Hey Izzy here again. Quite a bit late as is apparently my habit. Sorry about that! ADHD brain is the worst sometimes. I got my weeks messed up and this should have come out the 4th. Sorry!

Ok so the “year of FNAF” is finally over, welcome to 2024 I guess. Though heaven knows what we will get from this franchise going forward.

So Help Wanted 2, omg amazing. I can not dwell on the many hours of lets plays I watched for that game, as it was arguably too many lol. I did not play any of the game, I do not have VR, but I loved watching it. Especially cause people play it so differently. The lore is not a topic I feel I can comment on lol. From Glitchtrap/Mimic or whatever taking over you via Helpi, to IRL princess quest, to the Bonny mask that maybe means we are Cassie’s dad who is also maybe Bonnie Bro. It is wild.

I would love to know what you guys think of it!

But as for general Fnaf I have been thinking about it a lot. It is a series that I really enjoy despite having not really playing the games (I have played a little of the first Help Wanted at a friends house and I technically OWN security breach on the switch but I’ve never played it lol). But it is very hard for me to put my finger on, cause while I enjoyed the novels I can admit that they are also a little stupid. Like how does SOOO many things in that book series not make sense while still connecting with me as a reader enough to enjoy them? Hell only knows. And the Fazbear Fright books ( I am on #7 now) are fun little horror stories (though I have not gotten to Faz-Goo or Sea Bonnies yet lol) but they don’t super connect to the overall narrative of everything.

Like even I kind of wonder why I am SOO into this franchise for how strange it is, but I love talking about and the community of people working to solve it and theorize about it is super fun. Finding the little details to make pieces fit together is fun.

And as I have cosplayed Roxy and plan to again I will say I also really like the character designs lol. Well most of them, AR gets a bit odd sometimes.

I would love to hear what you guys think, let me know how you got into the franchise/ things you like and dislike about it. I am super curious!

And now to harass Lauren about my hyper fixations! (I bullied her into watching some Help Wanted 2 footage with me lol) (also very sad about MatPat stepping down, he was a huge part of my fnaf experience and fuck if that video didn’t get me teary eyed)

So Q: As someone not into the series I am curious to see how it reads to an outside eye. Like from random internet/tumblr/ having annoying friends that group cosplay it, cultural osmosis. It is a franchise that I feel is confusing even if you keep up with it but I honestly do not know how that reads in small details, like do you really just see the merch everywhere and know its a spooky chucky-cheese game? Or is there more? And from the like hour of Help Wanted 2 game play you saw I was curious if it sparked any interest in the series/ looked interesting. Like other than the cost of VR, does this seem like a series someone could jump into?

A: The majority of my exposure to the Five Nights franchise has arrived through social media and surprisingly few advertisements from as large as it has grown. This tells me the game, with a simple storyline and play mechanic in its first iteration, has attention grabbing power. Previous to you guiding me to watch Markliplier’s and MatPat’s let’s plays of Help Wanted 2, I tried to catch up on the lore of the game world through wiki’s and the plot synopsis of the movie. I’m going to accept that the haunted animatronics’ origins are best thought of as an entertaining excuse to engage with the cartoonishly frightening game rather than a plot driven narrative. So dead children in robots did not make me want to see how the story ends, what about the challenge of the game? This VR game, at least, isn’t for me. The controls utilized didn’t seem to extend past character movement and selecting correct tools for tasks with a time crunch, which can certainly cause anxiety for a player trying to rescue a cake from a chest cavity before a mascot bear kills you, but I can’t say that I would play a several hour game of that. -Lauren