Tear Jerker / Bendy and the Ink Machine

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned!

For a game that is based on silly old-timey cartoons, it is filled with all types of grief and tragedy. In the world of Bendy, happy endings are sparse and rare. People have, can, and will suffer, even if they don't deserve it.

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Chapter 1: Moving Pictures

• Finding the corpse of Boris the Wolf. Your first clue as to what's really going on here, and it's a beloved character being horribly maimed and gutted, then his corpse being propped up as some sort of disturbing trophy.

Chapter 2: The Old Song

• Susie Campbell's tape. She talks about how excited and happy she is to be the voice of Alice Angel, but given the wreckage of the studio, it's clear her fame didn't last. And given what we see later, it's unclear as of this chapter if she even survived or not.
• After finding several tapes talking about Sammy Lawrence's Sanity Slippage, we finally get a chance to meet the man himself, and it's not a pretty sight. Sammy has become a deformed ink monster, and was driven almost completely insane by the horrors of what happened in the studio. And then he ends up getting killed by Bendy.
• The Searchers are terrifying ink monsters that constantly pop up from the floorboards and try to kill you, but their screeching sounds give off the impression that these things, whatever they are, are in a lot of pain and torment.
  • And it gets even worse after you find out about what happened to Sammy. Are these things former employees?

Chapter 3: Rise and Fall

• Boris cowering in the elevator. Poor guy just needs a hug...
• After spending a while with Boris helping you get through the ruins of the studio, you wander into a room and find dozens of Borises, all dead and gutted just like the one in Chapter 1. Definitely a Player Punch, after most players have gotten close to him. Boris' reaction is worse, where he stares at one of his gutted clones and examines it.
• Susie's entry in Chapter 2 becomes much, much worse when you find her first tape in Chapter 3. All she wanted to do was voice Alice and make people happy, but then the role that could have been her big break was just yanked out from under her at the last second. Ouch.
  • Gets even worse when you progress in the chapter, and see what ultimately happened to her.
• There is a moment in the elevator in which Henry eavesdrops on Alice quietly reminiscing how she was loved by everyone, no matter what Joey said... He apparently wasn't so confident about the poor toon's popularity, yet he still assured her actress Alice would be popular.
• Norman Polk's fate. He became an ink monster similar to Sammy, but with a projector for a head. Unlike Sammy and Susie, Norman doesn't even seem to be sentient anymore.
  • You're also given the choice to either abandon him down there in the basement, where he'll probably wander in pain and confusion forever, or put him out of his misery.
    • In chapter 4 it's even worse if you do end up killing him. In this case he actually recovered from his injuries and all you did was cause unnecessary pain to him. Hopefully he doesn't come back after getting decapitated by Bendy, ouch.
• Henry has his own tape in which he reveals that Joey hasn't been treating him fairly and describes him as a man full of ideas... and only ideas, never really paying back what Henry's been giving him. As if we needed more proof of Joey's incompetence...
  • He also mentions that he hasn't seen a "Linda" in days due to being in the studio. The books reveal this is his wife, and the pre-release tapes from Henry in chapter 5 emphasize how much it pains him to be apart from her.
• After you do what Alice asks, she tells Henry to go to the elevator, and reveals she wasn't going to set Henry or Boris free. She sets the elevator to crash, knocking Henry out. Boris then tries to rouse Henry, who's obviously been injured, and Henry can't warn him about the approaching Alice Angel figure. Boris is then dragged into the dark, terrified and unable to scream. Henry can only watch and lapse back into unconsciousness. Also, the only reason Boris was in trouble was because he followed Henry out, wanting to help. He ultimately sacrificed himself for Henry...
• Shawn Flynn's tape is Harsher in Hindsight. He talks about how he painted some Bendy dolls with a "crooked smile" and calls Alice's merchandise "angel whatchamacallit". Then you realize that Shawn was probably killed or turned into an ink monster.
  • Mitigated at the end of the game when his name is not found on any coffins, so it's likely he was merely fired and lived his life elsewhere. The sequel does indeed reveal that he quit working at the studio alive and unharmed.
• A few people have noticed that if you hide while "Bendy" is chasing you, there's a split second where he looks sad before returning to walking around. Either it's because he or someone else misses Henry and is chasing him for a different reason, or he's sad that he didn't kill Henry. Boris may not be the only one who needs a hug.
  • What about his bad leg? If you pay attention how he walks in-game or have watched Pascal's videos, it's painful to see him limping around.

Chapter 4: Colossal Wonders

• Remember the Searchers from Chapter 2? In this chapter, Henry finds the docile Lost Ones. People completely covered in ink with glowing yellow eyes that will peer at him with an absolutely despondent expression if he comes close. Most of them seem to be stuck in one place, or only move when you don't look. But there is one you see on a walkway...
  Lost One: *crying* H-He's going to find me! He always finds me! Oh no! I just want to go home! *crying* When do we go home? WHEN DO WE GO HOME!?
• Near the Bendy animatronic, you can see a Lost One curled up out of reach, crying. After getting the seeing tool in chapter 5, you can see a message written below: "Please don't cry..."
• Bertrum Piedmont was only a man passionate about building amusement park attractions and has built many that shook imaginations for 40 years. He had the misfortune of being hired by Joey Drew to build an amusement park based on the Bendy Show. Despite claiming that this achievement of making the park would only be his, Joey's mismanagement ruins the park plan and he tries to kick Bertrum out. While you listen to Bertrum's last audio log in front of an octopus amusement park ride, you slowly realize you're actually looking at what became of him.
• Joey's audio log reveals he didn't even believe in his "power of dreams" inspirational speeches. So remember every time he justified exploiting his employees with these speeches? He is kicking even more dogs than ever before.
• Henry's attempt to rescue Boris from Alice. Just when it seems he will face Alice in the Haunted House, Henry is confronted by a frankentoon monster Boris created by Alice after she successfully took the wolf's insides. The Frankenstein Boris is now a mindless monster loyal to his kidnapper and hellbent on killing Henry, forcing Henry to kill his friend. When you finally slay Brute Boris, Henry goes to Boris's side and can only watch as the lifeless body of his friend dissolves away.
  Henry: (horrified gasp) Boris!! No, no... What has she done to you?!
  • If you give Boris a bone back in Chapter 3, he will still have it; a clear sign that this is indeed OUR Boris, which makes this all the more heartbreaking. The one who appears at the end is named Tom, which means our Boris is most likely gone forever.
  • This fight becomes even worse when you analyze how he's damaged. Every time Henry damages Boris, his pipe disappears from his hand, meaning it either dissolved, broke, or got shoved inside Boris. And you have to do this three times. If the poor thing wasn't in agony before, he certainly was when he died.
  • Even the music's hard to listen to.
    • The first 16 seconds of the music that follows up his death just add more insult into the emotional injury.
• Sure, she was a Manipulative Bitch turned Ax-Crazy murderer, but you can't help but feel a bit bad for Susie. A woman who just wanted to play a character. Deceived by Joey, being kicked out of the role with no prior notice, and slowly being driven mad by the Ink Machine and studio. By the time her transformation into Alice is complete, she's gone completely insane and is barely recognizable as the woman she once was. Driven to become a homicidal maniac by trauma, stress, and madness... I'd almost call Susie!Alice being stabbed and killed by Allison!Alice a Mercy Kill.
  • It gets worse if you remember that with Susie's death, Alice herself might be gone for good. Unlike Susie, Alice didn't deserve any of what happened to her at all.

Chapter 5: The Last Reel

• Pre-release video logs have Henry confessing he misses Boris and Linda.
• Seeing Joey as an old man who ultimately realized his choices were bad ones, and quietly admits Henry was the one who kept him straight - but even this wasn't enough, at the end.
  • Becomes even sadder if you view him telling Henry that he (Henry) should have "pushed harder" as a case of Never My Fault. Even with everything that's happened, Joey can't fully accept that all of this madness was his and only his fault, and would go so far to protect his denial as to blame the one person who had absolutely no involvement.
• Allison Angel can't remember her own name.
• After getting the Seeing Tool, going back through the other chapters (mainly Chapter 2) and finding all the graves with named characters on them. They did not deserve this.
  • And when using the Seeing Tool while you're near Boris, or a poster of him?
    Invisible Message: I'm sorry, buddy.
  • Or how about the implication of the hidden messages in the previous four chapters? Namely, that they were written by Henry, who's trapped inside the studio and forced to repeat his experiences there, going in circles but never finding a real way out?
• Several of the audio logs are about the creation of the Ink Demon himself... and it's rather sad. He was the one and only Bendy ever created and brought into the real world. Why? Because he was deemed such a failure Joey didn't want to risk making another imperfect replica of his cartoon star. One log shows Joey demanding that "that grinning thing" get locked up... for no other reason than the possibility that Bendy's appearance may give the company bad PR. To make it worse, there's no indication in the audio logs that Bendy had ever done anything bad up to that point. As far as we're told, all he did was wander the halls and act as an in-universe case of Uncanny Valley. Makes one wonder if he only became what he is in the game proper due to the forced isolation and a desire to strike back at those who've hurt him.
  Joey Drew: —but I'm paying for living attractions, not weird abominations! Whatever that grinning thing I saw wandering around your office, you better keep it locked up tight!
• When Joey finds out that the reason Bendy "failed" was because he lacked a soul, the first thing he does is go to Susie and manipulate her into becoming the first Alice Angel.
• With the ending in mind, (specifically the fact that Joey sent Henry on an unknowing quest to kill the Ink Demon), quite a few of Bendy's actions against Henry seem less out of crazed bloodlust... and more like an effort to survive. Bendy clearly knew that Henry was going to use "The End" against him and stole it, only attacking him when the man got his hands on the reel. Several encounters with him in the previous chapters, many of which were just jump scares that caused no harm, may have been his attempts to simply scare Henry off.
  • If you go with the above interpretation, Bendy convulsing, crawling, reaching towards Henry and screaming as "The End" plays and causes him to evaporate becomes difficult to watch.
  • The way Bendy gets distracted from Henry and wanders over to watch what's happening on the screen is almost... childlike. One can't help but wonder what would have been different if he hadn't been cast aside or if Henry had still been working in the studio during his creation.

Cartoon Shorts

• The last part of the Snow Sillies short can be painful to watch, especially Bendy crying over the snowman's melting at the very end. If you haven't felt bad for the little devil before, you certainly have now.

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