#william still never shutting up afton ig

[trapton]

lean into me. it's okay. ( vanessa and springtrap for fazbear frights )

🔧 @khalaesi !

𝚑𝚊𝚜𝚗'𝚝 𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚢𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜. a trio of decades, breaking down tissue and threadbare body. pathetic, he thinks to himself. yet the thought of his getting out of here on his own was as impossible as it was for him to break through the steel, sealed entrance of the safe room he'd hidden from the intelligence of the robot performers. [...] he had hardly been able to stand, let alone find the strength possessed to pull the door inward. however, he would build that strength back. with her help or no, despite the set-back or the way he grumbles at simply being supported by a woman on his way out of his own bloody restaurant.

he makes a rumbling sound, deep and guttural. his arm thrown around the girl's shoulders, with his head tilted sideways and downwards. eyes lidded, whilst his steel feet make contact with the ground.

plastic orbs flicker around the abandoned pizzeria, although such doesn't [...] last long. there's a pain radiating throughout his nerves, staring down at the black and white floor. peering pack and forth with shuttering clicks of eyelids. it was one thing to know that your life's work has been destroyed [...] yet it's another thing to see with your own eyes, the shell of your own tomb.

"shut. up." he thrusts his head towards her with a violent shake of metal ears, his jaw rising and falling. other arm heavy at his side. "i am leaning. just help me, and be quiet about it." [...] "what bloody year is it, anyway?" his irritation is shown through his impatient, and irritated tone. she's lucky she isn't dead by now. lucky he needs her. he growls once more.

" -- and what exactly is the plan once we get out of here?" he can't imagine it would be odd to have his corpse propped in a vehicle, or whether or not he would fit in anything less than a transporting vehicle.

[therealnotta]

(this is a very long analysis, ig, about William Afton as a character and whether I think he's a good villain or not. I'm putting the whole darn thing after the cut bc it is. pretty long lol)

look okay there's generally two popular "types" of villains that I see in fiction lately. You got your "Joker" villains and your "Loki" villains. Joker villains are causing problems for funsies. They don't really have an overarching plan, or if they do it doesn't have much of a purpose. Like Moriarty, for example. It's not that they don't put thought into it, but the outcome they want is chaos.

The Loki villains are the ones you're supposed to feel kinda bad for, the ones with a tragic backstory who are doing what they think is the right thing. Maybe something horrible happened to them, maybe they were raised wrong, who knows, but they really, truly believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys here. These are more popular lately; they also make for good redemption arcs. (note: you HAVE to accept that the character is fictional for just about any redemption arcs to work. in the real world, it doesn't matter if you just wanted your family to accept you or not, killing eighty people is just not going to work in your favor. this is a VERY IMPORTANT THING to remember for where I'm going with this.)

Both types of characters serve different purposes. A Joker villain is fun, energetic, and you probably still want to see them get punched in the face. They're scarier because they can't be reasoned with; the classic "I'd rather work for Lex Luthor than the Joker" argument applies here. ANYONE around a Joker villain is at risk of being killed with no warning. And, depending on the target demographic, they're easy to balance out! Joker can show up in kids' shows as a goofy wild card and still show up in the live-action stuff (or animated movies that aren't really for kids) as an intimidating villain.

A Loki villain is harder to work with, in my opinion. You have to carefully balance the whole "they're doing what they think is right" and "they are doing it VERY wrong" without going too far; one way and they're an antihero, the other and they're too despicable for your audience to feel any sort of sympathy towards. And, really, as long as you don't FOCUS on what they did you're probably good. Loki killed quite a few people, did some messed up stuff, and everyone still loves him. I think a large portion of this is STARTING with the tragic backstory. You already feel bad, so you can excuse a little murder, perhaps.

Now onto my point: William Afton from the Five Nights at Freddy's series. I'm writing this before I've actually seen the ending/whether or not he comes back, but seeing as how his catchphrase is "I always come back" I think we already knew. What kind of villain is he?

He's... both? It's weird. Really weird. For much of the series he was this faceless entity, a shadow in the memories of his victims. This really lent him some scary factor; the unknown is always the scariest. And then we find out he's a single dad of three and, depending on the timeline and how you interpret some stuff, started killing in an effort to find a way to bring his son back. So it's an attempt at a Loki villain; he's doing this for a reason, he thinks it's worth it, and, hey, he's clearly struggling. Another one of his kids gets caught in the crossfire when he tries to get the robots to do the dirty work for him, so he shuts everything down and never tries that again. Most of the audience didn't feel any sympathy towards him; we had already seen the horrible stuff he had done and, honestly, child murder is a little too far for most people to forgive. So he doesn't end up working out well as a Loki villain. Too much bad, it's all introduced in the wrong order, and even though there's a decent chunk of the fanbase that thinks he's hot (British accent. we literally have never seen him alive lol) they still don't generally sympathize with him. I don't think ANYONE would be happy if he got a redemption arc.

So then this concept gets introduced, either intentionally or not, to push him into the Joker box. By.... giving him a fursona....?

Look, okay, okay, it's Malhare/Spring Bonnie. Except it is NOT Spring Bonnie, it is a distinctly different rabbit; even though the Springtrap bot is different in every rendition, he still looks nothing like Malhare. Ever. But that's a pretty small detail; either way, Afton has a rabbit fursona that he uses when he's actually doing the killing. And when he's in costume, his personality changes. Instead of being the calm inventor we heard trying to pitch his invention to the board, he's dancing across a pizzeria in a bunny costume while his victim realizes they can't move. If he had been like that from the start, I'd say sure, fine, but it feels so... disconnected. Even taking ONLY what we know is canon, it's so different from what we've already seen that it's challenging. Springtrap is an intimidating force, but not because he's unpredictable. Every voice line we've gotten skews towards "evil genius," not "mad scientist." And now, totally out of left field, he's the wild card. Which might get cleared up in Security Breach; again, haven't seen any endings yet lol.

All in all, I feel like there wasn't that strong of a grasp on who he was as a character from the start. Which makes sense! Scott made one game and he didn't necessarily expect it to go this far; why would he detail the honestly unimportant killer? The antagonists are the animatronics; all you need to know is that they're possessed by the victims. The killer's motives might be nice to know, but personality doesn't matter. And then the reboot comes along and suddenly Afton is front and center; he's the one we hear in the opening of Sister Location, and it's his daughter you're primarily going up against, and you're playing as his only surviving son.

We should have had a firm grasp on the character when Sister Location came out. Having his kid's stuffed animal in his office, having his daughter clearly not viewing him as a bad person (she was willing to kill him, but that's unrelated), the way he calmly explains the features of his robot and his implied lines of trying to keep his daughter away from the animatronics, it all makes it sound like this is a serious villain. Maybe a little sympathetic, even. The next game doesn't disagree. Help Wanted, then, turns it around with Malhare.

Now, if you explain it as "that's just what's LEFT of Afton, and the ghosts are known to start to lose their personality with time," then I think it ends up working out. Maybe that's what Security Breach does! But if it's literally just that that's how he is, we should've already been seeing that. "Ah, but the books say that's how he is in costume!" Okay, well, he's been "in costume" since the third game; we should've been seeing more of a Malhare-like Afton.

I don't think he's a bad villain. I think it's just a villain that doesn't know what its trying to do, which is fine and fixable, but it's still frustrating, especially since bringing this up in the fandom leads to people thinking "This is a somewhat sympathetic villain due to his backstory" means "I think that having something bad happen to you means you're allowed to kill all the kids you want." A) no, B) He's not real and neither were the kids, and C) it's an issue of writing, not morality. I don't see people complaining that Loki is a mass murderer and therefore all the fans think that that's okay, and it's the same thing here. From what I've seen, people WANTED Afton to be a Joker villain; I just wish we had always seen that instead.