Reality sucks. That’s why a lot of our fiction is about the off chance that it doesn’t.
What used to be shared on whispers in basements has become mainstream and brought all its strange concepts along with it. Parallel Earths and multiverses aren’t quite as old comic books, but they’ve been there for a while, and now, they’re all the rage in the largest parts of mainstream fiction.
Loki introduced MCU fans to the multiverse, and What If?, the new Disney+ animated series is exploring it on a weekly basis. Over at DC, Dark Nights Death Metal led into Infinite Frontier which introduced readers to the Omniverse, a place where all possible interpretations of their characters are all infinitely valid and infinitely real.
With the MCU I get it, it’s the next logical extension of stakes. They spent 20 movies and 13 years saving the universe, the only thing bigger than that is saving every universe. Add in the fact that limitations exist on film that you’d never find in a comic. Peter Parker has been 29 or whatever for like… a million years, but it won’t be long until Tom Holland’s Peter Parker stops being a cute precocious teen and starts being a dude who you might not want to be friends with.
Blink and he’ll be 40. Blink again and he’ll be a photo at the 176th Academy Award In Memoriam section. Dude’s operating on a timeline that, just like the rest of us, is measured in years coda’d with asterisks.
And that’s where the appeal of comics steps in. In 1961’s Flash 123, when Barry Allen met Jay Garrick, the original Flash, DC Comics was just trying to explain why there was an older Flash that previous readers remembered. It was a narrative device that needed some massaging so readers could comprehend how Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, the only heroes to survive the fad of superhero comics in the 30’s and 40’s wouldn’t remember The Flash and Green Lantern while they’re hanging out with, well a different Flash and Green Lantern.
It happened on another Earth, very much like our own, but not our own. Genius, really. And it’s the same loophole that will let Marvel recast Tom Holland when the dude doesn’t want to sling web anymore, so that’s neat too.
Flash (heh) forward 60 years, and one of the most ambitious and successful interconnected series of films are betting their entire future on it. I listed a few earlier, but let’s rundown all the recent explorations of the multiverse currently happening in nerd-dom. A bunch of these are from the MCU, but they’re worth mentioning:
Disney+’s Loki introduced the concept of the Multiverse to the MCU
NetMarble’s Action MMORPG Marvel Future Revolution releases to mobile devices
Spider-Man: No Way Home’s trailer shows Peter and Dr. Strange breaking the Multiverse
Disney+’s What If? series explores different worlds from the Multiverse
DC Comics creates the all-encompassing Omniverse in Dark Nights: Death Metal
Future MCU film: Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
Sony’s Into the Spider-Verse
Timeless: A new Marvel comic event about an emergent timeline Kang doesn’t like
Avengers Forever: A new Marvel comic event about the Multiverse’s Greatest Heroes
DC restores multiple valid and possible realities In Infinite Frontier
Every Rick and Morty episode, ever.
Don’t dig the aesthetic, dig the story.
And that’s where I stopped counting. Not for any discouraging reason mind you, I just think 11 examples of culture glomming on to one idea is enough to make my point.
I think the reason people are so entranced by the idea of the multiverse is because everyone does the same thing that Marvel is doing every Wednesday - they ask “what if?”. That conditional question answers everything.
What if I didn’t get a parking ticket?
What if I never went to college out of state?
What if my parents weren’t shot in an alley after we got out of seeing Zorro?
What if 9/11 didn’t happen?
It’s the Sliding Doors moment of everything, and why the hell wouldn’t you be asking ‘What If?’ every goddamn second of every day right now? Have you seen today lately? Today sucks. Every new headline from Afghanistan, the 17 Hurricanes lining up on the east coast of the US, the pandemic, the unemployment, the seeming deterioration of institutional government, documented police brutality, the uncontrolled spread of misinformation, impending climate catastrophe, Tom Brady being Super Bowl favorites for the fucking Buccaneers, and about a thousand other things I can’t even think of because I’m too busy thinking of the first thousand things that remind me every day that today sucks.
But I think fiction analyzing what if is a good thing. An encouraging thing. A worthy thing.
Imagine having to do this twice. Three times. 57 times.
Since 2020, it felt like so many works of art were touching on the idea of temporality being a prison. The Hulu movie Palm Springs being my favorite - a completely nihilist exploration of reliving the same day over and over. But there was also the game Returnal from Sony about an astronaut who crashed on a world and every time she died she found herself back at her crash site, with the memory of what she’d just done but without the physical mark of progress. Hulu made another timeloop movie called Boss Level that looked way more fun than Palm Springs but way less smart. The recent Xbox exclusive 12 Minutes traps you in a loop where you have minutes to respond to unchecked tragedy, but you get infinite times to try and save yourself from it.
These reflect the anxiety of living a meaningless existence, exacerbated in social consciousness because of the Pandemic and the years of truth losing objectivity. Those two circumstances coalesce into the futility of simply existing. Every day felt exactly the same and time is a shackle that keeps us in place, because everything you experience and internalize isn’t real anyway. I am trapped in today and guess what? As previously discussed, today sucks.
If time loops are existence presented as a prison, then the multiverse is the tunnel that Andy DuFresne had been digging for 12 years.
Even though it may seem like a trend that people are chasing in their art because scientifically it sort of makes sense even to people without a PhD in astrophysics, and narratively it’s the only thing bigger than what the Avengers just pulled off in Endgame…. it’s pretty optimistic, isn’t it? The grass is greener on the other side of the wall between our realities, so let’s go kick it over there for a sec.
People want to believe in a better world, even if it’s not their own. They want to save a world, even if it’s not their own. A world where you might be better, taller, richer, happier. Maybe you have ten kids or maybe you have no kids. A world where you’ve never gotten a cavity - the multiverse is infinite, every possible you at every possible moment in every possible state exists and our fiction is diving into it headfirst. You might think it’s depressing to look for a life that’s better than the one you have, instead of making your life the one you wish it were. I think it’s hopeful, personally, because at the very least we’re imagining things to be better, even if we’re too pessimistic to believe it could be us that’s better, it at least acknowledges the concept of better. Maybe we’ll make this world better and worth saving, by ourselves or by someone else, across the bleed between universes. Somebody has to want to save this place.
It would suck if someone didn’t, but that’s reality for you.