Fazbear Frights #6-3: Hide-and-Seek
Freddy's has a new "Hide-and-Seek" game, featuring a Bonnie shadow cutout, and in a fit of rage, Toby destroys it. That rage (plus some Eleanor meddling) results in "the Shadow", a literal Bonnie shadow mimicking the form of the cutout, becoming attached to Toby, following him home and causing him pains and nightmares. It 'feeds' on his negative emotion, as a fire feeds on kindling."Maybe the shadow had attached to him so easily because he’d been in a bad place emotionally."
"The shadow radiated fear and anger, and just like in his dream, the shadow loomed behind him, a predator waiting to strike."
"Then something moved within its face, and that’s when he noticed the shadow had formed a mouth. A row of spiked teeth flashed into a smile."
"It wasn’t real. Just a nightmare. But it had seemed so real. It was one of the worst nightmares of his life."
The Shadow is a construction of Toby's anger- its intensity grows and shrinks throughout the story in direct correspondence to Toby's emotional state. But this is not anger in the abstract. The Shadow embodies that specific anger felt by Toby toward his brother who bragged about beating him in games, the anger he took out on the Hide-and-Seek game. Hence...
"Just like Toby, the shadow had only wanted to win."
FNaF 4
FNaF4's gameplay is a series of recurring nightmares, where a child in their bedroom is attacked by ragged animatronics with vicious teeth and claws. Between nights, we are shown the tragic story of the crying child: his distressing experiences, traumas, and finally his death. Given how the nightmares and minigames are woven together, and given that the player is child-height, in a child's bedroom, defending against exaggerated scary animatronics, the nightmares are clearly framed as a scary scenario with scary monsters imagined this child. On the 5th night, just before the party, we face Nightmare Fredbear- the character he feared most, the one behind the bite, acting as a sort of "final boss" of the main story.Despite these nightmares clearing representing the child's fears, he is not the one experiencing them. The actual dreamer is Mike, his older brother, as suggested by a bit of Phone Guy ambience and then shown outright in the logbook. Why is Mike having nightmares about somebody else's fears?
The FNaF4 trailer asks...
...and the Steam description opens with...
"This time, the terror has followed you home."
This contextualizes the nightmares as the product of something, some terror, which followed Mike home after FNaF1. What is this terror?
It turns out that Fredbear is not really the final boss of FNaF4. The true final boss appears in Night 7: The black, slightly transparent double of Fredbear, seemingly a new character pulled from nowhere, though there is an intuitive connection to the existing dark Fredbear recolor from previous games. This character is the actual, final culmination of the nightmares, with the suggestively succinct name "Nightmare", as though to imply they somehow are the nightmares themselves, the embodiment of those horrors imagined by the crying child.
As revealed in the game files, this character is Shadow Freddy.
Shadow Freddy's identity now comes clearly into focus. Shadow Freddy is the terror of the crying child, his literal fear of the shadow cast on the wall by Fredbear, warped by perception into a monster which is then made reality by the "energy of emotion", as Taggart put it. He is that memory, that fear, that fantasy, come to life.
The story of FNaF4 is, in general, the story of the crying child's fears living on after his death- his fears of the animatronics coming to life at night, of a shadowy man in the back room stuffing bodies, of his brother's jumpscares, of the naked endoskeletons, and of the shadows on the wall. The game thematically and diegetically embodies those fears in Shadow Freddy, as the final boss of the game, and the core of the nightmares which make up the gameplay.
I have not forgotten Nightmare's line in UCN.
"I am your wickedness, made of flesh."
Shadow Freddy claims to be William's evil. The characters are clearly related- Shadow Freddy is purple and shadowy in the back room, and he recreates the MCI in Follow Me. SL recontextualized the nightmares as related to a series of experiments conducted by William.
Nonetheless, I think that Shadow Freddy is first and foremost the fears of the crying child. There is no reason for William's evil to spontaneously take the form of a shadowy Golden Freddy; his body clearly comes from the shadow on the wall at Fredbear's. He claims that he is William's evil because those fears are William's evil- fears of children being stuffed and bringing animatronics to life, killing people and hiding their bodies... That's what William does. That's William's evil.