Game Theory - Don't Trust Gregory (FNAF Security Breach)

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Theorists, it's time for a Five Nights At Freddy's Security Breach theory. Well, a post-release FNAF Security Breach theory. Don't worry, I will be covering EVERYTHING I can find. The biggest thing I want to talk about today, however, is Gregory. The young boy that we play as throughout the whole game is a big mystery and I intend to solve it! Who is he? Why is he there after hours? Is he even HUMAN? It's time to dive back into FNAF!

After years of waiting, five nights at Freddy's security breach has finally launched, and with it, we now have a whole load of mysteries to discuss. What's the deal with the Vanney Therapy tapes? Why is this room from sister location in the Pizzaplex? Who's the best animatronic? And why is it Music Man? There are a lot of things to solve in this massive game as lore hides behind every pirate poster and inside every arcade cabinet. But the theory I have today goes to the heart of this game,

addressing the one character that we spend a lot of time with, but don't actually see all that much. And that's our main character of security breach, Gregory. Yep, in a franchise full of dead kids, I want to focus on the first ever living child we've seen in the main story of the games, except for in the Fruity Maze mini-game, but we all know that she ends up dead. Who is Gregory? What is Gregory? And why is he such a cold-hearted savage to Roxy and the rest of the animatronic gang?

I'm so mad that you're driving without my permission! Oh my gosh! Gregory is brutal! My friends, the answers to those questions will re-contextualize everything that you thought you knew about this series. So let's begin. Oh, internet, welcome to Game Theory. The show that can't help but stuff its face with Fnafflor like Chica stuffs her face with pizza and garbage. I guess at this point it kind of applies to us too. Because today starts what, I expect to be a three-part series into the many unsolved mysteries of security.

of security breach. I mean, on the surface, the game seems pretty self-explanatory, right? Survive being trapped in a mall for one night. Looks like the new team forgot to read the title of the franchise. That's nothing. That's easy. Once you start looking into secret rooms, secret tapes, secret endings, secret mini-games, and actually bothered to read all the emails and item descriptions,

you learn that there is a lot more here. Stuff that looks both backwards at the series that came before and forwards into what is coming next. Stuff that, quite frankly, I'm still working on piecing to This is a big game with lots of places to hide things. But today I want to focus on a mystery that I do feel like I have a pretty solid handle on. The relationship between Gregory and Glamrock Freddy. What's the deal with this random kid and why's a killer animatronics suddenly trying to help him? Like seriously, the game kicks off with this incredible cutscene. Everyone is living their best 80s-tastic lives on stage before Freddy suddenly glitches out and smash cut to Gregory just being there, I guess. It is one of the weirdest, most jarring intros to a game ever. And then from that point forward, we're just expected to assume that everything is perfectly normal, no explanations necessary. So I'm here to give you that explanation, because I strongly suspect that this boy is not a boy, and this robot is not a robot, and that the story of their

relationship is one that's trying to make amends for one of the earliest and most pivotal points from this entire franchise. To begin, let's establish what we do know about Gregory in order to piece together the rest. So what does the game offer us in terms of his backstory? Nothing. First and foremost, we know that he's pretty much off the radar. At the start of the game, Freddy does a quick scan, only to realize... Your guest profile is unknown to me. Similarly, when security guard Vanessa is chatting it up with Freddy, we hear this part of their conversation. That is great news. He can be returned to his parents.

He can't. Turns out there's no record of him. Clearly, Gregory is not a guest at the Pizzaplex. It also seems like he has nowhere else to go. In the game's bad ending, unlocked by just leaving the building, at 6 a.m., we see Gregory winding up in an alleyway sleeping in a cardboard box. He appears to be homeless. He's an orphan. This then explains a few other things that we see around the Pizzaplex. In a couple of hidden locations around the building, we find little dens that are filled with drawings, plushies, and beds. The most notable one being the one behind the daycare center. Gregory seems to be living inside the Pizzaplex,

which would explain his lack of a guest pass. We can't even be sure that his name is Gregory. In the game's opening scene, Gregory has no issues speaking to Freddy. Will you shut up? Who said that? I did! However, once Freddy asks him for his name, he stutters. I'm Gregory. Why would he stutter on his name when he was clearly fine answering everything else just seconds before?

So... What? Is that it? Gregory's just some homeless kid that sets up shop in the Pizza Plex and happens to get wrapped up in Afton and Vanny's plans? Yeah, right. Of course not. Nothing in this franchise is ever an accident. Take a look at Gregory here. Notice anything familiar? Dark eyes? Brown hair with a piece full. in between his eyes, shorts, a shirt with two stripes across the middle. Ladies and gentlemen, Gregory is none other than the crying child.

Don't believe me? Early on we get this weird moment when Freddy suddenly stops what he's doing and says this. I feel you are broken. We all know that the language in this franchise is never chosen by accident. Everything is meticulously crafted, so is it a coincidence then that the word broken is only used one other time in the FNAF series to describe a child? That iconic FNAF 4 clip with Crying Child and Golden Fred Bear, you're broken. We're still your friends. I will put you back together. The fact that both crying child and Gregory look alike and are considered to be broken screams of a connection existing between these two.

Him being the crying child would also explain why he has nowhere else to go. His dad is an undead zombie living inside a yellow bunny suit and his mom is MIA. There's also lines like this. Your parents want you to follow me. Your family is looking for you. Let me take you to your parents. On one hand, this just sounds like Chica's spouting out some generic security protocol. On the other hand, if indeed Gregory is the crying child, Chica's lines here take on a whole new meaning, because she is quite literally bringing him to his family, his father living in the basement, William Afton.

But obviously there's one big problem with this. One that I'm sure all of you are screaming at your monitors are typing aggressively down in the comments. Crying child is dead. He died in FNAF 4 when his older brother, Michael, picked him up to be chomped. And not only did he die, his soul then went on to be one of the two spirits possessing Golden Freddy, the other being the vengeful spirit Cassidy, before he was finally put to rest by the puppet in the happiest day ending of FNAF 3. This kid is well and truly gone.

He is removed from the franchise. He is one of the few cards that are officially off the lore table. So why then do I dare invoke his name here? Because Gregory is a robot. A rebuilt version of the crying child. Flame shields activate, because it's time for everyone's favorite set. Matt Pat uses the lore from multiple Fnaf books to try and explain parts of the game that don't make sense. I'll try to make this as quick and painless for all of us as possible.

In the books, children having tragic, premature deaths, and then being rebuilt as robots by their grieving fathers, is something that happens a lot. Like, if I had a nickel for every time this plot line showed up, I'd have, well, I'd have like three nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened three times. In the original novel trilogy, the whole big twist of that was that Charlie, daughter of Henry Emily, died as a kid, and that her father, put her back together by building robotic versions of her, each one representing a different stage of her growing up development. Then again, in Fasbear Frights, we have the character of Eleanor, who is strongly implied to have been built as a replacement daughter,

as well as Dr. Telbert, who developed Remnant as a way to preserve his sick and dying daughter. And all of this is without me even going into the numerous stories where children get swapped out for robots and or Fasgu, which, uh, once it has your DNA basically creates a clone of you. If that's the future of the franchise, we're going down some weird paths, my friends. Anyway, to summarize, there's evidence in the wider canon that Fnaf 4's lines about the crying child being broken and needing to be put back together were meant to be much more literal than any of us first suspected. But we don't even have to go that far. Within Security breach itself, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Gregory isn't exactly what he seems.

When Vanny spots you and starts to get closer, your vision gets a CRT effect. Basically, the horizontal lines that old TV monitors used to get. And it's worth remembering that since this is a first-person game, that is representing your vision. So why are your eyes suddenly behaving like cameras on the Fritz? Unless, you know, they are cameras on the Fritz. Later in the game, once we defeat Roxanne Wolf, we can take out her eyes and upgrade Freddy. Our Faswatch tells us that, quote, Roxy sees things differently than others.

Sometimes she'll stare and talk to the other bots through walls. She's able to see things that others can't, which allows us to see collectibles like secret CDs. In a way, she has a sort of expert which is why when you first install him into Freddy, his comment really stands out. How are your new eyes? I am having a hard time adjusting. You look different to me.

Hmm. It's almost like he was seeing Gregory as a normal child, but now that he has these new eyes, he's able to see through Gregory's skin and reveal something that he wasn't expecting. Like, say an animatronic endoskeleton. Also, Gregory can be inside Freddy when he's inside the charging stations, which on its own feels weird. Like, I kinda expected you to hop out and leave him to charge, but nope, we pilot him inside of it and then sit there as he charges. Or could it be that those charging stations are as much for us as they are for him?

Remember that secret den behind the daycare where we assumed Gregory's living? There's a strange amount of decommissioned and what appeared to be salvaged security robots. Maybe for a kid who needs a robotic upgrade. The fact that there's no record of Gregory would also make sense. If he's an animatronic, there wouldn't be records of him because he's not technically a human. human, it would also explain why Gregory has no parents. But maybe the biggest point of evidence comes from the very beginning of the game, where, during the opening cutscene we see Freddy glitch out.

This sets him on a course of being good for the rest of the game, but what causes that glitch to happen in the first place? Well, by going frame by frame, we can see that there's a security threat on the loose, and it looks to be a small child. What? It's Gregory, it has to be. Gregory is the threat here, a robot that poses a threat to Freddy's programming. But why? How? What would make sense about that?

Well, to understand that connection, it's time to put a pin in Gregory and turn our attention over to Freddy. If you unlock the game's final secret ending, you end up going below the Pizzaplex, only to discover a former Freddy Fazbear location, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place. If that name doesn't mean anything to you, it shouldn't, really. Most of the restaurants in the series go unnamed. But while the name might not mean anything, the layout should be a familiar one. One large rectangular stage with lights on the trim and big speakers on either side and a smaller semicircle stage right next to it. It's from Fnaf 6, Pizzeria Simulator. Notice the stools that are placed right in front, the checkered floor.

We even have purple-striped tablecloths and blue-green and red plates exactly like we saw in Pizzeria Simulator. As a refresher, this is the location that Henry lured all of the roaming animatronics to in order to burn them to the ground one final time. Although for one of you, the darkest pit of hell has opened to swallow you whole. So don't keep the devil waiting, friend. And this is it here. Seems like Henry's plan didn't quite work as expected. We still see pretty much everyone that he tried to torch away. They're all alive and well and thriving underground.

Springtrap is there. Moulton Freddy is there as this big black blob. And if you look inside that blob, you can even see baby. And heck, even the puppet. Kind of lessens the impact of that savage Henry. speech from FNAF6, but whatever. Anyway, the reason I bring this up, outside of it giving me a chance to remind everyone that I totally called something like this happening at the end of the last theory from a year ago is that one character is notably absent here. Michael Afton, who we're

reasonably sure was the guard working at the Fnaf 6 location and the one who helped to burn it down. And to you, my brave volunteer, who somehow found this job listing not intended for you. Although there was a way out plan for you, I have a feeling that's not what you want. I have a feeling that you are right where you want to be. After being scooped, turning purple, and trying to undo his family's sins location by location, he went down with the ship and burned alongside his father and sister, which means that presumably he should be here somewhere. And yet he's not, unless of course he's taken on a new form, say perhaps,

Glamrock Freddy. We know for a fact that Freddy's been down here based on some of the lines that he drops during the finale. I know what this is. I have been here before. before. She brought me here. I had no choice. Now I have a choice. I have changed. My friends are here. They are so angry, confused. But I can protect you. So he's in a place where he can get possessed. We also hear that Freddie isn't acting like his normal self, saying, I am not me. And in yet another ending, the fire ending, Freddie is more than prepared to set the place ablaze, much like Michael Afton, did to Fasbear Frights at the end of FNAF 3.

I guess old habits die hard. And nothing says that clearer than the replica of Mike's room from sister location that's hiding inside the Pizzaplex. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, hidden inside the mall is the exact replica of Mike's living room from sister location. Down to the TV, lamp, and basket of exotic butters. Exotic. Exotic. Exotic. But here's the kicker. Over on Mike's wall is a coded message, one that was solved through an incredible team effort from Doco and the

rest of the fnaf subreddit it reads as follows quote break and mend I built the breath they hunt now drawn to life not real still me and fritt and fraught with thought and zest and guest no blunt woes dodge duck flash shoot crawl run crush the vile band cry not try not do not do not hold out hope your life your aim will save those with soul feel like this is some sort of a poetry reading snaps everyone snaps snaps snaps yeah man cue the bongos all right Basically, this is just a bunch of fancy talk all relating to Mike's personal journey. The first line is all about breaking and repairing things, and in doing that, creating new life. In other words, Ennard and Baby.

The rest is all about his commitment to try and stop the evil animatronics and try to save any of them with a soul left in their bodies. Now, does the presence of this room and poem necessarily mean that Mike is Freddy? No. But I do think it's telling that we're reminded of Mike's commitment to save everyone inside of a room that you're required to find alone in the dark, i.e. without Glamrock Freddy hovering over your shoulders. Heck, during the finale, we even get this line from Glamrock Freddy. My friends are here. They're so angry, confused.

He's talking about molten Freddy. The spirits trapped inside of the blob. It's very possible that those were indeed his friends captured and killed back in the day. Maybe William himself struck back against the kids that had bullied his youngest son. And now some of their spirits are trapped below the surface as part of the blob in this aband. Or maybe that's why Gregory is so brutal to all of these animatronics at the end of each boss battle. They killed him back in 1983, and now it's his turn to show the bullies no mercy, by launching a go-cart at their face and ripping out their eyeballs. And meanwhile, Freddy is sad because they are, quite literally, his friends from when they were alive.

But to me, honestly, the biggest connection points between Mike and Glamrock Freddy are thematic, their narrative. Mike has been moving to location after location to try and undo his father's horrible work. This would just be a continuation of that story, as both Afton's return post-fire. And more importantly, it also completes the arc of the crying child and his older brother. Since accidentally killing his brother in Fnaf 4, Michael's been trying to make amends. This would be, quite literally, their grand reunion, an older brother finally able to protect and defend his younger sibling in a way that he failed to earlier in their lives. This is also why Freddy's programming would glitch out after he encounters Gregory in the opening cutscene.

The soul of Mike buried deep in Freddy's co-es. comes through upon sensing his brother again. It hot wires the system so that Michael Afton in the body of Freddie can defend his kid brother. And the Afton story doesn't stop there either. In part of the Pizzaplex we find a family dinner scene made up of decommissioned staff robots. A father, a mother that kind of looks like Ballora, a daughter with rosy cheeks and orange pigtails, a son, and one with its head missing, the child whose head was bitten off in 1983. This is very clearly the Afton family. There is no doubt about that. The story continues in this game. In fact,

I expect that's why the save Vanny ending here is so important. If you manage to find and complete all the Princess Quest Arcade cabinets in throughout the Pizzaplex, you get an ending where we are able to save Vanny from the control of Glitch Trap. This is something that we predicted would be possible literally a year ago in a theory, but I'd bring this up not to pat myself on the back, but rather to call out the final moment of this ending, where we see Gregory, Freddie, and Vanny all sitting together on a hill. A hill that I should point out is oddly reminiscent of the Fnaf 6 Gravestone Hill.

It feels meaningful, like all these characters have some sort of history. Why would Vanny be there otherwise? Unless, this is meant to be the crying child, Michael, and maybe even Elizabeth, the Afton children, the three kids who literally had their lives stolen by the evil deeds of their father, finally reunited, finally able to share a moment of peace on this hill. After all, Vanessa does have green eyes and blonde hair, just like someone else that we know from the series. But that's probably a theory that's best saved for another day.

Long story short here, Gregory isn't just any kid. He's not just the crying child either. He's the rebuilt version of the crying child, an animatronic designed to fill the void left by the death of Afton's youngest son, literally put back together piece by piece. And Mike, meanwhile, is also back. Glammed out this time, continuing to make amends for his past by reuniting with the brother that he accidentally killed as a kid

and protecting him in a way that he never could before. Which then leaves us with a question, who's Vanney? How does she fit into all this? Why does she fit into all this? And why does Robot Gregory glitch out each and every time she gets close? That my theorists will have to wait for the next episode, because this episode's running along and honestly I need more time to think through the answers. So in the meantime theorists, remember, it's all just a theory.

A game theory! Thanks for watching!