post #22: the religiosity of FNAF (trauma; resurrection; christ)

     I have been called out in a recent FNAF theory video (not directly, but directly enough). and it's been making me feel some type of way. I've meditated on my feelings for a day now, and here's where i'm at with things:

     If I formatted things correctly, the image meming my position (which I think was in a friendly joking manner -- i.e., the image agrees with its argument but isn't intended to cause harm to what it pokes fun at) will be provided above or below or something. In any case, the heart of the argument is that there is a portion of the FNAF theory community who read(s) crying child (cc)/bite victim (bv) as a "godlike entity capable of reshaping reality itself". lo and behold, i am one such person. I interpret the meme as saying that, while some people view cc as a godlike figure, given such things as how the franchise has unfolded and comments made by the author in interviews, reading cc and the events of daytime fnaf 4 as symbolic (i.e., not literal) is a more defensible interpretation since it's more cognizant of common narrative trends used in prequel media. I think I agree with this point, in a sense. .... but I'm still in a type of way where I want to believe that cc is a godlike figure. i want it to be true, perhaps even it is that i need it to be true. let me explain that some more (and in the process explain some of the thinking behind my fnaf Black Dresses AMV )

[^^ the meme in question ^^]

     Reading CC as a godlike entity essentially means reading him as a christ-like figure. His suffering saved the world. He suffered for the weight of the world. Et cetera. Given Scott's religiosity is something Scott has said in interviews as being something that grounds him or is very important to him, I think this argument has merit. (See, for example, Scott's quote "My relationship with God through the years has been absolutely essential, and only now can I look back and see what He has done."). A point that both detracts from and adds to this is that religion is never explicitly mentioned in the games made using the Clickteam game engine (FNAF1-6 + UNC). The lack of explicit mention could detract from the validity of reading CC as christ-like. That is, a non-religious text having a fundamentally, transcendentally religious theme clashes with the non-religious nature that apparently governs the text. If not a transgression outright, it would at least make it difficult to make such a reading work. At the same time, the lack of explicit mention of religion makes me think that -- again since Scott has made it known how fundamental religion is to him as a person -- religious themes nevertheless inform the texts of fnaf albeit in more thematic or sublimated ways (in the same ways that religion would inform a religious person's day-to-day life). Even stepping down from the most extreme claim of saying that CC is a christ-like figure, I think it's reasonable to argue that FNAF emulates many religious (Christian) themes. Examples include sin, damnation, hell, resurrection, passing into the afterlife, etc. The hardest christian theme to deny as pertaining to FNAF is the theme of resurrection / Lazarus. Michael Afton comes back from the dead. William Afton comes back from the dead. Crying child,, somewhat comes back from the dead. Arguably, most of the murdered children in the original Clickteam games come back from the dead (in some capacity). Sister Location offers the most explicit instances of resurrection -- with both the aforementioned Michael Afton resurrection cutscene and the Elizabeth --> Baby cutscene / narrative. When expanding the frame of consideration to FNAF media post-UCN, the presence of religion becomes straight up explicit. In the short story, "The Man in Room 1280," a priest or whatever shows up to the hospital to deliver rites over William Afton's burnt, comatose corpse. This action kills Afton, causing him to explode into evil energy and, dot, dot, dot, become resurrected again. I haven't read the short story, to be clear, but from what I understand, it (and the character of the priest) is/are narratively essential to the overarching story of the Fazbear Frights anthology books. (I don't know how essential it is that the character is a priest -- but he is a priest and what he does is narratively essential, so).

     A religious reading of FNAF has additional merit when done in tandem with a historiography of the series and its narrative(s). THe first game was about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese. It got popular and then it got a sequel. The second game has a more fleshed out story which is then set up to end in the third game (and then the fourth one, and then the world one,,, etc.). In other words, FNAF starts as a chaotic, non-narrativic text. FNAF 1 has narratives, yes but not a Grand Narrative. There's no creation story and there's no second coming or anything like that. FNAF becomes an ordered text by continuing as a series -- it becomes a narrative with primordial qualities. The transformation of FNAF as chaotic into FNAF as Grand Narrative happens most legibly within the (release of the) games FNAF 4 / FNAF World. In these games, we learn about the Crying Child, and in the crying child, the grand narrative gets a christ-like figure. Through him and his story, everything else gains meaning. It is his suffering, it seems, which sets the world into motion. I've been circling the drain on the issue until now, but my point here is that religion emerges in FNAF (the text[s] AND the community coalescing around it/them) for the same reason / in the same way as it does (in my opinion) in the real world. Religion is a cultural technology for ordering the chaos of life and creating community out of the rituals enshrined in that process. I wonder if there's similarities between the ways people go to church to hear about the testaments of the Lord and how people show(ed) up to MatPat videos to learn about the suffering of the Crying Child and the divine punishment of William Afton. A more concrete similarity (to the mechanisms of Christianity) is in the invention of the FNAF "community" -- a virtual space where people exchange interpretations of the FNAF series as they might readings of the Bible. (Consider, for example, the contentious issues of "canon" in both spaces). These community discourses are the primary ways FNAF has maintained its longevity and retained cultural relevance. And these are the contexts where the Crying Child is most tangibly sanctified. Prior to the video calling my kind out (indirectly; not as a personal attack), at least two sanctifying videos released this month (April 2025) -- FNAF-ology's "FNAF 4 isn't Real (but not in the way you think)" and Sodal's "[FNaF Theory] The Second Retcon". Each offered readings of the crying child's story that imagined him having the ability to rearrange reality and the world itself (precisely what the meme in question pokes fun at).

     Being a CC-is-godlike-entity believer myself, I have some sense of what might motivate someone to think in these terms. In order to explain this, I need to bring Black Dresses into the conversation, but I'll get to more on that in a second. To begin with, the thing about chaos is that it's traumatic, and pointless. It doesn't build to anything. If life is chaotic then it doesn't have a point. If a narrative is chaotic, then, ultimately, it isn't likely a narrative. What's important in viewing the crying child as a christ-like figure is not the fact that Christ is the Messiah and is tied up in the Rapture and all of that. No, what's important is that Christ suffered (perhaps the ultimate trauma -- death; but also, persecution; abuse from the world itself) and because of that He resurrected. Christ was killed and born anew, and, in being reborn, he became more powerful -- or at least more able to enact change on the world. Suffering is thus a productive act. Pain is not chaos, it is order not yet revealed. The same could probably be said for the narrative of the Fall more broadly, but I'm not worrying about that because this is a discussion of the crying child and Christ.

[^^ album cover for Black Dresses' album, _WASTEISOLATION_ ^^]

     Black Dresses is/was a Canadian noise pop band, is probably what Wikipedia says. (I'll use present tense to refer to the band going forward). The band consists of two members, Ada Rook and Devi McCallion, who each worked as solo musicians before and after coming together to form the band. Black Dresses' first album, WASTEISOLATION, released on April 13, 2018. While not Easter Sunday (it's like a week and a half after), the timing of the album's release was nevertheless situated as co-occurring with a broader Eastertide tradition. Further, the album's cover art depicts Rook and McCallion standing together in a church underneath a crucifix. While I can't dredge it up right now, I remember hearing or reading in an interview comments from one or both of the members stating that this timing was intentional -- that they wanted to (symbolically) like their image to Christ's. I don't know either artist personally, so I won't speak for them authoritatively (in fact assume going forward that what I say is my interpretation of their music and personas), but from what I understand both members experienced traumatic events in their childhoods. I think the specific traumas they encountered were different from those I've dealt with or the ones we see the crying child experience, but the fact of (childhood) trauma is what's important. I mention this backstory to the artist's personas because their music repeatedly explores themes of trauma, healing, and the difficulties of moving on. They wrangle, almost endlessly, it seems, with their pains and their (former) proximities to those who've hurt them. "What does it really take to want to hurt a child?" asks Devi McCallion in the song "Mistake," concluding that "It seems like it's not much for a lot of people." Throughout the song, Devi grapples with the vulnerabilities of being a child -- of being someone who's simultaneously curious and excited about the world and yet forced into precarity by being younger than the people born before them (e.g., parents, etc.); "when you're a kid y'know, you wanna try and understand the world // Try and find your place in it // People love to tell you your place in it but, // Isn't that just for them?" At the same time as the song explores childhood curiosity it is also about the impossible search for meaning, the desire for order in a chaotic, creul world. Importantly, though, this search for meaning is happening at multiple levels simultaneous. The song is about being a kid and trying to learn arcane knowledge on the internet but it's told by reflecting on the experiences of being a kid (the singer is not a kid while they sing it) and thus the project of the song becomes about making the trauma of childhood (in general) have meaning. What if not this is FNAF and the phenomenon of theorizing it?

     Well anyways, in making art about their trauma, Black Dresses engage with a process of sanctification (a process of ordering and arresting order from the violence and chaos of the past traumas of youth). Through making music, their personas remake themselves. Looking at Black Dresses' output from a macro level, they don't seem to have been healed, and yet the wounds seem to look different now. In my opinion, Black Dresses' narrativization of trauma is illustrated most obliquely in their album, Forever in Your Heart -- a text that explores childhood trauma in a full throated way, declaring, it seems, that it's willing to weather any storm and look the thing in the eye; to push its way through time and space and pummeling rock and splintering sun in order to pierce through the matter to its very core; to pull out the heart of the beast and slaughter it one and for all. Eventually, though, as is always the case, they bow out. They have to. It's too violent in there, sputtering blood and preventing breath. "Why does it always feel like healing // Is kinda like removing a vestigial limb?" asks Rook's character on the band's final/breakup album, LAUGHINGFISH. Eventually you have to turn back around and face the vicissitudes of life.

[^^ album cover for Black Dresses' album, _Forever in Your Heart_ ^^]

     So yeah, this is why I used Forever in Your Heart album as the soundtrack to my FNAF AMV. This is what I think FNAF is about. (And I think about FNAF when I listen to this album). From its traumatic beginning and even more so from the trauma that came to inhabit the series' narrative core, the games and their author wrangle endlessly with the unbearable task of undoing -- of hopelessly trying to make things better (of finding peace with the inevitable truth that you'll have to wake up tomorrow and face the terrors all the same). And I think both texts are transcendent. I think they reach a resolution (in their failure to heal trauma, in their failure to move on, in their attempts to close things out once and forever again, and, again). I think these texts are embodiments of love. I think these texts come to accept themselves as beautiful. ...

     But there's also the existing trends for how prequels are composed, and maybe that makes more sense for what's happening in FNAF 4 with the crying child. Grand Narratives are helpful, but they aren't always Truthful. I'm prone to viewing the art I consume as meaningful. But sometimes I end up hallucinating things. I don't think that's bad, necessarily, it's just the way it is... And sometimes you're wrong when you want so badly to be right. I don't know what to do then. You move on, I guess. But I don't want to. (But I have to). Admitting I could be so fundamentally wrong is painful. So right now I'll hold on. Christ is real. He will come back. He's a crying child at heart, just like me. He has experienced pains and they meant something, just,, like, me..? He helped people move on with his pain... just,,, like,,, me ?

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

getting to reuse assets, woo!