Help Wanted | HAPPS | B-7
"He'll get bored with it soon enough."
Animatronics were robots. They were strong, and he knew they didn’t feel bad things like real people did. It would be nice not to feel bad things.
Five-year-old Billy loves watching Freddy and Friends on TV. He comes to the conclusion that being an animatronic would be better than being a person, as animatronics don't have to feel the bad and scary things that humans do. So he declares himself to be an animatronic, to his parents' amusement. They have a grand old time playing pretend with him... only he's not playing pretend. He's convinced himself that he is an animatronic, and animatronics aren't easily dissuaded.
The sixth Tales from the Pizzaplex story, and the last of the second book, HAPPS. The short was later given a sequel in the eighth book, entitled "B7-2," which serves as a more hopeful conclusion.
Tropes related to “B-7”:
- Artificial Limbs: Billy replaces his arms and legs with prosthetics in order to feel more like a robot. The sequel later claims that only a few of his limbs were removed, and Doc actually faked the other surgeries as a way of running off with Billy's money.
- Back-Alley Doctor: The appropriately-nicknamed Doc, who takes Billy's money and chops off his limbs with no regards to whether or not the surgery will be needed. Quite a few ethics violations in this clinic.
- Black Eyes of Crazy: As part of Billy's delusion, he has a surgery to make his eyes pure black. Maliah laments that his eyes had been so pretty before.
- Body Horror: After his surgeries, Billy has prosthetic limbs, pure-black eyes, metal plates in his cheeks, and removes his own tongue and ears, speaking through a vocal synthesizer implanted into his throat.
- Call-Back: Billy being killed in a junkyard car could be seen as a callback to Fazbear Frights' "To Be Beautiful," where Eleanor (a robot who pretends to be human) is found and dragged out of a junkyard car trunk.
- Computer Voice: Billy intentionally gives himself this in hope of aligning more with his robot persona, taking out his tongue and replacing it with a vocal synthesizer.
- Cope by Pretending: This is how the delusion began, as little Billy was so traumatized by an intensive care visit that he pretends to be an animatronic so that he won't feel those "scary" feelings again.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: When Billy looks at himself after all his surgeries, he is horrified to see that he isn't a machine, but a badly-mutilated human. The sequel story ups the ante on this trope to have B-7 become a conscious, malevolent being.
- Cyborg: This is what Billy ends up being after his surgeries.
- Delusions of Doghood: As Billy seems to have clinical lycanthropy; see "Truth in Television."
- Died on Their Birthday: In a way; Billy celebrates the day he "realized" he was an animatronic as his creation day. On his 16th creation day, he looks at his transformed self in the mirror and becomes horrified by what he sees, before climbing into a station wagon in the junkyard and letting it compact him.
- Downer Ending: A horrified Billy ends up killing himself in a junkyard, letting himself be crushed like spare machinery. However, the blood and pain brings him happiness, reminding him that he is indeed human. The sequel has him survive.
- Driven to Suicide: Vera overdoes on pills in the bathtub after a decade of raising a mentally ill son. Three years later, Billy chooses to remain in a junkyard car as it's being compacted after the horrible realization that he is not actually a robot.
- Emergent Human: Billy acts like this the entire time he believes himself to be an animatronic; his mother told him not to tell the public about his "true self," so he pretends (badly) to be a human boy.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: When Billy looks at himself realizes that he's been human the whole time, he has a breakdown and kills himself.
- Human All Along: Billy was only delusional and lycanthropic; he was never an actual animatronic.
- Humanoid Abomination: Billy becomes this by the time he's twenty-one. Mixed with a Mechanical Abomination, of course.
- Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Implied with Maliah, who has just gotten away from an abusive boyfriend and is really hoping that Billy will be different.
- Machine Monotone: Billy speaks in this even before getting the synthesizer, thinking it's just how robots talk.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Billy, when he looks at his "transformed" self and realizes that he's mutilated himself beyond recognition.
- No Full Name Given: In neither first nor second story does Billy get a surname.
- Parental Abandonment: After an argument with Vera about institutionalizing Billy, Dan leaves the family and cuts contact.
- Parental Neglect: It's implied that Dan doesn't spend practically any time with Billy, mainly just sitting on the couch and doing his own thing. He eventually abandons the family.
- Pinocchio Syndrome: Subverted and Played for Horror as a young boy decides he is an animatronic and ruins his entire life to achieve that image.
- Robo Romance: Maliah and Billy start dating while Billy is still convinced he is an animatronic, and he doesn't really even realize the implications of this until she's already left.
- Robots Are Just Better: Billy would rather pretend to be an animatronic than be a real human, as humans have emotions that frighten him.
- The Shrink: Dr. Alice Lingstrom, who is set to psycho-analyze Billy and sees him throughout the next decade. She's somewhere in the Well-Meaning, but Dopey and Ineffective category, as she does nothing to try and break Billy from his delusion for this entire period, and later asks Vera if maybe they should do something to shake it up. As if that wasn't, you know, her job for the last ten years.
- Stealth Prequel: Unlike most of the stories in this series, "B-7", its sequel, and "The Mimic" have the distinction of taking place in the timeline of the original games, rather than the post-Help Wanted story the others follow. "B-7" isn't directly stated to be in any time period, but it's in one where Billy grows up going to the original Pizzeria chain and watching Freddy and Friends on television, then has limited forum access as an adult. This could put him in the 80s-90s.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Billy refuses to eat anything that has color in it, as it makes his "sensors" malfunction.
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Trans Audience Interpretation: In a negative sense. A lot of readers were very concerned and upset upon reading the story as a transphobic allegory, with the idea that Billy desiring to be transformed from a human to a robot and ends up regretting his decision was seen as an alleged hidden message mocking the transgender community and gender identity. Author Andrea Waggener confirmed in a message that it was not at all a transgender metaphor, and her and Cawthon hadn't even considered that it may come across that way
."Not one single second or fraction of a second when I was writing that story did I even THINK about transgender people or any other kind of people. I just took Scott's ideas and wrote the story he wanted written. Second, I can't speak for Scott's views on anything because I honestly don't know what those views are, but I can say that in all the time I've worked with him, he's made it very clear that he never wants to put in his stories anything that could be construed as a commentary on anyone's gender identity, race, religion, or any other human choice." - Trauma Conga Line: Billy's coping mechanism prevents him from realizing it for sixteen years, but after his horrible stay in the hospital which traumatized him initially, he is outcast by his peers, constantly made fun of, rushed to the hospital for drinking oil, is abandoned by his father, drops out of school, finds his mother's body after she killed herself due to her stress over his state, had multiple horrible surgeries in a back-alley clinic, and then killed himself upon realizing what was happening to him.
- Truth in Television: Dr. Lingstrom seems to have diagnosed Billy with lycanthropy, as she references it by name on his 13th (18th) "creation day" party, and Billy is said to leave and look up what it meant. In real life, clinical lycanthropy is a psychiatric syndrome in which a person believes they are or have transformed into a non-human animal. The rest of the story shows Billy matching quite a few of the symptoms.
- Unrobotic Reveal: Played for Horror as Billy realizes he is, in fact, human after all.
