#batim ending

All right, so I finished playing through Bendy all the way through to the end at about 2:00 in the morning, and I’m pretty sure I laid awake for another hour or so just thinking through what I saw in the ending. After sleeping on it and looking at what some people found with the Lens in earlier chapters, I’m going to take a crack at my own theory. Not sure how different it is going to be from others’, since I haven’t seen that many so far and people are still reeling from it, but here goes.

Okay, so first and foremost:

The entirety of the game up to the end (not including the apartment) is astory.

It is a story written by Joey Drew as an old man, years and years after starting his studio.

This is why Joey has storyboards featuring Ink Demon Bendy and the other character in their corrupt forms in his apartment.

This is why there’s a little girl asking to hear the story again from Uncle Joey.

This is why he has nice letters and phone numbers and photos from his employees that in the main game are most definitely dead.

And this is why everything in the “Studio” is so outlandish in comparison to the apartment, why everything is so sketchy, mono-colored, with stray pencil marks covering every surface.

It’s all ideas. Stories. Sketches and storyboards.

So given this, here’s what I think happened in the “real world,” the world with the apartment in it.

Years and years ago, there were two fresh-faced cartoonists. Both immensely creative, they each had their own strengths. Henry Stein had the stronger knack for animation and character design, and was an extremely hard and persistent worker when it came to his craft. Joey Drew was a big-concept ideas man, and had the charisma, drive and willingness to take risks in order to take his stories to a wide audience. Their ideas and stories bounced off each other like Kirby and Lee, and so they decided to start an animation studio together. It was a small humble studio (resembling Chapter 1′s studio), but it was one started in earnest, with a strong heart to it. 

After work on smaller projects, one day Henry created a brand new character, a little darling devil that he decided to call Bendy. Bringing his design to Joey, his ambitious partner saw that this design was the perfect jumping-off point for their studio. Bendy was cute, streamlined, and had a look that could only be described as iconic. And so they ran with it.

And it was a huge success.

People absolutely loved Bendy. He became the Mickey Mouse of this universe, with fans all over the globe. The studio began to grow with Bendy’s fame, but as any arrangement with a devil goes, it did not go as smoothly as was hoped.

Joey and Henry, the two founding titans of this studio, had a falling out. Joey had become ambitious to a fault, and any number of things could have been a breaking point. Perhaps Henry saw Joey’s ideas to expand Bendy into a huge empire as getting too far away from its humble beginnings. Maybe Joey was trying to take the studio away from traditional animation as the times changed (with the Ink Machine’s 3-D constructs representing a jump to digital or CGI maybe?), and Henry just couldn’t/didn’t want to keep up. Maybe there was even an argument over Bendy himself and who really created/owned him. Whatever the reason, Henry left the studio, never to come back.

As Joey says to Henry at the end, Henry went on to start a family and live a full life outside the studio. Joey stayed on, and kept building his animation empire, just as he said he would. Without Henry to ground his ambition, he tried to put everything into action that he wanted to. Merchandise, toy lines, even a theme park, just expanding the name of Bendy and Joey Drew Studios as far as it could go. There were pitfalls. There were risks that might have fallen through. There were budget overages, social snafus with designers, even a particularly nasty scandal that resulted in Alice Angel having two different voice actors. But through all of this, Joey Drew’s great machine kept chugging along, and the studio was still wildly successful up to the very end of Joey’s career.

And at the end, Joey Drew looked back at his career. He saw this massive success where he made so many people happy. The people who worked under him, despite butting heads with him, had fruitful careers and left on favorable terms with him, moving on to other successes, still keeping touch with their old boss and updating him on their lives.

But even in this success, Joey still felt somewhat hollow. In hindsight, he saw how naked his ambition was. He saw that he was not always honorable, and in crafting his animation empire, he knows that there was still a certain level of corruption, a certain level of soullessness that he brought to the once-humble animation studio. He had grown this empire just as…

…just as Henry said he would.

Joey remembers how all those years ago, he drove his friend and founding partner away. This was the man that made up Joey’s  little dancing cash cow in the first place, and while Joey did so much for the company, he has to admit to himself that his studio wouldn’t have gone anywhere without Henry’s hard work and design.

And so, Joey decides to invite Henry to visit. But before he does, he sits down at the old drafting table in his modest apartment and does something he hasn’t done in decades.

 He draws.

He writes one last story.

This story is about an ambitious cartoonist who started a studio with his best friend who he eventually drove away. Joey writes about how this ambitious cartoonist wasn’t satisfied with just making moving pictures, no,  he wanted to take his studio to the highest ascension it could, to the point where he would be immortal. He would do this no matter what sacrifices had to be made. And it is this ambition, these sacrifices made without thinking of who is being sacrificed that corrupts everything in the studio, takes the soul from it, and expands it not upward towards the heavens, but lower and lower, closer and closer to hell.

Joey populates this story with people he knew and had working for him, just heavily exaggerated, much like how he exaggerates his less savory business decisions by writing them as actual demonic sacrifices that actually kill people. 

-Sammy Lawrence makes it clear he’s just working for a paycheck while complaining about Joey the whole time? Joey makes him into a devout follower of Bendy, aka where the money comes from. 

-His lyricist Jack Fain is a bit of a loner that keeps to himself but does his job? Why not write him as a minor lurker with his own little alcove far away from everyone else?

-Grant Cohen was frustrated with Joey’s budget-sucking ideas? Translate it to gibbering madness. 

-Norman Polk kept to himself in the projection booth and cutting room and had a habit of lurking? How about we make him a wandering projector-headed monster that gets angry when you stand in front of his projection?

-Bertrum Piedmont was just as ambitious as Joey, but a bit far up his own ass when it came to his own genius and attractions? Why not literally stick him up one of his own attractions?

-With the two Alices, Joey thought that Susie was great for the role. However, some falling-out/scandal resulted in him having to hire Allison. But again, while she left on decent terms, while she was working there, Susie was a bit of a diva that tended to look down on and maybe even mistreat her fellow cast members, while still doing her job well enough to stay. But Joey never felt that she was quite…perfect enough for the role compared to Allison, and he had quite a few complaints about how she treated everyone else. Eventually he hired Allison back, and when he wrote his story, he decided to exaggerate Susie as a perfection-obsessed monster who rips into other people one second, but begs not to fall back into inky obscurity the next. And despite all the things she does, all the people (cast members) she destroys, she’s never quite perfect, and is eventually replaced by Allison.

-Allison, Tom, and possibly Wally (as Perfect/Frankenboris) are the three employees that he sees most favorably, and it’s possible that they were the longest-standing and most loyal employees. Sure, contractor/mechanic Tom was gruff and of few words, and custodian Wally was a bit lax and jokingly threatened to leave quite a lot, but the three of them were always loyal and did their jobs despite the nonsense that Joey made them endure. That is why Joey writes them as good guys for the most part, and why shining the lens on Allison and Tom shows a shining gold halo and bone respectively. They are the golden employees.

After coming up with them, Joey places his new characters in a twisted mockery of his own studio, making it more and more expansive and twisted as it goes down. But the story needed a good hook, a centerpiece for the action. In his apartment, Joey has an Ink Machine. Now I believe that in the real world, the Ink Machine doesn’t make monsters and ink demons. I believe that this smaller Ink Machine just literally makes ink. It’s a fad machine meant to increase productivity, a random idea that Joey had  brought Tom in to help build. It did its job, yes, but it was also really temperamental, and extremely messy, with a nasty tendency of just spurting ink everywhere and even causing minor floods across the studio’s floor. Nobody liked it, and so when Joey writes his story, he exaggerates that initial minor failure that came from his ambition into the cornerstone of the story studio’s corruption.

And then there’s Henry. Because Joey regrets what he did to Henry all those years ago, as an apology, a peace offering, he decides to write Henry into this last story as the protagonist. Henry is the big damn hero, the man who goes through all the hardships and battles and waist-high ink with nothing but his wits and whatever tools are on hand. Joey knew that it would be a role Henry could play, because before he left, Henry was always the one to muscle through problems through hard work and persistence; always the one who worked through Joey’s own ambition fueled shortcomings to find a solution.

And so the story goes. Joey has his estranged friend return like the prodigal son to come save the day. He wades through the ink, the corruption, fights off the demons that Joey summoned in his greed. And at the very bottom of it all is the great Ink Machine itself, the vast empire that Joey built around Henry’s designs. And at the center of the Machine? The Little Devil Darling himself, the creation that started it all. Bendy started out so small and innocent, but through Joey’s actions grew larger and larger, more and more corrupted, until what’s left is a soulless juggernaut of animation.

Henry faces his character after all these years. He was there at Bendy’s original conception and creation, and so Joey decides that it is only fair that it is Henry who brings the Ink Demon to his end.

—

(note: Had to do a quick edit because I managed to mix up the Alices.)

So that’s what I think. TL:DR, Joey wrote the events of the game as one last story as an apology to his friend and partner Henry for driving him off all those years ago.

Now this doesn’t bring into play the yellow writing, which judging from some of it in the earlier chapters may have something to do with Story!Henry possibly being aware of his existence and reliving the story over and over and over again, leaving clues for himself. That’s a whole ‘nother meta layer that I don’t think I want to jump fully into, at least not without really seeing all the messages. But I think what I have ties everything up quite nicely, and I really like this more positive idea of Joey being successful but regretful and reaching out to his old friend with something that they used to do together.

Despite running into some issues (notably my save screwing up and having to redo a large chunk of Chapters 4 and 5,) I had a great time with Bendy and the Ink Machine. I loved looking around for its secrets, I liked looking at all the fun little details that were included, and I loved that I got into it soon enough to be part of all the fandom fun and speculation, as well as seeing how the devs just kept improving the game as time went along. The game had a unique flavor to it that I loved, and there were lots of parts where I, a horror-loving geek, did genuinely feel apprehensive (that giant fucking hand; goodlord it creeped me out that I couldn’t look back to see how close it was when the boat was running).

So in conclusion, all I have to say is thanks.Thank you very much, TheMeatly. Thank you very much, Mike Mood. Thank you very much to everybody at Joey Drew Studios for this game. It was a wild ride, and one I was happy to go on. :-)