axelmania

fightin ajw butch flight since 1987

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dante
@dante

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.


ondororu
@ondororu
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in reply to @dante's post:

considering multiverse stories through the lens of his dark materials is so good...even the creation of portals into other universes is traumatic and slowly sucks life out of the world

I think it's no coincidence that popular interest in the MCU dropped off in line with the introduction of time travel and multiverses.

Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness leaned all the way into the worst tendencies of comic stories: Captain Carter and Black Bolt and Charles Xavier are killed off like it's squash match in professional wrestling. You get the cheap pop of "oh shit it's Patrick Stewart!" but you immediately undercut it to establish Wanda as an unstoppable threat.

The moment the MCU fully embraced multiverses, the first lesson they taught viewers is that beloved characters are disposable now.

That's the most egregious example. But in Loki the TVA has a drawer full of infinity stones. It's fun gag but it also says to the viewer "don't you feel silly for caring about the stakes of our previous work?"

Even in Avengers: Endgame, they use multiverses to pull the punch of killing Gamora.

I think that you can tell good stories with multiverses: Everything Everywhere All at Once uses multiverses to explore themes of lost opportunities and regret. This Is How You Lose the Time War uses multiverses to tell a really beautiful and impressionistic love story. Even in the superhero genre, the Into the Spiderverse movies are fantastic because they make you care about the individual characters: Peter Parker is dead and he's never coming back.

But I don't think Marvel can be trusted with multiverses; it doesn't work if you're trying to extrude Undifferentiated Superhero Product at a rate of 2 movies and 4 TV shows a year.

Haha, sorry for the rant. I just think time travel and multiverses are radioactive, and you shouldn't deploy them in a story unless you're being very careful and know exactly what you're doing.

no i 100% agree with all of this lmao. i feel like i'm harder on Spiderverse than some folks but even those really understand the value of when and how to deploy alternate universe material. EEAAO is just Doing It Right, as far as i'm concerned -- it's one of the few truly great multiversal narratives I can think of.