Here is the opening dialogue of the game:
"Everything that happens out there, has an effect here. Do you understand? This is a safe place. This is a santuary. But something has gone wrong, and now it can be seen here. Something went very wrong. That's why I am here. But I won't let the same happen to you. I will put you back together."
In most lore analysis of World, the parts of the game which scream "I have lore relevance!" are considered in isolation, without giving much thought to their contextualization within the game as a whole. From this vantage point, certain parts of Glitchbear's dialogue seem very mysterious. Yellow Eyes AKA Glitchbear is obviously FNaF4's final speaker, talking to BV. But then, what is the thing that went wrong? Whatever it is, it's the reason Glitchbear is "here"- as in, why they exist, or just why they're present in World, speaking to BV? "I won't let the same happen to you" implies it's something that didn't happen to BV, so it can't be the bite. It also implies it's something which is at risk of happening to BV, if Glitchbear doesn't stop it by putting him together. What is going on here?
What this analysis ignores is that the game actually tells us exactly what is going wrong. In fact, it's what the whole plot of the game is about! Here are some quotes from Adventure Fredbear:
"I think I found a clue as to what is happening! Look behind me, there is a tree that is distorted and glitched. [...] Whatever has gone wrong, we have to fix it. It will be an adventure! Something horrible must have happened on the flipside, because it’s causing this world to fracture."
"Once you have found and pressed the buttons, the gates protecting the game’s security system will be lowered! That’s when you can strike at the heart of whatever is corrupting this world!"
The plot of the game is that something went wrong on the Flipside which is causing the FNaF World to fracture and glitch, and we need to go on an adventure to find out what it is and put a stop to it.
So, what do we find? What is at the heart of FNaF World's corruption?
FNaF World's story is a meta narrative about Scott Cawthon's work. The plot is that the storyteller, Scott, is going mad, overworked by the demands of his audience and their "insatiable gullets", and it's causing his creation to break down. The "Flipside" is the real world, where Scott lives, and Animatronica is Scott's creation, a cartoon sanctuary for his characters which is being corrupted by his insanity. It's an amateur RPG in the signature Scott Cawthon modeling style, an explicit video game world with glitches as a plot point, with Chipper upset about his game failing, and with Scott himself as a character pulling the strings behind everything. I do not think the map was intended to be shaped like a brain; but if it was, it's Scott's brain.
This plot is then continued (a bit more explicitly and convolutedly) in Update 2, which peels back yet another layer of meta. Fredbear explains:
"The game bombed; end of story. I've already put in my application at the Fazburger down the street. The problem is that now... he... has gone insane. We don't know what he is making, and we can't reach the room where it is being kept. Whatever it is, it has everyone around here on edge. You won't be able to reach the room where it's being kept. Any party you have would get wiped out. The air is toxic, and the guardian is unbeatable."
The failure of FNaF World itself has driven the "real" Scott insane (second-order meta Scott), leading him to make a bunch of terrible spin-off games. Animdude is just the first-order meta representation of Scott, who is, from this second-order meta perspective, just a FNaF World character whose code is now reused by the "real" (second-order) Scott to make Chica's Magic Rainbow (Animdude explains this directly in the Halloween backstage area). We kill second-order Scott's head-in-a-jar in Freddy in Space. Finally, we defeat the "unbeatable guardian" (Chica's Magic Rainbow) to access "the room where it is being kept"- Desk Man's room. Desk Man is the real second-order Scott. (I guess the Freddy in Space head was just a clone or something? :p)
"I'm impressed. What are you doing here? Can't you see I'm busy? You deactivated my games? I didn't know what else to do. I don't want to disappoint. Something terrible is coming... Her name is Baby. I am afraid there is nothing you can do. It is too late to deactivate her."
We know for certain this is Scott, not Henry, because of the "You deactivated my games?" line. The terrible thing that the madness-driven Scott has created is revealed to be Circus Baby, who then kills him. The whole thing is framed as a meta teaser for the next game, Sister Location, which is built up as this evil creation born from Scott's insanity, as he moves past his cute intermission with World to delve back into horror.
"The pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. Now we turn to darkness."
"There's only so much you can let your mind focus on murders and tragedy and stuff like that before you kind of start cracking. Even if it's just stories that you're making up, there's only so much human suffering that a human mind can sit around and think about. At that point I was 2 years in, fully commited to this grisly story of murders, and I had to make something more lighthearted. In hindsight what I should've done is, I should've used that for a troll game, or I should've made something like Foxy Fighters. I should've just done something that was obviously for fun, and not tried to somehow tie it in to a canon game. And that's obvious to me now, but like I was saying, I wasn't thinking completely rationally at the time."
- Scott Cawthon
(Y'know's edited out)
Notice his weasel words here. He didn't just say World was canon, he said he "tried to somehow tie it in to a canon game." I do not think FNaF World is a canon FNaF game. But it is undeniably tied to FNaF4.
So. How does the Clock route fit into all this?
"There is a task for you to complete. You need to leave breadcrumbs for him, to help him find his way."
"This is a safe place, a sanctuary. The truth is that there is no safe place. You don't understand that; you were made for one thing. There is a task for you to complete. Before you take this passage, go back. Find the clock."
"Another clock should be inside the funhouse. Nothing else matters. Don't be decieved by the one pulling the strings."
"I will tell you a secret. There are powerful chips that can only be attained by breaking the game- the red chests. [...] Find these places to gain an unfair advantage. That is, if you insist on following this path that has been forcefully placed before you. Something terrible is coming."
That "Something terrible is coming" was added in Update 2, and is in direct parallel with Desk Man's "Something terrible is coming...", in reference to Baby. Glitchbear also talks about World's gameplay mechanics, Adventure Fredbear's lines, and Scott Cawthon himself. He is not separate from the game's meta plot; He is woven into it, a direct product of it. He tells us this himself:
"Something went very wrong. That's why I am here."
Remember that the "something" that "went wrong" is, explicitly, Scott Cawthon going mad. FNaF World's fracturing and glitching has caused FNaF4's final speaker to "glitch" into the game, as Glitchbear.
"But I won't let the same happen to you. I will put you back together."
But he won't let the same happen to BV. Despite this odd circumstance, he's going to continue what he set out to do in FNaF4; allegedly, to "put him back together".
Later, he tells the player that-
"The truth is that there is no safe place. You don't understand that; you were made for one thing."
He is not saying here that the player characters were created for the clock route, as many people speculate. He's saying the reason "You don't understand that" is because you're just a video game character made by the storyteller, Scott.
So, within World's story, the FNaF4 final speaker has been Glitched into Animatronica, and is now continuing with their previous plans, but within the confines of the game. What World shows us is a version of what the speaker was trying to do at the end of FNaF4, but plucked out of its original canon context, and dropped into this silly meta game.
From an out-of-universe standpoint, Scott obviously included Glitchbear to help clarify FNaF4... which didn't work at all, and fittingly, was legitimately born from a kind of madness which he now regrets.
...
So that's FNaF World. I don't want to get into interpretations of what specifically the Clock route means for the canon story here; I've discussed it at length in previous posts. See:
