#by having a “best ending” to achieve you have inadvertently established a canon

[icedvanillas]

Hot take but a game about the intricacies of free will and how any one decision by any character can impact all aspects of the narrative because choices don't exist in a vacuum and will have consequences on the outcome should not have had a "best ending" where everyone survives at all.

[scribbly-dee]

Inspired by this post

I adore corruption arcs, so I graded how well the non-archivist characters would have damned humanity if they had been the archivist.

Sasha James 11/10, would be an ideal archivist, this plus her height is probably why the stranger monster targeted her before she could peak

I have a soft spot for any au that knows Sasha has never seen a brain cell in her life and that any unhinged!Sasha au is really just a regular Sasha au. Picture it with me. Sasha and Jon have parallel archivist tracks, until Sasha (my beloved show off) decides: you know what would make me more efficient at snooping? Becoming a Human Google. And things accelerate. The Web doesn't even need to bother with subtly magic lighters, it slaps all 14 marks on her at once by pulling up next to Sasha in a windowless van with "free secrets 👍" written on the side.

After the Unknowing, Sasha takes over the institute from Elias instead of Martin and Peter. With Tim dead, Jon in a coma, Martin lonely-snatched, Melanie compulsively homicidal, Daisy in the coffin, and Basira on autopilot, she quickly bonds with Rosie, the ultimate nosiness enabler. Sasha is a fully marked archivist for a good long while, but doesn't start the apocalypse right away because she's eager to read ALL the ominous notes Elias left, so the watcher's crown statement is in her to-be-read pile. When the apocalypse starts (Rosie: "Hey, Sasha, I just read something extra fucked up that Elias wrote, wanna see?" Sasha: "God yes."), she books it to become the pupil with Rosie as her anchor. Mayhapse an anchor-archivist polycule with Archivist Jon and Martin? Mayhapse Jon is just a normal eye avatar here and deeply invested in all of Sasha's eyepocalypse statements, so it's Sasha and her plus-three? Mayhapse it's a race across the eyepocalypse wasteland between Archivist Sasha and Archivist Jon to usurp Jonah and become the pupil?

Tim Stoker 2/10 dude's here for a good time, not a long time

The only way I see this working is if Elias disguises not-stranger clues as circus related so Tim is motivated to investigate. Otherwise, his archival assistants are way more curious than him and disobey his direct orders to 🍹chill🏝. Jon, Sasha, and Martin inadvertently bring marks home to him like cats bring home dead birds. He asserts his agency when he decides the best course of action? Actually? Just blow up the archives. This unfortunately puts him in a false sense of security, and Elias makes him read the watcher's crown statement by cat fishing him on grindr and sending the ritual as a dm mid conversation.

Daisy Tonner - 9/10 archivist, would have started doomsday before she was at the archivist job long enough to use her PTO

Daisy already had a lot of experience hunting down fear-entity-related people in sectioned cases, which means she possibly canonically already has all the marks from just hunting avatars who use their powers in self defense. The reason she lost one point is because she's too much of a jock to read, only nerds are culpable to watcher crown statements, so this would be the only delay but oh what a delay it will be.

Melanie King - 7/10 archivist, points awarded for achieving her breakthroughs by smashing her head against a wall until she literally breaks through, points deducted for doing so in full clown makeup.

If Jon got a handful of marks by just asking anoying questions in the same room as an avatar, imagine how much faster Melanie would get marks by bringing her trademark Chaotic Brat personality on fear entity investigations. The apocalypse would have started in like two seasons: one season to hire her off the streets and establish shakey, complex relationships with her new assistants (Jon and Sasha put in the time with the institute but were passed over on this promotion for some random YouTuber (plus they're tighter with Tim and Martin, so proletarian solidarity against the boss)).

Then a second season to stab every mark and get stabbed in return. Melanie would blitz through all 14 marks because what precious little impulse control she starts with is slowly replaced with slaughter juice. One fun moral ambiguity to explore could be if Melanie tries to use her new, dangerous Eye/Slaughter powers to revive her reputation and platform in the supernatural community now that she can, ya know, identify supernatural things for the first time ever. Does she acknowledge her entire career up to her hospital episode apparently only investigated fake sightings? A better question to ask is whether Basira, Tim, and Jon ever let her live down how Ghost Hunt UK's professional dignity was contingent on the legitimacy of her sCiEnTiFiC gHoSt eQuIpMeNt in those episodes, so the temperature spikes set to dramatic music were well and truly just temperature spikes and dramatic music. Sasha found a clip of that music playing as Melanie narrates "it's a message... from the other side..." and made it as her text tone.

Also, it would be hilarious if Melanie tried to kill Jonah on sight in the panopticon, once again botched assassination attempt number 1,963,538, and then Jon quietly snuck in to finish the job on his first try just like in canon.

Jon: "What, like it's hard?"

Basira Hussain 3/10 archivist, her eye alignment manifests as office gossip, like a normal person

Basira has the most formidable super power of all: the power to nope tf out of any conversation or plan she wants. She therefore would probably take 10x longer to start the apocalypse than any other archivist because her fatal flaw is refusal to directly engage with a lot of personally difficult things (like the slaughter bullet surgery she organized, Daisy In General, etc). The marks will be slow going if she resists putting her safety on the line or invests time in making good plans (which is smart, but unhelpful for dooming humanity). She would for sure still get marked and end the world because once she's convinced of a plan (aka Elias convinces her of a plan), she's ruthlessly efficient. So I'd stay out of her way that last year or two, she marks the entities right back at them.

Martin Blackwood 2/10 archivist, considering a prerequisite for creepy eye avatar staring is the ability to make eye contact.

S1 Archivist Martin would probably dote too much on the employees under him to be hugely susceptible to Elias' isolation-dependant manipulation. Any progress Martin inadvertently achieves toward the watcher's crown goal would have to be contingent on it helping his loved ones, which is perfect fuel for a "corrupted by good intentions" arc. This would be key because Martin has superb bullshit and manipulation detection, making the marks are tricky but not impossible to orchistrate considering Jon can't stay put in a safe corner for 10 minutes and Martin's mother would refuse to stay with him where she's safe from avatar threats.

Imagine the petty drama when Jon and Sasha learn he got the promotion they wanted because he lied on his CV.

Other than that, Martin would be even worse about pit stops on the apocalypse road trip than Jon because his Kill Bill mode would have no off switch. Does Archivist!Martin and his anchor Jon ever reach the panopticon? Eventually, but not until after they lose points for significantly reducing the apocalypse fear quantity. Would Annabelle survive to deliver her cryptic MaCHiNAtIoNs and achieve the Web's goal? Hard No, additional point reduction for neutralizing the multiverse invasion. Points potentially earned back if Martin's Web connection is strong enough to come up with the multiverse invasion plan on his own, though.

Georgie Barker 4/10, as a fearless coward, all the fear she feeds to the entities would be khaki flavored. They'd get their apocalypse, but they probably wouldn't enjoy the meal.

Similar to Basira, Georgie has the super power to Fuck This Shit I'm Out. She would overall be a subpar humanity damning archivist; a major archivist success factor of Jon's is that he has enough affective empathy to be afraid with every statement giver he reads, so when Jon archives a statement, he unintentionally contributes to the fear soup seasoning. Combined with how Georgie doesn't want anything to do with entity drama, so any corruption specific to the watcher's crown would stagnate. Even her casual exposition conversations would go like

Georgie: "I've connected no dots."

Melanie: "you've connected a lot of dots??"

Georgie: "I've connected shit all dots."

The reason she gets one more point than Basira is because Georgie's fatal flaw is the passive observer quality the Eye tried to stoke in Jon. Her level of engagement oscillates between two extremes, impulsive over commitment and judging from a distance. This would probably lead her to geting involved just long enough for her involvement to become irreversible, at which point she would try to cut that shit out of her life after it's trapped her. She'd linger, barricading herself on the margins of this problem as the marks that are targeted at her slowly tally up until boom. Apocalypse is on and she only half understands what's happening.

Georgie would wander around an apocalypse hellscape confused, but vibes and physical health fully intact. Anchor!Melanie would have quite the emotional journey starting with Georgie on that pedestal Melanie placed her, and ending with a slaughter avatar stabbing the person who convinced her to work on her slaughter inclination.