it occurs to me that the magnus archives, for all that its mythos is built around “ancient, primordial, universal fears,” is actually a supremely modern story, because the fear of surveillance represented by the Eye is, i think, born directly out of a post-griswold idea of privacy & privacy being under attack (before you inform me that us legal precedent doesn’t apply to the uk, please see the note in the tags lmao). which is not to say that this fear is new in any sense–the panopticon, etc etc–but the sort of central entanglement between our heroes and the Eye, not any other power… it really places post-industrial paranoia at the heart of the story in a way that is deeply reflective of the modern day