#don't mind me i'm just here overanalyzing the character who probably has less than ten minutes of actual screentime

[cel-aerion]

Alright, so, while (re)watching First Nights at Freddy’s, I noticed that there are at least a couple instances of MatPat’s character and Glitchtrap saying similar things or expressing similar sentiments:

-“You wanted to force my hand, didn’t you? Be careful what you wish for.” / “Force my hand, and you’ll pay.”

-“I drove away the light ‘til I was numb.” / “I didn’t really understand the concept [of evil] at first, but the more I watched you sniveling skinbags, all your lies and hypocrisy and corruption, the more I embraced it.”

-Both have instances where they reply to one character telling another, “I’ll be right behind you,” with “No, you won’t.” This one feels especially notable, since the musical is basically bookended by these scenes.

So this got me thinking, maybe there’s more of a link between these two than there appears to be.

So, spoilers and random headcanons under the cut.

So here’s what we know, or at least what we can infer:

-When William Afton was killed, Henry had already killed or attempted killing, as shown by the fact that when William found the Crying Child, he already knew what was going on and what Henry's intention was.

-Presumably, this was after Glitchtrap had been locked away, otherwise no one would have been there to do it.

-Despite apparently being created for personal use, Glitchtrap actually resided in a company computer, or else wiping the old files wouldn't have freed him. Which means that it's possible Henry was aware of him in some way.

-Henry was shown to have a wedding ring*, suggesting he has, or at least had, a family - probably the latter, since he switches identities so easily.

*I am fully aware this is probably just because MatPat doesn't tend to take his actual wedding ring off. I also don’t care, because I’m having fun. Besides, I would hope that MatPat, of all people, would appreciate someone looking into tiny details and coming up with explanations for them

-Therefore, it's probable that at some point, Henry *lost* that family. We don't get any confirmation of this, or any indication that he ever had a kid, but Henry Emily did have a child who died young in the FNAF novels - this is not evidence that it happened in the musical, of course, but it at least supports that possibility.

So consider:

William has this advanced AI on a company computer. Henry, who's lost a child of his own in the past, somehow learns of the suggestion made to William to “replace his dead child with one of the many unsupervised kids flocking to his family diner each day” - perhaps William talks to him about this AI, maybe Henry stumbled on it accidentally, but either way, unlike William, he likes the idea. Maybe he tries straight kidnapping at first, then killed when the child was uncooperative, discovering he enjoyed it, or maybe he took it too far from the start. Either way, that’s what starts him on that path.

When Glitchtrap first appears, he mentions the murders in the restaurant, though he thinks they were done by William (“Or [take] your uncle, an upstanding business manager, using his restaurant as cover to murder kids in his spare time.”). Which suggests two things: That there is evidence of the murders on the computer - also supported by the fact that Henry wanted the old files wiped clean - and that Glitchtrap is still aware of what's going on in the computer system, even if he doesn't know who's actually adding it.

(Side note, but this probably added to Glitchtrap’s frustrations: Imagine being locked away for your ideas being “too extreme”, only to have your jailer then go even more extreme.)

All this is to say, it's possible that, even though they didn't really know each other, Glitchtrap was influenced/shaped by Henry, even if just because Henry was using that computer under William’s name, and Glitchtrap was picking up on what he left behind.

This also offers a possible backstory for Henry. The closest we get to learning his motivations are his lines in Dark Remains, and though they don’t really say anything about what that motivation is, the song implies that he was driven to it and it was a conscious decision, he wasn’t just dark from the start. If he thought doing so would restore his family in some way, or if he failed in that and started looking for retribution instead… well.

...

Subtheory That I’m Not Really Serious About but Think Would Be Interesting: Imagine if Henry and William were partners in more than one way, and so the child lost in the car accident was one they both lost. This is thrown off because Glitchtrap mentions that William lost his child and wife in that accident. But this idea hopped in my brain before I remembered that line, and I was too amused, so I wanted to share anyways.