Post #18: FNAF theories and the pursuit of beauty

now that i have hit my most recent peak as a video artist, i will get back to writing about my thoughts on things.

      essentially my thesis is this: fnaf theories -- especially within the last year -- are not actually about uncovering a narrative or assembling a logical puzzle. Although FNAF theories may use signifiers associated with these strategies (or my directly engage in these strategies), in my opinion, the end goal is ultimately a pursuit of beauty. The object of theory is always FNAF, as a text.* (*which text that is / is not varies, of course.) And it is a sublime object. While theory engages with narrative in the sense of ordering chaos and generating hallucinatory meaning, the function is NOT narrational. To clarify: FNAF, as a text, often signifies an interest in beginnings and endings but fnaf theories don't actually engage with these signifiers on terms that accept them as what they declare themselves to be. When I say that FNAF is a sublime object I mean that it is slippery AND ineffable -- it literally steps outside of time and operates outside of language and all the conventional heuristics for symbolically conveying meaning (or narrative). FNAF is authored and ostensibly this matters to theories. However, theories treat authorship in such a peculiar way that Scott Cawthon, the nebulous and symbolic authorial figure, explodes in on himself like a blown out speaker. More recently, theories have begun to offer provisions of "this based off the storytelling that Scott has expressed he likes to do... or that he has done in the past..." but I think this is a sidestep of the issue or, at best, symptomatic of something else.

      The crisis of theory is something primordial. It is a desire for knowledge, yes, but also no. Theory uses the language of epistemology but what it's actually about, in my opinion, is the pursuit of beauty. Somehow FNAF is beautiful and sublime and incandescent, but it's completely indescribable. This beauty, it must be understood, is secrete by the very maelstrom of culture and contexts that both shreds up and situates the text. FNAF is games and books but these games and books are inseparable from the community which has expressed interest in them. Community labor generates FNAF and spurs it into continued being. And community and labor and generation are beautiful objects and they are inseparable from fnaf and thus fnaf is all that more beautiful. But in being so beautiful, it is also that much harder to describe.

      Fnaf theories also reckon with trauma and pain and the horrific weight of being and being alive and the unimaginable terror of death and of undeath. fnaf theories circle the drain on the themes that fundamentally propel the text and in so being, theorizing fnaf is about exploding the self. i am in pain, i have these qualities about me, here is this thing that is so painful i can hardly breath, i can hardly believe. i can't even feel love anymore the text tells me, and it seems like it has a pulse, and it seems like it is writhing under there. let me dig you out. let me excavate your corpse. let me mutate you into something beautiful. something intimate. something altogether new and strange and wonderful and horrific and vile and vulnerable. let us work together. let me have you all to myself. let me steal you from the world. let me arrest you from evil, from goodness, from incompetence, from the burden of knowing. let me poison you. let me slice off your face, two or three times. let me give you water and the wounds of life. let me do all of these things because i am in the pursuit of beauty. i want to know what it is you are. i want to be someone who knows things. i want the world to have meaning. i know there is meaning. i know there are things. i know you are something. i know you are beautiful. because, THERE. IS. BEAUTY. IN THE WORLD.. (but can we make something beautiful,, with NO hope?)

to be beautiful ... it's all you want to be ... and so you rot into a pile of rusted trash and black blood oozes from your eyes ...

[^^ my fnaf interpretation of the cover art for black dresses' "Forever In Your Heart" ^^]

(for more information see this video I made)