Literature / Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights

Readers be ready, for here comes Freddy...

"Readers beware: This collection of terrifying tales is enough to unsettle even the most hardened Five Nights at Freddy's fans."

Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights is a horror anthology novella series based on the popular Five Nights at Freddy's franchise. Franchise creator Scott Cawthon is involved with the writing in all books in the series, with additional co-writers varying with each book from an assortment including Elley Cooper, Carly Anne West and Andrea Waggener. Emese Szigetvári, better known by her alias LadyFiszi, provides the artwork for the books.

Each book in the series follows a common structure, boasting three separate stories in which characters are plunged into dangerous encounters with a wide variety of animatronics, ranging from familiar opponents from the original games to entirely new enemies. As with similar series such as Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Plot Twists and Downer Endings are prevalent. Closing out each book is an additional story revolving around a mysterious entity known as the Stitchwraith, often set after the conclusion of another story within the books as a means of tying them together.

The canonicity of the series is highly ambiguous: according to Cawthon, various stories within the books are loosely tied into either the games' continuity or that of the other novel series, but none have explicitly confirmed to fall within one or the other. The series consists of eleven books, with a twelfth bonus book of stories that didn't make the cut for the main books included in the complete box set. A graphic novel adaptation of the series has been confirmed, with the first volume (covering two stories from Book 1^* "Into the Pit" and "To Be Beautiful" and one from Book 2^* "Out of Stock") released in summer of 2022, the second volume (covering one story from Book 2^* "Fetch" and two from Book 3^*  "Room for One More" and "The New Kid") released on March 7th, 2023, the third volume (covering one story from Book 4^* "Step Closer", one story from Book 5^*  "Bunny Call" and one story from Book 6^*  "Hide-and-Seek") released on September 5th, 2023.

The series was followed by Tales from the Pizzaplex, a Spiritual Successor series more closely tied to the recent video games, in 2022. The series consists of eight books.

The first story of the entire Fazbear Frights series, "Into The Pit" was revealed to be receiving a video game adaption, developed by Mega Cat Studios, in 2024 as part of the franchise's tenth anniversary.

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Fazbear Frights Stories

• #1: Into the Pit (Released December 26, 2019)
  • Story #1: "Into The Pit"
  • Story #2: "To Be Beautiful"
  • Story #3: "Count the Ways"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #1
• #2: Fetch (Released March 3, 2020)
  • Story #1: "Fetch"
  • Story #2: "Lonely Freddy"
  • Story #3: "Out of Stock"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #2
• #3: 1:35 AM (Released May 5, 2020)
  • Story #1: "1:35 AM"
  • Story #2: "Room For One More"
  • Story #3: "The New Kid"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #3
• #4: Step Closer (Released July 7, 2020)
  • Story #1: "Step Closer"
  • Story #2: "Dance With Me"
  • Story #3: "Coming Home"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #4
• #5: Bunny Call (Released September 1, 2020)
  • Story #1: "Bunny Call"
  • Story #2: "In the Flesh"
  • Story #3: "The Man in Room 1280"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #5
• #6: Blackbird (Released December 29, 2020)
  • Story #1: "Blackbird"
  • Story #2: "The Real Jake"
  • Story #3: "Hide and Seek"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #6
• #7: The Cliffs (Released March 2, 2021)
  • Story #1: "The Cliffs"
  • Story #2: "The Breaking Wheel"^* Originally intended to be Story #1, it was swapped with "The Cliffs" as the "The Breaking Wheel" cover art was deemed to be too scary by Scott Cawthon himself.
  • Story #3: "He Told Me Everything"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #7
• #8: Gumdrop Angel (Released May 4, 2021)
  • Story #1: "Gumdrop Angel"
  • Story #2: "Sergio's Lucky Day"
  • Story #3: "What We Found"^* Originally intended to be Story #2, it was swapped with "Sergio's Lucky Day" for an unknown reason.
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #8
• #9: The Puppet Carver^* Name originally revealed as "The Pupper Carver" (Released July 6, 2021)
  • Story #1: "The Puppet Carver"
  • Story #2: "Jump for Tickets"
  • Story #3: "Pizza Kit"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #9
• #10: Friendly Face (Released September 7, 2021)
  • Story #1: "Friendly Face"
  • Story #2: "Sea Bonnies"
  • Story #3: "Together Forever"
  • ** Stitchwraith Epilogue #10
• #11: Prankster (Released November 2, 2021; confirmed to be the last book in the main series)
  • Story #1: "Prankster"
  • Story #2: "Kids at Play"
  • Story #3: "Find Player Two!"
  • Stitchwraith Epilogue #11
• #12: Felix the Shark (Released April 5, 2022; included exclusively in the official box set, this volume consists of various stories which didn't make the cut for the main series)
  • Story #1: "Felix the Shark"
  • Story #2: "The Scoop"
  • Story #3: "You're the Band"

Tales from the Pizzaplex Stories

• #1: Lally's Game (Released July 19, 2022)
  • Story #1: "Frailty"
  • Story #2: "Lally's Game"
  • Story #3: "Under Construction"
  • Epilogue #1
• #2: Happs (Released September 20, 2022)
  • Story #1: "Help Wanted"
  • Story #2: "HAPPS"
  • Story #3: "B-7"
  • Epilogue #2
• #3: Somniphobia (Released December 6th, 2022)
  • Story #1: "Somniphobia"
  • Story #2: "Pressure"
  • Story #3: "Cleithrophobia"
  • Epilogue #3
• #4: Submechanophobia (Released December 27, 2022)
  • Story #1: "Submechanophobia"
  • Story #2: "Animatronic Apocalypse"
  • Story #3: "Bobbiedots, Part 1"
  • Epilogue #4
• #5: The Bobbiedots Conclusion (Released March 7, 2023)
  • Story #1: "GGY"
  • Story #2: "The Storyteller"
  • Story #3: "Bobbiedots, Part 2"
  • Epilogue #5
• #6: Nexie (Released May 2, 2023)
  • Story #1: "Nexie"
  • Story #2: "Drowning"
  • Story #3: "The Mimic"
  • Epilogue #6
• #7: Tiger Rock (Released July 4, 2023)
  • Story #1: "Tiger Rock"
  • Story #2: "The Monty Within"
  • Story #3: "Bleeding Heart"
  • Epilogue #7
• #8: B7-2 (Released October 3, 2023)
  • Story #1: "B7-2"
  • Story #2: "Alone Together"
  • Story #3 "Dittophobia"
  • Epilogue #8

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The Fazbear Frights series continues with bone-chilling tropes to keep even the bravest troper up at night...:

General examples

#-A

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The majority of the stories are implied to be this, given both the advanced technology on display with the animatronics and the fact that most of the stories are implied to take place several years after Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, which itself was set in 2023.
• Accidental Murder: A few examples:
  • "The New Kid" has Kelsey get killed inside a Fredbear / Golden Freddy suit as a result of a prank gone wrong, forcing Devon and Mick to cover it up. Except that might not actually be what happened at all.
  • "Step Closer" has the unnamed surgeons harvesting Pete's eyes and hand for an organ transplant… unaware that Pete is actually still alive and still fully conscious. It's not explicitly stated that Pete died, but it's hard to imagine any other outcome.
  • The fourth Stitchwraith epilogue reveals that at least some of the murders committed by the Stitchwraith arguably qualify, as neither Jake nor Andrew intend to kill the people they touch (Andrew only wants to prank them with a minor electric shock). As for what else might be in there with them, however…
  • "The Breaking Wheel" has Reed lock Julius in a springlock-type exoskeleton as a punishment for bullying him and his friends. It's not until Reed hears Shelly talking about medieval torture devices that he thinks maybe it wasn't as harmless an idea as he thought...
  • "Jump For Tickets" has Colton become a victim of this, as he is locked inside the Ticket Pulverizer as the kids jump around inside it, seemingly causing him to be crushed into a bloody paste.
  • "Pizza Kit" has Marley end up becoming the perpetrator of this, as her attempts to reveal her survival to Payton end up causing the terrified girl to slip and fall off the roof where she had hidden, breaking her neck on impact.
  • "Together Forever" has Jessica kill Brittany inside the springlock Rosie Porkchop animatronic by accidentally flipping a switch while in a panic and changing it from suit mode to animatronic mode.
  • "Find Player Two!" has Aimee thinking that Emmett Tucker kidnapped and possibly murdered her childhood friend Mary Jo as he had been poking around the Hiding Maze they were playing in and was later arrested for attempted kidnapping, but later learns that she herself is responsible for Mary Jo's death when she goes through the ancient Hiding Maze and finds her mummified corpse, having been trapped inside her hiding spot ever since Aimee fled the Maze without pressing the "Give Up" button.
• Adaptational Abomination: In the games, Spring Bonnie is a simple mascot costume, only made dangerous because of William Afton's usage of it to kill. Here, Spring Bonnie is a full on Pennywise-like creature that can even change its appearance.
• Adaptational Badass: The Plushtrap Chaser in "Out of Stock" possesses quite a few abilities that he has yet to display in the games: not only are his teeth fully capable of eating straight through a garage door, but it also possesses some form of voice mimicry and is able to become so heavy that the boys can't even move it (precluding them from going for the easiest solution and just turning it off). These decidedly non-standard features are revealed in the tenth Stitchwraith epilogue to have been added by Eleanor, for as yet unknown reasons.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the original novel trilogy, Ella was simply one of Charlie's childhood toys, but 1:35 AM turns her into something far more sinister. Averted in the tenth Stitchwraith epilogue, which reveals Eleanor to be the one invisibly terrorizing Delilah.
• Adaptation Name Change: Circus Baby goes by Eleanor this time around. Justified as they're actually separate animatronics.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Funtime Freddy's personality is completely different from the games, instead of being crazy, constantly referencing Bon-Bon and being obsessed with parties, he loves to make references to history and has a much darker sense of humor.
• Affably Evil: Lucky Boy is nothing but cheerful and giggly with seemingly good advice, but he slowly guides Sergio down the path to destroying his own life, which Sergio never realizes despite its increasing obviousness.
• Agony of the Feet: Jace in "HAPPS" has his feet cut off when Happs tries to grab him by the ankles with its damaged claw hands.
• The Alleged Car: Nole from "Blackbird" drives an old car that used to be cool once, but turned into a "piece of junk on wheels" over many years of use.
• Ambiguous Ending:
  • "Count the Ways" doesn't clarify whether or not Millie managed to avoid being decapitated by Funtime Freddy or what fate befalls her afterwards. Sadly, epilogue 11 reveals she didn't survive.
  • Nothing about what happened to Jack in the second half of "The Puppet Carver" is clear.
  • "Prankster" leaves it unclear if the Jigsaw-esque game is really one of Parker's pranks or the work of a malevolent entity, to say nothing of what was in that closet at the end...
• Ambiguously Evil:
  • "Fetch" raises the possibility that the titular animatronic might not be inherently evil, but simply badly malfunctioning and prone to taking instructions literally; for example, Fetch ripping off Greg's uncle's finger seems to have been an overly literal interpretation of Greg texting his uncle asking for his "Magic Finger of Luck" (metaphorically asking for his help in setting up a business). That said, the epilogue of 1:35 AM seems to imply that Fetch is not just actively malevolent, but one of the most actively evil things in Phineas's collection.
  • Golden Freddy and Kelsey in "The New Kid". Was Golden Freddy actively luring Devon to be eaten, or was it simply retaliating against him after seeing what he did to Kelsey? Is Kelsey actively luring kids to Freddy's, or does he have some other agenda? Are the two working together, or is them getting involved together a coincidence?
  • Dominic from "Gumdrop Angel". The story drops hints that he knows what effect the gumdrop would have had if Ophelia had eaten it, but it's left ambiguous. He's also clearly horrified and distraught that Angel ate it instead… though that notably doesn't stop him from loading her into a box to be eaten as the next Birthday Gummy.
  • The amorphous entity from "The Puppet Carver". On the one hand it behaves in a pretty threatening way, chasing Jack down and forcing him to experience all the psychological pain he has inflicted throughout his life, not to mention the fact that its appearance does not exactly seem like a traditionally "good" entity. On the other hand, the entity seems content to leave after doing so, and its behavior may have been trying to help cement Jack's Heel–Face Turn. And that's not even getting into the possibility that the entity may actually have been the original Jack trying to confront the impostor, and/or its possible connections to Faz-Goo.
  • The titular robot from Happs doesn't seem to be entirely malevolent, but rather just trying to do its job while badly damaged after being kicked repeatedly by Aiden and Jace. The two boys even discuss if Happs is vengeful, with Aiden coming to the conclusion that he's just following his programming. While that does seem to be the case, it does nothing to prevent him from ripping Jace to shreds and presumably doing the same to Aiden later on. Even with all of Happs' brutality, it's likely that he was just trying to help and Aiden and Jace unknowingly made him dangerous by breaking him.
  • The Pizzaplex Ballora is an interesting case. Unlike Happs, she was in no way damaged or even malfunctioning during the story, or before it for that matter. It's implied she just didn't know her own strength, and ripped Grady apart while trying to pull him out of the tunnel.
• Anachronic Order:
  • "Count the Ways" jumps back and forth between regular days from Millie's life where she gets annoyed by her grandfather or hangs out with a boy she grows fond of and her terrible experience trapped inside Funtime Freddy's torso as he lists off historical death methods in gruesome detail.
  • "Step Closer", "Gumdrop Angel" and "You're the Band" start with scenes that happen later in the story before jumping back to the actual beginning.
  • "The Real Jake" is interspersed with short flashbacks.
  • The Stitchwraith Epilogues indulge in this somewhat as well, with Epilogues 3 and 4 taking place before the first two.
• And I Must Scream: Quite a few stories end this way:
  • "To Be Beautiful" sees Sarah reduced to a pile of scrap metal, unable to feel or presumably even think.
  • "Lonely Freddy" ends with a literal example, with Alec and the dozens of other people trapped inside Lonely Freddys screaming out as they're trapped inside a dumpster.
  • In a similarly literal way, "Room for One More" ends with Stanley only being able to scream in terror as another Minireena begins to force its way down his throat.
  • "Step Closer" has Pete Forced to Watch, paralyzed and unable to move or communicate, as a pair of surgeons — believing he's dead — prepare to harvest his organs for donation, starting with his eyes and hand.
  • Springtrap (or at least a virtual recreation of him) gets this treatment in "In the Flesh"; thanks to Matt's sadistic revenge, the game is altered so that Springtrap finds himself wandering a maze without any victims to kill, while the game's frame rate is boosted so that he spends what's implied to be months in this purgatory in the space of a single night. It's implied that his desire to escape from this torment, and to find new victims, was at least in part what allowed him to escape the game and enter the real world via Matt's body.
  • "Kids at Play" has Joel's body taken over by an unknown force and piloted to the location where he hit Caleb in his car, before undergoing a visceral transformation into a plastic Kids at Play figure.
  • "Under Construction" has Maya consumed by the giant blobs, but she is seemingly unable to die and can only wonder if she ever will.
• Animalistic Abomination: The Friendly Face that Edward gets. Friendly Faces are supposed to be animatronic recreations of deceased pets, using DNA from the pet's hair to recreate the face. Edward wants one to get over Faraday's death, but mistakenly sends one of Jack's hairs, resulting in a black cat with a grinning human face.
• Artificial Afterlife: Jake can't technically free the souls of Eleanor's victims that are trapped in the ball pit, so he uses his powers to allow them to live out happy memories, and give them some measure of peace.
• Ascended Meme:
  • One of the earliest memes in the FNAF fandom was "Sparky the Dog", a notorious hoax regarding a passive dog animatronic that allegedly appeared in the Backstage area of the first game. "Fetch", the first story in the second volume, reveals that Freddy's was working on an actual dog animatronic, the titular Fetch (although Fetch turns out to be anything but passive).
  • When Five Nights at Freddy's 3 was first being teased and no one knew what Springtrap was, one of the most common theories (either jokingly or otherwise) was that he was an amalgamation of all the previous animatronics, with some overeager fans dubbing the new animatronic "Salvage". The ending of Epilogue 6 sees William Afton — the man who originally inhabited the Springtrap suit — build a giant mechanical body for himself to inhabit using the scrapped remains of other animatronics, including at least one member of the original Freddy's crew (the version of Foxy from "Step Closer"), arguably realizing this long-standing urban legend.
  • A small one from Epilogue 10: at one point, the narration refers to the homeless man that Jake met in Epilogue 8 as "the man behind the Dumpster"; this slightly odd phrasing seems to be a nod to "the man behind the slaughter", a line from the FNAF fan-song "It's Been So Long" which has become the fandom's go-to nickname for William Afton.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Devon from "The New Kid" definitely exhibits some psychopathic tendencies. He writes and presents a story where two real children are brutally murdered, kills a bird without hesitation, and plans to traumatize Kelsey for the crime of not hanging out with him for a day. Keep in mind, this is after Kelsey offers him a sincere apology. Similar to "Lonely Freddy", this makes his brutal death hit less hard than someone like Delilah or Stanley's.
  • Matt from "In the Flesh" is by far the least sympathetic protagonist of the entire series, being an arrogant narcissist with a positively disgusting attitude towards co-workers and women, and a general refusal to address any of his many personality flaws, even when confronted with blatant evidence of them. It's likely that the writers intentionally chose to make him so utterly unsympathetic to make his truly horrific fate somewhat easier to witness.
  • Nole from "Blackbird" is set up to be one, but repents and survives. Blackbird, the movie character, is conceived by Sam and Nole as an animatronic bird who specifically targets Asshole Victims.
  • Jack from "The Puppet Carver" is a complete monster of a person, rivalling Matt in his assholeness. He is verbally abusive to literally everyone; his employees, his wife, his son, even the random cashier at the Golden Heifer. Unlike Matt, however, he ends up having a Heel–Face Turn after his near-death experience with the Puppet Carver and becomes kindhearted and forgiving. Maybe.
  • Jessica and Brittany from "Together Forever" are both utterly obnoxious Alpha Bitches who think the world of themselves and look down on everyone around them, especially Mindy and Cindy, a pair of eighth-graders who are nothing but nice to everyone around them. As if that wasn't bad enough, the two later concoct a plan to lock the younger girls inside a springlock animatronic and program it so that they'll be forced to serve the two older girls like maids. Thanks to Jessica's bad programming, they inadvertently inflict this fate upon themselves instead.
  • Joel from "Kids at Play" is self-absorbed, ungrateful, and constantly disrespects his parents. When he hits a child wandering outside in the night while he's speeding on the road, he decides to not help the child or tell anyone what happened so he won't jeopardize his own future, and tries to justify it by blaming the child for being outside after midnight and outright tells himself that one stupid kid isn't worth a potential criminal record. His fate is deserved but nonetheless horrifying.
  • Mr Burrows from "The Storyteller" is by far the biggest one in the entire series. Not only is he a Corrupt Corporate Executive who is all too eager to replace the Pizzaplex's creative team with an AI, he also is more than willing to kill Edwin by trapping him in the Storyteller Tree. (In fairness, he suspected Edwin was tampering with the Storyteller AI, causing glitches in the Pizzaplex, but the fact he went straight to murder and disregarded all other possibilities doesn't help him much) More than any other protagonist, Mr Burrows brought his horrific fate upon himself.

B-C

• Barred from the Afterlife: Any dead souls trapped in the ball pit from "Into The Pit" are unable to truly move on to the afterlife even if they are able to rest in peace. By the end of the original Fazbear Frights books, Eleanor had managed to trap the souls of her multiple victims in said pit like Millie from "Count The Ways" with the implications of the other dead protagonists from the other stories being there as well. Even after Jake manages to defeat Eleanor in the pit and trap her in one of her own memories, the souls are unable to move on. Jake however decides to help them rest in peace at least.
• Big Bad:
  • The Stitchwraith was originally built up to be this for the original series as a whole, serving as the antagonist in the epilogue stories that tie the others together. With regards to the individual stories, each one has a different animatronic as the main villain; see Monster of the Week below for details. Subverted as of Epilogue 4, which reveals that the Stitchwraith is actually closer to the Big Good (of a sort); neither of the children possessing it actually want to kill people, and Jake seems to have made it his mission to track down the objects infected by Andrew's anger and stop them from hurting people.
  • "The Man from Room 1280" introduces us to the Fazbear Frights version of William Afton, the Big Bad of the original games and Andrew's killer. While he comes back to life after dying in his introductory story and becomes a 15 foot tall version of Springtrap made from junk and the remains of the destroyed animatronics from throughout the series, he ends up being a Big Bad Wannabe since he ends up defeated in epilogue 7 thanks to the help of the Puppet and is Killed Off for Real with Andrew finally able to go to the afterlife as a result. However, it's revealed that something much worse was the only thing keeping Afton alive and was now free after his defeat.
  • Epilogues 9 and 10 reveal and confirm that the true Big Bad for the whole original series is Eleanor, the evil being that was keeping William alive after his death who wants to create more agony and caused the deaths of multiple protagonists and other events from the stories in the series. She is defeated in epilogue 11 thanks to the stitchwraith pulling her into the ball lot from the story "Into the Pit" and traps her in one of her own memories seemingly forever as Jake's soul passes on after helping all of the souls trapped in the ball pit like Millie from "Count the Ways" rest in piece despite them being unable to move on to the afterlife themselves. However, Everett Larson could hear a voice singing in the heart-shaped pendant Eleanor was using, hinting that she may still be around in some form.
  • Tales From the Pizzaplex introduces us to its Big Bad in the epilogue storyline in the form of the Mimic, an endoskeleton originally created by an engineer hired by Fazbear Entertainment named Edwin Murray with an AI that allows it to learn based on what it experiences and mimics it. While it was originally made to entertain Edwin's son while he was working, Edwin later took out his anger on the Mimic when it started acting like his son after her was killed in an accident and violently smashes it to pieces and abandons it in the process. When a team eventually tried to recover it, the Mimic starts killing them due to learning how to be violent from the experience. Later, the Mimic is somehow transported to the FFPS location and is reprogrammed by a technician named Gil to rip off the limbs of the endoskeletons there before it starts doing the same to everyone and has to be sealed up below the Pizzaplex.
• Big Damn Heroes: Ian, Nole's neighbor in the frat building, woke Nole up in the nick of time when the Blackbird tortured him in his dream.
• Bittersweet Ending: Oscar and his friends defeat the Plushtrap Chaser in "Out of Stock", but Oscar's mom will presumably need to find a lot of cash somewhere to replace all the doors and furniture damaged by the animatronic.
  • In "Alone Together", Travis realizes he has been Dead All Along and the body he was looking for was actually his own. After realizing this, his spirit is implied to have found peace.
• Blood from the Mouth: Toby and Jace, as they're dying in their respective stories.
• Body Horror: In droves. Notable examples include:
  • "To Be Beautiful": Sarah's entire body is replaced with scrapyard garbage over the course of a few nights without her knowledge, leading to her falling apart into a pile of metal when she loses the necklace Eleanor gave her.
  • "Out of Stock": The malfunctioning Plushtrap Chaser has its mechanical eyes and teeth replaced with human ones, implied to be because someone (presumably a child) was stuffed inside.
  • "Room For One More": Stanley discovers that Minireenas have been crawling inside his body as he sleeps, causing his arms and throat to swell painfully until ultimately he becomes totally immobile… allowing more Minireenas to crawl inside him.
  • In a similar (but even weirder) vein, "In the Flesh" has Matt somehow become pregnant with an infant-sized, organic version of Springtrap, and end up cutting open his own stomach in order to extract the entity from within himself.
  • "The Man in Room 1280": The titular man is burned so horrifically that any normal human body should have long since shut down… and yet he remains alive, his organs still functioning against all reason. The story goes into gruesome detail about the visceral horror of the man's not-quite-corpse, especially when Arthur first sees him.
  • The corpses of the Stitchwraith's victims are left as withered gray husks with missing eyes and black tears running down their faces, not unlike certain other murder victims shown within the franchise.
  • "The Breaking Wheel" has Julius locked in his exoskeleton and left overnight. When he reappears… he's not pretty.
  • "Gumdrop Angel" has Angel develop a mysterious red and squishy rash that quickly spreads over her body, and she can't find a successful treatment. She goes on to describe herself as looking like a red lizard with gooey blotchy scales. During her drive to Freddy's, her body and limbs become floppy and pliable. Although it's never outright stated (but it's obvious on the cover), she's transformed into a figure of candy, and is eaten by ravenous children.
  • "Sergio's Lucky Day" has Sergio mutilate himself after asking Lucky Boy how he should improve his appearance for wooing his high school crush. From his ideas and Lucky Boy's suggestions, it can be inferred that he removes his ears and eyelids, scalps himself, trims down his lips and nose, and cuts out his stomach fat.
  • "Sea Bonnies" has Mott's body infested with the titular creatures, gradually being eaten from the inside and reformed by the Sea Bonnies until they take control of his body.
  • "Prankster" has Jeremiah discover more and more dismembered body parts throughout the office.
  • "Kids at Play" has Joel controlled by unseen forces and gradually transformed into a Kids at Play sign, and the text describes his teeth, hair, eyes, and skin falling away in succession as he can only observe the transformation.
  • "Lally's Game" has Selena killed by Lally and crammed into the small trunk he was kept in before.
  • "HAPPS" has Jace mutilated to death by Happs, cutting off his foot and badly slicing his body.
  • "Cleithrophobia" sees Grady pulled apart by the Pizzaplex Ballora, reduced to a bony, paralyzed pulp by her attempts to help.
• The Bus Came Back: "The New Kid" has Golden Freddy as the main antagonist, marking his first major appearance in the series since Five Nights at Freddy's 4 (discounting his ambiguous role in Ultimate Custom Night).
• Bus Crash: The epilogue of 1:35 AM shows Phineas dismantling Fetch, using his circuitry for the "heart" of the robot which becomes the Stitchwraith. (Although given that it's not clear how much of Fetch was transferred into the Stitchwraith, this may be more of an example of Came Back Strong than this trope.)
  • Several of the other animatronics, including Ella and Foxy, are implied to have been killed or deactivated by the Stitchwraith during the events of the Epilogues.
• Call-Back:
  • In the very first game, Phone Guy cautioned the player that if a person were to be stuffed into an animatronic suit, "the only parts of [them] that would likely see the light of day again would be [their] eyeballs and teeth when they pop out the front of the mask." Now "Out of Stock" has a Plushtrap Chaser with human eyes and teeth, implying that someone got stuffed inside. Averted in Epilogue 10, which reveals that Eleanor put the eyes and teeth into the Plushtrap Chaser.
  • The events of "Bunny Call" and "What We Found" resemble the gameplay of fourth and third games respectively.
  • "Frailty" is one big callback to "To Be Beautiful", as Jessica is all but confirmed to have fallen prey to Eleanor in the same way Sarah did, since she's actually made of scrap metal and uses a heart-shaped pendant to retain her former human appearance, as well as having a strong aversion to the junkyard.
• Changing Yourself for Love: Sergio does this to an extreme at the behest of Lucky Boy.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Both Toby in "Hide-and-Seek" and Colton in "Jump For Tickets" pay with their lives for trying to cheat in a Freddy Fazbear game.
• Complexity Addiction: Toby tries to cheat in the Hide-and-Seek game by limiting Shadow Bonnie's mobility. Instead, for instance, of simply bringing a flashlight to the game room and watching where it hides.
• Continuity Nod: One of the arcade games Colton notes in "Jump For Tickets" is Dee Dee's Fishing Hole.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The depiction of Ralpho on the cover of Bunny Call seems to directly contradict his appearance in the story; while it is difficult to judge given the lack of a background, the cover makes him look about the size of a classic "cymbal monkey" toy, quite a far cry from the six-and-a-half foot tall monstrosity in the story proper. LadyFiszi, the cover artist, has said this is due to the vague description of the character she was given to work off of.
  • The puppet-like animatronics on the cover of The Puppet Carver don't actually appear in the story at all, with the closest thing the story has to a villain being an animate collection of Jack's organs powered by what may or may not be Faz-Goo.
  • The cover of Friendly Face depicts said character with white, pupil-less eyes and a blank expression, but in-story it has regular-looking brown eyes and is constantly grinning.
  • The cover of Happs can make the titular robot (and the tube maze surrounding him) look absolutely massive due to the perspective. In the story itself, Happs is only about two and a half feet tall, while the tube maze is four feet in diameter.

D-H

• Darker and Edgier: Quite possibly the bleakest works in the entire franchise, which is saying something. The animatronics are far more brutal than in any other incarnation, and numerous characters, including the majority of the protagonists — several of which are children — suffer bloody and horrific fates rife with Body Horror.
• A Day in the Limelight: In addition to completely new animatronics such as Fetch and Lonely Freddy, as well as old classics such as Spring Bonnie and Golden Freddy, the series takes less well-known animatronics from throughout the series and gives them some new and terrifying lore. Examples include Funtime Freddy in "Count the Ways", Plushtrap in "Out of Stock", the Minireenas in "Room for One More", and Shadow Bonnie in "Hide-and-Seek".
• Dead All Along: Susie from "Coming Home" was one of William's victims and is now a ghost, unable to interact with her family except through her drawings.
  • Also the case in Tales From The Pizzaplex's "Alone Together", though no murder was involved, just a tragic accident, and the reveal is saved for the very end as opposed to "Coming Home", where it's revealed relatively early.
• Deadly Prank: In "Pizza Kit", Marley pretends to go missing for laughs after she falls out of view at the Pizza Kit factory, but this winds up causing her friend Payton to think that she's actually dead, which causes a domino effect of guilt, paranoia, and hallucinations that ultimately result in Payton falling off the roof of her house and breaking her neck.
• Death by Childbirth:
  • Matt in "In the Flesh" ends up experiencing possibly the most fucked up twist on this trope imaginable, cutting open his own stomach with a kitchen knife in order to extract a baby version of Springtrap out of his body.
  • Anna in "The Cliffs" has this fate before the story begins, after experiencing some health issues that prompt doctors to perform an emergency C-Section before the baby is due. She has a stroke on the operating table and dies soon after.
• Decoy Protagonist: Tales From the Pizzaplex epilogue storyline starts with a team of Fazbear Entertainment workers sent to try and renovate the FNAF 6 location and focuses on two, a disgruntled technician named Gil who believes he should be on the company's technical team, and Danny, a member of the team who is excited to be there. While it seems that these two are set up to be the main characters of the epilogue storyline, Gil and almost everyone on the team ends up being killed by the Mimic after Gil reprogrammed it to tear off the limbs of the endoskeletons at the location and Danny escapes and begs other members of the company to seal off the entrance so it couldn't escape. The actual protagonist of the epilogue storyline is Lucia, a high schooler, and her friends who decided to check out the ruins of the FNAF 6 location with them all being killed by the Mimic throughout until Lucia is the only one left alive by the end of the 7th epilogue.
• Dissonant Serenity: In "Under Construction", cancer diagnoses and deaths skyrocket but no one is particularly bothered aside from Maya. The newscasters are even cheerful while reporting thousands of deaths. Additionally, no one seems to care that instead of human babies, people are giving birth to see-through blob creatures that mature to adulthood and multiply in days, quickly overtaking the planet. It's implied to be because Maya never actually left the AR booth and the people are actually just recreated versions incapable of feeling anything but joy.
• Double-Meaning Title: The story "Bleeding Heart" gets a lot of mileage out of its title. The first 'tattoo', or, more accurately, flesh carving, which Danny gets is a heart. Bleeding heart is a term for someone who's too sympathetic towards another problems, matching Danny's actions throughout the story. And Danny requesting hundreds of tattoos at the end leaves nothing of his body but a trail of flesh cutouts leading to a still, bloody heart.
• Downer Beginning: We learn right off the bat in "The Real Jake" that Jake's mom died four years ago, and Jake himself is suffering from a brain tumor. It only gets downhill from there.
• Dream Within a Dream: Toby thinks that this is happening when he first sees Shadow Bonnie following him.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Delilah in "1:35 AM" gets herself stuck in a vent trying to escape Ella, and decides to stay there forever as she no longer feels Ella pursuing her.
  • Toby in "Hide and Seek" impales himself on pegs meant for hanging props as a means of destroying RWQFSFASXC and, in his Sanity Slipped mind, beating the Hide and Seek game.
  • Robert in "The Cliffs" is about to leap from the titular landform after his son's disappearance magnifies his grief from losing his wife, but resolves against it after realizing that she wouldn't want him to choose an early death.
  • B-7 has two cases; first, Billy's mother, Vera, overdoses on pills in the bathtub after raising her severely mentally ill son for over a decade as her health declined. Three years later, Billy himself chooses to remain in a junkyard car as it's being compacted after the horrible realization that he is not actually a robot.
• Emotion Eater: Shadow Bonnie in "Hide and Seek" is this, being fueled by Toby's anger whilst attached to the latter's shadow.
• Everybody Lives: Despite the setup, all human characters survive the events of "Out of Stock", "Bunny Call", and "Blackbird".
• Eye Scream: As Joel transforms into a sign, his eyes fall out, and the narration makes sure the reader knows that one of them gets impaled on a sharp rock.
• Faking the Dead: Marley from "Pizza Kit", in a way. After falling out of view at the Pizza Kit factory, she decides to go missing for the fun of it; meanwhile, her friend Payton thinks she was killed and made into pizza ingredients.
• Faux Affably Evil: Funtime Freddy, as usual. He's surprisingly cordial to Millie even as he's planning to kill her to sate his own boredom.
• Fell Asleep Crying: Greg, after Fetch mauls his uncle.
• Fetus Terrible:
  • "In the Flesh" has Springtrap escape the game through Matt's body. Yes, in that way.
  • During the second half of "Under Construction", people start giving birth to transparent, jelly-like blob creatures instead of regular babies. They grow, multiply, and spread across the planet in days, eventually surrounding and suffocating Maya.
• Gainax Ending:
  • The ending of "The New Kid" takes an abrupt turn and becomes more bewildering than any other story thus far when Devon sees a corpse that's not Kelsey's stuffed inside of the active Fredbear suit before dying. Afterwards, Kelsey inexplicably appears alive and well at a new school, apparently intent on luring more children to their doom for reasons unknown.
• Goofy Print Underwear: Ian, the Gentle Giant jock from "Blackbird", likes to go around the frat building wearing only boxers with funny prints on it.
• Grand Theft Me:
  • At the end of "To Be Beautiful", Eleanor steals Sarah's original appearance after leaving her for dead in her house.
  • Lonely Freddy in the story of the same name switches its mind with that of a child, going home with their family while the child in the Lonely Freddy animatronic is found to be faulty and discarded.
  • In "He Told Me Everything", the Faz-Goo grows a clone of whoever's DNA it absorbs, attaching to them and transferring their organs and other parts to itself, killing the original.
  • This may be responsible for Jack's Heel–Face Turn in "The Puppet Carver", due to the appearance of human-like organs and tissue in the titular machine at the end of the story. Then there's the possibility of Faz-Goo being involved here too.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The fourth epilogue reveals that Andrew is the one behind most of the Animatronics of the Week. Bunny Call reveals that this happened because of the Man in Room 1280, who himself is originally implied and later confirmed to be the franchise-wide Big Bad, William Afton. Until The Cliffs reveals there is another, even bigger one residing inside the Amalgamation – Eleanor, the real Big Bad of the original Fazbear Frights stories heavily implied to have been created from Agony itself.
• Henpecked Husband: Bob, the protagonist of Bunny Call.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Subverted. The series initially seems to have no true Big Bad, with each story featuring a different antagonist; however, the Epilogues reveal the existence of the Stitchwraith, which is inadvertently responsible for causing the items in many of the other stories to become infected and turn evil. However, it's not until Epilogue 6 that we learn the true source of the infection itself: William Afton, who came back after the events of "The Man in Room 1280", and assembles a new body for himself out of the compacted remains of the infected items – only to be utterly curb-stomped by the Puppet in the very next epilogue, revealing him as nothing more than a Big Bad Wannabe, not helped by how the epilogue closed on the ominous revelation that he was extremely weak and only as dangerous as he was because something else was helping him. This mysterious entity, later confirmed to be Eleanor from "To Be Beautiful", escaped as the Puppet began to tear apart the Amalgamation, abandoning its "puppet" to seemingly die in the process, and becomes the true Big Bad of the series with her defeat happening in the last epilogue.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Spring Bonnie from "Into the Pit". Initially, only Oswald is able to see it inside the ballpit, at least until it follows him out and kidnaps his father. It then replaces Oswald's father without anyone else — including his own wife — acknowledging the change; only Oswald himself continues to see it for what it really is. One might suspect illusion discs to be involved...at least until it unhinges its jaw during Oswald's final confrontation with it, revealing itself to be organic. It ultimately dies by asphyxiation after hanging itself on a rope, but even after its demise, Oswald's father is left unable to remember anything that happened involving it. Then there's the matter of whatever connection it may have to William Afton...
  • The Stitchwraith looks to be this, being a cloaked figure with a grotesquely crude mask that's wreathed in mystery; its victims are left as withered husks with gray skin and black tears. In truth, however, it's more of a Mechanical Abomination.
  • Julius in "The Breaking Wheel" simultaneously becomes this and a Mechanical Abomination when he's locked in his own exoskeleton which is unknowingly controlled by Pickle's remote due to the same frequency to the exoskeleton's remote, causing his body to be mutilated and merged with it. His arrival to kill Reed spares few details on his appearance.
  • The Birthday Gummy in "Gumdrop Angel" is seen as this by Angel, and she feels sick when looking at it. Eventually Angel herself becomes this trope when she turns into the next Birthday Gummy.

I-M

• I Just Want to Be Beautiful: Sarah’s motivation. Says it all in the title of her story, “To Be Beautiful”. She ends up getting what she wanted, but at a terrible price...
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The children at Ophelia's and Julie's birthday parties in "Gumdrop Angel" unintentionally become this (in a way) with the revelation that the Birthday Gummies are actual people turned into candy.
  • Payton in "Pizza Kit" falsely believes herself to have become this due to her paranoia over Marley's disappearance causing her to think that her pizza contains Marley's remains, and she eats it to Destroy the Evidence.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Stanley says that to Amber in his last note.
• Kill and Replace:
  • Spring Bonnie does that to Oswald's dad in "Into the Pit", with nobody but Oswald himself noticing. Thankfully, Oswald later finds his father unconscious, but alive.
  • Eleanor steals Sarah's looks in "To Be Beautiful".
  • The Faz-Goo clone in "He Told Me Everything" ends up doing this to Chris due to him using a baby tooth for the expirement rather than removing one of his own teeth as instructed, in that it completely absorbs his body.
  • This probably happens to Jack in "The Puppet Carver", as after his experience with it and the blob monster he becomes a completely different person, and Sage afterwards finds human-like organs and tissue inside the Puppet Carver.
  • This turns out to be the purpose of the Sea Bonnies, first doing it to Rory's fish and then to Mott.
• Large and in Charge: The trope is namedropped by Jessica and Brittany in "Together Forever".
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday:
  • The Emporium in "Out of Stock" has certain traits of one. It's big, and it was there yesterday (and a long time before yesterday), but it disappears shortly after Oscar and his friends obtain the Plushtrap Chaser.
  • Not exactly a shop, but the house in "1:35 AM" where Delilah bought her doll at a garage sale ends up completely empty several days later.
  • The seller who sold Sylvia a haunted Freddy Fazbear mask in "You're The Band" at an online auction disappeared without a trace the next day.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Jake is a serious, non-glurgey take on this trope. All the efforts by other characters only manage to ease his suffering a little, and he succumbs to his illness at the end.
• Logical Weakness: Fetch’s implied deactivation is this. He was implied to have been caught in a thunderstorm and shorted out because of it. No matter how much of an Implacable Man an animatronic is, if it's not waterproof, there's not much it can do against the rain.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In almost all stories, it is left unclear to what degree the animatronics' capabilities are the result of advanced technology and which are explicitly paranormal. Some noteworthy examples include:
  • "To Be Beautiful": Was the necklace that Eleanor gave Sarah actually supernatural, or was it some form of illusion disk?
  • "Out Of Stock": Are the Plushtrap Chaser's abilities the result of it being tampered with by its previous owner, it possibly being possessed by a spirit, or both?
  • "1:35 AM": Is the Ella doll genuinely supernatural, or is it simply equipped with an extremely advanced (and spiteful) AI and technology such as illusion disks and the invisibility devices from Special Delivery?
  • "Bunny Call": Who (or what) exactly was Ralpho is left ambiguous. The only thing that's certain is that he was not the counselor who usually did Bunny Calls in the camp.
  • "Blackbird": Was the titular creature actually a supernatural entity, a manifestation of Noel's own guilty conscience, a very much alive Sam playing a prank on Noel as revenge for Noel's behavior on set, or some combination of the three?
  • "Under Construction": Are the horrific worldwide deaths and blob creatures all real, or is Maya still inside the AR machine in the Pizzaplex? Even she doesn't know, though a background event in "Cleithrophobia" implies it's the latter.
• Mechanical Abomination:
  • Fetch. It goes well beyond its original function as a phone-connected assistant to track Greg's every activity and pulls off some highly improbable feats, such as killing a real dog and later Kimberly. It proves to be fast enough to the point of implied teleportation: Greg burying it does little to slow it down, and afterwards it's able to kill Kimberly and leave her at Greg's house in a carpet without detection in the span of time that it takes for him to visit Kimberly's parents, talk to the cops, get back home and take a shower. None of this is explained at any point in the story. The 1:35 AM epilogue only raises further questions, showing that Fetch has somehow accumulated strong enough "agony" to become the most threatening item in Phineas' collection, with its battery seemingly giving the Stitchwraith its lethality. It is implied that Fetch may be a random event generator influenced by Greg's consciousness, but such an idea fails to explain its particular capabilities.
  • 1:35 AM's epilogue reveals that the Stitchwraith itself is actually one of these, being a rogue endoskeleton with a modified doll's mask and powered by Fetch's battery and the agony carried with it. The first thing it does upon activation is kill Phineas, its own 'creator', by effectively obliterating his consciousness with a touch, and it's suggested that this is what it does to the rest of its victims.
  • The robot body that William constructs for himself out of the infected items in Epilogue 6 can scarcely be called anything else; the story takes great pains to describe it as a 15-foot-tall monstrosity with countless robot parts being used in the wrong places, even referring to it as a "miscreation".
  • Felix the Shark. While it initially seems to be a case of Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, this is quickly averted by the end of the story. The years have not been kind to Felix, who is now a broken, rotten, and seemingly violent animatronic. He chases Dirk around his tank and seems fully intent on ripping him to shreds, but the story ends before it's shown exactly what Felix does to him.
  • Tales From The Pizzaplex has possibly the biggest one in the entire franchise: the Mimic endoskeleton. It doesn't have an associated spirit (though it's likely infused with agony), instead having an advanced AI. It's arguably the most purely mechanical threat in the entire series, and what a threat it is. It easily slaughters almost a dozen Fazbear Entertainment workers, and slowly but surely picks off a group of teens one by one. It has the highest kill count in the series, except maybe for Eleanor, who is a literal demonic entity.
• Meta Twist: For pretty much the series' entire run, William Afton has been the definitive Big Bad of the series; even before his name was known — even when he was just a nameless, faceless figure mentioned in some newspaper articles — his evil has cast a shadow over the franchise and cemented him as the source (directly or otherwise) of pretty much all the evil in the franchise. So when it starts to become clear that the episodic stories aren't so episodic as they seem, and that everything seems to originate from a heavily-burned man alive against all odds, many fans smelled his fingerprints all over the series; and sure enough, Epilogue 6 has him cement himself as The Man Behind the Man for the infected items, forming a vast mechanical body for himself out of infected junk. Case closed, right? Wrong. The very next Epilogue has Afton and his Amalgamation Killed Off for Real by the Puppet, and it becomes clear that — as evil as Afton was — the only reason he had the strength to do anything after years of torment by Andrew was because Eleanor was feeding him power.
• Mind Rape: Ella seems to have some form of this, tormenting Delilah with sounds from her closet and under the door and the feeling of her presence even when she's not actually there. This also turns out to be the Stitchwraith's modus operandi: with a single touch, it can overwhelm a victim's mind so severely as to induce convulsions and ultimately reduce them to a near-mummified state.
  • This also happens to Hudson in What We Found, shortly after he touches Springtrap in Fazbear's Fright. This causes him to be haunted by visions of the animatronics and flashbacks to his childhood to the point of reducing him to a blubbering, piss-soaked mess before he's cremated alive in an oven.
• Misplaced Retribution: In “Gumdrop Angel”, Ophelia may have been spoiled by her father, but she didn’t act like it. She never threw any tantrums and wanted to include her stepsister Angel, but Angel was so jealous of Myron giving her anything she wanted that she took her anger out on Ophelia for getting positive attention, when Myron and her mom were the ones who were favoring Ophelia over her. Her misplaced retribution towards Ophelia for Myron’s cruelty is what sets off her demise later on.
• Mistaken Message: In "The Cliffs", Robert continually gets notices from Tag-Along Freddy saying "Why don't you go to the Cliffs?" Robert sees this as some kind of Madness Mantra goading him into committing suicide (as the Cliffs were a common location for such decisions); however, when Robert gives in and plans to jump, he hears his missing son's cries and finds him in a hole. Tag-Along Freddy was just telling him where the child was.
• Mister Seahorse: What ultimately claims the life of Matt. Even weirder, the entity he's pregnant with is Springtrap (or rather, an infant-sized organic version of Springtrap, implied to have been created from the Five Nights at Freddy's VR game he was working on).
• Monster of the Week: While the Stitchwraith initially appeared to serve the role of Big Bad of Fazbear Frights before being revealed to be Good All Along, leaving William Afton and later Eleanor took on the role of the real Big Bad, and the Mimic acts as such for Tales, each individual story so far has focused on a different animatronic, including:
  • Into the Pit: Spring Bonnie in "Into the Pit", Eleanor in "To Be Beautiful", and Funtime Freddy in "Count the Ways"
  • Fetch: The titular animatronic dog in "Fetch", the Lonely Freddys in "Lonely Freddy", and the Plushtrap Chaser in "Out of Stock"
  • 1:35 AM: Ella in "1:35 AM", the Minireenas in "Room for One More", and Fredbear / Golden Freddy in "The New Kid"
  • Step Closer: Foxy in "Step Closer", Ballora in "Dance with Me", and Chica in "Coming Home"
  • Bunny Call: Ralpho in "Bunny Call" and Springtrap in "In the Flesh". "The Man in Room 1280" is somewhat different in that it lacks a traditional animatronic antagonist; rather, the role of the story's villain initially seems to fall to the nurses, but later is revealed to be Andrew, who kept the Man alive and later infected various things. Hell, the Man himself is also this, seeing as he turns out in the next book to be William Afton.
  • Blackbird: The Blackbird in "Blackbird" and Shadow Bonnie in "Hide and Seek". Simon arguably qualifies for "The Real Jake", but is such a non-entity for most of the story (not even getting any audible dialogue that isn't Evan speaking through him) that it's debatable whether or not he fits the role.
  • The Cliffs, however, heavily deviates from the typical "animatronic of the week" formula: "The Cliffs" has No Antagonist, as — at least taken at face value — Tag-Along Freddy turns out to be benevolent (albeit terrible at communicating); "The Breaking Wheel" has Julius, making it the first story to have a human antagonist (albeit one fused to a mechanical exoskeleton); and "He Told Me Everything" has this role seemingly split between the Faz-Goo and Mr. Little.
  • Gumdrop Angel: The titular story has Dominic, making it the third story to have a human antagonist, "Sergio's Lucky Day" has Lucky Boy, who seems to be a small talking figurine of Balloon Boy, and "What We Found" has Springtrap return, with other animatronic remains attacking Hudson.
  • The Puppet Carver again deviates from the formula, as all three stories appear to have no traditional antagonist: in the titular story, the fleshy creature, which may or may not be made of Faz-Goo, is Ambiguously Evil; in "Jump for Tickets", Coils the Clown actually tries to prevent Colton from crawling into the arcade machine and seems visibly distraught at Colton's death; and in "Pizza Kit", there was nothing supernatural whatsoever, just a prank that went way too far.
  • Friendly Face: The titular entities in "Friendly Face" and "Sea Bonnies", and Rosie Porkchop in "Together Forever" (although only the Sea Bonnies are actively malevolent, as the Friendly Face and Rosie are just following their programming).
  • Prankster gives us one final pattern break, with none of the stories having traditional animatronic antagonists, at least as far as we can see. While "Prankster" is implied to be the work of Glitchtrap, he never makes a physical appearance; "Kids at Play" has a generic traffic sign that happens to have been set out by Fazbear Entertainment as the "villain"; and "Find Player Two!" has No Antagonist, with the apparent (human) villain being a Red Herring and Mary Jo's death having been a tragic accident.
  • Felix the Shark has Felix as the antagonist of his story. "The Scoop" has No Antagonist, while "You're the Band" has an unknown malevolent force in the Freddy head driving the conflict.
  • Lally's Game has No Antagonist for "Frailty" or "Under Construction", but gives us the titular Lally for the same story.
  • HAPPS has Fazbear Entertainment as the main antagonist pulling the strings in "Help Wanted". Happs zig-zags the monster line since he's only trying to get Jace and Aiden to safety but the damage they caused to him makes his efforts lethal instead. "B-7" has Billy/B-7 as the monster of his own story.
  • Somniphobia: The titular story sees the Moon form of the Daycare Attendant (referred to as Moondrop for the first time) as the antagonist, albeit a holographic version of him in a toy. "Pressure" has a Pizzaplex employee named Earl, who is implied to have brought the springlock suit our protagonist is being killed by to imitate Afton. Finally, "Cleithrophobia" has a new version of Ballora designed to help children stuck in a Pizzaplex tube maze, who unintentionally pulls the protagonist apart.
  • Submechanophobia: While the Fantasy Water Park animatronics of "Submechanophobia" serve as threats, the waterpark's owner Martin Copper is the reason they're haunted in the first place...and he'll do anything to cover it up while disguised as the "Frank the Diver" animatronic. "Animatronic Apocalypse" has the school's principal Mr Renner, though it's implied something else may have corrupted him. "Bobbiedots, Part 1" features the First Generation Bobbiedots, robotic versions of the current holographic assistants, who are a wee bit bitter about being replaced.
  • The Bobbiedots Conclusion: The main antagonist of "GGY" is none other than Gregory, though it's strongly implied he's possessed by Glitchtrap. "The Storyteller" is an interesting case- Mr Burrows serves as a much more direct threat to protagonist Edwin than the titular AI does, but considering the AI's true nature and the fact it traps Mr Burrows at the end, it's undeniably the main villain. "Bobbiedots, Part 2" reveals the Second Generation Bobbiedots as the true villains, while the First Generation Models are actually trying to help Abe.
  • Nexie: The titular story's titular animatronic doll is the villain, manipulating Astrid down a destructive path. The mysterious 'Drowned Girl' with the VR Resort is the antagonist of "Drowning", determined not to be left alone with the simulation. "The Mimic" unsurprisingly has the murderous Mimic endoskeleton, though it's only truly a villain for the second half of the story- the first half actually serves as its Start of Darkness.
  • Tiger Rock: The titular virtual character is the main villain of the story of the same name, trapping Kai in a twisted game of hide and seek. A version of Montgomery Gator's AI from a video game is the antagonist of "The Monty Within", getting lodged in protagonist Kane's brain and fighting for control of his body. While the horrific events of "Bleeding Heart" were only possible due to the Cutting Nanobots entering Danny's body, they aren't sentient, let alone villainous. Instead, it's Danny's self-destructive choices and desperation to please his crush that lead to his nightmarish fate.
  • B7-2: "B7-2" has B-7 itself- specifically, an entity formed by Billy's agony that possesses the robotic parts separated from Billy. It's determined to merge with him... or anyone it can, as shown by the ending. "Alone Together" has No Antagonist, with the hauntings Travis experiences throughout the story being a result of him being dead due to a tragic accident. Ending the series off, "Dittophobia" has the Nightmare animatronics until they're revealed to be harmless mannequins wearing costumes. The Greater-Scope Villain is William Afton- while he's not present, he's the one who captured Rory and other children for experiments, and the recording of his voice he left behind had prevented Rory from leaving likely dozens of times.
• Mouthful of Pi: Edward does this while in bed to distract himself from his paranoia over the Friendly Face and get to sleep.
• Mythology Gag: This isn't the first time a white-faced animatronic who seems to be the Big Bad has actually turned out to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is actually attempting to stop more murders from taking place.

N-Z

• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Andrew, who is either a Golden Freddy parallel or the bear himself, wanting to keep William Afton alive just to torture him more is what ended up allowing him to survive and create a new body for himself. Not that he managed to survive for very long, though, since the Puppet obliterated his new body and seemingly killed him off for real, but still.
  • Edward is so excited to essentially have Faraday back from the dead through Fazbear Ent.'s Friendly Face product, he just grabs a hair from the location of his and Jack's death without examining it to make sure it was Faraday's cat hair. A few weeks later, and Edward gets his Friendly Face. A human face.
  • Cade is so scared of Lally getting out of the trunk that he won't tell Selena what's in it despite his obsessive behavior regarding it. This only makes Selena more curious until she breaks open the trunk, releasing Lally which results in her gruesome death. Cade doesn't even learn his lesson, employing the exact same strategy with his next fiancée.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Anti-Villain!: Ballora forces Kasey to turn her entire life around, even though all she wanted was for Kasey to return the glasses she stole from a little girl.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • After Fetch injures Greg's uncle, Greg destroys Fetch with a baseball bat and buries him. It doesn't last.
  • Tag-Along Freddy is at the receiving end at Robert's hands over the night after his son disappears. He's kicked across the yard, thrown in the trash, taken out of the trash, punched in the face repeatedly, thrown in the trash again, burned, run over three times, shredded with scissors, and finally tossed over the edge of Jumper Cliffs.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood:
  • Played with for the Stitchwraith: while the two children's souls inside of it turn out to be non-malicious (albeit one of them is something of a Jerkass), and while its goals in collecting animatronic parts turn out to be benevolent, it's heavily implied that there is something else in there as well, something which is a whole lot more malevolent and which causes the entity's electrical shocks to become fatal. It's later confirmed that the soul of the man in room 1280, the Fazbear Frights version of series Big Bad William Afton, was inside the Stichwraith as well.
  • Tag-Along Freddy, who seems to be ambiguously responsible for Tyler's disappearance and taunting Robert over it, was actually working as intended and trying to tell Robert where Tyler went.
  • The Friendly Face that Edward gets, while creepy due to Edward sending in human hairs by mistake to make the face with, turns out to be simply playful and is not malicious at all. Unfortunately, Edward never finds this out.
• Not Like Other Girls: In terms of Fazbear Frights, it's directly subverted in "Count the Ways," in which Millie asks Dylan why he would want to date someone who is "blonde and basic," and he calls her out for judging Brooke based on her appearance, despite having never talked to her. There's quite a bit of straight examples in Tales from the Pizzaplex, however:
  • In "Frailty," shy and dark-clothed Jessica gets told this word-for-word by Robert.
  He smiled. "Like I couldn't tell. You're not like the other girls."
  "I know. I'm not trying to be conceited. I just know that I'm... different. Weird."
  "I wouldn't call you weird. I mean, other girls I've met like to talk about themselves. Sometimes too much. Worry about a lot of drama. You handle things differently, quietly. It's nice."
  Jessica didn't know what to say.
  • In "Nexie," the boy in Astrid's class, Remy, cites this as the reason he has a crush on her in his narration.
  Astrid wasn't anything like some of the crybaby girls in the class[...] Unlike the other girls Remy knew, Astrid never acted like she was putting on a show to get attention. She never seemed self-conscious. She didn't flash fake smiles or strike poses. Remy had no doubt that Astrid was exactly what she appeared to be– a smart girl who was happy in her own skin.
  • In the Mimic Epilogues, Lucia is comfortable hanging out around the more feminine Hope, but in the last epilogue reflects that she had never been a mainstream girl, and "had little patience for what most girls liked talking about– endless chatting about clothes and boys. She preferred reading a book to shopping and pretty much everything else."
• Objectshifting: Two cases. Sarah collapses into a pile of scrap metal when she loses her heart pendant in "To Be Beautiful", and "Kids At Play" sees Joel being gruesomely transformed into a "Kids At Play" figure.
  • Similarly to Sarah, Jessica transforms into scrap metal at the end of "Frailty", most likely indicating her as a victim of Eleanor.
• Off Screen Moment Of Awesome: Fetch's presence in Phineas' collection implies that Greg, or at least someone, managed to somehow trap and disable the damn thing. Even more impressive when you remember Fetch managed to come back from being smashed to pieces and buried in its original story.
  • Subverted in Epilogue 4, which implies that Fetch broke down when it was caught in a thunderstorm and presumably shorted out.
  • Played straight in Epilogue 5, as Jake and Andrew have successfully recaptured and contained several of the infected items...including Ella, who was almost as implacable as Fetch in her story.
• Once More, with Clarity: Epilogue 10 features, as part of The Reveal, a sequence in which Larson, in a kind of hallucination or Mental Time Travel, witnesses Eleanor's past... and learns that she was responsible for several of the events of the past stories. In particular, we see her placing the eyeballs and teeth into the Plushtrap Chaser, scratching on Delilah's window to make her think Ella is stalking her, holding Pete immobilized as the surgeons prepare to cut him open, arriving at the Hide-And-Seek game with a knowing smile after Toby kills himself, and leaving Sam disoriented in full Blackbird costume on the train tracks.
• Parental Abandonment: Protagonists of quite a few stories suffer from that.
  • "To Be Beautiful": Sarah's father left the family some time before the events of the story, only keeping in touch via holiday postcards and the like.
  • "Count the Ways": Millie's parents are often away, sending her to live with her grandfather.
  • "Out of Stock": Oscar's father died in a freak medical accident.
  • "1:35 AM": Both Delilah's parents died when she was eleven years old.
  • "Step Closer": Pete and Chuck live with their mother after divorce, but their Disappeared Dad sometimes visits.
  • "Dance With Me": Kasey had a Disappeared Dad and a neglectful mother who eventually just dumped her on the street.
  • "Coming Home": Susie and Samantha's dad just decided that "he couldn't take it" one day and left.
  • "The Real Jake": Jake's mom died before the events of the story, and his father is constantly away on military duty, albeit he does everything in his power to talk with his son as much as possible. His nanny Margie acts as a Parental Substitute and then Jake's father names her as his legal guardian in his will, one day before Jake succumbs to his illness.
  • "Hide-and-Seek": Connor and Toby's mom divorced their father several years ago.
  • "The Cliffs": Tyler's mom died shortly after giving birth to him, leaving Robert as the single father.
  • "The Breaking Wheel": Reed's mom died before the events of the story.
  • "Gumdrop Angel": Angel's father left the family before she even learned to walk.
  • "What We Found": Hudson's father died when he was a teen, and he got a horrendously abusive stepfather in his stead (who also died, together with his mother).
  • "Jump for Tickets": Colton's father died in a car accident.
  • "Friendly Face": Edward's Disappeared Dad left the family when he was three and remarried. Jack's father is almost constantly at work.
  • "Sea Bonnies": Mott and Rory's dad is an airline pilot and often away.
  • "Find Player Two!": Mary Jo's parents had her at "too young" an age and abandoned her when she was a preschooler, and then she went through several foster families.
  • "Felix The Shark": Dirk's parents died in a car accident when he was eight, and then his aunt who took him in died of cancer in his teens.
  • "The Scoop": Mandy's mother is often away due to her work.
  • "You're The Band": Timmy's father died in a construction accident not long before his birth.
• Past Experience Nightmare: A good portion of Hudson's ordeal in Fazbear's Fright is this, centered on his abusive stepfather and the house fire that killed him.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Dan from "Hide-and-Seek" is a decent man who happens to run a Fazbear Entertainment establishment.
• Recurring Element: The Fazbear Frights and Tales From The Pizzaplex series each have a recurring fate for the unfortunate protagonists.
  • Fazbear Frights has many protagonists be replaced in some way by the Monster of the Week. This includes "To Be Beautiful", "Lonely Freddy", "He Told Me Everything", "Sea Bonnies", and most likely "The Puppet Carver".
  • Tales From The Pizzaplex has characters being trapped in simulated realities. This includes "Under Construction", "Help Wanted", "Somniphobia", "Drowning", "Tiger Rock", and "Dittophobia".
• Recursive Canon: After Help Wanted hinted at the idea, "In the Flesh" officially confirms that a game series known as Five Nights at Freddy's exists in-universe, with main character Matt being part of the team tasked with designing Springtrap's Revenge, the next game in the series.
  • And "The Scoop" shows that, as in real life, Five Nights at Freddy's has a thriving fandom, with fanfiction and fan theories abound.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Fetch's victims serve as this to show exactly what the animatronic is capable of after initially being shown as creepy, but helpful.
• Second Place Is for Losers: Toby's brother Connor in "Hide-and-Seek" beat him at everything and loved to rub this fact in his face.
• Spit Take: Directly named by Parker in "Prankster" after he slips vinegar into Jeremiah's coffee.
• Stealth Pun: The blurb for Bunny Call summarizes "In the Flesh" as "Matt redirects the residual anger over his many failed relationships into a video game, and ends up birthing the horrible consequences." That's... an on-the-nose description of what exactly happens.
• Stealth Sequel:
  • In true Scott Cawthon fashion, the majority of the third Stitchwraith epilogue turns out to be both a Stealth Sequel to "Fetch" and a Stealth Prequel to the other Stitchwraith epilogues, depicting the creation of the Stitchwraith using parts from the titular dog animatronic.
  • "The Man in Room 1280" turns out to be a Stealth Prequel to almost all the other stories, showing us how the various Fazbear products throughout the series became infected; by extension, it also serves as a possible Stealth Sequel to Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, as it's all but confirmed that the titular man is either William Afton or his son Michael (at least assuming the books are canon). Later epilogues confirm that the titular man is in fact William Afton.
  • "What We Found" turns out to be a retelling of the events of Five Nights at Freddy's 3 with the main character Hudson working at Fazbear Frights and the main antagonist being Springtrap and the hallucinations caused by him touching it. However, it's ambiguous if the corpse inside Springtrap is still William Afton since the story describes it differently than how he appears by the time of "The Man in Room 1280".
  • "Prankster" is implied to be a prequel to Help Wanted, given that it's heavily implied that Hope and Parker have been infected by Glitchtrap.
  • "Frailty" seems to be a sequel to "To Be Beautiful", with Jessica presumably being another victim of Eleanor.
  • "Help Wanted" is implied to be another prequel to Help Wanted since the protagonist, Steve Snodgrass, is an indie game developer hired by Fazbear Entertainment to make indie horror games so they can make light of the events that happened around their business. The story reveals that Steve was actually kidnapped by Fazbear Entertainment and brainwashed into having the perfect family to do it, when in reality said family turned out to just be robots as the story ends with Steve choosing the lie and being blissfully unaware that his "wife" was stabbing him in the heart after hugging her.
  • "GGY" is revealed to be a prequel to Security Breach since Gregory is revealed at the end of the story with the implications that he was patient 46 and that he killed all five of his therapists while under Glitchtrap's control.
  • "Dittophobia" is revealed to be a sequel to Five Nights at Freddy's 4 and a prequel to Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location with Rory being stuck in the Bedroom while haunted by the Nightmare animatronics who were actually hallucinations created from gas as part of an experiment Rory was part of for the last ten years and eventually learning that it was actually a part of "Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rentals" with the animatronics still in the facility. The ending of the story where Rory returns to the experiment and the tape reminds itself also heavily indicate that Rory might actually be the dead body that was found in the vents of the facility before Sister Location began.
• The End... Or Is It?: At the end of the final epilogue for the original Fazbear Frights series, Eleanor had been defeated, Renelle Talbert has been rescued and reunited with her father, Jake decides to help the spirits of Eleanor's victims trapped in the ball pit rest in peace before seemingly moving on to the afterlife himself as the Stitchwraith seemingly shuts down for good in the ball pit, and Detective Everette Larson has decided to start spending more time with his family after the incident while taking Eleanor's heart-shaped pendant with him after Dr. Talbert gave it to him. As he leaves however, Larson begins to hear what appears to be singing coming from the pendant, implying that Eleanor may not truly by gone, before seemingly brushing it off and heading home.
• Time Travel: Oswald, the main character of the first story, "Into the Pit", jumps into a Ball Pit located in an old Freddy Fazbear's location. When he emerges, he is sent to the past, to when Freddy's was still open. Later epilogues however implied that the ball pit might not actually be able to time travel, but be some sort of entrance to some sort of spirit world limbo for the souls of Eleanor's victims such as Millie from "Count The Ways".
• To Be Continued: "Bobbiedots, Part 1" ends with this. "Bobbiedots, Part 2" picks up right where it left off.
• Truth in Television: "Fetch" deals heavily with the idea of zero-point energy, Random Event Generators, and the ability of human thought to influence them; it also deals heavily with Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist who allegedly used a polygraph to prove that plants can sense human thoughts. These are all referring to real concepts that have been at least considered by scientists over the years, with Cleve Backster's experiments really occurring as detailed (although in real life, his theories have long since been debunked by the greater scientific community).
• Uncanny Valley: Mentioned by name in "In the Flesh", together with Nightmare Fuel.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • Millie's fate at the end of "Count The Ways" was originally unknown. Epilogue 11 seems to confirm that she died.
  • While Greg isn't in any immediate danger by the end of "Fetch", Kimberly's death, Fetch's final message, and his lack of appearance in the Stitchwraith epilogues imply that his torment is far from over.
  • "The Breaking Wheel" leaves Reed's fate somewhat ambiguous. Reed could have already been dead by the time Ory picked up the remote, or been killed by Ory causing the exoskeleton to spin and thrash. Alternatively, he could have just been badly injured, or even gotten away just in time.
  • Jeremiah doesn't seem to be in a good spot by the end of "Prankster". Despite the video of Hope and Parker claiming it's all a prank, there's a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise. Even without considering the dismembered body parts strewn throughout the office or the suspicious backdrop of the video, there's the thing in the closet...it's likely that Jeremiah didn't survive much longer after that door opened.
  • The ending of "Happs" leaves very little hope left for Aiden. Jace is dead, and he's left alone, down to his last primal reserves of energy, and scrambling around in a circle as Happs chases him down. Even if he managed to evade Happs until a passage opened back up or fight his way out, he'd still be deep in the maze with no clear way to escape.
• Unknown Rival: Millie turns out to be one to Brooke Harrison in "Count the Ways".
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Arthur brings William Afton's undying body to a Fazbear Entertainment facility, fulfilling his Last Request, which leads to infection of a lot of various items stored there.
  • Edwin Murray creating The Mimic to entertain his son while he worked eventually led to events where Edwin took his grief from his son's death out on the Mimic and infused it with his agony while teaching it about violence. Because of this, when a Fazbear team sent to retrieve everything Edwin abandoned tried to find it, the Mimic started its killing spree.
  • Gil reprogramming the Mimic to tear off the limbs of the animatronic endoskeletons at the remains of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place from FFPS leads to it eventually turning on the Fazbear team there and kills almost the entire crew including Gil. The only survivor, Danny, tells the team building the Mega Pizzaplex over the sinkhole it's located in to seal it off as a result. Downplayed, due to later revelations the Mimic was already murderous, though Gil still reactivated it and programmed those particularly brutal methods.
  • Mr Burrows' decision to replace the entire Pizzaplex creative team with an AI known as "The Storyteller", who is actually known as Mimic01, the Mimic's AI, leads to the animatronics starting to act stranger than before. While he originally believed that it was because Edwin had messed with the AI and trapped him in the Storyteller's Baobab tree in the Pizzaplex which leads to Edwin suffocating and dying, the Mimic was the one that was actually behind it and kills Mr. Burrows as well. While the giant tree the AI was in was later removed from the Pizzaplex, the AI had already infected the animatronics with the implications that it still had some effect on them by the time of Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach.
• Valley Girl: Jessica and Brittany from "Together Forever" speak in such a way.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Said almost verbatim by Toby in "Hide-and-Seek" before his attempt to drown the shadow.
• Wicked Cultured: Funtime Freddy, of all characters, is portrayed as this in Count the Ways, gleefully detailing various historical methods of execution and acting out the final decision to decapitate Millie as if it were an execution during the French Revolution (complete with a countdown in French).
• A Winner Is You: The arcade game Ultimate Battle Warrior in "Hide-and-Seek" ends this way.
• Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour: Played for Horror. In the story "1:35 AM", a woman finds an animatronic doll that doubles as an alarm, and sets it for 1:35 PM. However, this goes wrong, and it instead wakes her up at 1:35 AM every morning. Even after she gets rid of the doll, she continues to hear the alarm no matter where she goes, including when she attempts to stay awake. This slowly drives her mad.
• Youkai: Not named as such, but RWQFSFASXC in "Hide-and-Seek" functions almost identically to an obscure Japanese demon Oigakari.

Tropes with their own pages

• Central Theme
• Downer Ending

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