For the last few months I’ve been trying to organize the fears in the Magnus Protocol. I went in with the assumption that they’d be organized by the same system that the fears in TMA were, but this very quickly turned out to not be the case, as I could pick out at least 2 or 3 alignments for each statement.

This made me think that maybe the fears in this universe were jumbled, and that they would eventually fall into 14 categories of their own. I started trying to write down any associations I could find. I was calling one sector Mutilation for a bit; body horror, the fear of being mutilated, very flesh-stranger-corruption aligned. “Making Adjustments,” “Putting Down Roots,” and of course, Mr. Bonzo are all things I marked down as being aligned with Mutilation.

I was relistening to the podcast recently when it occurred to me that the Magnus Institute itself is centered around a separate thing—so, then, might the fears also be separated in an entirely different way than the 14?

Alchemy, I found out, has three “primes”: body, spirit, and soul. Body, which holds the subconscious, your physical being; spirit, which hold your conscious, your perception of the world; and soul, your superconscious, associated with a sort of “higher self”.

Three primes of alchemy, three sections, one of which aligns incredibly well with that I’ve been calling Mutilation.

So we have our basis for the fears this series. I’ve had Mutilation fleshed out (pun intended) for a while now, and a friend of mine noticed another pattern, something associating the vast, the lonely, and the buried; they called it the Deep. The Deep aligns incredibly well with spirit.

My official hypothesis: The fears in the Magnus Protocol universe will be organized by the three primes of alchemy.

Body: gore, flesh that is not the way it should be, the fear that you will be mutilated.

Spirit: Horror surrounding the conscious experience. I haven’t delved into this one yet, but I think the concept of vast-buried-lonely fits well.