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 brand is successful, with merchandise, side characters, and a spinoff TV show, setting up for the FNaF4 minigames.
BV is a boy who wears a black shirt with white stripes, and sleeps in a bedroom with a checkered floor, caring after his five furry friends: Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, the torn-up Foxy, 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.
BV has lots of delusions. 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 child's 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 constantly teases him for it, especially his older brother Mike. It's left him as a teary-eyed mess, a traumatized crying child with a broken spirit.
These things he fears are delusions, but they are not mere delusions. Strong emotions and memories leave a mark, imbuing themselves into the tangible 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.”
(The Silver Eyes, 2015)
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 5 pieces. Accompanying him are his 5 plushies, his friends, fading away one after another.
That voice speaking under the guise of his imaginary friend Fredbear is William Afton. SL makes it clear that Afton used the Fredbear plush, and is interested in whatever it is that happened to this kid after the bite. So he makes his first move-
We are still your friends. Do you still believe that?
I will put you back together.
BV's ghost is lured by this false promise. He joins his "friends", and the pieces are put into place, into the 5 animatronics; Afton's first work of possession, though I doubt he really yet understands what he's done. There is still lots to be learned- All those painful memories best left forgotten still linger, BV's fears imbued into the world around him, channelled most especially, I imagine, into the immediate vicinity of the bite itself: Fredbear. Afton is fascinated by these fears, and wants to study them, to recreate them, to control them.
Fredbear's is shut down after the bite, and Freddy's opens later in 1983 (says the coin), this time with some extra safety measures: the Security Puppet. Halloween night, Afton is a drunken mess, embarrassed by the death of his son, jealous of Henry's perfect family, only to find, lo and behold, little Charlotte is locked outside in the rain. He kills her, and drives off, leaving the Puppet to find her body. Does Afton notice that Charlotte lives on inside it, not content to stay dead? Maybe not yet.
Skipping Midnight Motorist...
Freddy's has some new animatronics, the Fazbear 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 just 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 just so happens to have 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, leading to the springlock suits being banned.
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 had to be cancelled... due to leaks. Elizabeth gets too close, and Baby is no longer feeling blue.
Now that Afton has a clear case study for possession, he decides to recreate the accident. Fazbear Entertainment receives five reports of missing children, finding camera footage of guests being brought into the hidden safe room, the Spring Bonnie animatronic is noticeably moved.
Gabriel, Jeremy, Susie, Fritz, and Cassidy. The children are killed, the bodies are stuffed, the vessels are haunted; small souls trapped in prisons of Henry's making, given new life by the Puppet, but bound to those old fears still festering within. 5 children, and 5 pieces of that broken spirit, together now animating the 5 animatronics to roam the halls of Freddy's.
Afton's caught on camera, alleged to be convicted, but in truth, the bodies were never found, and "nothing was ever proven in a court of law."
But there had been no evidence, there had been no bodies, and so there could be no charge. William Afton had left town, and there was nothing to stop him. They did not even know where he had gone.
(The Silver Eyes)
Freddy's closes for a couple years.
Come 1987, Freddy's cautiously reopens in a new location, sparing no expense on the new "Toy" animatronics, equipped with facial recognition tied to a criminal database. And, for good measure, they hire a nighttime security guard as well. This guard just so happens to be William Afton under a fake identity, who immediately kills 5 more kids. The Toys are haunted, left to terrorize the new guard Jeremy-NotMike-Fitzgerald, until he gets bit by Foxy at a party. Fritz-NotMike-Smith works one last night, and the place closes.
The Toys are scrapped, dismantled, so the spirits can move on. The original ghosts of the main five animatronics, though they had also been dismantled, are still trapped by the trauma of the events of 1983. Charlotte remains by choice, refusing to leave the other children behind. In the wake of the '87 location's tragedies, the original Freddy's is reopened on a smaller budget, with the old reliable animatronics restricted to their stage during the day, but allowed to roam at night. Foxy is kept under maintanence until they can figure out how to stop him from biting people (AKA indefinitely).
"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- perhaps drawn by a feeling of closeness to his brother? His brother wants to feel close to him, too; or rather, his brother's fears, the dark shadow of Fredbear, who follows Mike home to torment him with ghostly nightmares. The fears Mike used to torment his brother are now reflected back onto him. He makes it through them, though.
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. A series of experiments, probably ongoing for quite a while. Children trapped in chambers pumped full of hallucinogenic gas, inducing terrible nightmares, recreating those old fears to study their power. Then, there's Elizabeth... I'll come back to her.
Afton is interested in making use of the children. He "set(s) some kind of trap", dismantles the 5 animatronics, and takes their endoskeletons. I should note that this plot point, Afton taking the endoskeletons, 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 addressed by future games: He melts them together and injects them into the Funtimes, setting the children's souls to new purpose.
But the souls don't just haunt the endos- they haunt the whole animatronics. Unbeknownst to William, when he dismantles the animatronics, splitting the endos from the suits, the souls are split as well, broken between the different components. So when Afton returns to Freddy's after securing the endoskeletons, he doesn't expect to be ambushed by ghosts still inhabiting those empty shells.
“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.
(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, who 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". This is 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 building is saturated with memory from Freddy's past.
"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 of particularly importance, which attach 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, still trapped by those old traumas in the suit parts strung around the building. With some effort, they're brought together in one memory: The memory of the party. With all the children in one place, the pieces are now put together, the pain subsides, and the spirits can finally rest.
After NoName-NotMike-FrightGuard's 6 nights on the job, a random error of faulty wiring sets the building aflame. After so many decades, all those last gasps of memory still clinging to the building's forgotten relics are finally dissolved; claimed by time, as all things must be. But 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.
"I'm broken. I can't be fixed."
(Baby, Sister Location)
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, conveniently coalescing her pieces into Ennard. He's scooped, injected with remnant much like Carlton in the above TFC quotes, where he can finally put her together.
Also in the Funtimes were the missing children, with BV's pieces. Much like in Happiest Day, they are now finally brought together. But here, rather than Henry's daughter accompanying them, they have Afton's; rather than a party, they have a flesh suit; and rather than resting, they remain restless. The children live on, their ending forever unresolved.
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- a parting gift from his dead sister.
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)
This, finally, takes us to Pizzeria Simulator. The missing children are still imprisoned by Afton's handiwork, Charlotte remains uncontent to leave the others alone in their suffering, Elizabeth continues to seek her father's approval, and William still refuses to succumb to death.
So Henry decides to re-enter the plot, to turn the bad ending into the good ending version 2, for-really-real-this time, by doing FNaF3 again but more dramatically. Judging by the Spookfest poster, it's around Halloween of 2(0)23, the 40th anniversary of Charlotte's death. He sends out some kind of call, to lure in Baby and Molten Freddy (now split apart), who think Afton is calling them to "do what they"- the Funtimes -"were created to do", and kill children at this new pizzeria. The Puppet is lured by Lefty with a "Bracelet code", 93401233 (code for "green", I assume), and kept calm with a lullaby. Afton knows it's a trap, but goes in anyway, still delirious with his newfound strength. Mike shows up unexpectedly to run the place.
We have the whole Afton family, what remains of the missing children, Henry and Charlotte. Now all the lingering narrative 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)
...
Except, not quite. We've forgotten about the top-secret seventh victim, Andrew, killed around the time of the MCI (possibly a 6th unreported child). His ghost was actually totally here the whole time, chasing Afton for vengeance, but only now, after the fire, has he gotten the perfect opportunity to enact it. 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, forced to "always come back" indefinitely, as torture.
A fitting conclusion, I think. And, considering the post-SotM outlook for Frights' canonicity, I'd say Scott agrees.
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.