#filed under events that make me know i'm living in the right timeline

[kaiminluu]

"when you slam the door i think you know, that you won't be away too long, you know that i'm not that strong"

hi @campbyler you destroyed me

[butchsophiewalten]

haii i like JUST watched the walten files… idk if this blog is still alive, but im tryin to learn the lore and if u could give me a run-down of like the timeline/lore i would rlly appreciate it ^_^ TY!!!

Well i'm definitely still active, but this is kind of a tall ask! Also pretty complicated since there's a lot of fringe stuff that I care a lot about but probably isn't actually that important for a new fan to familiarize themself with right away, and sometimes it's hard for someone like me to differentiate that from the essential stuff. That said, I've written a lot here so it's going under a cut.

Just to cover all my bases: If you've just watched the series for the first time, be sure that you're also checking out the two hidden videos. They're both present in the Official Playlist in the order you're meant to view them, but there's really nothing wrong with watching both of them last, you shouldn't be that confused. These are technically and literally bonus content, but they ARE lore-important.

Also, a mutual of mine, @gir-posting put together a neocities site a while ago specifically with the intention of helping people who are new to The Walten Files get their bearings with it, and you can find that here:

Just as a note and to add my own pedantic criticism, this page eventually guides you towards the series' companion website, Findjackwalten.com, and provides archived links of all* the iterated versions of that site's pages. It's a LOT, don't worry about catching up on everything, it is literally all just bonus content to make the wait between episodes more fun. The Twfinfo page here also calls it an ARG, which i would not consider it by any stretch of the word's definition. It's just a website.

*some pages were never archived and Twfinfo is also missing the most recent findjackwalten update from August 15th.

I recognize that literally none of this is what you asked me for! This is because I honestly have a really difficult time trying to summarize the events of The Walten Files. But this is the part where I try:

In the late 50s, two college friends named Jack Walten and Felix Kranken came up with an idea for animatronic performers that, through the years, would eventually morph into the concept for Bon's Burgers. Sometime between 1968 and 1972, Jack and Felix's company, Bunny Smiles Incorporated, would partner with a company called CyberFun Tech to assist them in their Bon's Burgers project, providing them with resources and engineering expertise to create those animatronic performers they had envisioned. After lots of work, Bon's Burgers was set to open on June 1st, 1974.

This is the part you probably know. On May 2nd, 1974, Jack asked Felix for a favor he was needing. He was doing overtime at the workshop trying to get things ready for the opening, but his two youngest kids, Edd and Molly, needed someone to drive them to a school party they wanted to attend. His wife, Rosemary, couldn't take them, because she was taking his eldest daughter Sophie to the dentist. Felix agreed to the favor. You know what happened then.

This is where it gets fuzzy. After Edd & Molly's disappearances, the Bon's Burgers opening was postponed to June 28th. It seems like Jack and Felix more or less continued to collaborate on the project until Jack's disappearance on June 11th. We have no idea what happened to him after that.

The restaurant opened. At some point presumably between Jack's disappearance and the 30th of June, the animatronic Bon went strange. The lead engineer, Susan Woodings, decided to examine him after noticing some "irregularities" during his performance during the day, and he violently attacked her, then stuffed her damaged-but-still-living body into the animatronic Banny, where she eventually starved to death.

Bon's massacre would continue with the elusive employee, Charles B., who we continue to know next to nothing about except that he ended up in Boozoo, and would finish with Rosemary Walten, who had been returning to the restaurant regularly with hopes of finding her missing husband. The screams heard during Rosemary's attack and dismemberment were reported by the neighborhood and led to the restaurant's immediate closure. All of the restaurants assets, including its animatronic performers, were relocated to a storage unit in the middle of a nearby forest.

Over the years Felix pulled a lot of cheap merchandising schemes to try and keep the Bon's Burgers and Bunny Smiles brand relevant in the consciousness of Brighton. Lots of toys and direct-to-video cartoons and even a reasonably popular television series. In the late 70s he put forward a plan to fix up all the animatronics and reopen the Bon's Burgers restaurant in a new location. The first version of the plan went really terribly, since they just went and hired some teenaged engineers and put them on crunch time to try and fix everything wrong with four half-decade old complicated machines. One of those engineers, Ashley Parks, ended up poking around in some back hallways she wasn't supposed to see and was killed by Bon for snooping. She ended up in the animatronic Billy, who was present at the old Bon's Burgers location but has been kept suspiciously separate from the other animatronics for years.

Flash forward to 1982. Sophie Walten, the only living member of the Walten family, has been living with medication-induced amnesia for years. This is until her girlfriend Jenny introduces her to the BunnyFarm arcade machine, which has just been installed in the basement of the hotel where Jenny and she live. Through the machine, the spirits of her dead friends and family begin communicating with her, and she learns a lot of the information I just relayed to you. And that's where we are, really.

[dreameasel]

How do you feel about the accusations against Percy?

I'll answer this one time and then I won't make any more comments on the matter.

I followed the whole thing from day 1 and was more than willing to accept that the allegations could be real. However, I was also vaguely present for when a girl stole another girl's con photo of her with Joe.sph Qu.inn, claimed it was her and that he'd assaulted her. Which of course, proved to be a false allegation when the actual girl stepped up and said how that was her stolen picture. I've been on the internet since elementary school and have seen how it can be a powerful tool to expose abusers who otherwise would've never seen any justice and also how people will use those same methods to ruin someone else's life. So with all of this in mind I was ready to believe them but if they wanted me to disavow a guy and join in on trying to end his career I needed hard proof.

I followed the entire thing, saw their claims, saw the evidence that was given from their end and the side of people who'd found holes in said claims and evidence. I aimed to try and find people who contesting the claims but weren't Percy stans to try and keep things as unbiased as possible. The claims of the accusers frankly fell apart the more stress they were put under. their timeline was vague and inconsistent, there was at least one event, party they claim he had at his house in Vancouver where things occurred, that he could not have possibly been at because he was in Atlanta filming The Gifted. Aries claimed first to have gone to school with him, then knew people who knew him, then was just speaking up for the victims. She said it was hard to see her abuser blowing up now and getting famous, someone mentioned how he was already in The Gifted, a decently popular marvel show. She didn't know about it. She claimed to be Marvel fan. He's also been acting since he was a small child and fairly well known already in Canada, were they both live yet she claimed his career was only now getting big. This is basic info and if she really was close enough to have been involved in this in any way she would've known it.

There were claims of a police report being filed, when people asked if there were any records of this (something that would be theoretically possible to get if they did not already have a copy, not a ridiculous ask) they then claimed they didn't file one "because the police are useless". All this inconsistency and lack of anything solid, especially a timeline -- something they would not need any documents for to get decently right -- has lead me to believe at this time that the allegations are false.

On top of all this the people who believed and supported those making the claims willingly spread child pornography of him all over twitter as if any allegations make it okay to disseminate child porn. Which does not you know, make me really wanna be on your side since that's kinda something I'm morally against.

I understand that sometimes the only way to get any justice is going to the court of public opinion. The justice system is imperfect and sometimes going online is the only way people can get any kind of justice. Journalism was the only way we learned about Weinstein. However, if you just say shit on twitter, a site not know for it's veracity of facts or ethics, with no solid evidence I will not join in your crusade against anyone. If there is no way to prove or lend credibility to you claim I will not blindly believe it. I want that proof both because innocent until proven guilty is how the law actually works but also because if I am going to bat for you against everyone I meet from now on over this I want that bat to made of something more substantial than cardboard and vibes.

If more substantial evidence against him were to come out in the future I will reevaluate my position on the matter and adjust accordingly. It's not that I don't want to believe them, it's that I don't want to be used as a pawn in someone's campaign to form an internet lynch mob. I do not want to be used as a tool to ruin someone's life for sport or petty grudges. I take claims like this seriously and so if it cannot stand up to a basic stress test I cannot in good faith believe it. Because if I cannot make sure it's real then the angry mob your leading could very well be damaging the life of someone innocent and I don't want to be party to that. Believing all victims does not mean automatically throwing away critical thinking and believing everything they say, it means helping them get their defense and offense straight and backing them up the whole way through. If you can't prove to me you even knew him how am I supposed to defend your stance to the rest of the world?