baqqrih being the man he is inspired me a lot to make a game about a small boy named Engel, being trapped forever in a Paper Domain, being tormented by demons. You can make an analogy of this, if you want, that in order for Engel to escape, he has to look for the guidance of God, if that makes you more comfortable, however, that isn't exactly my goal, as if anything, it's more akin to Engel, being the young but relatively capable man that he is, is able to survive and escape an extremely pressurable and stressful situation through the power of hope and strength and also via the power of the player, the only person who can help Engel remember.
I haven't really gotten a clue as to how Engel could escape, as the world is not like a nightmare, it is a book, he exists as an actual literal paper creation by an evil artist, he might be able to lift himself directly off of the pages and see the real world for what it is and decide that the only way to escape is to either rewrite the story and erase the demons from it, creating a new story with a happy ending. How Engel might be able to do this, I'm not too entirely sure, but perhaps it might require the player to physically break the game Doki Doki style, access secrets and directly do things out of character to help Engel remember his nightmares.
I'm not entirely sure if it intersects with FNAF or TADC but this is the story that I want to go with for this project, that fundamentally, you play as a suffering young man in a stressful situation, looking for ways to escape. It feels hopeless, as even if you beat the game, that doesn't mean that you win, but in a world without hope, the only thing that shines is your own determination, that if you keep going despite the odds being extremely slim, you can still make it out alive. I suppose this sort of idea reflects my own personal world views on the power of negativity, but it also reflects on FPE as it currently stands as the animation itself. The artist, Kaaatie, draws these characters and gets them killed with no repurcussions to the point where the gore is seen as cutesy and the fanbase is drawing and animating Engel killing his friend for no good reason. My idea does away with that, that this isn't a world of cutesy gore, this is a world with real torture, real suffering, suffering that continues to go on until someone does something about it. That person is me, but it's also the player in a sense. By making this game, I can rewrite the story of FPE, I can change how people might perceive it, I can turn coal into a gem.
My personal lore heavily centers around that core concept of being able to rewrite history, but taken literally, as Engel is a character inside of an art book.
That is why I saw potential in Maim Crucifix when I created that alteration in Miss Circle, I was originally going to call her "Trauma" but I found that name to be too corny, even though that is what she represents, a figure that Engel is all too familiar with, one he remembers even when he seemingly cannot remember his nightmares. This figure, whatever it is, he knows he has to stay away from it, he knows that he is powerless to defeat it, but that's not entirely true, if Engel somehow remembered what she did to him, all of the lives he lost, all of the limbs she cut off, all of the souls she tortured, and remember her weaknesses, he can beat her and rewrite history for good, ending this cycle of torture with a happy ending.
When you think about it in terms of FNAF and TADC it is similar to FNAF 3's Happiest Day Minigame.