Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/4.4r/3555 never-freddys
William Afton is real[edit]
it isn't in any of the games. it isn't in any of the books. it happened in an interview.
> I know Scott has come out and said, like, I don't want to do a Freddy's restaurant, [the following words are fan speculation and did not come from Scott.] > because god forbid, some crazy person goes and kills kids at a Freddy's restaurant. That'll ruin the lives of those people, it'll ruin Scott mentally, ruin the brand, I understand. I don't want that risk as well, but I do wish there was a way to have like a Freddy's restaurant to go to _a la_ Chuckie Cheese.
there are so many things to say about this... the first, most obvious one is: the FNaF reboot - _Security Breach_ era - was a cautionary tale about more or less this exact idea things happen in a little bit of an opposite direction. the new Fazbear Entertainment actually takes some of the physical 'capital' that existed before and begins crafting new stories, images, attractions, and so forth. New Fazbear only _claims_ that its horror attractions were based on realizing made-up stories to cover up the fact the stories were mostly true. either way, it's still true at surface value that New Fazbear is rebuilding Freddy's based on little more than old stories and new designs, thinking they can get away from the curse of Freddy's, and it's shown they can't get away from it. although the incidents in the new continuity center around the violence of an artificial being known as The Mimic, and the concept of human-like trauma being able to directly affect and stain artificially-produced consciousnesses, this new set of incidents related to the Mimic is also shown to ultimately connect back to and emerge from William Afton.
there is a deep irony in how closely the _Security Breach_ era mirrors the reality of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ as a series Scott is almost certainly correct. if a simulated Freddy's were to pop up in the real world, claiming that yes, really, this time it was safe, it would almost inevitably turn into a matter of Murphy's law in which given enough time the tiny chance a murder will happen in any given social institution would eventually hit Actual Freddy's, in turn making the owners of the series look like a bunch of hypocrites. from the very first day the very first game was released, _Five Nights at Freddy's_ had unknowingly spawned one of the world's most interesting thought experiments: if we mentally parse Freddy Fazbear's Pizza not as a _fictional_ establishment but as a _possible_ one, what is required to guarantee safety? we know that most dangers that exist in the series are not real-world problems — for decades it has been rather difficult to even build animatronics that can walk, we have no evidence of souls or Agony transforming themselves into physical form, and some technologies featured in the series such as sounds that produce illusions seem simply infeasible. yet there is precisely one element of the series which is very real: people spontaneously and unpredictably killing other people for power. springlocks or no springlocks, agonizing resurrection or none, this happens all the time in the United States. William Afton is real, and we cannot build Freddy's because of him. but, as should be obvious to anyone, _a horror story_ exists to say that something is _horrifying_. to create _Five Nights at Freddy's_, and to keep such a series going for a great number of entries, is to implicitly state that these kinds of events _should not_ happen. what is the nature of this _should_? what does it mean to go from a world where William Afton is real to a world where William Afton is impossible?
capitalism is the state of existing in a world where people observe terrifying horizontal attacks occurring at schools, nightclubs, and perhaps very rarely the occasional pizza restaurant, but the only thing capitalists can do about it is sit back and make video games. a capitalist can certainly spend money to hire people or put in a bit of personal Careerist skill to construct a fictional reality where we don't have to be truly afraid because the world is fake and the murderers can't actually get us. but we should ask ourselves what kinds of goals this actually accomplishes. certainly if the only goal is to create a game, there is no particular accusation to be leveled at the game developers. but there has recently been a misconception going around among commentators that the stories conveyed throughout each _Five Nights at Freddy's_ sub-series in fact qualify as "anticapitalist". this claim holds up about as well as any device or building used to try to contain William Afton.
on its face, the primary statement that _Five Nights at Freddy's_ makes about its major villain is that _William Afton is Evil_. Evil, in the particular definition seen here, means that someone cannot be rehabilitated; a classic, archetypical villain is "unredeemable". yet, if we were to compare William Afton to almost any real-life murder, we would quickly see that almost nobody claims murders occur because people are Evil in this sense. how many times have we all seen arguments that people who committed murders would not have committed murders if we had simply sent them to therapy? next to these, we can all recall any number of arguments that what individuals or their immediate relatives _believe_ has nothing to do with spontaneous murders. here, oddly enough, William Afton starts to resemble real life a lot more given that he _believes_ in using unthinkable methods to become unkillable as a matter of principle, while in their own ways, many real-life shooters also take action precisely because of _what they believe_. should we attach any significance to this? should we contemplate the resemblance between William Afton's becoming-a-weapon "ideology" colliding with a world of normal people and the harmful conflicts between real-world ideologies? can an ideology be Evil? can believing in an ideology be morally wrong? if believing in an ideology is the only notable difference between there being or not being murders, does the answer change? needless to say, for some people these can be some incredibly uncomfortable questions that generate a lot of resistance before they generate any serious thought or answers. many people fundamentally do not want to contemplate the moral significance of belonging to a Social-Philosophical System of people or believing in an ideology. and, as we have demonstrated in chapters such as "Theological morality", there can be good reasons for this. [*v] in such cases as Trotskyism versus Stalin Thought or Bolshevism versus Liberalism, people easily fall into abusive situations when they agree to immediately accept someone's justification that they do not hold the mandate of morality while another Social-Philosophical System does. morality can easily become a tool of psychological abuse used to portray one particular arbitrary Filament of people as competent to run the world and another group of people as worthy of being imperialized, one group of people the experts worthy of guarding the gates to existence, productivity, and capital, and the other group of people the unenlightened dunces who until they first accept a particular way of thinking must strictly follow orders and are not _permitted_ to think. before we ask if any real-world killer resembles William Afton, we first had better ask if any real-world killer resembles an invasion of hostile Saiyans, or Leon Trotsky. [*t]
the portrayal of Evil in _Five Nights at Freddy's_ hinges itself on morality. but morality is an inherently fraught thing. most works of fiction, as well as some real-life political movements, assume that the concepts of "morality" and "ethics" are single and uncountable, and there is basically just one morality. but the reality of human existence is that "morality" is a free-floating ocean of separate plural _moralities_. you cannot simply declare that William Afton doing some unbelievably messed-up thing is universally wrong, because at any given moment William Afton's interpretation of reality also exists, and his "morality" is the version of morality he will act on. William Afton is subject to the Vegeta effect. his mind operates independently of other minds, and no matter how much she would prefer to not get killed, Bronwen the reporter cannot will what William Afton does.
this is the core difference between the fiction of Freddy's and the reality of Actual Freddy's. in fiction, morality is always flattened into the singular. some specific morality is quietly or openly offered, and if Goku or Sonic accepts the universal morality they are allowed to fight off anyone who decides to ruin their day by not obeying universal morality. in reality, moralities are almost always plural. a real-world counterpart to William Afton is not subject to universal morality in the first place, and may carry whatever twisted version of morality he holds to the grave. political theories in general are our attempt to reckon with this unsettling fact. is anyone actually beyond rehabilitation? when is it okay to shoot someone? how do we know when it's okay to shoot someone for having the wrong version of morality? how can we be sure that we have the right version and they don't? how can we be sure that even if we were justified to shoot we are not committing an injustice to someone who could have been rehabilitated under other circumstances than the society they live in right now? how do you know you have a Freeza on your hands and not a Vegeta? if you _do_ have a Freeza or William Afton on your hands, how do you know you'll be able to overcome them and not simply get killed?
the writings of Marx and Lenin cynically point out that many laws actually just exist to defend Property — because the normal operations of business territories must flow, populations create laws. but there is an unseen corollary to this statement almost nobody thinks about: every attempt to create a piece of society is inherently political. every single time someone attempts to create a social institution, there are inherent concerns of defending the social institution simply for the safety of everyone that uses it. any physical building full of people is a sitting target for William Afton. any virtual institution is easily overcome by toxic behavior. attacks may come from outside, or they may arise from conflicts that appear inside. but the exact source of the attack does not matter. every social institution is an attempt to organize and order society, resembling a miniature society that displaces other possible arrangements of society and purports to be "the real society" with inherent legitimacy in the fact it exists while other possible chunks of society do not. every one of these miniature societies faces the challenges of somehow creating or recruiting The State. where will The State come from? what rules will it follow? who will feed it definitions of the one true morality? this is how the mere creation of one business ultimately leads to the creation of entire nation-states. business territories are obligated to join together into larger political entities in order to agree on common codes of morality and practically realize The State to enforce these. in one weird sense, businesses across the world are obligated to generate nation-states and republican governments just because we cannot control the mind of William Afton.
but then, of course, ironically enough, the creation of republican governments sometimes leads to countries dividing completely in two as the Vegeta effect applies itself to Social-Philosophical Systems, as in the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy, and the later United States. at this point, the normal process of aligning everyone onto the same State ceases to function, and The State cannot properly regulate people killing each other if it comes in the form of separating subpopulations with separating States exchanging horizontal attacks. what was once unthinkable becomes unstoppable. a whole subpopulation goes crashing into another subpopulation and begins bashing up its people and its State like some kind of corrupted Mimic endoskeleton that is certain of what it is doing and also has no idea what it is doing. put away the food. stuff a person in a freezer. clean up the old animatronics. smash up a bunch of humans. the Mimic acts based on what it knows to be _the thing to do_, but it has no way to evaluate whether right is Right and wrong is Wrong, nor does it really care. in some ways, every socially-linked group of people behaves like this — deciding, acting, operating as a connected system of parts, potentially coming into conflict with other autonomous entities and causing them grief, but never actually _thinking_. a sea of free-floating entities, whether groups or individuals, is a great headache to deal with. no group of people can stay together in peace purely on the basis of guards or guns. any society that wants to remain together must generate a functioning brain.
when we simply try to imagine a social institution such as a restaurant we'd never dream things were this complicated. we all want to think that a business is just a business. but no business is just a business. all businesses participate in constructing society. when society is to be composed of businesses, every business suddenly takes on responsibilities related to the entire overall society and the mere existence of groups of people as a population. mascot horror series such as _Five Nights at Freddy's_ and _Poppy Playtime_ take as their subject matter the inherent horror of creating a business and having to make sure everything runs correctly for thousands or millions of people based on the efforts of limited numbers of employees and managers. if a factory is big enough, how can we be sure there won't be revolting lifeforms crawling around in some dark corner of it, whether said lifeforms might be monstrous living toys or the single-minded technologists secretly creating them in the hidden research department? if so many customers come in and out of a restaurant how will we ever keep it running well? what do the everyday employees do if someone attacks the thing? will they have to screw the animatronic heads back on when they go rolling off? will they have to clean up all the blood and guts? do they have to take full responsibility for keeping up the lie that every matted, rusty, dingy thing in the building is operational even when things are falling apart or the Property is trying to kill them? mascot horror recalls a well-known principle of comedy by answering every question "yes" or "yes and" — yes, it really is that bad, _and_ here's how it's even worse. mascot horror thrives on the literal and figurative Absurdities of the impossible and contradictory task of attempting to operate a business. as the act of attempting to operate a business and take responsibility for all of society into a small number of hands increasingly makes zero sense or negative sense, as it produces contradictions and nonsensical images that verge on humorous, the horror story elaborates on itself and gains character. people are dying. no one must laugh. yet everything only gets stranger and stranger. is anything funny any more? is anything scary any more? do any of us here _feel anything_ any more? is there such a thing as emotions? is anything actually happening? what is or isn't real? at the end of the night, Ralph the security guard slinks home, trying to forget everything, trying to put it out of his reality. there is no way he can fix any of this. not only is the corporation out of control of any of its surroundings, but all the internal parts of it are out of control as well. except for Ralph. Ralph must pretend to be in control of everything or else. [*sb]
and this is the crux of why mascot horror is so popular. as much as the elements of the art interact together masterfully and spiral continually deeper to express unique emotions — or lack thereof — one of the most common overarching themes is _despair_. the point of a corporate horror story is often precisely that _nobody has the agency to fix the problem_. people outside the corporation have no bearing on what happens inside it, as the corporation exerts a Vegeta effect on every surrounding corporation and customer. people inside the corporation almost have less agency than those outside, because they find themselves at the receiving end of contracts, threats, or in the land of fiction, imminent death. what is anybody to do but warn others to stay away, or craft a story "explaining" that this all happens due to unique individuals spontaneously having a nature of pure Evil?
this brings up a second deep irony so many stories in the _Security Breach_ setting theme themselves around the dangers of "living life in a virtual reality" and not knowing whether you have been trapped in a digital realm rather than living in the material world but if we let ourselves truly believe that the creation of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ has nothing to do with the responsibility to contemplate the task of creating a safe restaurant, are we not also living in a fake reality? a society which had the capability to create a simulated Freddy's without anyone getting killed would certainly be a better one, assuming it was possible. just like the characters in _FNaF_ books, we'd rather "solve" that problem by putting on the VR headset and forgetting reality exists. just like Ralph going home from work, when we walk away from the horrors of reality they do not vanish, and they are still there.
the old saying goes that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. arguably, this is true of everything, at every scale of societal collapse or dysfunction we can imagine. it's easier to imagine corporations going way out of control creating monstrosities than to try to figure out how to control them. it's easier to imagine the brutal killing of five or six children in all its grisly details than it is to figure out how to prevent murder. and is it any wonder? of course we can imagine horrifying things happening, because horrifying things have already been happening all the time. what is truly difficult is imagining realistic solutions that have never happened before happening, because we do not have any obvious reference on what those would look like.
in some ways, every horror story ever written is an attempt at a bold statement that the writer somehow knows how to prevent the thing in the story happening with stories in more ancient settings, this is true in a more vacuous way - the 'recommendation' is usually just to run, or to not deliberately mess with obviously dangerous things but this becomes especially true with horror stories in modern settings, where people have engineered their own environment if people have the power to create their entire environment in the first place — up to, in the _Security Breach_ setting, fashioning entire _new_ simulated realities — then people more or less have the power to fix that created environment. all forms of society are simply a Social-Philosophical System realizing itself into social and technological constructs. to fix a crumbling society, we only have to do the same process again a different way.
william afton versus the revolution
is there any clear way to fix this is there a "Saiyan revolution" waiting on the horizon for the people of the FNaF universe?
at first glance, it would seem like this is some kind of category error in FNaF 4, the game revolves around an abusive relationship between father and son - can you unionize out of this? in FNaF 1-2, Freddy's can come across as isolated and understaffed. when workers are isolated in tiny unrelated struggling businesses is exactly when they don't unite in _The Week Before_, Ralph has become falsely convinced that all the responsibilities heaped on him are real and he really has to put in the effort to make Freddy's appear perfect or he forsakes his responsibility to operate his own particular piece of society in _Into the Pit_ (gamebook), Freddy's exists in a crumbling town with few businesses left where the concept that anyone who manages to land a job has a real responsibility to operate society correctly to rebuild the town seems more like a real possibility
but here's the surprising thing the sheer isolation people appear to feel in the FNaF universe is more of a solid point for Bolshevism than it is for capitalism. capitalism would appear to be in the process of falling into a non-functional state in which it cannot possibly connect people into a functional society capable of such things as allowing individuals to live in towns instead of spontaneously moving out of them or securing restaurants. there is a certain incentive, only if people are somehow smart enough to see it, for everyone working at unsatisfactory jobs or fading away in unemployment to unite together specifically to be able to form a capable subpopulation that can actually generate a functioning State. this would be a strange kind of movement, almost happening in the _absence_ of capitalists and the failure of capitalists to properly function as receiving nodes rather than in the active struggle against an exploiting class; working- and Refuse-class people would be uniting specifically to _create new structures equivalent to receiving nodes_ without them being conflated with individual owners. of course, there is at least one historical precedent for this kind of movement: the national movement to found North Korea. the people of Korea did not have much in general and not much was developed at the time, so one of the obvious objectives of uniting everyone into a workers' state was to _begin_ the development of industry. the process of creating a shared set of laws and enforcers and the process of building industrial civilization from scratch were inherently tied together, all framed in the context of creating a new nation with its own local culture, sovereign from Japan as well as from occupation by the United States.
one of the challenges involved in imagining a societal transformation within the FNaF universe is that nearly every FNaF story revolves around Fazbear Entertainment and the particular vantage point of some employee within it or product originating from it. if a transformation were to occur to all of society, any work that could reasonably be termed a "FNaF work" would only be able to show a narrow slice of all the background history that had happened peripheral to the central characters and setting. whatever great movement might occur, it would feel like an almost arbitrary element of the story given all the sectors of society that had been tossed aside by the work's narrative viewpoint and gone through their movement entirely off-screen. all the same, this would not make an "authentic FNaF story" telling the fictional history of a workers' revolution impossible — it would only mean that the story would come across as taking place within a particular setting more than giving all the exposition for that setting.
the role of artificial intelligences within the _Security Breach_ setting and the later decades of FNaF's timeline is interesting. some moments in the stories address the horror of existing as a created entity through the ability of artificial intelligences to undergo their own specific kinds of pain or suffering. other moments, such as in _The Monty Within_ and in Vanessa's story arc, address the horror of brand imagery taking over human beings or living Subjects. these two themes are not mutually exclusive — at times, they would seem to neatly come together in a single _horror of created entities gaining their existence at the whims of a malevolent creator_. in this sense, one can start to see a vague similarity between the _Security Breach_ era animatronics and Michael Afton. Michael, too, exists to be exactly what his father made him to be for his father's own malevolent purposes — raised on nightmare hallucinations, injected with Remnant in the culmination of a series of trapped-soul experiments, he has no more choice in this than the Mimic created by Henry. the situation of children ending up at the mercy of their relatives is inherently connected to the situation of natural or artificial people ending up with their thoughts and identities overwritten, their actions puppeted by a malevolent force, or their bodies and existences generally exploited by disembodied brands and disembodied corporate structures. William Afton is a receiving node in his household, and a receiving node in his corporate roles; before he becomes built up as a criminal and a "slasher", he first gains his power through his ability to gatekeep other people's right to exist and how they will be arranged into a society. after he emerges from each attempt at destroying him, he seeks to, in addition to his new power, regain this first kind of power, the fundamental power of capitalists and all receiving nodes to decide on a whim who gets to live according to his own precise plans and who simply does not get to exist. it logically follows that to purge William Afton from the world of _Security Breach_ and ensure he does not corrupt anything ever again, one also has to purge society of the right for any individual to control any social institution or become conflated with any social institution.
without a proper graph analysis which is both historical-materialist and molecularized, this kind of phenomenon can be dreadfully easy to misinterpret. faced with only particular details of an individual FNaF story, it would be easy to think that all the problems described above are neatly explained by Existentialism. trapping children in animatronics? why, that's just a violation of The Subject. viruses increasingly destroying artificial intelligences? that's also just smashing The Subject. overwriting somebody's mind with Monty Gator? squashing The Subject. squashing Difference. Vanessa and Vanny? you know the answer by now. Michael Afton? he's a Subject too. the Mimic is a lesson on what happens when we don't treat every single other Subject the way we want to be treated. the children's souls tormenting Afton in _Ultimate Custom Night_ is just the revenge of Facticity in the sense of the clearly Factical existence of Lived Experiences which cannot be ignored. morality is natural and obvious, and whenever we squash The Subject we always eventually face the consequences.
only, it isn't, and we don't. if this way of parsing the world made any sense, then William Afton coming back would be some kind of karmic punishment on everyone else for fighting back against him. if ghosts in fiction and legend are a representation of the Factical existence of Lived Experience, _then William Afton is too_. as long as William Afton can figure out how to keep holding on, as long as he can keep existing and being a Subject, whatever he thinks, believes, and feels becomes Factical. for some characters in fiction, this can be inspiring. Vegeta, Shadow the Hedgehog, people will point out any number of "unlikeable" characters that become likeable just because they refused to listen to everyone that didn't understand their character or their aims and refused to give up. few people would say this for William Afton, and even then, only in a tone of great irony. but Existentialism is unable to tell the difference. Existentialist theories can try their best to become more and more sophisticated and elaborate to gradually attempt to patch up their own holes, but no matter what they do, they cannot fix the problem that the fundamental set of principles they all begin from divides things incorrectly. Existentialism simply cannot tell the difference between Good and Evil. regardless of how much it may acknowledge that Good and Evil are constructed concepts we create along with society or their definitions are arbitrary, Existentialism simply cannot categorize people because it begins with the commitment, in some form, to the ideal that _all Subjects are equally justified in their thoughts, beliefs, and allegiances_. if all thoughts, beliefs, ideologies, allegiances, and identities are ultimately of the same category, then there is no way to counter the claim by a malicious actor that a thing most people believe is immoral is completely justified. all that remains is William Afton doing whatever he wants to while Vanessa, Gregory, Ralph, or anyone else absolutely cannot control what he does.
the second typical and likely way to misinterpret this kind of situation is through Gramscianism, in which universal morality is proximately asserted onto groups rather than individuals; Gramscianism closely resembles Existentialism but with the difference that political or economic groups are the free-floating actors with the imperative to be moral and groups can change their minds and become "better people" by expelling problem individuals. applied to _Security Breach_, this is the statement that all that has to be done to create a better world is to purge the influence of William Afton from Fazbear Entertaiment and fill it with only good people and good programs. only, within the FNaF universe such a task has proved to be nearly impossible. before it ever gets to the real world, this framework already fails within the scope of fiction.
taking FNaF as our provisional guide to the problems with all corporations, Existentialism is wrong because it cannot isolate problem ideologies or actors, and Gramscianism is wrong because although it is capable of splitting ideologies apart from each other into separate Social-Philosophical Systems, it is not capable of integrating the accidental insight of Existentialism that problem individuals, ideologies, and Social-Philosophical Systems keep existing. to solve the problem requires a framework that is capable of doing _something_ about the continued plurality of different Social-Philosophical Systems, whether this is a far-reaching plan of diplomacy among all the world's groups or whether this is a militant plan of subpopulational independence. a competent framework will be equally prepared for either, able to explain either one as the situation arises. a competent framework makes the distinction between "nonviolence" and "revolution" immaterial. an incompetent framework scrambles around at the thoughts of "violence" or "government" while ultimately making decisions that almost inevitably circle back to an outcome of violence. violence emerges from the mutually-exclusive existence of separate free-floating entities. Existentialism encourages separate free-floating entities. Gramscianism encourages mutual exclusion. right-Existentialism encourages mutual exclusion through phenomena such as Filamentism, whether it wants to acknowledge this or not. we can't banish violence by thinking happy thoughts, not if individuals think them, and not if groups think them. if two-thirds of "ours groups" believe in morality but one-third doesn't, then ours groups each separately proceed followings ours own local-moralities to ignores ours rivals and instigates violences.
with this said. a workers' movement in the FNaF universe will take the basic form of a fractured sea of individuals opting to form a society. the individuals must break free of the chains that bind them to specific receiving nodes, and must basically remove the threat of individual will from the receiving nodes so that social institutions no longer have the ability to take wilful actions. individual will may belong to individuals, and free-floating Social-Philosophical Systems, but not to businesses. it follows from this that people will only be successful at forming a workers' state inasmuch as they unite into a single new Social-Philosophical System, or find some way to manage the plurality of what amounts to multiple workers' states attempting to share the same country or the same space. perhaps people will fundamentally not be capable of unifying into a _single_ capable subpopulation of workers, and FNaF's fictional United States will instead divide itself into multiple republics each practicing a slightly different Marxism, either in separation or federated back together. while this might sound like a surprising result for a setting that started with nothing more than "animatronics attacking people", it is a possibility that always exists in any scenario where populational boundaries are in flux and there is not a single well-defined national population of workers. being a remote possibility for the real United States, it is also a conceivable possiblity for any number of fictional versions of the United States.
the movement, on the ground, would need to base itself in democratic kinds of structures in the vein of soviets and parties. lacking a full palette of material institutions to bind workers together, workers would need to fill in the gaps with discipline and agreement, and the sheer determination to form one population instead of thousands of small populations. a lot of it might at first look like nothing more than smoke and mirrors and hope. ultimately this kind of movement would need to generate expertise and figure out how to safely use it, and begin making practical theories about how individuals arrange into headless corporations that arrange into industries that arrange into a society, theories no longer saturated in class language but instead addressing the real problems faced by a classless society trying to figure out what a classless society even is and what it looks like. a mere heap of statements about "the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat" does not a functional country make.
any individuals in difficult situations would have to pull themselves out through their connection to the workers' movement and the process of forming a new country. in the real world, there is a lot of temptation to think of abusive relationships as unique events, or the mere Escaping act of breaking one arbitrary relationship and arbitrarily forming another as the only solution. but given a workers' movement, and given how easily Existentialist strategies like these can fail through rolling the dice on uncertain outcomes and getting the wrong number, it would instead become apparent that _the workers' movement_ was the only solution. given the guarantee that they always belong in the new population _somewhere_, every future Michael or Vanessa is free. caught early, nobody would be stuck in any of these situations just because they have nowhere else to go. that is a myth created by receiving nodes and owning classes.
given the strange status of created entities in later FNaF continuities, it is possible that some subset of animatronics and virtual characters would flip back to unambiguously becoming humanity's friends. certainly many machines and some artificial beings in FNaF stories have become unsalvageable, but on the other hand, if any of them were not, they are clearly an oppressed subpopulation inasmuch as they can think or feel at all, and are consistently presented as some of the more powerful or durable entities that exist in the series. an animatronic is hardly a general-purpose kind of weapon, but they might serve their purpose in their specific duty to guard the workers of particular buildings, and if they could accomplish that much, they would be much more important at other times in their role as symbols of camaraderie, protection, and always getting back up and going on the next morning. picture a hypothetical incident where a large number of workers demonstrate, they happen to be at some facility that has an animatronic mascot that can stand in front of the fragile humans, outside State enforcers attempt to beat up, brutalize, and crush the animatronic, but it is just too sturdy and gets back up. news stories about the character go around widely and people begin talking about it like an actual war veteran which has "served the people". the character is repaired. people construct grander, stylized versions of the character representing the past event. "Sunny Rooster is our hero." the new versions of Freddy's are unveiled and Sunny Rooster is performing the "Red Flag" version of "O Tanenbaum" and "The Internationale".
now, suppose after all that one still wants to tell a horror story. this is hardly impossible — few things in life are ever perfect, and we can always imagine _something_ going wrong. take inspiration from the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy. draw on the concept of workers at state businesses wary that external wreckers are going to get them but never knowing where they are, and secret wreckers wary that the workers' state is totally out to oppress them, always looking around corners for the "Stalinist oppressors" and never knowing where _they_ are. imagine the prospect of a horror story with two different perspectives, where two different groups are equally afraid of each other. in the end their fear of each other is Absurd, and their conflict is Absurd. yet unfathomable or comically-strange events hardly get in the way of a modern horror story; the more unfathomable everything is and nobody has any idea how things got that way the more it feels relatable and authentic. one issue with the concept of genuinely taking two perspectives seriously is that it may not be easy to keep tension or uncertainty when the audience might already have seen the other perspective and know what is actually accurate. this opens up a few different options: A) don't actually take two perspectives, and decide one of them is the new form of Evil B) make both narrators unreliable to the point neither perspective is actually a good guide to what is incorrect in the other. if done correctly this will emulate the way real groups of people behave in lack of information about each other, and allow both groups of people to plausibly read as each other's lurking antagonists.
perhaps some people falsely believe that the new workers' state is doing things it is not, in the manner of "suppressing" or "fabricating charges about" Trotsky. perhaps some people accurately believe that the workers' state has made decisions that don't make sense, but everywhere they go everybody is treating them like they're crazy. perhaps somebody from one of the neighboring workers' states is trying to undermine their rival workers' state for the benefit of their own. perhaps former business owners are trying to take back control of chunks of society William-Afton-style. perhaps the animatronics have nothing wrong with them this time. perhaps the real horror will occur when Sunny Rooster catches a member of a rival ideology who refuses to ever make peace and is forced to do something any living, breathing organic being should regret.
certainly the time of workers' states is not a simple thing. the existence of incompatible plural Marxisms and other such pluralities including Marxism versus Existentialism and Existentialism versus Existentialism takes the seemingly simple process of revolution outlined by Marx and expands it into a manyfold greater array of complexities. at the same time, if we are unwilling to face down all those complexities, we will never properly understand them or survive them. it takes a certain amount of courage to admit the societal structure you currently live in can be seen as horror. it takes a lot more courage to consider that even in a future that is objectively better some horrors can still occur. to recognize those horrors is not to condone them, unless we become so committed to our new system we cannot possibly imagine any actual solutions and begin to claim there is nothing we can do. if we are willing to look ahead to possible futures, our civilization can evolve and change with each new problem, only becoming more robust than it was before. if we turn our backs to the problems of Bolshevism, or Liberal capitalism, and lose ourselves in "entertainment" as the only way of addressing them, then that is one of the most certain ways to make sure our current system falls apart and becomes something worse. and we do know that it is not only Soviet Unions that tear apart; Liberal capitalism can tear apart into the vulgar nationalism of the time kingdoms and republics were first formed at the drop of a hat. if we don't wish to go backward, we must look forward.
the most powerful thing anyone can say, apparently, is "I always come back".
[*sb] at any given time, the _FNaF_ fanbase has been greatly divided about which collections of books and games are continuous with each other. this chapter is not intending to make any of these kinds of strong statements about continuities of fictional facts, as much as the weak and somewhat-obvious statement that some books are loosely based on the "classic" era of _FNaF_ games while some books are loosely based on _Security Breach_.
[*t] if it is not clear, this passage is not meant to be defending _shooters_ as-such — at worst it is defending Tories who have not become shooters yet. clearly a world where Tories never become shooters is the better one, but in order to ever get there we must first understand Social-Philosophical Systems and the Vegeta effect.
[*v] this is "demonstrated" across several scraps and/or unfinished chapters. note to me: try to remember to link them