#rip aim

[animatedglittergraphics-n-more]

RIP, AIM: Remembering how we used to talk on the internet

A eulogy for AOL Instant Messenger, and how it changed the way we talk about games and everything else By Luke Winkie published December 15, 2017

Do you remember all the souls you've lost to the internet? Those incidental friendships, forged in IRC clients, Newgrounds forums, 40-man Ragnaros wipes, scattered across the globe when the web was young? They came into your life and played Fall Out Boy over Ventrilo. They came into your life and disappeared forever. Do you remember when snapping a selfie required a frustrating tangle of mechanical coercion, but it was worth it to show them your face? When real-life names were rarefied information shared exclusively through digital blood pacts? AIM shut down today, and the only thing I can think about is how all of those people still exist somewhere, perhaps exploring the same pit in their stomach that I am.

AIM belongs to all of us. As a pioneering force of internet communication, anyone born in the early '90s or late '80s has spent some time on the platform. As a 26-year old, I'm crucially aware that my appreciation for the prodigal instant messenger is colored by a nostalgia that has nothing to do with the service itself. It was simply the medium of choice to grouse about homework, The Decemberists, girls I liked, and the rest of my random bullshit. 

But I do believe that there's a special union between AIM and people who grew up playing games, or at least came of age on the internet with people who played games. The early millennium revolutions in online multiplayer pitted us together and asked us to collaborate, so of course we carried those early internet accords to their logical extremes—talking all night in lonely chat boxes about what's cool, what sucks, and how easy it is to relate. In 2017, the web feels less like something I approach for those connections, and more like an overwhelming ennui that I'm constantly trying to outrun. Boston's Kyle Seeley nailed that feeling perfectly with 2015's Emily is Away, and this year's sequel Emily is Away Too—both of which transport you back to the spongy leather office chairs of your parents' computer room.

"AIM was primarily for one-on-one conversations between teenagers. That's how I used AIM, to have a very intimate conversation with another person. Now we have texting and Facebook messenger, but you can use those wherever you are," he says. "You can use those at a concert or while driving. But when you were using AIM, you were sitting down at a computer to talk to people. You had their undivided attention." 

Emily is Away tributes AIM in the only way anyone can—spinning a yarn of disentranced high-school drama that eventually mounts into something deeply sad. The way Seeley presents an old Windows XP desktop, with the hilariously temperamental tastes of your idiot friends revealing themselves in their bios and away messages (until one day they stop logging on entirely) is immediately resonant. We've all had our Emilys. "When you have a conversation on the phone, you spend 10 minutes making small talk," says Seeley. "On AIM you talk to someone for hours. Like eight hours, 10 hours straight. You get all the small talk out of the way in the first hour, and then you're talking about these big teenager questions. Who am I? Who do I want to be? I think AIM was really good at that."

It was always difficult for me to articulate the intimacy I felt with my internet friends to my parents. There were the obvious, mechanical mistranslations; I begged my mother for early exits from countless family dinners that consistently managed to interfere with my guild's crucial Molten Core attempts. But beyond that, there was a certain shame in feeling loved and valued by people I only knew by username. A latent fear that those who did not understand might consider that affection to be false, or even sinister. That's different now, as social media has flattened out our offline/online dichotomy, but if you were on AIM, you probably remember how once upon a time those bonds felt illegal.

Years ago Nina Freeman, level designer at Fullbright and one of the foremost thinkers on love and technology, launched a flat-out covert campaign to get close with one of those friends. She spent months locked in the holy matrimony of Final Fantasy XI and nightly AIM treatises with a boy named Glenn from New York City. Eventually they met, but not before Freeman satisfied her aunt, (who she was staying with) with a fabricated narrative—Glenn was no longer a dude from the internet, now he was just an old family friend who happened to move east. "I was still in high school," says Freeman. "We made up that whole story."

That secrecy is immediately familiar to me. AIM was surreptitious, clandestine. A service that belonged to teenagers, sequestered from leering ears and concerned authority figures. As Freeman notes, a screen name was one of the few commodities a young person could fully own. A domain, an aesthetic, a communication channel you could control. It was rare to feel fully untethered from your parents, so you guarded that sliver of liberty with your life.

"I wouldn't hand out [my username] lightly," explains Freeman. "I'd only really do it with people I felt close enough with. It seems sort intimate. It was a 'thing' to add someone on AIM. The expectation would be that if we're adding each other, we're going to chat regularly.… It had a weight to it."

Cecilia D'Anastasio, senior reporter at Kotaku (and a friend of mine) went a step further. As an 11-year-old, she was already griefing in the multiplayer Flash games she shared with her friends over AIM. I don't think anything sums up the juvenile euphoria of instant messaging quite like using that power to cheat in stakes-free freeware.

"One of the Flash games I discovered was basically Pictionary, but online and with a chat room. One player would etch out an image in a Microsoft Paint-like interface while the chat would dutifully guess at what it could possibly be. It was very wholesome," says D'Anastasio. "That's why my friend June and I were passionate about cheating. We'd join a game on the same team. Over AIM, we'd tell each other what we were assigned to draw, instructing whoever was guessing to wait a solid ten seconds before revealing the answer. It was a riot. We always won."

Over the past decade or so AIM has slowly been replaced with services that de-emphasize traditional internet patois. Gchat and Twitter are all full of real names and faces instead of coded handles and custom-colored text, and logging in to most platforms scarcely takes more than a click on a Facebook icon. For the most part, this is a good thing. Anonymity is one of the scourges of online culture—a de facto institution that continues to cause a lot of people pain. Personally though, I can't help but feel like we've lost something along the way. There was a certain sublimity in typing from behind the guise of a username. It gave way to a feeling that your AIM conversations existed in some sort of permissive, alternative reality, the ideal spot to work up the nerve for swollen 3 am confessions. In 2017 there is no such thing as "IRL" anymore; your internet presence is permanently married to your day-to-day existence. Everyone on earth spends their waking hours waging wars and making peace with strangers they will never meet. It is overwhelming and insoluble, and there are moments where I wish I could get outside again.

I'm not the only person that feels this way, and there are some people working to restore the parts of the mid-aughts internet that worked. When I interviewed Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, earlier this year, he affirmed a deep appreciation for AIM, and believed that perhaps the online infrastructure might soon swing back in that direction. "When you zoom out and think about the internet and how communication is trending, there's definitely a trend to more live experiences," he said. "The internet has done so much to connect people asynchronously, so I think there's something more macro happening that Discord is taking part in. It's like we're bringing it back to how it used to be."

He's right. One of the things that's made Discord successful is how separated it feels from the rest of the internet. When you join an ultra-specific channel—for niche Hearthstone formats or fan-favorite Persona characters—it's like you're uncovering a league of obsessives that are ready to welcome you with open arms. The true solidarity of dorkiness. It's funny, but by holding back on cosmopolitan design choices (like Facebook integration or a required photo-reel), Cintron stumbled into a scheme that evokes the furtive splendor that made AIM special. This is something Nina Freeman found when she started up a Discord channel to support her growing Twitch following. "It quickly became a community, and now I have a bunch of newer online friends. I'm already cracking up at myself as I'm wondering what they look like, or what they do in real life," says Freeman. "It definitely has a similar appeal." 

If Discord doesn't quite meet your personal instant messaging standards, Citron tells me that, if enough people in the community request it, he'd consider implementing the low-res AIM chimes into the service. You know, door creak, door slam, those disruptive MIDI twinkles. "To this day, that sound still triggers my desire to hop online," he says.  

Kyle Seeley is doing something similar. Yesterday he released a piece of DLC for Emily is Away Too that reskins Steam Chat to look exactly like AIM circa 2006. He spared no expense; you can change your text color, drop in vintage, blocky emoticons, and create your own custom profile so you can tell the world that Warped Tour will never die. "It's a farewell to AIM," he says. As one gaming's foremost nostalgia artists, it'd be wrong if he didn't say goodbye.

Now the AIM generation is old enough to both intellectualize their wistfulness, and use the lessons they learned from the service to create for the today's teenagers. To facilitate affection and respect on the internet, to show them what it looks like. We were the first to taste love on the web, at a time when those feelings had no context or guidance, and I hope that AIM helped create a baseline for young people and the midnight communion with those across the screen. The liberation that comes with knowing that the internet friendships you cherish are just as valid and wonderful as you think they are—these stories matter, because they help light that path. Lord knows I needed it, and I'm sure you did too.

Luke Winkie

Contributing Writer

Luke Winkie is a freelance journalist and contributor to many publications, including PC Gamer, The New York Times, Gawker, Slate, and Mel Magazine. In between bouts of writing about Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and Twitch culture here on PC Gamer, Luke also publishes the newsletter On Posting. As a self-described "chronic poster," Luke has "spent hours deep-scrolling through surreptitious Likes tabs to uncover the root of intra-publication beef and broken down quote-tweet animosity like it’s Super Bowl tape." When he graduated from journalism school, he had no idea how bad it was going to get.

#rip aim #aim #aol instant messeging #old web #techcore #aim eulogy #webcore

[seancamerons]

unusual asks: 1-5.

Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora? spotify🎶

is your room messy or clean? a lil messy (but i'm determined to make time this afternoon after work to fix that.)

what color are your eyes? brown🤎

do you like your name? yes and no lol why? funny enough, my parents initially liked the name bri. my government name was discovered when a mom was yelling at her kid in a doctor's office.

my name is shortened (if you wanna know.) tbh i associate gov't name with like being in trouble (which in like early elementary/grade school i was often in for talking too much😂 ) or kids having issues with pronunciation, misspellings, whatever so, i go by bri to cut out that. sometimes there'd be another girl with my name and we'd have to put initials in. most teachers called me bri which is fine. it feels a lot less idk.. when i go to like the doctors whatever, it's often a topic of discussion in spelling since my gov't name has a bunch of spellings and of course at work and such where it matters and counts i use the gov't name. even still some people call me bri at work too so it's interchangeable.

brimi is actually an alias conjured up in teenhood. my favorite thing at the time was rent. my favorite rent character was mimi marquez. with my name being bri (and there was another bri in the crew so it made it easier to distinguish) on aim (remember those days?) they had these silly chatrooms a bunch of message board buddies had rent-related nicknames and mine was brimi. stuck ever since. some high school friends still call me that. so by comparison, my gov't name to me, sounds like a foreign concept. i get loads of compliments on gov't name and questions, "why do you not go by gov't name?" it's honestly a long and silly story as you now know lmao. i often in response to bri, "like the cheese?" different spelling, always a laughable introduction. it doesn't bother me in the slightest. when i was younger i guess i didn't like it, now i don't really care that much.

what is your relationship status? very much taken, and loved in a relationship. 🥰💕

#asks #malinastan #unusual asks #??? #💌 thanks for the ask! #among hundreds of aim screennames i had over the years it was callmebrimix #rip aim

[surreal-duck]

es rarepair week day 6 - holiday/shopping

i think about the flambé santa bears a normal amount

#just to preface this i do not celebrate nor particularly care about christmas at all. its their season to me tho #my sincerest apologies for yesterday's one. i have no regrets though and i enjoy reading the tags immensely o7 glad it turned out ok #es rarepair week #duck scribbles #doodles #midoyuzu #yuzumido #midori takamine #yuzuru fushimi #enstars #enstars rarepair week #just noticed i tend to go for the first of each day's prompts wkjwkjghkdjs oops #i think midori absolutely wouldve gone to each flambe performance and wouldve wanted those teddy bears too but failed to get one himself #its ok tho !!! she gets one personally from yuzuru later 👍 #think maybe yuzuru also wouldve seen him in the audience and aimed in that direction but miss too. rip #also a new sketchbook for yuzuru !!! mascot themed ofc

[random-human-being2311]

one weird thing I only noticed after starting classic who is that the nuwho companions never eat. like, ever. name any instances you have of nuwho companions eating, a few of them have one (1) scene or one borderline scene, no more

classic who companions be getting a meal every serial fr

adric alone has probably eaten more food on screen than every nuwho companion combined. and he's only in one (1) season

#doctor who #that one's ramblings #classic who #nuwho #nu who #new who #dw #adric of alzarius #that scene in black orchid where everyone else is dancing and adric is just helping himself to the food spoke to me on a spiritual level #as an aroace person especially - given the romantic associations dance has #if i just think about it here on the spot #adric has three aims in life #1. eat food whenever possible #2. be an annoying little nerd (/pos because otherwise it would be extremely hypocritical of me) at every opportuinity #3. explode (whether metaphorically - exploding in anger - or literally depends on the serial) #ok sorry for that last one #rip adric

[mariaalenkoshepard]

So I had a dream last night that jkr did one of those rocket trips up into the atmosphere, and the rocket blew up, and tumblr was having a field day celebrating and making memes that looked like this

#i had to image search her and look at her face for several minutes to make this rip me 🤢 #anyway like to charge reblog to cast fjklksjdkfkfk #aim here Apollo

[shsl-leader]

i think if you're telling women/femmes/nb people/bigender people/trans people (including transmascs/trans men)/whoever who love women that they can't be lesbians because of whatever reason, you are misunderstanding queerness at its fundamentals- love, acceptance, and breaking down boxes.

#yes this post is about #transmasc lesbian #mspec lesbian #bi lesbian #gaybian #straightbian #bigender lesbian #etc. #also why is this always aimed at lesbians. and not gay men. like lesbians cant decide their attraction on their own or something #sounds like misogyny #rip my inbox after posting this

[mimikyu-chr]

‘we need more BPD representation’ ‘more BPD coded characters’ you couldn’t handle Chloe Price. you couldn’t handle Kaveh. you couldn’t handle Catra. you don’t deserve more BPD coded characters when you can’t be normal about the ones you already have.

#bpd in media #bpd coded characters #bpd coded #catra #chloe price #kaveh #yes these are ripped straight off my kinlists #these are just ones I think are implied #not ones I think make sense with their storylines #or who have things I relate to because of my BPD #< that one specifically is aimed at eda clawthorne

[auguryanxiety]

i'm firmly an "ed and izzy did not grow up together as pirates/did not sail together young" truther.

i think that Izzy joined Ed's crew as Ed was building a reputation as Blackbeard and consistently succeeding as a pirate and helped better his infamy and the legend. i think they were older when they met because of how experienced Izzy is - like with how he was known for his swordsmanship - and how deep he is within toxic masculinity and pirate culture. Also the quote of "I was honored to serve Blackbeard" or something like that - to me that felt more like he knew Blackbeard further into his career. i do think early on in their work together Izzy may have had moments of being a good first mate but as he became more comfortable with the reputation Blackbeard and the Queen Anne crew developed and all the success, he became more complacent and closer to the little nightmare (derogatory) he is now (was). And adding in Ed's history of having an abusive white father figure throughout his life, it makes more sense to have a timeline with "growing up with his Father -> serving under Hornigold -> working with Izzy" and maybe other people between the years (kind of looking at his 'whim'/experience with fishing and Pop pop maybe?). i also headcanon Izzy as at least a decade older than Ed but idk if that belief would clash with what's established in the show bc apparently Stede was only 30(ish)* when he died 💀 *referring to Stede's tombstone in the show

#aybigchats #just in case - this isn't aimed at anyone specifically #and there is amazing fanart and fanfic with this scenario - i just hate izzy and have different hcs #i've been seeing a lot of content of that stuff lately so i'm feeling salty LMAO #sorry to anyone who doesn't want to see this kind of stuff but i like to organize my tags rip #these are hcs based on content in the show and personal opinion/interpretation so....idk don't take it as me declaring it law pffff #our flag means death #ofmd #edward teach

[neko265]

Reflection Doodles

Average height in Reflection is over 6ft, everyone below 6ft is tiny in comparison.

#reflectionttrpg #stabbyness #neko draws #fanart #coll #treble #melli #collbrande #rip coll #tiny and stuck with babyface #his brothers stole all the height #and yes #the outfit is stolen from Detective Conan #i aim to make all Coll's outfits on the same level of fashion as Shinichi Kudo

[diathadevil]

Here's the full thumbnail I made for my Ptutu Organ Trail gameplay I ran tonight (basically put their names in the team I was playing).

This started as a joke artwork, but I... I think I ended up accidentally creating a new AU after getting back into Organ Trail again.

(might make more sketches later on if I play more of the game and have them survive. Sadly Rue died midway in my first game 😔)

#(RIP to Rue on my first campaign run she got shot by a bandit because Ahiru (me. the player) sucked at aiming her gun) #I'm playing Endless Mode rn and AHIRU HAS A BABY NOW UHH??? She adopted a kid from an abandoned hospital after killing their zombie parents #Also BOTH TIMES Fakir and Autor kept GETTING BITTEN BY ZOMBIES HOW are they so prone to the T-Virus jfc #princess tutu #organ trail #Organ Trail AU #Zombie apocalypse AU #honestly both sound like legit good AUs to use so I'm keeping them both #ptutu organ trail au #yeah okay we're gonna use this tag for them alright #ahiru arima #fakir #rue kuroha #mytho #autor #blood #blood tw #horror #art

[reksink]

Designing a Stitched Up Friend 💚

#my art #my ocs #character design #zombie #I've been doing a lot of misc design work recently and here's a favorite of mine so far hehe #Right now I'm aiming for clear posing and strong defining shapes #I feel like I'm really getting there with this fun guys #Also fun fact their 'glasses' are cheek meat #Ripped and flared out for the sake of fashion #Such as life #I also need to think of a name for them right now I just have 'Zomrock' but it needs to be more personal methinks

[realyauza]

Greatest disappointment of the game series: this scene never happened.

#rgg #like a dragon #rgg screenshots #ryu ga gotoku #yakuza 0 #quotes #yakuza games #goda ryuji #majima goro #just imagine out of context the scene when the real aim of assaulting the Kamurocho is actually ripping Majima's pants off

[xyl4-4444]

Some toony self portraits ripped from my recent sketchbooks

#xyla-does-art #xyla-does-self-portraits #artists on tumblr #digital art #digital illustartion #traditonal art #art #my art #portrait #self portrait #portraiture #stylized portrait #sketchbook #sketchbook pages #sketchbook dump #doodledump #art dump #my aim for these doodles is to make a presentation of myself as cartoony as possible #plain and simple #btw the last three images are ripped from sketchbook 23 #the rest of them are from sketchbook 21 #SoundCloud

[queen-hastur]

i hate having scp 076-2 as my main special interest because i keep getting really annoyed at people constantly mischaracterising/misrepresenting them

i could probably go on for hours about how the constant sexualisation of them is fucked considering they are pretty much canonically aroace, i know you can still be aroace and date (platonic relationships exist), its the abundance of nsfw and over sexualised content that annoys me.

like i know its not a massive deal but man is it frustrating.

#it's mostly twitter and pinterest but it's slowly becoming an issue here too #i do block everyone i see doing it but for some reason the tumblr app will just not let you view the tag if you block too many people on it #everytime i see this i get the autistic urge to rip someone's throat out #this isn't aimed at anyone i don't already have blocked #scp 076 #hastur rants

[kulemii]

to the monk that killed me with a spear in my dream (therefore waking me out of my sleep) while i was in my ✨️adventure boy era✨️ it's on sight. just know that.

#rip to all the smarties that fell out of my hand just before the unfortunate tragedy #i hope the people i was aiming to rescue were eventually save 😞 #what a fun dream- aside from the spear in the gut #*saved

[gibbearish]

it is with a heavy heart that i must announce. the five nights at freddy's movie was really good

sorry for how much of a behemoth this post is im fnaf autism just bear with me also i can't keep my thoughts straight for the life of me so this will be a bumpy ride. as an additional note i got very lucky and had literally 0 spoilers whatsoever for this movie, i haven't even seen the trailer

so first of all: i thought all the changes they made to the plot to make it work for a movie were good decisions, altho some of them did take a minute to actually feel like good changes lmao. once i thought about em a bit more though they made sense.

one of the things i really liked was that they also did include a lot of the things i wanted them to, or more specifically things that you're like "you literally can't have a fnaf movie without these, it just wouldn't be right", like we got mike schmidt, we got fucking VANESSA??? altho she might be in the trailer so that might not be the same reveal for yall as it was for me but still. they heavily alluded to vanny? (altho that's a part i'm kinda sad abt is they didn't /actually/ include vanny, vanessa just makes an offhand comment about how she "wouldn't be much help" if she was around afton and then. comes to help anyways and doesnt have any issues? lame they shouldve had him hypnotise her and then she fought her way out to help mike and abby. or alternatively they couldve used the family restructuring to make vanny be a result of afton giving vanessa osdd-2, like thats kinda functionally what he does with the mask anyways but this would make it more obvious).

also swinging back to changes they made that i liked!! VANESSA AFTON?? like this is the one that took me a while to get used to bc it feels like such a cliche from an outside perspective but it also kind of Super Isn't considering what the original plot is? like all the family restructuring they did makes pretty good sense to me, i do think it loses a bit of the weight having michael be Just Some Guy Whose Brother Happened To Be Kidnapped By Afton Forever Ago and now coincidentally has this weird guy offering him a job as a night guard, but also the og lore. absolutely would not fit into a movie lmao. so i like that they kept the characters everyone wanted around while also rearranging it to keep the spirit of "learning about all of this for the first time through the eyes of a security guard" you get from playing the games. it's fun for people who don't know the lore because it's easy to follow and it's fun for people who /do/ know the lore because they can pull apart all the differences.

oh right back to things they included that i wanted them to. we gotttt chica's cupcake murdering people, we got FUCKING MATPAT? SAYING THE ITS JUST A THEORY LINE? SOUNDING THRILLED OFF HIS ASS TO BE THERE??? i dont like the man and his opinions vis a vis addressing nonbinary characters but. goddamn was that a funny cameo. why couldnt you include markiplier too you fucking cowards. who said that. anyways. oh we kind of tangentially have a canon name for crying child? aka garrett? like idk this one could go either way because like. yeah he's mike's younger brother that died tragically and scarred him for life, makes sense that theyd be the same character in function but also it is technically a different family so who knows.

umm what else. oh this doesnt rlly fall into either category i just really liked it, the intro sequence for all the animatronics? showing what they can /really/ do with the breaking and entering dudes?? that was such a cool sequence i really liked the whole thing honestly. chica being introduced in the kitchen and the dude finding the cupcake then looking back and it's gone? bonnie in the supply closet? foxysprint??? AND FREDDY!! THE BITE!!! in case anyones reading this before watching the movie so they know what to expect: youll know when this moment is coming and if youre watching it at home with friends i HIGHLY recommend having the "was that the bite of 87" clip ready to play right after, they WILL lose their shit. i had it queued up from the very beginning of the movie cause i was like. they can't not include it /somehow/, it's the fnaf movie there has to be A Bite. and sure enough. oh also it's not at the same time but the golden freddy reveal is really good too, they did a good job of setting it up so even if youre already aware of golden freddy conceptually you still go "oh freddy's here? i mean i guess that makes sense he's the leader and all. or wait what happened to his eye why's he only got one? oh. oh i see. ohohohohohohohoho" 100/10. also very funny that they just straight up. MURDER THE AUNT? AND SHE NEVER GETS MENTIONED AGAIN SHE JUST IS DEAD??? the kid isnt like. hey what happened to aunt jane?? i get none of them liked her and with good reason but youd think at least one of em would be like "damn she sucked but she didnt deserve that, rip jane"

oh and the springlocks of course the springlocks. like as soon as we saw aftons name in the cast list we all knew he was gonna get springlocked, it's such a cherished memory for so many of us and there's no way in hell The Fnaf Movie™ wouldnt include afton getting springlocked, they just legally can't leave that out. and they do it pretty well too like yeah if you know what's gonna happen you can see it coming way ahead of time and it's kind of a slow crawl to get there but like. idk i think it still works pretty well. i don't personally like how long the actual springlocking itself took, i think they couldve milked that a little bit less cause i was under the impression that if one springlock failed they All Would Instantaneously And Your Flesh Body Will Become Occupied By A Full Endoskeleton. but no we just get very slow rib beartrap. w/e though still cool and again the leadup to it was really good even knowing exactly how it would end, like just the really slow shuffling of the animatronics towards him? like yeah it's slow and kinda tedious but its also like. theres literally nothing you can do, youre surrounded and defenseless and theyre infinitely faster and stronger than you and now they remember that you killed them. and you just have to sit there and watch them slowly slowly get closer all while trying to talk your way out of it knowing youre fucked. 10/10 they did that part well

oh and that also falls under changes i liked, i liked that instead of "afton tries to escape intangible ghosts by getting into old decrepit suit which then fails and kills him" it was "afton was already in the suit to do murders in and has brainwashed the bots to follow him" wait omg point postponed i just realized that part is from security breach. i thought vanessa was the only thing they brought over from that i didnt even notice that they werent doing the theyre-attacking-all-adults-indiscriminately thing goddamn. omg wait and the fact that the restaurants already closed in this one, it really is just a blend of all the games huh. scott do you see how much more coherent your plot couldve been if there wasnt So much going on. anyways. back to what i was saying. instead of "afton tries to escape intangible ghosts by getting into old decrepit suit which then fails and kills him" it was "afton was already in the suit to do murders in and brainwashed the ghosts into thinking he was their friend so they would help him do murders while possessing the robots. then they get their memories back and the robots turn on him and.. i think deliberately? set off the springlocks, or were just aiming to regular kill him and the springlocks failing was a happy accident? then the robots drag him away as they keep slowly one by one collapsing into him", like the first one made a lot of sense for the game and the timeline and the second one just feels right for this too. it's still his hubris that kills him, still his springlocks, it's just in one version the hubris is "trusting his springlock design to still work after however many years" and in the other its "thinking he has conplete control over the ghosts he killed", plus the ghosts finally get a bit more direct participation in his death than in the other version lol.

one change i did not like. forced het romance. like i dunno i guess im happy for them, both of those characters have certainly earned happy endings by this point so its nice they can get something cutesy. but also. like cmon man it's vanessa and mike do we have to do this she just got stabbed stop holding her hand

oh also this change wasnt really good or bad i just thought it was funny, vanessas a full on cop now? like i get they prolly just dont wanna have two security guards or something but i mean. it wouldve been really easy to just say she was the day shift guard? thatd explain why she had more information on the bots and the place's history than him, why she's always Around, it wouldve even flowed into the vanessa afton reveal pretty well too because like. yeah obviously a guy doing murders would want his main security guard to be someone he trusts and who better than his theoretically brainwashed daughter yknow? as it was she just kinda Showed Up Knowing Stuff And Ignoring Questions and later afton's like "you were supposed to be keeping an eye on him" but like of course Mike was getting dodgy about the weirdo cop loitering nearby for no reason, thats sus as hell lmao. vs "experienced security guard here to show you the ropes" he would have a much easier time trusting that she actually did have his best interests at heart. idk it just seemed like a weird change to me lmao

ummm oh my roommate pointed out the fact that when they tried to springlock abby the suit they were aiming for looked suspiciously like circus baby and abby and baby are anagrams so thats fun. it's hard to tell though if shes intended to be a rework of elizabeth or if vanessa's filling that role now. cause like on the one hand, michael's younger sister whose name is v close to baby, on the other hand, vanessa is afton's daughter. so idk i feel like it could go either way. if abby's elizabeth i guess that negates the thing about garret maybe being crying child's name bc then theyd prolly just be keeping mike's name the same. w/e

oh my god i completely forgot when i was talking about changes to the afton springlock thing, they had him deliberately put his mask on after the other springlocks started releasing and say the "i always come back" line, i thought that was an excellent touch. like he's actively dying a horrific death and is like. no no. im not leaving this bot. this shit is going to suck ass no matter what so i might as well do all i can to ENSURE my soul gets locked in this fuckin thing, go on stab me in the brain lets do this. i will however also say that having him say "i always come back"... before he's even come back the first time? is a little bit weird, i know thats another one of the "we have to include this in the fnaf movie" things so im not mad but just in the moment it def flows a bit weird. like mf you don't even have one example of that yet much less several to be saying "always" about

OH AND THE BIGGEST ONE. THE ANIMATRONICS. theyre so good. like im so glad they went all in on that, i think they probably knew that if there was one single thing they had to get absolutely 100% right to avoid a fan uprising it was those and by god did they deliver, theyre so big and so unsettling and so fun. chica's wink at abby was the best part of the movie no questions asked. or alternatively bonnie falling over after they built the fort. like theyre all just so good. OH MY GOD OR IN CHICA'S INTRODUCTION SEQUENCE WHERE YOU CAN SEE HER JUST. SCOOTING BY THROUGH THE VENT?? THAT WAS THE FUNNIEST THING OF ALL TIME HELLO???

god. but yeah i was honestly expecting it to be a lot worse than it was. also this mike is a bad brother/dad figure. but i guess in the games he also kind of is the pinnacle of bad brother so i mean it couldve been a lot worse. theres definitely some rough parts, i mightve mentioned this already but i felt like a few of the dramatic pause things were a bit too drawn out, like i said the springlocks locking is one good example of that but another that i REALLY found slow was like. in the opening we watch a guy get turbomurdered by the swirly blade mask and it takes. way longer than i feel like was necessary. also unnecessary: a jumpcut a second from scared eyes to swirly blades to hands fumbling and repeating during that. oh another thing that was weird to me, why was mike so insistent on sleeping specifically at night? to the point of deliberately sleeping on the job? like i get he wanted to revisit the kidnapping dream but like. presumably he could dream just as well during the day, no? done his night shift then once it was up rolled out a sleeping bag for a quick powernap before heading home? idk that just felt. forced to me

more random things, i am sad we didnt get a whiff of henry emily (my fringe theory was that their twist to change it from the games was they were gonna make henry be evil, rip to that idea) or the puppet/charlie, and kinda sad they changed the kid possessing golden freddy to be a boy like. we love cassidy and her Undying Rage Towards Afton's Soul smh why would you get rid of her. also loved balloon boy, kinda wish mangle had gotten like a similar level appearance but thats w/e. oh also while i did appreciate the low gore level there were also a few times where it was a bit weird how minor the injuries the dead people had were. like this man just had his face put in a blender mask and he just has like. some forehead gashes or whatever? he should look like someone stirred up jello

anyways with that gross thought i think i am out of things to say about the movie for now. if anyone else watched it already and somehow read all of this blease tell me your thoughts

#the stuff under the cut contains major spoilers so reader beweader #this post is also gonna be rambley as hell so like. strap in #update after finishing it: it is indeed very rambley and also long as hell so see again: reader beweader #fnaf movie spoilers #five nights at freddy's movie spoilers #fnaf spoilers #five nights at freddy's spoilers #fnaf #fnaf movie #my roommate said they heard they were aiming to make 3 moves total and if i had to guess #i would say the other movies will probably hit fnaf 3 and then pizzaria simulator #obviously with some massive changes to the plot regarding timelines and just resolving general world changes #but i do feel like those encapsulate the main big points of afton's arc #aka 1) getting springlocked‚ 2) being springtrap (potentially in fazbear frights and i think that would be a really cool movie #but really the location doesnt really matter so much as the He's Been Woken Up And Is Hunting Someone #and then 3) getting his ass sent to ghost hell by henry. frankly i would be happy if they just ripped his final monologue #straight from the game and didnt even rerecord it it's just so iconic #like id want them to include security breach too somehow but. the timelines gonna get real condensed real fast then #it already would be if they include 3 isnt there like 30 years between aftons death and that one? so the part thats #originally set in 2050????? yeah thatd take some serious rearranging #hmm although i am now in my head thinking of something. abt the location not mattering as long as #springtrap wakes up and hunts someone. what if they did that /in the pizzaplex/ instead of in a horror attraction #or maybe for a horror installation there #idk im just rambling more now but i think thatd be a cool way to combine those parts #oh sorry technically that thing abt afton getting springlocked is technically a spoiler #but i mean come on we all knew that was gonna happen