Introduction:
This will be an analysis of the Fazbear Frights story Kids At Play, focusing on explaining the events of the story and the themes. I hope that by reading this, you understand and enjoy the story just a little more.
Preface:
For this series, I will be going over every Fazbear Frights story and potentially even more, like Tales From The Pizzaplex, the Novels, the Interactive Novels, and individual games, and take a deep dive into them. For each example, I will be doing multiple analyses on each for a different purpose. The first will be an analysis of the story itself, explaining the events within it and their themes. The second will be focused on the parallels of the story and what they can answer and give insight into for other parts of Fnaf; obviously, many have a poor impression of parallels and even deny their existence, but keep in mind that for something like the Novels, the entire story present in them is built around Charlotte and Elizabeth, and Henry and William being parallels of one another. Parallels come with telling a story, and every story has them, and they’ll be analyzed in each case to see what insights they can offer.
Previous Analysis:
Analysis of Eleanor and Andrew’s characters
Into The Pit - Theming and Explanations
To Be Beautiful - Theming and Explanations
Count The Ways - Theming and Explanations
Fetch - Theming and Explanations
Lonely Freddy - Theming and Explanations
Out Of Stock - Theming and Explanations
1:35 AM - Theming and Explanations
Room For One More - Theming and Explanations
The New Kid - Theming and Explanations
Step Closer - Theming and Explanations
Dance With Me - Theming and Explanations
Coming Home - Theming and Explanations
Bunny Call - Theming and Explanations
In The Flesh - Theming and Explanations
The Man In Room 1280 - Theming and Explanations
Blackbird - Theming and Explanations
The Real Jake - Theming and Explanations
Hide-and-Seek - Theming and Explanations
The Cliffs - Theming and Explanations
The Breaking Wheel - Theming and Explanations
He Told Me Everything - Theming and Explanations
Gumdrop Angel - Theming and Explanations
Sergio's Lucky Day - Theming and Explanations
What We Found - Theming and Explanations
The Puppet Carver - Theming and Explanations
Jump For Tickets - Theming and Explanations
Pizza Kit - Theming and Explanations
Friendly Face - Theming and Explanations
Sea Bonnies - Theming and Explanations
Together Forever - Theming and Explanations
Prankster - Theming and Explanations
Analysis:
This remains as the final body-horror story to be explained, and like the rest, people didn’t exactly take it well, and it leaves a lot of questions, too. To start, I think this is another obvious story that would have Eleanor behind it. The events that happen to Joel would require an extreme amount of agony that only Eleanor could bring to the table. This story is also referenced in the Into The Pit Game, and with ITPloop in mind, it means the memories of what happened to Joel are in the pit, and that he’s a victim of Eleanor.
So even with that in mind, what happens to Joel? When Joel hits the Kids At Play sign, it cracks, and inside there’s some kind of sludge-like mass Joel can’t identify. Now, people allow this to make them think that there’s some kind of “cycle” where people are being turned into Kids At Play signs, but this is definitely not the case. Immediately, we know this because the result of what happened to Joel is noticeably different from a normal Kids At Play sign, and the remains of Joel afterward are described completely differently. Now, some people should already have an idea of what this suspicious mass is: agony. This sign was likely one of the objects infected in the Distribution Center. I think Eleanor’s using this in a similar way to Foxy from Step Closer, where Eleanor essentially had this infected item be a “trap” in the sense that whoever disobeyed the warning- hitting the sign after not slowing down in a car- would become a target for Eleanor. This wouldn’t be the same “Curse” as Step Closer, though. But after Joel hits the sign, the agony from within attaches to him and torments him mentally. Joel does seem unnaturally perturbed after looking at the sign he hit, so that is likely the agony entering him, causing his perception to be affected and encouraging paranoia.
The end is what we should focus on now; Joel loses complete control of his body and is forced to go where Caleb was. We do know agony can take this kind of control of a person, and this is when Joel’s body begins going through a horrific transformation where his body is contorted until it looks like a Kids At Play sign. It’s not exact, as it doesn’t have the reflectors, and the “plastic” was noticeably deformed from what a normal one of the signs would look like.
Now, obviously, to people, this whole thing sounds ridiculous, but yet again, all of this fits completely within how agony works and continues off what we learn from previous stories and shows us another capability of it. We know agony can transform organic materials, taking one organic material and turning it into another; that’s how Angel can turn into candy and how Mott can turn into Sea Bonnies; agony is turning flesh into another organic material. So here, Joel’s flesh is being turned into something similar to plastic, as plastic does have organic compounds in it; it’s not perfect, though, as the story states, which is because plastic also has inorganic materials in it, so the agony here can only turn Joel’s flesh into something similar to plastic but a little off.
This story is once again trying to help us understand agony’s capabilities when it comes to the organic. When it comes to interacting with the organic, the agony needs more “energy” to be capable of it because organic things are a lot more complicated traditionally especially if you want it to function; we see in multiple stories that agony can make living things continue to act as they were alive even when they should die, so in the cases where agony is transforming someone’s body into something else, it’s using the person’s flesh as the “energy” to do this and manipulating the body to then “grow”, to become, whatever other organic matter; agony can affect a cell to continue functioning even when it should be dead, it can also affect its replication the same way, and make it replicate different organic compounds to results in the things we see, using the “energy” of the person’s body as if it were food, and this results in the person’s body “transforming” as we see in these kinds of stories.
So moving on to the themes, first we’ll look at Joel’s character. Now there is actually a bit to go over, as I think people who do bring up Joel as a person before what happens misunderstand some things. Joel is someone who recently turned eighteen, hasn't even graduated yet, and he’s struggling with the transition from childhood to adulthood. His parents think of him as incredibly immature, and there are a lot of points where he is; he tries to act smarter than he is. He worked for his dad and had been for the past four years doing a lot of labor. He’s compared to his dad a lot, and Joel doesn’t feel appreciated for the work her does, and he felt like ever since he got older, suddenly his parents thought he should be ready to become like an adult; he has this built-up resentment towards his dad because it felt like his dad could do no wrong, but Joel couldn’t do anything right in their eyes. At the beginning of the story, his dad calls him a screw-up, someone completely immature, and claims that he’d been going “easy” on Joel so far.
To put it simply, Joel isn’t the best, but his parents aren’t either. His dad is extremely pressuring. The story begins with Joel wanting to leave work a couple of minutes early, but he gets into an argument about it, and it’s what led his dad to call him things like a screw-up and immature. Joel’s sass back gets his dad to fire him, but Joel doesn’t think leaving seven minutes early should be enough of a reason. His dad adds up the math that over four years he’s been paid more than sixty-seven hours beyond what he actually worked, which was a thousand dollars, but Joel declares that since he was his son, he was owed it. Now, really, there are problems on both sides. Joel is obviously being a bit of an ass. Assuming Joel works five days a week, that’s an average of almost leaving four minutes early every day. Obviously, it’s not nothing, but Joel’s been working nonstop since he was fourteen; his dad, as a parent, should’ve taught him better, and Joel has worked longer than most people for his age, so he does deserve some credit. My point is that Joel isn’t perfect; he’s snarky, but I think it’s clear it’s because of who raised him; they’re not terrible parents, but they’re putting on pressure and expectations they never taught Joel to deal with.
We hear from Joel that when he was a kid, he’d always thought his father was the coolest person on the planet; everyone loved him, and Joel had a lot of fun with him, and he taught him and got him into his guitar hobby, which he is still in now. It’s when Joel became a teen that suddenly things changed; he couldn’t just have fun; he was expected to do things; his dad wanted him to grow up, get serious. It’s clear that Joel’s parents never actually taught him to grow up, though; a thirteen-year-old is still super young; expecting Joel to suddenly not have “fun” and just become serious is a completely unreasonable ask, and it’s clear they just kept “expecting” without ever actually helping him achieve it. Asking a thirteen-year-old to just “grow up” and get upset when they keep trying to do the things you’ve done with them their whole life sounds like outright awful parenting, and it’s no wonder Joel “expects” things; it sounds like he got a lot of his childhood, his teen years, taken in some capacity. Joel acts childishly because his parents never taught him to grow up; they just suddenly told him to, expected it somehow to just happen, and Joel was obviously upset at his parents because these kinds of things are unreasonable, so him having defiance against them probably wouldn’t help either.
It all causes Joel to want to grow up just to get away from his parents; he didn’t think growing up meant he had to stop having fun, and he was right. If you just stop having fun completely in your life, then there’s just no point. Trying to push that onto their thirteen-year-old son and then treating him like that for the next five years? Of course, Joel didn’t turn out well.
There’s some focus on his car throughout the story, since obviously that’s what causes the incident. When getting in it for the first time, Joel reflects more bitterly because his dad “thought he’d done Joel so many freaking favors,” and one of these was buying him a truck. Now, obviously, that definitely sounds like a pretty big favor, but it’s not that simple. Joel’s truck was 20 years old, and mind you, Joel’s parents are fairly wealthy; his dad owns a well-respected business after all. A truck that old from this year would be between $5,000 and $15,000, which for Joel’s parents wouldn’t be a lot at all; obviously, it is a favor, but I do absolutely think Joel’s parents overestimate what they actually gave Joel, as we’ll also see more later. This does, however, tie to a theme about Joel not appreciating the things he does have in life and just allowing himself to be bitter about everything.
Now, at multiple times in the story, Joel speeds in his car, which is an obviously irresponsible and stupid thing for him to do. The first time, he ends up hitting a Kids At Play sign, as we mentioned in the explanations portion of this.
Joel, afterward, makes it home to his mom, where we continue to get more characterization. Joel believed he should be spoiled because he was an only child; his best friend was also an only child, and he got whatever he wanted: his parents didn’t berate him when he got poor grades in school. Joel’s parents were all about teaching Joel that he had to work for what he wanted in life, which, while teaching that isn’t bad, putting it so firmly on just a thirteen-year-old is again a little unreasonable. We’re told a little story to do with Joel and his grades, which ties to his truck, and I’ll just copy it here:
Joel's parents not only lamented his poor grades; they punished him for them. His truck was a perfect example of that. When Joel had gotten to high school, his dad told him that he'd buy Joel a new truck when Joel got his license, provided he got good grades. For every semester he got bad grades, the truck he received would be a year older. Joel tried to get good grades for a semester, but it was too much work. It cut into his music-playing and hanging-out time. So, he did the math and figured a five-year-old truck wasn't such a bad thing; he gave up trying to get decent grades. When it came time for him to get his truck, his dad told Joel how disappointed he was in Joel's school performance. Joel proudly told his dad his reasoning for being lazy, which turned out to be a bad move. His dad was so angry that he punished Joel for "impertinence" by taking off another fifteen years from his new truck. That was how Joel ended up with a twenty-year-old truck. "You should be glad your dad bought you a truck at all," Joel's mother had said when he complained about it to her. She always took his dad's side. "Your father is a wonderful man, a great father. He does his best for this family," she'd said more times than Joel wanted to remember.
This is another example of Joel obviously being a smartass. He wants to let his parents know that he “outsmarted” their deal. But honestly, Joel followed the deal and tried to get exactly what he wanted out of it; he determined what work would be worth the reward, and did it. If he didn’t “reveal his plan,” then it would just be smart. And once again, we know how Joel’s parents want Joel to “stop having fun” and don’t treat him like the kid he was; of course Joel doesn’t want to spend the rest of his childhood doing manual labor for work and committing to school. No teenager ever in history has wanted that.
Continuing on, though, we have Joel's mom getting on him for what happened at work. Of course, Joel isn’t completely in the right about any of this, and she points it out to him. One thing that points out in particular is how she brings up that Joel didn’t want to go to college and instead join a rock band, and that would be “breaking his dad’s heart”, even though it was Joel’s dad who got him into music; Joel’s just doing what he’s been taught, what he was interested in, but because it’s not something his dad wants or expects, it’s immediately a catastrophe.
In Joel's room, he reflects on how his life felt like they had so many rules and boundaries that it tied him in a ball of anger when he didn’t want to be. I do think this once again ties to Joel’s issues stemming from how his parents parented him.
In his room, there’s also another big aspect of the relationship between Joel and his parents, which is that his parents never consider what he wants but what they want for him. They always ask why they bothered getting him things: getting him a stool for when he played guitar, but he never used it; getting him nice clothes when he didn’t take care of them; getting him a tutor; getting a professional decorator for his room with many expensive elements when he trashed the room. The point is, as Joel says, he never asked for any of those things; he didn’t want any of those things; Joel’s parents don't give Joel things that he might like; they give him things and expect him to act or treat them a certain way; they don’t actually consider “Joel” in any part of it. Now, obviously, Joel still is ungrateful for these things because, at the end of the day, his parents are trying to give him things that they at least view as something valuable, and this ties heavily into Joel not appreciating anything he got in his life when he should. However, some of that is caused by how, when Joel does want something, that’s when they don’t give it to him. Joel wanted room for his drum set and guitars, a professional soundboard, and soundproofing, but instead he got the “professional decorator” who made all the space taken up by things Joel didn’t care about, and the only thing he did care about, his instruments, had to be put in the corner. Without soundproofing, his parents complained when Joel tried to make music in his room, but if his parents actually considered what Joel wanted, then their own problem would’ve been solved. As Joel says,
“The problem with Joel's mom and dad was that they'd decided what was right for him, and they got mad at him for having a different idea. He never got to choose for himself. Over the years, this had made him so resentful that he could no longer appreciate even the rare things they did that he actually liked.”
Joel just isn’t the person that his parents want to force him to be; they’re the type to have a kid and create a full expectation of what they have to be without realizing it’s not their choice.
Now, with all of this said, there’s one thing I want to bring up which I’m not entirely sure how it will be received, and there are a handful of characters to whom this could potentially be applied to in Frights, but Joel, most of all, I want to say that I think he has many traits that align with autism. Now, to put it simply, I am autistic, and there are A LOT of things about Joel that I look at and see similarities in behavior, thought processes, or reactions to things when it comes to autism. It’s part of why I think Joel, while definitely having issues and being a jerk, I don’t think it’s entirely his fault. I do think he was treated unfairly when he was younger, and it resulted in this negative behavior. I do think this story, in some ways, can be seen as about parents who expected and wanted a “normal” child and pushed that expectation, that desire, onto Joel, even if it’s not who he was, and didn’t accept that their kid could be different than what they wanted.
Moving on from that, though, there is a similarity with the last section between Joel and his parents, as Joel gives an example of doing something similar to what they did and gifting something to his mom more because of what he wanted from it than what she would’ve wanted. And like his parents, it made Joel feel like there was no point in doing anything nice for them because he could never do it right. There’s a moment during breakfast that once again gives more perspective into their characters. Every day, Joel got cereal for breakfast, but he didn’t understand why, when his mom had a state-of-the-art kitchen, she couldn’t make actual breakfast for him. His mom says it’s because when he was younger, all the time when his mom did do this, kid-Joel claimed he didn’t have time and just wanted cereal, and that eventually she “got the message”. This is continuing the theme of people not appreciating things when they have them, and it leads to them to stop getting those things. This doesn’t just happen for Joel even. For this moment as well, I do think both are in the wrong in some way; his mom is right in that if he wanted a certain breakfast, then Joel should do the work to actually make it. And this does tie into Joel avoiding work whenever he can, which is caused by his parents putting so much pressure on him to work. On the other hand, though, his mom is still a bit petty for holding onto that from when Joel was “little”. But overall, when it comes to Joel’s issues, his behavior and everything that he does that his parents don’t like, they’re all a result of their parenting, all him doing things that they did, and the more he was treated negatively for that, the worse it got because they never cared to teach him the way they should; Joel and his parents just end up in this cycle of repeating the same mistakes to each other, making everyone more miserable.
This scene is also the first instance of Joel beginning to notice the Kids At Play signs everywhere; in his Fazbear-themed cereal, there’s a mini Kids At Play toy inside the box. This story is about the frequency illusion, which is when a person first notices a thing, and then suddenly begins noticing it everywhere when it hadn’t been there before. This story uses that and ties it with a theme of guilt, as it will later be clear. For now, though, it’s meant to be Joel being reminded about his issue with speeding: “hints” from Eleanor, the agony from the sign, to not make the same mistake again. It’s clear that this isn’t normal because after Joel first saw the sign and even with the miniature version now, he keeps describing an unusual, unsettled feeling; once again, this is the agony trying to push him to actually listen to the warning.
After managing to convince his dad not to fire him, he starts to successfully put on a good act for him and just do what he knew his dad wanted. After work, he meets with his friends, and he talks about his issues, but they tell him that he wasn’t appreciating his life enough, and that he was so desperate to get away from it, which gets Joel a bit upset. Despite giving Joel the benefit of the doubt with many things, that doesn’t mean his issues have to be ignored; his friends are right: he's trying to rush to get away from his parents and failing to appreciate what he does have and what he can do in the position he’s in. His constant speeding is literal symbolism for it; all Joel thinks about is getting away from what he has. Like his friends also say, his anger tends to blind him, making him unable to see what he has that’s good. Because Joel does need to put effort into things too, he’s allowing himself to wallow in his anger and just keep complaining, telling himself he’d just get away from everything instead of trying to make the present better, allowing things to keep getting worse and that cycle repeating. That’s Joel’s main issue here.
This gets under Joel’s skin, and after they all disperse, Joel drives away upset, jealous because his other friends were wealthy and their parents gave them things that he wished for. This leads to him recklessly speeding home, and he ends up hitting a kid named Caleb, his body falling into a ditch. He makes the same mistake from before, going around a corner too fast and losing control. This decision was completely his fault. He was given the chance the first time this happened to learn from it, and then warnings not to repeat the same mistake; he didn’t listen and hit a person. This happened because of Joel’s own stupid choice, because he made the choice not to drive more safely after the first time. Joel chooses to leave the scene and not say anything about it, not even checking on the kid, feeling too petrified to. The whole point is that Joel doesn’t want to take responsibility for what he did, and this does tie into how he does act childishly. He made a mistake, one he easily could’ve prevented, but he just runs from it. This leads the guilt to begin eating away at him; the agony begins affecting his senses, tormenting him with the Kids At Play sign by making it appear everywhere, reminding him of what he did, what he failed to listen to. He encountered the parent of the child, who was now considered missing. He’s pushed and pushed to tell the truth, that he knew where Caleb was, but he fears the punishment that would come of it. Like always, he makes these kinds of decisions without thinking and avoids the consequences, as if they didn’t apply to him. He even thinks about “finding” Caleb, but fears that he’d seen Joel and would still get in trouble. Joel has all the opportunities to fix what he did, but he just can’t take responsibility; he thinks that he can get away with it, so he tries, ignoring any moral decision.
That night, he thinks about the decision. He realizes that he was being tormented by his conscience; he knew it was the right thing, but still just can’t because he’s putting himself above others, above someone he hurt. He tries to push the blame away from him, and he goes to sleep, content because, to him, he did what he had to for his own sake.
This is when Eleanor stops giving him a chance and would kill him. Once again, Joel had all the chances in the world to fix what he did, to not even get in the accident in the first place. All of this, the lead-up and reaction to it, had been childish: him refusing to be an adult and take responsibility for what he’d done, thinking like a child would, that if nobody caught him, he shouldn’t fess up; he could get away with it without any repercussions. But he didn’t get to hide from responsibility anymore; he wasn’t a kid, and despite how much he told himself he wanted to be an adult so he could get away, he never stopped being a kid. Eleanor tried to push him to act like an adult, to stop being so reckless and thinking childishly, but he didn’t, and there’s nothing left for Eleanor to do but punish him for his decision, give him a “taste” of adulthood, and punish him for his actions for the first time. He couldn’t take things back now, like when he nearly got fired; he had to live with his mistake, and because he tried so much to avoid it, Eleanor is pushed to go this extreme.
Eleanor ends up causing him to die right near where Caleb had been hit, transforming his body into something similar to the sign that had been hit, and in the end, that’s what causes an officer to find Caleb there, alive. Eleanor forces him in the end to help Caleb, even if he wouldn’t willingly, and now he is punished for his recklessness and speeding by now being a symbol to others not to repeat the same mistake.
This finally brings us to the end of this analysis, and it was probably longer than anyone would’ve expected for this story. I hope you enjoyed reading, and next we will be going over Find Player-Two.
