hello i am going to explain to you how fnaf drives children insane, plz listen if you want to and those who dont want to plz dont irreverently undercut this with a snide comment and be polite plz
FNAF functions as a post-modern mythos akin to Evangelion, but it's denied the same dignity for its conventionally incompetent craft. Yet it is this failure which imbues it obsession inducing character, which its shares with the contradictory, obtuse, and sincere dogma of the belief systems which molded Cawthon's mind. It was a cry for help by a Gen X American dad out in Dallas who went to church, worked with a blue collar, cared for a nuclear family, and who was plain broken by an emaciated wallet and emotional failure by the institutions he trusted for guidance. FNAF never fully realizes this, it always falls short of a proper long-term answer to its issues, this is why its special to me, it's like sorta my Bible but not sacred so basically my Bible lol.
The narrative's devil, William Afton, is the shadow of Scott, what he fears most. A man driven neurotic by the American Dream, whose every creation biological or mechanical was made to be sacrificed for it, who burns away the peace of others in pursuit, becoming his own hellfire. Mike the son of Afton, operating within the systems laid out by his authorities, who desires his own death but also to return what his father stole from his victims. He is the pragmatic protagonist who lives a farce of a lower-class American's status quo, endangering his life for the selfish, those out of necessity and for greed. David second son and the crying child, tormented by the creations of those up the social food chain, who has no one to trust and rely on but stitched caricatures of the faces of the furry friends, even those being crafted by the abuser who put him together. Elizabeth the only feminine presence of the family, who tears apart David's friends, who joins his antagonists out of the same twisted definition of love he once held for them. The two youngest would then proceed to die by William's negligence and malice, like all of those he hurt the most. Mike wanted to save them. William wanted to save them. The Emilys, whom Afton mistook for his American Myth come true. Henry wanted to save them, Charlie the daughter of the same man who Afton obsessed over and who he killed, after death she tried to save them. She couldn't, no one could. Cawthon tried to do the same, he gave his creations heaven and he gave his creations hell but their power over others and themselves halted all recovery, he led them away from the light.
And then... he said good night.
This doesn't capture everything I want to say about these games but it express the most the most coherently.
All of this communicated via arcadey point and click games with convoluted easter eggs with graphics comprised of manipulated low-res 3D rendered images. Made by a man who used to make PC shovelware for and direct-to-dvd religious cartoons for decades. A story whose only on-screen characters are designed Like This.
Scott Cawthon would become like the coolest Marxist Furry artist if he just saw the vision dude, it's crazy. He made a fucking internet folk-religion. Unreal.