Games: Five Nights at Freddy's | Five Nights at Freddy's 2 | Five Nights at Freddy's 3 | Five Nights at Freddy's 4 | Five Nights at Freddy's World | Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location | Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator | Ultimate Custom Night | Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted | Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery | Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach
Novels: Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Twisted Ones | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet | Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights
- Accidental Aesop: Given the conflict of Fetch is that the titular character causes problems for Greg by reading his phone history and listening in on his calls, one possible interpretation besides ("Don't try to control what you don't understand") is "don't be overdependent on technology".
- "Out of Stock" gives us "Stealing is bad, regardless of technicalities." Oscar's mom will presumably need a lot of cash to repair the damage made to Oscar's house by the $80 Plushtrap Chaser toy.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: Bob, the Henpecked Husband protagonist of Bunny Call. How much of his inner monologue about his unbearable family life was genuine, and how much was an exaggeration? And if he was not exaggerating, did his heroic effort to save his family from Ralpho lead to a Broken Aesop that "you must put up with anything and everything if you love your family?"
- Applicability: While the series has always had some degree of A.I. Is a Crapshoot on display, the Big Bad of Tales from the Pizzaplex, the Mimic, showcases an unexpectedly realistic side of it. Ultimately, the Mimic isn't possessed by any supernatural forces or intentionally designed to commit murder by a Serial Killer; it's simply a robot powered by an unrestricted learning algorithm that was exposed to violent behavior and began mimicking that behavior without any concept of morality to its actions. Given that neural networks and AI-generated content were a hot-button issue at the time the books were being published (particularly on the front of AI-generated art programs), it can be easy to read the Mimic as a cautionary tale of what could happen if such an AI is given too much freedom in what it can learn and do.
- Base-Breaking Character: Tales introduces perhaps the biggest one in the entire franchise, the Mimic, though that may have more to do with its entrance into the main games. Many fans love it, finding its abilities and backstory interesting and are happy to have a main villain other than William. Others heavily criticize it, finding it inconsistent in personality, as well as not having a strong motive. A third group likes the Mimic in concept, but heavily criticize the choice to reveal pretty much everything about it in the books. And that's not even getting into the Mimic possibly being Glitchtrap/Burntrap.
- Catharsis Factor: Given that the stories so frequently end on a Downer Ending (or at least an ambiguous one), on the rare occasions when a protagonist does get a happy ending after being put through hell for most of the story, it is a damn satisfying sight.
- The fates of some of the villains, as seen in the Stitchwraith epilogues, can fall into this trope. After all the harm they inflicted on Greg, Delilah, and Pete with no retribution, readers can be forgiven for feeling rather satisfied — not to mention relieved — to see Fetch get torn up with a knife for parts, a lifeless Ella stuffed into the Stitchwraith's bag, and the dismembered parts of Foxy among the pile of infected junk.
- The climactic scene of Epilogue 7, in which the Puppet makes her grand return by utterly demolishing Afton's Amalgamation, leading to William Afton by all accounts being Killed Off for Real, is incredibly satisfying to witness, in large part because of the Laser-Guided Karma of William meeting his final end at the hands of his first known victim. For those who were frustrated that William was apparently yet again the Big Bad, the scene has an extra layer of catharsis with the reveal that the William of these books is ultimately a Big Bad Wannabe who was severely weakened by his years-long battle with Andrew, and who collapses quickly after being abandoned by the mysterious entity who now seems poised to become the true Big Bad of the books.
- Complete Monster: Eleanor is a demonic mechanical being who serves as the true mastermind of the events of the series. A monstrous Serial Killer who feeds off the agony of her victims, Eleanor is responsible for murdering dozens of victims in grotesque manners. In her first appearance in the series, Eleanor mutilates and murders a young girl named Sarah who had helped her to steal her organic body parts. The mastermind to many of the grisly murders to occur in the series, Eleanor has decapitated a teenage girl through an animatronic; driven a woman insane and to death; and traps the soul of a deceased boy so he can experience his organs being removed. Each of her victims' souls is trapped in her ball pit where they're forced to experience their horrific fates over and over again. Reviving and empowering child serial murderer William Afton, Eleanor is responsible for him causing mass death and chaos through the series and helps empower him to become an amalgamation monster of animatronics that threatens the entire city. Ultimately, Eleanor intends to gain the power of "Remnant", planning to use it to superempower herself and spread suffering across the planet.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: B-7, the third story in Happs, has some uncanny similarities to semi-Lost Media children's book Super-Giles. Both tales involve children with the desire to become mechanical objects (an animatronic for Billy and a gas pump for Giles) who find a mysterious stranger (a talking streetlamp for Giles and a much more mundane back-alley doctor for Billy) that allows them to (or attempt to, in Billy's case) transform. They are both imperiled by a junkyard crusher, and even the manners in which that happens are mirrored; Giles is deliberately thrown onto a crusher conveyor belt by a man unaware that the random gas pump that appeared in the middle of nowhere is sentient, while a magnet or claw crane operator deposited a car on the crusher's belt unaware that a (presumably) homeless man is sleeping inside that vehicle.
- Moment of Awesome:
- Oswald managing to defeat the Spring Bonnie animatronic by shoving it into the ball pit ropes, tricking it into hanging itself. Considering the animatronic (or whatever it was) is implied to be some form of William Afton, it's a pretty viscerally satisfying scene.
- On a similar note, Oscar managing to kill the Plushtrap Chaser by jumping past an oncoming train, timing it just right so that the train's headlight freezes the Plushtrap Chaser on the tracks to get run over.
- Larson, an ordinary man, a trained police detective, yes, but still an ordinary man, refuses to run away from the Afton Amalgamation despite realizing that not only is his opponent a serial killer, but twice his size and supernaturally charged, because of his promise to protect his city, after remembering a promise he broke to his son.
- And then he does, rushing for a forklift and attempting to drive the thing in the lake. And he got pretty far, too, before Afton sucked that stuff away, and all this he did after being impaled.
- Even if they might have been too late, it's very nice that Kara's friends were Genre Savvy enough to look for their friend when she disappeared, and actually manage to find her. A common happening in these stories is to shift perspectives at the last moment to a secondary character obliviously going about their business while the protagonist suffers their fate somewhere. Even if Kara turned out dead/comatose, at least she was found.
- Nausea Fuel:
- Matt dying via slicing his own stomach open to surgically remove an infantile organic Springtrap from inside of him.
- In Pizza Kit, the pizza that Payton gets from the factory is unusual, to say the least. The crust was soft and fleshy with the appearance of skin, the sauce looked suspiciously like blood and the pepperoni had a texture reminiscent of a tongue. Payton noticed a grisly and metallic taste as she forced herself to eat the "pizza" that could very well have been her friend's remains. It's hard to say whether the final reveal makes it better or worse, since Marley being alive and well means that it wasn't her corpse in the pizza; that's just what pizza from Freddy's is like.
- Older Than They Think: Think using a Ball Pit for Time Travel is unique here? The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald actually did that first.
- Signature Scene:
- For better or for worse, the scene of Oswald emerging from the ball pit and finding himself in 1985 became an instantly memorable symbol of the book series. Later epilogues revealed that the ball pit didn't send Oswald back in time, but instead the spirit world.
- The ending of "Lonely Freddy", with Alec (in the Lonely Freddy's body) being thrown away into a dumpster, where he finds himself surrounded by dozens of other kids in the same plight as him.
- The climactic scene of Epilogue 6, in which William Afton finally makes his grand debut in the series by constructing a huge, misshapen artificial body for himself out of the remains of the infected animatronics, instantly captured the imagination of the fandom, with dozens of artist's interpretations floating around less than 24 hours after the book was released, most resembling the Glitchtrap-goop-thing encountered at the end of Help Wanted Mobile’s Princess Quest minigame.
- Matt somehow becoming pregnant with a miniature Springtrap.
- Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While Fazbear Frights got off to a strong start, it was plagued from the beginning by complaints over being too weird even for FNAF- most especially with "Into the Pit" and "In the Flesh"- and trying so hard to make readers feel sorry for the protagonists that they ultimately wound up too dark and tragic to get invested in. This only got worse over the course of the second half of the series, with Prankster (and especially "Kids at Play") in particular being widely criticized for being the peak of the problems with the book series. Tales from the Pizzaplex, meanwhile, has debuted to a much warmer reception: while it hasn't entirely escaped some of the same criticisms, it places more of the focus on the horror than the tragedy, focuses on generally more grounded stories (even "Under Construction", the most Surreal Horror installment in the new series, offers strong hints as to what's going on which are later confirmed by "Cleithrophobia"), and generally being agreed to have stronger writing overall. It helps that unlike the first series, where lore connections- if present at all- were either tenuous at best or else a retelling of a previously known event that openly contradicted game canon, TFTPP's stories actively seem to tie into the games, including answering some questions which were left unsolved in Security Breach. Finally, the stories share a much stronger continuity with each other, with many Pizzaplex attractions and characters from one story being referenced in another, so keeping up with the series is much more rewarding.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Probably the most common criticism of the books, and the thing that makes it hard for some readers to get engaged with them, is how utterly bleak several of the stories are. On top of the franchise's traditional horror — which is arguably more gruesome than it's ever been, and often made all the more painful by the fact that we get to know these characters much better than the mostly faceless avatars of the games — the series regularly deals with a lot of extremely heavy real-world topics, including poverty, depression, coping with loss, and even suicide. Combine that with the fact that the stories have increasingly featured characters who are hard to sympathize with, as well as the large number of stories with a Downer Ending, and it's no surprise that a number of fans prefer to read summaries of the stories rather than read them directly.
- Unexpected Character: Some of the characters who get highlighted in the short stories are not exactly the ones the fandom was expecting. Pretty much everyone could have guessed that Spring Bonnie and Baby would make appearances, but Funtime Freddy was more of a surprise to the fandom; and almost no one could have expected that Plushtrap would be getting new lore in 2020. And that's to say nothing of the original characters such as Fetch, who seems to be an Ascended Meme of Sparky the Dog.
- 1:35 AM brought back the Minireenas after their near complete absence from canon since their introduction in Sister Location (and even at the time, their appearance was something of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment).
- While Andrew would at first glance appear to be a Canon Foreigner, a close reading of the scene heavily implies that he might very well be the Vengeful Spirit from Ultimate Custom Night and/or the Bite Victim from Five Nights at Freddy's 4, two characters the fandom very much never expected to see again.
- The Puppet's surprise reappearance in Epilogue 7 caught more or less the entire fandom off-guard, especially given how the character had seemingly been Killed Off for Real in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator.
- While it's in a much more minor role, suffice to say the fandom was not expecting a cameo by Pigpatch at the start of The Puppet Carver.
- Considering how Tales From The Pizzaplex takes place in- well, the Pizzaplex- and she wasn't mentioned in her story's description, everyone was taken aback to see a new version of Ballora as the main antagonist of Cleithrophobia.
