The Puppet Carver | Jump for Tickets | Pizza Kit
"I will honor Freddy Fazbear in my heart, and try to keep it all the year!"
Sylvester held his newborn daughter in his arms. With one hand, he touched her impossibly soft cheek. His eyes filled with tears at the same time his lips spread into a smile. This, he thought. This is what it meant to be human.
Jack is trying to keep his struggling animatronic pizzeria business afloat– no, not that one. He runs The Pizza Playground, where the pizza is somewhat edible and the animatronics break down every other minute. They're going out of business, and Jack becomes infuriated when his employee, Porter, claims he has a solution, only for his "puppet carver" machine to break immediately. Jack fires everyone, and goes backstage in hopes of salvaging anything. Instead, he finds himself inside the puppet carver, with his life about to change forever.
The twenty-fifth Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights story, and the first of the ninth book.
Tropes related to “The Puppet Carver”:
- Ambiguous Clone Ending: It's never outright stated whether Jack was replaced with a Faz-Goo clone or if he actually survived the Puppet Carver. Considering the human organs inside the machine, it's not looking good.
- Ambiguously Evil: 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.
- Ambiguous Situation: Is the flesh-beast actually the original Jack, chasing his clone, or is new!Jack hallucinating it in some metaphor for his guilt catching up to him? We know the organs somehow ended up back in the Puppet Carver, at least.
- And I Must Scream: Implied with the meat-beast, who's most likely the original Jack.
- Artificial Human: Jack's clone, unbeknownst to him.
- Asshole Victim: Jack 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. However, he ends up having a Heel–Face Turn after his near-death experience with the Puppet Carver and becomes kindhearted and forgiving. Maybe.
- Bad Boss: Jack constantly shouts at and demeans his employees, expects far too much of them, and fires them all after forcing them to clean the whole place.
- Bland-Name Product: The Pizza Playground seems to be one in-universe, as instead of Freddy Fazbear and friends, they have Baron von Bear, an unnamed bird, and... possibly Pigpatch?
- Body Horror: Jack ends up chased by a strange creature made out of fleshy organ bits, desperately slithering down the street in an attempt to reach him.
- Bungling Inventor: Porter's got his invention all set up to perform, but for no real reason, it malfunctions and shreds a log to pieces in front of everyone.
- The Cameo: The Ultimate Guide claims that the unnamed pig animatronic is actually Pigpatch from Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator.
- Covers Always Lie: The puppet-like animatronics on the cover of this book 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.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Jack thinks he's escaped this. He was wrong.
- Dead All Along: The audience is led to believe that the Puppet Carver actually did malfunction and fail to kill Jack, and he simply had a Jerkass Realization and got to turn his life around. Then Sage finds a bunch of human organs inside of the Puppet Carver, similar to the blob creature that chased Jack. It's heavily implied that Jack was killed and replaced by a Faz-Goo clone.
- Empty Nest: Now that their son is in college, Becky has become obsessed with remodeling, which puts more strain on Jack's budget.
- Forced Transformation: The original Jack, implicitly, turns into the strange creature that chases the clone Jack.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Porter is just out of school and already able to make a robot-building invention he's ready to patent.
- Gold Digger: Jack is afraid that his wife is this, and she'll leave him when she learns he's about to go bankrupt. Averted when it turns out she's actually pretty chill, and was already ready to go back to work and get them a second income.
- Grand Theft Me: Jack was (most likely) actually killed and replaced by a Faz-Goo clone, who has no idea he's a clone but has its wide-eyed wonder and newfound hope for the world. This is shown from the appearance of human-like organs and tissue in the titular machine, and the possibility of Faz-Goo being involved here too.
- Heel–Face Turn: After Jack "survives" the Puppet Carver, he becomes overjoyed and decides to be more honest and caring to everyone.
- Improperly Paranoid: Jack is convinced that everyone hates him and is out to get him. In truth, his wife is just suffering from empty nest syndrome, his son is stressed and desperate for approval, and his employees are just doing their best.
- Irony: After coming out of the Puppet Carver, Jack thinks of himself as a new man. Little does he know, he is.
- Kick the Dog: Jack's given extra asshole points for cussing out a cashier at a fast-food place, and then yelling at his son on the phone for getting into a car accident.
- Kill and Replace: Probably happens to Jack, 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.
- Monster of the Week: Possibly the fleshy creature that goes after Jack.
- Morally Superior Copy: Played completely straight with the new Jack, who comes out of the Puppet Carver excited to be alive and enthusiastic about making amends with his loved ones.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Sage is an aspiring author working on his first novel, the titular Puppet Carver, named after his roommate's invention.
- Never My Fault: The original Jack's thought process, before his transformation.
- No Full Name Given: Sage is the only character given a surname.
- Our Clones Are Different: In here, clones are made through a wooden animatronic carver squirting Faz-Goo onto you.
- Pinocchio Syndrome: Sage's novel is about a robot created to be a simple worker who begins wanting to be human. From the snippets, it seems that he ends the novel able to become human and reproduce.
- Show Within a Show: Every now and again, the story is interspersed with snippets from Sage's upcoming novel, The Puppet Carver, analyzing what it means to be human.
- Starving Student: Porter, Sage and Angie are all college students or recent graduates who are barely scraping by with the funds Jack gives them.
- Stealth Sequel: With a bunch of goo surrounding Jack during the Puppet Carver's function, it's heavily implied that he was covered in Faz-Goo, killed, and recreated as a "new man." Is this a prequel, and the origin of Faz-Goo? How did Fazbear get their hands on it? Is it a sequel? If so, why is Porter using Faz-Goo in his animatronic shaper?
- Yet Another Christmas Carol: Referenced as Jack thinks of himself as Scrooge, becoming a new man and immediately being nice to his family, strangers, and raising his employees' wages.
