This freaky little guy first appeared
in FNAF 4’s optional Halloween Edition Update as a non-canon swap for the Final
Boss, Nightmare. At the time it was cool to just get a Nightmare Puppet design, even
if it wasn’t canon. But then FNAF World came out. A game which IS canon. And Nightmarrione
was in it, meaning HE is now canon as well. Since this particular character has been
circulating the FNAF Theory Community a lot for around a year, you might already know that the
way to get Nightmarionne in your FNAF World party is by beating a strange minigame called Foxy.EXE,
a reference to Sonic.EXE. But what you might not know is that he actually has some dialogue in
this game. And what Nightmarionne says is really important to figuring out what he is supposed to
be, but we’ll get back to that dialogue in a bit. When that question is asked; ‘What is
Nightmarionne supposed to be?,’ I usually see four main schools of thought in response.
The first postulates that Nightmarrione is just Charlie. That after Pizza Sim where her father
lured her into a Bear Trap and then seemingly repeatedly shocked her with steady voltage
to “soothe” her and then set her on fire, she sort of changed into something
else. Something a little darker, and a little less…benevolent. But the fact
that BOTH Marionnette AND Nightmarionne appear in UCN, the latter’s mainline game debut,
makes me feel like this is not the case. ESPECIALLY because Charlie calls herself
aware, while the others are like animals. Even if you believe that the animatronics in
UCN are just projections of Afton’s fears and memories brought on by Cassidy, rather than the
actual spirits of those animatronics themselves, it would just be weird to have both a phony PAST
Charlie AND a real PRESENT Charlie in the game. Especially considering UCN is Nightmarionne’s
first canonical appearance in a MAINLINE game. The second theory I usually see is that
Nightmarionne is a representation of death itself. Like a Grim Reaper type of entity that’s super
powerful and weird like Old Man Consequences. This would explain why he looks to be a twisted
version of the Puppet, since the Puppet is associated with life. This idea is mostly based on
his UCN Voicelines. “This time death cannot save you,” and “Let’s taste death, again, and again,
and again.” But while this theory is intriguing, I don’t think it’s fully right either. If
Nightmarionne is a representation of death, why has it seemingly only encountered William,
when a lot of other characters have died? Not to mention that William isn’t actually dead in UCN
anyway, so why would he be seeing Nightmarionne? Don’t get me wrong, I like the theory, but I
don’t think it has a super strong foundation. The third school of thought I see is
that Nightmarionne isn’t Charlie herself, but rather, her AGONY, or Dark Remnant. This
would explain why they both appear in UCN and why their personalities and goals and whatnot are so
different. All the stuff she went through in Pizza Sim created a Dark Remnant version of her, making
Nightmarionne not only a Nightmare animatronic, but a Shadow animatronic too. Speaking of, a
branch of this theory is that Nightmarionne and Nightmare are the same entity. That’s
why Nightmarionne is Nightmare’s swap in the FNAF 4 DLC, why their jumpscares can be
overlapped to look like this, why they share the same jumpscare noise, and why Nightmarionne’s
Security Breach collectible is titled Nightmare. This theory is definitely more plausible than
the first two in my opinion. His voicelines in UCN even support this idea to an extent. “I
am the fearful reflection of what you have created.” William’s actions caused Charlotte’s
Agony, thus creating Nightmarionne. This could even explain why Nightmarionne is seemingly
around in the Pizzaplex/AR World in some way. Even if CHARLIE burned in FNAF 6,
the manifestation of her Agony DID NOT. Leaving it able to possess the systems of
the Pizzaplex that is built right above it, thus explaining all the Nightmarionne
plushies and black and white tentacle imagery. It’s honestly a pretty solid theory.
But there’s just one little itty-bitty thing. Remember that dialogue from Nightmarionne in
FNAF World I mentioned earlier? It’s his first ever line in the franchise. He says, “I would
help you if I could, but my code is being used for a second rate horror game. Maybe if
you beat the game and get my code back, then I could help.” Now, yes, it’s possible,
maybe even LIKELY, that this was supposed to be a throwaway line by Scott originally,
but FNAF World is confirmed to be canon, so this line is canon. And what this line tells us
is that Nightmarionne is or has CODE. Could this mean that the Agony Theory I was just talking
about is true, and that what Nightmarionne is referencing here is the code he has corrupted
in the Pizzaplex/AR World? Absolutely. But we still have to consider the final school of
thought out of the four I mentioned earlier. A recent hot topic in the community has been
the debate about whether Glitchtrap is a form of the Mimic program or not. I do plan to do
a whole video about this topic in the future, but for now, I want to discuss the idea I’ve
seen thrown around that Nightmarionne is a program mimicking Charlotte. This theory dives
into a lot of stuff about parallels between Edwin and Henry, and how Henry could’ve
made a Mimic program of Charlotte (ie: Charliebot) after she died. And that THAT
program is Nightmarionne. An evil version of Charlie like we see in the books. This
explains his FNAF World dialogue about code, and how he’s messing with the AR World and
Pizzaplex. You can make connections between him and Tiger Rock if you want to as well but
either way, that’s the idea. Sometimes people call this the Charlie-virus, or the C-virus,
which is something FNAF AR teased with Lefty, but none of that made it into the game so it’s
unclear if we can really use that as evidence. In any case, this theory could also
explain the Nightmarionne Staffbots, which I’ve neglected to mention so far. We saw
these things first in Security Breach where most of them were just reskinned regular Staffbots that
don’t act differently compared to normal ones, except for notably the ones in the sewer which
kill you rather than just alerting the Glamrocks. What’s really interesting is how the Nightmarionne
Staffbots seem to be under Glitchtrap’s control. We see that Vanny has control
over them in Security Breach, and if you do the Faz-Force ending in Help
Wanted 2, Glitchtrap summons a small group of Nightmarionne Staffbots that follow his
orders. Also in Help Wanted 2, we see that regular Staffbots can just…BECOME Nightmarionne
Staffbots when they get aggressive. Which implies to me that all Staffbots are infected with this
Nightmarionne Virus if you want to call it that. The issue with this theory is that there
should be no real way for Nightmarionne to be in Ultimate Custom Night if it’s just
a mimic program. The Mimic can do a lot of weird things but it can’t invade someone’s
nightmare coma. So we’re kind of at a dead end, huh? Not quite. You see, we’ve been leaving
a big part of Nightmarionne’s history out of the discussion so far. Let’s talk
a bit about the first FNAF VR game. In its first few moments, Help Wanted kind of
implies that FNAF 1-6 are in-universe games. This is not to say that we should disregard
them or that the events shown in them didn’t happen though. Anyway, what’s important is that
both Ultimate Custom Night and FNAF World do not seem to be in-universe games. Both of these
games were the only canonical appearances of Nightmarionne up to this point. Which is to say,
the people that made Help Wanted 1 in-universe, should not know who or what Nightmarionne
is. So how did he get in the game? The same way Cassidy and Old Man Consequences
did. It’s still debated who the Princess is and I made a whole video on it which I’ll link
in the description, but with the Princess originally being named Cassidy and the Old Man
being named OMC (meaning Old Man Consequences) in Help Wanted 2, I feel pretty confident
in saying that Princess Quest is where these characters are. But we never really stopped
to ask how they got there in the first place. We know Glitchtrap got downloaded into Help
Wanted 1 via something the developers scanned into the game, which seems to be a chip
Helpy was carrying in his skull when he fled the Pizza Sim fire according to Help
Wanted 2. Whatever you think this chip is, and whatever you think Glitchtrap is, the
only thing that makes sense to me when I ask how Cassidy and OMC are in Help Wanted 1 is
that something containing a piece of William’s Remnant or consciousness was scanned into the
game. Even if you think William is 100% gone and Glitchtrap is 100% a Mimic program, I can
think of no other explanation other than William, in some way, shape or form, was brought into
Help Wanted 1, and Cassidy and OMC followed him, as both of those characters are present in the
UCN Torture Coma that William was experiencing. Something else present in Ultimate Custom Night
that could’ve gone from there to Help Wanted 1 is Nightmarionne. An argument CAN indeed be made that
because we see Nightmarionne appear in the Night Terror levels that Nightmarionne has NOW been
canonized in FNAF 4, from a meta perspective. What I mean by that is, if FNAF 4 is canonically
a video game, an argument can be made that the Halloween DLC for FNAF 4 is ALSO canonically DLC.
Thus explaining how the in-universe developers for Help Wanted would know of Nightmarionne.
But I don’t quite think this is true. In Help Wanted 2, we get to play Princess
Quest 4, but more interestingly, we use the Princess Quest 4 cabinet to access Princess Quest
Alpha, a VR game. It’s important to note that, as Princess Quest Alpha is in fact,
an Alpha version of Princess Quest, it came before all of the other Princess
Quests, including the one that the mobile port of Help Wanted released with. And it’s
in this earliest form of Princess Quest that we see a Nightmarionne plush, which seems to
me to be the very first one. The beginning of a long line of stuffed toys that mark
the presence of this mysterious entity. I think it makes sense that the very
first iteration of Princess Quest, where we see Cassidy and Old Man Consequences
were ported to from Ultimate Custom Night, is also where Nightmarionne first arrived on the scene.
Help Wanted 2 sees us face the last remaining piece of Gltichtrap, which interestingly, also
resides in Princess Quest Alpha. However Afton was scanned into Help Wanted, followed closely
by the Vengeful Spirit, Old Man Consequences, and evidently, Nightmarionne, it seems like they
all were brought in originally to Princess Quest. But out of these 4 characters, only 2 of them
actually managed to manifest themselves outside the arcade game. I can’t come up with
a firm explanation as to why this is, but I find it VERY weird that the two
beings whose code/Remnant spread from Princess Quest into Help Wanted 1 take
the form of plushies inside the former. So Nightmarionne went from UCN, to Princess
Quest Alpha, To Help Wanted. And from there, to the systems of the Pizzaplex and AR
World. But is that really true? Let’s examine the evidence of Nightmarionne’s
existence in Security Breach and Ruin. The big obvious thing is the
existence of Nightmarionne Staffbots, which we now know is something all
Staffbots are capable of becoming, as well as switching back and forth between
Nightmarionne mode and regular mode. The fact that these exist at all is extremely strange, and
I’ve seen absolutely no rebuttal or explanation for these bots by those who claim Nightmarionne
is nothing more than an Easter Egg or Mr. Hippo Style-”You’re Overthinking Things” dig
at theorists by Steel Wool and Scott. A more subtle reference to Nightmarionne
is the fact that multiple locations throughout the Pizzaplex contain
black wires with white stripes, which are eerily reminiscent of Nightmarionne’s
limbs. These wires take different forms, like the thin ones in the Arcade that act
like ambient lighting, and the big thick ones in the Server room near Fazerblast. The
fact that more than one incarnation of these Nightmarionne-esque wires exists tells me
that it’s not just a one-off coincidence. These branching tentacles connect the entire
Pizzaplex like a series of nerves, or like the many threads of a spiderweb. Steel
Wool used Environmental story-telling a lot during Security Breach and RUIN, and
these wires are a good example of that. There are a lot of Nightmarionne plushies
around, as I mentioned. In Security Breach, they’re seemingly scattered randomly, the only
recurring theme between the placements is that they’re all not places you would expect to
find a plush. They’re all in spots that are almost hard to spot, and sometimes in
places where they have vantage points on the area they reside on. Almost as if
they are observing what’s around them. RUIN uses Plushies a lot. We can
see a table of the Glamrocks, each of their plushies ripped in the appropriate
place to match the damage of their animatronic counterparts. The Plushbaby room
shows us another example of this, which I go into a lot in this video about
Baby and her relationship with Elizabeth. The important thing in this room is that these
Plushies giggle and laugh and disappear. People have said this is Cassie’s brain chip
bleeding AR World stuff into her perception of reality, but I disagree. This room
specifically disables the Vanni Mask, and there are no other instances of
this kind of thing or anything like it occurring with the Vanni Mask off. Even
the Brazil Ending, the ending literally about Cassie going crazy and seeing things that
aren’t there, makes her put on her mask. So whatever is going on in the Plusbaby room is
happening in the real world. The reason I bring all this up is because I want to showcase
how RUIN uses plushies and the amount of emphasis it puts on them. They matter, and
they can tell us about what’s going on with the character they depict. With that in mind,
look at RUIN’s use of Nightmarionne’s plushies. Unlike Security Breach, these Plushies aren’t
placed randomly, instead they are placed very deliberately. And yet, they still look as if
they are observing what’s going on. Immediately at the start of the game, we can see one
of them watching Cassie as she narrowly avoids being crushed by an ATM on a cart. (PUT
A PIN IN THIS, it’s going to be important soon) We see it later as an unmissable detail that
you can’t ignore because you use it to proceed, and most importantly, we also see it watching
us during the final chase scene. Whatever doubt there was about Nightmarionne being
a key component of modern FNAF Lore is completely out the window. This isn’t
an easter egg, it’s not an inside joke, this is Steel Wool telling us something.
Nightmarionne is around and it is watching us. But watching us isn’t ALL it’s doing. See,
throughout RUIN, the player is hit with a number of scripted events, close calls for
Cassie. Things outside of animatronics chasing her or MXES trying to hunt her down. THINGS,
like, REAL OBJECTS, attempt to halt Cassie’s progress or stop it entirely. And these things
happen out of nowhere. Constantly, vents are collapsing while she uses them. An ATM Machine
on a cart rolls towards her out of nowhere. An elevator falls and tries to squash her. A Go-Kart
suddenly activates and tries to run her over. There is a force at play here that doesn’t
want Cassie to reach her goal and is willing to stop her even if it means killing her. For
all the events where surviving is not scripted and is something the player actively has to
do, the player WILL die if they do nothing. And funnily enough, the two instances where
this is the case are also the two instances that have the strongest ties to Nightmarionne.
A Nightmarionne plush is situated in the perfect place to watch Cassie die by runaway ATM, and
shortly after being attacked by a Go-Kart, Cassie can see Nightmarionne Staffbots
driving Go-Karts in the AR World. Okay. So we’ve explained how Nightmarionne went
from a non-canon Boss Fight to a secret but important player in the FNAF Storyline, and we’ve
explained how it canonically entered the real world via Princess Quest Alpha, but we still
haven’t settled on an answer for what it is. For me, personally, the most sensical option is
that Nightmarionne is indeed a manifestation of Charlie’s Agony, taken digital form.
In essence, a mix of the two most likely schools of thought I mentioned earlier.
This way, Nightmarionne’s existence makes sense, and it being in UCN makes sense. But it saying
it has code in FNAF World also makes sense, since it was scanned into Princess Quest Alpha.
And its dominion over the Staffbots, connection to the AR World, and sway over the real world
make sense too. It’s Dark Remnant that’s been digitized and spread like a virus over the System
of the Pizzaplex and the AR World parallel to it. The only real question left is
how Glitchtrap is connected to this Nightmarionne Virus. But that’s a
theory for another day. Subscribe to the channel if you liked the video,
and thank you for watching. Bye!
