post #3: mascot horror: a failure of anticapitalist critique?

   Note: I initially drafted this in my dreams last night, but when I first woke up, I was too eepy to write it down and thus ended up falling asleep again. I think I still remember broad enough strokes, so I'll do my best to capture what my dreaming self came up with.

     I've been thinking about this in a broad / general sense for a little bit now. Yesterday I watched a theory video about the new Poppy Playtime chapter speculating that perhaps the evil company's former CEO (Elliot Ludwig) will be revealed to be the big bad, aka the Prototype. The YouTuber says that some people don't think this would be the case because the CEO is canonically such a kind and nice guy (even though after he disappeared authorities found a dead boy on his property?). The YouTuber goes down a path of saying, well, but maybe narratively or whatever, he's had a change of character (for some reasons and hypotheses she moves through). I'm not really interested in that route of litigation. What strikes me more is that this seems like an easy calculus. A character is a CEO? They're evil, in some kind of way. That level of capital accumulation necessarily requires wide scale exploitation. That the company Elliot Ludwig ran was cartoonishly evil, like genuinely doing Nazi shit on kidnapped orphan children matters, in a sense, but, at least in my preferred version of the world, this would be for to magnify the innate evilness of the system Playtime Co. emerged from and is sustained within. In other words, I'm not sure why it's apparently a radical position to say that CEOs are not nice people and that the CEO of a child killing factory is probably an even more not nice person. Like why is the pro-CEO propaganda being entered into consideration? I'm not sure I follow the logic on that. That this discussion is happening (the trial of Elliot Ludwig) and the relations of capital are being ignored, especially the relations of the workers to the company are being ignored, I feel like this indicates a supreme failure of what I assumed was anti-capitalist storytelling on part of Mob Entertainment (that is, the whole of Poppy Playtime).

[^^ my drawing of what it might look like for a security guard to run into the animatronics roaming the halls ^^]

     I start with this example, but I want to work through these ideas more fully using the case of FNAF as that's what I'm more familiar with, and in any case there's more flesh to dig through there. So FNAF too is ostensibly a series about how evil and crooked the Fazbear Corporation is (or Fazbear LTD or whatever it's incorporated as). And yet, I don't remember ever hearing people use political theory as grounds for considering the series. Most people I see approaching the subject even (of a critical analysis of the fictional Fazbear Entertainment Corporation) do so in the regular FNAF hermeneutic fashion of only working with the tools the series gives you for evaluation. That is, the relation of the company to its workers is considered, for example, via the sticky notes and worker logs hidden around the Pizzaplex in Security Breach. The general consensus is that the company, shortly before the game takes place, did a mass execution of all its employees and replaced them with automated labor in the security bots (jury is out on if the workers got literally transformed, if their consciousnesses got transferred, or if it's more of a metaphorical replacement). That's fine, I guess, but I feel like that's stopping pretty short of what seems to be some pretty obvious critiques we can be making of Fazbear Entertainment and, more relevantly, of applying those critiques to the world we all live in together. Sure, FNAF exists in a fiction world, and one that is more and more being severed from our own via its ever expanding world building, but the images and systems that perforate FNAF are not wholly invented -- we have most of them here too, so I'm not sure why there not more of an effort by the Fandom to take those into consideration. I say this, but, in certain spaces, something vaguely approximating this has popped up from time to time -- YouTuber Candi Buunny recently released a video investigating what the video games have to say about justice and how that may reflect on systems of incarceration and punishment in the real world.

     With all this prelude out of the way, what I want to consider is if FNAF is effective anti-capitalist media. For a long time I've assumed it must be because of how cartoonishly evil and transparent the repeating atrocities of the parent company, Fazbear Entertainment, are and continue to be, but that these haven't translated into much introspection or action that I've seen makes me wonder to what extent these images actually interrogate capital. What they would be doing that's not interrogating capital, I don't have a solid grasp on, but options could include using anti-capitalist pastiche to trojan horse the development of a concerted franchise (the FNAF series) or something like to neuter what anti-capitalist action looks like and can be -- relevant perhaps in the sense that this is a series with a majority younger demographic; the theory here would be kids grow up consuming images of Fazbear = evil and not images speaking to the tangible violences of the real world. This last point, though, I wonder if this is a conservative, think of the children's critique, and I'll get into more caveats in a bit.

     In the meantime, join me in considering how FNAF might be falling short of capitalist critique. Staying on the mass execution of Pizzaplex's human labor in Security Breach, for example, I guess it's interesting how consistently the series has invisibilized labor and has never even remotely demonstrated laborers as powerful in their own right. For all the violences in FNAF, it's disproportionately laborers who bear the brunt of the suffering. Even though child deaths and murders started the series (timeline wise), with the likes of BiteVictim dying to Fredbear and at least Charlotte Emily and the children involved in the missing children's incident dying to William Afton, it's employees who start feeling the pinch once the engine of Fazbear, in all it's haunted metallic glory, gets running. Take, for example, the famous "Bite of '87" where an employee got literally lobotomized by an animatronic, potentially even while returning home from work (see this video by Alena's Woodlands for more on that). See also the literal player character, as early as the original Five Nights at Freddy's, where it's been all but a given that people working the night time security position-- that they frequently get killed on the job in often brutal manners, such as be mutilated against the certainty of endoskeleton steel. Then in the Steel Wool era, you have such things as the entire Help Wanted game series (which is literally just employee murder simulator) where you play the day in the life of a Fazbear employee forced into all manner of violent and dangerous situations. Even assuming that the player character wins every mini game (and thus never gets killed jumpscared by any of the animatronics), there's still a veritable treasure trove of lore pretty much exclusively dedicated to explicating all the gruesome ways employees have been used as fuel by both Fazbear Entertainment the parent company and the Mimic-aligned evil entities operating within (e.g., Jeremy from Help Wanted, Tape Girl from Help Wanted, Vanessa from ??? or Player Character [possibly he's still Jeremy] from Help Wanted 2). Employees get slaughtered, yes, but the game never speaks to their ability to possess power in and of themselves. Employees are almost always victims. Even when an employee resists against Fazbear Entertainment or the Mimic, such as the Player Character in Help Wanted 2 seems to be doing at various points, the emphasis there on singularity only magnifies the failure of the series to render the power of laborers. Laborers possess power not because one or two are uniquely talented and can go behind the backs of the execs to play video games at work, but because their labor is the means by which capital accumulates (or even exists in the first place). Laborers have the power to withhold their labor, for example, and can take such actions as go on strike or rally for legislation etc.. Scabs notwithstanding, the Pizzaplex cannot operate (prior to the employee executions) without laborers. Even though these capitalist entities require labor, the series is repeatedly coy about this and takes as a given that laborers will be available to be sacrificed. Corporate expansion is simply inevitable and, in fact, almost happens of its will.

     In a similar way, to work off a video essay script I have drafted but which I likely won't return to, the series is all about how evil and exploitative Fazbear Corporation is, despite its happy go lucky appearance -- how they abuse their workers and turn around and sell these smiling, singing faces (that have rotting, murders kids inside of them) -- and yet, extra-diegetically, FNAF is a merch selling juggernaut. The YouTuber lotodots has an interesting video going over FNAF merch that exists both in the games and real life. This is a strange thing, I think. And yet part of me feels like maybe this is just the consumerist iteration of loving the villain (hello to all the Springtrap lovers, you do you) -- which would be to say that it's something of a conservative critique to say "why you play game that says consumerism bad and yet you consume? checkmate dummy!" I also want to somehow tread the line that FNAF is not unique in its appeal to consumerism -- this is the thing to do these days. It's convenient, in a sense, that FNAF can advertise its merch within its games and just have that be a natural thing as part of its storytelling repertoire, but so what? Honestly, I don't know, so I'll pretend these complications don't exist for the meantime.

     Ignoring counterarguments, the reason I bring up FNAF merch and consumerist culture is that this merch also isn't self-generating. When I was more actively working on this video essay script I'm now interpolating, I tried to track down where some of the manufacturers are that make FNAF figurines, for example, but with what digging I was able to do, all parties were conveniently vague and coy about where they source the labor and the raw materials. However, based on what little information Funko did say, I can say with 80% certainty, that these tchotchkes are being made in exploitative conditions (as is the case for so much these days; [sarcastic] thanks fast fashion [/sarcastic]). I'm writing this on a different computer than that had my original research on it, so I can't pull up the figures right now, but know that in a majority of these vinyl and toy manufacturing facilities in the part of China where Funko says they source their labor, workers are working for the smallest of small pay, in conditions that lack proper temperature regulation and with hours that barely leave time for eating and sleeping, much less living anything of a life outside of the factory. And then I feel I should mention that once these things are manufactured there's the persisting ecological impact they have in that these Funko vinyl figures can't be disposed of in any kind of way, that is, vinyl is made from a non-recyclable plastic that also doesn't biodegrade almost at all. So you just have thousands of Freddies littering landfills around the world. I think this ecological argument probably has holes in it, so know that it's not the main thrust of what I'm trying to say, I just felt it was still worth mentioning. But anyways, the point remains that FNAF claims to critique Fazbear Entertainment and yet in all but the name itself (because sadly Scott Cawthon doesn't have access to magical reanimating soul juice) Scott Cawthon and the various limbs of industry involved in manufacturing FNAF content turn around and replicate the very injustices the apparently wicked Fazbear Entertainment was on blast for doing in the first place.

[^^ my drawing showing what the staff bot employee cull is doing, in effect ^^]

     I think I've said most of what I was planning to say in criticism of FNAF and its shoddy critique of capitalism. Undeniably, I've left holes, but my vague sense is that there's enough of a contour suggested in the above paragraphs to give the sense of what I mean to talk about. I'll close out by contesting my lines of logic. An easy and probably impotent contestation would be to say that FNAF (and mascot horror) is not unique in this regard -- that I go through all this chit chat about FNAF when it's just one head of this complex web of children's media sockpuppeting shoddy systemic criticism. I guess this is true, but in that case, that's just a sign that more work needs to be done, no? Another critique of my argument could be, does FNAF need to criticize capitalism? Does media need to be didactic? I'm not sure. I feel like it would be nice if FNAF followed through on what I perceive to be a promise it makes, that is, to criticize capital, but then again maybe FNAF doesn't actually make such a promise and this is me projecting onto it. I'm blanking on other caveats, so I'll turn to what I planned to be the closing remark: actually, FNAF does critique capitalism, just look at [X,Y,Z things I overlooked]. If something like this exists -- and it very well could, FNAF has had over a decade to mutter all manner of things -- then, yeah, I guess I concede some part of my argument. In fact, I would prefer for this to be the case. I want these mascot horror games to be doing things and saying things and being art that works toward beauty and criticism. So if it turns out that FNAF had the secret sauce all along, then I'm happy for that to happen. Maybe FNAF has never been genuinely interested in critiquing capital, and that's my loss for rambling for so long if that's the case. But if FNAF has wanted to do that at some point or another, and then followed through on that promise, I would be elated.


   I just don't want it to be a Frederick Jameson thing -- where these mascot horror games with dubious practices (such as Scott spending hundreds of thousands to sue people selling knock off fnaf merch or Mob entertainment gatekeeping lore information behind expensive NFTs) use the front of criticizing a caricature of capitalism, only to run around and reinforce it while we're all looking the other way. I don't want it to be, "well as long as you're a good CEO and less evil than Fazbear Entertainment, then, in my book, you're in the clear! :D". That would sting.