The Five Nights at Freddy's series features one of the most profound and complicated lore in popular media. What started as a series of hidden easter eggs has evolved into a secret narrative spanning games, books, graphic novels, and film. Every FNAF fan has personal theories surrounding the franchise's significant events and current trajectory. However, most, if not all, of the fandom considers Five Nights at Freddy's 4 one of the most crucial and earliest events in the series. That is, until a significant reveal in the eighth and final entry of the Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex series, just last month. While the series is chiefly concerned with building the lore of the Mega-Pizzaplex, the latest entry diverges for a single story, pulling back the curtain on Five Nights at Freddy's 4 to devastating effect.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 is widely considered one of the series' most terrifying entries, as it tasks players, in the role of a small child, with surviving the night against large and nightmarish creatures. These monsters, called the Nightmare Animatronics have long perplexed the fandom, as their design and appearance is a massive departure from the traditional animatronic characters featured in every other game. FNAF 4's most significant elements are its lore implications, which play out across a variety of minigames. Players have long believed that the child was Afton’s youngest son, as 8-bit lore sequences depict an event in which Fredbear’s jaw clamped down and killed a small boy, referred to as the Bite of '83. This event and connection form the basis of many FNAF theories. However, fans who remain caught up on the lore are now left questioning everything.

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Tales from the Pizzaplex Pulls Back the Curtain on Five Nights at Freddy's 4

The latest Tales from the Pizzaplex novel included a short story that pulls back the curtain on FNAF 4. Titled DITTOPHOBIA, the story follows a seven-year-old boy named Rory, who awakes to find his previously locked bedroom and closet doors open. Suddenly, nightmarish creatures begin to peak through each open doorway - a decaying fox from the closet, a yellow chick from the right, and a purple bunny from the left. As he flees to his bed, an even scarier brown bear emerges from beneath it and attacks him.

Rory awakens to the comforting hiss of his ceiling fan, and gets ready for the day, with various sounds leading him to assume that his parents are getting ready for work. After readying for school, he realizes the front door to the house is missing. Suddenly feeling drowsy, he searches the whole house, finding only locked doors, until night falls. Giving up the search, he gets ready for bed and locks all of his bedroom doors. Rory relives Five Nights at Freddy's 4's nightmarish cycle over multiple days, until, one day, something changes. While searching for an exit, Rory hears the sound of an engine failing. Suddenly, every sound in the house, except the refrigerator, stops. Feeling tired and confused, Rory gets ready for bed, again locking his bedroom.

The next day, Rory awakens feeling healthy and well-rested, realizing that he did not experience any nightmares that night. However, everything around him is wrong. His legs are long and hairy, and his room is in a state of decay and filth. Rory quickly realizes that he is an adult, and the doors throughout his home, save for his bedroom, are completely fake, with sounds emanating from hidden speakers above them. In the fridge he finds no food, but rows of strange wafers. Even worse, Rory finds a series of steel tracks on the floor, which trace back to hidden closets and trapdoors that house the "monsters" from his nightmares. In reality, the Nightmare Animatronics are just mannequins with large costumes on them. Everything he has experienced is fake, and he has been trapped in this cycle for over 10 years.

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Rory eventually discovers a door in the back of the fridge, leading to a series of tunnels in which he discovers large gas tanks and tubing that feed into the house. It turns out that he was kidnapped as a child and subjected to an automated experiment to study the effects of ongoing fear in children. The researcher, likely William Afton, wanted to know what would happen if Rory faced the same horrors every night, with no external source of comfort or routine during the day to balance the trauma. The comforting hiss he always heard was the gas pumping in, which led him to believe he was living a normal life during the day, and nightmarish attacks each night. Rory discovers that the facility was abandoned ten years ago, and begins to explore rooms branching from the corridor.

It is here that readers learn that Rory is exploring the various rooms from Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, as he describes seeing the observation station, dance floor with Ballora on-stage, the breaker room, a room filled with animatronic parts, and the Funtime Auditorium. Eventually, Rory finds the control module, which leads him to discover blueprints to an "Underground Facility" and an elevator. The discovery of a two-way walkie-talkie leads him to reach out to a childhood friend, who catches him up on his family's existence in the present. Rory almost decides to leave the facility, until a mysterious middle-aged man starts to communicate with him over the facility's speakers.

The mysterious man reminds Rory of how he reached the facility in the first place. It is revealed that Rory ran away from his family, due to relationship, friend, and personal issues. The man reminds Rory of how much simpler life was when he got to be a child forever in the experiment. Rory agrees, going back to the "house", plugging the gas lines back in, and restarting the engine. As Rory stands in the kitchen, he suddenly can't remember why he's opened the fridge. Shrugging it off, he fixes the disheveled food within, closes the door, and gets ready for bed, reinitiating the FNAF 4 experiment.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4's Canonicity is a Paradox

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 is the subject of an immense amount of theories, as its events appear to be critically important, and yet impossible. With DITTOPHOBIA's release, both are proven canonically true. Fans can now explain away the nature of the NIghtmare Animatronics, but to do so eradicates the narrative that many attributed to FNAF 4's gameplay. While the lore minigames and sequences may hold true, there is no longer any certainty that fans were playing as this child at all. While these two factors may seem mutually exclusive, with the game's nights simply a vehicle through which to deliver segments of lore, the disconnect sends shockwaves throughout Five Nights at Freddy's timeline.

The Sister Location bunker is intrinsically tied to the modern Five Nights at Freddy's lore. When it was initially released, fans discovered a secret final night, which sees the player locate and entrench themselves in an observation room. On the desk in the room is a stack of monitors, each showing a different room from the FNAF 4 location, and a map revealed the facility to be connected to the original Fredbear's Family Diner. DITTOPHOBIA's narrative confirms fans' suspicions that these monitors were observing FNAF 4's protagonist. However, fans no longer know who that child was.

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The past few years have seen the Sister Location facility canonically connected to FNAF: Security Breach's Mega-Pizzaplex and Pizzeria Simulator's Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place. In Security Breach and its RUIN DLC, fans can venture from the Pizzaplex to the Pizza Place, which exists directly below it. However, fans also discover a facility housing Tales from the Pizzaplex's Mimic, directly below the Pizza Place. By unlocking RUIN's secret ending, fans can lure The Mimic into a Scooping Room, like the one featured in Sister Location. The connection between the two is emboldened by the reveal trailer for the upcoming FNAF: Help Wanted 2, which sees the player character riding the exact elevator from Sister Location downward, the same detailed in DITTOPHOBIA, which now features one of RUIN's Faz-Wrench puzzles.

While recent shifts in the lore have seen creator Scott Cawthon imply that early FNAF titles were in-universe creations, these games were meant to capitalize on urban legends surrounding Fazbear Entertainment's various endeavors. Hence, DITTOPHOBIA is a significant piece of storytelling, as it both canonizes FNAF 4 as a real event and connects it to the most significant locations in modern lore. The problem is that no one can be sure when FNAF 4 takes place, removing the very first point of the timeline from a majority of the series' most popular theories. Rory's tale describes a series of experiments, of which he was the last.

A larger problem arises when fans learn that Rory endures the experience for at least 10 years before the tale's narrative begins, and an untold amount of time after its ending. There's no telling how long the experiment stretches back and how long it eventually lasts, but Sister Location's secret room appears to display an active observation desk placing it somewhere within the experiment's active period. However, that may not be the case, as the mysterious voice that speaks to Rory seemingly confirms that someone is still presently watching the facility a decade after it has been abandoned.

With so many questions up in the air, Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted 2's return to the bunker will likely shed crucial light on these events and their various connections. Particularly telling will be the point on the timeline in which Help Wanted 2 takes place. Due to the reveals within DITTOPHOBIA, many fans have been left clamoring for an explanation. While FNAF's newest reveal is objectively devastating to many fan theories, it makes the crucial move of canonizing FNAF 4 in a way that opens the door to a deeper narrative. Where that narrative is preparing to take fans is currently a jarring, and exhilarating, unknown.

Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's is a first-person survival horror and resource management game from Scott Cawthorn that raced to popularity thanks to its creepy animatronic enemies and its array of panic-inducing jumpscares. Bringing life to a cavalcade of well-known characters like Freddy Fazbear, Chica, Foxy, Bonnie, and more, Five Nights at Freddy's has seen immense success, spinoffs, and fan games.