Ok so this is going to be an extremely weird rant/post but bear with me here.
I am not a fan that canonically, Freddy Fazbear’s pizza just straight up uses pictures/drawings of the animatronics, not the mascot characters, in advertising and other related things. What I mean by this, in things like the first two fnaf games (and I believe to a lesser extent sister location and pizza sim), you constantly see official posters all over the place with pictures of the animatronics on them. And in the fnaf movie, the outdoor sign advertising Freddy’s uses just has a redraw of the animatronic of Freddy on it, not some cartoonish version of Freddy. This also somewhat extends to the Fazbear Entertainment logo as well, instead of using a stylized or cartoonish version of Freddy’s head, they just use a drawing of Freddy the animatronic’s head instead.
This bugs me mainly because why would they do this? At least in places like Chuck E Cheese, they don’t use the animatronics on things like posters or related advertising. At the very most, ads could include someone in one of the mascot costumes doing things, and certain things like paper articles or news events might show the animatronics in some way or form, but overall the advertising for a place like Chuck E Cheese wouldn’t just use a picture of the animatronic on the logo outside of the location or things advertising the location, they would typically either (as I previously said) have a guy in a mascot suit acting out the ad or have a cartoonish version of the main character either in animated or drawn form. The main reason why they do this over just filming the animatronics doing thing is because (I assume at least, I’m not an expert for these places) they want to sell the atmosphere of these characters being real and you can meet them. So why would Fazbear Entertainment, a company trying to achieve an almost identical goal to Chuck E Cheese, not do the same thing? If all of the advertising for Freddy’s just shows the robotic animatronics, that’s not selling families (especially kids) that Freddy’s is a place where the actual characters are, they’re selling it on the prospect that there are robots here that you can get entertained by (even if things like the showtime audio from HW tries to alleviate this issue).
And I get that in things like SB we see the “proper” type of ads done with Fredbear’s and the Pizzaplex itself I guess, but other than that I can’t think of any other examples prior to steel wool’s games. And ofc I’m not applying this logic to the animatronics themselves for clearly showing parts of themselves as being robots, I can understand the logic of “Fazbear Ent are a bunch of cheap bastards who didnt want to pay more than the bare minimum for their robots” (even if later lore somewhat contradicts this to an extent). And I completely understand that in a meta context, Scott didn’t have a bunch of artists on his payroll when making the first handful of games so he had to make things like the posters in a way that he was skilled in. I GET that. But when they were making the movie, did nobody on the production team think to suggest that maybe something like the outdoor sign should MAYBE look less like the animatronic and more like a cartoon?
Idk am I the only one slightly bothered by this? I get that fnaf as a series isn’t perfect by any means and I get that I might be nitpicking this point a little bit too hard, but idk I don’t really see this brought up that much in fnaf spaces, but I obviously could be missing the posts and times when it does. What do you guys think? Do you think this isn’t as bad of a thing as I think it is, or do you agree or think it’s worse?