#um. ask to tag for the eugenicist shit?

[springtrappd]

it is genuinely difficult for me to even attempt to summarise the jargon-heavy ramblings that is Trying To Explain Esoteric Religions in a post about five nights at freddy's. like i've thought about doing this before and stopped every time because there's like, fifty years of history there and the thought of trying to explain emanation to a thirteen-year-old makes me want to re-enroll in high school so i can drop out again. but as a brief example

yeag

like. i'm not a ufo guy. (i think you can guess what brand of pseudoscience haunts my creative process.) but the fact that "what if ufos are actually interdimensional travellers briefly phasing into our plane of existence" is a real theory (that my mother........ believes.............)(she also thinks they're demons. no i don't know why. no i am not going to ask) is a bit. Telling. i would say.

the tldr is that once you open your mind to one fringe idea, you kinda leave the door open for all of its relatives to come on in? and also it is incredibly easy to just... replace the mystical Almighty with the (slightly less mystical) extraterrestrial Almighty -- because they are, functionally, the same thing; they are an otherworldly force that exists on a different playing field to humanity, an awesome ideal we must aspire to reach; they are the guiding hand watching us through history, the paternalistic guardians waiting to bring us home, the ones who shall judge us for our failures. ufo-based religions simply replace the metaphorical heavens with literal ones. you can touch the stars no more than you can touch an angel.

(wanna acknowledge that this is also all very christocentric, but that's because these religions are; they ape the language and aesthetics and concepts of eastern religions, yeah, but in their appropriation they reinterpret them into something entirely new. And that new thing just so happens to be "what if Gnosticism was overtly racist")

so anyway yeah i think the topics of ufology and spiritualism are inherently linked, and this would've been especially so back in the 70-80s. which we care about because this is a five nights at freddy's blog and that is when afton would've been kicking around with it. and i think any exposure to conspiratorial shit like, at all would've sent him down the rabbit hole of occultism -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing?

like, if you go with the idea that fnaf4 was him experimenting on kids -- that's backyard psychology experiments, not tests of The Spirit™️. yeah yeah frights has talbert studying agony fuckin' whatever, he both isn't afton and explicitly comes after him on the timeline. there's nothing in the games (or fuck, even in afton's many... many speeches) to indicate that that stuff was necessarily spiritual to him. and what i'm leading into here is a thing i think most people get wrong about afton, which is that he only gets metaphysical after charlie dies.

it's kinda undeniable that he was always thinking about it -- you don't make something like the funtimes without it haunting you the way batshit metaphysics haunts me -- but he doesn't get his modus operandi until after charlie dies... and the puppet gets back up. (SECRET OF THE MIMIC HAVING NOT YET RELEASED ON THE 22/03/2025) it's only after the bite victim and the crying child kick the bucket that he pivots away from the fear fixation towards the focus on life (and the expression of it) -- likely because it gave him an answer to his own fears. (remember: control is the point. power is simply a tool he uses to take it.)

so you can make the argument that if nothing had gone wrong, afton would've been able to explore his... neuroses interests in less destructive ways. kinda hard to do it without the catalyst, right? but i think that's also missing The Point, which is that it was never the murder that was the catalyst -- it was always afton himself.

afton chose to neglect his kids. afton chose to distance himself from everyone. afton chose to kill his best friend's kid. afton chose to deceive his best friend. afton chose all of it. they are his choices, regardless of his reasons for making them -- and they are choices made because of who afton was as a person: an emotionally volatile coward with a dozen different complexes that he insisted on taking out on others rather than processing in literally any other way.

and as i must always remind everyone: spring bonnie (the truest face of afton) thinks of what he's doing as an expression of love -- an expression of love that he learnt from henry. "your father loved and now i have loved" etc etc.

(and henry chose to neglect his kids. henry chose to distance himself from everyone. henry chose to ignore his best friend's actions. henry chose to build what he did. and this is why henry chooses to hate himself, regardless of his reasons for making them: because he sees his choices and finds them lacking.) (afton hates himself as much as he loves henry because he loves himself as much as he hates henry; henry loves afton as much as he hates himself and henry hates afton because he cannot love himself. the galvanising force behind henry's despair is not his anger at being slighted, it is his fury over the harm afton brought to innocents. it's one thing to hurt him; it's another thing to hurt those he loves. this is the key difference between them.)

so: the tragedy of fnaf is that no matter what path he took, afton was always going to implode -- and he was always going to insist on taking out as many people as he could with him (and preferably his loves ones, see the whole love thing). it's less of a question of "would he" and more "how big would the scale be?" and the answer is "the population of a small town" so y'know maybe the whole ufospotting thing is exactly up his alley, actually

Anyway. hope you enjoyed whatever the fuck this stream of consciousness was. i have barely edited any of this. consider this me reaffirming my commitment to write up that analysis of remnant eventually. and a plea for help i guess, that too

If nothing bad* happened to his kids william would gotten into ufology instead of spiritualism

i have incredibly bad news about what ufology is adjacent to and how deeply the historic ties run between esoteric spiritualism and conspiracy theory culture as we know it today, anon