Isn't it weird how many stories lately feature villains trying to tap into alternate or simulated realities to reunite with loved ones? Let's take a tour of this multiverse full of dead relatives and what they have to say about our cultural moment.
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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:
its unfortunate that you spend most of this talking about Marvel movies, a series that I, at this point, outwardly refuse to watch in any capacity anymore. so a lot of this flies over my head, despite being into the topic.
but you know, weirdly? Fire Emblem: Engage, which I finished recently, does this. Excuse me if you have any reservations about spoilers for a game that you...might not be interested in.
the villain is the villain because he believed that being loved and accepted by humanity made him lose the one friend he still had from his homeland, which had been ravaged and destroyed, and he couldn't accept that - he'd destroy humanity to go find that friend, which he believed must've been out in another universe. didn't give a shit about humanity if it meant losing his one ally. as far as modern fire emblem games go, the final villain actually having a sympathetic reason to enact their carnage is...new? a bit weird, even, for how simple the rest of the story is. and a fair amount of people don't like this game for being less serious than FE:3H.
yeah I tried to give enough explanatory material for the marvel movies, but it's always sort of the struggle with articles like this--I'm trying to make broad analytical points about stuff (particularly like DEVS...) that a lot of people may not have actually seen. at least with mcu stuff it's like, the most popular shit on the planet so I can usually, though clearly not always, assume SOME level of familiarity.
I was very focused on american media in this but I wonder what I'd find if I dug into more jrpgs, anime, &c... it feels like this trope might have a longer history there actually...
thank you! I'm rather smug about smuggling a bunch of epilogue-liker takes into an article ostensibly about stuff like The Last Jedi lol.
I’ve been watching The Man in the High Castle recently, and this has me thinking about how that show is simultaneously “a better world is possible; the fascists can be beaten” and “the better world is our timeline”. The heroes are fighting against their own status quo, sure, but Black Communist Rebellion secondary characters aside, they’re effectively just looking to replace it with our own. It’s at least better than “trying to reach or bring about better possibilities is evil/misguided” though.
It took me reading this to realize that BioShock Infinite was perhaps the earliest example of what I'm going to call the panglossian multiverse, and it released the same year that Rick and Morty started airing. This reinforces the impression I formed last night that Hollywood writers began to critique this genre only as it drifted beyond the privilege it once served to uphold. https://cohost.org/Video-Game-King/post/1425954-responding-as-i-rea
I like "panglossian multiverse" a lot as a descriptor of the like "quest to restore things to... our timeline, here, which is good actually"
I can't let a good Einstuerzende Neubauten reference pass without comment!
(Essay is good, too, of course.)
i have not actually seen the play but my understanding is that cursed child was mostly written by jack thorne and john tiffany; the only other work of theirs i know about is a play called "the end of history" about middle-class left-leaning-but-not-clawmmewnist purrents whose children do not value their ideals, and the collapse of their family concurrent with the collapse of liberalism in the UK. though, i hear it was also kind of bad lol