To be fair, the Invincible multiverse saga came out around 2004 so I'll give it a pass on seeming to fall into the current multiverse trend. Which should stop 😅
At its best you can explore IPs in new ways like Scott Pilgrim did; or you can use it as another narrative tool and plot point for a rich story like Everything Everywhere and Spiderverse did. At its worst, we get the same bland amusement park movies with the same jokes and same puddle-deep ideas. It's really easy to get tired of them quickly. Not to mention, in existing universes, it feels like it removes all stakes once introduced. I don't feel like anything that happens in the MCU really matters anymore.
I don't mind "multiverses" where each story is it's own complete universe but unless care is taken, cross dimensional stories can get really stale really quickly. Definitely seeing too many of those right now
When I was young, a part of me was annoyed that the Multiverse was literally closed-off in the finale of His Dark Materials, but as I get older, I now understand a bit more of Phillip's intentions about it, since at some point in your life, everything begins to feel more finite rather than ever expanding, specially now that I've picked-up the sequel/prequel to His Dark Materials: The Book of Dust...
Excellent points. I love how there are lots of multiverse stories. However, I concur that there are a ton. You're also correct that there is a chance that people can use for characters to not face consequences or stakes to be lowered or for a story to be changed just because of the multiverse and infinite possibilities as a result. I remember my dad telling me about how the show Dallas pretty much took back an entire season by saying that it was a dream (just to bring back a character who died in a previous season). (And that was way before multiverse stories became popular). Similar concept with our concerns about multiverse tales. Hope you're having a great week. :).
As Savage said Multiverses bring forward comparisons of a current version of a character to past or future versions of that character. If the function is "What if they made a different choice?"; then using multiverses should be avoidable as there are plenty of ways to inject that into a story without creating other realities.
"Nothing really matters". Well, auperhero comics have been this way for a while. Funny this same problem is seeping into the media adapting them and for the exact same reasons.
Not exactly a multiverse story but I love how Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was adamant about "No, that Gamora is dead. Gone. There's no bringing her back." If everything had gone back to "normal" it would've made her death in Endgame feel cheap and pointless in retrospect.
5:20 I mean isn't this how American comics have always been? Hence why there's so many different versions and reboots of the same character over and over again without ever having them conclude a character arc.
I think Everything Everywhere All at Once and Rick and Morty work in part because they acknowledge three inherent nihilistic aspects of multiverses. What bothers me is something like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where they unleash absolute horror in another universe, but they don't have to deal with any of the consequences-they want it to be empty spectacle, and then they wonder why audiences come out of the movie feeling empty.
I think there's an important distinction to make between a _multiverse_ and _alternative tellings_. The difference is, a multiverse is alternative worlds that exist within the fiction while alternative tellings are outside of the fiction. Multiverses have similar possiblilties and drawbacks to time travel: you can tell interesting stories exploring the branching nature of the world or whatnot, but it also has the potential to completely erase any sense of consequences from the story by making it easy to undo the consequences. Because an alternative telling exists outside of the world of the fiction, its consequences still have weight withing the fiction. Of course you could still get overwhelmed by varying versions of the same story if someone overdid it, but e.g. the show Sherlock story is not undermined by the existence of the RDJ movies, since they're alternative tellings, not a multiverse. Personally I'd prefer if we saw fewer connected multiverses and more alternative tellings. I should also say I think an alternative telling can be distinct from a remake, though there may be overlap. Same example again, various versions of sherlock holmes are alternatives, not remakes of each othed.
No. Just bad ones. People are using them too much, but their mere precense is no greater problem to me than any other single tool that is relied upon to substitute for emptional storytelling. I love to see branching effects. And stories that follow this path well are fine. Most don't have the right spirit and desire to start with.
Coming from the narrative design and transmedia background, there is a core issue with anything multiverse: they are not considering the mechanics of their backdrop. I was very excited for Marvel Phase 4 because there is no better way to understand and fight trauma then by having the ability to go and see all the lives you could have lived. Marvel has a lot of issues right now, but it is a sad waste of the multiverse to now use this concept to best fit the story model.
I agree with the sentiment -- I am getting a little tired of multiverses -- but I think I disagree with the concerns here. Multiverses didn't introduce us to studios throwing away all the existing canon and starting over, or running multiple universes simultaneously so there's something for everyone. DC comics film and animation seem to do this every other week, and while DC of course has a multiverse, I don't think anyone actually introduced that as the reason we dropped Nolan's Batman for Batfleck, and then dropped the Batman-v-Superman universe for Joker and The Batman (if those two are even the same universe). Star Trek has a mirror universe, but I think the most unsatisfying reboot it had was because of time travel. Maybe what we're tired of are the endless reboots, no matter what they're wrapped up in. And maybe we've been burned by all the other ways a story can destroy its stakes -- "It was all a dream!" -- that now we're wary of any tool that *could* do the same. But I just don't see multiverses making these problems more prevalent. The business motives behind them wouldn't go away if we stopped calling reboots "multiverses." Honestly, I suspect multiverses as core story elements will turn out to be a fad, like the zombies and the YA dystopias. I think, like they did in the comics, they'll fade into the background as a way to justify any impossible crossover you want, or as a way to explain the reboots that are happening anyway, but the story will rarely be *about* them.
SPOILERS FOR INVINCIBLE CUZ MULTIVERSES ARE NOT THE SAME THERE I THINK: from what i remember from the comic multiverses on invincible are mostly for the invincible war and 2 occasions where people get stuck in places so i think it's not the same as marvel cuz there's only one normal planet earth that can be saved at the end of the day
I personally to not believe in narrative fatigue, I.E. superhero fatigue. Or rather, I see it in a different way. A good movie is a good movie and generally doesn't lend itself it fatigue. Now there are most certainly aspects that affect this, such as expectation. For example, everyone complains about Marvel's CGI being bad. That doesn't matter. It doesn't, and to prove that we can look at the video of the triangle chasing the square, we can look at Undertale and Shovel Knight whose graphics hark to olden days, we can look at indie films. However people have issues with the CGI due to their expectations of what it should be. So again, I do not believe in narrative fatigue. I am a big believer in the monomyth and even if you don't, you still have like 7 stories, maybe 6 core genres? So in the end what we have is the concept where a movie with a unique high concept gains a lot of grace, both in terms of its marketing but also its forgivability. Sure Star Wars was unique for its time, but the marketing was a good OLD FASIONED cowboy movie in space. It did as well as it did because of it' closeness to The Hero's Journey. There are of course exceptions, Avatar is not a great film, nor was 2001 A Space Odyssey, however most movies that are good don't need a unique high concept. The only reason we have this concept fatigue is merely because it is not a new enough concept to forgive the mediocrity a film or show using it can have. So I am not tired of the multiverse movies as much as just bad movies, but I also don't believe if all of these were good that you would be tired of them either.
I was thinking about ths. South park basically called it out with how it just makes excuses for bad writing especially with what we see in marvels endgame and loki verse. Heck even to cartoons people make excuses like in Scott pilgrim where the latest cartoon basically makes the movie a bad end where scott and remona never learned anything and became broken but people/thw creator excuse it with "oh its a different universe" aka the new excuse next to pandering
It's very hard to care about the stories when all of the parts of the story are replaceable from another universe. If there's going to be any timeline or multi-verse stuff, I'd prefer it if all of the branches feel very unique and distinct. While things are up to like... 75% the same thing there is some unique element that means "no, this is special". It's why I like Everything Everywhere and Spiderverse; yes they are "the same" but actually, no. It's why I'm not a big fan of the Rick and Morty multiverse stuff. That, to me, feels too samey.
I fell out of love with Rick and Morty long ago for other reasons, but their multiverse never bothered me because it was used intentionally in that way to play up and explain the nihilism in the characters.
I think the multiverse works extremely well in worlds designed around it, allowing creators to explore so many ideas but when the multiverse is added onto an existing idea I find tends to be a bit contrived and it doesn’t function harmoniously with the world
Rick and Morty actually addresses this. If there are multiple universes and IF we can jump between them like through a multiverse channel does that mean it's all meaningless? Or the fact that we're running from our "current" universe mean it's extremely meaningful and like "Interstellar" and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and even Rick and Morty suggests = love transcends it all.
This is why I've always enjoyed Magic: The Gathering because it's Multiverse isn't just a bunch of "What Ifs" or "Alternate Worlds" they're entirely different universes and worlds each with their own laws of physics and logic and that makes seeing a new Plane Of Existence in M:TG really, really fun!
I immediately stop watching anything that introduces multiverses. Makes the whole story worthless, meaningless. Can’t stand it. If you can’t continue your story in the world you created, then you’ve messed up. Absolutely ridiculous and poor writing. “I can’t think of any good ideas so I’m just gonna break all the rules.”
I don’t mind multiverses existing, but I do prefer them being in the background and not being plot relevant (aside from the Spider-Verse movies) with stuff like What If for example. In the sense that it is a «background show» to the MCU’s main plot. Other than that, yeah. They need to chill with the multiverses if they don’t wanna use their strengths and only cop out all the time.
I appreciate embracing the idea that fiction is fiction, but there's been way too much multiverse and I'd prefer something more like the usual suspects.
It's alright. I could do with less "everything is connected" storytelling because when it fails, it's just a bad multiverse trope set-up. But I think I'm desensitized from anime, because that has the same problem. Shonen powerscaling, Issekai, dystopia beyond the door/wall/ect
It was space before multiverse, but our culture's nihilistic, pessimistic worldview turned that into dust and gas floating around in a largely lifeless void. That is always what nihilism produces in the end: Claude Monet was great, but abstract art eventually devolves into a banana taped to a wall. I think the multiverse phenomenon is just a little different though: it's typically produced explicitly by an agnostic, nihilistic worldview and becomes a search for transcendent meaning outside of this tiny little reality around us. It is a search for transcendence, but no matter how many universes nihilistic fiction creators explore, they always take their own meaninglessness with them. That universal thirst for transcendence is described by Paul in Acts 17:26-27: "And he (God) made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us." And still we grope on.
I didn't like the multiverse introduction in invincible. It takes more than it gives. For example: (Minor spoiler) One plot point is that the two blue dudes are unmatched in their expertise, which is why they are broken out of prison and recruited. But in with an infinite number of universes to choose from this literally doesn't make sense and just feels forced. Maybe there could've just been a different planet where a Viltrumite child sides with their parent to explore that scenario instead of creating an infinite number of universes.
Its weird that with so many Multiverse stories, there is little to none that have limited amounts of them rather than infinite. There are stories that touch on the idea of a limited multiverse, such as Dragon Ball or Loki (although, makes it infinite), but I don't think I've seen any particular story that properly deconstructs multiverses, rather just explores alternate ideas or outcomes through multiverses.
Alternate universes is an interesting sci-fi/fantasy concept. To me, if the story has something interesting to say or to explore, then I tend to enjoy it. But if a show throws in an alternate reality or alternate characters and says nothing new (or nothing at all), then what's the point?
I think the standards should be higher. We've seen when it works and when it doesn't. Like when people talk about super hero fatigue the answer is raised standards. Which of course is easier said then done.
Yeah i mean the multiverse storyline is actually an integral part of the invincible universe without using it as a crutch. That and it was written with it way before the trend
I mean art mirrors reality right, its almost certain within the scientific community we are in one of many universes. I think what you mean is bad writing using multiverse as a crutch like time travel
It's not at all near certain. In fact, the many-worlds interpretation borders on unscientific since as far as we know it is completely untestable. You can't call something certain if you can't even test your hypothesis.
