To This Day I Think One Of The Best Writing Decisions The Magnus Archives Made Was Making It Explicitly

to this day i think one of the best writing decisions the magnus archives made was making it explicitly clear that your bloodline made little to no difference to whether you would develop any kind of connection to the entities and their powers. even so-called "avatar families" either had to produce multiple heirs in the hope that at least one would be inclined to continue their work (like the lukases) or end up with imperfect messiahs despite all their efforts (like the cult of the lightless flame), and in most cases being born into that life only made you more at risk of ultimately rejecting and/or being consumed by it. there was no direct runs-in-the-family line of succession ending in the perfect chosen one. even generations' worth of preparation and legacy-building could be brought to an end by a single act of defiance or doubt. it's the perfect theme for a podcast all about choices and their consequences.

You get a new job. The pay isn't great. Your co-workers are your ex and a workaholic. You get nightmares from The Horrors. You just got an email from a cryptid. The IT guy wants to fistfight you.

I always liked the detail of how elias continues to maintain a performance of bureaucratic courtesy towards the institute's employees while the exploitation and active undermining of the archival staff's well-being gets increasingly ludicrous in horrible supernatural ways. telling jon not to worry about the doctor's note for his return to work form after framing him for murder. making a point to ask melanie for her input at the beginning of her "performance review" and offering her the rest of the day off afterwards as she's sobbing across from him. "make sure you keep any receipts for expenses, assuming you wish to claim them back. / and assuming we don't, you know, die. / yes, if you die, I’m afraid you probably won’t be able to claim your expenses." passing the torch to peter lukas who starts off strong offering martin paid leave and fucking institute-covered counselling

why are alice and gwen a married couple on the cusp of divorce

Okay so, I have a hypothesis

I think part of the reason I’m so averse to the “Jon and Martin are really in the computers” theory is because it feels too… easy, I suppose, compared to the kind of themes and plots I’ve come to expect from Magnus.

I mean, sure, it’d be an interesting direction to go in, and provide some angsty character beats to drag us all along by our heartstrings for three more seasons. But it doesn’t scratch that same horror itch as the theory that it really is just an AI program, built from the tapes.

The idea of digitally recreating someone's personality and mannerisms from fragments of words they spoke, without ever once actually touching the real living person who spoke them...

It's not even that far-fetched: AI chat programs have advanced to the point where, if they're trained on the right dataset, they can reliably generate responses that sound like the people whose writing or speech they were trained on. We're all facing the dilemma right now of how real AI actually is; how it could fool you into thinking you're talking to someone you know, when really there's nobody there. Add in the supernatural element of inanimate objects being able to gain some sort of life of their own-

Are there ghosts in the machine, or is it simply the crucible from which something new will be born? If a computer is programmed to think and speak like a real person, is it still just a computer, or has it become a person in its own right? And is it the same person whose memories it was built from?

What, when you get right down to it, makes a person… a person?