The Retcon! It’s one of the big unanswered questions in the Five Nights at Freddy’s fandom.
In the early days of theory crafting, retcons smoothed over conflicting info and patched holes in messy timelines. Well, the story just isn’t told very well. Scott changes the story all the time. It was a retcon!
Scott made a Reddit post titled “The retcon issue” to address this.
What is The One Retcon? It needs to be exactly what Scott said here:
1: Made before Scott’s post! Between FNAF1 – Sister Location.
2: Integrated seamlessly.
3: Most people didn’t notice it, and it didn’t cause any confusion or controversy in the fandom.
So it can’t be anything spicy, or something people bickered over or had trouble solving. It needs to be something that Scott changed his mind on and people naturally take for granted as part of the story without any problem. So what’s my guess?
I think the change was the yellow costume used in the killings. In FNAF1 and 2, there was only one yellow costume: Fredbear.
But in FNAF3, Scott introduced an entirely new yellow costume that wasn’t in FNAF1 or FNAF2 at all: Spring Bonnie. By Sister Location, this was no problem for the fandom! William Afton used the Spring Bonnie suit for the murders. But I think when FNAF1 and FNAF2 were made, the story was written with Fredbear as the killer’s suit of choice. Let’s take a look!
FNAF1:
An article tells us the suspect “dressed as a company mascot”. In FNAF1, all the animatronics are upright. There is only one slumped, almost wearable costume in the first game. One particularly dreadful character that appears in ghastly flickers.
He looks wearable because, as Scott later reveals, he is! In FNAF1, Fredbear is unique and Spring Bonnie is nowhere to be seen, not in flashes, not in wall art, nowhere! Our available Faz-suspects are Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, The Cupcake, and Fredbear. If we had to solve the costume the killer uses only using FNAF1, the story points us in one direction: our spooky slumped yellow bear.
FNAF2:
FNAF 2 gives us a drawing of William using the Fredbear costume for a kidnapping.
One child is separated from the others. The other children are turned away, distracted by the show.
Spring Bonnie is completely missing from FNAF2. Scott loves Easter Eggs, and I think he would have at least hinted at him.
Scott integrated the story he had already told in FNAF1 and FNAF2 into FNAF3, which means that some things couldn’t be changed. It had to be a costume. It had to be yellow. And William did put on and use the Fredbear costume for at least one child. But for the main murders, he now used a different character and costume, one which would become iconic and integral to the series: Spring Bonnie.
Novels:
The Novels, which were written after FNAF3, have the same compromise. William uses the Fredbear suit to kidnap one child: Michael.
But he uses the Spring Bonnie suit for everything else.
Pizza Simulator:
Pizza Simulator shows William using Spring Bonnie directly.
A change like this didn’t really cause any problems. Springtrap is one of the series most popular characters. In my opinion, if Spring Bonnie was added for FNAF3, he was a great choice!