First, as far as I'm concerned, we have the opening of Fredbear's, with William and Henry as coowners, and Fredbear and Spring Bonnie as the two (springlock) animatronics. The place is a success, with tons of merch, side characters, and a spin-off TV show, setting up for the FNaF4 minigames.
BV is a boy with a black shirt with white stripes, who sleeps in a bedroom with a checkered floor, caring after his five furry friends: Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy (missing its head, "out of order"), and the ghostly teleporting Fredbear. The Fredbear plush is his favorite, his imaginary friend, speaking directly into his mind, aware of his thoughts and feelings, and especially his delusions. This is not to say that the plush isn't real, or even that it doesn't really teleport. Strong emotions and memories leave a mark, and a piece of oneself can be imbued into the world. Fantasies come to life.
Marla looked around at her friends. “What?” she said defensively. “I don't believe in ghosts."
“I do,” Charlie said. She felt like she was talking from a great distance; she was almost surprised they could hear her. “I mean, not ghosts, but... memories. I think they linger, whether there's someone there or not.” The house, her old house, was imbued with memory, with loss, with longing. It hung in the air like humidity; the walls were saturated, like the wood had soaked in it. It had been there before she came, and it was there now; it would be there forever. It had to be.
[...]
“Maybe they are,” Marla said. “I don't know, sometimes I have little moments where it's like there's something I forgot, something I regret, or that I'm happy about, or something that makes me want to cry, but it's only there for a split second. Then it's gone. Maybe we're all shedding our fear and regret and hope everywhere we go, and we're catching traces of people we've never met. Maybe it's everywhere.”
“How is that different from believing in ghosts?” Lamar asked.
“It's totally different,” Marla said. “ It's not supernatural, and it's not, like, the souls of dead people. It's just ... people leaving their mark on the world.”
“So it's the ghosts of living people?” Lamar said.
“No.”
“You're talking about people having some kind of essence that can hang around a specific place after the person is gone,” Lamar said. “That's a ghost.”
(The Silver Eyes, 2015)
BV has lots of fantasies. He spends a lot of time at Fredbear's (his dad owns the place), and he once saw something in the shadows, in a back room, an employee putting on a suit- or was it a body being stuffed? He's heard rumors that the animatronics come to life at night, kill people, and hide the bodies. Now he's terrified of the place, and everyone makes fun of him for it, including his brother Mike who constantly tries to scare him. It's left him as a teary-eyed mess, a traumatized child with a broken spirit.
His party is coming soon. He spends the few remaining days crying, hiding from his brother, or trying to escape Fredbear's, terrified of the costumes with barely visible bodies inside, and of the shadows of the bear and the bunny which just might come to life. He speaks to the boy with a Spring Bonnie fingertrap, the creepy girl with red pigtails and green eyes, the round boy with a balloon, and the girl with the Chica toy missing its beak.
0 days until the party, Fredbear gets a big kiss, chomp, and to the hospital he goes. Mike apologizes, and then, a word from his imaginary friend- though something's off about its voice. BV is broken- his soul, specifically, is broken into pieces. The plush promises to put the pieces back together. Accompanying him are his 5 plushies, the pieces, fading away one after another.
"Sometimes I feel like I remember every inch of it, like Carlton," she said. “But sometimes it's like I hardly remember it at all. It's all in pieces."
(Charlie, The Silver Eyes)
Speaking through the plush is William Afton. Sister Location's private room is obnoxiously upfront about this. There's also Afton's yellow dialogue in FFPS and the "I'm still here" being a reference to Springtrap's first teaser, though these are more subtle. SL makes it clear that Afton is obsessed with whatever it is that happened to this kid after the bite.
"Anyone can discover a fire already burning, but Henry found a unique spark —created something truly different, something he didn't deserve, or intend, to stumble upon."
(William Afton, The Fourth Closet)
"Even after this; embodying the one thing Father did love, I'm not enough. Because he can't duplicate this, he can't make himself like me." Her voice began to grow angry again. "He can't duplicate what happened to me, or maybe he's too scared to try it on himself. [...] I gave myself to him, to study, to use, to learn the secrets of my creation. And still it is you he wants." [...]
"You, maybe he can re-create. Henry somehow got a piece of himself into you, and that's something we haven't seen before. That's... unique."
(Elizabeth to Charlie, The Fourth Closet)
In the games, this is BV's role. It's Afton's motivation, in the beginning anyway. Every place BV walked and every tear he shed left a mark, a lingering fog of memory and anxiety which hangs in the air after his death, in the background of all the events going forward, manifesting itself, subtly but persistently. Afton is fascinated by this, and wants to study it, and to control it. So he makes a move- "We are still your friends. Do you still believe that?" He's coaxing BV, reminding him of his "friends", beginning to put the pieces in place. I'll come back to this.
Following the bite, Fredbear's takes some security measures, giving us the Puppet. Halloween night, Afton is a drunken mess, embarrassed by the death of his son, jealous of Henry's perfect life, and hey, look at this, here's little Charlotte locked outside. He kills her and drives off, leaving the Puppet to find her body. The Security Puppet is, of course, programmed to protect, which probably has a lot to do with its behavior going forward. Does Afton notice that Charlotte lives on inside it? Maybe not yet.
Skipping Midnight Motorist...
The place surely can't stay open after the owner's kid is killed, so Fredbear's closes, leaving Freddy's to open later in '83 (says the coin). There's the new animatronics, Freddy's band, but the old ones are still here, the "two specially designed [murder] suits", to be used in the safe room, which is always off camera. Now it's... *consults pit*... 1985, and apparently there's been "an unfortunate incident at the sister location involving multiple and simultaneous springlock failures". Notice that it's "the" sister location. It just so happens that we know of "the" sister location, the only sister location called a "sister location" in the game titled "Sister Location", which coincidentally had a springlock suit which was used in "not the way it was intended to be used." This is pretty explicit: The springlock failure happened at Circus Baby's Pizza World before the missing children incident.
Circus Baby's Pizza World was planned to open that year, with a series of animatronics designed to kidnap children for experimentation. They were so successful that the whole thing was cancelled... due to leaks. Elizabeth gets too close, and Baby is no longer feeling blue.
"The most terrible accidents sometimes bear the most beautiful fruits," he said, as if to himself. "Re-creating the accident—that is the duty and the honor of science. To replicate the experiment, and obtain the same result."
(Afton, The Fourth Closet)
Now that Afton has a clear case study for possession, he decides to recreate the accident, dressing as Spring Bonnie to kill 5 kids in the Freddy's safe room... and I guess a 6th one for good measure. He really shouldn't have killed that last one, it's a Tucker-tier retcon, but whatever. The bodies are stuffed, small souls trapped in prisons of Henry's making, and the pieces are finally put in place. The Puppet carries them in her arms, and gives them life, one way or another. Afton now has his perfect family. And connected to each of them (and probably the Puppet) is a piece of BV, one with his friends.
Afton's caught on camera, and "convicted", allegedly, but since the bodies were never found, and "nothing was ever proven in a court of law", he gets out of it. Freddy's closes. In '87, it reopens in a new location with new animatronics. Afton works there for a bit, kills 5 more kids ("to replicate the experiment, and obtain the same result"), the Toys are haunted and terrorize Jeremy for a week, he gets bit at the party, Fritz-Notmike-Smith works one last night, the place closes and the Toys are scrapped. The original Freddy's reopens, with the classic 5 haunted animatronics.
"They don't remember," Dave said. "They've forgotten. The dead do forget. All they know is that you are here, trying to take away their happiest day. You are intruders." He lowered his voice to a hush. "You are grown-ups."
(The Silver Eyes)
The spirits are restless and angry. Some security guards are killed. Ralph takes the night shift and dies. Mike works a week and gets fired. Maybe he's drawn by a feeling of closeness to his brother. Maybe that's why he keeps carrying that book around. Shadow Freddy follows him home and gives him some spooky nightmares. Freddy's goes out of business in '93.
Now that the place is abandoned, Afton is free to do as he pleases. The stage is set- no pun intended -for another contender in children's entertainment. Deep below ground, the abandoned memories of Circus Baby's Pizza World still sleep. There's a series of experiments which have probably been ongoing for a while now. Rory is in the nightmare chambers, a test for the paranormal effects of fear. There's some recreations of BV's more specific experiences. Then, there's Elizabeth.
"I'm broken. I can't be fixed."
(Baby, Sister Location)
I'll come back to her.
Afton is interested in making use of the children, and finally fulfilling his old promise. He "set[s] some kind of trap", dismantles the 5 animatronics, and takes their endoskeletons. I should note that this was already planned in FNaF3. The whole premise is that Springtrap is the only animatronic left. The Fazbear's Fright team found the empty suits, which are integrated into the attraction, but they couldn't find the actual animatronic parts, because William had taken them. But we didn't know what exactly he was doing until SL and FFPS expanded on it: He melts them together, injects them into the Funtimes, setting them to new purpose.
Remember that the souls surely don't just haunt the endos, they haunt the whole animatronics. When William dismantles them, the souls are split, between the endos and the suits. This is why the spirits can still appear at Freddy's in the final moments of Follow Me.
“They're all in pieces,” Michael said. He shuffled the pages in front of him and found two that showed the same child, then he placed one on top of the other, and began to trace the lines. “These go together,” Michael said, holding up the picture: the two drawings had become one, the separate pages somehow bonded together; the lines were clearer and the colors more vibrant.
“What are you putting back together?” Carlton asked.
“My friends.” Michael pointed to a single picture propped up against the wall. It showed five children: three boys and two girls, standing together in a cheerful pose, with a yellow rabbit standing behind them.
[...]
“My papers blew away,” the boy cried, and hurried off. Carlton turned and saw another boy in the same outfit on the opposite side of the room, chasing other pages. A little girl with long blonde hair ran past him, and he whirled around, recognizing her far away: there were duplicates of each child, all of them chasing different pages.
[...]
The syringe mechanism recoiled with a loud snap: the man in shadow had taken something from the metal body on the table. Suddenly, another drawing flew into the air, and another ghostly child appeared to chase it.
[...]
Beside them was the little girl with blonde curls: they had found all her drawings and put them together, and now she looked solid and real, no longer ghostly like the others. She was able to speak in full sentences, her cognitive abilities having steadily grown stronger as her drawings were united.
[...]
“What a waste,” [Afton] hissed. He turned his attention to the fox again, apparently the most intact. “Bring that boy to me,” he instructed, and the fox turned its eye to the corner.
“I have to go do something for him,” Susie said cheerfully, getting to her feet. “Something for who?” Carlton asked with alarm, and took hold of her arm.
“Bonnie.” She smiled, gesturing toward the cheerful yellow rabbit wavering in and out of existence beside the table.
(The Fourth Closet)
The children's spirits can and do haunt multiple vessels at once. They are 'split' across them, "broken" into "pieces", and their cognition suffers. It's the same thing that happened to BV, though on a smaller scale. Here, the story diverges into two paths, following the two copies of the broken children, which ultimately find themselves in two different endings.
Which FNaF3 ending is canon? According to Scott in his first interview with Dawko, the answer is "complex", and "very interesting". Now we know why.
The 'good' ending takes us to Fazbear's Fright. Years after Afton was springlocked and sealed away, all that can be scavenged is brought together into one place, a horror attraction. The place is saturated with all the memories from Freddy's.
"Just be careful," Aunt Jen had said. "Some things, some memories, are best left undisturbed."
(The Silver Eyes)
Springtrap is introduced, and the memories are reawakened. The attraction comes to life. Of these memories, there are a familiar few which are of particularly importance, connected to the arcades: A kid outside with a balloon, Mangle in a bedroom, Toy Chica in a grassy playground, the shadows at Fredbear's. Also connected to these memories are the children, this version of them anyway, who still haunt the suit parts strung around the building. They're brought together in one memory, the memory of the party, the pieces put together, to finally rest. Hudson-Notmike-Foster works 6 nights, and the building burns down due to faulty wiring, finally dissolving all the remnant still clinging to the forgotten relics (yes, that includes the SAVETHEM kids). Springtrap lives on... and so does the Puppet, somehow.
On the other hand, there's the "bad" ending. Deep below ground, anger is restless, and Mike is told to go put his sister back together. For her to be "put back together" explicitely tells us that she had previously been broken apart. Elizabeth was Afton's experiment with broken souls, split across the Funtimes. Mike plays along with her scheme, and she's put back together, into Ennard. He's scooped, injected with remnant much like Carlton in the above TFC quotes, where he can finish the job.
Also in the Funtimes were the missing children, with BV's pieces, now put together once again. But here, rather than Henry's daughter, they have Afton's, rather than a party, they have a flesh suit, and rather than resting, they remain restless.
Scott was prepared to end the story here. But the bad ending was, well, a bad ending, and nobody understood it anyway, so the show must go on.
Ennard abandons the flesh. Michael should be dead, but he's not.
He was looking at Carlton's chest, where someone had placed a drawing over his wound. “This is a part of you,” Carlton said, grasping at the picture.
“You'll die without it,” Michael whispered.
“I can't keep this.” Carlton shook his head as Michael pushed it back. “You can give it to me next time you see me.”
Michael smiled, and the drawing began to fade, hovering where Michael had placed it for a last moment before the ghostly image vanished, seeming to sink into Carlton’s chest.
Thank you.
(The Fourth Closet)
Elizabeth left behind a piece, so that he won't die.
This, finally, takes us to Pizzeria Simulator. Henry has decided to re-enter the plot, to turn the bad ending into another good one by doing FNaF3 again, but more dramatically this time. Judging by the Spookfest poster, it's around Halloween of 2(0)23, the 40th anniversary of Charlotte's death. He uses the old Fredbear's building, and sends out some kind of call, to lure in the animatronics. Baby and Molten Freddy, now split apart, think Afton is calling them to "do what they"- the Funtimes -"were created to do", and kill children. The Puppet is lured by Lefty with a "Bracelet code", 93401233 (presumably somehow translating to "green"), and kept calm with a lullaby. Afton knows it's a trap, but goes in anyway, because he's just that carelessly cocky I guess. Mike shows up unexpectedly.
We have the whole Afton family, what remains of the missing children, Henry and Charlotte. Now, all the pieces are together at last, sealed away, to be burned for good.
"The memory of everything that started this can finally begin to fade away, as the agony of every tragedy should."
(Henry, FFPS)
...
Not quite. Andrew, the top-secret sixth victim, was actually totally here the whole time, his spirit latched onto Afton's. Cassidy fades away, leaving the demon to his demons, but Andrew remains, trapping Afton in an endless nightmare, refusing to let him go. This is where the games conclude Afton's story: An eternal nightmare, where he's forced to "always come back" indefinitely, as torture. A fitting conclusion, I think.
I suppose Scott didn't agree, though, because he wrote a series of books picking up where the games left off. Afton's restless corpse is taken to Heracles Hospital, where he uses finger movements to convince a priest to bring him to a Fazbear distribution center, where his body explodes, and his soul (as well as Andrew's) is split across all kinds of things. Phineas Taggart collects one of these, Fetch's battery, as well as a doll with the spirit of a cancer victim, and some other miscellaneous trauma-infused items, to build the Stitchwraith, which immediately kills him, and then goes on to find the remaining pieces of Andrew to bring together. This also brings together Afton, who pulls himself together from the random trash he's possessed, into a mass of garbage with rabbit ears. He's powered by the combined suffering of Freddy's past (Eleanor), but once they ditch him, his weakness is revealed, and the Puppet (who is randomly still around again??) attacks and defeats him. He falls apart, sinking into a lake, dead for good.
That is, finally, the end of this era of the story. The Mimic's story follows. Maybe when it's finished, I'll cover it too, but that won't be for a while.