The Tattletails don't really need batteries.
The version of the Tattletail commercial seen in the trailer says "batteries not included", but you get yours right out of the box with what looks like a fully-charged battery. Thus, the Tattletails must not actually need batteries to function; "battery charge" is just one of their programmed needs. With all the supernatural goings-on around them, it wouldn't really be much of a surprise to find that they didn't have a standard power source.
Mama Tattletail is a demon whose soul is inside a cursed VHS Tape.
So she's basically either
Sadako or Samara, you say?
Mama Tattletail is possessed by the original creator of the Tattletail who sadly died during development.
Not actually the creator, but she did come up with the original idea of the Tattletail, but her idea was stolen from someone else, leading her to suicide and now is an overprotective sprit of her creation not wanting anyone to play with them.
The sequel will take place at the facility where the Tattletails are made, and will involve more Mama Tattletails.
There are a few things that lead to this conclusion. First,
the tag you get in the good ending makes a big deal out of how, where, and when the Tattletail was made. There's no use for this information in the game itself, so it's likely something left for the sequel. Then there's the phone calls. If you answer the phone before Christmas Eve, you get staticy noises along with Mama Tattletail's grinding sound. But if you wait until Christmas Eve (i.e.,
after you banish Mama), you get a phone call, with some distortions. The distortions make it unclear where exactly the call comes from- but, it's a prerecorded call instructing you to call a 1-800 number, indicating that it's probably a business; the voice sounds similar to Mama Tattletail's; and it ends with a clip of the same background music that plays during Mama's story. Most likely, therefore, the phone call comes from Waygetter Electronics. The continued distortions make it likely that something's still wrong over there. And, it's not hard to figure out what- Mama Tattletail was recalled, presumably to be destroyed at the factory- but, if you could physically destroy Mama to get rid of her, what would be the point of
the Tattletails' ritual? Therefore, most or all of the recalled Mamas should still be around, and wreaking havoc in the factory.
- Further information lends a bit more credence to this theory: Easter eggs accessed by using the numbers on the tag during the VHS sequence show hitherto unseen camera angles
, including a control room with Mama hiding in it, a door to a "Prototyping" room, and a storehouse full of Mama Tattletails.
Obviously it didn't work out too well.
Mama was intentionally made to attack and kill children.
Waygetter Electronics is actually the newest venture of
William Afton.
After the deaths of his children (his daughter was eaten by Circus Baby and his son was mistaken for him and driven into the spring suit), not to mention the Bite of '87 and the shutdown of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, he needed a new approach.
He briefly toyed with the idea of hacking the animatronics at Fazbear's chief competitors, Pizza Time Theatre and Showbiz Pizza Place. There were issues, though. For one, none of them could walk around, with the PTT animatronics lacking legs of any sort until the introduction of the C-Stage in the late 80s, and the SPP animatronics also couldn't walk, though Creative Engineering was looking to do this until their R&D budget was slashed thanks to Uncle Klunk bombing with consumers. Second, they didn't have any AI at all, instead being controlled by a single computer, hydraulics, and reel-to-reel tapes (and later, VHS tapes). Finally, he would never, ever get away with tampering the SPP animatronics without incurring the wrath of their creator, Aaron Fechter.
He soon decided he needed a new approach. Then he saw Child's Play, and got the inspiration he needed. After all, children's toys have a much, much wider market than Fazbear's ever could. He designed the toys to be cute and innocent, and test-marketed them in Oklahoma City in 1995. The first Tattletails were live bombs, and on April 19, 1995, destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Afton bribed government officials, who scapegoated two of his employees (Timothy Mc Veigh and Terry Nichols), and covered up the exploding toys by planting evidence that it was a car bombing done in retaliation for the Ruby Ridge and Waco sieges.
Satisfied, he then released the toys to the national market, and they became a hit. At some point, though, his plans ran into a roadblock: NONE OF THE TOYS WERE EXPLODING ANYMORE. Apparently, the government found out about Afton's involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, and remotely shut off the detonators. He went back to the drawing board, but with little budget left, settled on a throwback plan, in which Mama Tattletail toys would attack kids like the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza were now attacking security guards and stuffing them into suits, as he had with the kids he murdered.
After one attack, in which a kid's eyes were torn out, Mama was recalled. At this point, William gave up. He lost so much money (plus his own kids) trying to satisfy his desire to kill. All the failure just took it out of him.
Years later, he became the security guard at Fazbear's Fright, if only to confront his son.
- While the parts about the FNAF fangames are out-of-place (and the references to real-life tragedies are in rather bad taste), the idea that William Afton was involved in the creation of Mama is certainly intriguing.
- Pizza Time Theatre and Showbiz Pizza Place were real places. They merged in 1984, and in the early 1990s, became the modern Chuck E. Cheese's we all know and love/hate/love to hate.
Her jumpscare involves pouncing the player with
More Teeth than the Osmond Family, and a big deal is made of the fact that Tattletails eat real food (
which has to be important). If the Tattletails need food, as opposed to it being an artificial variable put into them, then the Mamas kill two birds with one stone... one being the people they don't like, the other being their "children" needing food.
The player character's mother was killed in her sleep, most likely by Mama Tattletail.
That's why she never comes out of her room. Maybe, in the good ending, when the player is instructed to
wake her up, Tattletail uses his powers to bring her back to life. Alternatively,
the ritual is what
brought her back to life, and at the end of the game, you really are just waking her up from her sleep.If the player hadn't put the tape in Mama, then she wouldn't have hunted them down. She didn't do anything out of the norm before the tape was inserted, and who's to say that the tape didn't make her, or another Mama cause the
Eye Scream incident? During Mama's time in the basement, the tape could have appeared or
haunted around that time, just waiting to be inserted.
The ritual that destroyed her tape and banished the soul within may have restored Mama to her regular toy state. Plus, since the aftermath of the ritual sealed all five Tattletails back into their present boxes, it could easily have undone Mama's...appearance changes, too. Therefore, the Tattletails can still be one happy family...- Another possibility is that Mama only attacks people who misbehave while playing with the Tattletails. She first appears when the player breaks a vase; perhaps if the player hadn't done that, they wouldn't have come to Mama's attention.
The Tattletails toy line is a failed attempt at child-protecting robot guardians.
The regular little Tattletails are capable of sensing danger, making loud noises, and having needs that force a kid to keep moving. It sounds dangerous and stupid and you end up being pissed at your stupid toy that won't shut up when you're trying to hide, sure, but if the goal of the toy line is to make sure missing children are found, it makes perfect sense. A kid who feels threatened or gets abducted might be inclined to hide, but that means it's harder for their parents or the police to find them; having a toy that demands its needs be met would cajole a kid into keeping moving and making noise, calling attention to their presence and making it more likely that they'll encounter an adult who will help, or that the noise will scare off a predator afraid of being caught.
On top of this, the Tattletails seem tailor-made for fighting ghosts, of all things. Mama has a cassette deck (which, if she can record, means she can detect EVP), weird tracking and movement abilities, and the little Tattletails are capable of performing exorcisms. Why give toys these abilities unless you're completely certain that ghosts are a thing? The company (maybe in the wake of all those Freddy Fazbear murders?) put together a toy franchise that could serve as a safeguard against threats that most people don't take precautions against because they just don't believe those threats exist.
However, the programmers fucked up: Mama misinterprets "children" as being her children, the little Tattletails, not human children in general. That dead/attacked employee in the VHS recordings wasn't Mama casually murdering a human, it was a simulation to see how Mama would react to a break-in. Mama only shows up to attack the player after she hears a breaking noise in the middle of the night, and finds them holding one of her babies: she has no idea that you're a kid playing with a toy, she thinks you're a home-invading thief trying to kidnap a child.
Just to make sure that you suffer for the sins that Mama believes you've committed.
The player's mother is on some sort of sleeping medication.
For some reason, you can't wake her up at night, she can't hear the grinding noises Mama makes, no matter how much you knock she never wakes up. At first, it seemed like she just wasn't there, but on Christmas morning, you have to wake her up to end the game. So, maybe she has some sort of disorder that makes it hard to sleep, so she takes sleeping pills at night?
Waygetter is a front for another toy making company.
Tattletails are not inherently malicious entities. They just want to play, it just so happens that they can be a bit of a handful when they play. They also seem able to 'process' some food (anything they can't process obviously ending up in an egg). It's also peculiar how this children's toy knows how to assemble a ritual on its own.
Even Mama isn't inherently evil, she's just a tad bit overprotective of her babies.
Tattletail isn't a Waygetter product, Waygetter probably doesn't even exist. Tattletail and Mama are the brainchildren of one Dr Wondertainment.
The Tattletails will return, but will return the same year Furbys were revived...2005.
A quote from
The Other Wiki:
"2005 saw the reintroduction of Furby with the release of the new Emoto-Tronic Furby." I am not sure what was so different between these ones and the original Furbys. If anybody knows, feel to add.
Who says that Waygetter went out of business? They could very well make more Tattletails to bring back the year 2005, the SAME YEAR Furbys were brought back to the market for the next generation....
Alternatively, the Tattletail that the protagonist gets is part of the rebooted line, and Mama Tattletail was only part of the original line.
The game takes place in an
Alternate History where technology progressed further faster than it did in our time. This would explain three things:
- Why there are technologies in place, namely the shake flashlight and recharge station for the Tattletail, that weren't commonplace in our 1998—it's not our 1998.
- Why the commercial in the trailer said "batteries not included" when Tattletail clearly has a built-in rechargeable battery, as well as why they bothered showing Mama Tattletail at all only to plaster on a message saying she wasn't available—for whatever reason, they decided to just reuse the old commercial. They went the lazy route of not just editing out Mama Tattletail entirely(maybe the format of the old commercial made this difficult, or maybe they just had No Budget), but didn't catch the "batteries not included" bit at the end and therefore didn't think to edit that out either.
- Most importantly, why there's a Mama Tattletail in the house at all despite them being recalled for being dangerous—it belonged to one of the protagonist's parents, who grew up with the original line and somehow never had any problems with her. Either their parents decided that their child got lucky enough with theirs to be able to keep it, or the child pretended to have lost it so they wouldn't have to give it up. If only the future parent had known the trouble they'd be subjecting their future child to....
- And lest you ask "Why would Mama Tattletail be protective of Tattletails from a different line that she shouldn't recognize?"—just as they reused the commercials, they reused some old software, so they're similar enough to get her attention.
The game is in the protagonist's mind.
To be clear this is not an "It was all a dream" plot. Rather what is going on is that the child in question is letting there imagination and guilty feelings over having broken the rules get the better of them. Mama Tattletail never leaves her corner in the basement, all the avoidance is the protagonist avoiding there actual half asleep mom who heard them up and about. The jumpscares are them panicking when they get caught and yelled at for there misbehavior. The reason
the ending without all the eggs is mama tattletail jumpscaring you is because without collecting them the characters mom figured out what had been going on. Where the golden ending has no evidence left behind and they get away with it.- How do you explain that demonic banishing ritual on the last night with this theory?
And this video will explain why.
The Waydrives are infused with the souls of those murdered by Waygetter Electronics.
Well, this is a pretty common theory by now, but I think it deserves mentioning. The Tattletails definitely show signs of sentience, and the Waydrives are responsible for giving them their "unique personalities." Not to mention, that, when asked about how the Waydrives work, the Waygetter Electronics member being interviewed says quite suspiciously, "It's a family secret."
The Kaleidoscope is actually some sort of Subliminal Message machine.
Partially tied with the
All Just a Dream,trope mentioned earlier, there are some hints lying around in the Kaleidoscope DLC that point to the true purpose of this Eldritch Location. One of the documents you find is a patent, complete with an issue date and ID number. Looking up the number in patent records online (5270800 for those of you who're curious) reveals a design concept for... a subliminal message generator. While this patent and the in-game one are separated by a few years, it's likely more than just coincidence;
especially considering how the Waygetter logo occasionally flickers on-screen in the DLC Tattletail commercial in a manner disturbingly similar to subliminal messaging in other media...It's the start of The Kaleidoscope DLC - because the player couldn't find the eggs, Mama Tattletail was
Not Quite Banished, and her final
Jump Scare isn't her coming back to physically rip apart the player, but to
mentally rip apart their mind,
taking their memories of her and Baby Tattletail with her into her prison in the Kaleidoscope.
The Tattletail brand is a direct attempt by Waygetter to make "occult rituals" more child-friendly.
...And they technically succeeded. People
brought their toys despite the very obvious dying employees shown about throughout the video, and they were apparently popular. Perhaps they even used
Hollywood Voodoo to attract customers.
The Tattletail brand is actually directly advertising assassin toys.
Yup, you heard me. They allowed to show their employees dying on the adverts as a way to promote that, "hey! we have robots that can kill in secret!" to people who don't want to commit murders themselves. Perhaps our protagonist's parents even
knew this, and brought their child a Tattletail toy, either hoping that their child would never find out the true nature of the toys... or they
wanted to kill their own child.
