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inhabited-by-something · 2 years ago

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@darlinghowl Alright! I'll give you the Mike Afton Rundown but I'll put it under a cut and on my sideblog because it'll be long ~

Here we go:

Most important thing assuming you Have seen the movie: Movie!Mike Schmit, as he is rn, is DIFFERENT from Game!Mike Schmit. In the games, Mike Schmit and Mike Afton are The Same Person, it's just Mike using a different last name for reasons that become clear later on. In the movie Mike is Not an Afton and that's an important distinction.

In the games, Mike is the oldest son of William Afton and the older brother to both Evan and Elizabeth Afton. (Sidenote, Evan is not his official name, he has no official name, but it is the widest used fanon name so it's what I use too.) In his teen years Mike is a shithead older brother who likes to get a laugh out of wearing a mask of the Foxy animatronic from his dad's Pizzeria and jumping out of places to scare Evan with it, because while Evan likes the Characters of the Pizzeria, he's scared of the animatronics. (And for understandably good reason later on.)

On Evan's birthday in 1983, which is held at the Pizzeria even though it's somewhere Evan hates to be, Mike and a group of his friends decide to play a very mean spirited prank on Evan and they stick his head inside of the Fredbear animatronics mouth.

Now if this were any old animatronic made like most of them irl, this probably would have been fine and just a mean thing to do in the moment. But because this is FNAF, things go horribly wrong. Both the original Fredbear and Bonnie are springlock suits, meaning that they can function as either full animatronics Or wearable suits depending what mode they're in. The actual springlocks inside the suits tho however are dangerous, and if activated while someone is inside them, can and will crush them very painfully and most likely kill them. They're very sensitive to movement and getting wet, and can fail easily.

Evan was a kid who cried a Lot, so much so that his official name in lore is the Crying Child. So when Mike and his friends stuck his head in the mouth of Fredbear, the springlocks in his mouth got wet and they failed, crushing Evan's head right in front of Mike and all of his friends. (Important to note, this is the Bite of '83, not to be confused with the Bite of '87.)

Evan doesn't survive this, dying in the hospital to his wounds. Mike becomes the first technical murderer in the Afton family, and it's something he will spend the rest of his life trying to fix and make up for it.

(Now, quick detour/disclaimer: Because of how fast and loose FNAF plays with some of it's lore and how vague Scott loves to be, people don't tend to agree on when certain events take place for some of the games, the biggest point of discretion seeming to be when Sister Location takes place. For the sake of how I interpret the story and how I understand the finer lore points, I place the events of Sister Location sometime shortly before the events of FNAF 2 and the second round of William's killings, which takes place in 1987.)

So sometime after Evan's death, William Afton discovers Remnant, which to try and make it the least complicated as I can because it's already hard to understand: Remnant is basically soul energy/tied to a person's memories. It can be made into a kind of metal and can then bind souls to inanimate objects. (This is how the animatronic's possession works.) When Evan died, some of his Remnant seemingly got left inside of the Fredbear animatronic since it's the one that killed him, and the popular belief is that William's grief over his son's death is what pushes him down the road of killing other kids in order to experiment with their Remnant, in an attempt to bring his son back.

Now of course, Evan wasn't his only kid. William also had Michael, who he most likely started to hold some disdain for/a grudge towards since y'know, he got his brother killed. But he also had a daughter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was seemingly a bit of a spoiled daddy's girl who William loved so much that he made an animatronic in her image, named Circus Baby. She was going to be the face of a new pizzeria even, one opened by William alone with more advanced animatronics than his and his business partner Henry's other original locations.

(in between all of this planning of course is when William starts his killing spree, starting with Henry's daughter Charlie, and then 5 other kids. This is known as the MCI, or the Missing Children's Incident because their bodies were never found since they're the ones that got stuck inside the original animatronics + Golden Freddie and the Puppet.)

Circus Baby's doesn't stay open for long however. Despite warning her multiple times against being able to see the new animatronic, Elizabeth Afton goes off on her own to see Circus Baby without her father present. She had no way of knowing of course that William had designed this animatronic with a mechanism to trap and kill children should she be alone with any of them, and so when she's alone with the machine, it kills her, as it's programed to do. William never wanted this to happen to Elizabeth, which is why he tried to keep her away from the animatronic, but this time he can't blame his child's death on anyone else but himself. It's purely his fault.

Elizabeth's death gets covered up as a disappearance, and Circus Baby's gets shut down with the excuse being that there had been multiple gas leaks inside the building.

This is where Michael re-enters the narrative.

Sometime before the events of FNAF 2 (where William kills another group of kids, because of course he does) and subsequently the bite of 87 that gets the second Freddy's location shut down, Michael gets a call from his father. This call is about going back to Circus Baby's, which has been converted into a rental business, and about "putting his sister back together." Michael has no idea the real fate of his sister, but after having one brother already dead to his own actions, he's willing to walk into what is essentially a death trap in order to try and save his sister if he has any chance of doing so.

Things of course do not go very smoothly, but they end in a way that Michael could have never expected them to.

Michael finds out about Circus Baby, about how his sister was killed by her. This even gets confirmed by the fact that CB can imitate Elizabeth's voice to try and manipulate him, which proves that some bit of Elizabeth's remnant lives on inside of CB. But CB and the other animatronics have other plans for Michael, and at the end of his fifth night working at the rental company, he meets his demise.

CB leads him to the "Scooping Room," a room with a mechanical arm that has Remnant layered on the outside of it. The arm is used for taking the exoskeletons of animatronics when they get replaced every so often, leaving the endoskeletons intact. CB at this point has joined her ai with the rest of the animatronics into a mismashed endoskeleton made of random parts called Ennard, and by getting Michael to the scooping room, they kill him by taking all of his organs out, and then shoving the endoskeleton inside his body to pilot his corpse around so that they can escape the facility.

You would think that this would kill a person.

It doesn't kill Michael.

See, because the scooper arm is lined with Remnant, Michael's soul is able to live on even after Ennard's possession basically rots his body, turning him purple. (Yes this is where some of the purple guy jokes come from but those also come from William being represented by a purple sprite in other cutscenes. Like father like son ~) Once Ennard leaves his body behind, Michael essentially gets back up from death, now trapped in some weird limbo of being dead but also alive. Not necessarily a zombie but something else entirely.

Despite dying, he did actually manage to achieve one thing: he seemingly freed his sister's soul from her eternal torment, and he tells his father as much when he calls him after the events of Sister Location. (You should just listen to his whole speech from the end of the game tbh because it's a very good moment.)

The biggest thing however is that Michael's goal has now changed: he's now learned of his father's horrible sins, and has decided to make it his goal to put an end to William Afton once and for all, and to make up for the deaths of his siblings and all of the other kids that William has killed over the years. He has no idea where his dad is at this point, but that won't deter him.

He starts with the first lead he has, that being the restaurant from the FNAF 2 location. He only works there for a night under the fake name Fritz Smith and promptly gets fired the next day for tampering with the animatronics, likely trying to figure out how to help put the souls in them to rest too. This happens again when he gets hired back at the original Freddy's location in 1992 (aka FNAF 1), and again he gets fired for the same reason of tampering with the animatronics, along with "general unprofessionalism." The trail goes cold for awhile. Nearly 23 years in fact. Mike bides his time, living in this weird state between life and death, not really sure what to do.

That is, until Fazbear Frights shows up in 2015. A horror attraction full of old remnants of the now defunct resturaunt chain. Mike has no idea if anything of real interest will be there, but he's not going to give up an oppertunity to try putting all of this stuff to rest if he can.

And he's lucky, depending on your definition. Not only do these fanatics running the place raid one of the old Freddy's locations (the one from FNAF 2 specifically) but they find an animatronic, a real one as they say.

They find none other than Spring Bonnie, now known as Springtrap, aka the very suit that William Afton ended up dying in so many years ago during the events of FNAF 2.

Finally after so many years, Mike has come face to face with his father again as he vowed to do.

He survives 5 nights working at the attraction, during which he also helps the spirit of Charlie to put the souls of the original MCI kids and his brother to rest after so many years. (This happens because of some mini games that you play in FNAF 3 that leads to this whole other schpeal about video games and how they affect "the other side", aka the spirit realm. It's also complicated and I am not going to explain the finer details of it here, because this is already long enough.) At the end of the five nights, he torches the place, setting it ablaze believing he's killed his father and finally put everything to rest after all this time.

He's wrong, of course. William survives the fire, along with Charlie's spirit still hanging on as well.

Some time passes, and Mike comes across another job oppertunity: a new franchisee position for Fazbear Entertainment to make your own Freddy's restaurant. Of course he applies, and of course he gets the job. At first it seems like a reletively harmless venture as he works to make a sustainable and safe restaurant that, for all intents and purposes, looks like it could actually be open to the public and run with no problems.

But that of course isn't the true purpose behind it.

No, the real purpose of the venture, and one that Mike was unaware of upon taking the job, was to bring the rest of the animatronics that were still out there all under one roof together, those being Scraptrap (the remains of William,) Scrap Baby (the remains of Circus Baby,) Molten Freddy (the remains of Ennard) and Lefty (now possessed by Charlie.)

The one who had put the whole venture together was none other than Henry Emily, who had been working in the background the whole time alongside Michael to help put an end to this mess and to finally help put his daughters soul to rest too.

Once everyone was gathered in one place, Henry choses to light the restaurant on fire, both with himself and Michael still stuck inside of it, so that everyone can finally say goodbye to the nightmare that their lives had become. He mentions that originally, he had a way out planned for Michael, seeing as the job wasn't even supposed to be for him in the first place, but he'd found it anyways, but he assumed Michael was right where he wanted to be.

(You should listen to Henry's whole speech from the end of this game actually, it's one of the best moments in the entire series.)

At the end of everything, Michael dies finally doing what he'd promised to do by putting his father down, and making up for being the one to start the tragedy of the Afton family by accidentally getting his brother killed.

There's a lot of finer details I skipped over in this summery because it already took me so long to type out lol, but Michael is truly a character of all time to me tbh. Son of a murderer who accidentally was the first murderer and who makes it his entire life goal, even after dying himself, to not rest until he feels he's made up for the mess he started.

There's a supplimentary book called the Security Logbook that's meant to be like a companion to FNAF 3, and in the book you can see some comments that Mike filled out at some point when he had it in his possession, and this bit always sticks out to me:

It almost feels like Mike's way of deflecting his guilt from getting his brother killed when you think about it. How many years has he spent trying to tell himself it wasn't really his fault, feeling horrible for what he'd accidentally caused?

FNAF is such a loose and complicated series, but underneath all the mess is the story of a character who, when faced with the guilt of accidentally being the one to create a family legacy of murder and horrific accidents, spends the rest of his days once he knows the truth trying to right not only his wrongs, but his father's as well, and I dunno man! I find it all very compelling, I love stories full of winding family drama and tragedy.