For Want of a Giant Mechbear: The (Alternate?) History of Mascot Horror
- cepmurphywrites
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Colin Salt.
The most common story about the creation of Harry Turtledove's classic breakout hit Guns of the South goes like this. An author complained to Harry Turtledove about how her cover was botched and that it looked as anachronistic and out of place as “Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi”. A light bulb then clicked and the rest is history. I can understand covers (laughing at the inappropriate MiG-21s on the cover of Phil Klay's Missionaries for just one of a great many examples), but strangely enough, a similar story changed the face of horror.
This origin story goes like this: Developer Scott Cawthorn had someone complain that the characters in one of his games looked like “Chuck E. Cheese animatronics”. Then came Five Nights at Freddy's, and the rest is history as well. For better or worse.
While it certainly didn't invent the concept of "Mascot Horror", FNAF definitely popularized and defined it in its contemporary way, similar to how Dracula and Nosferatu made the modern pop-culture vampire. Mascot Horror went beyond just camera gameplay, similar to how the influence of Jaws went beyond movies about sea creatures.
The most basic thing first. It's some sort of silly kids’ mascot creature come to life and attacking.
The game's protagonist is either a total blank slate or something close to one. Their development isn't really intended.
SECRET LORE. There's always some supposedly hidden secret and deep thing that apparently requires watching a hundred five-hour Youtube lore videos to understand – maybe.
The game is centered far more around obvious jump scares than any serious attempt at a mental theme. If there's a motive, it's a one-dimensionally evil one.
The reason for 4 is because the game ultimately has to be kid-friendly and merchandise-able, so trying to be deep isn't just difficult or tonally off, it's literally counterproductive.
The gameplay tends to range from the kind of barely interactive “walking simulator” to simplistic reflex/timing. With exceptions like Hello Neighbor (which ultimately got tangled in its own attempted complexity), the actual game part of video games isn't the main selling point.
The answer to "How would no FNAF change horror?" is something I honestly do not feel comfortable trying to answer. Pop culture has the most butterflies of any type of alternate history, so it's impossible for me to say what's what. I will say that the game came at the right place and time as the original horror trends of Slenderman-style internet creepypastas and zombies were both saturated and over the hill at the time of its release. It also came when internet streaming and video posting was gigantic and rocketing upwards, and it was perfectly suited for that in both the obvious and subtle (the cryptic lore) parts.
That being said, "how would a different FNAF change horror?" is something I do feel comfortable addressing. And the biggest change that wouldn't affect the games themselves or their popularity would be the SECRET LORE.
In fact, there's surprisingly little overlap between the people who consume lore videos on a product and the people who actually consume said product in depth. This, I think, would be for the better. While loretubers would exist (after all, I remember both a long video series about Star Wars and someone who wrote a hundred+ page rebuttal to said video long before FNAF came out), I see them more going for actually deserving franchises, be they sincerely complex or just having a lot of content.
It also means developers would be less inclined to go into literary Ponzi Schemes where they fill the games with obvious breadcrumbs to lure loretubers but either don't know where to end it up or just don't manage the final payoff well. After all, the big secret, the light at the end of the tunnel, the prize at the end of the rainbow, the culmination of all the Bites of 87 and cryptic mystical hints in Five Nights at Freddy's was...
…a resurrecting killer. Which is one of the biggest horror cliches out there.
Colin Salt is an author who, among other works, wrote The Smithtown Unit and its sequel Box Press for Sea Lion, and runs the Fuldapocalypse Fiction review blog.