Recap / Fazbear Frights: The Scoop

Recap: Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights: Felix the Shark
Felix the Shark | The Scoop | You're the Band

"What's up, gamers, today we're gonna solve FNAF!"

"But just remember, these are real people... not a game. Promise you'll be careful?"

Mandy Mason is a lonely, bullied teenager who retreats into online fandom forums in order to escape her life. Recently, she's been obsessed with the Five Nights at Freddy's and the intricate clues the creator left in it. When digging through the files of the the third game, Mandy finds a strange photo that just has the title lookshauntednow.jpg, showing an old mysterious metal building. When nobody else online can find it in the files, Mandy becomes obsessed with solving this clue and proving that she's not making it up. The search leads her to an old, closed restaurant in Utah with tales of a mysterious missing boy, and she's now determined to solve the cold case on her own.

The thirty-fifth Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights story, and the second of the eleventh book, Felix the Shark. This short is only ambiguously canon, as it is an unfinished, scrapped story released as part of a bonus book with the series boxset. It is also the most Metafiction story in the series, taking place in what seems to be a world where all of Freddy's is fictionalized.

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Tropes related to “The Scoop”:

• Accident, Not Murder: It turns out that in climbing into the Sideshow bear, Stevie accidentally broke his neck, and nobody was able to find his body inside of the suit. When he vanished, everyone thought he was kidnapped by a mysterious stranger and panicked.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Once Melissa started picking on Mandy, everyone else started to avoid her. They just don't want to piss off the richest kid in school.
• Almighty Janitor: Mandy and Lindy are able to get most of their information from Jim, a man who'd worked as a janitor in the building for decades, meaning he was present for Stevie's disappearance.
• Alpha Bitch: Melissa Chandler, who is so rich and influential that nobody dares befriend Mandy in fear of invoking her wrath.
• Alternate Universe: A lot of this short implies it takes place in a world where FNAF is entirely fictional. It's not confirmed, as FNAF does exist as games in its own universe, but there's no mention of real Freddy's locations, and it's more implied that the story had something to do with a completely separate incident.
• Best Friend: Lindy, Mandy's fellow fanfic writer, who relates to her and video-calls her long-distance.
• Beta Bitch: Lilly Jansen, Melissa's best friend who doesn't do much but hang around Melissa and laugh at her antics.
• Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts: It's implied that the haunting begins once Mandy opens the lookshauntednow.jpg file, and Stevie was either connected to it or caused it to appear in the first place. He terrified Mandy until she's able to solve his death.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Implied with Melissa, as Mandy knows that reporting her is going to do nothing.
• Bullied into Depression: The ruthless bullying Mandy ends up in at school takes a toll on her mental health, and the incident with her exploding locker literally made her unable to talk at the academy.
• Call-Back: The possible inspiration for Freddy's being a closed restaurant in Utah is likely a reference to Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes, which was what placed the original location in Hurricane, Utah.
• Came Back Strong: Stevie, who is able to reappear as a ghost to someone he doesn't even know, and terrifyingly haunt her until she finds his corpse.
• Cassandra Truth: The other people on the forum, being unable to find the same file as Mandy, dismiss her as lying for attention. Not wanting to be shunned from the one place she belongs, Mandy becomes desperate to prove herself right.
• Color Motifs: Early on, Mandy connects the report a possible kidnapper wearing purple to William Afton. Afterwards, she dyes her hair purple before going to Utah, where she meets up with Lindy, who has purple glasses.
• Commonality Connection: Mandy and Lindy first became friends through the FNAF fandom, and during their video calls list things about their personal lives in hopes of finding similarities and differences to bond over.
• Cool Board: Mandy rides home from school on a longboard, which gets stolen when Melissa pranks her locker. It is returned to her after she stands up to her bully, and she ends up befriending another skater.
• Death of a Child: It's upon seeing Stevie's body that Mandy realizes the reality of the situation and finds herself traumatized.
• Fanfic: Mandy and Lindy are both fanfic writers and readers. They both agree they like modern AU fluff pieces the best.
• Fangirl: Mandy is a huge FNAF fan who writes fanfiction during class and decompresses game files in hopes of finding clues.
• Fiery Redhead: Melissa Chandler.
• Ghastly Ghost: While not malevolent, Stevie's ghost is terrifying to Mandy and causes her quite a lot of stress. Some of the Body Horror he shows her freaks her out quite a bit.
• Ghostly Goals: Type A: Stevie just wants Mandy to find his body.
• Happy Ending: After turning her life around, Mandy opens her door to find the ghost of Stevie, no longer creepy and angry, who happily thanks her for finding his body. He then tells her that her dead brother says hello, which means he's been listening to her the whole time.
• Hate Sink: Melissa Chandler, who does nothing but ruthlessly bully Mandy.
• I See Dead People: Mandy is apparently the only one who can see Stevie's body.
• Jacob Marley Apparel: Stevie constantly wears his t-shirt advertising the Sideshow restaurant.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Being an only child (somewhat) in a house with two working parents, and no friends at school who are brave enough to stand up to Melissa, Mandy is deeply and utterly lonely, talking to a picture of her dead brother and retreating into the internet to escape.
• Magnetic Medium: Mandy finds herself stalked by Stevie's ghost, and tries her best to avoid him, finding him to be a terrifying spectre. It takes her a while to figure out that he's connected to her mystery.
• Metafiction: This story is from the point-of-view of a Five Nights at Freddy's fanfic writer and theorist who uses the franchise as escapism, and thus has trouble deciphering between fiction and reality and taking real people out of the equation. She has to learn, not only to leave real tragedy out of her fantasies, but to face her own life instead of hiding from it.
  • With the connection to a "real" tragedy that Mandy theorizes inspired FNAF, and Lindy warning her that these are real people, this may have connection to the original Game Theory on the series, which connected the game's plot to the 1993 Aurora, Colorado shooting. This apparently made Scott Cawthon personally uncomfortable. Ironically, the book it was in would inspire quite the destructive search for clues in a real town as prompted by a Game Theory.
• Middle Child Syndrome: Lindy jokes that this is why she's an attention-seeker.
• Missing Child: Stevie's disappearance was a huge deal in the town, and eventually caused the closure of the Sideshow.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Mandy is an avid fanfiction writer and reader.
• The Napoleon: Melissa is described as being incredibly short, yet very cruel and powerful.
• Nerd Glasses: On Lindy.
• Never Found the Body: As Stevie's body was never found, nobody was ever able to get closure on his disappearance.
• Nightmare Sequence: Mandy has a few where Stevie is hiding among the FNAF locations.
• No Full Name Given: For Lindy.
• Nonconformist Dyed Hair: Mandy started dying her hair as a way of standing out, changing the color every other week. The story begins with her having bubblegum-pink hair, but after getting hit with green goop in a school prank, she changes it to a grape-purple. By the end of the story, it's faded to lavender.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: After being forced to acknowledge reality, Mandy no longer sees Melissa as a viable threat, and her newfound confidence scares the crap out of the bully.
• Nothing Is Scarier: While it's stated that Mandy found Stevie's body in the bear, it's never described, and it traumatizes Mandy to the point she can barely speak.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Mandy's a bit of a Motor Mouth, so when she shuts off– first when Melissa's pranks go too far, then when she finds Stevie's body– it's a serious matter. The latter causes her parents to freak out, wondering if something is wrong with her.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Poor Mrs. Robins continues to visit the last place she saw her son, even after it turns into a silent film theatre, as she feels closer to him there. Little does she know that his body is only a few feet away.
• Plot Parallel: Intentionally utilized, as Mandy finds out that a photo she found in the files of a FNAF game leads her to the disappearance of a young Utah child which was blamed on a purple man, only for the little boy's body to be found years later inside of the bear costume.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Stevie Robins, though it took him over a decade to find someone to haunt.
• Posthumous Sibling: The Mason family had a male child first, a baby named Bobby, who died for unknown causes. Mandy carries around a picture of him, and likes to talk to it, imagining that Bobby got to be her Big Brother Mentor and using him to vent her frustrations to. Part of the Tear Jerker ending involves Stevie telling Mandy that "Bobby says hello," meaning that his spirit was listening to her the whole time.
• Red Herring:
  • Mandy thinks she sees the ghost child on the plane and nearly has a panic attack, before going to confront it and realizing it's just a normal kid.
  • Panicked guests reported to the police that a man in purple may have abducted Stevie, all giving differing descriptions so nobody was able to find him. It turns out that Stevie's death was indeed an accident, and there was no kidnapper at all.
• Rich Bitch: Melissa, who's the richest kid at the school and the Alpha Bitch.
• Shout-Out: Mandy uses Game Theory phrases when talking about online FNAF theories.
• Spoiled Brat: This is apparently why Melissa is so cruel; even Mandy's mother, who's not in town long enough to know much about Mandy's social life, recognizes her as a spoiled child.
• Spoiled Sweet: Despite being extremely rich, Mandy is very nice and outgoing. She's a bit socially unaware and can't tell fantasy from reality until she finds Stevie, but she's more well-intentioned and ignorant than malicious.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Mandy finishes her journey by writing on her blog that she's keeping the details of the case to herself so as not to reveal other people's personal details, and that if the game creator wanted them to know why the mysterious file was in the game, he would tell them. Think someone's trying to tell us something?
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Both of Mandy's parents work long hours, leaving her home alone a lot of the time. At the end of the story, they both take breaks from work to spend more time with her.

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