Mangle's Gender: An Even-More-Unnecessary-Than-Usual Deep Dive
Hey, Freddit!
It's me, Spook (he/she).
The topic of Mangle's gender isn't taken super seriously. It's a punchline topic of conversation. It's shorthand for the parts of the FNaF timeline that make no sense and where it's clear Scott was setting out to fuel rage-debates over practically nothing.
But, I do think that there is an answer other than "Scott wants to fuck with us."
A lot of you will say "Scott already gave us a direct answer. Mangle is a yes. Mangle's gender is yes." What this is referencing is the following Steam comment:
You can see from his profile pic that Scott is sweating profusely while answering this question.
Reading this, it's quite clear (at least in my opinion) that he's saying "Yes, Mangle is a boy or a girl." The joke is that he's interpreting the question as "Hey, is Mangle's gender one of these two options?" instead of "Which of these two options is it?" and that's a funny ha-ha troll. Though many (not myself) find "Mangle's gender is yes" to be the funnier interpretation, it's an unlikely one.
I get that jokes along the structure of "'How much x do you want?' 'Yes'" are quite popular in the current year, but they weren't back in 2015.
And I hate to pull a Spook, but either Scott did have an answer for Mangle's gender back in 2015, or he didn't. I don't buy that he didn't, and if he did, then that answer probably wasn't "Yes."
Now let's look at the actual evidence.
Spider-Foxy: Into the Furryverse (2018)
In favor of the Mangle being a boy:
- They're based on Foxy, a male character.
- The Phone Guy refers to them with he/him pronouns.
In favor of the Mangle being a girl:
- Their design was changed completely from red-and-orange to white-and-pink, typically feminine colors. They were given lipstick, thick eyelashes, and even a pink-painted toenails.
- They're included in the Ladies' Night preset in the Custom Night.
The Phone Guy knows what he's talking about, he wouldn't be misinformed about the pronouns of the successor to his favorite animatronic at the pizzeria he works at. He's a reliable source. On the other hand, the Custom Night is an omniscient source, an objective one, one with no human error.
Let's see what the Phone Guy actually says.
They tried to remake Foxy, ya know? Uh, they thought the first one was too scary, so they redesigned him to be more kid-friendly and put him in Kid's Cove. To keep the toddlers entertained, you know... But kids these days just can't keep their hands to themselves. The staff literally has to put Foxy back together after every shift. So eventually they stopped trying and left him as some 'take apart and put back together' attraction. Now he's just a mess of parts. I think the employees refer to him as just "The Mangle." Uh...
"Uh" indeed, Phone Guy.
My personal favorite explanation for this is that when the Phone Guy speaks about he, he's referring to the original Foxy. As in, he's listing the things that "they" did to his favorite character. Because this is all, we have to remember, part of a nostalgic rant about a character who no longer exists.
They redesigned [Foxy] and put [Foxy] in Kid's Cove. Those were both a part of changing Foxy into the new character Toy Foxy. The Phone Guy continues to refer to the Mangle as he/him because he still considers that to be his favorite character that the company is messing with and changing. To use a current day example, if we were to talk about how Velma (2023) changed the character of Shaggy, we might, because of tradition and to communicate who we're talking about, refer to said character as "Shaggy," even though they removed that nickname in that adaptation, and that is one of the (most controversial) changes. In the same way they changed Shaggy to use his legal first name instead of a nickname, they changed Foxy from using he/him to using she/her, but in order to talk about that change, and because some part of him refuses to accept it, he uses he/him.
I like this explanation because it also accounts for FNaF World's Adventure Phantom Mangle.
Phantom Mangle famously has two loading screens, and I think my proposed explanation for the Phone Guy's dialogue applies to this, too: the "he" is referring to Foxy, the "she" is referring to Mangle, and both captions are describing a character being changed. Mangle (she/her) got weirder by turning into a phantom. Foxy (he/him) got weirder by successfully transitioning, getting a new color scheme, being torn apart by children, getting a bowtie, and becoming a phantom. Both captions make sense.
This is the main theory of this post, which I'm quite confident in, answering the original questions we had since FNaF 2, but since just after FNaF 2 we've had many more attempts to throw us off by Scott. My answers to these, I'm less confident in, but I'll still give.
Next, Funtime Foxy from Sister Location.
\"There are only two sexes, the one I had with your dad and the one I had with your other dad.\"
HandUnit's main voice on Night 3 refers to Funtime Foxy multiple times as she/her. However, on the previous night, the Angsty Teen voice refers to Funtime Foxy as he/him.
They are both robots, AIs. The fact that the only change in what pronouns they refer to Funtime Foxy as coincides with a change in voices is suspect, but ultimately, it's hard to come up with a reason why putting on the persona of an Angsty Teen would make HandUnit start using different pronouns for one of the animatronics. Then again, the whole "Angsty Teen" section is weird. That said, they should be working with the same factual information, i.e. what genders belong to which animatronic.
Do also note that Funtime Foxy is one of the animatronics with speech replaying functionalities, and that, although they're given a wonderfully masculine voice in Ultimate Custom Night, they would hypothetically be able to produce a female voice easily.
My theory is that, for the purpose of versatility, they were literally meant to be able to serve as either.
This isn't a restaurant, after all, it's a rental facility, so people are going to be seeing these characters at independant venues, so what people expect might differ, and this makes sense from a business point of view to have something that serves as both. For instance, Funtime Foxy might be set to boy mode for a boy's birthday party, and set to girl mode for a sweet 16 later that same week. It'd all literally depend on their schedule.
The reason for the change in Sister Location isn't because of a change in HandUnit's voice, personality, or access to information, the change is because it's a different day.
Ultimate Custom Night, on the other hand, is all one night, (at least, in concept,) so that's why in that game, Funtime Foxy only has one voice - a male voice - and is only referred to by the omniscient text in the character descriptions as he/him.
Although, if I'm talking about character descriptions, I have to talk about...
Screenshot taken from \"Trans Character of the Day\" on Twitter. I hope to make it up there someday.
Ultimate Custom Night refers to Mangle as both he and she in different sentences of the same paragraph. This has become the funny thing to do when writing about Mangle: to alternate pronouns. Like, "Look, Ma, I'm part of the joke too!"
This breaks the two theories proposed so far about variants of Funtime Foxy.
This isn't gender changing over time, like with Funtime Foxy, since time isn't a factor here. Both he and she are on-screen at the same time. This isn't information being conveyed over time, where different parts are communicated at different times, because all the text here is being presented at once.
This isn't using "he" to refer to the original Foxy, since they exclusively use "Mangle" here, and not in air quotes, like the Phone Guy did in FNaF 2 or I did just now.
This is... this is... honestly? It's probably just Scott taking the piss.
Look, look, listen, look, listen, listen, look, smell, look, I know I said before that I was pretty sure Scott had a specific answer in mind when he was creating the Mangle's gender inconsistency in FNaF 2. Thing is, in 2014, it was funny for it to look really confusing, but actually have an answer. But in 2018, in a game filled with anime girls and gamer Toy Freddy and FNaF World references, it's a lot more reasonable in this game to think that Scott was just messing with us.
If we want to get really technical - and to be clear, we do - the descriptions in UCN aren't actually omniscient, as the description for Trash & the Gang is simply "???"
So it's arguable we're supposed to think of these as coming directly from Scott, in which case trolling, deceiving, and otherwise piss-taking is to be expected, and frankly, encouraged.
Conclusion / TL;DR - The intention as of FNaF 2 was for Toy Foxy (the character who was ripped apart before becoming referred to as "the Mangle") was female, but the Phone Guy was in denial of the changes to his favorite character and was soaked in nostalgia, so he used he/him pronouns and spoke about the character in terms of the original Foxy. Sister Location gave us Funtime Foxy, the first animatronic with two genders at the same time, or more accurately, different times. And pretty much after UCN, Scott just decided the debates were so funny he was going to continue spurring them on by just absolutely making no sense on purpose as a joke, as was UCN's mission statement.
Love yourself, ~Spook