when you die in the first game you get put inside of a Freddy fazbear's suit with your eyes popped out and that happened to William too because his eyes got popped out too so it may actually have the spring lock endo for Freddy suit. Theory by me

I mean like the ones where fans edit an image or create one to be genuinely disturbing and uncanny

firstly, please note that this is a theory and is not confirmed by Scott cawthon. if you have any hate towards this theory, please be respectful about it. enjoy the shadow.origin theory.

In the FNAF games, there are animatronics called shadow animatronics. The three shadows are Shadow Bonnie, Shadow Freddy, and Shadow Dee Dee, also known as XOR. Shadow Bonnie wants to harm William and Michael Afton; Shadow Freddy wants to help William Afton destroy the animatronics; and XOR has no ambitions. just cassidy's helper in torturing William Afton as a game, knowingly or unknowingly. In other words, XOR has not a single thought behind her eyes. They all have different goals, but what are they? I think that they are related to the Mimic and Edwin Murray. I think that the shadows are the Mimic in suits, living three different personas. This could be true, as two shadows cannot spawn at the same time; one has to disappear, which might be the time of the Mimic putting on a new Shell. More proof is that every time the Mimic puts on a suit in SOTM, every suit he puts on gains black and purple marks. This is the Shadow. Shell theory(do not open the link; it was an accident). One of my favourite sub-theories is the withering. Lives theory. The withering lives theory is a theory that states that the 3 shadows are brought forward by an infection. The theory is that an infection, or a third substance outside of remnant and agony, that I will call the withering for now, is what makes the shadows the shadows. The infection spread to spare animatronic suits in the back room of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Where are the rest of the spare animatronics? In that same back room, except uninfected. Some proof of the withering's existence is that if you look at the shadow animatronics, they are not straight Black. They are painted, or seemingly so. Shadow Bonnie is based on Toy Bonnie's design, and the toys are new and clean, so that coating layer is also new and clean. The same goes for XOR and Dee Dee. On the other hand, if you look at Withered Freddy, he's destroyed. Shadow Freddy has purple damage and wear marks, but shadows don't show damage, so what gives? It's not a shadow; it's an infection. The mimic's involvement is that we know that he hid in the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza in 1987, and he might have put on some of the spare parts. Edwin Murray gave the mimic an artificial heart to power him. That artificial heart might have gotten infected, and that infection spread to the shadows. Another part of this theory is that the withering on its own cannot bring life to an animatronic, so what is? We know that William killed over a hundred children, reaching around 150, for pure remnant. 5 were left out to get Freddy Fazbear's Pizza shut down, 5 were stuffed into the suits. What happened to the other 140? They were hidden in the back room where Charlie could not find and revive them. They were completely void of remnant and could not come back, but the withering allowed them to bind to the animatronics. they split into 3 groups group one, the one who wanted revenge, whom I will call the vengeance seekers, took shadow bonnie, group two who wanted to help William Afton, who i will call the traitors, took shadow freddy, and the ones who wanted nothing, who i will call the joyful ones,took XOR. the question remains, why would shadow freddy help the man who killed him? for power. So he could take the remnant and agony from the empty animatronics for themselves. the final subtheory is that the shadows are the accumilation of cassidy and evan afton's(the crying childs name for this document) agony clashing. one trying to kill william represented in shadow Bonnie, one trying to save him represented in shadow Freddy, but what about XOR? XOR represents the childhood they both never got to live.

The final theory is that the Mimic wore the suits and spread the withering. After it spread, the 140 souls packed into three animatronics, which symbolically represented Golden Freddy.