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stylish rascal (in a Dreams Come True shirt)
Maybe it's just because I read The Subtle Knife young enough that it imprinted onto my brain but I don't understand the desire to use multiversal storytelling without an element of tragedy involved in it. The act of existing in a parallel universe should be horrific, terrifying, surreal, angst-ridden. It should prompt existential questions and more often than not, regret.
I keep thinking about the fact that the MCU has started referring to multiversal characters as "variants", implying that they're just variations on the base universe (Earth-1999999) versions of characters and I think that terminology is telling -- the MCU writ large has very little interest in treating these "variants" as characters, more just as different colorways of the guys you already know.
And I think you can say this for a lot of modern "multiversal media", even moreso these days as "the multiverse" becomes more standard (ugh) for large franchise storytelling. I've said it before and I'll say it again, a multiverse is a fine organizational tool for worldbuilding, it is a very risky storytelling tool for individual works of media.
As soon as you dip into multiversal storytelling without really considering the conceptual framework you're playing with, it becomes a REMARKABLY easy tool to use in order to make do-overs at will. Death suddenly means less. Characters become interchangeable. Is that "good" for a story that has stakes? Rarely. Very rarely.