William Afton
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| William Afton | |
|---|---|
| First appearance |
|
| Created by | Scott Cawthon |
| Designed by | Scott Cawthon |
| Information | |
| Full name | William Afton |
| Alias | Dave Miller (novel) Steve Raglan (film) |
| Nickname | Purple Guy |
| Species | Artificial intelligence/ghost possessing animatronic Human (formerly) |
| Title |
|
| Occupation | |
| Affiliation | Afton Robotics Fazbear Entertainment |
| Children | |
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William Afton, colloquially known as the "Purple Guy", is a fictional character in the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise. Introduced as a minor character in Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the character's role was significantly expanded in Five Nights at Freddy's 3 and subsequent installments, in which his children Elizabeth "Circus Baby", Vanessa "Vanny", and Michael respectively appear as antagonists and protagonists. A roboticist and businessman, William causes the death of several children over the course of the series while wearing a bunny rabbit mascot costume, binding their souls to animatronics in a quest for immortality. In Five Nights at Freddy's 3, William dies after being crushed inside an animatronic-costume, before possessing the suit as the undead cyborg Springtrap, returning in the sequels Sister Location and Pizzeria Simulator, which explore William's relationship with Elizabeth and Michael, and his former business partner Henry Emily.
In Help Wanted and Security Breach, a digital copy of William's soul teams up with his other daughter Vanessa/"Vanny", forming a cult that aims to take over the world with an army of artificial intelligence-controlled animatronics, going by the name Glitchtrap, and later Burntrap. In the novel The Silver Eyes, set in an alternate continuity to that of the games, William is depicted as a security guard named Dave Miller.
PJ Heywood voices the character in the video game series, while Matthew Lillard portrays the character in the 2023 Five Nights at Freddy's feature film, depicted as a career counselor named Steve Raglan.[1][2] In February 2023, Lillard revealed he had signed a three-film deal to reprise the role across a film trilogy.[3]
Development[edit]
William Afton first appeared in Five Nights at Freddy's 2 as a purple figure appearing in backstory minigames, causing him to be dubbed "Purple Guy",[4] also appearing in Five Nights at Freddy's 3 as the main antagonist in the form of an undead corpse called Springtrap.[5] He would later appear in Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, and Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach.[5] In Ultimate Custom Night, Afton serves as the protagonist, with the player experiencing his never-ending nightmares as a malevolent entity keeps him alive to torment him for his crimes.[6]
Afton is also the antagonist of the Five Nights at Freddy's book series, as well as the film adaptation, in which he is portrayed by Matthew Lillard.[1][2] Lillard will portray the character in at least two more films.[3]
Fictional character biography[edit]
Five Nights at Freddy's 2[edit]
William would later team up with Henry Emily in order to create Fredbear's Family Diner, covering up Emily's daughter's death after hitting her with his car outside the diner when drunk. His youngest son would also die to an animatronic, Fredbear. Afton and Emily also founded Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and in 1985 Afton killed five children while dressed in a mechanical "springlock" suit of a yellow rabbit. He would then stuff their corpses into the restaurant's animatronic entertainers: Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, and Golden Freddy, to which he then bound their souls, ahead of also binding his and Emily's own children's souls to animatronics, granting them "new life".[2][7][8] These animatronics would then attempt to kill security guards watching the diner at night in the games Five Nights at Freddy's and Five Nights at Freddy's 2.
Five Nights at Freddy's 3[edit]
In a series of flashback mini-games in Five Nights at Freddy's 3, after witnessing the spirits of the children he murdered possess the animatronic robots within the restaurant, William donned the yellow rabbit suit in an attempt to scare them away, but was killed due to the suit's faulty mechanics crushing him to death.[9][10] Thirty years later, in the main plot of the game, William returned as an undead corpse called Springtrap, possessing the suit.[5][2][8][11]
Sister Location[edit]
In life, William Afton (voiced by PJ Heywood) is revealed in Sister Location to have been a British businessman with ties to the robotics and restaurant industries. He founded Afton Robotics, providing animatronic robots for a pizza restaurant called Circus Baby's Pizza World. His daughter, Elizabeth Afton, would ignore his warnings and got too close to the titular Circus Baby animatronic, which killed her. Elizabeth would go on to possess Circus Baby, bonding with the animatronic's artificial intelligence (A.I.) system. In the main plot of the game, William leaves voice messages for his son Michael, aiming to have him free Elizabeth.[7]
Pizzeria Simulator[edit]
In Pizzeria Simulator, William is resurrected in a new disfigured human-animatronic form called "Scraptrap" on the whim of the spirit of Cassidy, one of the children he killed, who wishes to keep him alive in order to eternally torture him with a recurring cycle in which he is continuously destroyed by his own creations.[6] In the main plot, William's son Michael, along with Henry Emily, start a new pizzeria before luring all the soul-possessed animatronics to it, burning it down with them all inside, aiming to free their souls.[5][10]
Help Wanted[edit]
In Help Wanted, when the remains of Scraptrap are repurposed as part of an in-universe virtual reality video game, a digital copy of William's soul is revived as the uploaded intelligence (U.I.) Glitchtrap, who recruits William's daughter Vanessa "Vanny" Afton to his cause, as they aim to take over the world.[12]
Security Breach[edit]
In Security Breach, the U.I. William returns as the computer virus Burntrap, working with Vanny (his representative in the physical world, as they attempt to kill and upload Gregory, a young boy locked overnight in the "Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex" shopping mall, who escapes William's and Vanny's clutches with the help of Glamrock Freddy, a good A.I. animatronic who resists the Afton family's will.[10]
In other media[edit]
Novel series[edit]
In the 2015 novel The Silver Eyes, set in an alternate continuity to that of the games, William is depicted as Dave Miller, the lone security guard of a mall surround the remains of the restaurant Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, who years previously kidnapped and murdered the children Michael Brooks and Sammy Emily before changing his name due to negative attention result from him being suspected for the murders but never convicted. Holding a simple outlook on life, this version of the character believes children's souls are "pure" and should be kept that way. After teenagers break into the mall, Dave dons his Spring Bonnie costume and kidnaps one of them, Carlton, before killing the police officer the remaining teenagers call to the scene when they flee. On placing Carlton in an animatronic costume, Dave explains that the "spring lock" mechanisms in the costume be lethal if triggered whilst a human is wearing the suit, discouraging him from attempting to escape, before removing his own suit's torso section to show Carlton a series of large cuts covering his back and neck, as Carlton witnesses living animatronics walking around Dave.
The returning teenagers rescue Carlon and knock out and tie up Dave, before forcing him awake with a water bucket and question him about the murders. He reveals the suits in the restaurant are haunted by the souls of the children he killed, and since they have no memory of who killed them, the animatronics will kill the unmasked teenagers should they remain, while Dave will "walk over their corpses in the morning" since the dead children will see him as "one of them" while in his suit. After the teenagers make several attempts to escape the killer animatronics, an apparent Golden Freddy animatronic controlled by Michael recognises the teenagers (his childhood friends) and stops the others, allowing the teenagers to leave, and a frustrated Dave attacks Charlie in the Spring Bonnie suit, only for Charlie to activates the costume's spring locks, apparently killing Dave, whose body is dragged away by the animatronics, allowing the teenagers to leave safely, as the Golden Freddy suit fades into the air, implying it to have been an actual ghost in itself.
In the 2017 novel The Twisted Ones, Dave returns as Springtrap, controlling a "twisted" series of animatronics along with the original children's ghosts, who have forgiven Dave for their murder on realising what they can do as animatronics to be much more "fun", luring the teenagers back to a new restaurant to kill, with Dave claiming to have killed Charlie instead of her brother, as well as having "created" her, before Charlie is then trapped in the torso of the twisted Freddy animatronic and apparently kille, and Dave is revealed as a hologram, before an imposter Charlie exits the destructing restaurant, after the teenagers had again turned the original animatronics against Dave.
In the 2018 novel The Fourth Closet, an elderly wheelchair-bound William Afton is revealed to still be alive, the previous "Dave" having been a robotic experiment of his, with both he and Charlie being robots. He reveals that after he had accidentally killed the real Charlie years previously, her father and his business partner Henry, with whom he was developing advanced robotics, using their restaurant animatronic business to to provide the funding for their true experiments, had recreated his daughter as a "Circus Baby" robot which he had transferred her soul into, continuing to transfer it between different models every few years. The "imposter Charlie" is revealed as the fourth robot, whom Charlie's father had died before completing. On finding the robot, William's daughter Elizabeth had accidentally been killed by it, before her own soul was trapped in it by the mysterious soul-trapping metal William and Henry used to make the animatronics, making her a doppelgänger of Charlie. On realising she has bee found out, Elizabeth has one of the other teenagers, Elizabeth, assist her in transplanting William's dying body onto an endoskeleton of his original animatronics, who have been fused together, restoring him to a humanoid form with the physical strength of a tank. Afterward, on revealing her existence to Charlie, Elizabeth plans to kill her to become her father's "favourite", only for Charlie to find the robot her father created to stab himself and commit suicide and has it stab them both to non-operative functions. Meanwhile, William kidnaps Carlton with the intent of resuming his robotics experiments as a mad scientist, only for Carlton to again remind the souls behind the animatronics of how they died, leading to them trapping William in a furnace, where all their souls are freed from the metal.
2023 film[edit]
In the 2023 film Five Nights at Freddy's, set in an another alternate continuity to that of the games and novels, William Afton is depicted as a career counselor working under the name Steve Raglan, who recruits violent offenders he meets at his job to work at the shut-down Freddy Fazbear's Pizza family entertainment center as night security guards, before hunting them down in his animatronic suit "The Yellow Rabbit", along with five other animatronics, possessed by the souls of children William had killed years previously, and strapping them to torture devices that drill animatronic heads onto their own ones. William is assisted in this by his daughter Vanessa, who is working as a local police officer under the name Shelley, who covers up the murders under the justification that her father killing violent offenders is better than him killing children. However, after William decides to hire Mike Schmidt, the brother of one of his former victims Garrett, and the animatronics convince him to claim his younger sister Abby for them to "play" with, Vanessa turns against her father, explaining the truth to Mike, before an arriving masked William knocks Mike out before he can seee his face. After failing to talk her father out of helping the animatronics, Vanessa shoots him; in response, William stabs his daughter into a coma. Seeing this, Abby draws William killing the children and shows the drawing to their spirits, reminding them of William's role in their deaths and turning them against him. Before he can put back on his rabbit helmet, allowing him to control the ghosts, William is bitten by the "Mr. Cupcake" animatronic, triggering his suit's internal springlock mechanisms which fatally wound him. Realizing he is dying, William declares "I always come back." and puts back on his helmet, having the animatronics drag him into a back room to die. Later, the spirit of one of the children watches a twitching William as he dies in preparation of reviving and possessing his own corpse, before closing a door on him.[13]
Reception[edit]
William Afton's role in the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise has been compared to that of Jigsaw in the Saw franchise, with his "aura of mystery" being described as a "constant, haunting presence" by Slash Film.[14] He has been described as "the only character throughout the series that doesn’t have any redeeming qualities" by Pocket Tactics,[8] as well as "one of the most evil characters to exist in video game history" by We Got This Covered.[15]
Afton has also had negative reception, being described by CBR as "roastable" due to his constant failures to achieve his goals and being defeated by "unremarkable" enemies.[16] His return in Security Breach as Burntrap was described as "unnecessary" and "a slap in the face to Michael Afton’s character development" by The Slate, stating that his character should have ended in Pizzeria Simulator.[17]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Squires, Bethy (2023-05-17). "Vanessa: Blumhouse Is Making a Five Nights at Freddy's Movie". Vulture. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Pomales-Diaz, Luis (2023-09-27). "HORROR 101: Five Nights at Freddy's and The Story of William Afton Explained". horrorpress.com. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Watel, Stephanie (2023-02-04). "Matthew Lillard Confirms He Signed a Three-Film Deal for Five Nights at Freddy's". MovieWeb. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ Writer, Nadia Oxford Staff; USgamer (2018-06-29). "Murder, Dysfunctional Families, and Purple Guys: The Larger Story Behind the Five Nights at Freddy's Games [Updated for Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator and UCN]". VG247. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Selway, Jake (2022-10-23). "Five Nights at Freddy's Lore: The Story So Far". Game Rant. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Hoban, Brie (2023-08-04). "Five Nights at Freddy's Lore: A Comprehensive Timeline - Part 2". Game Rant. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 McCoy, Joshua Kristian (2023-09-15). "Who Plays William Afton in the Five Nights At Freddy's Movie?". Game Rant. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "FNAF William Afton – lore, personality, and appearances". Pocket Tactics. 2023-10-26. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ Troughton, James (2023-10-09). "Five Nights At Freddy's Fans Think William Afton Has Springtrap Scars". TheGamer. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Bridges, Ryan (2022-05-27). "Five Nights at Freddy's: Will William Afton Ever Truly Die?". CBR. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ Colangelo, B. J. (2023-10-27). "That Five Nights At Freddy's Credits Scene Needs An Explainer". /Film. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ Ji, Yujie; Zhao, Yixuan (2022-06-01). "Follow the Purple Bunny: A Brief Analysis of Five Nights at Freddy's Narrative". Proceedings of the 2022 8th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2022). 664. Atlantis Press. pp. 153–158. doi:10.2991/assehr.k.220504.028. ISBN 978-94-6239-580-0. Search this book on
- ↑ Briscuso, Lex (October 29, 2023). "Why Five Nights at Freddy's Ending Is the Perfect Twist". IGN. Retrieved November 1, 2023.
- ↑ Colangelo, B. J. (2023-09-13). "Why The Five Nights At Freddy's Films Should Treat William Afton Like Jigsaw". /Film. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ "Who is William Afton? 'Five Nights at Freddy's' lore, explained". We Got This Covered. 2023-10-24. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ Krum, Rebekah (2022-11-02). "10 Most Roastable Video Game Villains". CBR. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
- ↑ "Breaching into "Five Nights at Freddy's"". The Slate. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
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