague ending because it's unclear whether Bolaura, who was one step away from getting Casey, instead nabs the girl because she's the one who puts the glasses on next, and the dancing is the girl becoming possessed, or if it's the girl just excited to be dancing alongside one of her favorite characters, Bolaura.

Anyway, there's not a whole lot to talk about with this one. The technology is super strange. Freddy's is apparently advanced enough to have holographics that work in cheap cardboard glasses for kids. That would be strange enough, but there's also some extra weirdness that the holograms can interact with the physical world. We see throughout the story that this Belora hologram

kicks up leaves and causes them to swirl around her. To quote from the story, there was Belora, pirouetting among the colorful fall leaves. As she spun, the bright leaves were sucked into her vortex. For a few seconds, Casey admired the beauty, but then she thought, wait, If Ballora is just a picture, a hologram, then how is she affecting the objects around her? It didn't make sense.

Welcome to the world of being a FNAF theorist, Casey. It didn't make sense. Prepare to get that one tattooed on your forehead. But in all seriousness, it does raise a big question. Is she actually a hologram or just invisible and the glasses are somehow revealing her? It's unclear. Today I'm going to be talking a lot about those weird little details that just seem so oddly specific for a book to call out that it feels like the book is trying to tell us something.

And this seems like one of them, but while I could spend a lot of time trying to figure it out, to my knowledge, holographic or invisible animatronics, haven't really been a thing yet in the franchise, so we'll just have to cross that bridge when it becomes important. Unless, oh, damn it, it might be a phantom animatronic. No, no, they don't interact with the real world, do they? Last point to be made about this story, though, is its recurring theme of mothers and motherhood. A lot of the backstory that we get on Casey is her troubled relationship with her mom,

which has played a big part in how her life ended up the way it did. Casey throughout the story is also visited by an older woman at a bus station that gives her grandmotherly advice She's saved from the police by another elderly woman She makes amends with that mother and daughter that have a relationship that she envies I mean it could be me thinking too much about this big surprise But it doesn't feel like a coincidence that Ballora is the main animatronic featured in a story about motherly Relationships I had a theory a long time ago two years ago that Ballora was some sort of stand-in for Mrs. Afton not in any sort of creepy way, get your mind out of the gutters. I mean, that she represents the wife that

William Afton lost, or divorced him, or most likely that he abandoned in the aftermath of his daughter getting clawed to death by baby. I mean, just look at the song that Ballora sings in sister location. Why do you hide inside your wall? When there is music in my hall, all I see is An empty room. No more joy, an empty tomb. An empty tomb, aka the bedroom of our tragically deceased child, William hides inside his walls by diving even deeper into his work. It's something that William's partner Henry does in the original novel trilogy.

When he loses his daughter, he shuts out the rest of the world, hiding behind his walls and obsessing over his work to try and bring her back. And so when William does this in the games, his wife is left alone, and probably ends up leaving him. As such, as some sort of coping mechanism, William recreates her in animatronic form, depicting her with perpetually shut eyes, because to William, she was blind to what needed to be done

to rebuild the family, blind to the fact that his work was so important. She wanted to move on to do frivolous things like sing and spin and dance, or at least that's how he felt from his perspective. William Afton was mired in his own misery of loss. Like I said, it's a bit of a stretch and something that I've lightly talked about before, but I thought the connection between Ballora and Mothers, In this story was particularly interesting and worth calling out. Anyway, onward to the real story I want to address today,

step closer, which isn't just spark in new theories, but is straight up confirming stuff that we've argued about for years. In it, we meet Pete, a 16-year-old who, due to their parents' divorce, has to babysit his little brother, Chuck the Chump. One day while watching him at a Freddie Fasbear's Pizzeria, Pete, annoyed about having to be the responsible one, decides to scare Chuck a little by taking him backstage to see an out-of-service Foxy. Pete fires up the machine and Chuck runs away.

Leaving Pete alone to get seemingly hypnotized by Foxy's performance, a performance that repeats one line over and over. You can be a pirate, but first you'll have to lose an eye and an arm. And from there, you can probably guess what happens. Over the next few days, Pete gets into multiple accidents that put either his eye or his arm in danger. A scalpel nearly hits his eye in science class. A butcher knife almost chops off his hand at the store.

A buzzsaw blade shoots out at him from a nearby construction site. He gets hooked in the face by a fishing line, and he almost loses a hand to a Chinese finger trap at the school carnival. Anyway, the two brothers eventually make amends and come to the realization that Pete needs to face down Foxy to break some curse. Pete rushes to Freddy's, but in his panic, he's hit by an oncoming truck and killed. Out of nowhere. It's this awful, awful reveal that you absolutely do not see coming, because you feel so bad for this kid. You're like, oh, he's apologized to his brother, they have a good relationship, they have a plan for getting Pete out of this, after him being brutalized for the better part of a week,

he's on his way to close off the story and then, bam, it just ends. And that would be where the story ends, except for one thing. Pete is still alive, kind of. We pick up back in the hospital where Pete's soul is trapped inside of his own dead body. Pete is an organ donor. Against his will, I might add. Thanks a lot for signing me up for that one, Mom.

And they just got an emergency request for, you guessed it, an eye and a hand. Pete is forced to helplessly watch as his body is taking. apart by surgeons. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, this story is shocking. But what's even more shocking is the lore confirmation that we get in this thing. Pete's story 100% confirms for us that Foxy Bro, the older kid from Fnaff 4 who repeatedly traumatizes his younger brother before eventually getting him chomped in the jaws of Fred Bear, that is undeniably Michael Afton. 100% no doubt. It's something that we strongly suspected for a while, and something that later evidence started to throw into question,

but this story, happening five years after that game's initial release, finally clears it up for us. Obviously, there are some superficial similarities here. Pete has a younger brother who's scared of the animatronics, just like Foxy Bro has the crying child, his younger brother who's scared of the animatronics. Pete is connected to Foxy throughout the story, just like the brother in the Foxy mask.

Pete and Chuck's parents are divorced, just like it seems William and Mrs. Aftonar in the game, leaving the older brothers alone to care for their younger siblings. At one point in the story, Pete's hand starts to turn purple, which points us back to Michael Afton and sister location physically turning purple. And lastly, is that final scene where Pete should be dead, but isn't, which exactly mirrors the iconic words of one Michael Afton. Father, it's me, Michael. I should be dead, but I'm not. But all of it is just a bunch of weak parallels between Foxy Bro and Michael and Michael and Pete and Foxy Bro and Pete.

How do we know for sure that all three of these characters are connected? One word, gum. People ask me a lot how I come up with these theories, and more often than not, it's small details that just stick out as off for the author or game designer to include, as though they're purposely seeding these details out there to try and signal something to us. And in this particular story, the odd character detail of Pete is that he chews gum a lot. Page four, he's chewing watermelon gum while watching his brother. Later, when he's scared by the Foxy Animatronic, the book makes mention of him swallowing that gum. Okay, that's fine, that's a one-off thing, no big deal. But later, on the way to the butcher shop, we're told,

that he, quote, pops a wad of watermelon gum into his mouth. On the boat fishing with his dad, he wishes he had brought his watermelon gum. It is mentioned a lot in this short story. Enough that it sparked my theorist senses and made me flag it to look into later. Now, obviously, at no point during FNAF 4, or, heck, any of the games do we see a character actively chewing gum. That'd be silly. But that's not the only place that we see these characters at this point.

Let me direct your attention back to the FNAF Survival Law. Who knew that a book with dabbing Chica as an active selling feature would become the single most important item for lore solving of this franchise? For those of you don't remember this little gem, it's the logbook, originally owned by Mike, as we see on the title page, that helped us to solve for Cassidy's name. And wouldn't you know it, but today it's also the thing that's going to now reveal to us Michael Afton's true identity. Page 49, quote, list 10 bad habits you'd like to break. Number one, chewing gum excessively. I mean, there it is, plain as day. Pete chews gum excessively.

Michael Afton choose gum excessively. Pete eventually turns purple and comes back to life after being dead. Michael Afton eventually turns purple and comes to life after being dead. Pete is an older brother who scares his younger sibling using Foxy. Foxy Bro and Fnaf 4 is an older brother who scares his younger sibling with Foxy. Pete equals Michael and Michael equals Fnaf 4's Foxy Bro. Done, confirmed, another character identity locked. This detail has been sitting in the logbook for years, just waiting to be used.

Kind of impressive. Well done there, Scott. Well done. And this confirmation tells us everything we need to know about Michael's motivation for the rest of the game series. He's avenging his brother's death, the one that he made happen. When Golden Freddy appearances are accompanied by the words, it's me, it is literally the younger brother saying, it's me. I'm here to his older brother. But of course.

Of course, of course! It is never that easy. This same security logbook, this thing that has been so pivotal to solving so many mysteries of this franchise, raises just as many challenges. Because sure, here it just confirmed the Foxybro connection, but then it also has lines like these.

Page 103, the party was for you. Page 75, does he still talk to you? In reference to psychic friend Fredbear. Page 23 was your favorite childhood toy a plastic purple telephone. Page 20, what do you remember? And most troublesome of all, page 31, do you remember your name? All of these questions seem pointed to the crying child.

The party was for him. His favorite toy was the purple telephone. Fred Bear did talk to him and never to Foxy Bro as far as we know. In fact, these are the exact questions that got us to throw the Foxy Michael connection away so many years ago. Why would the spirit in this book Cassidy be telling Mike things that are very clearly true of the crying child? Mike was indeed the older brother the entire time. Like this latest Fasbear Fright story just confirmed for us. It doesn't make sense.

Which is why now we have to solve these last two questions. What do you remember? Do you remember your name? I mean, yeah, I do remember my name. It's Mike. I wrote Mike on the first page of the book, didn't I? Unless Mike never truly was my name. The question that we're left with,

and the question I posed to you and that I still need time to think through is, What did Michael forget? And how did he forget it? Was he the bite of 87 victim? Is that how he lost his memory? Did some sort of other trauma cause him memory loss? And more importantly, is there some other strange connection between Michael and the crying child? Like, seriously, why would the book say that the party was for Michael when FNAF 4 clearly tells us that it's not?

I can't believe that this is just some sort of typo or something. This book is so precisely engineered to be the linchpin in too many mysteries of this franchise for that to be the case. So could that connection between the two of the two things? two brothers be the reason why Michael's name might somehow be different. All theories for another day, my friends, but at least for now, we're one more confirmed step closer to getting the answers we've been looking for so long. So maybe that's the reason why the story is in fact called step closer, because otherwise that title for a story about a kid losing an eye and an arm just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But hey, that's

just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.