post #1: Thoughts on Mascot Horror (as motivated by Poppy Playtime chapter 4)

[i don't usually mention this type of thing, but ill give a disclaimer at the top that this post includes potential spoilers for poppy playtime (most relevently chapter 4 i think)]

   *note about the usage of terms such as "mascot horror:" i'm only familiar with fnaf, poppy playtime, and indigo park, in that order. as for poppy playtime, i only learned about it today, and as for indigo park, i only know about it vaguely, in passing. this is to say that it's quite possible that what i say here as applying to "mascot horror" only applies to my availability heuristic image of the genre. take that as you will.

   *note about the usage of terms such as autistic: while dsm has diagnostic criteria, im of the belief that not really such a thing as a crystalized embodiment of autism -- one autistic person is one autistic person yadda yadda. and so i mean these terms to be metonyms for that these are types of experiences.; in other words, i'm gesturing at the phenomena of chronic sensory issues, (subjects) of ableism and, in the greater extreme, ideologies of eugenics etc. (in other words: being in a body that gets read opposite by others outside of you; the propotypical example is living in what is read by others as a horrifying body when it's actually a child getting read as monstrous, or in any case nonsensical).


     OBSERVATION ONE: mascot horror as autism allegory: see for example the animatronics in the original fnaf; in the latest poppy playtime ,you have doey who is very much coded autistic; see patricia taxxon's video on dhmis. while i dont have those experiences personally, it seems like there could be affinity between what she is talking about there and whats happening in games like fnaf (sister location) and poppy playtime (idk about earlier ones, but at least as for chapter 4)

     by autism allegory, i mean to gesture at such things as a certain kind of embodiment, not being understood/read by others, and experiences of ableism and abuse. ostensibly this post is about mascot horror, however i mostly talk about poppy playtime -- i want to take a moment and diverge from that pattern as well to give examples of what i mean using fnaf, the progenitor mascot horror as case study. in fnaf (1), the animatronics are machines haunted by the spirits of dead children. i would say even when it first came out, i interpret the original intention to be something like that this game is about scary animatronics but they're actually ghost children haunting machines who don't know any better. i cant say how generalizable it is, but i think there's a way to figure the text to make it analogous to special education readings. people in special education at my high school were allowed to roam the halls during classes but during lunch and otherwise they had to stay locked in the classroom. i remember overhearing frequent ableist remarks from peers observing this routine. similar ableist sentiments would be shared when people in special education were visibly stimming in the hallways. while a reading of fnaf that maps onto some of these facts would undeniably be reductive i can synthesize easily enough the image of foxy running down the hallway humming his, "dum da da dum dum, dum da da dum dum" with images i saw in high school. i think its worth mentioning that i engaged with fnaf images at a similar time, so there could be some extent of cross contamination coloring my imagination.

      regardless of how precise a match it is, the contour is still that, in essence, fnaf characters are clunky beings [i mention this attempting to suggest dyspraxia and other disabilities which are often comorbid with autism; also just the general way that living in an autistic body can intercept one's vestibular sense -- see also pain tolerances and things in this vein] for whom their guardians and other people who hold power over them often don't understand (or misunderstand) what they're trying to communicate.

     i think its also worth cautioning that being autistic / disabled does not mean just being a child, as sometimes the stereotype can be, and so the facts that the fnaf animatronics are [supposedly "just"] children -- anyways, i could see how that could be misconstrued as saying this other thing. i don't know the precise verbiage, but its nevertheless my understanding that people in the autistic community find resonances with the image of being a child. the proper way of clarifying this would be something like, the socialized platonic conception of a "child" has overlapping characteristic with being austistic, such as being misunderstood by people older than you or being not as much able to read social cues. context dependent etc., but i've seen permutations of child metaphors expressed by a number of autistic people. and so that is to say that in these fictional texts where the fact of a character being a child is not literal, i think there's room for reading some of these children as narrative short hand for being autistic. in any case, mascot horror games are often about how children are ostracized and abused by people in power; both these criteria can also apply to autistic people.

[^^ Doey the Doughman ^^]

     >>the most concrete example in the latest chapter of poppy playtime i would say would be doey, the doughman -- a new character for the chapter. i think he's a deutorogonist or whatever the term is. they're technically a good guy, but then the player has to do a boss battle against them after the player (unintentionally?) backstabs doey; doey comments on sensory topics frequently. the one i remember the most is during the boss fight (when he's crashing out) and he just keeps repeating over and over again "too loud" "too loud" "too loud" in a writhing sort of pain. see also doey's death by hydraulic press (ive heard expressed from other adhders and autistics something like the desire to be crushed by a hydraulic press; usually this is metonymic for a desire for some compressive for to deal with sensory regulation issues -- nevertheless, the image [and being crushed by it] have neurodivergent connotations)

     >>is doey as system a reading worth considering? i think so, and it's interesting the various ways that the series is playing around with system characters right now; though it seems to be baffling people not familiar with the identity and pronoun usage (is my reading of game theory reaction to characters i read as system-coded) ; see also, patricia taxxon's video about its recent considerations of whether she is a system and what that means for them -- notably that one of the alters is specifically rambley raccoon from indigo park, (the mascot from the mascot horror game); i haven't heard anything suggesting it sees her experience in an autistic body as related to the condiseration of its host as potentially hosting a system

     >>kissy, another poppy playtime character (the gender swapped version of huggy wuggy, the series' main mascot) -- from chapter 2 onward -- is coded as nonverbal, i think (ive only really watched part 4 [and then gone back and watched some theory videos from the past few years] but is my reading from what i saw)

     >>sticking still with poppy playtime; it seems like there's a trend in the children patients (who get tortured and experimented on) that the ones explicitly mentioned in the provided documents are often stated to be troublesome (in a personality disorder kind of way -- iirc , something like that language gets used explicitly)

[^^ Kissy ^^]

     with this, its worth giving a disclaimer that i think there's an argument to be made that portions of what (poppy playtime) speaks to maps onto disability in a more generalized sense. we're still less that 100 years away from the holocaust, and so its probably impossible not to read images of people in gas chambers and not think of the nazi genocide. i would also point to eugenics in the japanese context -- which was a wartime and especially postwar policy. the holocaust, that is, did not target exclusively jewish people. Nazi eugenics also targetted romani people, disable people and people who would now be considered queer and trans (among others). of course, there can be and often is a large amount of overlap between the categories. Being jewish, for example, doesn't mean you couldn't also be disabled (my sense -- and i don't have any numbers by my side when saying this -- is that especially as the concentration camps became more industrialized, so to speak, disability would have also emerged from within the inprisoned population. given that i mentioned autism in the previous paragraph, though, its also worth considering what used to be classified as aspergers, what was the result of asperberger's (a nazi) study into neurodivergent people who might be able to weaponize their disability for the nazi cause. Being autistic doesn't mean being a nazi or having a superpower, but the classification of aspergers has these contexts and histories. I don't know that much about poppy playtime, but it seems like in characters such as the doctor, there could be some parallels to these types of nazi ideologies around disability and eugenics. that the non-human non-player characters are titled "experiments" lends a similar image as the various nazi projects of white supremacy (experimenting on prisoners through torture et cetera -- what we see in poppy playtim as well).

     whatever is going on with religion in poppy playtime i don't know. possible this could relate to nazism and the occult -- certainly the cult personality of hitler could be made an argument for

     also, game theory refuses to mention it, but the historical context of poppies shouldn't be waived away too readily -- what with the opium war and the proceeding century plus of colonial/semicolonial teriterrialization of east asia, especially china and hong kong. though i have no idea how that fits into the text and contrary to the holocaust, this is over a century year old, so it's perhaps an unfortunate side effect of a symbol selected for other purposes

[^^ Poster for 赤い天使 / Red Angel (1966), a film about Japan's wartime eugenics practices which targeted disabled people ^^]

     OBSERVATION TWO: modern day periodical release : though a more orchestrated version, compare it to , say, great expectations or the scarlet gang of asakusa , that model of releasing (granted thats mostly with literature and this is a different thing). there are other similar things in current popular culture such as fan fiction that are periodic and also literary. differences in all of these things and so i dont mean to be saying stuff is direct syllogism. neverthless i find the affinity (possibility for) interesting and worth considering further in the future.

     >>the comparison point for what would make mascot horror distinguished would be -- looking at poppy playtime -- the portal games in comparison to poppy playtime. there's probably a case to be made for fnaf or other mascot horror games, but i don't know much about other mascot horror games and fnaf doesn't have a strong genealogy for what to compare it to in terms of genre precedents. While portal still engages in storytelling across installments (and, crucially, across media -- this is a component of present day video game story telling which i think deserves more consideration), i would argue that each portal game is more conclusively telling its own story, and its thus more so the case that these are separate stories in the same continuity, versus poppy playtime which is explicitly (as for the games) one story being released in multiple installments. My sense though is that there's not a strict bifurcation, and thus there's some kind of leniency for what counts as installment and what doesn't. (For example the hunger game book series -- probably this is not installments, but then the move adaptation for the third book released in installments [what is an increasing trend for movie rollout])

     >>something to be considered about what a "work" of art is. one complaint i saw frequently for the wicked movie that came out in december 2024 was that this movie is so long and yet is only the first act of the musical, what gives? that is, i saw people frustrated with that this finished movie released as an unfinished story. i feel that there's room for complication in this regard.

     >>i almost can't not think that poppy playtime in part exists just to canonize mat pat's notorious theory about portal cubes being made of human flesh; as has been discussed for however long its been since that video came out (see portalpilled's video "Debunking EVERY point of Game Theory's Portal Companion Cube video.") it seems pretty likely that this reading of portal is not what the storytellers / game designers were going for with their narrative / story world. however, given that poppy playtime is in some way spelling out an almost identical articulation of this idea (in broad strokes , so maybe that undoes the almost identical ness), i would say the intentionality of the text going into it not only makes the reading more valid, but also lets the reading open up more considerations of the text, its themes, and its world




(note about my misconceptions: poppy is not huggy, poppy is some doll?? and the whole thing, i didnt ever know beyond the scary huggy images, huh -- i never knew what it was all about)
(to preface for this last point: i still haven't played fnaf and i've only just now watched parts of a playthough of poppy playtime, but seeing poppy playtime chapter 4, im even more baffled by how security breach but moreso ruin came out. i can pretend that its understandable with security breach given that its an open world [theoretically] game -- though the supreme-unoptimization is still side-eye-worthy -- so ruin thus bears the greater brunt of this 'what happened bro?' as its gameplay is linear in a roughly equivalent way)