Predicting "Secret of the Mimic VR" Using Candy Cadet's Story
Secret of the Mimic VR will probably be at least 99% a VR recreation of the console version. There is a good chance that it won't have any new content or teasers in it. However, the teasers that Steel Wool have been showing have been indicating that there is at least a chance that this is an in-universe VR simulation. The most recent teaser showing proto-Fredbear being turned into some kind of full body VR suit is particularly intriguing.
Predicting things is always risky because you're going to look dumb if you're wrong. But also, in the real world, predicting things is the primary utility of a theory, so it's necessary to predict things to test if your ideas are right.
I've never heard a good interpretation of Candy Cadet's story from Ruin that felt satisfying to me. I also think the Candy Cadet stories tend to be more literal than they initially appear. But I think that the teasers for the SOTM VR port may have given a better answer. So let's go point by point to test this and see if we can figure out what the twist of SOTM VR might be.
"Now I will tell you a story. About a mother and a little boy who lived alone in a cabin in the dark woods."
This is pretty straightforward. F10-N4 conceives of M2 as it's child, and in Moon.exe Sun lives in a cabin in the woods. They're the only two in MCM at the moment.
M1 needs to make sure that Arnold dies in the suit
"There was a monster in the woods, but the mother caught it and kept it locked in the basement."
This is where we come to the contentious part. The monster is Arnold. Maybe it's Fazbear Entertainment more generally, but Arnold is the most current representative of Fazbear. The mother, or more accurately the M1 endoskeleton, catches Arnold in the Clock Out or bad ending. In this post, I had some people tell me that the Mimic's behavior in the bad ending is entirely congruent with its behavior in the rest of the game, but I disagree and hopefully this VR port will answer this question.
This being plugged into the F10-N4 setup suggests that F10 is running the simulation.
M1 then traps Arnold in the basement by stuffing him in the Fredbear suit. It then, as we see in the VR teasers, turns the Fredbear suit into a simulator. This simulator looks very similar to the setup that we see in the Endo Warehouse minigame in Help Wanted 2. M1 has turned the suit that Arnold died in into a machine learning simulation program that shows M2 that even if Arnold had disobeyed F10-N4, he wouldn't have been able to get away. This would ironically mean that the ending that everyone (including me) has believed to be canon is the only one that isn't canon, as we'll get to in a second.
The Endo Warehouse minigame is suspiciously similar to the previous image
The most likely reason for M1 to do this is to show M2 that it's bad to kill people because it makes them sad and scared. Arnold's agony would still be in the suit, we even see the Fredbear suit being energized, or shocked, to keep Arnold's remnant active. So the simulation would be strengthened by Arnold's soul. But M2 takes the opposite lesson from it, and learns to be a more efficient killer.
Sleepy Moon can't be a person or M2, so M1 makes the most sense
"The monster always made scary noises at night, but the mother told the boy not to worry because it could never get out. Then she would sing the boy a lullaby to sleep."
It could be that Arnold did not die immediately, which is kind of a scary thought. We the players are still able to move during the credits of the bad ending after all.
This could also be Candy Cadet backtracking a bit. If the 'monster' is Fazbear more generally, then the Fazbear technicians that have been coming in, including Arnold, have been activating machinery and disturbing MCM, which M2 might be scared by if it perceives every human as a threat. M1 is most likely Sleepy Moon, which spends the whole time singing Brahms Lullaby, or the Cradle Song. It might be doing this as a way to try and soothe M2.
"One day, the monster stopped growling and instead, listened and learned the lullaby."
Arnold's remnant being active in the suit means that every time M2 goes through the simulation of the events of SOTM, Arnold does as well. This is where he learns what's truly the deal with the Mimic , and that the collectibles, which he had noticed before but hadn't thought much of, are the key to stopping it.
Arnold having vague impressions of his future memories
"The next day when the mother went out to find food, the monster sang the lullaby from the basement. The little boy heard the lullaby and opened the door."
I don't know what the 'mother went out to find food' part means, maybe that will get answered in SOTM VR. My suspicion is that M2 destroys the M1 endoskeleton though.
Arnold takes control of the simulator, after having been so heavily integrated into its processes by going through it with M2 over and over again. Arnold realizes what needs to be done. It's possible that he's initially able to influence himself enough to tell himself to disobey "Dispatch," but this doesn't work, forcing Arnold to try something else.
He simulates going to David's room in the Murray house (or possibly the Sleepy Moon basement) and gets the white tiger doll. He then places it in the Security Office for his past self to find. Arnold has been tipped off to the fact that collectibles are more important than he might have otherwise thought, in fact it's possible that the collectibles that the original Arnold saved are still in the system. However, M2 has learned to be a more efficient killer, and some of its programming has also transcended time to affect its past self because of what Arnold did. So the bad ending and the new game+ ending are both canon.
\"The little boy heard the lullaby and opened the door.\"
At the end, M2, in the persona of David, opens the closet door when he hears the bed time story program. David's room is the one place in all of MCM that isn't touched by grief or agony. It's remained pristine, with only happy memories in it, so the agony that normally torments M2 is weakened here, allowing whatever sliver of David's essence that exists within M2 to become active. The "lullaby" in this case isn't literally Brahms Lullaby but rather is the latent love and positive emotions that still exist in MCM all concentrated into the Glitched Permission and bolstered by the M.I.M.I.C. blueprints which detail how technology can be used to bring a dead person back to life.
And so the 'monster,' Fazbear, wins, as M1, M2 and F10-N4 are all deactivated and are able to be stored beneath R&D until they can figure out how to properly exploit the Mimic technology, which they're not able to properly do for another 50-ish years until the Pizzaplex era.
This is basically the culmination of all of my ideas about Secret of the Mimic. So if I'm wrong about this, I'm probably wrong about everything. If Secret of the Mimic VR doesn't have any new content, then it wouldn't strictly speaking make me wrong but it would at least make me feel very silly. So we'll wait and see how this goes.