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All Wild Mass Guesses from before the game's release have been moved here.


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    Post-Release - Part 1 

Someone was wearing the Golden Freddy suit when the bite happened.
Fredbear/Golden Freddy and Spring Bonnie were the only two animatronics that could be worn by someone and manipulated from inside. Earlier we see Purple Man helping a fellow employee into Spring Bonnie. So what if Purple Man or someone else was wearing the suit when the teens shoved the Child's head into Golden Freddy's mouth? That would raise a whole other slew of questions: was the bite intentional by whoever was controlling the suit? Or was it an accident and the reason the suits were taken out of commission — notably, that the Child's scared breathing might have weakened the spring locks? For that matter, if someone was wearing the suit and the locks failed, thereby crushing the Child's head, what if the person inside the suit died too? That could be the "incident with an employee" that got the spring suits banned.

Purple Man was wearing the Golden Freddy suit and therefore is responsible for the bite as well.
Related to the above, Purple Man was seen helping another employee into the suit, implying he knows about how to do it safely. It also confirms that he was there at the establishment near the time of the Child's birthday party. So what if he was the one wearing the Fredbear suit and operating the animatronic as it sang on stage? Especially interesting is the Rule of Symbolism in this case: Fredbear's bowtie and hat are purple, possibly a nod to Purple Man himself. Earlier the Child was being urged to run because of something he saw... So what if the Purple Man was inside of Golden Freddy and saw an opportunity to silence him when the Child's brother and friends stuck his head in Fredbear's mouth?

Justifying the The Bite's timing.
It's now confirmed that Fredbear did the bite. But we were all led to believe that the bite happened after the second game, right? The culprit wasn't around by then! Well, think about it. The fact that the brother's room had Mangle in it meant that the toy animatronics had at least been introduced. This means that the second game's place has already been built. Assuming that this is the day when Jeremy had to do the party, this would be around the time that the toys would be scrapped. With the bots from the old place broken and cannibalized and the new ones being trashed, there's only one alternative: the spring animatronics.

The main game is all in the kid's head.
After getting his frontal lobe bitten off, he's suffering from hallucinations. The attacking animatronics are his own nightmares. The reason they're fatal is because the kid's in a very delicate state, so seeing his nightmares attack him triggers a stroke.
  • Alternatively, the entire game is set in his head. The bite did not happen at Fredbear's; rather, the kid knew about the place and the bite messed with his mind, giving him fake memories which exaggerated his relationship with his brother and similar things.

The only part of the game not in the kid's head is the end of Night 6.
At the end of Night 6, Fredbear says to the child, "Can you hear me? I don't know if you can hear me. I am sorry. You're broken. We're still your friends. Do you still believe that? I'm still here. I will put you back together." The child thinks that Fredbear is referring to himself and his fellow animatronics, but really the child is hearing his brother's voice in his hospital room, as he and his friends are hoping that the child will recover and forgive them. This is supported by the fact that occasionally things can be seen near the bed that might be found in a hospital room, like flowers and an IV bag. So the child can see and hear glimpses of the outside world, but due to the severe brain damage, is trapped in an endless nightmare and acting out the last days before the bite.

The Day Shift Guard is the Purple Man.
We see him putting someone in the Spring Bonnie suit during the day. This could be one of the murders he committed or possibly just him helping a coworker into the suit, since the person inside doesn't appear to be struggling. Regardless, we do see him at the Pizzeria during the day. When he commits his murders, he was arrested shortly afterwards, but was acquitted when the Bite of '87 happened, since it happened without him and there were other suspects.

The Child is Golden Freddy.
After getting his head squashed between Fredbear's jaws, the Child goes into a coma from which he never wakes up. His disembodied spirit manifests as Fredbear because that is the Child's way of holding onto "Fredbear's" promise of putting him back together (which was all in his headnote ). In the second game, Fredbear's head can be separate from his body and attack Jeremy because, with the Bite incident being so recent to the Child, his head injury at Fredbear's teeth is something the Child is completely fixated on, to the point that he sometimes manifests only as Fredbear's head to attack. In the first game, Fredbear slumps instead of stands — apart from having no actual robotic frame to support him, as he is entirely spirit — to mirror how the Child's real body is completely limp and lifeless.

Furthermore, Mike Schmidt is the Child's brother all grown up and never having gotten past the guilt of causing his little brother's accident. He is trying to make amends by taking a guard shift — hoping that he can work his way up to the day shift so he can look out for everyone at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and protect any scared little kids, the way he didn't with his own little brother. The Child's spirit recognizes Mike ("IT'S ME"), but whether the game-over represents him actually killing Mike in revenge, accidentally causing his death (such as by the commonly theorized heart attack), or Mike not dying at all but something else happening, is up to interpretation.

Obviously, the big problem with this WMG is that it's implied that the fourth game and the second game are happening simultaneously (as it is implied that the second game also ends with the Bite of '87 at a birthday party), so you'd have to completely disregard this, pretend the fourth game happened prior, and that the second game's ominous mention of a birthday party turned out to be nothing to make it all work, but eh. This is WILD Mass Guessing.

  • Actually, there were two incidents involving bites. The one that took place at the end of the fourth game was the bite of '83.
  • OR you can subscribe to Golden Freddy in 2 and the appearance of the Nightmare animatronics in 3 as Foreshadowing, where in the latter they warned of Fazbear's Fright burning down. Golden Freddy's head coming out at you is essentially the supernatural presence of the diner warning you that the Bite was coming.

The Child's True Identity.
We now know the truth of who "Golden Freddy" actually is. We also know that, in Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Golden Freddy did exist as a hollowed animatronic the fifth child's soul was placed into. Finally, we know from 3's ending that Golden Freddy was not physically at the first game's location. Yet, we saw Golden Freddy in the first game, when we know that, because he lacks an endoskeleton, the child possessing him cannot cause him to physically move. So, Golden Freddy was a hallucination in the first game. But why would Mike hallucinate Golden Freddy? More directly, why would the hallucination of Golden Freddy cause Mike to presumably black out, allowing him to be caught and killed? Why would he return, night after night, knowing what he knows? Because Fredbear nearly took his life. Because he's been battling hallucinations of his terrors every night ever since 1987. Because, compared to that, the genuine articles are child's play. Because Mike Schmidt was the child who nearly lost his life in 1987.

Mike was the child's brother.
Alternatively to the above, Mike is the child's brother and blacks out due to the truama of remembering the day he damaged his brother for life seeing the animatronic that did the deed.
  • Not to mention that due to being responsible for the Bite, he may have something akin to a criminal record as a result, possibly explaining why he has to take, and keep returning to, such a crappy job in the first place.
    • And if the animatronics still have their facial recognition scanners, they would certainly be aggressive to anyone with a criminal record...

The Purple Guy's actions during all of this mess.
It was thought to have been implied in the second game that the Purple Guy had already murdered the kids when the Bite of '87 occurred, seeing as strange things were happening and the Animatronics were starting to grow wary and stare strangely at adults. Here, we see Purple Guy dressing what seems like another employee with a Springtrap suit, although it could've also been a hapless victim for all we know. However, the fact that the victims following these series of events are similar to The Child's brother and his friends, plus other potential victims in the whole mess, make it seem like the Purple Guy hadn't begun his murdering sprees yet — and then decided to start in full after the Bite happened. Especially with the implication that he killed a child already outside one of the Fredbear diners that would create the Marionette, who then haunts FNAF 2's location. He's still responsible for a lot of shit in this series, but the Bite of '87 was very much out of his hands.
  • There's probably a worse implication: The Bite of '87 is what got the Purple Guy off the hook. It's implied that the Day Shift Guard was arrested for the murders, but we were led to believe he was just some hapless innocent... but what if he wasn't? What if the murderer was able to get away with his crimes because the Bite of '87 resembled his M.O. too much, so reasonable doubt allowed him to get off?

The Bite of '87 exonerated the Murderer from the law.
Tying in with the above, this follows in that the Murderer appears to indeed be the Day Shift guard... who was fired from Freddy's and arrested, wait what? But he's at the party. How does that make any sense? Well, it makes perfect sense when you consider circumstantial evidence. He was arrested in that he was the only one missing at the time of the murder... but, ah, the Animatronics have been suspicious, haven't they? He is released while they remain viable suspects. Meanwhile, Freddy's is forced to bring Fredbear and Spring Bonnie out of retirement, as, even though they took lives in Suit Mode accidents, they had never taken a life in animatronic mode. Of course, Spring Bonnie was the Murderer's suit, so they bring him in to instruct on how to wear it, while they decide Fredbear is too dangerous to risk suiting, and leave him in animatronic mode. Then the Bite happens. It has been shown to everyone that the golden animatronics can kill children, so the one in the back may well have done so entirely on their own, without any human within. Combined with the actions of the others, the Animatronics are deemed responsible for the missing children. With a verdict reached, the Murder walks away a free man... Until he decides to cover his last tracks and take out the robots that somehow seemed to know his intents.
  • Going asking with this is in the Night 3 to 4 minigame, there were already urban legend and stories about the animatronics coming to life at night, killing people, and hiding the bodies. That could easily have affected peoples' perception of what happened.
  • Just a note, he wasn't at the party, he appeared a couple of days before the party.

The child's identity will be revealed in the Halloween content update.
Scott is intentionally leaving us hanging just one more time, before he gives out the final clue to the story.

The child was the protagonist of Freddy's 3.
Now that we know he was the victim of the bite and suffered from terrible hallucinations as a result of the restaurant, I am positing that he took a position at Fazbear's Fright in an attempt to overcome his childhood trauma. But the combination of brain damage and the belief the whole experience is all in his head (like it was when he was a kid) makes him Suicidally Overconfident. He believes confronting his fears will overcome them, but just runs into the problem that Springtrap is Real After All. Upon accepting he can't overcome his fears that way, he burns Fazbear's Fright to the ground. For bonus points, Purple Man may recognize him as a child who escaped his grasp.
  • Hell, if the above theory could be correct, they might all be the same guy. Mike never quit, he was fired. If he was determined to make sure that Freddy's never hurt anyone else and/or face his fears directly, he may very well have come back for round two, giving the entire series only two protagonists in total!
    • Don't forget Fritz, there's nothing saying he isn't canon.

The child's name is Freddy
Since this game doesn't take place in a pizzeria but is still called Five Nights at Freddy's, this is clearly the only explanation for why it would retain the franchise's name.

Phone Man was the child's brother.
The brother who torments you does so endlessly in a Foxy mask. In the second game, Phone Man reveals his love of the old animatronics and asks the player if they ever saw Foxy. Foxy, who has been famously 'out of order' and hidden from audiences of children for a very long time. In the original game's very first night, Phone Man knows gory details about the Bite of 87, including the extent of the victim's injuries and he knows that the victim survived. He's also still a passionate fan of these old animatronics, and emphasizes that they aren't cared for or respected enough by audiences today like they once were.
  • If Phone Man fed his own brother to Fredbear, he may continue working at these restaurants as a sign of a guilty conscience, or as a result of his trauma.
    • Or he may have been forced to work there. If the Fredbear & Friends 1983 tv ad means anything, the event may not have been the Bite of 87, but a previous bite that was covered up by Fazbear Entertainment. Since something like this would ruin them (like the Bite eventually did), they may have agreed to keep everything underwraps in return for the Phone Guy's (and maybe even his friends') continuous service.
  • Well, remember the second game? He DID say Foxy was his favorite. And which animatronic do we see the brother dressed up as?
    • It's not actually possible. Phone Guy was already working for the company at that point; the tapes from FNAF 2, 3, and the minigames from 4 all take place during the same week in June.
  • Not possible — the fourth game and the second game take place at the exact same time. The Asshole is a teenager while Phone Guy is an adult.
    • We don't actually know that. It stands to reason that Phone Guy, being such a huge fan of the company, could have put in an application for part-time work (like doing the employee announcements) at age fifteen. It would explain why the brother and his friends seem to wear the mascot masks when they're screwing around (so young!Phone Guy doesn't lose his job for acting unprofessionally on the floor) and why their parents forced the kid to have a birthday party at a place he hates: his brother gets employee discounts. It also explains how he left a kid in a place he never should have been able to drag him to: he took him to work with him because there was no one home.
      • Still not possible. At fifteen, he wouldn't be allowed to work at midnight. It's debatable when most of his calls were recorded, but the Night 6 recording is a recorded live call ("What are you doing there?") that was made at the start of the June night guard's shift, instead of a recording made in advance. He also says he'll take the night shift himself, and underage employees aren't allowed to work the graveyard shift.

The Bite gets the spring animatronics taken out of service.
One of the easter eggs in the between night mini-games is that you can turn the TV on which displays a title card for Fredbear and Friends 1983, which explains why Fredbear and Spring Bonnie are still in service. This is the first location and the other animatronics are fairly minor characters in the franchise, hence why they are only masks. Phone guy mentioned in 3 that there were multiple fatalities/injuries from the spring suits. Fredbear was the culprit of this bite and had his endoskeleton terminated while spring Bonnie got put in storage this also explains why Fredbear is all over the area as it's mascot.
  • Actually, he said that it was an unfortunate incident at a sister location (Night 4, FNAF 3). That incident just involved a bunch of things going wrong in the suit at once (risks were definitely known, but only one actual incident is stated and treated as a big deal). However, the rest is sound. Suspiciously specific instructions on what an employee should do in a spring lock failure, and mention that the accident revealed them as unsafe for employees, led to the assumption that it was a reference to an event involving an employee. However, neither the Fredbear employee nor the Spring Bonnie employee seem to have any trouble with their costumes in 4. Phone Guy does mention that moisture can loosen the locks though. FNAF 4 could be showing that incident, and not the Bite of '87. While Fredbear appears to be in animatronic mode already, the animatronic-suit transition is unlikely to be intended to be performed while they're in use. What if the kid's tears are the moisture that triggers the spring locks, crushes his head, and shows that the spring suits are not safe? In Night 5 of FNAF 3, Phone Guy also feels the need to reinforce that customers should not be taken to the safe room, which might be a reference to the Night 4 minigame in FNAF 4.

The man we see putting on a suit is important to the third game.
The Spring Suits were decommissioned immediately when their main fault (mainly they kill you by crushing your body) was discovered. The person we see Purple Guy helping is the first person to die as a result... which gives him the idea on how to kill the victims.
  • Impossible. The Murder's presumed "hiding the bodies" was disproved back in 2, when we saw the Puppet take the old models to the children and put them inside to give them life, the very same way he "returned to life" after being the Murderer's first victim.
    • Alternatively, the incident regarding the suits has already happened once and to be on the safe side, the employees are using costumes instead.

Phone Guy and the Pizzeria got their dates wrong.
It Wasn't the Bite of '87, Phone Guy got mixed up, it was the Bite of '83. FNAF 2 and FNAF 4 are set in 1983. The Pizzeria must have made a typo on the cheque. Purple Guy witnessed the Bite of '83, and he wanted justice for the Child, so he murdered the Child's Brother and his friends. So what he was doing was with good reason, he is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
  • That makes zero sense. Why, after two games establishing the date as 1987, would Scott change his mind? If you're trying to explain the 1983 in the 'Fredbear and Friends' show, reruns are a thing.
  • Also, none of the events in FNAF 3 would've taken place by this logic. However, I do believe the year is 1983, due to the Law of Conservation of Detail.
  • Besides, Phone Guy says he was a fan when he was younger, meaning the Fazbear gang had been around for a fair while, and no pizzeria mascots get a cartoon show off the bat. Speaking of Phone Guy? He was there when the Bite happened, he was a longtime employee, and that incident was the beginning of the end for Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, forever this time. Pretty sure that's the one thing he could never forget if he tried.
  • Yeah, remember, Two featured the grand reopening. So they've been around for a while. At any rate, I could see them putting the wrong year if it had just been one year and it was around January, but I can't see them being four years off on a paycheck. And certainly not a date in the future.
  • It does make sense, because the Pizzeria obviously gave the wrong timestamp by mistake; if that wasn't the case, then on the other hand, Phone Guy is a liar, even if it is not by his own admission, as he probably lied about Fredbear, he probably lied about the entire Pizzeria. Jeremy knew it was Fredbear's all along. And the 87 on the timestamp, if it weren't a year, it was probably the Paycheck if it included VAT. Also, Scott doesn't have a photographic memory, like any human, he can forget.
    • That'd be easier to believe if he couldn't look it up. On This Very Wiki, no less.
  • There's one good clue to when this game took place — the use of the Spring animatronics during the cutscene featuring the Bite, which are nowhere to be found in the second game. At all. This means the two games actually cannot run concurrent. The second game was in '87, as the paycheck indicates — suggesting it's a typo is more than an Epic Fail on the part of the company since 3 and 7 are nowhere near each other, even on a keypad, and it's unlikely. The fourth? That may not have been in 1987. There's no indicator whatsoever that the second and fourth games take place at the same time except that we know there's a Bite incident in 1987, when the second game takes place, and one happens in the fourth game. It's more than likely that there's at least two Bite incidents, especially because the end of Night 6 has the child die (listen for the flatline!), but Phone Guy states that the victim of '87 lived ("I-It's amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know?").
    • The games do run concurrent. There's one huge piece of evidence you're missing: the Mangle parts strewn about in the brother's bedroom. Considering Mangle was repeatedly pulled apart by the kids, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that the brother could take some of the parts home with him. Since Mangle wasn't operational until the Grand Re-opening of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, 4 couldn't take place more than a week before 2, and unless the brother never cleans his room ever, it couldn't take place too long after 2. Therefore, the two games must run concurrent, though it's certainly possible they could be two different restaurants.
      • Unless, of course, the restaurant was selling toy versions of the characters that were later used as the basis for the new animatroncis in 1987.
    • They spring suits aren't found in FNAF 2 because they were discontinued by then. The Bite and Missing Children Incident happen in June '87, Jeremy works during November '87.
      • Where does it say the game is in June of '87? At the very least, I succeeded in proving the game cannot run concurrent with the second game. Which is mostly what I wanted to point out, and I placed it under here because doing so lends to the above theory. There are a lot of timeline issues, since all three stages of the animatronics are represented — the Spring suits are clearly shown to be in use, the brother and his friends wear masks of the designs that theoretically came up when the Diner was bought and made into a pizzeria, the Child has plush toys of them like that, and the Girl Who Would Be Chica (supposedly) has figurines of the Toy animatronics. Even to be in June of that year, the girl shouldn't have those toy as the grand re-opening where they were introduced was in November. Scott claims the game isn't a prequel (though he's a Lying Creator), but since it cannot run the same circles as FNAF2, you can actually make a good argument that this game is actually a sequel to the first or second games, and the idiots who run the joint decided to use the Spring suits for a while, possibly while they repaired the old suits for use in FNAF1, but scrapped the Toy bots (we know they were scrapped for some reason, after all). That would explain why all three variations of the Animatronics are shown, and we don't know if the place was closed down immediately after this incident. So it could fall between the second and first games, taking place after it re-opened for the first game, but before Mike took the shift- something made the place close down when Mike's turn was over, after all. I'll say here that I make theories, and I submit evidence, but I don't always believe what I write. I just like to examine all angles, but I can't make the game fit into FNAF 2's timeline. I originally did suggest the game took place earlier in the year, but I cut it when I was shortening my comment (apparently. I thought I left it in but...), since it was three times as long before I did.
      • In the first game. The newspapers say the Missing Children Incident in June. It doesn't give the year, but we see Purple Guy using the suit three days before the party. The phone calls in FNAF 2 and FNAF 3 are actually from the same week, the 2 calls are for the night guard (not Jeremy; again, recorded in June, not November) and the calls in 3 are for the performers on the day shift. You can align them yourself, just bump the ones from 3 up a night because you don't get a call on Night 1. If you line them up, you get a very clear picture of what happened that week, and "three days before the party" is June 26th, the day before an arrest is made for the kidnapping of the children. When we see Purple Guy putting another employee in a suit, he's most likely framing him because he knows there's been an investigation going on. June 26th, 1987 was a Friday (Day 5), which means the night guard was told to come to the last birthday party the next night, which would be his Night 6. The Missing Children Incident and the Bite occurred in the same week, but had nothing to do with each other.
      • The two games could run congruent, if there were two resturants. Who's to say they didn't build a new building for the toy animtronics, and kept Golden Freddy and Springtrap in the location seen in the ''FNAF 3'" minigames.
      • Two things: the Spring animatronics were supposed to be put firmly into disuse according to Phone Guy in FNAF3, and in FNAF2, Phone Guy makes it sound like there's only ever one location, referring to the other one as a "previous location" that was "being left to rot". It always sounds like there's just the one when its talked about. Well, and a third point: Phone Guy would have to work both locations at the exact same time, as he was there for the duration of the use of the Spring suits (and before that, because he was a senior employee to be giving out safety instructions like that despite being a security guard, supposedly), and was working there for the duration of the Toy animatronics, since he's clearly giving you instructions at night.

    Post-Release - Part 2 

One of the Child's parents works at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria.
Why host a party at a place you know your kid hates? Because you get a discount thanks to working there.
  • There's more evidence than that. During the minigame before night two if you go into the room on the right side of the hallway from your bedroom you see a bunch of somewhat "Mangle" like parts laying on the floor. What would those be doing there unless one of your parents was bringing them home from work?
  • More evidence would be how several of the between night minigames takes place at Fredbear's. Why else would a kid keep going back to a restaurant he clearly hates so much?
  • On that note, the parent/worker might be a single parent and brings the kids every day in lieu of paying for a babysitter.
  • This would also explain how the kid's older brother had a key to lock him in the Parts and Services room with.

The Other Bullies
Are Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald and Fritz Smith. The Characters you play in Five Nights at Freddy's and Five Nights at Freddy's 2.
  • This runs concurrent to FNAF 2, so it's impossible for Jeremy and Fritz to be bullies. That doesn't rule out Mike, though.
    • Actually, there is some debate about that. Either this game is set in 1987, in which case it could rule out Jeremy and Fritz as potential other Bullies, or it's set in 1983, which would support this theory.

The Child's father is the Purple Guy.
This puts his motives in perspective. When his son's frontal lobe was bitten off, he took leave of his senses, killed the bullies, and stuffed their bodies in the Withered Animatronics (who by this time had been repaired and supplanted the Toy Animatronics). The kids, though, came back as spirits, believing Purple Guy to be a psychopath and not the father of their bullying victim (who, by this time, had had his frontal lobe regenerated by highly-top secret government technology), so they tormented him, driving Purple Guy to take refuge in Springtrap. And the rest is history.
  • Unlikely. Phone Guy mentions that on Night 6, someone used one of the suits in the back, while there's mention of a birthday the next day. If anything, the events of the Bite of '87 may have been what got rid of the suspicion on him, explaining why he might have been arrested but was later shown to be free.
    • What if that birthday was of someone else? The animatronics are hostile throughout the whole game. It's hard to swallow that they are all merely malfunctioning. What if the Child is already dead by then, and haunting the building?
  • It's also possible, if we go by the theory that all four games are Adventures in Comaland, that Purple Guy is the kid's step-father, and the person that locks him in his room and in the Backstage area. He may very well have had good reasons, of course — if he brings home an animatronic to work on, locking the kid's door would be the simplest way to avoid a freakout, and locking him in the Backstage area could be a well-intentioned attempt to help the child overcome his fears. The child wouldn't see it that way, however, resulting in the Purple Guy becoming the villain of the coma dreams prior to the fourth game.

The security guard's uniform is predominately purple.
Now this may sound strange, given that this theory has absolutely nothing to do with FNAF4 itself, but hear me out. From the beginning, we've known that the one responsible for the child's murders was Purple Guy, named only for the fact that he was entirely purple. But the only concrete bit of evidence confirming the guy's identity is that he was a security guard at the place. How many other security guards do we know?

Plus, according to the minigames, we see a purple man stuffing someone in a Spring-Bonnie suit. But unlike the Purple Guy, he wasn't wearing the trademark Slasher Smile. Answer? The purple man in the above video was just a generic security guard, maybe the Day Shift Guy from FNAF2 helping a performer into the suit. Because of this, it stands to reason that every security guard of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza is dressed in purple, which also explains why the animatronics go after any security guard in their vicinity: the children only saw the purple jacket of their killer, and only have that to go on.

Nightmare's existence will be explained in the DLC.

The Bite we saw wasn't the Bite of '87 and the Child becomes the Puppet.
Scott loves throwing curveball twists with red herrings a plenty. Here we have some things that just don't add up, such as the Fredbear TV show being dated 1983 (Law of Conservation of Detail would suggest it has more meaning that just being a rerun), the Child's sprite having tears streaming down his face (just like the crying child in 2), Fredbear's promise to "fix" the Child, the fact that the 8s and 7s in scottgames.com’s source code have been replaced with 8s and 3s, the puppet case shown at the end of night seven...

What we're actually seeing is an event at Fredbear's Family Diner, perhaps during the transition to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where a kid is bitten. Fredbear, some sort of Eldritch Abomination, tries to "fix" the Child with the Nightmare Animatronics (maybe in a poorly thought out attempt to get the Child to face and conquer his fears?) and ultimately leads him to return to Fredbear's at some point after recovering. There, the Purple Guy kills the Child for whatever reason (possibly he's "inspired" by the bite, or also under the influence of Fredbear), and he becomes the Puppet. Fredbear has "fixed" him by giving the Child immortal life and a new, non-frontal lobe missing body.

  • Probably also worth noting is how the child's posture as he sits on his knees in Night 6's ending looks quite similar to the giant crying Puppet in The Mangle's minigame in 3rd.
  • There's an unpsoken qualification that just about everyone seems to ignore... it's called "The Bite of 87". Why would they call it that and not just "The Bite" or "The Fazzbear's Bite" unless there was more than one of them? Maybe this game is based around what is now called "The Bite of 83" which used to be just called "The Bite" until 87 rolled around...
    • The media. The Bite of '87 is just so much catchier than simply 'the Bite' or 'the Fazbear Bite'.
  • In the first game, Phone guy says that the animatronics had a daytime free-roaming mode, but that it was disabled because of the "Bite of 87." This strongly implies that the bite happened when one of the animatronics was in said free-roaming mode. This is not the case with the bite in this game, as it happened with a stationary animatronic on stage.
  • Notice that there's no adults around during the Bite depicted in this game, only the bullies, their victim and the animatronics. If the kids lied about how the child's head got mangled - he fell, something dropped on him, etc. - no one else may have known that this Bite took place (the management decides to ignore or clean up the bloodstained teeth). After nights in a coma in the hospital the child flatlines, his spirit ends up in the Puppet, and then four years later, when his brother has another birthday... look, any family that would bring the child to a place he clearly hates for a party would be stupid enough to return to the place where that child suffered an eventually-fatal accident to throw a party for his brother. And at that party, one of the free-roaming animatronics delivers a karmic chomping in full view of everyone else, which goes down in history as the Bite of '87.

Fun with Plushtrap involves the little girl from Night 2's mini-game.
She'sseen with a Spring-Bonnie Bonnie toy and mentions how it's a finger trap. Plush the house you play in may not be the same one in the main game. As such this troper believes that the bonus round features this little girl.

The main character of 4 becomes the Puppet, and has been the villain all along
The game takes place earlier than it appears and is the Start of Darkness for the real franchise villain. The whole time, it's just been his spirit trying to get revenge on the people that hurt or ignored him (the kids who laugh at him seem to share characteristics with the animatronics, like rabbit ear-shaped hair or holding a balloon, potentially foreshadowing their fates).

In fact, the kid scaring him about the animatronics killing you and hiding your body may not have been a legend about something that has happened, but the inspiration for his MO.

As far back as the first game, there were hallucinations that said "It's Me" and one that showed crying faces, as if to say "it's me, the crybaby." The newspaper articles about the missing children could then be seen as him bragging about succeeding in dealing with those children, and taunting who's next. The Golden Freddy hallucinations are him getting revenge by subjecting them to what he suffered. The Bite of '87 could actually have been him intentionally trying to recreate his tragedy.

We know that the Puppet was around during the first game, but never seen directly, and the Puppet was the one who put the kids in the animatronics in the minigame, which maybe wasn't as nice as the text made it sound. Phone Guy was definitely scared of the Puppet, and I'd guess he's connected to the kid in some way.

There was perhaps no murderer at all, just a vengeful ghost, with the purple man being representative of those he blames most (giving the third game a much different meaning).

The kid witnessed one of the murders
In one of the mini-games, the kid refuses to go in a direction because "of what he saw." This could have been one of the murders and he was so scared he couldn't do anything. Also, at the end you'll see a locked box, which could be a mental representation of a repressed memory.

The game is a prequel
This game takes place earlier than most people think, it takes place before game #2 and what we see taking place at the end of night five isn't actually the Bite of 87. After all, why would they need to call it "The Bite of 87" if there wasn't another "Bite" somewhere in the company's history?

Consider how the main character's brother and his friends are all wearing masks based around the original four at one point.

When you're locked in the supply closet, there's no sign of Foxy, who was supposed to already be broken by the time that 2 takes place. The most obvious conclusion to draw is that Foxy is still functional at the moment and hasn't broken down yet.

Also remember the bite of 87 was what caused them to take away the animatronics' ability to walk around freely during the day, but the bite we see happening to the main character takes place when Golden Freddy is just standing around on stage, exactly the same way that the robots are shown doing in the first game when they have their freeroaming mode turned off. Since the bite we see in this game had nothing at all to do with freeroaming mode, why would they disable it? Well, freeroaming didn't come around until the second game.

Also, if this game takes place before it came into being, that would explain why the only times we see suits walking around it is when people are inside of them.

In short, much like with the second game, Scott is pulling a fast one on us in regards to where it falls in the timeline, and it won't be confirmed/revealed until whatever comes with the Halloween DLC.

  • It does make sense, because it looks like it takes place when the Spring suits were being phased out and replaced with the animatronics. We see stuffed toys of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy in the minigames, implying that the first Pizzaria is opened, and the Diner is slowly phasing out, along with the Spring suits. Also, one of the kids in the minigames says that the animatronics are rumored to wander at night, so it's implying that the murders must've happened before the bite?
  • What we don't see might be as important as what we do. Sure, all of the originals are present as plushies and on the TV, and toy versions of the toy animatronics can be found. However, at the restaurant, only Golden Freddy and Golden Bonnie suits or pieces are found. We never see any other animatronics, except in the gameplay (which are heavily implied to just be nightmares inspired by his plushies). Is it possible then, that none of them had been made yet? Perhaps the TV show expanded the cast for the sake of TV and spawned merchandise before animatronics could be made. Finally, we see the brother and his friends wearing masks of the original FNAF 1 animatronics, while outside the restaurant, you see a kid with a balloon, as one example. It seems possible that only Golden Freddy and Golden Bonnie exist at this time, and they are not haunted. It might very well be that these kids are the ones that end up possessing the animatronics they imitate or resemble (the protagonist himself being the puppet).

The Bite of '87 is accurate, but the game itself...
Each night is 'another night before the party', and the strong suggestions involving the series-noted Bite are obvious. But with how hallucinatory and ridiculously nightmarish each of the Animatronics obviously are, combined with the fact that there's an IV bag next to the Child's bed, who's to say that the actual game isn't long after the cause? Essentially the child is reliving PTSD of the Bite and the stress leading up to his birthday party gone awry, and the Fredbear animatronics haunt him each night, memories slowly unfolding of what really occurred — to a degree, given the obvious mental distortions. If they catch him, it's the equivalent of either a psychotic break that ends poorly or the poor kid goes into a stroke or shock that ends up being fatal.

The Halloween DLC will have more Nightmares.
The case in Night 7's ending has been identified as a puppet case, so a Nightmare Puppet as well as a couple of others may be around next time.
  • The DLC will have Nightmares versions of the Toy antimatronics and Nightmare Spring Bonnie which will replace the Nightmare versions of the orginal antimatronics in a new mode which explains more of the story.

The Bully Brother Grows Up To Be A Serial Killer.
In fact, considering the way he and his gang treated his little brother, his fondness for the animal masks, and what he ultimately did to his own little brother, the chances are pretty good that he'll grow up to be the next Purple Guy.
  • It's strongly hinted that the big brother did not mean to injure the boy as seriously as he did, and regrets it immediately after. Also, he's not so much fond of the animatronics as exploiting his little brother's fear of them.

Phone Guy's description of the Bite of '87 was a rumor.
When we see Bite actually happen in the game, it's less the kid's frontal lobe being bitten off and more the kid's skull being crushed like an egg. It may be amazing how long one can live without the frontal lobe, but it would be a miracle to survive your whole brain being squished by mechanical jaws.
  • To be fair, any bite victim would only have to worry about the inner teeth of the endoskeleton; the "teeth" of the outer shell (or "shroud") would be cheap plastic. So yes, it's possible to come away with "only" frontal lobe damage from the bite we see on the screen. Areas at risk are all of the orbital gyri — anterior, medial, posterior and the gyrus rectus. It does depend on exactly how the kid's head is wedged in there, though.
    • The animation isn't necessarily something to go by either. The 8-bit style animations aren't exactly meant to show an accurate model of how the kid's head was positioned.

The so-called Halloween expansion is, in true fashion for Scott Cawthon, going to be released earlier than announced.
We'll be getting it on the 8th of August, the day he initially pushed the game's release up to.
  • Jossed in terms of August 8th, but it got released on October 30, the day before Halloween.

Alternately, the Halloween DLC will end up becoming Five Nights at Freddy's 5.
Related to the above theory that the Halloween DLC is essentially Five Nights at Freddy's 5. Should Scott stick to Halloween, that would give him roughly three months to develop the DLC, about the same time it took for him to make each of the four main games. If he's determined for a thematic Halloween release, that extra time would probably flow into building the DLC up and up until its a full game in its own right. There's a perfect excuse to be used as well. The first teaser didn't say Five Nights at Freddy's 4 would be on Halloween, it said "The Final Chapter" would be then...
  • Jossed. Scott said in a post that it wouldn't be a sequel or a prequel.
    • A) Scott's a Trolling Creator so anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt, and B) There's room for loopholes. For instance, he didn't say it wouldn't be an Interquel.

The game does take place in 1987, the restaurant it takes place in just has not caught up with the current Freddy theme truly.
As said already by others, if the concept of Freddy is as popular as it is being made out to be, then it could be easy to find an episode of the TV series in a four year difference due to reruns. The other part I would like to share deals with one of the things we could look for as inspiration to the series, Chuck E. Cheese's. For a few years now, Mister Charles Entertainment Cheese got himself a redesign, some locations were blessed to get the remodeled animatronic that resembled this upgrade while others are stuck with his old designs only with the outfit to put on. This could be an explanation for why masks and toys include Freddy, Chica, Bonnie, Foxy, and those Mangle remnants while the restaurant still had Fredbear and Springtrap as the playing robots. They are trying to get rid of the old models and update the best they can.
  • Or they may have had a separate contract from most of the franchises because they negotiated directly with the original owner before he sold it to a conglomerate. There's a few McDonald's that run like that cause they negotiated with the McDonald brothers before he sold to Ray Kroc. They're not required to keep up with the mandatory updating. This pizzeria might be the same.
    • Specifically, most of those franchises probably have to turn in their old animatronics when they get the new ones. The locations at 2 and 4 didn't, hence why they still have the Withered and Springlock animatronics respectively.

The Puppet is what is in the locked chest
  • The chest is big enough to fit a puppet...so it could be possible..?

The Kid's brother is actually the protagonist of FNAF 3
Because the protagonist wasn't named, the protagonist is likely the brother of the kid whose Deadly Prank went horribly wrong. Because of the time frame between 2/4/1 and 3, the kid's brother is an adult at this time. However, seeing as he sees animatronics coming after him, he purposely burned the pizzaeria down because of Springtrap being a bigger threat.
  • Incidentally, it was considered strange that Phantom Freddy resembles Golden Freddy. If the Brother is indeed the protagonist of 3, it would make sense that it was Golden Freddy/Fredbear he was seeing and not Freddy Fazbear, for the very fact that Fredbear was his little brother's favourite, and also the one that committed the Bite of '87.

Various Phone Guy, Purple Guy, and Protagonist Theories
  • This is a prequel, and Purple Guy's motive for murder is that the bite prank was the first black mark on the company's reputation, leading him to want revenge on anyone who was at the party and tarnished their name (ironically only making it worse).
  • Phone Guy isn't connected to the events of this game, explaining how he managed to survive so long (in other words, wasn't the murderer or any of the kids that the crying kid might want revenge on).
  • Phone Guy is the killer... but doesn't know it because he's actually been manipulated by the Puppet. It would explain why he's scared of the Puppet despite liking the establishment so much, why he lasted so long, how the murderer could provide reasonable doubt, and put a tragic spin on his reaction to the horrible things that happened.
  • The Purple Guy is Bite of '87 victim, the injury having affected his judgment and turned him into a crazed killer.
  • The Phone Guy is the killer but doesn't know it because he's the Bite of '87 victim.
  • The Phone Guy is the killer, and the FNAF 3 trailer hinted at this, as he's the only character confirmed to have continually come back (we now have a reasonable expectation that the Purple Guy knew about the spring suits early enough to know their dangers as much as Phone Guy, so the killer's death to one is almost certainly due to desperation and not stupidity).
  • The killer is some other person simply being manipulated by vengeful ghosts and not an active force themselves.
  • There is no killer. The Purple Man is just the representative of the older brother who accidentally killed his brother and other people the ghosts blame, with the evils of the series just being the result of vengeful ghosts.
  • Phone Guy is the older brother, as he likes Foxy and the brother wears a Foxy mask.
  • Phone Guy is the father, who presumably works at the establishment due to their proximity, using the place for a party the kid doesn't like, and bringing home things like the Foxy mask, and would be the right age if this is concurrent with FNAF2.
  • Phone Guy continues to work at the establishment over the years as penance or guilt (if he's related).
  • Phone Guy does not talk to you in this game because he's either the protagonist himself, or another character too young to sound like how we're used to him sounding during these events.
  • All of the player characters return to such a dangerous and low-paying job because they're connected to the events of 4 and either want revenge or have a guilty conscience.
  • All of the player characters are the same person going by different names. We are only given explanations for hallucinations in 3 and 4, and the hallucinations in 1 and 2 include the cause of the protagonist of 4's hallucinations (Golden Freddy).
  • The Puppet causes the hallucinations throughout the games. The Puppet was definitely around in 2. He was retroactively implied to be in the building during 1. We're given an alternative explanation for the hallucinations in 3 in case him being dismantled actually stopped this. In 4, well, the entire game is essentially one big hallucination by a character who resembles the Puppet, potentially providing an origin for the hallucinations, and why they tend to feature Golden Freddy.

The Nightmares, Nightmare in particular, are the result of a Saya no Uta style attempt to fix the protagonist's brain by Freadbear's spirit.
The Bite of '87 effectively lobotomized the protagonist, leading to Fredbear's spirit trying to fix him. In keeping with the Puppet's inability to 'get it' in regards to helping people despite its best efforts, Fredbear attempted to rewire the child's mind to account for the loss of his frontal lobe. Unfortunately, in doing so, he also caused the nightmares to occur, and vivid hallucinations. The events of the game proper are the result of Fredbear's attempts to help the protagonist separate the horror and trauma of the Bite of '87 from the animatronics, leading the protagonist to visualize Nightmare as a last-ditch effort on his subconscious's behalf to localize his trauma without irreparably damaging his relationship with the other animatronics, who were innocent of wrongdoing.

The Nightmare is...
The Child trying to separate the bite incident from the animatronics, or rather, from his plush friends. So, rather than fully associate the fault with his favorite characters (even if the bots themselves scare him) as the nights go on, he is trying to preserve the 'friendship' he has by imagining a monster worse than any of the Nightmare Animatronics.

The Murderer is Jeremy Fitzgerald
To me, it seems that it has to be him; as he'd be in uniform, he wouldn't be inside a spring lock suit with badges, a walkie talkie, and maybe even a gun, because if he moved wrong, the spring locks would go off and kill him... so that rules out the person chasing you and the person that Purple Guy is helping into a suit. Thus, as we know Jeremy was on duty on the day of the Party (he was shifted over to the day shift and Phone Guy took nights!) and was in uniform, the only other person he could be is Purple Guy. He witnessed the Bite of 87 and got off scot free for his murderers because the animatronics were blamed for it instead. As he was helping someone into a suit, he'd know how the spring locks worked, so that fills in that detail and he just got cocky... or careless... when around the ghosts.

Nightmare is Shadow Freddy

Golden Freddy/Fredbear's Endoskeleton is has no free roam capabilities
due to being a very early model this troper finds it hard to believe the first incarnation of Freddy Fazbear would be able to walk around.

Plus the fact Fredbear does not move at all when the children forces the player character into his mouth or at least try to remove him from his robotic maw seems to support this, meaning in animatronic mode Fredbear/Golden Freddy has the limitations to our IRL Animatronics (the same is possible with Spring Bonnie/Springtrap since we don't know which is in control out of his endoskeleton or the purple man)

This would also make sense as one of the reasons Golden Freddy is unable to move like the others without paranormal activity, Even if he wasnt in suit mode his endoskeleton renders him completely imobile

The FNAF 3 Guard is a Pyromaniac and Heroic Comedic Sociopath
He does see hallucinations that are BURNT of all things, and also and HOW exactly does he bring down Fazbear's Fright?

The nightmares are the missing kid's spirits either possessing the protagonist's toys or somehow entering his mind
Regardless of which is true, they actually don't mean any harm. Like it was speculated back in the first game, the jumpscares are him hallucinating and their monstrous forms are either "accidental" or again, him hallucinating. Nightmare HIMSELF, on the other hand, is purely imaginary.

All four Games are set in the Kid's mind
Ok, so this is gonna get pretty deep and involve small details from all four games while glossing over some inconsistencies (and maybe explaining why there are inconsistencies), but this may explain some parts of the series as a whole: All four games are part of the Protagonist's coma dream. Also, there will be a lot of spoilers, but if the spoiler tag is used, there would be half a page of nothing but white. So, you are warned.

The first game is set just after the Bite of 87, where the kid had lost most of his short term memory and can only vaguely remember things about his life. Due to the incident, he now has a deathly fear of the animatronics, which is why he imagines himself as a security guard trying to ward them off. The hallucinations flash back to bits of his memory, which is why they include details of events that, realistically, Mike Schmitt probably wouldn't know or care about. After he successfully fends off the animatronics, he gets his reward by being fired from the place, never having to deal with them again.

But the flashbacks triggered his memories, so the second game takes place. Set during the week of when it happened, he slowly remembers bits from that week. The minigames are his lucid memories slowly being pieced together. He sees the purple guy taking kids away and seeing kids die, thinking that he must be responsible for the animatronics being haunted and aggressive. It is here he assumes the Purple Guy is the real villain behind all of this, not the animatronics, and prepares to confront him at the end of the week.

Which is where the third game beings. Now exonerated of guilt, the main animatronics disappear from his nightmare, leaving him alone to face off against the purple guy. The animatronics, in his flashbacks, trap the Purple Guy in the Springtrap suit, so that the kid can now face him with all the skills he has. At the end of the week, he sets fire to the place, burning the Purple Guy and everything else associated with it. But the Purple Guy survives.

This leads into the 4th game. Now with his arch nemesis gone, he relapse and thinks it must be the animatronics. But his memories are now coming back to him full and clear and in his flashbacks (still the minigames) Fredbear tries to reassure him that they are still friends. He remembers that there were no murders and no haunted animatronics; his dreams created those because of the rumors the kids had told him on his way home from the pizzeria one day and he assumed it was the Purple Guy because he saw PG stuff someone in a suit, not understanding that he's just helping a fellow employee. But he still does not understand his fear and misery, and when Fredbear himself shows up to help, the kid instead pictures him as the worst monster of all. It's not until the final flashback that he remembers it was his brother that caused all of this. He then grinds through one more night seeking answers, and Fredbear appears at the end, reassuring him that he will be fixed. And then he leaves his coma, for better or for worse.

Now, tidbits throughout the series: Fredbear was his guardian angel, and constantly tried to help him. But in his fear, the kid refused to listen. This is why in most of the games the best way to get Golden Freddy away is to ignore him; the kid is trying to ignore Fredbear's pleas until the very last game. Similarly, Foxy is always the more decrepid animatronic because he's associated with the memory of The Brother, who always wore a foxy mask and would hide in places to scare him, rather than just lurk about. And the phone guy draws attention to the whole "frontal lobe" thing because, at the time, it was the most recent memory he had (of his frontal lobe being crushed) and the amazement at being alive is his own subconscious being amazed. It may be that the Phone Guy is Fredbear's voice; Fredbear knows he appears as an apparition to the kid so he disguises his voice and only makes calls to try and talk some sense into him. This is why he posthumously appears in Fnaf 3; He knows beating the purple guy won't solve all of the kid's problems, but nonetheless helps him out. He disappears in 4 because the kid is now remembering his actual memories and the phone guy wouldn't logically be able to appear anymore (if he appeared, he will contradict the logic and possibly trigger a relapse). Also, Springtrap served as the Purple Guy's final form because he was the other animatronic on stage when his head was crushed; a painful memory that the kid's imagination gave meaning to for his suffering. It's why he's neutered into Plushtrap in the 4th game; the kid knows that he's harmless now. And in the end, Fredbear tells him that he will fix the kid because that's what he's been doing across the series. The Frontal Lobe is responsible for most of the Dopamine-related neurons, which is responsible for feelings of reward, attention and motivation, and helps with short term memory tasks and planning, all of which are the central themes in the four games (drawing attention to his accomplishments, the sense of reward for the simplest of things, the motivation to get that reward, and extensive planning and skill with short term memory tasks to keep the animatronics at bay). Fredbear wanted to train the kid in doing all of this now that he no longer has a functioning frontal lobe, so that when he does awaken, he will still be able to function.

This would explain why the fourth game seemingly does not fit into the chronology of the other 3. It's the other way around: The other three games had consistent chronology because the kid did not realize who he was, but instead thought he was inhabiting the bodies of several people in another world. It's why the details are similar, but not clear cut. Dreams tend to exaggerate details and muddle others, but in his subconscious the world was already figured out based on what he could remember, muddling it up whenever it got near a memory that caused him pain.

The brother and his friends are the protagonists of the other games.
There are four protagonists and four teenagers involved in the incident. However I subscribe to the theory that Jeremy, the first guard you play as chronologically, is also the Fazbear's Fright guard, and submit the idea that the fourth person, possibly the brother, is someone else. Combine this with the theory that this game does not take place in 1987, and that this could very well be in 1983 (as proposed above), and that there are multiple Bite incidents (as they feel the need to specify the '87 part). This bite could have closed the original Freddy Fazbear's pizza, as the second game is a grand re-opening prequel to the first game, or it could have terminated the original Fazbear's Family Diner. If there is a time skip of 4 or so years, supposing the brother and his friends are in their later teens, this would patch the fact that they're not old enough to be security guards. Considering they're all drawn rather bulky (meaning muscular), that would be a good indicator they could be security guards. If there's a time skip of about 4 years, they'd all probably be in their 20's when Fritz and Jeremy at least were guards (and older when Mike does it). Phone Guy can't be, unless he was older than the others because he was at the company for a long time by the sounds of it, even before Jeremy.

Purple Guy was the Day Shift Guard that got the brunt of the Bite of '87 legal problems.
"He should have kept his eye on the children and prevented this from happening!" In turn, he was fired and in blind retaliation he decided to extract revenge. Stuffing the children into the animatronics and letting the springs and wires do the job for him; "Oh, you love the animatronics don't you? Here, let me get you closer to them." He didn't expect for them to turn vengeful however, which led to the creation of Springtrap.

The Child did not survive
At the end of the Night 6 cutscene, a flatline can be heard as the Child's sprite disappears, a pretty strong indicator that he died, probably while at the hospital or during hospice care, as indicated by the hidden IV drip at his bed. His spirit now haunts one of the animatronics, possibly Fredbear (as this troper theorized in an above WMG) or the Marionette (a more popular theory). Phone Guy's implication that the Bite of '87 victim survived without their frontal lobes was either a lie to make it seem not so bad to Mike, misinformation he'd been told by Management to make it seem not so bad to him which he then passed on to Mike, or as theorized by some on this page, referred to a separate Bite incident in which the victim DID survive and he simply neglected the mention THIS unlucky protagonist to Mike because there was no happy ending, like how he neglected to mention the Missing Children to Mike or Jeremy.

  • One thing that may or may not shoot your theory in the foot. You are aware that a machine does not flatline when someone dies, right? I've seen a relative die in hospital, physically been there as their life ends in the bed, and the machine only flatlines when the machine is turned off and the power vanishes, causing the flatline. As the child fades away, that could be him waking up from the nightmares and the machine being turned off as he recovers... or him passing on and the machine being turned off as it isn't needed anymore.

The bullies are the four spirits possessing the animatronics from the original games.
There’s a pretty clear correlation, what with the four of them wearing the Bonny, Chica, Foxy, and Freddy masks in the penultimate cutscene. Whether their murders were simple karma or instigated by Fredbear as vengeance for “breaking” his friend, remains to be seen.

Fredbear Plush is an angel.

Throughout the game, he tries to help the protagonist, and seems to be the only real friend he has. He's everywhere in the minigames, even places he shouldn't be, so he's always watching. Some of his advice isn't the best, but it could be taken as trying to help the child find the confidence to face his brother. "You know he won't stop until you find him." Eventually, the child would have to face his fears. Furthermore, after Night 6, we hear a flatline, and Fredbear Plush promises to fix him because he's broken. This could symbolically be him taking the child to heaven, where he'll be made whole again, and freed from his nightmares.

The Halloween Update will be Another Side, Another Story.

Possibly detailing some strange going ons around Fredbear's Family Diner, or something else entirely. Who knows?

The Child is a latent psychic

He's been seeing visions of his fate, which are the cause of both his nightmares and fear of the animatronics. He's known what was coming the entire time. That's "what he saw", that's why Fredbear becomes the sole threat on Night 5, before it actually happens. The glimpses of an IV, pills, or flowers also go along with this. His conversations with Fredbear the plushie are just the child's way of expressing / warning himself of what's to come.

After the Bite actually occurs, this latent psychic ability is what lets him live on as, most likely, the Puppet and later put the murdered children into their animatronics. The former possibly occurred as a kind of survival instinct.

The reason (or one of them) why the child is scared of the animatronics was due to witnessing a spring-lock failure.
Think about it. Imagine this: You're a child at everyone's favorite neighborhood family diner, hiding somewhere because of your fear of the animatrons that inhabit the diner. Anyway, you're over here, in your little corner, when all of a sudden, a man in a golden Bonnie costume quickly approaches you. Being scared of the animatronics, your first instinct is to back away, in the case of which the man picks up his pace, and then he stumbles, setting off the faulty spring-locks. Just imagine the poor kid witnessing this, and if he didn't know that there was a human in the costume, that would have been all the more horrifying. Seeing a cartoon mascot's eyes roll into their sockets as blood pours out of them every which way and they fall onto the floor, screaming in pain and begging you to help them. No wonder these these look so outright horrific.

The Animatronics do have souls/sapience and the dead kids aren't in complete control.
One thing for certain is that the animatronics were rather jumpy around adults while the murders were taking place in FnaF 2. If it were the children possessing them and the very brief cameo showing the Purple Guy worked the Day Shift, wouldn't they have attacked the security and pizzeria workers in broad daylight? Another thing is how the extra nights allow you to control the AI of the Animatronics, making it easier to fend them off. If they were fully haunted, then things like A.I.s shouldn't matter, right? Finally, the gibberish message given on Night 5 of Five Nights at Freddy's 1 is a backwards masked and pitched down excerpt from Autobiography of a Yogi, which is a demonstration that metal is alive. Dead children possessing things cannot be called "alive". One final note is the IV bag by the bed, indicating that this game takes place after the Bite of 87, and all animatronics would be shut down for the time being, allowing the AI some off time while the children were trapped at the Diner.

Therefore, what if the Nightmare Animatronics weren't actually hallucinations, but the disembodied AI of the Animatronics? What if they were trying to reach out to the child, AKA the victim of the Bite of '87 but his heavily bad memories of the event had warped their forms? And it's only after getting through Night 6 when they finally get through to him and state that they're still friends? That Fredbear still cares about the child?

On another note, this WMG could also explain the existence of Shadow Freddy/Shadow Fredbear and Shadow Bonnie. Fearbear's AI could've been permanently kicked out by the possessing dead child (which also explains why Golden Freddy's AI is so high from the get go in FnaF2, nothing is holding back the possessing child), thus only letting it manifest as Shadow Freddy. As for Shadow Bonnie, why does it appear? Spring Bonnie is inactive, being seen in the brief cameo of the Purple Guy helping another worker or stuffing a child into the suit. And if this game does take place at the same time as Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Springtrap wasn't one of the active animatronics in that game, therefore letting its spirit leave and manifest as Shadow Bonnie.

....but then again the purple guy fully kicks it out perhaps when he died.

The animatronics behave the way they do in the first, second, and (to a lesser extent) third games because of a unique case of Your Mind Makes It Real
Bonnie comes in from the left, Chica from the right. Foxy stays hidden away for a while before coming after you. You have to check on him frequently or flash your light at him to keep him away. When he jumpscares you, he’s either peeking out from the door, or pouncing at you. Freddy could appear in your room even if both doors were closed, and he has a tendency to laugh maniacally. Fredbear can appear anywhere at any time. Sometimes, all you can see of him is his disembodied head. In addition, most of the animatronics try to sneak up on you while you’re not looking or can’t see them, and they always stop attacking at 6:00 am. Why do they have these particular behaviors? It’s because they were influenced by the FNAF 4 protagonist’s nightmares.

The child survived, but had a really close call.
We hear the flatlining-like sound in the Night 6 video, but we still have some more gameplay options afterwards. Perhaps the child did flatline temporarily, but was resuscitated.
  • It would certainly add a Crowning Moment of Awesome and Heartwarming to the game. The child pulled through his own fears and escaped being trapped in his mind, because the players helped to pull him through his nightmares! His fading away wasn't him dying, it was him re-entering the real world by waking up!
  • And, it would add a nice bit of happiness to what is probably the darkest, scariest, and saddest game in the entire franchise.
  • This is true, the Child probably only clinically died, and then was brought back to life; clinical death is when someone is pronounced dead for several hours, and then comes back to life.
  • Another point to back this theory up — a life support machine only flatlines when it is switched off, implying that the child either clinically died and they switched off the machine and he recovered... or he truly died and they switched the machine off anyway as a dead person doesn't need a life support machine because they are dead.

The Bite of 87 the same incident of the "multiple and simultaneous springlock failures" that Phone Guy mentions in FNAF 3 that ultimately lead to the discontinuation of the springlock suits.

Two factors make the situation probable: the first simply being that the springlock suits become dangerous when exposed to moisture, which would explain why Fredbear bit down after stalling for a few seconds: the child in his mouth was crying. The tears theoretically could have broken the locks and sent the jaw down on the poor kid's head. The second factor is the the fact that the victim of the bite was a child. The management has consistently displayed no regard for their own employees' safety. Even with the springlocks, the only solution offered by the management was to escape to a saferoom to painfully die away from public eyes. Obviously, the idea is to have a ready-made cover up. So, with all that in mind, why would they suddenly have a change of heart and hide the suits rather than continue with their corrupt practice? Simple: they couldn't cover up the incident in question, nor could they justify it to the public eye, because the victim was a child! It all makes sense that, since the Bite happened the week of the murders, the lawsuits would start flying, and the management would be desperately trying to prevent more. Thus, we have the hasty stowing away of any remaining suits so that insurance companies (or perhaps the legal system) didn't find out that these things were built capable of maiming anyone who handled them the wrong way.

The Bite of '87 and the Purple Guy murders didn't take place at the same pizzeria.
Remember the unfortunate incident mentioned in the third game? The one that caused the springlock animatronics to be scrapped? The Bite was it. That happened at a 'sister location' remember, so it didn't actually happen at the same pizzeria that the second game took place in. The hints that Jeremy was there were just red herrings.

The Child dies, and becomes Golden Freddy.
Fredbear and Springtrap were both scrapped after not just the Bite, but also after several employees were injured (or worse). Fredbear was probably taken apart and his parts were probably put into the renewed animatronics of the first game, leaving the empty exoskeleton. The Child manages to hang on for possibly a year, then flatlines. The game actually takes place during the days leading up to the Child's next birthday, in 1988. The Fredbear plushie isn't who is talking to the Child, but the Puppet, a child who was murdered by Purple Guy and is out to end the Fazbear franchise. The Puppet put the Child's spirit into what was left of Golden Freddy, before it was taken apart. It explains why Golden Freddy doesn't ever show up in 3; the Child has moved on and was never a victim of Springtrap, and doesn't have a problem with Fazbear's Fright— which was founded by people who shared his original fear of the animatronics!

The Bite's impact was much, much, worse than we thought.
(This is based on my "animatronics attacking" post on the Fridge page, by the way. And this will be long, so bear with me.)

The Bite of '87 didn't just lead to the near-death of a child, but an even worse disaster for the company, and terrible consequences for the child's brother.

On the day of the Bite, Jeremy Fitzgerald was guarding the Toy Animatronics, who seemed to be going haywire, glaring at anyone who wasn't a child, and looking like they were ready to attack anyone who seemed hostile to kids. However, the party seemed to be going fine, even if the birthday boy was, for some reason, quite upset.

Then, from the stage room, the song suddenly stopped and a loud "CRUNCH" was heard. Jeremy and some other employees, including Phone Guy, ran into the room to see what had happened. What they found was blood pouring down from Fredbear as the birthday boy hung from the bear's mechanical jaw, his frontal lobe and some of his head crushed into a bloody pulp, as well as 4 teenagers panicking over what had happened. Immediately, the manager came in, took one look, then marched outside, sending someone to call the police and another to call an ambulance.

The incident would have ended there and then if the already glitchy Toy animatronics had not suddenly showed up, thanks to the Puppet’s spectral influence. Before, the Toy Animatronics had been extremely hostile and unfriendly to the teenagers and other employees. Now, they looked at the comatose and bloody child hanging from the jaws of their older, fellow animatronic, and the teenagers, who were angrily shouting at each other and pointing fingers, ignoring their bloodstained masks and clothing.

The Puppet, already furious at his death and the deaths of the 5 other children who were going to attend the day’s party, could not bear to see another child get hurt. He angrily climbed out of his box and headed into the stage room. While everyone was distracted, the child inside him used his spectral powers to fiddle with the Toys’s programming, and Fredbear’s, until all hell broke loose.

The Toys marched over and furiously attacked 3 of the teenagers, crushing their bones and spraying blood everywhere, while severely injuring anyone who tried to stop them, resulting in almost all of the employees in the room getting killed except Jeremy and Phone Guy. Meanwhile, the kid’s brother, already bleeding and suffering many broken bones from the wild but lethal swings of the Toys, was picked up by Fredbear, who had marched down from the stage, and blacked out in sheer terror as Fredbear roared into his face, before Purple Guy, the mechanic who managed the spring suits, happily dismantled him.

After the violence ended, the completely homicidal Toys searched for the remaining staff — any kitchen workers had barricaded themselves in the Kitchen, while everyone else had fled into the Parts and Service room. The Puppet, unfortunately, was already quite mad with rage and began to rouse the Withered Animatronics awake to kill the others, who were looking for anything they could use to beat off the Toys that were trying to smash open the door.

Thankfully, before any further carnage ensued, the police stormed the building, scaring the Puppet and causing him to flee into his Prize Corner, so he could try and control the Toys from there. Although the Toys were extremely well-constructed and injured several cops in the furious gun battle, heavy gunfire annihilated the robots. However, the brother’s friends had been horrifically maimed, and so were any workers in the stage room. They were sent to the morgue, while the child, the brother, and Jeremy headed to the hospital. Fazbear Entertainment immediately did their usual cover-up, and it almost worked — the Bite was known to the public, while the dead victims were turned into heroes for supposedly sacrificing themselves in order to stop the rampaging animatronics.

The police later interrogated any remaining employees to what caused the Bite. As all fingers pointed towards the kid’s brother and Jeremy's eyewitness account backed this up, the teenager was pulled in. He confessed to the deadly prank, to the outrage and horror of everyone, and handed over his bloodstained Foxy mask as well. Things, however, got worse from there — Purple Guy decided to claim that the teenager was responsible for the murders, as he thought it would be hilarious and was itching to hurt another child, and the Bite was evidence enough already that the brother 'hated' children. As a result, the murders were very briefly pinned on the brother, until the day shift guard was found the next day and arrested. The murders were then pinned on the latter, but wild rumours spread that the brother helped the guard commit the crimes, and practiced on his little brother to see if their sadistic plans would work.

The extensive media coverage and national outcry lead to Fazbear Entertainment being swarmed with even more lawsuits than before, and led to the demolition of both the pizzeria and Toy animatronics, although Fredbear was simply taken out of commission instead. As the Toy animatronics's parts were now in Fazbear's 3rd generation of robots, the company dropped the 'mask disguise', guessing that it would not work after the bloodbath. They also forbid any old employees to speak about the true events behind the deaths on the birthday, which was why Phone Guy only told Mike about the Bite. The costs of the massive property damage and lawsuits tore away at the company's money until they were reduced to the state they were in during the first game.

The target of anger, however, was not the company, but the brother himself. The papers painted him as a cruel, vicious bully of the worst kind and briefly, a murderer of children, so he was shunned by the town for the rest of his life, and the parents of his friends hated him, as well as his own grieving parents, who couldn’t believe what their son truly was.

The brother was sent off to prison for several years, and before he left, he apologized to his comatose, nightmare-stricken sibling, promising that someday, the kid would wake up. His sibling did wake up, thankfully.

Although the brother was eventually freed from prison in 1992, once new evidence about the murders was found and a manhunt for Purple Guy began, the brother was forever haunted by the fact that he now knew what a horrible person he was, that he started a massacre, possibly killed his younger brother, was responsible for his grieving parents and the deaths of countless people. As well as that, wherever he went, he started to see a Golden Freddy suit, and suffered a recurring nightmare of the suit bellowing in his face.

Despite all this, though, his little brother invited him to live with him, having forgiven him courtesy of Fredbear transmitting his big brother's apology to the sibling's brain.

But now desperate for money, and holding a newfound desire to find out the truth about what truly happened, Mike Schmidt applied for a job at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria...

  • Big a jerk as the brother was, I legitimately cannot see the police blaming a teenager for deliberate, calculated murders, when his worst crime was a prank gone wrong he was truly remorseful for.
    • Noted.
    • Depends on how corrupt the police department is. If the Purple Man was from a well-off family who was working at the pizzeria for 'experience', I could see them rather blame some poor (in both the financial and emotional terms) kid rather than piss off the family.

The older brother is/was the protagonist of the third game.
Going off the "he was blamed for the murders at some point" theory, he took a job at a Fazbear location to see if he could dig up the truth and find out who the real murderer was. The minigames are dreams/hallucinations he's having. Solving all the minigames to save the kid's souls and eventually burning down the building with Springtrap/the real murder's spirit inside was his way of trying to atone for what he did to his brother.

(And maybe he's Mike Schmidt as well because why not?)

The flat line at the end could be the Child leaving the hospital.

The first game, we hear Phone Guy say "It's amazing how someone can survive without their frontal lobe", so there's a possibility the Child has survived and is living past the events of the series, but probably from mental scarring. The flat line at the end could be him being removed from the hospital, seeing how in his dreams, we see IV bags, meaning he could be recovering at home. The clocks also give the distinction that the Child is at home, still suffering from nightmares.

That, and the fact that a life support machine only flatlines when it is turned off, meaning he could have survived.

The brother got blamed for the murders because Purple Man was the son of the C.E.O. of Fazbear Entertainment.
Basically, daddy bought off the police to convince them to blame the kid cause god forbid HIS son gets in trouble for anything.

The event is the canon Bite of '87, but is set in Fredbear's because of Scott's pandering to the people who wanted to see Fredbear after his first mention in 2.

Purple Guy's Cameo is Actually a Huge Reveal
Purple Guy was helping someone into Spring Bonnie. Considering the Law of Conservation of Detail, who do we know that works at Fazbear and instructs employees on the proper use of the mascot costumes? That's right, Phone Guy. The unfortunate incident at a sister location he mentions in Night 4 of FNAF 3 is actually the moisture of the kid's tears triggering Fredbear's spring locks and crushing him. Phone Guy was visiting the sister location to help a new employee with the spring suit when the incident happened. Phone Guy wasn't familiar with Fredbear's Diner in FNAF 2, but considering the prevalence of the other characters outside of the restaurant (and in the show) in FNAF 4, it's possible that the buy out had already occurred and the location was no longer known as Fredbear's Diner.

There are only one set each of the Animatronics
Considering you never see any of the Toys or Old Animatronics in the Restaurant within 4, it can imply that Fazbear Entertainment is too cheap to make more than one copy of the animatronics, which means the FNAF2 Area has the Toys while what could be the sister location has the Spring Animatronics which is why we don't see them in the FNAF2 location.

To Re-illeterate what I mean. When I said there was only one of each Animatronic I mean only one of each SET meaning there are only one set of Spring Animatronics (unless you count the supply suits mentioned in night 5 in FNAF3), One Set of Toy Animatronics and One set of the Withered Animatronics.

  • Jossed in SOOOO many ways. For starters, the withered animatronics in the second. Then THE ENTIRETY OF FAZBEAR'S FRIGHT (which, for example, had a destroyed Bonnie, Toy Bonnie's face and Springtrap all clearly separate from each other). Then take into account the fact that this game takes place in 1983, BEFORE ANY OF THE ANIMATRONICS (save Goldie and Springtrap) COULD BE MADE. ...have you even played these games?
    • Yes I have because how would I know about the Sister location, the spring animatronics, and the fact in FNAF4 you see what appear to be Mangle in one room, and a child with little toys of the Toy animatronics, ask yourself this if this was in 83 why would there be merchandise of the Toy Animatronics which would allegedly mean that if this was 83 that they wouldnt exist. Plus again this could be the sister location mentioned in two, note you dont see the Spring animatronics (except for the ghostly Golden Freddy) on the stage where they would probably be deactivated on. In FNAF2, you also do not see any of the Toy Animatronics in 4's establishment if this IS 87 they would be in service. The players brother and friends also wear masks of Freddy and Friends which imply they must have existed for some time too. So yes I have played the games and done enough research to come up with this theory so there is no need to be Rude.
      • Okay, the Mangle thing is a good point (I personally think that was just Scott trolling us again but whatever) but about the Toy Animatronic figurines, Withered Bonnie was blue too so it could've been of him. I personally think that, by the time of 4, they were slowly phasing out Fredbear's (hence the references to the other establishments) and the bite of 83 was the final nail on the coffin for the place. Note, the only way the main 4 could exist would be if they had animatronics and there was also the give cake minigame which only had Freddy in it. For all we know, that was the sister location and they were merely holding Fredbear there. And you're still missing my point. 2 had THE WITHERED AND TOYS STAND TOGETHER ON SCREEN SEVERAL TIMES and the toys were made of plastic. Every other character is made of metal. Try explaining how THAT makes snese.
  • I just illiterated what I meant. I meant that there were only one of each set. meaning that there could of been only one set of the Withered animatronics and One set of the Toy animatronics. Meaning while yes the two sets appeared side by side in FNAF2 these could be the only sets in existance meaning there might not be copies of the same sets in other locations.
    • Oh, my bad. I thought you meant they kept on remodeling the animatronics and never had more than one of each character made. My mistake.

The protagonist of FNAF4 is actually the brother.

According to MatPat's theory (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJ2jZtW7cw), it would be impossible for the protagonist to have the nightmares. Without the frontal lobe, a person couldn't care less about most inhibitions, including life-threatening scenarios, fake or otherwise. So perhaps, the brother is the one with the nightmares, traumatized by his prank gone horribly wrong. Now, because he's seen what the animatronics can do, he's scared rightfully shitless of them, and probably feels all sorts of survivor's guilt. Perhaps the medical equipment near the bed shows this, and he thinks it should have been him instead of his little brother.

  • Additionally, this would make more sense for why the animatronics are attacking you. At the end of the game, the Golden Freddy plush promises to 'fix' the bite victim. Except the animatronics have a history of thinking that Murder Is the Best Solution, and are going about 'fixing' the child by getting vengeance on his brother. This is also why Foxy reverts to a plushie — the spirits are using the victim's toys as a way to get to his brother.
    • Another video by a YouTube user named Binton Gaming also has the same theory as far as "you're playing as the brother" goes. You can watch it right here.
    • It also becomes sort of funny seeing as how the protagonist seems to be able to stop Foxy mid-jumpscare, and who likes Foxy? The brother!

The kid does not die at the end of the game.
The flatline is ambiguous. The boy does not actually die at this point, but Fredbear(/the Puppet) takes his spirit and puts it in the Golden Freddy animatronic to stop his nightmares, leaving his body alive but in a permanent coma state. He stays like this for years, until the time of the third game when you solve the minigames and free all the kid's spirits. Golden Freddy's head isn't on that screen because the situation is different - the spirit inhabiting him did not go to the afterlife, but back to his original body, and he finally woke up again.
  • Wouldn't that mean he's been in a coma for at least 30 years?

The nights take place before the bite actually happens.
Once again mentioned by MatPat, you wouldn't be able to dream without a frontal lobe. And before every night, it says "X days before the party", which is when the bite presumably takes place. The reason the kid has nightmares about them is because he hates the idea of being in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. As for why the IV Bag is there, maybe the kid had an injury that required him to need that, and his parents forgot to take it back after it got healed.

The bite of '87 didn't remove The Child's
frontal lobe.However, it did cause a bad enough injury that the hospital was forced to lobotomize the victim. The Child can have nightmares at the hospital because his coma takes place between the bite and the emergency lobotomy surgery.
  • As established in this video, removing the frontal lobe would definitely end the nightmares, and it was never explicitly established that the Bite of '87 Victim had his frontal lobe bitten off, only that he was able to survive without it (Phone Guy's exact words were, "But then there was The Bite of '87. Yeah. I-It's amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know?"). The kid's entire head appears to have been crushed inside Fredbear's mouth, so one can conclude that the frontal lobe must have been removed from the damaged brain as part of the kid's recovery operation in the hospital bed. It would still look amazing for the human body to live without the frontal lobe, regardless of whether the lobe was removed by animatronic teeth or a hospital operation.

Purple Man is based on Scott Himself and is the father of the children, the children have suffered Abusive Childhoods.
Based on this Theory. Purple Man is based on Scott Cawthon, and that he was the father of the children all along, as Scott also has two children. Purple Man may not have only murdered children, but he probably was the father of the child and his brother, as the brother locks him in no access area, and someone takes him to the pizzeria who isn't his brother. Presumably Purple Guy. Purple Guy must have abused the child's brother so much, that the brother suffered trauma and started to abuse his own brother because of his father. Usually abusive parents have a history of being abused themselves, so it is possible. This means that the child's father is the murderer, and the brother is a bully. There are pictures of Scott and his family on the walls in FNAF 4. So it makes complete sense.

Golden Freddy/Fredbear will be redesigned
Now that FNAF 4 has confirmed that Golden Freddy is both Fredbear and is a spring-lock suit like Spring-Bonnie/Springtrap, there is now a problem is that the Golden Freddy in the previous games lack the purple hat and bow-tie and has four fingered hands. To fix this retrospective continuty error Scott would have to make updates for the previous games that brings golden freddy to his up to date depiction with Golden having the purple hat and bow-tie and has 5 fingered hands like Springtrap
  • To be fair, they could've easily just changed the hat and tie in-universe. Or hey, for all we know, Fredbear ISN'T Golden Freddy. Note the puppet vision from 2. Regardless if it was a flashback or flashforward, why would it be there? Maybe he was at the withered animatronics' place.

Mike is this and 3's protagonist
First, let's get something annoying out of the way. This game DOESN'T take place in 1987. It takes place in 1983 (or atleast in-between that and 1986). How do I know this? Well, for one thing, Fredbear's was established as closed in 2 for "years", so unless the bite happened in early January and Phone Guy was off by a year, this couldn't be the same bite. Also, the random appearance of Fredbear and Friends. Yes, I know it could've been a rerun but think of this. Why does it NEED to be in the game? It only shows up once for the sake of an Easter egg. One that means nothing if this theory if false. And why does it need to specifically say 1983?

Then remember the original Golden Freddy and Phantom hallucinations. What do they share in common? GOLD AND YELLOW COLOR SCHEMES. The kid was bitten by GOLDEN Freddy. Yes, the minigame makes it look like he's killed but remember, the normal gameplay most likely takes place after it and as mentioned above, the good ending implies he survived and left. Plus, how else could Scott animate a kid getting bitten? Especially considering HOW he gets bitten.

Now, if this game takes place in 1983 (and as I proved above, it most likely does) the kid would most certainly be old enough to get a job in 1993 (which is most likely when the first game takes place). Speaking about 1, remember what Phone Guy said was what caused the bite of 87? The animatronics moving around during the day. Fredbear was on a stage at the time and could've been in suit mode, again, meaning he couldn't have caused the bite of 87.

The child dies and becomes Shadow Freddy or rather Shadow FREDBEAR
  • The child has one particular distinction from the other children: he has ACTUALLY SEEN the Purple Man face to face. This is a very important detail that explains Shadow Freddy's role throughout the series. When the kid dies, he becomes a spirit in the form of his favorite character. Having gotten over his fears over the course of FNAF4, he now watches over the various Fazbear estabishments. Eventually, he witnesses the Purple Man murder the children in the FNAF2 location, but is unable to do anything besides beckon Freddy to S-A-V-E T-H-E-M. The Purple Man stops Freddy and leaves the establishment, never to return. Eventually, Shadow Freddy moves with the others to the FNAF1 location. One night, long after the franchise has gone bankrupt, he spots the Purple Man in the sealed off room, preparing to finish off the animatronics. Realizing that destroying the machines would free the children's ghosts, he beckons the animatronics to follow him so that they can get their vengeance.

Following this, the child's brother became Shadow Bonnie.
And his brother, as seen above, is Shadow Freddy. Consumed with guilt over what he did, the brother ended up killing himself. As punishment for what he did, he became Shadow Bonnie in death.

Phone Guy is the child's
father.Despite Phone Guy saying the Bite of '87's victim survived without their frontal lobe, it's heavily implied the Child died after Night 7. If so, why would he lie? Well, what if the child is his son? The trauma of seeing his own son die at the hands of Fredbear motivated Phone Guy to stay with Fazbear's, in spite of the risks the job posed to his own life, dedicating himself to ensuring the fate of his son never befalls anyone. He fudges the details of the bite victim surviving, in denial about his son, rationalizing "hey, he survived at least days without a frontal lobe."

Nightmare is The Grim Reaper.
He appears on the final night, where it's hinted the child died. He is deep black, skeletal and has a brain in his head. Nightmare is Death, and takes a form relevant to how you died. A more optimistic view is that the child survived, and you're experiencing a near-death encounter. A more pessimistic view is that the Reaper has come for you. You fighting against him symbolizes that you're in a life-or-death scenario.

Remember what you saw?
Some things are best left forgotten.

Fun with Plushtrap takes place within the Child's dream
The reason why winning the mini-game allows you to skip a few hours is because it is a recurring nightmare he has. If you fail at it, the Child has a Catapult Nightmare, and stay the night awake. However, if he wins, he is able to sleep a few hours before his fears wake him up.

Shadow Bonnie and Shadow Freddy are mere hallucinations, like the Phantoms.
There's no other way to explain their absence in this image, as it shows every real character in the series. The Nightmares are there obviously to represent this game.
  • Doubtful. They played a central role in the minigames and were seen by 3 separate people. He probably either forgot, didn't know how to (they were non-moving sprites), didn't have enough room, or thought if he put them there it would give people ideas.

In conjuction with the Above, the Nightmare Characters were real
That's right; the Nightmare Characters are real, and they were really attacking the kid! Why else are they there with the real characters in the series?

Nightmare's worse than we think.
Nightmare was an experiment at creating a cyborg, using the child's organs. Granted, the real life Nightmare probably isn't as terrifying and probably isn't called Nightmare, but think of it from the child's perspective. You Are What You Hate now. His appearances in Nights 7 and 8 were foretelling the experiment, much like Fredbear foretold the Bite of '87.

The collage of animatronics isn't just a thank you. It's a warning.
We have one last piece of DLC headed our way. And considering Scott has made games called There Is No Pause Button and ''Rage Quit'", we're looking at the endurance round to end all endurance rounds. Every. Single. Animatronic, gunning for you at once. Here comes 26/20 mode.
  • Oh shit. Don't give him ideas.
  • And if the Phantoms and the Shadows are included in the mix, it would be even worse. Get ready for 35/20 mode.

There will be a fifth installment.
It will be called Five Nights at Freddy's 5: Nights at Freddy's.

The DLC will reveal:
  • The murders of the 5 children, in full. The pain, the terror, the utter horror of the entire thing, and we finally get to see how the Purple Man truly operates, and how much of an utter monster he is.
  • SOMETHING to do with the Puppet.
  • The true identity of Shadow Freddy, and what Nightmare is.
  • Answers to all the unexplained mysteries of the series.
  • Scott doing a commentary of all 4 games as he plays through them.

The Puppet is...
Not a ghost, but an Eldritch Abomination. Just his sheer power is NOT suitable for a mere ghost. He must be something more. Perhaps related to to the shadows, or even one of them.

The Child ultimately survives and wakes up, and his brother is MUCH nicer to him afterwards (or at least tries to be).
I.E., Getting a new Foxy plushie to replace the headless one, visiting him every day at the hospital (partially because he himself is a patient after being attacked by the animatronics), offering to sleep in his room with him after finding out that his brother is having nightmares (though it's a while before he finds out what exactly those nightmares are), etc.
  • Doubly nice if he's Mike Schmidt — if he did do 4/20 mode on Night 7, it was so he could get the newest plushies for his brother, and went to work for the Pizzeria not only out of guilt, but to find out what truly happened. Oh, and his younger brother could give Mike tips based on his nightmares and how he managed to stop the animatronics, particularly Nightmare Foxy.

The child would have died early on, but is kept on life support for several days.
Tear Jerker incoming! Have tissues ready.

The child's family, desperate to have him live, insisted that he be put on life support after he was bitten despite his poor prognosis. (This would — partially, but still — justify Phone Guy's statement in FNAF1 that someone can live without their frontal lobe, unless you believe the theory that this wasn't the bite of '87 and he was referring to someone else.) Unfortunately, he'd lost enough of his brain (as well as enough blood) that he would never recover and wake up. The levels are his comatose Dying Dreams; that's all his damaged brain can still do. Eventually, his parents are forced to accept that their child is gone, and allow him to be taken off the life support, hence the flatline at the end of the final cutscene. The brother's apology is his final goodbye. The plushies in the cutscene are the spirits of the children that had been murdered and stuffed into their respective suits prior to this, welcoming him to the afterlife. (This goes double if they were the same children you can interact with in one of the cutscenes, who could also be the child's friends.) They do it in plushie form because they know he's more comfortable with them than the animatronics.

    Post-Release - Part 3 

The Timeline

Spoilers abound. You've been warned.

In the first game, Phone Guy mentions that the bots have been around for about twenty years. Based on the check in the first game, we know it takes place in 1993, meaning those robots have been in operation since at least 1973. Now, we don't know if Phone Guy means ALL of the current animatronics, or if he's just counting how long Freddy himself (who has been around the longest, based on the "Give Cake" minigame) has been in operation, and is just including the others who were added later. For the purposes of this theory, I'm going with the latter.

Fredbear's Family Diner opened in 1973. It had several good years of business, but it dwindled because the company simply couldn’t afford to upgrade. With that in mind, we have our first milestone on the timeline:

The Crying Child died first. There are two big reasons for this deduction:

  • Fredbear's Family Diner was a single-room location with one animatronic (Freddy/Fredbear)
  • Fredbear's was bought out by Freddy Fazbear's Pizza later.

The incident in the parking lot (the Purple Man killing the Crying Child, be it a hit-and-run or some other reason) only hurt an already struggling business. Fazbear Entertainment was already buying out Fredbear's for the sole purpose of re-branding it; this incident only pushed the deal along more quickly. Because Fazbear Entertainment was buying out and converting, they already had the Puppet available to be haunted: it simply hadn't been showcased yet.

One other thing to factor in: the Puppet (which is haunted by the Crying Child) is infamously different from all the other ghosts. This allows the Crying Child time to learn about their new abilities, get used to their new body, and to form its personality as a gift-giver. Phone Guy also implies the Puppet's been around longer than the new location. From the second game: "I've never liked that puppet thing. It's always...thinking." The new place (second game at the time of the call) had only been open a week, but that wording in that sentence implies it's likely been around longer. Unless Phone Guy (who we know has been with the company for many years) figured out that it thinks on its own in a week (not impossible but unlikely, since it stays in its box unless it's giving out prizes or going after security guards), it probably was around at a different location and moved over to the one in the second game.

Fast-forward to the events of the fourth game. Based on the TV Easter egg, this game actually takes place in 1983 (and could very well be the year Fredbear's was bought out and rebranded). This is also presumably the year that Phone Guy recorded the training tapes heard in the third game, due to the presence of the spring animatronics. We have to remember the spring suits are a new concept at this point, as Fazbear Entertainment renovates and upgrades its new business. This also shows why the spring suits are golden, and the original Freddy was brown: he is the oldest animatronic the company owns. Freddy was also the original Fredbear, but due to the incident with the Crying Child, and the buyout, the company used a new Fredbear (Golden Freddy), and rebranded the old one as just Freddy.

Why would they do this? Because the original Fredbear/Freddy glitched out from being unable to save the Crying Child, and was probably being repaired, but Fazbear Entertainment already had the spring suits ready to go.

The location we see in the fourth game is the "sister location" mentioned in the third game. The evidence is due to the notable absence of the main four animatronics, despite there clearly being toys made and based off of them. This is the first new location after the buyout and being converted over to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza (and hence the use of the name "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza" on the training tapes).

What happened to the child in the fourth game is the "incident" at said sister location, for a few reasons:

  • The child is always crying, and we know that moisture can loosen the spring locks.
  • If you pay attention, his whole head was shoved into Fredbear's mouth, meaning he more than likely suffered a neck injury than the frontal lobe.

What we saw was NOT the Bite of '87, but rather the FIRST incident that decommissioned the spring suits. Fazbear Entertainment can get away with hiding their own employees, but a customer, with several witnesses to the event?

No way. NO goddamn way.

Switching gears for a moment, we have this message from the third game:

“Uh, hello? Hello, hello! Uh, there's been a slight change of company policy concerning use of the suits. Um, don't. After learning of an unfortunate incident at a sister location, involving multiple and simultaneous spring lock failures, the company has deemed the suits temporarily unfit for employees. Safety is our top priority at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, which is why the classic suits are being retired to an appropriate location, while being looked at by our technician. Until replacements arrive, you'll be expected to wear the temporary costumes provided to you. Keep in mind that they were found on very short notice, so questions about appropriateness/relevance should be deflected. I repeat, the classic suits are not to be touched, activated or worn. That being said, we are free of liability, do as you wish. As always, remember to smile; you are the face of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza."

Back to the point, this is around the time when the spring suits were hidden behind the walls in their respective locations. This also shows that the first game's location was, as other theories pointed out, shut down not once, but twice: the first time in 1983, to hide the faulty spring suits, and the second time in 1993, sometime after Mike got fired. This audio tape also shows these were NOT the only spring suits in use: the originals were hidden behind the walls (or "looked at" by technicians), and replacements were ordered because the originals were faulty.

This also explains why Golden Freddy in the first and second games looks more like the classic animatronics, and has four fingers: he was specially-ordered as a result of the incident, and the proper adjustments were made to make him more uniform to the other models. We also know that the child in the fourth game survived his ordeal a time, and haunted that particular suit. And remember that neck injury? The reason Golden Freddy doesn't walk isn't only due to the lack of an endoskeleton: it's also because the child was paralyzed.

One other thing this explains is how there could be a Golden Bonnie suit available for the murderer to use when the faulty one was already locked behind the wall: it was a safer, updated replacement. This further seals why the murderer was able to safely use the Spring Bonnie costume without an incident: he wasn't using the original one, but the replacement.

The original Fredbear (now Freddy) is moved with new friends Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy to the first game's location to entertain while the new spring suits are being ordered, and other preparations are made.

Now we skip ahead four years, to 1987.

The time skip is easy enough to explain: Fazbear Entertainment has actually been doing well. The murders hadn't happened yet, and the 1983 incident was probably explained as a combination of a faulty animatronic and guest stupidity (it's obvious the teens were traumatized, and likely confessed to what they did). Since this was partially the fault of the guests, it was easy to just be rid of the original spring suits for good publicity, sweep the matter under the rug, and move on. Remember, this is BEFORE Fazbear Entertainment was better known for their shitty policies and had more than a few incidents under their belt. Also remember at this point, the first incident happened under a different company name, the second one was easily written off as a freak accident due to the guests mishandling their property, and there were years between them.

Now we're moving on to the location in the second game. That unfortunate incident in 1983 seems like an isolated and one-time-only thing, business is booming, and with four years of profits, good business, and no further incidents, Fazbear Entertainment decides it's time to upgrade, get a bigger building, newer robots, etc. And that's exactly what they do: they pack up everything at the old location and move to the new one. They have also, in four years' time, realized the new spring characters aren't as popular as the other ones, and mostly keep them on hand for emergencies and special events, hence why they never got Toy versions made of them.

Things are fine, until the night guard starts complaining about the animatronics trying to get into his office. There's also a reason he didn't need the music box: because he did something at night to warrant its use by the time Jeremy Fitzgerald took the position. It's possible he had the flashlight (standard security gear) and the mask (because he has a criminal record). But the main reason the Puppet isn't happy is because it saw a night guard do something while on the night shift to warrant its suspicion. This is what sets off the overzealous Toys and the old bots: they know the night security is responsible for something happening at night.

The murders happened that week. The Puppet gets Freddy — whom it remembers came from the original diner, knows he has experience with children in peril, and may know what to do — to try to stop it from happening.

They can’t.

One other thing to keep in mind is the bodies of the children are scattered on the map: there is no back room, because it's already been boarded up. However, every child's body is discovered in a camera blind spot on the map.

So why has this not been discovered by a human before now?

Because the murders happened when the last guard (who switched over to day) was on shift. He knew the blind spots, and where to commit his murders. He also knew how to get to the (new) spring suits, which were likely hidden in the parts and service room, in a corner that couldn't be seen. That was "the spare suit in the back. A yellow one." As mentioned, the Puppet got Freddy and tried to stop the murderer, but failed. With nothing else it could do, the Puppet hid the bodies inside of the old bots, because it remembered it was given new life in a similar manner. The murders are then discovered the week of Jeremy’s shift.

Notably, when the murders are discovered at the end of the week, Fredbear/Golden Freddy joins in. Fredbear, as we know, is haunted by a child who was (accidentally) hurt by the animatronics, as well as someone he should have been able to trust (his older brother). This is a similar pattern that sets him off and he joins the others in vengeance.

Unfortunately, the facial recognition software doesn't work properly. All the bots know is that a man in a security uniform, to their knowledge, is responsible, hence their increased aggression towards Jeremy as the week goes on.

This climaxes to the actual Bite of '87: poor Jeremy Fitzgerald, stressed to the max from the previous night, unable to keep properly alert, and made to linger around the Toy animatronics to ensure guest safety, was the victim. It doesn't matter who took him out, only that this ends with the Toy line dismantled, the new location shut down, and the old bots brought to the previous location to save both money and face. The new spring suits are destroyed with the Toy models (because this is the SECOND incident the company's had with them, and wanted to be rid of any and all liability), the spring Fredbear only escaping its fate due to being haunted...either that, or it was destroyed, and the Golden Freddy we see in the first game is a ghostly form (which also explains its absence in the third game's between night minigames).

Cue the events of the first game. Phone Guy dies, Mike survives and gets fired, the place shuts down at the end of the month, and the place lies in rot until the Purple Man dismantles the bots, is chased into the back, and killed. Remember, the original spring suits were the ones that got buried behind the wall. Purple Man might have forgotten just how dangerous the original suit was, because he had been using the replacement suit before. Add in his panic at the ghosts, the running around in a decrepit building with a leaky roof and rain puddles, and you have the perfect formula to cause the spring locks to go off.

Purple Man dies, is discovered thirty years later, and eventually (presumably) perishes in the Fazbear Fright's fire. If there is anything left, it's either not enough to do any real damage anymore, or it's the "It's Still Out There" horror ending.

Either way, this is the timeline.

  • This theory is actually really deep and well observed. Are you secretly Mr. Cawthon in disguise?
    • Agreed — this is a very well-thought out theory. Everything's so nicely slotted into place, even the discrepancies in 4 in regards to the Springlock, Classic, and Toys all being present. Well done!
  • OP here. Came back to clarify some things, and thank you very much! I do have something to add, though.

My brother pointed out that one thing that got overlooked is the presence of the broken Mangle toy in the minigames, which suggests the 1987 date instead of 1983 (and that the show could be a re-run). My explanation for that is first, Scott generally puts in details for a reason. Second, the TV show itself, as well as the Fredbear/Fazbear conversion, are enough explanation for Mangle's existence. It's possible Fazbear Entertainment started out with Foxy as a new introduced character (and animatronic) as part of the franchise merger, and parental complaints lead to Mangle's creation on the TV show. Then when the new place was built in 1987, she replaced Foxy entirely for further appeasement.

This is also The '80s. Cartoons were practically made for the sole purpose of selling toys back then, which means the characters exist, but the animatronics themselves might not have until later, when Fazbear Entertainment made enough money to invest in them (and animatronics that walk on their own and have facial recognition technology would cost a fortune. They had four years to build that fortune before opening a new place). The fact that the Mangle toy is broken simply shows the older brother will do anything to taunt his younger siblings. Remember: the Foxy plushie was missing its head, and it's unlikely the protagonist did that — especially when his brother's mask of choice is Foxy. It's just coincidence that the Mangle animatronic gets disassembled later.

  • You're forgetting the Foxy minigame in 2. If Foxy had an unfortunate run-in with recently deceased children, then that would imply that at least five of the children's deaths had happened before the game's location, since Foxy would be out of commission. This also explains the beefed-up security measures with the Toys. Those five deaths were the first incidents to really rock Freddy Fazbear's credibility as a safe family establishment. Another thing to consider: was Foxy's retirement because he was too scary (as he'd been around for years), or was it because some suspected HIM of malfunctioning and killing the kids? After all, he'd been the first one seen with the bodies upon discovery, and if Foxy wasn't haunted yet, then who's to say that his A.I. didn't "snap" like Freddy's did, only in a different way to explain his "twitchy" behavior later on? He seems to have a much more...psychotically driven disposition that would explain why he was never brought back.
    • OP here. Thank you for pointing this out. This still fits into the above, and now that I think on it, Phone Guy did have this to say in the first call of the second game:

"Uh, now, I want you to forget anything you may have heard about the old location, you know. Uh, some people still have a somewhat negative impression of the company. Uh... that old restaurant was kind of left to rot for quite a while, but I want to reassure you, Fazbear Entertainment is committed to family fun and above all, safety."

Even if it was left to rot only for a few months — a year before 2's location opens — it still leaves room for Fazbear Entertainment to have made some money to fund the new building and robots. As you pointed out, Foxy discovered the murders. Seeing as there were dead children on the map in both locations, you are also correct in that there was another incident before the one in the second game. This would also explain why the Toy models had the facial recognition, and why the old models were being retro-fitted: the murders in the old location that also caused Foxy's "twitchiness" were the reason it was needed to begin with!

  • While I'll hang my hat on this theory, I'd like to postulate the Purple Guy isn't the Day Shift guard. It's Jeremy, which is why the Puppet is after him. It's also why the Puppet's upset with Freddy in 1, and doesn't go after Mike: He knows Mike isn't the killer.
  • I really like this one, and it's supported by a small detail I noticed: The Fredbear in four always has a purple set of bowtie and hat. Whether he's being shown in a minigame, plush form, or nightmare form in 4 he has Purple hat and tie. But in 1, 2, and possibly 3, he doesn't have a purple set. He has a BLACK set instead, therefore supporting the theory that the one in 2 and on was an improved suit rather than the original.

Another Timeline

I'm not as fond of my theory after reading the previous one, but I thought I'd post it anyway so people could have fun reading it.

In the beginning, there was Fredbear's Family Diner. There was only Fredbear and Spring Bonnie. The Night 5 call from FNAF2 implies this was the first location, and early enough that Phone Guy isn't really familiar with it.

By 1983, Fredbear and Friends had become a thing. This was a TV show that showed Fredbear along with the familiar characters from FNAF1.

In FNAF 4, while the TV show can be seen, and the FNAF1 characters can be seen as plushies, masks, and toys, they are never seen at the actual location except as masks brought in from outside. The location itself only features Fredbear, Spring Bonnie, their parts, and other depictions of Fredbear (it should be noted that the only animatronics we see in the gameplay are part of a nightmare and are implied to be inspired by the plushies, with no corresponding animatronic seen in the real world aside from Fredbear).

My conclusion, then, is that the FNAF 4 location is Fredbear's Family Diner. The other characters either originated in the TV show and would be added to the restaurants later, or they were from a different company that was merged with Fredbear's.

Or at least, it used to be Fredbear's Family Diner. When it was bought out, I'm guessing that the Diner was officially rebranded as a Freddy Fazbear location (similar to Chuck E. Cheese's in real life), though they didn't bother to update the decorations or animatronics as it was a merger (and they might have intended to, but things came up).

With this being a second Freddy location, I'll posit that Phone Guy's calls from FNAF 3 are roughly concurrent with FNAF 4's events, and the FNAF 4 location is the “sister location.” With this in mind, those calls can be reinterpreted a bit. Suspiciously specific instructions on what an employee should do in a spring lock failure, and mention that the accident revealed them as unsafe for employees, led to the assumption that it was a reference to an event involving an employee. However, neither the Fredbear employee nor the Spring Bonnie employee seem to have any trouble with their costumes. He does mentions that moisture can loosen the locks though.

Could it be possible then, that FNAF 4 is showing this incident, and not the Bite of '87? While Fredbear appears to be in animatronic mode already, the animatronic-suit transition is unlikely to be intended to be performed while they're in use. What if the kid's tears are the moisture that triggers the spring locks, crushes his head, and shows that the spring suits are not safe? In Night 5 of FNAF 3, Phone Guy also feels the need to reinforce that customers should not be taken to the safe room, which might be a reference to the Night 4 minigame in FNAF 4.

So at this point, the incident of FNAF 4 leads to the sister location being closed down prematurely and the spring suits moved and retired. Now there's just one location (well, Phone Guy implies several in the last call in 3, but those don't seem important), a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and the origin of the FNAF 1 animatronics.

This is probably where Phone Guy worked in the FNAF 3 calls, and where the first murders take place, as evidenced by the call in Night 1 of FNAF 2 where he tries to brush off rumors of the previous location (and he later reveals he's not familiar with Fredbear's, so it can't be there), and in Night 2 he mentions the smell, implied to be the result of corpses in the original game.

After this, things get a bit more vague for this theory. It's likely that, after the FNAF 4 incident, Fredbear was largely gutted as part of the technician's job mentioned in Night 4 of FNAF 3. We know Spring Bonnie wasn't gutted because of the fate of Purple Man seen in FNAF 3. So my theory goes that the spring suits were moved to the Fazbear Pizza location, and the now-gutted Fredbear was used by the murderer.

Who was the murderer? Why, the Purple Man from FNAF 4. He is the Purple Man after all. Inspired by another theory, my guess is that he saw what the kids did to the main character of 4, and wanted some twisted form of justice by using the Fredbear costume against them. He either moved to this location after the ex-Diner closed, or he was fired (another potential motive) and only used his knowledge as an employee to exploit the new location.

This is supported by the perpetrators of that tragedy all wearing masks corresponding to the Fazbear Pizza characters, and the other kids in the Night 3 minigame having some characteristic corresponding to an animatronic, implying they are the kids that will end up getting put into those animatronics. Further evidence is that Foxy was said by Phone Guy in Night 2 of 2 to always be twitchy, and his gimmick in both 4 and 1 is to hide in an area and rush out, just like the brother's MO who wore the Foxy mask in 4.

After these events, that location was shut down as well, but as he hid the bodies in the animatronics, no one could prove anything definitively and it ended up being a PR nightmare that the Phone Guy would dismiss rather than a full blown controversy.

Eventually, the location of FNAF 2 is opened up, with new, kid-friendly “toy” versions of the animatronics based off the popular toys seen in the Night 3 minigame of FNAF 4, as an attempt to offset the bad press (explained in more detail in the first FNAF 2 call).

Here, again, I'm going to stretch a bit. I think Jeremy Fitzgerald is the Purple Man. Proof? Well, I don't have proof, but on the course of this theory, here's the circumstantial stuff:

While Phone Guy mentions that the previous guard had the animatronics trying to get close (Night 1, FNAF 2), that doesn't sound that aggressive on its own. That guard didn't seem to have any issue with the old animatronics either, and Phone Guy doubts they can move, however, they're very aggressive toward you.

Shortly after Jeremy arrives (Night 3), Phone Guy is already hinting that the new murders have happened (which I believe happened to the rest of the kids from 4, like the kid with the balloon), but they don't know the whole story yet. On Night 6, when Phone Guy reveals why the place has closed down, he wonders why you're still there, showing that Jeremy's actions are suspicious.

The fact that Phone Guy implies an employee got in trouble (Night 5, FNAF 2), mentions a suit was used, and is audibly distraught by the idea, implies that these were the murders referenced in FNAF 1, as most of the details were known and Phone Guy seemed to think the original set of murders were just rumors rather than something to get upset by.

Someone was arrested for this as explicitly stated in FNAF 1, but was it the right guy? The Night 6 call in FNAF 2 claims it was a yellow suit, which we know from FNAF 3 were already retired by that point. They were in the safe rooms, which Night 3 of FNAF 3 explicitly states is off-camera. The newspaper article in FNAF 1 claims that the perpetrator was caught on video surveillance, but if the murderer was using the off-camera safe room, he could potentially have avoided getting caught on camera. Therefore, it's likely that the wrong guy was caught, and the murderer was still at large. The only other employees who have a presence in the story at the time are Jeremy and the Phone Guy.

Jeremy switches to the day shift for one last party before the location closes. Since I've already guessed that the FNAF 4 event is the spring lock failure and not the Bite, I'll posit that Jeremy is the victim of the Bite of '87 during this party, as the animatronics attempt one last act of revenge against him.

We know from Night 1 of FNAF 1, however, the victim of the Bite of '87 survived, so their revenge was not complete.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how FNAF 1's events fit into all of this, unless Mike Schmidt is Jeremy Fitzgerald going under an alias (maybe even because of his injury).

Anyway, after the events of FNAF 1, the murderer comes back, wanting revenge against the animatronics themselves as a result of the Bite. He uses the safe room once more to ambush them, dismantling them one by one. However, when their ghosts confront him, he panics and climbs into the only remaining spring suit... the one that still has all of its parts and has been left to rot.

After that, the story concludes in FNAF 3 as simply as it seemed: the murderer is the only animatronic left, and with his destruction, the spirits are finally freed.

Scott will do something to commemorate the anniversary of the game.
Don't ask what, because I don't have a clue, but there'll be something. Maybe the popularly theorized Let's Plays?

The Child is Mike.
Yes, it's one of those theories, but with what 4 shows us, there's more potential evidence to the child's identity.

It's been established that loss of a frontal lobe removes all traces of fear and rational thought. Mike Schmidt shows neither fear or rational thought, hence why he keeps coming back to Freddy's when outright told he will die if they get him.

Also, the hallucination of Golden Freddy/Fredbear adds to this. Perhaps when it says "It's me" it's the same soul as the Golden Freddy plush that he had as a child trying to contact him. Its condition is also the way it is because that's how Mike remembers Fredbear on that day.

  • However, Jeremy and the FNaF 3 protagonist come back every night, too.
  • Jeremy might be excused if you side with the theories that he's the Purple man and as for the FNAF3 Protaganist I'm not sure outside of him wanting to help the children's restless spirits.

Nightmare is the representation of the kid's slowly deteriorating status.
I know this sounds farfetched, but think about it.

Night 6's cutscene. It shows possibly the last moments of the kid... until we see Night 7.

Night 7 is his brain slowly running out of its ability to comprehend his own personal purgatory of sorts. Nightmare can't even be processed as something original; it's Nightmare Fredbear, but with a different color. He can't render anything new; it's just the same nightmare... but it's different.

All he can render about Nightmare is that is different is that it is definitely more harmful. How harmful? Well, so harmful, he can't imagine what would happen if he got attacked by it. All the other jumpscares show him being grabbed, pounced at, etc. All Nightmare's is is... a close up of his face. Garbled screaming, presumably a garbled version of the one that the previous nightmares he faced used. And after that...? He doesn't even know. The game doesn't even know. It completely reboots the game, warning and all.

His brain is slipping; he can't see Nightmare as anything but another manifestation of Fredbear... but, one that might just be the culmination of all the nightmares. And he can't figure out what would happen.

We are not playing as the kid.
We've all been assuming that because of the age and apparent height of the player character that we are literally playing as the kid. However, the dreams continue even after the bite. This is physically impossible; without the frontal lobe, people are physically unable to have nightmares. They are still capable of dreaming, but are unable to experience fear within those dreams; in fact, at one point in time, a partial frontal lobotomy was considered a viable treatment for chronic nightmares.

So it isn't possible we are the kid, but who else would be dreaming of horrific disfigured anamatronics coming for a child every night, assorted hospital equipment peppered in the background, and of all the torment showered on him by an evil older sibling? Who else would have good reason to have these specific dreams?

Simple, you are playing as the traumatized guilt-stricken older brother. We do see him tormenting this kid, but despite all of that, we never seen any indication of physical violence between the two. The bite also surprised him and his friends enough that they immediately stopped laughing. It's entirely possible that while he was emotionally abusive, perhaps only so when viewed from the bias of the younger sibling, he never actually intended to hurt his kid brother and is now reliving all those horrible things he did ramped up by the guilt of what happened to his sibling. Now every night he is the one being tormented by those anamatronics.

Nightmare is... the older brother, after the spring locks on his suit fail.
Why else would his ending sound like muffled but undistorted human screaming rather then the usual heavily distorted child screaming? At some point after his brother got bitten, he had to wear the springlock fredbear suit and either from sweating at the memory or crying because his kid brother is basically dead and it's entirely his fault the spring locks failed. Now he's haunting the suit just like the kids and the purple guy long after.

The DLC will be heavily based around Chica.
Think about it. In the first game, the main focus was Freddy. In the second game, Foxy started getting a lot of attention. In the third game, Springtrap was an old springlock suit of the original Bonnie, so we could say Bonnie got the most focus here. And in the fourth game, We could say Golden Freeddy got the most focus, since Fredbear is the main villain, and is Golden Freddy. So to complete the original five getting large focuses, Chica will have a very large focus in the DLC.
  • The "SEE YOU SOON" teaser has an... odd version of Chica. It's highly possible that she'll take Fredbear's place, and therefore be the Big Bad of the DLC update. So we might be heading this direction.
  • Darn it. It's more based around the Puppet.

The Child is a Decoy Protagonist of sorts.
Seeing as it's implied he kicks the bucket in the night six cutscene, but there's still a night seven and night eight. Given Nightmare's presence in the those nights, I came up with two ways, that conclude that we are playing as the child's brother, who despite his regrets, is not easily forgiven by his comatose brother.

This can go one of two ways.

1. Following the child's death, the child meets the ghosts of the children who are the Fazbear gang, who "fix" him by manifesting his ghost as Nightmare. The child and his new friends set their sights on the child's brother as part of their Roaring Rampage of Revenge before moving on to the killer.

2. Going with the theory that Nightmare is a manifestation of the Grim Reaper, the child, not wanting to die and desiring revenge, makes a bargin with Death to spare him. Death agrees but has specific terms; a life for a life. The child, wanting justice, sics the reaper onto his brother.

Not all of The Child's frontal lobe was bitten off.
It's mentioned on this page that the loss of the frontal lobe would make one unable to have nightmares. The Child was left with just enough of his frontal lobe to be able to have the nightmares in the game. Still, the majority of his frontal lobe is gone.

The protagonist of the game isn't actually The Child. It's an employee.
In one of the minigames, the Child has to run for the exit, but fails when a (teenage?) employee in the Fredbear suit approaches him. FNAF4 isn't from the Child's perspective. It's the imagination and nightmares of an employee who felt bad for the kid and tried (yet failed) to comfort him while wearing the suit. The Employee happened to witness the Child's death. Fortunately, he didn't have to wear the Fredbear suit that day. With Fazbear Entertainment being as callous and idiotic as it is, the Employee was later forced to wear the suit... and of course, had a panic attack remembering the events. His breath triggered the springlocks, and the suit crushed him. The Employee manages to hang on for a year, and in his final eight days, begins to remember what he knew of the Child's life (considering the Child and his brother were apparently regulars there). In the Employee's damaged brain, the animatronics are all warped and he is a helpless child who must fend them off. After Night 6, Nightmare arrives. Nightmare is the personification of Death, created by the traumatized mind of a dying teenager. The Puppet, who is already active, is attempting to communicate with the Employee, and we see them promising to put the Child "back together". The Child starts to haunt Fredbear and becomes the infamous Golden Freddy, while the Employee becomes the nightmarish but ultimately harmless specter we know as Shadow Freddy.

Eddy was the Bite of '87 victim (thus making Eddy's Brother the brother.)
This ties into the EEnE theory that the series takes place in some sort of afterlife.

Another Timeline Theory.
This is pretty straight forward, I'd imagine. FNAF4 takes place alongside FNAF2, or at least incredibly close to it, and the came seems to give plenty of hints at this. The biggest one is that Mangle is clearly visible in the brother's room, and another hint is that one girl seems to have figures of the Toy Animatronics in a minigame. As 2 established the Toys were introduced massively recently, it's impossible for them to be present if the game took place much earlier than that. As for the commercial, this company is known for being criminally cheap, so why does keeping an outdated commercial around seem so strange?On top of that, it's implied that the Toys were designed to replace the original four, who were being used for parts after plans to incorporate them in the new location fell through. It's easy to assume that Fredbear and Spring Bonnie, along with their springlock suits, were kept around for ease, and they basically recolored the posters and such in the restaurant to be Fredbear since the planned original Freddy wasn't able to be put on stage.1983 is likely a hint to the DLC, and will very likely be related to the origin of the Puppet itself.

The first teaser for the DLC will show something even more terrifying than the Nightmares.
Or at least something equally as horrifying.

The DLC will be hidden.
In fact, it's in the actual game. When it's released, the game will be updated with bug fixes, and two keys hidden in the closet and under the bed, or other, more secret areas. Once you get both and complete Night 7, clicking the two locks will cause them to unlock, thus unlocking the DLC for use.

The kid didn't get his frontal lobe bitten off

Credit to my brother for this one.

The kid was hurt when Fredbear bit down. However, he didn't lose his frontal lobe. Not yet, anyway. What happened was he was lobotomized because of the nightmares to help him cope. His parents were desperate to do anything to help him, and medicine and other treatments weren't working. The lobotomy was a last resort to help their son find peace.

  • This is my canon. My guess is that the bite messed with his brain that increased his fear sensors and nightmare causers and they had to give him a real lobotomy. The flat-lining noise you hear if Nightmare gets you on night 6 or 7? That's if the Doctors mess up and kill you!
  • ...except the flatline happens at the end of the Night 6 minigame, not if Nightmare kills you. Meaning that's completely inaccurate.

The kid does survive and becomes Crazy Dave.

The reason why he's so crazy was because of his lack of a frontal lobe. He wears a saucepan to hide his injury, and because he most certainly does not want to lose another part of his brain to the zombies.

Why the Toy Animatronics are called that

The Toy Animatronics from Fnaf 2 are scaled up versions of toys the establishment has been selling for years. This is how the small toys the kids are seen playing with can exist in 1983, long before the lifesized robots.

  • Doesn't explain why Mangle is there. We know full well that Mangle is the result of kids pulling apart Toy Foxy and putting him/her back together in FNAF 2's resteraunt. The toy version couldn't have been pulled apart because there are tiny animatronic bits of plastic jutting out and even a head seperate from the Toy Foxy head. Usually you wouldn't mold this stuff when it won't be visible to the consumer unless they are intentionally trying to mold the mess that is Mangle.
    • Mangle's been rebranded as a take-apart-and-reassemble attraction since Toy Foxy was deemed too scary, so the toy version is probably less of an actual doll and more of a puzzle. Which would explain why it's all over the floor in pieces: whoever owns it doesn't know how to solve it.
      • If Toy Foxy was deemed too scary, then why would kids ever want to get near him/her to tear apart and recombine? In fact, Toy Foxy was made because the original Foxy was deemed too scary and so they made Toy Foxy more "kid-friendly". The staff even put Toy Foxy back together again after each shift for the first few days before they quit and left him/her in the Mangle state. So it is possible the Mangle toy is meant to be like the animatronic, but that means FNAF 4 had to have happened during '87 roughly a month or two after the FNAF 2 resteraunt re-opened.
    • As mentioned above, we know the older brother (presumably) took apart the Foxy plushie (and it's up in the air if it became his mask or not). Who's to say he didn't take apart a Mangle figure for shits and giggles and leave the pieces for a sibling to find? It could easily be coincidence that the Mangle animatronic gets taken apart later.

Fredbear isn't the First Freddy Fazbear's
It's the Second.

That's why, in 2, Phone guy says the Company is calling Fredbears instead of the previous Freddy's; not just because they had the Golden Suits you could wear, but because it was the previous Freddy's establishment that the new one had to distance itself from!

Unmarked spoilers ahead. For convenience.

Let's start this off simple. Now... take into account that Scott Cawthon's family photos can be seen on the wall of the Left Hallway. Scott, of course, voiced Phone Guy; coupled with the fact that there's a toy phone in the Child's room and that Phone Guy's very first call can be heard echoing throughout the house on occasion, and it's not hard to make the conclusion that Phone Guy is the Child's father.note 

So... that's that. But, wait a second; one of the biggest theories that stretches throughout all of the games is that Phone Guy is the Murderer. Where am I going with this? Well... there are purple toys in the Child's room. That's an obvious hint.

But, here comes the big part... how, exactly, could a nice, hopelessly idealistic family man not have a complete breakdown upon losing his son to an accident in the place he worked at, because of the kid's own brother? Simple... he never had any attachment to them whatsoever. A psychopath can easily hide their condition, with time and experience. It's not out of the question that all the concern and all the terror and sadness and everything negative he ever felt because of the accidents that caused this mess in the first place... were faked.

If Phone Guy was a sane human being and genuinely cared about his children, especially the Child, who was seemingly much, much more likable than his brother... wouldn't he have had a major breakdown after all that? He'd be rendered incapable of going to work. He could have helped, he could have saved him... but he didn't. He could have done anything.

But he didn't.

There's something else; Phone Guy is never shown to be (well, at least very) scared of anything that happens in the restaurant, so, if he's the Murderer, why would he be scared of the dead children when they attack him at the end of FNaF3? Simple... his own son is the one chasing him.

The original Crying Child. The one that started this mess.

Panic can cloud your judgment. And, well... Purple Guy never made it out of Freddy Fazbear's alive. But we already knew that.

I'll probably deal with a variety of other things around this theory... later. But for now, I'll stick to the majority of the stuff FNaF4 tells us, mostly common-sense stuff.

As a side note, this theory assumes that FNaF4 takes place in 1983.

Phone Guy/The Killer/Fritz Smith was truly responsible for the bite
In a recent statement on Steam, Scott confirmed Game Theory got "Almost everything right" in their episode on Freddy's 2, meaning it's practically Word of God Phone Guy was the killer. In addition, we've had the implication before that Fritz Smith is Phone Guy, but one piece of evidence ties them together: custom night. Both Fritz and The Killer can seemingly manipulate the animatronics, so what do we get when we add Phone Guy in as well?

The Killer is all but confirmed to be a drooling sadist. So let's say he saw the Kid Hero of the fourth game, but didn't get to kill him since there would be witnesses. What's his alternative? Cause Fredbear to malfunction and take a chomp out of the kid's head when the oppertunity reveals itself.

  • Actually, http://steamcommunity.com/app/388090/discussions/0/527273452869422224/#p2 in case you didn't see it, Scott jossed the Purple Guy being Phone Guy theory. And Fritz was fired on his first day, despite Phone Guy working as a security guard 4 years prior, so he wouldn't be so inexperienced. And Fredbear didn't seem to be malfunctioning. It should be perfectly normal for him to close his mouth during the middle of a song, and how did he (Purple Guy) just happen to know a bunch of teenagers would should shove this one child into Fredbear's mouth to the point of sabotaging an animatronic!? What, is he a time traveler and the child is someone who stopped him in the future!?

The DLC is an alternate phone recording from 1-5
Out of everything we've seen the ghosts and animatronics do, it seems out of character for them to be able to create a weird, scrambled phone message. The Yogi recording was planted by Phone Guy to fake his demise, supporting the Phone = Purple guy theory.

What is something so heinous that it's best left forgotten? Rape and molestation. And that was what Purple Man did to his victims before he murdered them. The child? Got away before he could be murdered, but it still traumatized him enough that it left him with a fear of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, and amnesia of the events that caused his fear, only manifesting as nightmares. Hell, I'll eve go so far as to guess that Purple Man was wearing a costume during the molestation. A costume of what, you may ask? Well, you ever wonder why Nightmare has a human brain? As for the Bite, Purple Man probably subtly or not so subtly encouraged the brother and his friends to do it. It'd kill two birds with one stone: he'd get rid of a possible witness if the kid ever got his memories back, and it'd frame the brother for his crimes.

The free halloween update will not directly open the chest...
Going by Scott's recent post located herethe new features]] need to be played in order to open the chest. Or better yet, you'll have to replay the game which, thanks to the update, will be updated with new features.

For instance, there could be hidden 'notes', akin to Slender, that you'll have to find that reveal some things we may/may not have learned about the game's backstory. Once all are found, only then will the chest be unlocked and reveal what's inside.

Balloon Boy will only be featured in the non-canon Halloween update.
  • Because he wasn't in the FNAF4 main game anywhere

     Post-Release - Part 4 
This is about the Purple Man's Start of Darkness...he's the teen brother.
We don't have conclusive proof that the brother was the one apologizing for the Bite, it could be one of the other bullies. For all we know, the brother realized he liked it. And if this does take place in '83, that means he only has to be fourteen then to be old enough to work at the reopening in '87...he'd be eighteen then. Which would give him the opportunity to torture/kill more victims, culminating in him tampering with the animatronics to recreate 'his masterpiece', which becomes the Bite of '87.
  • The text apologizing to the Child is in same color used when his brother talks in the night 5 minigame. And we SEE Purple Guy in one of the mini games.

Alternately, this is about the Purple Man's Start of Darkness...he's the child.
This does take place in the original Fredbear's diner, the '83 in the tv show was a Red Herring (probably a story that takes place in the future), and this kid does survive his frontal lobe being chomped up...but it irreversibly changed his personality from a timid kid who hated the animatronics to a sociopath that reveres them.

There were indeed 11 children murdered.
The five children in the Night 3 minigame possess the original four, plus BB. The child you're playing as, due to who he was bitten by, possesses Golden Freddy. His brother and friends, if the theory involving the Toy animatronics attacking them was true, possess said Toys. And finally, the first child murdered by the Purple Man possesses the Puppet.

The game takes place in 1978 and Phone Guy is the child.
  • Thought 1: IF those pictures on the wall are supposed to be Scott and his family, and Scott plays Phone Guy...this kid could grow up to look like Scott.
  • Thought 2: the odd static that plays occasionally is the first game's first phone call. Done by Phone Guy.
  • Thought 3: Phone Guy seems to have both a reverence and fear of Foxy. Foxy is the only one that can be turned into a plushie (the reverence) and the child's brother used to terrorize him with a Foxy mask (the fear).
  • Thought 4: Phone Guy said 'amazing how one can live without the frontal lobe'. If he was the victim he would know, right?
  • Thought 5: Look on the floor in front of the dresser. Doesn't that thing look like a phone?
  • Possible conflicts:
    • he calls it the bite of '87. Well, perhaps it's really the bite of '78 and Phone Guy's just bad at remembering things (which makes sense for a brain injured victim). Or there were indeed two bites, '78 and '87, and Phone Guy mixed them up (which, again, makes sense for a brain injured victim).
    • The tv. Given the limitations of 8-bit, isn't it possible that the tv actually says 'Fredbear and Friends 1963' instead?
    • What about his love of the Golden Freddy plushie and the flatline? Well, the flatline actually symbolized Golden Freddy's metaphoric death. GF decided the best way for the child to cope was to forget everything about him and so he erased himself from the child's memory, hence, he 'died'. The 'oh no' that was Phone Guy's famous last words? He saw Golden Freddy and got his memories back, triggering cardiac arrest. And before you ask, the yellow suit Phone Guy mentioned in 2 was Springtrap, and after the bite the pizzeria tried to retcon all traces of Fredbear's existence, hence why he didn't get his memories back before then.
  • Conclusion: Phone Guy was the child.
    • It clearly says 1983 in that font.
    • Technically it doesn't. There's a line running through the date cause of the stylistic choice, and crucially it's running through the date at the part where the top half joins the bottom half, so conceivably it could say 1983 or 1963.
    • Which is why it's the font that matters and not how the TV screen appears in the minigame. Without the filter effect, it says 1983.
      • Or, another thought. Maybe, like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which kept the same title even when Sabrina became an adult, the TV show did the same and its title was "Fredbear and Friends 1983", even though it was on its fourth season and was being broadcast in 1987. Ever consider that?

Following on from a certain rumor, the reason Nightmare Foxy doesn't have his tongue in the final game...
...is because if the animatronics did attack the jerk kids for their line-crossing prank, the older brother's tongue may have gotten torn out. That, or something else related to the brother talking.

The locked box contains... Pizza
Thus making it a pizza box. In addition to being scared of the animatronics, the child caught on much earlier than his peers to the generally crappy, cardboardy taste of a standard Suck E Cheese restaurant. The horror he refuses to see again on Night 2? The dining area. But why make pizza so reviled and sinister? ...I don't know, but isn't it weird that across five games all based around a restaurant chain, pizza never came into play? Sure, Fazbear's Fright was being renovated, so I GUESS it gets a pass, but the kitchen was always pitch black in the first game and there was no sign of one in the second! "Some things are best left forgotten" indeed, they forgot to add any pizza to the pizzerias!

The brother and his friends were the ones who dismantled Mangle.
I mean, in the minigame, her remains are lying on the floor, how come nobody suggested that? I theorize that the Child's brother and his pals divided her body parts between themselves... and returned them back to do it again later.
  • Probably jossed. There's evidence this game is set in 1983 (her cameo could be explained as another character from Fredbear and friends or simply another white fox) and she appeared during the night. If the game is set during the bite of 87 she should've been at her location. Also, we never hear mention of said location anywhere in the game, and how could a couple of teenagers steal her unnoticed?
    • Sure, but the brother and his pals still could mangle her up, after all. It's not something they couldn't do, and it would be in-character for them (the brother wears a Foxy mask, he probably hated the design of new Foxy).
    • True, but give them a few years. There's more 83 evidence than just the TV, like the bite being in no way consistent with the one mentioned in the first game or the full public use of the springlock suit animatronics as seen in mini-game 3.

Nightmare is behind everything. And I do mean everything.
As we've seen at this point, Nightmare is a severely messed up character even by the standards of the other animatronics. We know almost nothing about him, except that he might be Shadow Freddy. I'm proposing Nightmare/Shadow Freddy is not an animatronic, not a ghost, but a demon. A demon intent on causing misery and death.

There are three notable appearances by Shadow Freddy, and each precedes an important plot detail: Nightmare obviously haunts the child in the forth game, he appears in the pizzeria in 2 just before Purple Guy butchers some kids, and shows up in 3 to lead the animatronics to Purple Guy. He never appears in the first game, because the first game is very much "business as usual".

The Child sees Nightmare within Fredbear's Diner, that is the horror he refuses to see again on Night 2. With Nightmare on the premises, he possesses an employee (thus making them purple, hinting at his possession) and, later in the week, kills the five kids the child sees.

In 1987, Nightmare possesses another employee (or maybe the same one) and slaughters more children, leading to that pizzeria's closure. At this point, with the animatronics seeking vengeance, Nightmare takes some time out of the spotlight and lets the madness commence. The spirit-possessed kids kill many security guards, but can never have their revenge, because Nightmare is the one truly responsible.

Finally, when Freddy Fazbear's Pizza goes under, Nightmare attempts one last shot at sticking around. He possesses some else (or, again, maybe the same guy), leading him to destroy the animatronics and create the more vicious Springtrap.

In the third game's Nightmare mode, Nightmare abandons Purple Guy entirely, and possesses Springtrap personally.

The true villain was never Purple Guy. There could have been many Purple Guys. Everything was Nightmare.

This game is actually the last in the timeline
After the events of 3, someone bought the remains of Fazbear's Fright and, rather than remaking that, tried to restore Freddy's to its former glory. The nightmares aren't actually the child's nightmares. They're the spirits trying to get help via the remains of their previous bodies. The mini-Freddies, Fredbear, Nightmare, Plushtrap, and the jumpscares are entirely his imagination though. As for Purple Guy's cameo, that could just be a red herring or maybe Phone Guy.

  • One minor objection; PHONE GUY IS DEAD.

Shadow Freddy/Nightmare is not a ghost/demon but an Eldritch Abomination behind everything along with Shadow Bonnie.
Why?

They thought it would be fun. For them, that is.

  • Then why was their only role them HELPING the children?

The Gen 1 animatronic has something to do with the DLC.
Otherwise, why would Scott change it?

The new update to the Scottgames website will introduce "Fun with Fredbear".
If not that, the entire FNAF 1 and 2 cast will get "plushie versions" of themselves as a "fun with" mini-game.

If not the above two wild mass guesses, it'll all end up being a trolling attempt by Scott
  • The fanbase will find ANYTHING to theorize over and/or discuss! Scott knows this and added it just to troll with the fandom and the new endo has nothing to do with the DLC at all.

The child becomes Balloon Boy.
Something I noticed about the new endoskeleton is that it looks an awful lot like it should be Balloon Boy's animatronic. Smaller frame, giantass creepy eyes, even the teeth look like his. We all just assumed he wasn't an animatronic because none of the endoskeletons fit him, but I don't think we ever considered that BB might have a custom endoskeleton. Plus, the box would fit B.B. more than it would the Puppet. PLUS, remember how on the Nightmare Fuel page someone said you could see eyes that look like B.B.'s inside Fredbear's promotional image? Well that would make some sense: Fredbear caused the bite, and the boy becomes B.B., so it's like Fredbear bit Balloon Boy. Or, metaphorically speaking (And I am EXTREMELY sorry for the mental images that will ensue) Fredbear gave birth to B.B.
  • You can actually fold up the puppet and fit it in a box. It still doesn't disprove your theory, but I'm saying that it's possible to fit a puppet that can fold up just right.
  • Some more food for thought. The other animatronics can get pretty close to you before the Freddy mask wards them off. B.B., however, doesn't even need to be in the room, just the edge of it inside the vent before he's warded off. It's almost like he's afraid of a human in an animatronic mask. True, the one used in FNAF 2 was Freddy and not Foxy, but B.B. might not be able to tell the difference anymore, or his fear extends to the other bullies, one who I'm pretty sure wore a Freddy mask. Also, what is B.B.'s M.O.? Killing the flashlight. What was the child's only other defense other than his reflexes? The flashlight. B.B. deliberately took away what he believes is Jeremy's only weapon to ensure Jeremy gets killed. Why do this though? Maybe he just blames all Fazbear employees for not stopping what happened to him. Maybe he believes Jeremy is the Purple Man. Or, perhaps, Jeremy is the older brother. (Though I think labor laws will joss me on that one, 18 year olds are unlikely to be security guards, and for him to be old enough to be a security guard in '87, in '83 he'd either have to be a really late bloomer teen or Joe Pesci short adult.)

The Miniature Endos and Fredbear are going to feature in the Fun with Plushtrap update
Its the only conclusion that can be made at the moment due to the similar build to Plushtrap, Furthermore Bonnie Chica and Foxy may also get this treatment.
  • As of this writing, Withered Chica and Balloon Boy (and Balloon Girl) have also been chibified. It remains to be seen just how far this is going to go, and just how many cutesy animatronics you'll be playing "Red Light, Green Light" with. Not to mention what sortof challenge rounds there are going to be, and what sorts of advantages beating the Plushed characters will net you.
  • As of 15/06/15 FNAF1 Foxy has changed to a chibi version.

The Miniature Fredbear is the original Fredbear and was in the box
Phone Guy knew about the yellow suits, but wasn't familiar with the original Fredbear location. This is the original, original Fredbear. After the child was killed outside the original Fredbear location, he began haunting the sole animatronic. With a small location and only a single animatronic, they couldn't hide that he was haunted, so they decided to seal him away in a double-padlocked box instead. Little did they know, his spirit could still project outside, and interacted with the child from FNAF4.

Fredbear's Family Diner never went out of business.
The one in the FNAF 4 minigames? It's the exact same establishment. And it never suffered any incidents up until the Bite. The springlock incidents happened in 1973, at the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, but it wasn't enough for it to be closed either. As the 10 years went by, they both slowly upgrade up until the murders. It closed Freddy's down, but Fredbear's? It was still open. It's only then that a lobotomization and possible death caused it to finally close down.

Everything's being chibified because they're being viewed in Pyrovision.
  • This is horrifying in its plausibility.

At least part of the DLC will indeed take place at the original Fredbear's Diner and what we're seeing is what those animatronics looked like in their prime.
I was discussing the recent changes with a friend when she said something that made me think: "So all the broken ones are being restored..." Which made me think: why are the broken ones being restored? Answer: We're going to see them at their prime, before they became withered. They're just, for lack of a better term, not to scale right now. Note that this does not preclude the above WMG that suggests FNAF 4 took place at the original Fredbear's diner being untrue, I think it actually strengthens that theory.

Related to the above, the new Balloon Boy behind Freddy is the original Balloon Boy.
When the other animatronics got a redesign, so did he into something a little less creepy.
  • Or, alternately, the new B.B. redesign is the original one, and the other B.B. was, perhaps, Balloon Girl after all, and got dropped for being unpopular.
  • After September 14th, the familiar Balloon Boy also got a toon-like redesign. Possibly jossed.

We really are supposed to think outside the box
What is outside of it?
  • .....us?

Plushtrap and the "toon" animatronics are prototypes for the withered animatronics
Fredbear and Friends was a big hit (either that, or Fazbear entertainment were really dependent on it) and so, they decided to bring the cast to life as the replacement for Fredbear's family diner. At first, they used plush sized animatronics to match the show's art style but something went wrong (possibly a murder incident) and so they just went for the 4 from the first game we all know today. Afterwards, one of the employees stole/was given the unused animatronics and let his daughter have fun with them. Meaning, yes, we play as the little girl in Fun with Plushtrap.

The redesigns appearing on Scottgames.com are hints at a new game, BUT...
It is not going to be a FNAF title. Rather, it will be titled after the SISTER location mentioned by Phone Guy in FNAF 3 on the training tapes. This place, being that it is a sister location, would probably have slightly different designs for the Animatronics, as it could be completely separate management making decisions. This restaurant may have a bit of a different theme to it than the original as well. This can easily explain the cutified BB, Fredbear, and Chica as well as the addition of JJ (Balloon Girl).
  • One thing confuses me about that though, if it was all part of the same franchise, wouldn't it be a Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria as well? How could it be titled differently? Maybe Five Nights at Fredbear's instead if it's related to the diner instead but still.
  • Confirmed, the game is a role playing game called FNAF World.

The new game is a Spinoff Babies one.
Just had to say it.
  • Okay, I got Jossed technically, but the thought's still cute. And Puppet is totally Nanny.

The box contains....
....the child's corpse...

Three possible theories of Toy Chica
One of the updates to Scottgames.com during Game Theories stream is about the Toy Chica action figure belonging to the little girl on Fnaf4's Night 3 Minigame; the text is asking why its missing its beak. This troper has come to three conclusions.

1. The girl has seen Toy Chica take off her beak at some point,

2. Toy Chica always takes off her beak even in public,

3. Toy Chica did the bite. (And before anyone tries to correct me, I'm with the side who believe what Night 4 shows us is a Spring Lock Failure not the bite of 87)

Another possible theory is the "The series is all a fabrication by the child", but I'd much rather not believe that theory until more evidence comes.

  • Fabrication is such a dirty word, though; it makes it sound like the child lied when what's more likely is he was mistaken.
  • Thought up then, either way that's a theory with at present little to go on.

There was once a Spring Chica.
What happened once is the child was hiding in the corner and he saw someone put on the Spring Chica suit. Something happened and the Chica suit was the one to fail. Perhaps in the death throes the beak comes off. Now imagine how that looks to a young, impressionable kid who doesn't know the difference between fiction and reality: he just saw Chica die. It traumatized him for life, leaving him with the fear of the animatronics.
  • There are a few for's and against this theory, for it would explain why Fredbear isn't called Spring Freddy, and if he is Golden Freddy, it would explain why he has three fingers instead of four; however, it's specifically stated in FNAF3 that there are 2 suits and in night 2's minigame of FNAF4, someone is shown wearing a Fredbear costume.
    • Couldn't the Fredbear costume possibly have been one of those temporary costumes Phone Guy told everyone to stop bitching about, though?
    • That is a valid argument considering Purple Guy is shown helping someone into a Spring Bonnie costume when Spring Bonnie is currently on stage.
      • In that case, I argue that this location is where all the animatronics were taken to, the 'appropriate location' Phone Guy mentioned on Night 4. They were testing Spring Bonnie to make sure the retrofitting needed on it to keep it working worked. They just didn't anticipate trouble with Fredbear. (It would also argue that Fredbear isn't a spring animatronic after all, but no WMG is perfect.)
      • Something else to consider. In one of the phone calls, Phone Guy specifically warned the employees that customers aren't supposed to be in the safe room. Why would he warn about it unless someone was found in the safe room? Someone like the child.

My interpretation of the "Purple Guy is The Child's father" theory
When The Child (I'll call him Travis for the time being) got lobotomized by Fredbear and later met his end, Purple Guy (I'll call him Vincent for the time being) was obviously upset. In Vincent's insane Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which set of children did he kill? Did he kill his other son and his gang to avenge Travis? Did he kill other children Travis's age in a non-romantic If I Can't Have You… moment? Now, I'd say the latter is true, because would Vincent really kill his only other son? No matter what, it came back to get him in the end, all in the name of poor little Travis.

The little girl with the figures of the Toy Animatronics is the boy's sister.
Notice the only times we see figures of the Toy animatronics are when meeting the girl — who has a Toy Chica whose beak has come off — and when visiting that empty room past the boy's — the room that's heavy on pink, has a flower picture on the wall, and has a "Mangle" lying on the floor.

Scott will eventually open the box.
Revealing it to have a smaller box inside, which has an even smaller box, and it goes go on, and on, and on, and on...eventually leading to a Jump Scare, all Played For Laughs.

The "Jack-o-lantern Bonnie" is actually Nightmare Plushtrap..
The reason it says "In the dark"? It's going to be part of some kind of harder version of Fun with Plushtrap, which is, well, set in a darker room.

The Child is the One Responsible for the Bite of '87.
If we are to assume that the game actually does take place in '83, that leaves the question of why Scott's promos for the game would bear so much focus on '87. And that's because the protagonist is not the victim of the Bite of '87, but rather the cause of it. The Child possesses the Fredbear animatronic, perhaps at the instigation of the Puppet, or perhaps because part of his body is still inside, but all his spirit remembers is terror, pain, and teeth. So the next time a forehead gets close, he does the only thing that remains for him. CHOMP. After Fredbear ends up biting two people, the animatronic itself is decommissioned and dismantled, which is why Golden Freddy thereafter appears only as a ghost.

So who's responsible for the Bite of '87, then?

IT'S ME.

Nightmare BB will not be the only new animatronic in the Halloween update.
This is implied to be a Nightmare Spring Bonnie, and chances are that there probably will be a Nightmare Puppet, as he's the only highly important character missing from the bunch we have now.
  • Nightmare Mangle has recently been implied via steam community.
    • The Puppet has appeared in one of the pictures...somehow though, 'Nightmare' seems too light a word.
    • From the OP, this has been confirmed. Nightmare Puppet is confirmed in the form of Nightmarionne. Jossed with Nightmare Spring Bonnie - it's actually a Halloween version of Nightmare Bonnie named Jack-O-Bonnie.

The Toy Animatronics will join Fun with Plushtrap
With the annoucnement of Nightmare BB and the implication of Nightmare Mangle, The other Toy Animatronics (Freddy Bonnie Chica) might get this treatment too.

Theory in regards to the new Nightmare animatronic teasers
When Nightmare Springtrap was shown in the site one of the dots at the top of the page lighted up, now that Nightmare Ballon Boy has appeared another dot did so; the dots are separated in groups of 2 1 2 4; that might imply that there will be a total of 9 new Nightmares, one for each dot; and that the dots are separated in groups might suggest the new Nightmares are separated by an archetype and other elements seen in the game: the dot next to Nightmare Ballon Boy's one is for Nightmare JJ given she is the only other human looking animatronic; the lone dot is Nightmare Puppet since it doesn't seem to have a counterpart or main companion and is usually isolated from the rest; the dot next to Spring Bonnie's is a Nightmare Endo-Eskeleton since they are based on the child's trauma from being thrown in the back room and the 4 dots at the end are for Nightmare Toy Freddy/Bonnie/Chica/Foxy(Mangle)

Purple Guy orchestrated the ending of FNAF 4
This is based on the possibility that the Child was a witness the Purple Guy couldn't dispose of through his usual means. The Child is terrified of the animatronics, so how else can the Purple Guy be sure that the Child won't suddenly talk and expose everything? Well, it's convenient the Child happens to be celebrating his birthday at the restaurant, and his brother seems to be fond of pulling pranks on the little feller...
  • First off, Purple Guy's cameo was completely optional. It's not required to unlock anything and was probably just there to confirm how long he's worked for Freddy's (since 1983). Second, how the fuck did he have ANY control over the brother? He's not something that can be reprogrammed and, regardless of which bite is shown, it's made obvious the child lives.
    • "Hey mate, wouldn't it be funny to put your brother's head in Fredbear's mouth?" That's all he'd have to say and the boys would run with it. The child living he didn't foresee, but if I had to guess he's probably so brain damaged that he wouldn't remember anyway.

The Toy animatronics will not be in the Halloween edition.
Since Toy Freddy has been deconfirmed for the update, it wouldn't feel right to have every Toy sans him. Instead, there will be one more teaser, and its featured character will be rather unexpected, whoever he is.
  • Partly jossed. Nightmare Foxy is replaced with Nightmare Mangle, and there's nightmare versions of BB and the Puppet, but Toy Chica and Toy Bonnie are also absent.

Shadow Bonnie will appear in the halloween edition someway
Be it another cameo or a nightmare esc makeover.
  • Jossed.

The nightmares are the older brother's, not the child's.
Rather than being the comatose child's Dying Dream, the nightly levels are the end result of the older brother's tormented conscience forcing him to go through the fear he put his brother through. Toys and decreased size (note that Nightmare Bonnie still picks him up, even though big brother wouldn't be too much shorter than eye level)? He's being forced to experience it from the perspective of his brother to increase the feeling of helplessness when confronted. Occasional hospital paraphernalia? Reminders of what he did to deserve the torment. The nightmares end when he finally goes to his younger brother to apologize and try to make peace.

Mangle did the Bite of '87
Now hear me out. There are indeed two bites, '83 and '87. We had it all wrong. The child never possessed Fredbear after all. If they did take him home to die, well, anyone remember that Mangle was in the other room? When the child died, his soul went into Mangle and there he waited and bided his time. For what? Revenge. On his brother. The victim of the Bite of 87.
  • Genius theory, though one small problem. This game implies there were actually two missing children incidents: one that gave life to the classic 5 animatronics and one that gave life to the toys. This is supported by the third game, where you have to save 11 kids as opposed to the usually believed 6. Because of this, it's most likely the incident we read about in the first game was actually the second one, therefore, Mangle should "already" be haunted. Still, maybe that child is only controlling the second head?
    • Point taken. Possible counterpoint: None of those kids in the second example possessed Mangle. There's other possibilities: Bonnie, Freddy, Chica, yes, there's also B.B., J.J., the bare endoskeleton, even the paperpals are possible.

How did the first child possess the puppet anyway?
  • His corpse was beheaded and the head was placed into the puppet. Where did the rest of the body go? Well...

Spring Bonnie was originally an Event themed character
Going by Spring Bonnie's FNAF world design he looks very Easter Bunny esc, it would not be a stretch to think that originally Fredbear/Fazbear wanted to bring an Easter Themed Bonnie out on Easter events, Also what season does Easter take place? Spring, which doubles as an Incredibly Lame Pun between the springlock mechanisms and the Easter theme.

Other than the the murder that produced the Puppet (which is mostly unrelated) and the child, all the murders were done as a coverup.
The child died and possessed Fredbear. His murderers were killed to hide the fact that a murder happened at their pizzeria and they possessed the original four. The five witnesses — those kids that made fun of him — were killed to get rid of witnesses and possessed the toys. And who did they get to do the murders? Well, the Purple Man, of course. They already knew he was capable and happy to do it after covering up his first murder.

Mangle is connected to the box; alternately, hints to unlocking the box may be found in 3.
Mangle is the only toy animatronic to have a phantom in FNAF3, and they're also the only toy animatronic to be seen in the Child's house. As 3 had hidden stuff to do to even find the minigames, that were oddly specific, it may not be too far of a leap to assume that there are hidden things to do to trigger a way to unlock the box in 4. After all, from the FNAF wiki, on getting Mangle's Quest: Mangle's Quest can only be accessed on Night 2 by going to CAM 7 and clicking on the top-left, then bottom-left, then top-right, then bottom-right buttons on the left (P1) side of the arcade machine.

It would make some small amount of sense that Scott has included hidden ways ala 3 to unlock the box. And since Mangle is the only toy animatronic (that's not actually a toy version of itself) to be seen in both 3 and 4, it stands to reason that the two are somehow connected.

The brother is secretly goth
Hence Nightmare Foxy's tongue.

The series itself is a dream but...
The Movie and the Novel are going to be genuinely what happend to influence the Child's nightmares and fears.

Because the idea of the original story being a dream, doesn't necessarily mean the lore is meaninglessSomething had to have set the poor kid off besides the idea of it being purple guy, and the rumors the kids spread to him had to have come from somewhere, there could very well have been a child killer in the restaurant to which spawned those fears.

There are three Fredbear/Golden Freddie suits
During the Night 3 mini game. The child is confronted by a man in a Fredbear suit. He runs away to the room with the stage where we see the shadow of Fredbear (being cast by the Fredbear on stage). The man in Fredbear suit walks into the room...

There's a full animation Fredbear suit and a wearable costume version... now either of these can be the Spring Fredbear suit, but...In the FNAF4 Night 4 minigame, we see a torn apart Fredbear suit in the room with the boy. What if that was the Sprint Fredbear suit? And the boy saw it malfunction? This might explain the teeth on Nightmare Fredbear's stomach. The boy saw an employee get into the suit... and it malfunctioned... which was why the Spring Suits were banned. The boy was not capable of comprehending that he saw Fredbear eating a person... with his stomach. The room from Night 4 was where the suits were stored after being dumped.

So there were three suits.An Animatronic Suit (on Stage)A normal costume (Employee wearing it)And the Springlock Fredbear (Decommissioned)

This might also explain the fact that Golden Freddie doesn't match the typical springlock suit design of having five fingers. The Golden Freddie version of Fredbear was the standard animatronic suit that bit the boy.

The existence of the third isn't exactly possible to prove... but there is undeniable proof that there are at least two Fredbear suits. One of which probably isn't the Spring Fredbear suit.

BB is based off of one of Scott’s Children.
Never intended to be a large part of a plot, but purely as just a nice little shout-out to his family.Scott has children, and the voice that we hear from BB is obviously, well, a kid’s. Scott could have easily had one of his children record the voices. This is why BB never kills you, ever.

He’s a kid, for the love of god!

But, when he saw how the fandom treated him, he did everything in his power to salvage the character. He had the laugh and the voices save our lives in an attempt to feed us humble pie, gave him a minigame so we could maybe stand in his shoes and play as him for a bit, and gave him a jumpscare and made his mechanics the same as the rest.

But it was no use. Everybody still despised and rejected the poor boy, the child who represented his own offspring.

So he punished us with FNAF4.

That’s right! FNAF4 was never meant to be. Scott was going to end it with FNAF3, The End, anyone?

That’s why FNAF4 makes no sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Child represents BB facing the Nightmare Animatronics, which represent us. The bite represents when the fandom went too far. The Good Ending for FNAF4 represents his fondest hope. He himself is Fredbear.

The 1983 commercial?

Our punishment. The story will never be found because...well...because we were cruel. We made BB a scapegoat, and it backfired.

The Box is the answer that Scott will never give us.

Nightmare BB is canon in the sense that he is the reason that FNAF4 exists.

Some things are best left forgotten...at least for now...

Foxy killing the player for honking Freddy's nose too much is a subconscious reaction to a similar incident involving his brother
The brother DOES seem like the type to get annoyed at constant squeaking....

The Fredbear Bite is what led the company to hire guards in the first place
This theory definitely falls under the assumption that there was a "Bite of 83" , but there are hints that lends it credence. There is no sign of any sort of security in the establishment. Purple Guy in his cameo seems to be operating as a costume assistant or mechanic of some sort (which would explain a LOT), but his appearance is markedly different from his night guard appearance in the second game. In addition, we don't play as a night guard, which isn't conclusive in itself, but the game makes a point to note that the child seems to be ALONE in the idea that the animatronics are malicious. Finally, the fact that the teens could get away with such a deadly prank indicates that there was no one in place to stop them. Fazbear Entertainment would probably find it in their best interests to hire someone to watch the place after such a devastating accident.

The rumors about killer animatronics ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy
Being during the era of Fredbear's Family Diner, the animatronics weren't haunted yet. However, the company was still corrupt, and thanks to incidents like spring-lock suit failures and who knows what else, employees started disappearing suddenly, with no explanation. Kids naturally started telling stories about the animatronics coming to life and dragging away employees into the night for slaughter. The idea seems to resonate with the child protagonist, which probably hints at something more. Some of those kids ended up killed by the Purple Man and haunting the animatronics. Those kids remembered the old stories, and considering the nature of their deaths, they thought it a pretty good strategy...

The brother ends up being the Fazbear's Fright night guard decades later
Still guilty about his past sins, the brother has had a ton of time for reflection on his little brother's life. He begins to realize that his brother witnessed something that traumatized him from the establishment. Now, thirty years after the franchise closed for good, he volunteers to play as a security guard for the sole purpose of investigating what pieces of evidence he can find. He soon comes face-to-face with the person responsible for his brother's trauma in Springtrap, who is eager to take his newfound immortality out for a spin by taking his first adult victim. The biggest hint to the night guard's identity, however minor, is that the Golden Freddy cameo (if you believe it's Golden Freddy) is absolutely placid towards him. He even almost seems to be smiling (as much as someone with a perpetually gaping mouth can smile, anyway). This behavior is absolutely uncharacteristic of Golden Freddy, unless he was possessed by 4's protagonist, who just wanted his brother to be nice to him. It would also explain why the last child to find peace is Golden Freddy. He only found peace when he saw that his brother really did love him, enough to risk his own life for five nights against the serial killer who tore them apart.

Fredbear plush isn't another child's soul, he is instead a portrayal and persona placed on the child's toy through his imagination
Anyone who grew up with a Teddy bear (or any plush animal of your choosing) would understand what i'm getting at here; a child is most likely to give his/her toys their own personalities and quirks when playing with them or cherishing them. It is clear FNAF 4's protaganist lacks many friends (if he has any at all). So he has to turn to his Fredbear plush to feel some company, the Fredbear plush is most likely a catalyst of his many thoughts and fears in the form of something he can call a friend.

I can't explain why he appears everywhere and his paranormal activity unless he is just always on the child's mind because he was Lost/Sold/Thrown away, which can probably be supported by Spring bonnie girl saying "Where is your plush toy?"

Golden Freddy's teleportation is actually a Breaking Bad Reference.
In the show, there is the occasional pink teddy bear that teleports around, seemingly following Walter around, which sounds very similar to what Golden Freddy is doing to the child.

The Crying Child is not who he seems.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely DESPISE the direction modern FNAF is going with, but it's still worth posting here.

According to the recently released "Dittophobia" story from "Tales from the Pizzaplex", the Crying Child is actually Rory, the protagonist of said story, unwittingly participating in William's experiment involving a fear-inducing gas. Now before you say: "But hey, I thought the kid is William's son and not a random kid he captured!", I have a perfectly logical explanation.

Michael actually only has a sister, and never had any brothers. Rory, in turn, had an older brother who liked messing with him. However, during the kid's birthday party, the brother's prank went too far and Rory got bitten in the head by Fredbear. Despite this, he didn't die, and only fell in a brief coma, soon waking up from it and having William gas him up. The ending of the game with the child's "friends" disappearing and him seemingly flatlining actually signifies the end of the experiments, as the kid finally escapes his longtime torture.

However, there's also a different twist to this theory, that being...

Rory was brainwashed into thinking he's William's son.

Now before you say: "But Rory had his own family in the story!", let me just say that first, I never read and never going to read the actual thing, and second, hey shuttup will ya?

Anyway, moving on. William kidnapped a random child named Rory to prepare him for a long line of torture, and to prepare him, the kid had to be mentally prepared for such a task, and since Rory couldn't just trust a random kidnapper, William brainwashed him into thinking he's his flesh and blood, with Michael playing along to sell the illusion. The different family seen in the story is also fabricated to help make the lie seem real.

     Working Theories "Spoilers" 

Notes for folder
I mean this folder to be for all-encompassing timeline WMG's; if "Spoilers" doesn't warn you off, what will?

The Puppet's Story

It is some time before 1970, the place is Fredbear's Diner. Fredbear is in the restaurant serving the guests. outside the diner looking in through a window is a small child who is crying then a man in purple drives up and kills the Crying Child (We assume this child's Soul makes it to The Puppet at some point because of the minigame's jump scare.It begins to inhabit the puppet making it the only one to Haunt an animatronic without their death being connected to the thing they haunt or their body being at some point inside.)

By at least 1970 (In FNAF 1 1990 the Phone Guy says that the animatronics have been singing the same songs for 20 years.) Fredbear's Diner has been bought by Frazbear's Entertainment and Fazbear and friends make there debut around this time. Between 1970 and 1983 Fazbear's entertainment becomes successful enough that they begin to produce a TV show and sell merchandise based on the said show (later design the Toy animatronics off of the said TV Show) and their already popular animatronics and they begin experimenting with the springlock suits.

Things go good for Fazbear Entertainment until 1983(FNAF 4) when a little boy who is often terrorized by his brother sees Something that gives him a dreaded fear of the animatronics. Earlier mentioned older-brother and co. shove the child into the mouth of Golden-Freddy/Fredbear which because it's an animatronic and follows a set of predetermaned movements bites down, Child or no Child Breaking the Childs Neck. Because Fredbear was the the Cause of death so the child's soul eventually ends up there along with the limp body a broken neck creates.(The FNAF 4 minigames would be akin to the child's life Flashing before his eyes while he is in a coma, it is also why Golden Freddy appears without the aid of the puppet in the give life minigame.) This also Explains Why he and The Puppet are different from the rest, They both began to haunt their particular Suits without direct interference. This would explain why in FNAF 1 Golden freddy acts completely seperate from the other animatronics and doesn't show up to the Purple Guy's death it was not actually purple man who killed him (as seen in the purple guy's death minigames.)

While the child is in a coma the older brother and his friends are killed by the purple guy. The Puppet Stuffs them into the suits based on the masks they were wearing. This explains why Foxy is so different from the rest; he feels especially guilty for his little brother. Although he does work with the rest of the animatronics.

The Bite of 83 was seen by the media and the public as being the acts of stupid children for the most part and is mostly forgotten. Also the Springlock suits fail Killing two employees Causing the Springlock suits to be discontinued. This is where shadow Bonnie and Freddy come from. They were entertainers and While their souls did bind to the suits both the suits and the bodies were presumably destroid limiting the things that they could do. When they appear in the office in FNAF 2 and shut down the game, they are actually getting the night guard to quit. They know that you are not the murderer, but can't communicate that to the Children.

All of the Tragedy above causes Fazbear Entertainment decide it is time for an overhaul and decommissions the evidently faulty animatronics using them for spare parts.(FNAF 2) The restaurant reopens for a few weeks before Closing because of another set of murders. Adding the cherry to the top of all the tragedy, the bite of '87 occurs. Massive Negative Backlash Ensues. Skip to 1990.

(FNAF 1) Freddy Fazbear's has been open long enough for the Murderer to strike once again. with the blame falling at least partialy on Foxy. (Who found the bodies in the minigame causing the out of order sign) The place eventually closes down for health violations. Some time later, the Purple guy returns to dismantle the suits once and for all. He ends up allowing the spirits of the children to follow him into the secret room, scaring him into putting on the already damp and old Springtrap suit, and the springlocks fail. Then years later FNAF 3 happens.

The Happiest Day minigame are the souls of the four animatronics (The Brother and his friends) and the puppet coming together afterwards to put the GoldenFreddy/Fredbear child's soul to rest with a actually half decent birthday party.

If there are any details that are missing please explain and I will Expand the theory to address those details.

Everything can be explained with experimental necromancy.
There are several hints and ideas that lead me to believe this:

First, the animatronics are far more complex than anything we have in the real world. Almost all animatronics are bolted to the floor or otherwise have means to keep them from collapsing under their own weight.

All animatronics require a constant power supply when they are in operation. In real life, a powerful battery pack would be too heavy and cumbersome causing the animatronic to collapse under their own weight like previously mentioned.

The creepy voice mail left in the first game talking about how metal has a life force, what if the lifeforce is a human soul?

Why put the souls in animatronics? As long as they can keep people paying to be entertained by colorful characters, they can keep funding their experiments.

If we treat the human souls as batteries, one would want to both use batteries that would last as long as possible (children) and periodically replace them. A pizzeria would attract lots of children, lots of fresh souls.

Why stash the bodies in the suits instead of removing them from the premises? It is part of the ritual.

Fazbear Entertainment doesn't care about the constant closing and reopening of the restaurants, because it is simply a means to carry out their rituals. They will either disband or start up again somewhere else under a new identity.

If it was in fact the Give Cake child that was turned into the puppet, it appears that it was a test on cloth and porcelain materials before moving on to much more advanced and expensive metals. Additionally, the child may have been related to one of the necromancers and had was standing outside of the restaurant crying for all the children who may become a part of a evil ritual. He was then killed and put into the puppet. Why waste a soul?

The song "My Grandfather's Clock" is associated with the puppet. A theme of impending death. Necromancy is often depicting as means of bringing the dead back to life or as a means to avoid death.

In the second game, Shadow Freddy and Shadow Bonnie may either be demons that empower the necromantic rituals or leftover souls fragments that once inhabited the suits but haven't completely dissipated.

In the third game, the Purple Man becomes trapped in the Springtrap suit. Why does his soul remain, haunting the suit? Because of the rituals done to the animatronics cause them to hold on to the souls of any bodies put in them. Perhaps what happened to him was part of the bargain.

When Fazbear Fright burns down in the third game, the remaining animatronic parts are sold at auction. What's to say that the necromancers didn't buy back some of their old experiments?

In the fourth game, the Nightmare has a visible brain. Perhaps this is either a demon (perhaps the same as Shadow Freddy) or a more refined method only requiring certain organs to be pressed into the animatronic. If it is a demon, it may be haunting the bite victim because He Knows Too Much and is trying to kill him using supernatural means. The other nightmare animatronics are the child's fears; even Fredbear, Nightmare is on a whole other level.

All throughout the Purple Man is in on the necromancy. Fazbear Entertainment found someone who was willing to murder and was capable as posing as a security guard. Fazbear Entertainment covers for him because they need him to collect souls for their experiments. When Freddy Fazbear's is finally shut down, they task him with returning to the pizzeria to destroy any remaining animatronics to eliminate any evidence.

What happens next is either an accident as the necromancers thought the souls would have burned out by then, or in a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, they knew the souls of the children would murder him, eliminating another witness.

The original Fredbear's Family Diner was a case of Defictionalization

The Fredbear & Friends cartoon had the characters having their various misadventures at Fredbear's Family Diner. Someone got the idea to make a real life version of it, which eventually became Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.

What is something best forgotten for now? The child wasn't even part of the family.
He had been kidnapped from his real family, when he was so young he probably doesn't even remember them.

The entire game series is Adventures In Coma Land

The entire game series has been nothing but the fevered imaginings of a child whose shattered mind is pulling itself back together. In fact, each character we see (and hear) in the games is based on someone in the child's life.

In the first game, he's just starting to pull himself together. His mental map of the pizza place is heavily distorted — notice the posters cut off by the ceiling, as well as the door overhead. He remembers he doesn't like the animatronics, though — especially Foxy, who appears "Out of Order", tucked away in a small alcove. At this point, you're dealing with representations of the brother (Foxy, as we learn in the fourth game), his friends (Freddy, Bonnie, Chica) and what is most likely a voice-only "appearance" by the child's father (Phone Guy), who works at the pizzeria (and thus could get a nice discount for his kid's birthday party). Golden Freddy, however, is the protagonist's representation, and he's not yet able to envision himself — thus the crashing game (and the black rectangle in the reflections on the Foxy kill screen).

(Phone Guy isn't literally the father, of course. In terms of the dream, he's the voice of the child's fears, telling him that every single story he's heard about the place is absolutely true, and the animatronics are coming to kill him.)

In the second game, he's beginning to remember a bit more — his mind has started working outside the coma dreams, giving us the minigames. The minigames do give us some insight into the backstory, but both story and pizza parlor are distorted. Not as heavily as in the prior game, but there's a reason Foxy and the Puppet pass through the walls on occasion. Here, the representations of people have begun to fragment:

Brother: Foxy, Mangle and Balloon Boy (steals the flashlight).Brother's friends: Both versions of Freddy, Bonnie and Chica.Father: Both Phone Guy and Purple Guy. Phone Guy now represents the kind, helpful father; Purple Guy represents the father who made him have his party at a place he hates just because they can't afford another restaurant. (We see him being told this in the "Give Cake" minigame.)Protagonist: Golden Freddy, Balloon Girl ("always hiding under the table crying") and The Puppet ("always thinking"). The protagonist's doubles are trying to piece him back together, but it's still very hard. The Puppet is the mind assigning characters ("Give Gifts, Give Life") in order to put things together in a way the child can accept. Golden Freddy is still too touchy a subject, though — the child isn't ready to think about him. And Balloon Girl is just a smaller Balloon Boy — the child's memory of being helpless and hiding under the tables at Fredbear's.

(A bit of reality peeks through, as well, in the persons of Shadow Freddy and Shadow Bonnie. Foxy and Chica were, in-universe, Canon Foreigner characters created for the video the child plays in the fourth game. That's why only Bonnie and Fredbear have shadows — only real things have shadows.)

In the third game, things are starting to come together. The protagonist now thinks the Bite was a long, long time ago (thirty years is forever to most kids), and is beginning to consolidate the characters, disbelieving them and throwing the pieces he doesn't need into the "toybox" in his mind. In the end, the pieces of the child's mind come together to eliminate the imaginary villain-father, Purple Guy — and, if you completed the hidden challenges, abandon their separation to merge into a whole person. From the constant references to fire, though, the child may have a fever, and a fever in a coma is very much Not Good.

The fourth game then gives us most of the missing story. Filled up with scary stories of the kind older kids have been telling little kids since time out of mind, the boy is terrified of animatronics — a condition not helped by his father's presumably-well-meaning treatment of getting him into the Backstage area, trying to force the child to consider the animatronics as machines. (Seeing someone being put into a costume by his father can't have helped, either, given the story of the animatronics hiding the bodies...) Finally, a foolish prank lands the kid in Fredbear's mouth, and, well... we come full circle. Back to the beginning of it all.

For further evidence of the dream physics at work, consider the disappearing/reappearing props of Bonnie (guitar), Chica (cupcake), and Balloon Boy (balloon). Joined to the physical impossibilities — which are intentional — they indicate that we're not seeing reality in the main game at any time.

If you want a more horrific take on matters, consider this: Children who are so badly bullied and damaged as to create imaginary friends that tell them what to do have been known to grow up into serial killers. There may be a reason the first game's animatronics all show evidence of trying to get out of their costumes — Foxy even having ripped his open with his hook. Of course, they insist they're not endoskeletons, but Fredbear knows better... and he wouldn't lie, would he?

Five Nights at Freddy's Proposed Timeline
This is an attempt to piece together the timeline of the FNAF franchise. While some parts may not fit in perfectly (And I don't expect all of it to), the majority of this is backed up with evidence from all the games thus far.

1973: Fredbear's Family Diner opens and with it come the original animatronics. Phone Guy states in FNAF 1 that they've been "singing the same stupid song for twenty years" so at earliest they started here (the year may seem oddly specific but I'll come back to that later.)

1973 - 1983: At some point between the opening of Fredbear's Diner and Freddy Fazbear's opening after the shutdown of the Diner, the first child is murdered and may be inhabiting the puppet at this point.

1983: Fredbear and Friends, a show/advert, is released on TV. Notably Freddy Fazbear is included in the show/advert despite the fact that the show/advert's host is Fredbear, suggesting that he is also an animatronic since the time Fredbear's Family Diner was opened.

1987, June 26th: The Missing Children Incident occurs, where five children go missing and are stuffed into the suits of the original animatronics. The location this takes place at is FNAF 1's resteraunt, as Foxy is present before and after the children are murdered. The Puppet is also present at this time, stuffing the children into the animatronic suits in an attempt to "Give Life" to the dead children and is backed up by the cutscene between nights in FNAF 2 showing the FNAF 1 resteraunt behind the Puppet.

1987, June 26th - November 7th: Some time between the incident and the events of FNAF 2, FNAF 1's resteraunt was issued new springlocked suits, both of which were Spring Bonnie and Fredbear. They then sent their older animatronics (Incuding the Puppet) which had been in use for a while to FNAF 2's resteraunt, where they temporarily closed down to run maintenance on the resteraunt and retrofitted the animatronics before opting to build the Toy Animatronics. Notably Phone Guy comments offhand that the old animatronics have a smell.

  • After FNAF 2's resteraunt is re-opened, they spend some time (from a week to a month) attempting to put Toy Foxy back together but ultimately decide to leave Toy Foxy as "The Mangle". Shortly after, toys of the Toy Animatronics are manufactured and sold. It is at this time that the events of FNAF 4 and FNAF 3's Phone Guy tapes take place, in which a child is bitten by a Fredbear springlocked suit and the FNAF 1 resteraunt is notified of an "incident at a sister location, involving multiple and simultanious springlock failures." This retires both sets of springlocked animatronics, with the Fredbear Biter being sent to FNAF 2 for spare parts, where he becomes "Golden Freddy" and the one at FNAF 1 is decommissioned while Spring Bonnie is left inside the Safe Room.
    • Not only this, but optionally the '87 victim may have also seen something happen. It may be either that he witnessed a man in a springlocked suit bleed out, or maybe even a child being stuffed into a suit, but this can be left for later.

1987, November 7th - November 14th: The events of FNAF 2 happen in which 5 more children may have gone missing, as Phone Guy tells us that someone has used a yellow suit and that none of the animatronics are working right anymore. A birthday party is the last event of the resteraunt before the resteraunt shuts down and the original four animatronics get sent back to FNAF 1's location while the others are scrapped or put into storage.

  • As a result of the earlier biting, FNAF 1's resteraunt has decided to ground their animatronics as a safety measure so children are less likely to be harmed. At the same time, they also put down rules on what the do's and dont's are at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, including not touching Freddy Fazbear.

1993, November 7th - November 14th: The events of FNAF 1 happen. The reason for this date specifically is that it is the only year where a paycheck could be payed on November 12th, as this would be a Friday and thus is the regular day of the week someone receives a paycheck. The Golden Freddy that is here originates from FNAF 3's tapes and not from FNAF 4/2, as the state of how well kempt the animatronic is yet the fact that it isn't used or is not even in posters indicates that it may have been used during the time the original animatronics were away until they were sent back, and since it's wasteful to repair something but not use it anyway, this implies that Golden Freddy in FNAF 1 and FNAF 2 are seperate entities.

  • A good question to ask is why are there two haunted Golden Freddies, then? This is where the '87 victim seeing something comes into play. I propose that the victim actually saw FNAF 1's Golden Freddy child stuffed into a suit, and the Fredbear Plush is the said child talking to the '87 victim. If one assumes that the '87 victim becomes Golden Freddy, then he haunted the one that bit him.
    • Eventually by the end of the year, the resteraunt was closed down Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria chain closed it's doors.

1993 - 2023: At some time between Freddy Fazbear's closing it's doors and Fredbear's Fright being opened, the Purple Guy made his way into FNAF 1's location and dismantled the animatronics one by one, at which point he is spooked by the spirits of his victims and jumps into the Spring Bonnie suit, resulting in his death.

  • While it may be possible that Purple Guy had done this before the events of FNAF 1, it seems unlikely as the resteraunt seems to be in a really bad state of disrepair at the time, with rats crawling on the floors, pools of something on the ground and drops of water leaking through the ceiling.

2023: The events of FNAF 3 take place. Shortly before Fazbear Frights is going to open, Phone Dude and the business he works for have been searching through the other resteraunts for animatronics and other things, however come up empty-handed until a former building worker shows them the location of a Safe Room, where they find Springtrap. After the events of the game, the establishment burns to the ground and items are sold off at an auction.

The events of the series are The Child's dreams. However, the child has SCP-1237
Both theories are true.

The entire game as all a Deconstruction of fandom treatment of Scrappies.

This ties in directly to the true identities of the dead children. Angry with their treatment, (Because the viewers effectively killed their characters) They possessed the animatronics that we know and fear.Scrappy: Foxy & Mangle

  • Foxy: The similarities are uncanny-Both are aggressive canines, but often come across as ineffective (Like how Foxy can be stopped by shutting the left door) Heck. Foxy’s attack strategy is almost exactly like Scrappy’s schtick in the old cartoons-the big rush.
The fates of both characters are eerily similar-Just as Scrappy was “mysteriously” pulled from the show, agreed to be never spoken of again, Foxy was placed, for unknown reasons, OUT OF ORDER.The IT’S ME sign? Scrappy’s ghost is fed up with his treatment, and wants to “Get” us.
  • Mangle: Mangle was created for kids, as was Scrappy. However, the viewers absolutely despised him so much that they basically tore his character to pieces. The writers did several attempts to put him back together, but in the end it was too late, and they gave up and embraced it, just the way Mangle became a “Take-Apart-Put-Together-Attraction”.
Chica-Possessed by Elmyra Duff. Her status in her original cartoon are much the same here. She wants to “Help” the nightguard into a “Suit” But doesn’t realize the true extent of her harm. She’s really just a lonely little soul, but nevertheless does not know her own strength and cannot be let in.Balloon Boy- Possesses Freddy and Golden Freddy.All three laugh quite a bit, both can be very...damaging to the gameplay.BB was created as a reminder to those who had interacted...negatively with the others, and proof of the darkness within they who had not interacted with the others...proof that hatred still existed within our hearts. He has one other one purpose-but I’ll be getting to that later.

He was quickly bashed enough to take control of Freddy.

  • Notice how only one of Freddy’s eyes is dark and possessed, unlike in the first game, when both are dark.

That’s how Freddy knows so much about the guard’s defense method. He has more experience. For three nights BB’s very unhappy soul plotted it’s revenge, and when he knows enough, he goes about it, laughing as he goes along. But there’s something different about his laugh this time. It sounds a bit like he’s crying at the same time.

  • Also, when the lights go out in this game, Freddy serenades you. Who most likely got your attention in the second game when the lights were unresponsive?
Golden Freddy-When BB possessed Freddy, there were a few...side effects. Most notably Golden Freddy. To solve the paradox of two characters who were technically one and the same, Golden Freddy was born. Goldie/BB remembers his purpose.Bonnie & The Puppet: Both controlled by the soul of Oliver Tyler, better known as Cousin Oliver.To explain further, let’s take a closer look at the Take Cake To The Children Minigame. A room with six children (The Bradys) Inside, beloved characters being given love and attention from the fanbase. We see one little child, an outsider (Cousin Oliver) Crying outside, wanting in but unable to. Then Purple Man(Considering him to be un comes and steals his life away. Here is one last bit of evidence that connects them. Purple Guy comes in a car. That’s not so interesting on it’s own, but take in this bit. He didn’t just come from down the street, or across the road. He drove up in a car. How was Cousin Oliver implied to be killed off-screen in the Brady Bunch Film?Thus a child died, and a puppet was born. But he wasn’t satisfied holed up in a prize box, oh, no. He took control of Bonnie-and then permanently relocated to him when the puppet was put away just before FNAF1.
  • Notice how in FNAF2, Bonnie is missing his face. What does this mean? Since his first fateful appearance on the Brady Bunch, we have dehumanized Cousin Oliver-his face is not his own anymore-it is a symbol-a plague. And now he’s come to make you pay.
FNAF3
  • End Of Night Minigames:
These are a particularly interesting bit. They represent how, after all the hatred and torment and decapitation of their characters, we have become the bad guys. Springtrapped by the cold reality of our own actions, there is no more escaping what has been done.Springtrap, the perpetrator, the conscience, serves to remind us of that throughout the FNAF3.He is part of the attraction.
Phone Dude: You are part of the attraction.
  • BB: This is B’s second purpose. Not only a benevolent entity to empathize with the other little souls and a child himself, but he also was given one other task: Set the other children free. He is given a whole minigame to himself to find the dead child, and what do notice throughout the third game?
...Balloons. Which create a bridge to the other children.In FNAF World, he is the one that Fredbear speaks when he tells us we must leave breadcrumbs for.
8-Bit Fredbear: You must leave breadcrumbs for him, to help him find their way.
Each Minigame Focuses On A Different Entity:
  • BB’s Air Adventure: BB, obviously. BB searches for Balloons to carry the other children and himself to the next life, and does some literal soul searching. The B Bs crying around the tree represent the three children he knows he must save, and the tree represents the darkness and pain that have been inflicted on them all.
  • Mangle’s Quest: Scrappy’s soul attempts to put himself together. This involves him having him have to actually not charge down the problem, but solve it pragmatically. The kid freaking out (Who looks and acts a bit like Shaggy) Represents his old memories, but coming contact with those is too overwhelming, so he goes to pieces. Eventually finds his own soul, and finding a weeping puppet, foreshadowing events to come.
  • Chica’s Party: Elmyra makes peace with the guards she’s killed. They cower in fear before her, but she lends them a cupcake, a symbol of apology.
  • Stage 01-Oliver, playing as Fredbear, navigates through countless rooms, all identical, yet slightly different. The complete map looks uncannily like the brady opening theme. He finally finds himself in the same position he was all those years ago forgotten in the darkest corner, forgotten by everyone else. Fredbear comforts him and he too and go to the happiest day minigame.
  • Glitch Minigame-The player plays as themselves. Regretful for what has happened, the viewers try and reach the dark colored child on the other side of the hall, which represents all four children. It is only through BB’s air adventure that they can get through and apologize.
    • Happiest Day Minigame:
The Children are finally freed from their suffering. The two halves of Oliver’s soul (The angry, strategizing part manifested in the Puppet and the lost, confused part manifested in Bonnie) Reconcile as one-BB’s two halves, angry (Freddy) Confused (Goldie)And they are free.“Remember to Smile, for you are the face of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.” It’s me.

The murdered of the Crying Child wasn't Purple Guy
In early 1973, Phone Guy is driving past Fredbears Diner, and accidentally runs over a little girl sitting outside (chase mini game shows they are in slow time, different sprite from Purple Guy, girls laugh in first game, HELP HIM SAVE HIM referring to Phone Guy??? Girls laugh, why does Phone Guy stick around? Guilt? Why does GF teleport into the office and kill him (pinprick eyes = puppet??? PG hates the Marionette 'it's always thinking' - the child remembers his voice?) and tries to convince her to stay alive. She remembers his voice when she dies (motive for murder - heard Phone Guys voice in the recordings at night???) and possesses one of the attractions (Marionette, and Freddy and those guys are also being added to do damage control after her death). Out of guilt, Phone Guy starts working at the new Pizzaria. He records messages for the Night Guard, but when the CC hears, she thinks it's him and possesses the robots and kills the night guards, stuffing them in the suits. This causes the spring suits to be even more dangerous and there is a fatal accident that kills an employee (what's seen in the shadows can easily be misunderstood in the mind of a child or whatever that said lmao) causing the older suits to be put away (1983).

-Sister Location - Baby related to FNAF 4 kid? Baby referring to someone younger and that mysterious empty bedroom? Does she causing the Crying Child to take an interest in the kid??? Is the guy who built Baby his dad?

The Crying Child's Fredbear toy is possessed by the Crying Child, who tries to help him through his fears (reminds her of him, he's sad and stuff???) and he's forced to go to the new location w/ just the Withers but not withered, and he's scared and his brother bullies him. The animatronics continue killing the Guards because of Phone Guy and his voice, and eventually someone discovers the bodies (hidden newspaper in first game) and the location is shut down, and reopened with the Toys.

They still want the Night Guard. Purple Guy is lurking about and being creepy, scoping out the scene for the murders of the kids who bullied his the soon to be lobotomised child (purple robots suggesting they have a connection) and the Toys get nasty during the day and start glitching. The company decides to not use them for the birthday party on Friday, and brings out the spring suits (them in Parts and Services, PG helping someone into them), and the night guard refuses to go back in the night shift, and he is to help out at the party instead. Purple Guy lures the children backstage, without a suit and attacks them. Also the Bite happens because literally the only adult there was killing people well done Purple Guy. The victims tears triggered the spring suits locks to go off and he ended up in a coma. The noise and horrified screaming caused Purple Guy to rush his two final kills and ended up only killing three of them, leaving the oldest an the girl with the Springtrap doll alive. He abandoned them to see what had happened. This passed the Crying Child off, and she began stuffing the children into the old Withered suits, even the two ones who were alive and they didnt die (newspaper from first game never says the five died, just that they disappeared :3, Phone Guy tries to hold out, because people already survived in those suits) and the Bite victim was in a coma.The Crying Child wanted him, she had taken an interest in him, and so she wanted him to die, so she could tether him to Fredbear (new ghosts possessed toys - only animatronics to have black eyes, Toy Chicas beak, they are the first to go after you, but when they stop, the Withers come out), and so she trapped in in her own personal hell ('I will put you back together', the puppet box, Adventure Puppets loading screen, the Happiest Day mini games featuring the same locations as the fourth game), but he managed to survive. Nightmare is the Crying Child, twisted by her hate, and when the child survives even that, his parents pull the plug on his life support and he dies (brother apologises right before he dies), and the Crying Child gives him the box containing the Marionette, and setting her fully free. He's now haunting Fredbear.

The restaurant reopens in November and Jeremy starts working there (summer job, November pay check), listening to the phone calls from months before. The new ghosts don't want to kill him because he is innocent, and the Crying Child attacks with the Withers because the Marionette is stuck there. Fredbear hangs out in Parts and Services because that ghost who I'm calling Greg from now on because using victim to describe him is getting annoying doesn't want want to kill him, until Phone Guy mentions the birthday party that ruined his life. He is angry, thinking how Phone Guy could have helped him, and starts moving around the place (also he was Shadow Freddy just saying), the guard survives and after that, complains. His and all the other surviving guards threatening to tell everyone about the animatronics behaviour causes the restaurant to shut down, and all the animatronics destroyed except the Withers and the Marionette. The dead children are left in FNAF 4s location to rot. Here, Purple Guy strikes again, killing more children and Foxy is blamed (Go Go Go has Foxy running which he only does in the first game and is in Pirate Cove) and is out of order. The night guards are all dying, and then Phone Guy takes the night shift. This annoys the Crying Child, who ramps up the hardness to extreme and finally kills him (Golden Freddys appearance, all the animatronics being super aggressive in the night four call), and he is stuffed in Golden Freddy, who was being used sometimes at special occasions and was heavily protested (GF Freddy looking different in first game and still being around) and begins haunting him (in-between nights thing from the second game take place on the week Phone Guy is in the office, Greg promising to save him, the Crying Child in the Marionette appearing on the night he dies), and Golden Freddy is shut down. Also Gregs still there, but Phone Guy is in charge (two lights in his eyes).

Mike takes the job up. Mike survived Purple Guy back in '87 (Scott said Mike had something to do with the murders somewhere, right???), hallucinates Freddy and Bonnie - were the suits he and his friend were in, wants answers. He gets nothing. Phone Guy tries to make contact with him (it's me, GF acting completely different in this game), but is unrecognised. The Crying Child is kept in the vent hidden by the door in the ceiling that's visible in jumpscares, unable to do anything because of the music playing and has to force the other children to attack against their will (cheering when you beat the nights), and Mike is fired and the restaurant shuts down soon after.

Phone Guy dismantles the robots, and the second lot children killed by him and the Crying Child (GF head not visible in Good Ending screen, no clue as to what sad child you play as in that mini game) go free. Happiest Day shows the trapped ghosts placating the Crying Child, and eventually, she forgives Phone Guy, and they are all set free, except for those other dead children hanging about in the background (FNAF World is connected to all this, maybe the story of how those children get set free? A more complex version of how it went down? What the children did after they all went free, with the Flipside as Fazbear Fright, and Springtraps reawakening as the glitches? Is this when the new game takes place?)

Springtrap stays in the back room until he's let loose in the pizzaria. This guard is the second survivor, the girl who was stuffed into Bonnie. Determined to make her leave, the Crying Child and some other children try to scare her off (four games one story - the Crying Child running the whole show, everyone effected by the events of 87?) but that has the side effect of making her see what happened when they got set free in her dreams, and she keeps coming back. Eventually, Fazbear Fright tragically catches fire and burns down. The ghost move on again, and the new guard kind of gets her closure.

The child's coma wasn't just a few days long.
It lasted months.The first six nights are the final six in his coma before he dies, and the two bonus nights take place much earlier than the first six.
  • For me, personally this makes much more sense. If Help Wanted and UCN are anything to imply then the animatronics that weren't present in this game, but were present in the Help Wanted version of FNAF 4 (Nightmarionne's tentacles, Baby escaping the facility etc.) then those are events that transpired before this game. The last few days was about the child finally giving in due to the amount of stress building up and/or the animatronics finally getting them.

The child created the nightmares.
You don't play as the child except in the minigames. During the nights, you play as the brother. The child has some sort of psychic abilities, and he created the nightmares (maybe unintentionally) to protect him from his brother. They look so scary because they are a manifestation of all his fears.

Look, ghosts exist in this universe. Why not superpowers?

Contrary to the usual belief, the game really DID happen. For the most part.
As in, this wasn't a nightmare the Child had. All of it really happened, because the Child wasn't home. The room in the minigames is shown to be in a house proper, so it's safe to assume that's what the Child's room really looks like- a window, a single door, the bed pushed into one corner, his dresser into one on the same wall (a wall with the door), a pile of plush toys in a third corner. Oddly, none of those things apply in the room you play the actual game in. That room has two doors, the bed is in the middle of a wall where there are no doors, there are no windows, the dresser is pushed into a corner across the room and still not on a wall with a door, and this room has a closet. There's also no pile of plush toys. The room you play in is NOT the Child's room. It's a room in Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental, which is why the room appears in that game. The "nightmares" the Child sees are actually caused by his plush toys not being in the room with him. The exceptions being Fredbear, whom doesn't show up until later after the Child has had several nights of the others getting to him, and possibly Nightmare, who is just a dark Palette Swap of Fredbear. They're referred to as "nightmares" not because they were born from a child's nightmare, but from being "nightmarish" mutations caused by fear. The Child wasn't in any real danger the entire time, aside from his own fears. Fears that weren't helped by being locked up in a building filled with that which he fears. It's possible that Circus Baby's is actually part of a theme park and sits under a hotel.

This is the Bite of '87 we see, despite Fredbear not being in daytime free-roam mode.

Out of the many reasons people can give for this not being the infamous '87 bite is that Phone Guy tells you that daytime free-roam was stopped after the Bite of '87. But look at what he actually says:

"Uh, they used to be allowed to walk around during the day too. But then there was The Bite of '87. Yeah. I-It's amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know?"

At no point does Phone Guy specifically say that an animatronic was free-roaming when the bite happened. So why then would the bite lead to daytime free-roam being stopped?

Well after incidents where people and children get hurt at other amusement locations in real-life, there's often a big meeting about what could be done to stop incidents like it ever happening again. New safety procedures are drawn up, new measures put in place. What if making sure the animatronics didn't free-roam during the day was one of those new measures that Fredbear's/Fazbear's was forced to put into place to stop themselves getting into even more legal trouble with authorities and to assure parents that nothing like this could ever happen again - because as long as no one ever approached the stage no child could ever get near enough to an animatronic to get bitten again.

I should point out that I don't really think this bite is the '87 one, but this just occurred to me and I thought I'd toss it up here for consideration.

Also, this is a Bite (of '83/'87) and NOT the 'incident' mentioned in FNAF 3 that involved springlock failures.

People like to theorise that instead of being a Bite incident, what we see happen is the incident that we hear Phone Guy talk about in FNAF 3 that led to the retirement of the springlock suits - the "multiple and simultaneous spring lock failures".

But hold on, we are told the springlock system works as so on Night 2 of FNAF 3:

"To change the animatronics to suit mode, insert and turn firmly the hand crank provided by the manufacturer. Turning the crank will recoil and compress the animatronic parts around the sides of the suit, providing room to climb inside. Please make sure the spring locks are fastened tight to ensure the animatronic devices remain safe."

We are then told that a springlock 'failure' is deemed as the springlocks coming loose while someone is inside the suit when it is in Suit Mode in the tape played on Night 3.

Yet we can be pretty sure that Fredbear is NOT in Suit Mode when the child has his head shoved into his mouth. The springlocks aren't actively holding any animatronic parts to the sides and able to fail unless the animatronic is in suit mode - so this can't be the incident that involved "multiple and simultaneous spring lock failures".

Nightmare is the one truly supernatural entity. And it's none other than Fredbear.
This is going on the theory that the Crying Child is Golden Freddy. The Fredbear plush seems to have some sort of sentience, and wants to "put him back together". The bite caused some sort of psychic connection, and Fredbear has been trying to use it to further connect them. You know how Shadow Freddy is a recolored Golden Freddy? That's because Shadow Freddy represents the A.I, and Golden Freddy the child. Same with the Nightmares. Nightmare is Fredbear's A.I trying to make the transition possible. Unfortunately he thinks turning the kid into a ghost is a good idea. The other Nightmares are just nightmares, but far deadlier because there's another consciousness.

The Nightmare Animatronics are real...sort of.
They're actually the normal animatronics as seen from the child's point of view. Whoever his parents are, they must be important to Fazbear's given we see what looks like an unbuilt Mangle in his house and he ends up in the storage room. The kid's parents, terrified of what happened, got the animatronics to look after and guard him. However since he was traumatized, the child envisioned them as horrifying monsters than only increased his trauma. His parents should've thought of that.

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