Music Hello, my Freaky Darlings. I'm Zefiewings and... what makes you so special? Five Nights at Freddy's. I've been considering making a theory video for the FNAF franchise for a long time. But I wanted to feel that I had something meaningful to add to the conversation before trying. I've had several small ideas But nothing that I felt was fleshed out enough to warrant a whole video. However, recently I have had a thought that I believe is worth exploring. So I think it's finally time for me to make the FNAF theory video I've always wanted. Time for me to throw my weird hat into the ring... ( a bit that took way too long to make for 10 seconds of screentime) (THUNK of worth it) ... and see what comes of it. Help Wanted 2 was an incredible FNAF game! At least...it seemed to be. I don't own a PS5 so I have to enjoy by proxy of Lets Plays. But it seemed like a lot of fun! And the storytelling was much more straightforward than usual. It's wildly accepted that we play as Cassie's Dad. A Fazbear employee who... has children, uses a Fazwrench, and loves Bonnie. In one ending, we find ourselves turned into a Staff Bot. The very one that gives Cassie her VANNI mask at the beginning of RUIN. And this ending is found by... beating all of the game levels. And it reveals a major revelation. Something that would normally have been hidden behind minny-games and secret wall codes in past iterations. Honestly, I love that this game has something that the Theorists can mostly agree on! So that we can spend our time arguing about the little details again. Just the way Scott intended. Another popular theory, one that I fully agree with, is that we, as Cassie's dad, are also the Bonny Bully Bro who participated in the prank that led to Crying Child being CHOMPED. There is an alternate path in the game you get by completing secret actions found on purple graffiti around the pizzeria. By doing them, you receive little 'voodoo dolls' referred to as memories. wearing felt masks of the core four plus Golden Freddy and the Puppet. By the way... I absolutely want dolls just like these, I LOVE these. These dolls are significant. They're handed to the player directly by what seems to be Glitchtrap's stitched bunny hand. Some of the evidance for the Bunny Bully Bro theory include things like the player reciving one memory by entering 1983 in the Sister Location minny game. Same as what you do in the original Sister Location game. This of course calls the bite of '83 moment to mind. Also if the players collect all of the memory dolls they are given a special purple glitchy FazToken. which is used to activate the Princess Quest arcade cabnet so you can play it. This leads to a series of graves with the little dolls beside each of them. If you light all the grave braziers in any order you can continue forward to this alternate game ending. But if you light them in a spicific order you unlock a hidden treasure chest. Chika Foxy Freddy Bonny Golden Freddy and Puppet. Not only does this seem to give us a confirmed order for the children's death for the first time something really cool and interesting of its own, but inside the chest is an old fashioned Bonny mask. That the player says "seems familiar". But I'm not here to rehash all the evidence for that theory. I want to focus on what happens the very first time the player unlocks any memory doll and gets an achievement for them. This is the moment that inspired me for my theory because the achievement received for receiving a memory doll is accompanied by the Bonny doll specifically and is called "Remember Jeremy?". We've seen this exact phrase before. It was used in Help Wanted 1, about the game tester before Tape Girl. In that game "remember Jeremy" was a sentiment left in the code to honour a co-worker who died in weird and tragic circumstances for the people working at Silver Parasol games. But here the punctuation changes the sentence. Its a question now, not a statement. A question that can mean two things; "do you remember Jeremy?" or, more interestingly, "Jeremy, do you remember?" We get this achievement from a doll called a "Memory". The memory connected to us, to Bonny, to 1983. So it feels connected to the name Jeremy. It feels like the game outright asking the player character if they remember the moments the dolls are calling back to. So then that would mean... are we named Jeremy? I have seen some suggest that the "remember Jeremy" achievement is not directly linked to us. But rather indirectly linked through Bonny himself. That it may just be a reference to the fact that Afton eventually comes to 'stuff' a child also named Jeremy into Bonny. However, that explanation doesn't feel entirely satisfying to me. It barely seems relevant. Why would they refer to a completely different Jeremy in that case? The repeated use of the name "Jeremy" in seeming(ly) disparate places happens so often now that Most people just consider it a troll from Scott and to a point, they are probably right. But is that all that's going on here? I think there is more that can tie us, the player character, to the name. But not through physical evidence, but rather in the psychology of Afton and the other Jeremys. Jeremy from Help Wanted 1 was an employee for Silver Parasol Games. an in-universe gaming company that Fazbear Entertainment outsourced to for making the video game they wanted. The Beta version that they create for them is the Help Wanted that we play. We are meant to be beta testers for this in-universe video game. The company was sent circuit boards to scan into the game data. Which gave rise to that game's antagonist; "Glitchtrap". A digital version of William Afton who can control or posses people. Glitchtrap drives 'Tape Girl' to free him and do his bidding by taking over her mind. But before he claimed her as his victim, he was worming his way into the previous game tester; Jeremy. While testing, Jeremy began suffering from nightmares, exhibiting strange behaviour, and looking increasingly ill. Eventually, Tape Girl arrived at work to find that in an attempt to 'escape the madness' Jeremy had cut his own face off with a guillotine paper cutter. But what if that scenario is different than we thought? What if Jeremy didn't choose to defy Glitchtrap and die rather than give in to his demands. but instead that his death was part of Glitchtraps plan all along. It doesn't make sense for Glitchtrap to allow Jeremy to die if his intention was to escape through the first means necessary. Unless, of course, there is another reason why he would want this particular man to die. And this is true whether this is a digital consciousness of Aftons or an AI mimicking program trained on his behaviour. In fact, if it is a Mimic like it seems to be shaping up to be it is even stronger evidence that said program would prioritize past behaviours rather than its own escape. No, that's crazy. Why would a mimicking program have Jeremy cut off his face? There's no precedence for that in Afton's past or Jeremy's or Bonny's ( DRAMATIC JUMPSCARE NOISE) Withered Bonny... ...is the only one... ...without a face. (Withered Bonny sounds. Please get out of my room.) Ok. That's weird. Maybe there is something there? Because when this was only the second victim of Afton's named Jeremy it wasn't enough to call it a pattern. But considering the game tells us to keep that Jeremy in mind and then calls back to him again while introducing another possible Jeremy. one that Afton would have a very specific reason to hate. Well, it starts to feel like we might have the beginnings of a possible victemology here. In studying serial killers, victimology is the study of the connection between (the) criminal and their victims. How they relate to each other, how they relate to the perpetrator, and possible reasons why they were chosen. This connection would tell us that there was more to Afton's victimology than just children who go to Freddy Fazbears. These children reminded Afton of the bullies who took his son away. We know that they would be, at least in part, children who remind him of the bullies rather than the bullies themselves since at least Bonny Bro grew up to have a career and a daughter. Since these kids would almost certainly never set foot in a Freddy Fazbear's after this incident it probably would have made it harder for Afton to have access to them. so it would track for them to just be the inspiration for his victims rather than the precise targets of his crime. Admittedly it could be a leap that Afton would use the name Jeremy as a link to the true target of his rage. It would be helpful if we had any evidence of Afton using names to connect people or seeing them as surrogates. Well actually, we kind of do have that. Not with William Afton admittedly but we do see that ideology show up in his son. The first instance of the name Jeremy in Five Nights at Freddy's was Jeremy Fitzgerald in FNAF 2. This was the name for the security guard you played in most of that game. When 2 came out, it was a random and meaningless name. but since then it's been strongly suspected that this and other security guards are alias' for Micheal Afton as he fills in for security guard. In that case, sharing a name with one of the children or two if you think that Fitzgerald could be a reference to Fritz, would have to have been a deliberate from Mike. Now there is debate on whether he is there to help his father, or to try and make amends for his father's crimes. but either way, this shows us that Mike believes in the power of name for sentiment. He is either honouring a tragic victim, or using it to further symbolically follow in his father's footsteps. Clearly sharing a name is a form of connection something he could have easily have gotten from his father. Because this game seems to directly address us as Jeremy and that feels so important. If we are playing as the person who was wearing the Bonny mask when William Afton's youngest son died it can't be a coincidence that the boy William eventually 'stuffs' into Bonny is also named Jeremy. It can't be a coincidence that when Glitchtrap's first contact was named Jeremy, that man died rather than become possessed like all his other victims. Remember: Scott uses new his games to rectify or clarify information in old games. The placement of the "Bite of '83" on the timeline, whether it's before or after the "Missing Children's Incident" has been a real hot topic of late. And tieing the bite into the motivation would be the clarification we need. The mystery of Help Wanted 1's Jeremy and why we are meant to remember him was a question that was never answered. So addressing it in the direct sequel also certainly falls into that pattern. I plan to dive deeper into this topic. But I wanted to begin by highlighting my inciting idea. I believe there is a lot of potential in exploring these connections. I think there is a lot more to Jeremy that we can learn. Was he involved in one of the many important fires in the franchise? We know the Puppet doll is asking him to remember the bite of '83 but what are the other graffiti and dolls asking him to call back to? Now that we have some important background information on one of the bullies, is it possible that we can dig into any of the others? If my theory on Afton's victimology holds water anything we learn about the bullies stands to inform us more about the missing children and vice versa. (INTERUPTION!) Hey darlings, editing Zefie here. One quick thing before I send you to the outro, I need to address this art. while I was looking for that render of Cassie I found this awesome design for her dad by @BarBADroid on twitter he made it as a commission for RyeToast for one of their videos. I got permission from both of them to use it in my video and I was just going to show it when talking about why the community recognizes the player character to be Cassie's Dad. But when I went to go add it into the video I noticed this. Well Shit. I thought a bit about whether I should still post this or not like I said at the top of the video its really important to me that I am contributing to this conversation meaningfully and not just being derivative. In the end though, I'm still really proud of what I put together and the video was, is, nearly done at this point. So I've decided to go through with it. I'm hoping that my focus on psychology and victimology and all that kind of thing will still set this apart. But who knows maybe RyeToast literally said everything that I did in their video, I haven't seen it yet, as soon as I discovered this I consciously made the decision that if I am posting this I'm not going to watch their video until mine is up That way I can honestly say nothing in their video influenced mine at all not even in the editing stage. I plan to watch their's once my is posted I couldn't end up using the art in the moment that I had intended to since it sort of ruins the punchline but if I retain permission I certainly will be... this will certainly be my image for this image for this Jeremy going forward Rye: I am very sorry if my video ends up being very similar to yours it was not intentional it was just an unfortunate coincidence but I can't keep putting off joining the conversation I've got to start somewhere Hopefully, I've still said something worth talking about. So that's it, just wanted to address that real quick I'll let past me send you all off. Thank you for watching my inaugural Five Nights at Freddy's theory video If you like FNAF, you would probably enjoy Rusty Lake another weird, cryptic, video game franchise with strange storytelling and one of my personal favourites. I made a video going over the timeline for that series as a starting point for theories I plan to make on it further down the line. Or you can see my tribute to the man who started it all for me and why I nearly didn't make this video at all. Like this video, if you are up to it; it's so important for a new channel starting out. Subscribe for more Five Nights at Freddy's videos on the way. Otherwise; let me know your thoughts and remember Buildings burn. People die. But the internet is forever. Bye now. [music, Grandfather's Clock, music box style]
