thinking about what melanie said about the avatars being mostly people either in power or in search of power and how that relates to the themes of both tma and protocol
because i think as the show goes on it will show that the externals in tmagp-verse are (typically, with exceptions) victims or the ones being exploited.
in this universe large governmental and political forces are taking advantage of their fear-gifted citizens and using their gifts to up hold the status quo, using the protocol in order to maintain general ignorance of these things so there is no support network for these gifted individuals outside of what the powers that be are offering.
needles and his morbid curiosity of what he's become, ink5oul and their demanding to know what is happening to them, bonzo's worshipper being involuntarily committed (likely for study or experimentation imo), and even lady mowbray and bonzo himself just being mere tools of the oppression instead of the oppressive systems themselves like in TMA.
all culminating in the mystery behind ERROR/tmagp!archivist, whom i think is a likely a foil to jon. we have only met Error as The Archivist, this is their starting point, and as they feed on people and hurt them they are becoming more coherent, more human. I suspect that their humanity will slowly come to them, in conversation with how jon's slowly fell away.
and once Error is seen as a person, a human who has been traumatized and exploited for things that were natural gifts (or maybe unnatural! maybe an extra dollop of trauma would be that every external is created by the oppressive force), then there will be a conversation about how people may do awful, terrible, horrific things but they are still people, who deserve the chance at repentance and redemption, something jon never believed he could earn or achieve in the end.