I’m back, and I wrote another six thousand words about a short story for children based on a series of video games I haven’t played. Probably read the first post in this series if you haven’t already, I’m not going to bother going through all the same introductory stuff again. This is the second story in Fazbear Frights #1: Into the Pit. You don’t have to have played the games to understand this review, I’ll explain everything — okay, that’s a lie, I’ll attempt to and then realize I can’t truly explain anything going on here because the lore is too vague, which I think basically means it doesn’t matter anyway.
Content warnings for stuff like violence, child death, and the like are probably not needed when we’re talking about FNAF, but I will mention that teenage body image issues are central to this story and you may want to tread lightly here if that’s something you’re sensitive to.
“To Be Beautiful”
This story opens with a mirror description scene, which is a bold choice, but this time I’ll allow it because it’s used to highlight our protagonist Sarah’s core character trait: she is horribly insecure about her body and thinks she’s hideous. She’s also fourteen, so that tracks. Sarah mentally compares herself to Mrs. Potato Head, except that’s copyrighted so instead it’s “Mrs. Mix-and-Match,” but you get the idea. She describes herself as being shaped like a potato, with a nose also shaped like a potato, and looking like her various body parts were slapped onto her torso at random.
As Sarah gets ready for school, the story takes the opportunity to futher establish how bad Sarah’s body image issues are. Sarah’s walls are covered in pictures of beautiful young women, models and celebrities, and even though she likes having them there to look at and mentally refers to them as “goddesses of beauty” she also feels as though they’re judging her for not living up to their standard. Sarah barely eats anything for breakfast because she thinks she's fat and is worried about carbs. She watches YouTube makeup tutorials on the school bus and yearns for the day when her mom will let her wear a full face of makeup, because she thinks her facial features are ugly. You get the idea. Being fourteen fucking sucks.
Sarah has a particular fixation with a clique of girls at her school, whom she calls “the Beautifuls.” If that moniker didn’t already make it clear, these four girls (yes, of course there's four of them) are basically the girls from Mean Girls. They’re the most popular girls in school, they do cheerleading, they’re rich, they’re gorgeous, and they coordinate their outfits together every day. According to Sarah, every girl in the school wants to be like the Beautifuls, though this is immediately contradicted when the story introduces Sarah’s best friend Abby and Abby comments that the black-and-white outfits the Beautifuls have on make them look like penguins.
About Abby. I called her Sarah’s best friend because the story does too, but she is in fact Sarah’s only friend and it definitely seems like the type of childhood friendship where you only hang out with somebody because you’ve known them since kindergarten. These two don’t really have anything in common. Abby’s not into fashion or aesthetics, and Sarah doesn’t share Abby’s interest in science. Sarah’s actually pretty judgmental towards Abby, mentally describing her poncho as “hideous” twice in the span of two pages and viewing Abby as less mature than herself because her sense of style hasn’t changed much since they were little kids. Of course, the real issue is that Sarah is resentful. Abby might not be interested in chasing fashion trends or conforming to beauty standards, but she’s naturally pretty in a way that Sarah (in her own estimation) isn’t. Sarah thinks that if Abby tried she could be beautiful, and that the same can’t be said for herself.
Abby and Sarah eat lunch together and discuss what they’d do if they had a million dollars. Abby says she’d like to travel the world, whereas Sarah says she’d want to use it for cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery. Abby finds this answer alarming and asks if Sarah would really be willing to put herself through all that pain and suffering just to change the way she looks when there’s nothing wrong with how she looks in the first place. She tries expressing concern for her friend, pointing out how Sarah has become increasingly obsessed with appearances and negative about her own looks over the past couple years. Unfortunately Sarah takes it the wrong way and thinks she’s being criticized, and she lashes out at Abby, telling her “I’ve grown up and you haven’t” before storming off.
The fight with Abby makes Sarah decide it’s time to take matters into her own hands and Become Popular, which of course requires that she give herself a makeover. Not having much money with which to accomplish this, she settles for buying a box kit from the nearest beauty supply store and attempting to bleach her hair to a platinum blond. It goes badly, and Sarah winds up with green hair somehow (if you have questions about this, so do I, but I’ll save it for after the summary). Her mom gets home and isn’t very happy that Sarah tried dyeing her hair without permission, but does take Sarah to the salon to get it fixed, i.e. dyed back to her original color.
Despite ending the day with the same mousey brown hair she started with, Sarah’s dreams of Becoming Popular aren’t over. The following day at school, Sarah sits down at the same table as the Beautifuls during lunch. At first she’s relieved when none of them tell her to go away, but the relief fades when the other girls fail to acknowledge her at all and continue talking amongst each other as if she isn’t there. Defeated, she gets up to leave and bumps right into her crush, Mason Blair, a boy so attractive that the story gives him a last name. Rather than it being a meetcute, Mason just tells her to watch where she’s going before Sarah squeaks out an apology and runs off.
That afternoon, Sarah walks home from school rather than taking the bus. To get home she has to pass by a junkyard, and as she’s doing so, something catches her eye. Near the edge of the junkyard, there’s a rusted-out vehicle with what appears to be a doll arm sticking out of its trunk. Sarah’s intrigued, the gate to the junkyard isn’t locked, and nobody’s around to stop her, so she slips inside and — with some effort — manages to pry the trunk of the car open. Once she does so, it becomes clear that this isn’t any ordinary doll; in fact, Sarah thinks that “doll” might not be the right word, this seems more like a robot or “some kind of marionette.” You may already be wondering which FNAF animatronic this is supposed to be, but I don’t really have a concise answer for you, so we’re going to have to set that question aside for now. The doll/robot/marionette is described as being a little taller than Sarah, with a fully articulated body. It has big beautiful green eyes, a perfect cupid’s bow mouth, and the proportions of a supermodel. Its face is painted in a way that makes Sarah think of a clown, but “a pretty clown,” and it has red hair tied in pigtails. Sarah’s captivated by the beautiful doll-robot girl, and, finding it to be surprisingly lightweight, carries it home.
At home, Sarah is cleaning the robot when she discovers a switch on its back and tries switching it to the “on” position. Nothing happens at first, then the robot powers up, makes a few jerky movements, and introduces itself (in a feminine but slightly mechanical voice) as Eleanor. Sarah responds by telling it her name and is shocked when Eleanor tells her “Nice to meet you, Sarah,” before getting to her feet and twirling in a surprisingly fluid motion. Sarah is too shocked to know how to react; is Eleanor sapient? Alive?
Eleanor thanks Sarah for rescuing her and cleaning her, then asks what she can do for Sarah in return. Sarah doesn’t know how to respond at first, but Eleanor keeps pressing and implies that she can grant a wish for Sarah. Eventually Sarah confesses that she wishes to be beautiful. Eleanor proclaims this to be a marvelous wish but requests Sarah give her twenty-four hours to begin working on granting it.
When Sarah awakens the next morning, Eleanor is inert, and Sarah figures she dreamed the whole thing. However, when she returns from school Eleanor is animate again and offers Sarah a necklace — a silver heart on a chain. Eleanor tells Sarah she made the necklace for her and asks that Sarah promise to always wear it from now on, and never to take it off. Sarah immediately agrees. Eleanor continues and tells Sarah that becoming beautiful is a big wish and she can only grant it a bit at a time, but as long as Sarah wears the necklace, each morning when she wakes she’ll be more beautiful than the day before. Also, in order for it to work, she has to sing Sarah to sleep. Sarah still doesn’t feel convinced that any of this will work, and indeed questions whether she’s dreaming right now, but she agrees and gets into bed, even though it’s early. Eleanor sings Sarah to sleep with a lullaby.
The next morning Sarah wakes up to find that her arms have become beautiful. Her skin is smooth, her fingernails are perfectly manicured. The rest of her body looks the same. Excitedly, Sarah thanks Eleanor (who has gone back to being inanimate) and kisses her on the cheek before hurrying down to breakfast. Sarah’s mom notices she’s in a good mood and remarks on how Sarah’s nails look nice and she’s eating real food for once. Feeling more confident, Sarah spends a little more time on her appearance that morning, and is rewarded when one of the Beautifuls compliments her on her nail polish at school.
At home that evening, Eleanor becomes animate once the sun begins to set and asks Sarah if her wish is coming true, and if she’s happier now. Sarah affirms that she is, which delights Eleanor. It isn’t bedtime yet, but Eleanor tries to get Sarah to let her sing her to sleep anyway, so that she can wake up even more beautiful the next morning. Sarah asks if it can wait, she needs to do her homework and eat dinner first, and Eleanor agrees to this, but she seems a bit disappointed.
Eleanor sings Sarah to sleep again that night, after reminding her never to take off the necklace. When Sarah wakes up, this time her legs have become beautiful — long and shapely, with a perfect pedicure to match her fingernails. Excited by this new development, Sarah puts on a dress instead of her typical blue jeans. Again, Sarah’s mom remarks on how Sarah is putting more effort into her appearance, and adds that over the last two days Sarah has seemed “so much more mature and easy to talk to.” Indeed, now that she can see herself becoming beautiful, Sarah’s much more relaxed and eats a full breakfast without stressing about her weight at all. She even decides to make things right with Abby, so she apologizes and they hug it out. Abby notices Sarah’s gotten taller (Sarah’s new improved legs are longer than her old ones) but Sarah lies and says that she’s just working on her posture.
I think you can see the pattern the story is falling into by now. Sarah gets home, Eleanor wakes up at dark, tells Sarah never to take the necklace off, sings her to sleep, and the next morning when she wakes up a new part of her body has changed and “become beautiful.” This time it’s her torso; when she wakes up, her stomach is flat and her training bra doesn’t fit anymore. Her mom ends up noticing at breakfast, but of course the rapid changes to Sarah’s body don’t seem all that odd to her, since she assumes her daughter is just hitting puberty at high speed.
At school, boys are beginning to take notice of Sarah. She’s distracted by a group of guys who appear to be checking her out when she, again, runs straight into Mason Blair. This time Mason’s attitude is totally different; he recognizes her as the girl who spilled salad on him the other day, but now instead of being annoyed he just seems to think the incident was funny. He asks for her name since he can’t just keep calling her Salad Girl and Sarah introduces herself but says he can call her Salad Girl if he wants (this isn’t an important detail or anything, I just liked the exchange). Sarah’s elated at having essentially gotten a do-over of the earlier meetcute and tells Abby about it straightaway. Abby seems unsurprised and remarks that something seems different about Sarah lately but it’s hard to put into words — she describes Sarah as “glowing from the inside out,” and Sarah thinks that it’s the other way around, the external changes are making her glow inside.
That evening when Eleanor wakes up, Sarah hugs her and gushes about how much she loves her new body… but there’s still one thing left. Her face. Eleanor seems surprised and a little hesitant, asking Sarah if she’s sure and pointing out that a new face is a big change. It’s one thing to wish for and receive longer limbs or a more shapely body — those things are expected for pubescent children anyway — but an entirely new face is another matter, and Eleanor warns that Sarah may find it shocking. Still, Sarah insists. She hates her face and longs for a new one. After seeing how adamant she is about this, Eleanor agrees.
Right before bed, a troubling thought occurs to Sarah, and she asks Eleanor: how will her mom react to seeing Sarah with a new, beautiful face? Eleanor reassures Sarah that her mom might think she looks a little different, healthier or more well-rested perhaps, but in the eyes of her mother she’s always been beautiful. Relieved, Sarah allows Eleanor to sing her to sleep once more.
Sarah awakens to find that Eleanor has granted her wish, and she now has the beautiful face she’s been dreaming of. Her nose is smaller, lips fuller, lashes longer, and even her hair looks thicker and shinier than before. Emboldened by her new beauty, Sarah decides to put on a red dress that she previously wasn’t confident enough to wear. By luck, the Beautifuls are also wearing red that day. Mistaking Sarah for a new student, they invite her to sit with them.
I didn’t previously give names for the Beautifuls because they don’t really matter as individual characters, but, for the record, their names are Lydia, Jillian, Tabitha, and Emma. Lydia seems to be the leader of the clique (the Regina George, if you will) and is generally more relevant to the story than the other three. Anyway, once Sarah sits down with the Beautifuls, Lydia begins asking questions and the other three follow suit, acting as though Sarah is interviewing for a position in their friend group. Sarah quickly realizes she’s going to have to lie to gain their approval. The red dress she’s wearing happens to be designer (a lucky find when thrifting), so the Beautifuls assume she’s rich like they are and begin asking her about how often she travels and what her parents do for work. In case it wasn’t already clear, Sarah is not from a privileged socioeconomic background; she and her mom (dad isn’t in the picture) live paycheck to paycheck off her mother’s social worker salary. Sarah lies and says her dad is a lawyer, which seems to satisfy the Beautifuls. Next they ask her if she has a boyfriend, or if there’s a boy she likes. Sarah confesses to her crush on Mason Blair, which wins her further points with the group since they also think Mason is hot. Lydia tells Sarah that she’s welcome to continue sitting with them at lunch, and to join them when they hang out at the mall on Sunday afternoons, but it’s clear she’s not an “official” part of the group yet. “Consider this a trial period,” says Lydia. Sarah’s elated.
Abby confronts Sarah after lunch, having witnessed this interaction between Sarah and the Beautifuls. She questions whether it’s good to have the sort of friends that make you pass a test and go through a trial period in order to hang out with them. Sarah’s defensive; Abby doesn’t get it. Beautiful people have the social power to get what they want, and Abby could have that power too if she dressed differently and ditched the glasses. Abby says she needs the glasses to see and is perfectly fine with her own appearance. Maybe she isn’t a cheerleader or a model, but she’s a nice person who doesn’t judge others on how they dress or how much money they have. Abby tells Sarah that she’s changed, and not in a good way. She storms off. Sarah’s too high off her own beauty for this to harsh her vibe; she figures she and Abby can hug it out later, once Abby has cooled down.
After school, Mason approaches and asks Sarah if she’d like to go get ice cream with him. Sarah of course accepts. He offers to walk her home after their ice cream date, but she declines, not wanting him to see where she lives (Mason, unsurprisingly, also comes from a rich family). Mason suggests they go out on a less impromptu date sometime — maybe get pizza and see a movie Saturday night? Sarah agrees, trying not to sound too eager about it.
When Sarah gets home, she can’t wait to tell Eleanor about the day she’s had. It’s been the best day of her life! The Beautifuls invited her to hang out with them! Mason Blair wants to go on a movie date with her! Eleanor asks if Sarah’s happy now and if all her wishes have been granted. Sarah enthusiastically agrees. Now that she’s beautiful, her life is perfect and she feels she doesn’t have a single thing left to wish for. Eleanor says she’s happy that Sarah’s happy, but stresses once again that Sarah can never take the necklace off.
Sarah’s date with Mason goes well. The pizza place they go to is not Freddy Fazbear’s, in case you were expecting it to be. Mason seems like a nice kid; he’s funny, has a lot of interests, they’re hitting it off beyond just surface-level attraction. They hold hands in the movie theater, which naturally Sarah finds extremely exciting. Sarah and Mason make plans to go out again the following week, and Sarah gushes to Eleanor that night about how perfect he is.
On Sunday, Sarah asks her mom for a ride to the mall in the afternoon. She doesn’t know exactly where the Beautifuls are meeting up or at what time, but manages to find them trying on lipstick in the mall’s most expensive department store. After finishing up at the makeup counter (the Beautifuls all seem to have wads of cash and/or their parents’ credit cards to shop with, but Sarah only has a couple dollars and doesn’t buy anything) they head over to the formalwear section to try on prom dresses. Eventually a saleslady asks them if they’re actually shopping or just playing dress-up, and the girls flee the store, leaving the dresses behind in a heap. Lydia mocks the saleslady after they leave, saying the woman probably makes minimum wage and can’t afford to buy the dresses she sells. Sarah feels a bit bad about this, but doesn’t speak up in defense of the saleslady. Hanging out with the Beautifuls is, to her, a great privilege, and she doesn’t want to screw it up.
That night, Sarah has a disturbing dream. She’s at the movies with Mason, but when they go to hold hands Sarah finds that she’s holding Eleanor’s cold metal hand instead of Mason’s. Sarah turns to look at Mason and instead sees Eleanor sitting beside her. The robot girl smiles, revealing a mouthful of sharp teeth. Sarah jolts awake to find Eleanor standing over her bed and questions it. Eleanor replies that she watches over Sarah every night while she sleeps, to keep her safe. She doesn’t elaborate on what she might be keeping Sarah safe from, but offers to stand by the door instead if Sarah’s more comfortable. Sarah falls back into an uneasy sleep, still with a feeling that something isn’t right.
The next scene picks up an unclear amount of time later; it’s implied that at least a week has passed, since Sarah’s mom has had time to take her clothes shopping. Sarah and the Beautifuls are in line to dump their trays at the school cafeteria. Lydia begins mocking a nearby girl for dressing like a preschooler and the other Beautifuls join in. The girl they’re making fun of turns out to be Abby, and, while Sarah agrees that Abby’s pink overalls are babyish, this time she feels like the Beautifuls are being a bit too mean. She tries to stick up for Abby, but the Beautifuls continue to mock Abby’s outfit. As Sarah approaches the trash can, she steps in something and her cute new shoes, which don’t have good traction, cause her to dramatically slip and fall. Rather than helping her up, the Beautifuls continue laughing, this time at how much of a klutz Sarah is.
Sarah tries getting to her feet, but something is wrong. She can hear strange metallic noises when she moves, and her body doesn’t seem to be working properly. Sarah begins to panic — has she been seriously injured? Why are her new friends still laughing, rather than helping her? Then suddenly the Beautifuls stop laughing. The tone shifts. The Beautifuls are in a panic now too; something’s happening to Sarah and they don’t understand what. Sarah reaches for her throat trying to feel the necklace Eleanor gave her and discovers in horror that it’s gone; the chain must have come unclasped when she fell. Sarah tries to reach for it and is helped to her feet by Abby, but standing feels strange. She looks down to discover that from the waist down, her body has transformed into twisted scrap metal.
Abby, looking horrified at what’s happening to her friend, hands Sarah the necklace. Sarah takes it, thanks her in a voice that sounds strangely metallic, and runs out of the cafeteria as fast as her scrap metal appendages will allow. As she runs, away from school and back towards her house, her body continues changing. Movement becomes more and more difficult as her joints stiffen; Sarah tries to put the necklace back on but can’t, as her fingers are too rigid to operate the clasp. People passing by in cars or on the street stare at Sarah in horror, as though she’s a monster. Sarah feels like crying but can’t manage it, as though her new body isn’t capable of tears. After what seems to her like an eternity, she makes it home and shambles into her bedroom calling out for Eleanor. No answer. The robot girl isn’t in her usual corner of Sarah’s room. Not in the closet. Not under the bed. Not in Sarah’s mom’s room, not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom. Finally there’s nowhere left to check except the garage. Sarah thinks Eleanor may be hiding from her on purpose, perhaps playing some sort of game, so she approaches the large storage cabinet in the back of the garage and pulls it open. Several clear plastic bags come spilling out, hitting the ground with a wet thud. At first Sarah has trouble comprehending what she’s seeing. The bags are filled with neatly amputated body parts; arms, legs, intestines, too small to belong to an adult. When Sarah spots a familiar potato-shaped nose in one of the bags, the awful realization hits her. She tries to scream, but all that comes out is a metallic squealing noise, like a car with faulty brakes.
Sarah hears a giggle from behind her and, with great difficulty, turns to see Eleanor. The animatronic girl presses a heart-shaped button on her own throat; Sarah hadn’t paid attention to this button before, but it looks just like the heart-shaped necklace Eleanor gave her to wear. When Eleanor presses the button, her body rapidly transforms until she’s a dead ringer for Sarah — the old Sarah, the way she used to look before Eleanor made her beautiful. Sarah, looking at her old body being worn by someone else, realizes that Abby was right. There wasn’t anything wrong with her appearance to begin with.
With a parting comment about how Sarah has certainly made Eleanor’s wishes come true, Eleanor dresses herself in Sarah’s old clothes and skips out the garage door. Sarah, having fully lost control of what remains of her body, is unable to move after her. In an old mirror she spots her reflection; Sarah is now nothing more than a rusted heap of scrap metal, no longer recognizable as human. Her consciousness slowly fades away to nothing as the story ends.
Bonus Round:
Remember how I said we’d talk more about the hair dye incident later? Okay. So Sarah buys a platinum blond box kit, and also buys bleach because the cashier tells her she’ll need to bleach her hair first to get the color right. This is bafflingly untrue. Blond “hair dye” is bleach. A box kit like the one Sarah bought is just bleach and toner. She shouldn’t need to bleach her hair twice, she has light brown hair and the color should lift out easily after one treatment. But whatever. Sarah then goes home and applies the bleach, leaving it in long enough that her hair is completely stripped of color. She then uses the platinum blond box kit and her hair turns green. I have zero idea how this could be possible. I’ve used those box kits. I’ve even done multiple of them back to back because my hair is darker and redder than Sarah’s and I have a difficult time getting the color out. Not once has my hair turned even a little bit green from doing this. Sarah does do some things wrong here, like leaving the bleach in too long and neglecting to use the toning shampoo, but the toner that comes with blond box kits is meant to neutralize red/brassy tones and wouldn’t do anything to make her hair Less Green. I have no clue why it wound up green. My best guess is that the author, who has clearly never bleached her own hair nor bothered to research how it works, somehow thought this would be similar to how blond hair sometimes turns greenish from chlorine exposure (like in a swimming pool). Sorry, I know this doesn’t matter at all to the overall story which is why I waited till the end to talk about it, but my suspension of disbelief fully broke during this scene. I had a much easier time accepting the evil shapeshifting animatronic lady.
Direct quote from when Sarah accidentally spills her salad on Mason: “She had wanted Mason to notice her, but not this way. Not as the ugly, clumsy girl with fried, frizzy brown hair who gave a new meaning to the words tossed salad.” I did a double-take at this line. I think the author may be unaware that “tossed salad” already has another meaning.
This is almost certainly not intentional, but I do have to mention that Sarah doesn’t come across particularly heterosexual in this story. She’s absolutely fixated on beautiful girls to a degree that feels like it might go beyond just issues with her own body image. Between the posters of gorgeous women whom Sarah thinks of as “goddesses” all over her bedroom walls, her notice-me-senpai attitude towards the Beautifuls (at one point, Abby comments that she thinks Sarah’s fixation with them is about wanting to dress them up like Barbies), and even how frequently Sarah takes notice of Abby’s attractive features and thinks how beautiful her friend could be if she tried at it, my gaydar was going off before I made it ten pages into the story. The dynamic between Sarah and Eleanor also quickly becomes close and physically affectionate; they hug frequently, Eleanor plays with Sarah’s hair, Sarah kisses Eleanor on the cheek, Eleanor uses terms of endearment for Sarah and gifts her a heart-shaped necklace… it all does read a certain way. Given Scott’s political leanings, I’m rather confident in saying that no queer reading of this text was intended and this is just an accidental side effect of writing a teen girl protagonist who is obsessed with female beauty. I also don't really want that to be the intended read for this story, since Sarah is punished by the narrative for her pretty girl fixation. However, I must also concede that if I read this when I was fourteen, I as an at-the-time closeted bisexual would have also related to being obsessed with pretty ladies and feeling like a hideous freak. I have a feeling this character might resonate particularly strongly with gay teenagers, whether or not this was intentional.
Lore Implications:
Those of you familiar with FNAF have probably been waiting this entire review for me to talk about whether Eleanor is Circus Baby. For those of you not familiar with FNAF, this is Circus Baby. You see how it's a difficult question to answer? Eleanor’s design is very close to Circus Baby in some aspects; the makeup, the hair, the eyes, the outfit, all match. However, Circus Baby is shaped like a freaky cartoon child and Eleanor is described as having supermodel proportions. There are further similarities between the two characters; like Eleanor, Circus Baby first appears in the games as sympathetic and helpful (never attacking the player directly) before a later reveal that she’s been manipulating the protagonist in order to take control of their body. Given the reveal at the end that Eleanor is capable of some type of shapeshifting, Eleanor being Circus Baby doesn’t seem out of the question.
However, after the last story I didn’t trust the explanation to be that simple and so I checked the wiki. They seem pretty sure that Eleanor is a separate character. I skimmed most of her page in case there were spoilers for Fazbear Frights stories I haven’t read yet (because surely Eleanor is going to be a recurring antagonist, right?) but the “Speculation” section of their article just raised more questions. Apparently in the novel trilogy there’s a character called “Baby” who defaults to looking very similar to how Eleanor is described, can also change her proportions to look like Circus Baby does in the games, can make herself appear human through the use of something called “illusion discs,” and attempts to steal the protagonist’s identity by disgusing herself as her. This is, according to the wiki, also not meant to be the same character as Eleanor. Perhaps she’s a being of pure Agony, like the rabbit from the previous story that I assumed was William Afton. Perhaps she is the rabbit from the previous story taking on a new form. I don’t know, and while I’d normally be okay with not knowing at this stage — we’re only two-thirds of the way through the first book in this series — it seems pretty clear from the wiki that we never get a definitive answer to any of these questions.
Apart from whatever’s going on with Eleanor, the only other thing to tie this story back to the FNAF games is that Sarah has a Freddy Fazbear plush in her bedroom. This is mentioned a total of once.
Closing Thoughts:
The first time I read this story, I went in feeling really confident about my assessment of these books being Goosebumps but for the iPad baby generation. The setup is classic. We have a kid protagonist, unhappy with herself because of a perceived flaw, seeking out the assistance of a supernatural being who offers to grant her wishes. It’s clear from a reader perspective that there will eventually be negative consequences for this and our protagonist will learn the error of her ways. There’s at least one Goosebumps book that has essentially the same premise. I thought I was in familiar territory here. And then the kid protagonist discovers her own dismembered corpse in her garage, which is so far beyond anything that ever happened in Goosebumps that I had to reevaluate my perception of this whole series. Clearly these stories won’t shy away from killing off their main characters, including in gruesome and violent ways, and frankly… I’m here for it. Sarah finding her own body chopped up and stuffed into garbage bags is a great wham moment, and, in hindsight, it’s the perfect payoff for everything this story set up. Even the mirror description opening scene becomes clever and purposeful once you realize the way the story is bookended — at the start Sarah looks in the mirror and thinks about how her body looks like a mismatched collection of parts, and by the end she finds her own body cut apart into a mismatched collection of parts and then looks in the mirror to find that she’s become a literal heap of scrap metal. I don’t think a horror story being For Kids should mean it has to pull its punches, and I’m glad that this one didn’t.
At present, having read roughly half of the Fazbear Frights stories, I’m inclined to say that this is objectively the best one. Maybe not my favorite, but the best written. Certainly the most satisfying twist ending. I know I spent a lot of time complaining about the hair dye scene, but I do think it speaks to the quality of this story that my main complaint is about a scene that doesn’t matter. I also have to point out that this story is unusual — perhaps unique — among the Fazbear Frights stories in that it has a coherent central theme. It’s pretty easy to read this one as a puberty allegory, and the messages about how beauty is in the eye of the beholder and superficial beauty only attracts superficial people come across pretty clearly. This generally cannot be said for the other stories, which is not a compliment to this story so much as a condemnation of the rest of them, but I still do want to give this one some credit for accomplishing what it set out to do. While the prose has plenty of awkward moments, with Abby in particular tending to sound like an after-school special about being true to yourself in the face of social pressure whenever she opens her mouth, there are also some pretty effective sequences; I’m particularly fond of how the prose shifts smoothly and unobtrusively from Eleanor being referred to as an object with “it” pronouns to a person with “she” pronouns as it dawns on Sarah that the robot girl is alive (I tried to replicate this effect in my summary, but the story itself does a better job). The pacing is way better than average for this series, and the repetitive sequences of Sarah getting home from school -> Eleanor cautioning her to never take the necklace off -> Eleanor singing Sarah to sleep -> Sarah waking up to find her body has transformed work well to build suspense. If writer Elley Cooper can keep this up for the rest of the series (she wrote several other stories in this anthology, including the one we’re reading next), then we have more fun and surprisingly dark middle-grade horror to look forward to, right? Right?
I think it’s also worth mentioning that my impression of this story was a little more critical on an initial read, especially before I got to the reveal at the end. Something about the tone did rub me a little wrong; I described it to a friend as feeling a touch like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in a bad way, in a “you deserve to suffer and die for the crime of being a teenage girl” way. Sarah doesn’t really do anything bad in this story to deserve the fate she gets, besides getting in a few minor fights with Abby (and their last and biggest fight in the story is one Abby initiates) and being complicit in the Beautifuls’ rudeness towards retail workers. And yes, of course we can say that Sarah is wrong to hate her own appearance and for judging others based on her own insecurities and that the narrative isn’t wrong for trying to show her the error of her ways, and Eleanor is an evil robot rather than a moral authority, but when we’re talking about a short story aimed at children with a clear message about how you should not be like the protagonist and then the protagonist dies horribly at the end, it’s hard for that not to feel like a parable. The message also begins to get muddy as one looks at it more closely; becoming beautiful and hanging out with the Beautifuls is, on the one hand, encouraging all of Sarah’s worst tendencies and making her more shallow and judgmental, but on the other hand Sarah becomes far happier and more confident as a result of the makeover Eleanor gives her. She starts eating normal meals without worrying about her weight, can talk to her peers and engage in hobbies and go out in public without being self-conscious or embarrassed about it. It’s not as though Sarah becoming prettier simply results in her becoming a worse person; it’s more complicated than that. I also want to be clear that I’m not against stories where awful things happen to the protagonist for completely unjust reasons, I just would have expected such a story to lean a bit harder into being gleefully mean, and this one is a bit too “after school special” in tone to ever really pull that off — at least until the delightfully nasty final scene, where I started to feel like I might have been a bit quick to judge here. I’m mentioning all this because “does the author just hate teenage girls?” is unfortunately often a relevant question when we’re dealing with stories about teenage girls, and if you read the summary and were also on alert for this sort of thing, I’m right there with you. I’ve decided that any problems I have with this story’s handling of Sarah’s character are minor enough I can overlook them for a work I otherwise have mostly positive feelings about, but we’ll have more teen girl protagonists in future stories and it might be worth keeping an eye out for how those characters are handled.
When I said that this is probably the objective best Fazbear Frights story, I didn’t mean to imply things will be all downhill from here. In fact, I think I’ll have far more interesting reviews to write about the stories that are stranger, more poorly written, and less coherent than this one, and that’s basically all of them. Look forward to that, I guess!
(Also, I used the word “beautiful” forty-eight times in this post and it no longer feels like a word.)