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Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz's Dark Fantasy Magic. Back in 2011, before I had really read a whole lot of Vance, the Vancian magic of D&D and the film Pontypool got me imagining spells as a neurolinguistic virus or memetic entity.
Anyway, all that as preamble to a related idea which I'm sure someone has had before but came to me seeing my daughter play Pokemon Go. If spells are living things in some fashion and wizards are forced to adventure to find them and master them, aren't they kind of like Pokemon? Eldritch viruses or self-assembling arcane subroutines. Free-living (at least currently) cheat codes to the universe. Things to be captured and tamed and bent to will of the mage.
I think this sort of framing could make the finding and learning of spells on scrolls more interesting (or at least more challenging), and I think it would definitely suggest interesting things that could be used to develop the background the campaign world.
Interesting concept with a lot of room for exploring it further in a dedicated campaign. Reminds me very slightly of the way the sha'ir got spells in the al Qadim setting. The spells there weren't alive unto themselves, but you had to send your gen familiar out to locate and retrieve them from other realms, sometimes from more powerful entities. You could easily twist that into recruiting multiple gen that are each better at "catching" certain spells or dealing with other gen for a more pocket-monster-ish experience, or make the gen into living spells in their own right and the ones they retrieve into "feral" living spells that need to be subdued and might be retained through bargaining - maybe like a Vancian sandestin?
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