Transcript
Speaker: And I get it.
Speaker: I stopped a long time ago, but man, for a while there, I was right there with everybody else.
Speaker: I, you know, I hadn't hardly played the game at all, but I was fascinated by all the shit that seems to be.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was so cool.
Speaker: And we're 140 pages in and almost nothing's happened.
Speaker: It's it is ridiculous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, it's not ridiculous.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixlet.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me, as always, is Phil.
Speaker: And today, we are reading, recapping, and reviewing our white whale, so to speak.
Speaker: Oh, Lord.
Speaker: It is a book that there are some lost episodes of from several years ago.
Speaker: It's probably on my hard drive or somewhere.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, Five Nights at Freddy's, The Silver Eyes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: See, because what you kids at home don't know is that Kevin and I attempted this podcast five years ago, maybe six.
Speaker: Yeah, something like that, maybe.
Speaker: Because it was back when I was working for Scuff, so... Yeah.
Speaker: So this book, the book came out in, what, 2015? 2015.
Speaker: Yeah, something like that.
Speaker: I think it was relatively new when we first started talking about this.
Speaker: I want to say 2016.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: OK, so I think it might have been 2017, which is five years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Five years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 17 was five years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, me and Kevin came up with the idea of let's do a podcast where we read and review and talk about adaptations of video games into novels.
Speaker: And we said, you know what everyone likes right now because it is 2017.
Speaker: It's Five Nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: It's Five Nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the perfect thing to start with.
Speaker: Scott Cawthorne was top of the world.
Speaker: Top of the world.
Speaker: He hadn't been...
Speaker: discovered to be a hardcore Republican yet.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: I think if anyone had done a little bit of homework, you could have figured it out.
Speaker: But still.
Speaker: You probably could have figured it out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You could have figured it out.
Speaker: And we said FNAF is perfect to start with because it's a popular game.
Speaker: It's a popular topic.
Speaker: Holy shit, they made them.
Speaker: books uh book about it they've got a whole series going at the time even then i think there was like two maybe at the time yeah i think there's five total uh yeah books that came out and we said let's start with this and we started reading it and we got one episode in the bank and did we got two
Speaker: I want to say episodes in the bank.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe.
Speaker: And then we just kind of, you know how it is when you start a project with a friend and it just wasn't meant to be.
Speaker: And you stop bugging the other one about when are we going to get together and record the next episode?
Speaker: It's just like, I don't want to.
Speaker: I just, we just didn't care.
Speaker: But we care now.
Speaker: We care now.
Speaker: I think we wanted to make sure we could get through a year of this show before we were going to give it another try.
Speaker: Before we turned our attention back to Mr. Freddy Fazbear.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: Yeah, the silver eyes.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin couldn't have put it better.
Speaker: This is our white whale.
Speaker: This is...
Speaker: Either we get over this hump in the next three episodes or this show is gone forever.
Speaker: Forever.
Speaker: And we shake hands and agree to a gentleman's truce that nothing could defeat us.
Speaker: Not Dead Space, nor Infinity Blade, nor Bloodborne, but FNAF.
Speaker: Five nights at Freddy's, the silver eyes, the silver.
Speaker: We did us.
Speaker: We're going to find out.
Speaker: We're going to find out.
Speaker: So to get us started, I'm going to just give a little primer on Five Nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: If you've been I don't know how you're listening to this show and not aware of what Five Nights at Freddy's is, because it is probably outside of Minecraft.
Speaker: It is probably the most famous indie game to ever be made.
Speaker: I would say it's certainly the most I mean, possibly the most famous horror game period.
Speaker: Most.
Speaker: But yeah, by far the most famous horror game period.
Speaker: Not if we're if we're talking about people's knowledge of it, knowledge of it outside of the gaming sphere.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because that's the one thing is is Five Nights at Freddy's has a very big influence on people who are not
Speaker: big gamers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: More of the the Fortnite and the the Minecraft crowd, you know, the the people who don't play a lot outside of their everyday games.
Speaker: So like my my daughter is very aware of of what Five Nights at Freddy's is and she's watched videos and she's never played the game.
Speaker: And that's kind of where the the game is.
Speaker: in the zeitgeist.
Speaker: So it was released in 2014.
Speaker: It's a point and click horror game where you basically just have to divide your attention between a bunch of security cameras to make sure that these haunted animatronics don't break into your office and murder you.
Speaker: And that's pretty much it.
Speaker: And we were talking before the show how, you know, the book has and we're going to get into the book.
Speaker: The book has a lot of fat on it and the game.
Speaker: But the game itself is very, very lean.
Speaker: And that's why it became so popular.
Speaker: There is there is very little there that doesn't need to be there.
Speaker: It's very tight.
Speaker: The everything about it is is very specifically done.
Speaker: Now, Scott Cawthon, who is the creator of the game, he made the game after being he got turned on to it because he was making these games that were I want to say they were like Christian.
Speaker: He did.
Speaker: PC games and they were they didn't they weren't going so well because everyone was really creeped out by the animal mascot characters that he would introduce into them.
Speaker: They looked terrifying.
Speaker: So with that information in mind, he he he took that and he made Five Nights at Freddy's with these terrifying animatronic dead eyed and animals as as the antagonists.
Speaker: Now, since then, I mean, the franchise has become this massive thing.
Speaker: There's there's a bajillion games.
Speaker: I want to say there's like upwards of six in the main Five Nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: And then there's a bunch of spinoff games like Security Breach, which is like a an actual first person like horror game where you you're walking around.
Speaker: a a mall or pizzeria or something like that, that that's littered with animatronics.
Speaker: And in, I guess, within the last couple of years, Scott Cawthon has I think it was last year, Scott Cawthon was outed as a
Speaker: hardcore Republican donate donator, uh, of funds, um, to a lot of people who, uh, to a lot of candidates who are in the antithesis of the fans, basically.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cawthon announced his retirement.
Speaker: He's not in the scene anymore.
Speaker: He's he basically left Five Nights at Freddy's to some some people and like, hey, you know, the the company handles it.
Speaker: He doesn't he's not involved in the day to day anymore.
Speaker: And he is retired and spending time with his family.
Speaker: And that's pretty much the overall.
Speaker: of Five Nights at Freddy's and its cultural impact basically from 2014 to now.
Speaker: It's kind of a big one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Phil, did you look into, aside from Scott Cawthon, who is listed as an author on this?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's listed as the author on this and every last one.
Speaker: of the Freddie books that have come out from this novel series, which this is the first entry into, to all kinds of smaller pieces.
Speaker: His name always appears on it, which makes it feel a little bit like a Tom Clancy sort of thing.
Speaker: Sure, yeah.
Speaker: It's his branding more than anything else.
Speaker: It's unclear how much of the writing for this book, for example, that he actually did.
Speaker: Um, I'm hesitant to say that he did nothing and that it was just ghostwritten, uh, by Miss Kira Breed Reasley, which, uh, we'll talk about in a second.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Because, you know, as you hinted at with his games, the games are very lean, but the lore behind them is very elaborate.
Speaker: And if you believe people like the YouTuber MatPat and other, you know, associated personalities online who have done quite a bit of research and digging and that sort of thing, that this whole thing is this...
Speaker: vast woven tapestry of a bizarre and violent and strange story that takes place over several decades.
Speaker: And I do...
Speaker: I think personally, I think that, yeah, there is an aspect of that that he is absolutely responsible for.
Speaker: I also think Coughlin is probably a smart enough guy that he saw with the internet and people reading very heavily into certain aspects of the game that he maybe didn't think about.
Speaker: But instead of going, oh, no, not really, he went, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Uh, so, and just kind of worked that into it over time.
Speaker: Um, it's tough to say, uh, but it has absolutely become a, an absolute rat king of lore where everything is just smushed together, uh, uh, in bizarre ways.
Speaker: It's still not clear.
Speaker: Uh, and it's actually one of the things that me and a lot of people, you know, your, your kid included, for example, that never really played much of the games.
Speaker: Uh, but, uh,
Speaker: But absolutely know a ton about the lore simply because it really was fascinating.
Speaker: So on one hand, I don't know how much Scott wrote of this book.
Speaker: On the other hand, I'm not willing to go completely on the Tom Clancy route, although it does feel a little like that.
Speaker: We do know that for this series of novels, he did have a ghostwriter.
Speaker: I don't know if you can call it a ghostwriter if they appear on the cover.
Speaker: But Miss Keira Breed-Reesley, who is a young writer, she came out of Columbia, which is, you know, you heard of it.
Speaker: Uh, she's got quite the pedigree when it comes to her entire bibliography.
Speaker: However, you are hard pressed to find anything, but five nights at Freddy's, uh, novels and books.
Speaker: Uh, she is, uh, uh, she is, uh, credited as a writer for all of the novels, as far as I can tell, uh, for the graphic novels that came of it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: She seems to be, and as a result has become a New York Times bestseller because of this.
Speaker: But I think this is really it.
Speaker: I think this is what she does now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or if not.
Speaker: There's not much.
Speaker: When I Googled her, I didn't find anything else.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: There's not much to it beyond that.
Speaker: I do not blame her in the slightest.
Speaker: If I had a sweet gig like this one, I probably would just focus on smaller projects that maybe wouldn't get as much attention after I cashed my FNAF paycheck.
Speaker: Same for Scott, by the way.
Speaker: He retired.
Speaker: He didn't need the drama.
Speaker: He didn't need everyone knowing he was a Trump voter.
Speaker: And he said, I'm retiring.
Speaker: I've got more money than God.
Speaker: I might as well.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Good move, my friend.
Speaker: Good move.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't blame him.
Speaker: He can keep those beliefs in his house.
Speaker: And, you know, he can donate to Ted Cruz all he wants now.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: The real...
Speaker: The real terrifying animatronic in America's closet.
Speaker: Those are some dead eyes.
Speaker: Those are some dead eyes.
Speaker: But what we have here, basically, that means is we have two writers whose entire careers are centered completely around the Five Nights at Freddy franchise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which makes you wonder how this book is so fucking boring.
Speaker: So far.
Speaker: Without without without jumping the gun.
Speaker: Without jumping the gun.
Speaker: It is a reason that it that this is our second try in five years.
Speaker: So here's the wild thing and just a little something I noticed is that this book sits at four and a half stars on Amazon.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: With nearly 8,000 reviews.
Speaker: So in terms of- 4.17 on Goodreads.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In terms of popular opinion, this book is good, quote unquote.
Speaker: It is well received.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And we're going to be the assholes on this series.
Speaker: If you are a Five Nights at Fridays fan and you like this book-
Speaker: So that is not our experience with it thus far.
Speaker: We have we're a third of the way into the book.
Speaker: And Phil and I have done this is our second time doing it.
Speaker: It wasn't easy either time.
Speaker: If you are a Five Nights at Freddy's fan and you are a fan of this book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and you don't want to hear us talk negatively about the book, this might be a series for you to skip.
Speaker: But if you want us to get into the nitty gritty of what the issues are with this book, aside from the fact that it seems to have been written just to...
Speaker: connect lore together.
Speaker: It feels like it was just put out to throw us to scattershot some little bits of lore for it, for the FNAF universe.
Speaker: It was it was written like written specifically for Mac Pat.
Speaker: It was like, yeah, yeah, it does pop up from time to time in those videos.
Speaker: And Kevin's absolutely right.
Speaker: You know, as much as we have, you know,
Speaker: twisted the knife a little bit when it came to books in this show that we didn't care for.
Speaker: I always am, I find it important to point out that, yeah, we do make fun, we do have a lot of laughs at sometimes these books' expenses,
Speaker: But it comes from a valid place of criticism.
Speaker: We've talked to the authors of books that we have made fun of.
Speaker: We're not afraid.
Speaker: We're not hiding how we feel about this.
Speaker: So I invite you, if you love FNAF unequivocally, to hear us out.
Speaker: Let me put it that way.
Speaker: And we haven't finished this book, by the way.
Speaker: As of today, we have not finished this book.
Speaker: It might be this.
Speaker: This book might turn it all around.
Speaker: It's just it killed our podcast once before.
Speaker: So I think we're on a. It's personal.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: It's personal.
Speaker: My name is God damn Ishmael.
Speaker: Just call me Queeque.
Speaker: So anyway, we're going to get into it.
Speaker: Chapter one starts with a flash forward.
Speaker: Fucking hate it.
Speaker: We're off to a good start.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So my problem with the flash forward is that it removes tension up until the point that you know exactly this scene is going to happen for the character in the flash forward.
Speaker: Why don't you real quick, could you tell could you tell our audience at home what a flash forward is just in case maybe.
Speaker: OK, so so a flash forward is flashbacks, super common writing trope.
Speaker: A flash forward is less used.
Speaker: The most the one I like to point to the most is
Speaker: which I thought was actually kind of a neat one was the third Mission Impossible movie opens with a flash forward, kind of like setting the stakes for the characters and then jumps back into present time.
Speaker: So a flash forward is is it's not foreshadowing.
Speaker: It's literally showing a scene from later in the story before jumping back into present time.
Speaker: It's not used as often because
Speaker: it's less of a natural writing concept.
Speaker: Like flashbacks are natural because memories exist and you can think back to something.
Speaker: Flash forward is a little bit more of like a
Speaker: uh, prognostication, uh, it's fortune telling.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's, it, it has a little bit like, uh, of a less natural existence within the, uh, a linear story.
Speaker: Uh, that being said, I don't dislike flash forwards, but as a rule, they, they're as good as the way they are used.
Speaker: But in a horror story, my issue with a flash forward is that a flash forward removes tension because you now know that this is nothing is going to necessarily happen to the character in the flash forward when they are not in that specific circumstance.
Speaker: So it opens with a flash forward.
Speaker: Unless you're planning on doing something weird with it, which this book is not.
Speaker: This book does not seem to be planning on doing something weird with it.
Speaker: The book opens with a flash forward.
Speaker: Foxy is it's Foxy, right?
Speaker: That's the.
Speaker: Yes, it was Foxy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Foxy is chasing our main character, Charlie, through Freddy's pizzeria with his hook.
Speaker: And she's trying to hide and then he finds her and the hook comes down towards her and we that's where it ends.
Speaker: It cuts into present day.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: It's a cliffhanger on a flash forward.
Speaker: Fuck it.
Speaker: Anyway,
Speaker: This is going to be a tough one, guys.
Speaker: This is going to be a tough one, guys.
Speaker: And I'll get this out of the way.
Speaker: There are some this is a very uneven book.
Speaker: There are parts where it is written and it's like, OK, the writer has skill.
Speaker: And then parts of it where it's like it's so frustratingly
Speaker: structured and paced that it loses me.
Speaker: So we jump to the present day.
Speaker: Charlie is arriving in Hurricane, Utah.
Speaker: And one of my least favorite things about this book is that there's a lot of
Speaker: description words that are just thrown in like she smiles wryly at the sign saying hurricane utah like fucking okay um i don't understand what that means especially because the next sentence is about how as soon as she passes a sign she has anxiety like yeah yeah you know it's there it's like a conflicting emotion
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It's, it's, yeah, we get a lot of those moments where, um, in this, in this chapter, basically we're going to meet this group of kids.
Speaker: They are kids.
Speaker: They're, one of them describes himself as being 17, I believe.
Speaker: Yeah, they're 17.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, so they're, they're kids and, uh,
Speaker: For all of the time we're going to spend with them in the next few chapters, we learn very little about them.
Speaker: And these moments that Kevin's describing, like, yeah, we're going to... She smiles wryly at a sign and then starts suddenly feeling full of anxiety.
Speaker: So it's like, well, then what the fuck was the... It's just...
Speaker: We're not suggesting.
Speaker: There's adverbs that just get dropped into these sentences that just feel really weird.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But I'm not going to I'm not going to hit on any on them for too long that it happens a lot.
Speaker: And that one was the first one to really stick in my stick in my craw, so to speak.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So we get an exposition dump and she's remembering the specifics that she's coming back to town 10 years after her friend Michael died.
Speaker: because his parents want to do some sort of scholarship announcement, basically.
Speaker: And it's never explicitly stated, but it's 1995 because Michael's death was 1985.
Speaker: So it's great.
Speaker: She drives through town.
Speaker: She goes to her old house and we find out that her aunt Jen has like finished paying off the mortgage.
Speaker: This is the house that she lived in with her dad.
Speaker: We from context clues, we assume that her dad is deceased.
Speaker: There's not a lot of even through the chapters we've read so far, there's not much discussion as to
Speaker: why or how or anything like that.
Speaker: It's just kind of like referenced that she lives with her Aunt Jen.
Speaker: And her dad has disappeared.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we get a lot of very precise descriptions of the house and the room and all that stuff.
Speaker: And it's a lot of time that could be better spent on literally anything else.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: We hear that the room has, is the ceiling of the room is slanted to follow the line of the roof and like, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, no, no, you're no, I want to, I want to touch on that.
Speaker: Cause you're absolutely right.
Speaker: We know about these precise angles of the roof.
Speaker: We know about the carpet.
Speaker: We know about the, all of these very,
Speaker: Tiny, tiny details, which you could admire if we knew any more about our characters.
Speaker: We don't know anything about the aunt, really.
Speaker: We don't know Charlie, Charlotte, if you will, the main character.
Speaker: We will get to know her, but we will not get to know most of her friends nearly as well as we will the architecture of this house.
Speaker: So y'all just, y'all just sit back and enjoy that goddamn house.
Speaker: Uh, because that is, that is, that is the kind of description that the attention to detail that you are going to have to learn to appreciate architecture, not human beings.
Speaker: This is a Frank Lloyd Wright book.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: There's some creepy animatronics in her room, which at first she's like, oh, I miss these guys.
Speaker: And then later on in the chapter, when the sun goes down, she's like, oh, fuck, I don't like this at all.
Speaker: I don't like these animatronics.
Speaker: I'm sprinting out of the house and and running to the car, which is.
Speaker: I mean, I like the fact that it's like hinting at that, that she has two basically two different two two wolves fighting inside of her.
Speaker: And one wolf is pro animatronics and the other one hates them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the other one's a normal person, a normal person who doesn't like animatronics because most people don't.
Speaker: No, it's not.
Speaker: It's not a unless you're Disney.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Unless you're you're knocking it out of the park.
Speaker: Disney level.
Speaker: It's I don't think anybody wants to deal with it.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: The other one's the uncanny valley loving wolf.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Loves him some uncanny valley.
Speaker: So she drives away from the house.
Speaker: I mean, there's there's not too much.
Speaker: This is this is a bunch of pages, but there's not a lot of specifically interesting or story beat moments.
Speaker: She knows she's she has creepy feelings about her.
Speaker: One of the closets in her bedroom, which she has never opened before because it is her big girl closet.
Speaker: She she doesn't want to go into her dad's workshop, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker: She is she is it's like bad omens, you know, she has some some bad vibes about this house.
Speaker: So she's gone.
Speaker: She's gone.
Speaker: She's driving down the road and she's going to a diner to meet her friends.
Speaker: And we get introduced to most of the party, most of the main characters that we're going to be living with for the rest of the story.
Speaker: We got a John, who is the cool who's the cool Bukowski writing dude.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: You know, he's going to be a real mess when he's older.
Speaker: He's going to be a real mess when he's older.
Speaker: I'm like adding characteristics to them that aren't in the story.
Speaker: But he's like, don't make them more interesting.
Speaker: John has a drinking problem that he's never actually revealed to anybody that the only way he can write is when he drinks and he does it.
Speaker: He hasn't been the same since the accident.
Speaker: He hasn't been the same since the accident.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's that movie?
Speaker: Barfly?
Speaker: Barfly.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That's Barfly.
Speaker: Drink for all my friends.
Speaker: All my friends.
Speaker: That's that's John's favorite movie.
Speaker: It's his aspirational film.
Speaker: It's his aspirational film is to be Mickey Rourke and Barfly.
Speaker: It's Mickey Rourke, isn't it?
Speaker: It's Mickey Rourke.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a it's a it's a it's a pre sledgehammer of plastic surgery.
Speaker: Mickey Rourke.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because he got his face fucked up from boxing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Is that what it was?
Speaker: I didn't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He was because he went into boxing and he his face got kind of jacked up.
Speaker: No shit.
Speaker: Oh, that explains so much, dude.
Speaker: That's fucking hilarious.
Speaker: I mean, hilarious.
Speaker: It's sad, but kind of funny.
Speaker: Yeah, you're right.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Yeah, you're right.
Speaker: It's not the right word.
Speaker: But I just I think I think most people think that he just got addicted to plastic surgery the way some people do.
Speaker: No, I think it's I think it has something to do with like breaking bones in his face or something like that.
Speaker: Holy shit.
Speaker: I think I might be totally making this up, but I think it was when he got into boxing and he fucked up his face.
Speaker: See, you're making up.
Speaker: You're making a background for these characters in FNAF.
Speaker: You're making a background for Mickey Rourke.
Speaker: Background for Mickey Rourke.
Speaker: I mean, where does it stop, Kevin?
Speaker: I'm addicted to making interesting character backgrounds.
Speaker: What can I say?
Speaker: Well, yeah, the author isn't, so why shouldn't you be?
Speaker: So Carlton is the local kid, and he's the only one that didn't move out of town after the incident.
Speaker: And Jessica, who is pretty...
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: That's about their- I mean, that's literally all they give her.
Speaker: Like, she's nice.
Speaker: But they make a point of saying, like, she's nice, though.
Speaker: She's not one of those pretty- She's nice.
Speaker: She's not like the other pretty girls.
Speaker: She's not like the other pretty girls.
Speaker: She's nice.
Speaker: So you can get that idea out of your head.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Conversation is really is dumb and really long.
Speaker: And I think in my notes, I just wrote Jesus Christ.
Speaker: I put no other details about what they talk about.
Speaker: Well, they don't really talk about much.
Speaker: They talk about like one's moved to New York and obviously the one stayed behind.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like what they did and New York is interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, it's, and I'd like to point out here, by the way, we've mentioned this already, but I don't want you to forget.
Speaker: These kids are all underage.
Speaker: They're all still in high school.
Speaker: We will not be seeing any of their parents at this point.
Speaker: They will be staying in hotels together alone and unsupervised.
Speaker: One drove, our main character we know drove far away to come here to be here.
Speaker: These are minors and they are fully unsupervised and we're just going to roll with that, I suppose.
Speaker: These are high school minors who are going
Speaker: This is, you know, this story could have gone in a bunch of fascinating ways.
Speaker: It really could have.
Speaker: We could set up here for something.
Speaker: Before the show started, Phil, you mentioned, like, if in some way you could compare it to it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Structurally, but things actually happen in it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And here's the thing.
Speaker: Some would argue too much.
Speaker: Too much happens in it.
Speaker: Bloated and you learn too much and it's like you don't need all of this padding to make an effective story.
Speaker: Here's the thing is we don't need these characters to have an orgy.
Speaker: No, well, that is for damn sure.
Speaker: No one needs it.
Speaker: No one needs that.
Speaker: And I'm hoping we don't get to that in this book.
Speaker: But the point is, you can make a valid argument.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You can make a valid argument for Stephen King's approach being a little too much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Too much information.
Speaker: It's like the other end.
Speaker: It's like it and Silver Eyes are like two ends of the going back to my hometown spectrum.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and creepy shit's happening.
Speaker: That's like, there's too much and not enough, you know?
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: But yeah, and say what you want for if Stephen King wrote too much, which I believe he did, at least we know stuff about our characters beyond just the one who is clearly the main character focus.
Speaker: In the next four chapters, we... In this chapter, this is where we should be laying it down.
Speaker: We should be finding out lots of interesting things about all of these characters.
Speaker: Because as you pointed out, Kevin, we're going to be spending this book with these people.
Speaker: So if we need to give a shit about whether they live or die, when they're in danger or not, this is a great time to tell us a little bit more than...
Speaker: We don't get anything.
Speaker: It feels kind of like, you know, I've read about how in, what is that terrible book series?
Speaker: Twilight.
Speaker: That in Twilight, that, you know, that Stephanie Meyer wrote the lead female protagonist as generically as possible so that young people could put themselves in
Speaker: this person's shoes and it could be like them.
Speaker: We can't do that when we've got like four or five main characters we're following around.
Speaker: We need to differentiate.
Speaker: You can still make them kind of, you know, I don't know.
Speaker: What do you want to say?
Speaker: Vanilla.
Speaker: But they need to be in some direction.
Speaker: And we don't really have a lot of direction for these characters.
Speaker: It's too...
Speaker: Yeah, just give me the fucking breakfast club.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Here's this.
Speaker: He's the gig.
Speaker: She's the one breakfast club.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I would have been fine.
Speaker: I would have been fine.
Speaker: Look, you're reading a FNAF book.
Speaker: We're not expecting you to, you know, reinvent the wheel here, but we need something.
Speaker: We need something.
Speaker: And these chapters are too long.
Speaker: These are very long chapters.
Speaker: These are very long chapters.
Speaker: There are multiple scene changes per chapter.
Speaker: And it's it's wild how long some of these chapters get.
Speaker: So they get on to the topic of Freddy's, which and they talk about it with.
Speaker: Here's the other thing is I have issue with is I remember being 17 and I remember I would never have had as much nostalgia for Chuck E. Cheese as these kids have for Freddy's pizzeria.
Speaker: Um, because by 17, I would have been too cool for school with that shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Especially if, as we find out later, your your last experience with the restaurant is your your best one of your best friends was kidnapped and goddamn murdered.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Which is spoiler alert.
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: Spoiler alert.
Speaker: We're going to get to that in like a chapter or two.
Speaker: But anyway, um,
Speaker: So anyway, they talk about how Freddy's is great.
Speaker: Charlie gets kind of like upset and leaves.
Speaker: She needs some air on the outside, which is the only interesting character moment that we have in the first chapter from any of them is that she actually has like a micro panic attack and she goes outside, get some fresh air and everybody comes out and like, oh, yeah, we we probably shouldn't have, you know,
Speaker: brought it up, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And then somehow the conversation gets turned back around to, hey, fuck it, let's go try to find Freddy's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And because Carlton has been talking about how there was construction in the area, he really doesn't know what's going on.
Speaker: And they're like, how the fuck do you not know what's going on?
Speaker: And he's like, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm it's on the other side.
Speaker: Fuck you, John.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Everyone gives him shit because like they're like, you're the guy who still lives here and you don't know what's going on.
Speaker: He goes, I don't fucking go over there.
Speaker: So they go to it.
Speaker: That's the end of chapter one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Chapter two.
Speaker: there is a page and a half talking about this building and it's a fucking mall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, and the word mall is not used anywhere.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And it is, it drove me insane.
Speaker: that there is a, they're talking about how weird the building is.
Speaker: And be like, it's just a mall.
Speaker: It's a mall.
Speaker: And later in the book, it's just referred to as, we go back to, they went back to the mall, because it was just a fucking mall.
Speaker: Like, we know what a mall looks like.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, they go to the mall that was like, it was just never completed, but-
Speaker: It's an abandoned mall.
Speaker: It's an abandoned mall.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Just say that.
Speaker: Everyone has context for that in this country.
Speaker: We know what you're talking about.
Speaker: So much time is spent on talking about how this building is weird and it's creepy looking.
Speaker: It's just an abandoned mall.
Speaker: We don't need to.
Speaker: Architecture.
Speaker: Not character development, Kevin.
Speaker: Architecture is not character development.
Speaker: We don't need to spend that much time on what the building looks like.
Speaker: Just say it's an abandoned mall.
Speaker: There's an entire aesthetic that predates this book being written of people doing the urban exploration into abandoned malls.
Speaker: And it's huge on the internet.
Speaker: It's a huge thing.
Speaker: It's a big thing.
Speaker: We get it.
Speaker: This book came out in 2017.
Speaker: We get it.
Speaker: Or 2016.
Speaker: And its popularity has everything to do with the internet.
Speaker: Culturally, we understand that abandoned malls are creepy.
Speaker: We got it.
Speaker: We got it.
Speaker: We got it.
Speaker: You got to...
Speaker: Cultural touchstone shortcut right there.
Speaker: So easy.
Speaker: Make it easier on yourself.
Speaker: But that's the thing is, it distracted me for so long because I didn't know it was a mall until we got into the building.
Speaker: And it's like they get into the food court and the food court, it's just like hand waved away.
Speaker: Like, of course there's a food court because it's a mall.
Speaker: They're like, well, you haven't said it's a mall.
Speaker: You just said it's a weird building.
Speaker: I know exactly what you mean because I was in the same place where I was like,
Speaker: It is weird how they're described.
Speaker: This is an odd place.
Speaker: What is this?
Speaker: And they break in and they're like, you know, there are the different storefronts facing each other across the hall from each other.
Speaker: And I went, it's weird.
Speaker: It's kind of like an enclosed market of some sort.
Speaker: It's a, oh my God, it's a mall.
Speaker: It's just a mall.
Speaker: Just say it's a fucking mall.
Speaker: It's a mall that was like never finished or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: So they're running there.
Speaker: They basically they get inside because there's a there's a pile of gravel leaning against one of the walls that they can like use as a ramp to get up into one of the windows.
Speaker: And they jump down and they start exploring and they have a little like.
Speaker: Brief moment where they have to hide from a security guard who is, you know, you know, buildings like that that are under construction or incomplete construction.
Speaker: Yeah, they tend to have security because they try not to, you know, kids get weird.
Speaker: It was it was still the tail end of the satanic panic.
Speaker: You know, I'm sure.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: I'm sure there would be some.
Speaker: Metal heads that would go in there and fuck around, making it look like there's an animal sacrifice in there.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Which would be which would cool.
Speaker: And that would be that would be really cool.
Speaker: And that would rule if they did that.
Speaker: But there's a security guard and they probably shouldn't.
Speaker: This is the first moment of a danger, any kind of danger that is just glossed over and the claws are taken out of it, which is such a strange choice in a book that's meant to be scary.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we're going to see a lot of that.
Speaker: We're going to see a lot of that where the where the claws and where it's declawed before there's really any effort for it to be scary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they the security guard passes and one of the characters, I think it's Jessica, figures out that there's like the the where they are in the mall.
Speaker: It's like this wall shouldn't be here.
Speaker: It should be further over.
Speaker: And they kind of put it together that there's like a this wall is built around something and then they they find a an inscription on a opening where it's something that Marla had written about Carlton on the wall.
Speaker: And they're like, this is Freddy Fazbear's.
Speaker: And they open, you know, they say.
Speaker: feel around and they find a door into, and wouldn't you know it, the mall is built around Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's still intact on the inside.
Speaker: Now, the first time we read this book, I was like, that's fucking stupid.
Speaker: And now I'm like-
Speaker: I'm thinking about it, and they might get to this later in the... First of all, the characters are not appropriately weirded out that that happened.
Speaker: Yeah, it's an odd choice, so yeah.
Speaker: But also, just having one of the characters point out and be like, oh, I've heard about this.
Speaker: There's a...
Speaker: I think there's like a mall somewhere.
Speaker: It's either in England or something like that, where there's this there.
Speaker: Basically, they had the entire block except this old woman's house.
Speaker: And the old woman was like, it's like it's actually the story of Up, the story of Up borrowed from this where the the old woman's like, no, I'm not going to sell.
Speaker: And they basically the entire like block except is just except for her property is like carved around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And built around her property.
Speaker: And so what I was like, I was thinking like, okay, well, maybe they just didn't have like, they couldn't figure out the ownership stuff with the pizzeria.
Speaker: So they just built around it.
Speaker: That's like my head cannon now.
Speaker: Maybe they'll eventually get to that or maybe they'll just ignore it.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I feel like you've got with, with how much weird, um,
Speaker: Not mystical, but like Resident Evil puzzle style shit has been built into the world of FNAF through all of this internet lore and mystery unweaving and stuff like that.
Speaker: There has to be some kind of strange, like they're burying it.
Speaker: They're burying this place.
Speaker: I hope that it has some sort of context to that.
Speaker: Like we're like, this is a bad place and we've got to like, just in case it, uh, in this thing from getting out.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Something like that.
Speaker: I, I do not know yet, obviously, but I, I fingers crossed that we get something cool like that.
Speaker: So they go inside Freddy's, they look around, they have some memories and they hear a music box playing somewhere, um, which is a reference to, I believe Freddy plays from a music box right before he kills you.
Speaker: I want to say, um, it's, it's the, it's usually the tune that's playing when, uh, you get to 6 AM.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You get a little music box.
Speaker: Uh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, you get that.
Speaker: So
Speaker: It's supposed to be like a good thing to hear that.
Speaker: So I don't know why we're using it for creepy.
Speaker: I mean, it is creepy.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I played those games in a long time.
Speaker: So so they're looking around.
Speaker: They get to the private birthday room, which is where Foxy's stage is.
Speaker: And, you know, Charlie starts having a little panic attack because she has some unresolved issues around Foxy.
Speaker: I think we all do.
Speaker: I think we all do.
Speaker: Why would you make the hook hand sharp?
Speaker: What the fuck?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: I don't know, man.
Speaker: I'm not an animatronics designer.
Speaker: I don't know how these things work.
Speaker: I don't know what the secret handshake is.
Speaker: Maybe the eye can tell it's dull and that really breaks the immersion.
Speaker: You just gotta, you really, you gotta, you know, in order to create the illusion of a threat, you have to create a threat.
Speaker: It can't be an illusion.
Speaker: It has to be a real threat.
Speaker: It has to be real.
Speaker: Right or so you subtext are cowards.
Speaker: I know who writers use subtext and they're all cowards.
Speaker: So Carlton, meanwhile, knocks over some pans in the kitchen and everybody freaks out and then they're like, all right, well, we got to go because the security guard probably heard that.
Speaker: And they run out and they run out into the parking lot and they got the giggles.
Speaker: Tee hee hee hee hee.
Speaker: And and that's the end of basically them in the mall.
Speaker: And Jessica and Charlie, they're staying together in a motel room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Jessica is going to drive Jessica and Charlie drive to the motel.
Speaker: And they get there and they have some girl talk.
Speaker: Yes, they do.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: Just what this book needed.
Speaker: Just what this book needed.
Speaker: Charlie says, asks Jessica about a guy that Jessica was seeing.
Speaker: Charlie asks the following question.
Speaker: Did you get to know his soul?
Speaker: And I highlighted that and like that doesn't seem like a word that doesn't seem like a question.
Speaker: Charlie, who the vibe we get from Charlie is like she's semi tomboyish kind of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not that we get any specific vibe from any of the characters.
Speaker: It just didn't seem like it would come out of her mouth like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have to ask it.
Speaker: Was this do you think this was like coded like for did you lose your V card or something like that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did you did you did did you fuck him?
Speaker: Did he did he did he go down to pound town?
Speaker: Is that you know, like you can't say that because kids like this series.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, and then Jessica basically is like, oh yeah, he was a poet and I read his poetry and it was so bad that I had to tell him it was bad.
Speaker: And I left with his book of poetry in my hands.
Speaker: And next time I saw him, he was wearing a sweater vest and had become like a finance major.
Speaker: And I was like, Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Christ.
Speaker: And then Jessica says, I did him a favor.
Speaker: And that's the pro-capitalism messaging that is embedded in the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise right there.
Speaker: Right there.
Speaker: The banker is worth more than the poet.
Speaker: Than the poet.
Speaker: And I dare you...
Speaker: good people listening to counter that argument because it's an easy one to counter.
Speaker: Give it a try.
Speaker: I also like, yeah, I just, I can't even.
Speaker: It's a rough scene.
Speaker: It's just, look, it's a bold choice as a writer.
Speaker: to write about finding out that somebody is a bad writer.
Speaker: And so you neg them into becoming a finance wizard.
Speaker: It's bold to put that in your shitty book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One would not want to invite comparisons.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Dangerous business.
Speaker: Dangerous business inviting comparisons.
Speaker: I, for one, am against it.
Speaker: I try not to invite comparisons whenever I can.
Speaker: Because it makes me feel icky inside.
Speaker: So this conversation goes on forever.
Speaker: Yeah, I will.
Speaker: I just real quick want to point out that I also try to avoid inviting comparisons.
Speaker: You guys let us know if I invite comparisons better or worse than Kevin does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Such a fucking.
Speaker: I can't believe I fucking interrupted you to do that stupid joke.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: I'm leaving it in.
Speaker: I'm not editing.
Speaker: I deserve it.
Speaker: I deserve it.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: The conversation goes on forever.
Speaker: There's a really weird moment where Jessica talks about going to a funeral parlor and how it's an old timey funeral parlor with the casket open.
Speaker: And I was like, like any funeral parlor I've ever been to.
Speaker: That's just a funeral parlor, man.
Speaker: That's just a funeral parlor.
Speaker: I don't... Have they changed?
Speaker: And this is 1995, by the way.
Speaker: This is 1995.
Speaker: So it's even more of just a regular-ass funeral parlor.
Speaker: I specifically went to funerals in 1995, and that was just the regular funeral parlor.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Aesthetic.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, I feel like we don't go to funeral parlor funerals much anymore these days.
Speaker: They tend to just be...
Speaker: in my experience, you know, at different places, you know, usually outside or something like that.
Speaker: I feel like I don't know, I don't go to enough funerals to know that funeral parlor, like the current ins and outs of whether this funeral parlor is in style or out of style.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Maybe we're just lucky enough to know that this is actually a very old fashioned thing.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Chapter three.
Speaker: Marla arrives and she is chubby, apparently.
Speaker: Yeah, she's quirky.
Speaker: She's the quirky one.
Speaker: She is quirky and she is she's she's thick.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And she's like the overbearing aunt type.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She's basically Kathy from the comic strip Kathy.
Speaker: I will say Marla gets a decent amount of description.
Speaker: She's actually the only character that's a character thus far.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She has a type, you know, like, yeah, follow it.
Speaker: You can follow.
Speaker: You can you can like I like the cut of Marla's jib, you know?
Speaker: I do too.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: She's got a shitty younger brother.
Speaker: Oh, God, that kid's a little shit.
Speaker: He's 11, but he's written like he's six.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As a parent of a nine-year-old, I'm like, none of what this kid does really tracks for me.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Yeah, I had to double-check that because he's 11.
Speaker: I was like, 11's...
Speaker: pretty old for like bitching about not getting to play with your action figures, like at a funeral, like even the shittiest 11 year old, I feel like understands the graphic toss of a fucking funeral.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So they go back to the diner because who doesn't who loves double beats?
Speaker: This guy.
Speaker: I mean, this guy loves him some double beats.
Speaker: Oh, that last that last diner scene was fucking on fire.
Speaker: So let's let's go back for round goddamn two.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: So we got we're now we're at the diner and we got the two final additions or three final additions to the party.
Speaker: Marla, her younger brother, Jason and Lamar.
Speaker: Now, now.
Speaker: Marla, M-A-R-L-A and Lamar, L-A-M-A-R, are anagrams of each other.
Speaker: Also, now we got a John, a Jason, a Jessica and a Carlton and a Charlie.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I personally have a little rule of thumb when I'm writing that I try not to have characters share the same first letter.
Speaker: I just try to avoid it.
Speaker: You know, just good best practice.
Speaker: But we got three characters and then two characters and then we got another two characters with anagram names.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I'm not a fan of the names, the way the names are kind of like spelled, like...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It really bugged me as I thought about it more.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I get it because, you know, when you've got this many characters and the characters aren't really differentiated in a lot of clear ways.
Speaker: You do need some sort of quick touchstone in your brain to fall back on.
Speaker: And if they all have similar names and similar letters, it becomes a mush after a while.
Speaker: They're just not well-cut characters to begin with.
Speaker: And then you make it that much harder for us to keep track of which one is which.
Speaker: And yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the diner scene happens again, except now with Marla and Lamar.
Speaker: Like, that's pretty much all that happens is they they they have a weird conversation about ghosts, which I guess could be it would.
Speaker: It could be interesting as a foreshadowing conversation, but it's too long and not really interesting enough to to give it any gravitas.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like a Twitter conversation.
Speaker: It's like it's basically people discussing memories.
Speaker: Are ghosts real?
Speaker: I don't think ghosts are real, but I think memories imprint in the room.
Speaker: Well, that's not what I'm talking about, though.
Speaker: And it's this back and forth and nothing really comes of it.
Speaker: It just kind of peters out.
Speaker: And I think you're right.
Speaker: I think if it had been just this kind of pointed moment.
Speaker: It could have been interesting foreshadowing or set the tone, set the mood.
Speaker: But instead it just comes off as this rambly conversation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So then they tell Marla and Lamar that they went to...
Speaker: Freddy's the night before and then they go off to the thing and they get there.
Speaker: It's it's at the I think it was at the football field.
Speaker: Was that it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is that it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they're the parents are.
Speaker: So Michael's parents get up and they do a scholar.
Speaker: These are like the only parents in the entire book.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: They get up and do.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: They get up and they do a scholarship speech.
Speaker: And then Carlton also gives a speech talking about Michael.
Speaker: Sad times all around.
Speaker: It actually comes up that Michael wasn't the only kid that was killed.
Speaker: There were like five other kids that were murdered, like in the same way or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, this is the only time we get like, this is like our first bit of fine detail.
Speaker: We know he's died probably tragically, you know, but this is this is the first.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just that he died and some other kids also got snatched.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Up until this point, it it keeps saying everything was great until it happens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'm not a fan of that, that heavy, like, reliance on... Because you... The narrator...
Speaker: is inconsistently bouncing between third person omniscient and third person, what the fuck's it called when it's just the character or just a standard third person point of view.
Speaker: Yeah, just third person.
Speaker: It basically jumps between Charlie's third person point of view
Speaker: or a third person omniscient narrator.
Speaker: If you have a third person, all knowing narrator, then the all knowing narrator wouldn't be stopping, wouldn't have like an emotional hedge.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To say it.
Speaker: There's no need to be coy.
Speaker: And not talk about it.
Speaker: There's no need to be coy from the narrator's point of view.
Speaker: So there's some inconsistency in the way the narration is structured.
Speaker: And that's like a tier level down in terms of like critique of this book is like there is some wibbly wobbliness in the straight up narration.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it feels like the author is just like, it almost feels like the author is basically saying like, well, there's totally a weird thing that happened.
Speaker: And you're going to have to wait to find out what it is.
Speaker: Like they're just like trying to come up with it at the top of their head.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's another book that I'm reading right now.
Speaker: And as a recommendation from Phil and I mentioned to him, I'm halfway through it.
Speaker: It's a novella.
Speaker: And in the 66 pages that I've read from from this novella, more has happened than in the 140 pages that we've read for Five Nights at Freddy's The Silver Eyes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yet.
Speaker: What one of the things it's it's a it's a first person narration, the story.
Speaker: And the great thing about it is that the way the narrator works in that is he'll drop a little crumb of detail about something that happens.
Speaker: but then doesn't actually it's not like he's he's constantly teasing something that happened.
Speaker: It would just be like offhanded crumb of detail that is something about something that happened.
Speaker: And then when it's an appropriate moment, that detail will blossom into like a full thing.
Speaker: So in this instance, the issue I have is that it's this detail keeps being like forced upon us that something happens.
Speaker: And like we don't need to know more than once with the big neon lights, something happened.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: What we need is something to pull us along.
Speaker: Yeah, there's no time for this after a while.
Speaker: Like you give us if you say if you say that once, if you say when the incident happened in italics, whatever, you know, the incident, you can do that once.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Do that once.
Speaker: That's you shaking a seed out, you know, but then you have to take the next step.
Speaker: You can't just shake more seeds out because it's boring at that point.
Speaker: We need more to pull us along and we're not really getting it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There isn't.
Speaker: Yeah, there isn't much that's pulling us at this point.
Speaker: I don't know how people got through this book because I'm only I only got this far because we have a fucking show.
Speaker: Yeah, we have a show to do.
Speaker: Let's do the show.
Speaker: Let's do the show.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Hi.
Speaker: Oh, fuck.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: So it's sad times.
Speaker: John and Charlie go off to her old house to soak in some more nostalgia.
Speaker: These are some nostalgic 17 year olds.
Speaker: These are some nostalgic 17 year olds for the age of seven.
Speaker: I can't trust that.
Speaker: Yeah, you've gotten like imagine imagine like a character from like Napoleon Dynamite, the the the uncle, the uncle who's like all he does is talk about his high school football career and everything like that.
Speaker: And he's in his 40s or 50s at that point, you know, so it's like that's a pretty well-worn trope.
Speaker: We're talking about 17 year olds who are getting misty eyed over the good old days and shit like these people are doomed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Too much nostalgia too soon.
Speaker: It's bad.
Speaker: So they they talk about how they had their first kiss together at the age of six.
Speaker: Didn't like that scene, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, that was not a comfortable scene.
Speaker: And I mean, like it was like, I guess, you know, kids being kids or whatever, but also.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: It feels weird.
Speaker: So they finally go into her dad's workshop and she has a memory of her dad showing her the animatronics and how like the one of them, Bonnie, has like a jaw that would snap shut and he's like, don't touch it.
Speaker: It'll bite your fingers off.
Speaker: And they're like, dude, you are terrible at this shit.
Speaker: You're a very bad father.
Speaker: You are a very bad father and animatronic maker.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: You're not good.
Speaker: So they talk about the day that Michael went missing.
Speaker: And earlier in one of the chapters, Charlie misremembered Freddie as having yellow fur.
Speaker: And that stirs a memory in John saying,
Speaker: You know, the day Michael went missing, I remember seeing a guy in a yellow mascot suit standing by the table next to Michael and the suit had yellow fur.
Speaker: And it's kind of like a dun dun dun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Piecing a couple of things together.
Speaker: Which is great.
Speaker: I mean, that's a fun... More of that, please.
Speaker: Please.
Speaker: For God's sakes, more of that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For God's sakes, more of that.
Speaker: Move the mystery forward, please.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: No more diner scenes.
Speaker: We are 100 pages into the book.
Speaker: Give me a little something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Chapter four, they finally call it a ducking mall, is what my autocorrected notes say.
Speaker: Ha ha ha ha!
Speaker: Good to know that still happens.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: The party, so the party retraces their steps from the previous night.
Speaker: They the security guard thing happens again because double beats are us is this book.
Speaker: We got to we got to hit the same.
Speaker: We got to do it and then we're going to do it again.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So Lamar then says that community service is worse than being shot.
Speaker: And after that, I wrote right wing propaganda.
Speaker: For context, he's telling the little, they're bringing this 11-year-old slash six-year-old along with them to break into this mall.
Speaker: And the kid's afraid of the security guard.
Speaker: And I guess as a way of making a joke, the kid says, well, when we get shot, and the guy says, worse community service, which, yuck, yuck, yuck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Pretty toothless stuff, guys.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Itch lords over here.
Speaker: Um, so they they get in there and they're exploring.
Speaker: They're walking around.
Speaker: They find a room behind the stage.
Speaker: And it's the it seems to be the room that is that controlled the animatronics like the the programming room where they would program the dance moves like there was a button for each like pose for the robots and you could like program those in for the for the performances.
Speaker: Some people hear the music again.
Speaker: There's a legitimately creepy scene moment.
Speaker: The only one so far where Jason finds a drawing of a kid hugging Bonnie and he's very interested in it and he goes to the wall and he takes it off the wall.
Speaker: And he looks away for a moment and then when he looks back at the drawing, now the drawing is of a kid running away from Bonnie and Bonnie is chasing him.
Speaker: And I was like, OK, that's cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Credit where credit's due.
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So meanwhile, John and Charlie are playing hide and seek.
Speaker: Because, OK, the rest of them find random ass scene.
Speaker: They just like decide they're going to play hide and go seek in this restaurant that this restaurant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The last place their old friend was seen alive.
Speaker: Childhood.
Speaker: Childhood.
Speaker: Bump, but I'm bad.
Speaker: I'm bum.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: The rest of them go find the security room, which is gives is described as being very much like, hey, it's a security room from the game.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or something along those lines.
Speaker: And as they're playing around with the dials, they start hearing like a creepy voice or something on the static.
Speaker: There's there's something going on with static.
Speaker: Charlie, meanwhile, thinks she's found a great hiding spot.
Speaker: She's behind a curtain.
Speaker: And wouldn't you know it?
Speaker: Holy shit.
Speaker: She forgot.
Speaker: She's behind the curtain and she's standing next to Foxy.
Speaker: And she starts to leave when the hook from Foxy's hand comes down and slashes Charlie's arm.
Speaker: And she falls out.
Speaker: John catches her and everybody runs out and they're like, oh, shit, sorry.
Speaker: That was probably us.
Speaker: We were pressing buttons in the security room.
Speaker: And that was like, we probably activated Foxy's like pose thing.
Speaker: Or maybe they didn't.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Maybe ghosts.
Speaker: Anyway, Foxy's irresponsibly sharp claw.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Design flaw number one.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: That's irresponsible, Sharp Claw.
Speaker: Your dad sucks, Charlie.
Speaker: God damn it, Charlie.
Speaker: What the fuck was your dad thinking?
Speaker: Yeah, the claw slices Charlie's arm and that's, they basically, they're like, all right, well, we gotta go.
Speaker: And that's the second night at Freddy's.
Speaker: That's the second night?
Speaker: They leave.
Speaker: They leave.
Speaker: They leave.
Speaker: They leave again and leave and Marla and takes Charlie to a 24 hour pharmacy and get some stuff to bandage her up.
Speaker: And they have a conversation about how.
Speaker: Like the only reason Jason is there is because Marla's parents or Jason's parents and Marla's.
Speaker: It's like Jason's dad and her mom.
Speaker: They're half siblings, something like that.
Speaker: But anyway, they're they're they're arguing all the time.
Speaker: They're probably getting divorced and all that stuff.
Speaker: You know, Marla, the MVP of the characterization race, just constantly lapping everybody else in things like having things, you know?
Speaker: The real, I mean, the real thing to be afraid of is divorce.
Speaker: Yeah, it's divorce.
Speaker: That's the real thing.
Speaker: We don't need to worry about.
Speaker: I forgot to mention Lamar does have is a great ahead of everybody and is going to is going to college the next year.
Speaker: So that's.
Speaker: So I mean, that's got as fleshed out as it gets, right?
Speaker: That's yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We all know that guy.
Speaker: John writes he's Bukowski in training.
Speaker: Carlton is local.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Don't know what else we can do with that.
Speaker: Jessica's pretty.
Speaker: Pretty but nice.
Speaker: Pretty but nice.
Speaker: Lamar is smart.
Speaker: He skipped a grade and John doesn't like that.
Speaker: He has a little bit of jealousy.
Speaker: Intimidated by it.
Speaker: He's intimidated by it.
Speaker: Jason's 11 but six.
Speaker: Oh, Jason's 11 but six.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Marla is...
Speaker: Marla is the chubby girl from the Cathy comic strips and she has a lot of emotions and her parents are getting divorced.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: And they've spent two nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: Two nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So are they going to do or do you think they're going to do five nights at Freddy's?
Speaker: They have to, don't they?
Speaker: I mean, they've committed at this point.
Speaker: They've committed to the bit.
Speaker: Kind of wasteful.
Speaker: But just a quick roundup of all of our threats.
Speaker: We are 140 pages into this book.
Speaker: We are a third of the way through the book.
Speaker: This is a very long book for FNAF.
Speaker: It's almost 400 pages long.
Speaker: Uh...
Speaker: Our threats after one third of the book is up, aside from flash forwards and flashbacks with, you know, memories of robots.
Speaker: One accidental question mark slash from the poorly designed Foxy.
Speaker: A spooky, admittedly spooky drawing of Bonnie.
Speaker: Two instances of music box slash voices and two instances of security guard who will just remain nameless, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Look, we can build up tension, but we're talking about...
Speaker: a book based on a game with killer animatronic bears and rabbits and shit.
Speaker: Someone should have died by now.
Speaker: The only death we've got is someone who died 10 years ago.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is, it's just, if I were, here's the thing, we immediately apologized to anybody who was a fan of Five Nights at Freddy's.
Speaker: We were pretty upfront with the fact that we are not impressed with this book.
Speaker: If I were a fan of Five, like a huge super fan of Five Nights at Freddy's, and I read this, this deep into it, and no one had died, and no one had really been in any level of real danger, I
Speaker: At all.
Speaker: A third of the way.
Speaker: I'd be pissed.
Speaker: Like I feel cheated.
Speaker: So I, I don't know what the fuck is going on here.
Speaker: I, I, this.
Speaker: So out of my fucking tits right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's the thing is somebody asked me, one of my friends asked me when I was complaining about it on a Discord, like, oh, is it like bad, you know, in a way that's fun or, and I said, no, it's worse.
Speaker: It's boring.
Speaker: It's boring.
Speaker: It's a drag, man.
Speaker: It is a drag.
Speaker: And that's, I feel like,
Speaker: I feel like bad is one thing.
Speaker: And I don't even like calling things bad necessarily because I think it's like it's usually just like a it's an inarticulate criticism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To me, on my cardinal sins is like the worst thing something can be is boring.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't I don't think that that's necessarily going to.
Speaker: be a valuable emotion to evoke in somebody is boredom.
Speaker: If you and I went to see a movie or something like that and we hated it, just straight up hated it and went to a diner afterwards and ate scrambled eggs until two in the morning talking about how stupid we thought the movie was, that would still be something because the movie got us to talk about
Speaker: how bad we thought it was.
Speaker: It's suggesting then that the movie made some choices and maybe what it comes down to is we just didn't agree with those choices.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: With this, I don't know.
Speaker: It really saps the energy out of it.
Speaker: It really does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now, you're a chapter ahead of me.
Speaker: Like you kept reading after this.
Speaker: Yeah, I kept reading.
Speaker: I forgot how far we were going into it.
Speaker: But yeah, I read chapter five.
Speaker: And my spoiler-free review of chapter five is like, oh, okay.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: There's things.
Speaker: There's things.
Speaker: Hey, I'll take things.
Speaker: That happen that are more interesting.
Speaker: Like the book probably could have fucking started with chapter five if you did some life rewriting.
Speaker: Oh, shit.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: There must have been.
Speaker: It's not like it throws continuity out or anything like that.
Speaker: I'm just like, oh, I mean, if you throw out the first 130 pages and just start here with some tweaking to the setup, I probably would have.
Speaker: It's like a JRPG.
Speaker: It's like a JRPG.
Speaker: It doesn't get good until 60 hours in.
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: When you get past that 30-hour mark, boom, starts picking up.
Speaker: Picking up.
Speaker: Persona 6 is going to be amazing.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Persona.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: You know, we talked about it earlier.
Speaker: Say what you want about FNAF as a game.
Speaker: Some people think it's just kind of a cheap, stupid thrill ride.
Speaker: And some people are super into it.
Speaker: Say what you want about it.
Speaker: The game itself has...
Speaker: No fat.
Speaker: It is lean, it is mean, you get right into it, and you know what this game is about immediately.
Speaker: Now you can get into that lore if you want to get into it, and there's plenty of fat chew with that, but that's totally different.
Speaker: This book right now feels like nothing but fat.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It doesn't even necessarily feel like it's super strong on the lore front either.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Other than some, it's like really long, ponderous chapters connecting some loose bits together.
Speaker: You get kind of a golden Freddy reference a couple of times.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The golden Freddy reference and, and, um,
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: And the dates are weird because I don't really feel like getting into Five Nights at Freddy's lore, but.
Speaker: No, that's not our job.
Speaker: That's not our job.
Speaker: Very little I know about the FNAF lore is like, oh, but I thought the thing that was bad was 87 and this is 1985 and this is 95.
Speaker: And OK, so there's like a whole bunch of things that I
Speaker: I'm just choosing to ignore otherwise because it's who, I mean, my new opinion is I don't really care about your canon.
Speaker: That's fair, man.
Speaker: Like continuity is just a lie we tell ourselves.
Speaker: Well, man, it's like, it's like if this book was meant to be
Speaker: If this book is meant to be supplementary, specific to the games, then we need to be told something.
Speaker: We need to be given something here.
Speaker: Because if you're just interested and you pick this up and find out later that it's like, oh, well, to get what's going on in here fully, you really need to play Five Nights at Threadies run through six or whatever in this order and all that.
Speaker: It's just more bullshit at that point.
Speaker: And the continuity, the canon...
Speaker: I don't give a shit if I can't just enjoy a piece of it by itself.
Speaker: You know, like you can pick up at any of the Five Nights at Freddy's games.
Speaker: Well, mostly any of the Five Nights at Freddy's games.
Speaker: And just have a scary, fun, good time if you're into those kinds of games.
Speaker: And never know about the lore.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the values in that game.
Speaker: And unless something changes quick here with this book, I'm starting to feel like this might not be the case with this one.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll see.
Speaker: We'll see how the next set of chapters feel in our eyeballs.
Speaker: So, Phil, I know your computer is still on the mend, but you mentioned you broke out some consoles.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I am legally and contractually obligated to ask you.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: I bust out the PS4.
Speaker: I actually, last week when I was hit with the joys of COVID, I actually did a thing that's never happened to me on Twitter before.
Speaker: I did one of those survey things where, like, you have 30 questions and I'll give you an answer for every like I get and everything.
Speaker: And I've done those before, but this is the first time that I got enough likes to finish the whole thing, which is new.
Speaker: And it was all about video games and stuff, and that was super fun.
Speaker: And one of the things that it asked about was, what's a game that you haven't played but you should?
Speaker: And I talked about how one of my big blind spots in gaming was Metal Gear Solid, which I've never played any of those games.
Speaker: And I forgot that outside of that, another huge blind spot for me, which is embarrassing because I own most of the games and I've just never played them, was Uncharted.
Speaker: And so I powered up the PS4 and my PS4 years ago when I got it came with the Nathan Drake collection, which I never got around to playing with.
Speaker: And I said, you know, I've seen the damn movie.
Speaker: I know this series.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: And frankly, when the... What's that?
Speaker: I said, I'm sorry.
Speaker: I liked it.
Speaker: I thought it was good.
Speaker: I thought it was fun.
Speaker: But then again, I find Tom Holland to be just effortlessly charming.
Speaker: He's so adorable, isn't he?
Speaker: You want to put him in your pocket.
Speaker: He's so cute.
Speaker: Just slide him right into your pocket.
Speaker: Even with Marky Mark present, you know, it still didn't.
Speaker: You know, I don't I I don't know if he was the right choice to play Nathan Drake at this point, but he's adorable and I'll watch him do whatever.
Speaker: So, yeah, I so I I started playing it and it was one of those things where when the reboot of Tomb Raider came out around 2013, I want to say 2012, something like that.
Speaker: The Crystal Dynamics.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I loved those games.
Speaker: The first one especially, but I really enjoyed the other two as well.
Speaker: And when I would tell people that, they'd go, oh, so you liked Uncharted?
Speaker: And I'm like, I actually haven't played Uncharted.
Speaker: And they're like, oh, well, you've got to play Uncharted.
Speaker: And I'm starting to see what they mean.
Speaker: I'm about two or three hours into the first one.
Speaker: I'm really enjoying it.
Speaker: I love the spectacle.
Speaker: I love the adventure, the climbing.
Speaker: The controls start to get on my nerves from time to time.
Speaker: I've always had a problem with Naughty Dog controls.
Speaker: um but uh it's just really enjoyable it's just that kind of big damn action adventure fun uh uh you know uh uh ludonarrative dissonance be damned uh it's it's a great time uh and i'm definitely going to wrap at least the first one up uh you know i this was the year that i finally got around to playing the uh
Speaker: Dead Space trilogy so why not get into Uncharted as well dust off some classics you know exactly get them off the backlog yeah so that's what I'm playing I'm really enjoying it so yeah that's good so what about you Kevin what are you playing dude I am playing Weird West still okay
Speaker: And it's great.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I'm also playing.
Speaker: I have a I have a special hidden secret project that I'm working on with someone that I cannot divulge quite yet.
Speaker: But I've been playing through.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: I said you heard it here first.
Speaker: Question mark?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What did you hear?
Speaker: He might have announced it between the time we're recording this and the time it comes out.
Speaker: So I'm not going to spoil that announcement.
Speaker: But if he announced it, then you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker: So I've been playing through the Heretic and Hexen series.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah, those are some classics.
Speaker: Hexen 2.
Speaker: How are they holding up?
Speaker: Hexen 2 is really neat.
Speaker: It is you look at Hexen 2, which runs on the Quake engine or the id tech engine that they used for Quake.
Speaker: And it is it's a really interesting game because it has a lot of like immersive sim elements as well as elements that you would find in like a Metroidvania or a Dark Souls or something like that.
Speaker: There's a lot of like backtracking and opening shortcuts and things like that in Hexen 2.
Speaker: It also doesn't have any like lives or anything like that.
Speaker: There's like a lot of little checkpoints.
Speaker: So if you die, it just like boots you back to the beginning of like the area that you were just in.
Speaker: It's neat.
Speaker: It's a neat game.
Speaker: And I've been enjoying my playthrough of it so far.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So good stuff.
Speaker: And I've been putting in way too many hours in Weird West.
Speaker: Like too many hours.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: I've got to play that game.
Speaker: I was looking at this point.
Speaker: I'm just like, I've realized that the main quest doesn't have like a timer.
Speaker: So I'm just like, oh, I'm just going to fuck around the map then.
Speaker: Side quest-o-rama.
Speaker: I'm just going to go to towns and see what's going on and talk to people and see if they have.
Speaker: Can they can they give me a side quest?
Speaker: Yeah, I'll do.
Speaker: I'll go kill that dude for $100.
Speaker: No doubt.
Speaker: Hell yes.
Speaker: That's excellent.
Speaker: So that's what I'm playing as of as of right now.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that brings us to the end of this episode.
Speaker: We actually made it through in a. It hasn't broken us yet.
Speaker: It hasn't broken us yet.
Speaker: If you want to help us out, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker: Our handle on both is PixletPod.
Speaker: Visit our webpage at PixletPod.com.
Speaker: From there, there are links to our Discord and to our Steam Curator page where you can see reviews of the games we talk about in the What Are You Playing segment.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: If you have the means and the wherewithal, please rate us five stars on iTunes, Spotify, Good Pods, or wherever you're listening and has a rating system.
Speaker: And otherwise, have a good evening.
Speaker: Bye.
