axelmania

fightin ajw butch flight since 1987

  • they/them

18+ only but not a porn account


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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@axelmania shared with:


The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. It's completely a lesbian art film like Portrait of a Lady on Fire in book form. I am so deeply into it. The plot:


It's 1961. Isabel grew up isolated and lonely, with only her mother, her younger brother, and the house they moved into after escaping from the Nazi bombings to love. But now her mother is dead, her younger brother is no longer the helpless little boy she could take care of and living happily with his male lover, and the house isn't hers. It was left to her older brother, and she is only allowed to live there until he starts a family. She finds comfort in keeping exacting order in the house, and in her older brother's string of meaningless girlfriends disappearing one after the other. Until that stops. He has a girlfriend he's really committed to this time, and she's very odd. Eva the girlfriend dresses like she's poor but is apparently an heiress. She acts bubbly, dumb, hyper feminine, but when confronted by Isabel about her likely doomed relationship she suddenly turns shrewd and cold. And now her older brother is on a business trip, and forces Isabel to accept Eva staying with her in her home. The tension is incredibly thick, and she suspects Eva is tormenting her by gradually stealing objects from the house... but this isn't a psychological thriller. It's a tale of suppressed truths and stifled sexuality.