I had never thought about that bit of irony before: That expanding into a multiverse can actually make the story feel smaller, because less of it matters.
I'm pretty sure that's why Rick from Rick and Morty is so messed up. He travels a multiverse, and what he's taken away from it is that nothing matters.
@@tellmeaboutyourgame314 it started fine in season 1 and 2 when it was clearly character focused but after the memory erasure episode in season 3 any good will I had evaporated as it confirmed nothing matters and Rick is a god
It is very similar to one of Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic - that one thing explored in depth is more interesting than an entire universe explored at surface level.
In the context of "writing yourself into a corner", multiverse introduction can tear down the walls that previously held you, but if you don't act carefully those missing walls may cause your roof to cave in
@@_Alleypaw_Unfortunately, there can be different types and scales of multiverse. There can be the small scale ones where it’s just your timeline and a timeline where a few events set it off course. There can be a full blown many worlds interpretation multiverse where all outcomes of different decisions and/or random events exist. There can be an infinite multiverse from the same singularity, where all different worlds that could exist under the laws of physics exist. There could be an infinite multiverse of different singularities, where all mathematically viable sets of laws of physics exist as different multiverses. There can be a multi-multiverse, multi-multi-multiverse, etc. where the author just finds some contrived way to say there are even bigger stacks of infinity (for instance, you can say every universe is a book in some infinite library, but the universe that library is in is also a book in the library of a higher order universe or you can say the multiverse is comprised of infinite universes next to each other on a 5th dimension, but there’s also a 6th dimension with parallel multiverses). There can be extra-multiversal planes, often places where gods that preside over the entire multiverse from outside of it live. There can be threats to history, where not only does a threat mean the end of the multiverse, but it means the multiverse never began in the first place. Basically, there’s infinite opportunity for authors to say “yeah the stakes are totally higher” even though they’re all functionally the exact same to an audience.
@@_Alleypaw_ Megaverse. I'm not kidding. This is what the Transformers wiki uses to refer to the entire Transformers multiverse + every multiverse belonging to franchises that have crossed over with it. From there, it's the Omniverse that encompasses literally everything.
I swear youtube is getting smaller. All of my favorite creators know each other! It's actually been quite cool to see all of the collaboration and crossovers in the history nerd sphere as of late
On Wandavision and the Multiverse of Madness: I feel really bad for everyone who went to see Multiverse of Madness and expected Wanda's character to make sense...but the thing is, when my Dad and I finished watching the finale of Wandavision, the FIRST THING WE DID was turn to each other and say "they're setting up for Wanda to be a villain in the next movie/show, while still being sympathetic in this one." And so when we went to see Multiverse of Madness, it just confirmed our worst fears. I really think that's the only way one can possibly make sense of the heel-turn in writing that happens in the Wandavision finale. Up until that point, everything is slow, subtle, artistically rendered, narrative which is clearly setting up for an actual Wanda redemption arc where she faces the terrible crimes she committed out of grief and makes restitution for it...and then suddenly Agatha Harkness shows up, and everyone's like "Quick Wanda! You have to beat up Agatha Harkness, who is clearly the One True Villain here that's responsible for everything bad, and then fly off into the sunset without thinking too hard about all the crimes you just committed!" It gave me and my Dad the very distinct vibe of "the writers had a particular story they wanted to tell, but then the studio had certain requirements for the ending that didn't fit."
It's scary how accurate this is. Lol Only difference for my experience is that me, my brother, and sis were watching together and all basically agreed and Imediatly knew exactly that.
I thought the last 2 episodes of Wandavision were a trainwreck when I first saw them, and this comment made me realize that, not only did they have to shoot during the pandemic, but they probably rewrote it at the last second to make Wanda less of the villain because it tested badly or something. And suddenly the continuity stopped making sense lol
Personally I don't like either Wandavision or multiverse of madness...it feels like the universe (writers) choosing favorites. Picking this one girl to have all the bad things happen. And it stops being fun. I stopped watching gotham for similar reasons. There's only so many ways/times the whole world can shit on someone and have it be interesting.
So you think _WandaVision_ was originally supposed to end with Wanda actually being the villain? Because that would make more sense both for that story and for leading into MOM. All I know is the moment the show started jabbing at SWORD as being the "bad guy" here I noped out. The agent guy being slightly rude to a woman in a meeting doesn't make Wanda the good guy.
@@samwallaceart288 Not exactly - more like an antihero, I guess. What I'm assuming the higher-ups wanted out of the show was a Wanda who people could cheer for for as long as the show lasted, but then boo her when she showed up in MOM doing evil stuff. Which, technically, is what they got! ...Eventually. Thanks entirely to the last two, hastily-rewritten episodes. And yeah, the lengths they had to go to in order for SWORD and Agatha look worse than Wanda were pretty hilarious.
A decade or so ago a coworker asked me why I'm always smiling singing and telling jokes at work despite all the sadness in the world. I pretty much told him it was because of the sadness. You can't beat the darkness via submission to it.
I think this is actually one of the reasons people (me) enjoy fanfiction so much. It's a bunch of mini multiverses that have little to no effect on each other, so you can have the same story told in slightly different ways by different authors, and have your favorites for each one.
Second "drafts" of stories really have a lot of potential since what worked in the story can be refined and what didn't can be taken out. Stuff like team four star's abridged series really shows the value of it. Overall I think multiverses just drag stories down. It really eliminates the sense of reality stories have to establish for the audience to stay invested. I find most of the multiverse stories work in spite of that plot point not because of it.
Also, one of the most heartwarming parts of No Way Home was Molina's Octavius remarking, "You're all grown up" to Tobey's Peter. Like. I actually got choked up because Ock's fate in 2 was genuinely tragic, especially as he could have been the kind of role model Peter so desperately needed after Uncle Ben's death.
They knew each other for all of 48hrs (at best) before Ock went mad. Having a "You're all grown up :') " moment would've made more sense & been more impactful had it come from a freshly sane Norman Osborn
I think what really made a difference for Everything Everywhere All At Once was that they weren’t introducing the multiverse to an established canon. They set out to make a multiverse story from the start, that would begin and end with one film. So the multiverse serves an allegorical purpose to the story, rather than a meta one. Every different version of a character feels like a different facet of their personality. They all teach Evelyn something new about herself or the people around her. So no matter how crazy and different some of the universes can be, there’s still some level of consistency between them you can latch onto. Evelyn and Joy’s first talk in the parking lot, versus their last, is what made me realize this.
You could honestly ignore all of the multiverse stuff of the moment and still reach the same conclusion. It's just that the multiverse helps communicate really big and subtextual things like how bad Joy's depression really is or just how important Waymond's kindness is
The Multiverse is usually used as a setting in most stories, like "Meanwhile, in another universe". But in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it's more used as a plot device to contextualise the main family conflict.
I think this gets to the heart of what is actually being described. This isn't a problem about multiverses, it's about how they are used in narrative structure. Long ongoing narratives and stories that aren't designed around the concept are where these things happen. EEAAO works as it's a stand alone piece. Umbrella Academy mostly works (as in it generally doesn't cause the observed problems) as it is the deliberate design of the story structure which the effects of the other realities has on the characters and their relationships is what matters. Dr Who (if you consider it in this bag) is an example of a long form show that uses this multiverse ideas regularly without it really hurting the show. Also, Days of Future Past technically fails as Xmen are a part of/coming into the MCU. The movie is good, but it still fits the criticism of "you may have done it well, but later writers might not".
The SCP Wiki is an interesting case because there was never an adherence to an established canon, so different co-existing timelines and world resets just sort of happen.
A lot of SCP material also points to the existence of a literal, metaphysical fourth wall and I don’t really know if I think it’s pretty neat or lame as hell
@@DannyDog27 I think it’s a realisation that what’s real here could be a story somewhere else, no matter how boring. But also yes, a lot of people think it’s funny and so original to make the monster aware it’s in a story (“I see you, reader” or some spooky words) or try to escape the SCP world(s) and enter ours or something. It’s sometimes done well enough, and other times I’m amazed this SCP was allowed to be put into the final listing because it’s just a meta-reference without saying anything or any original spin.
Depending entirely on which piece of SCP "lore" you ascribe to, the entirety of the universe/multiverse resets on a near daily basis with all the contrivance of the company coffee maker acting up and needing that one employee to smack it just right... Or Not. It doesn't happen. Or it does, and has all the drama and shit to be expected.. its all very "Who's line is it" in that it all doesn't really matter.
Man, any time a story analyst starts talking about "Everything Everywhere All At Once" they inevitably start revealing the deepest core of their personal philosophy. It's an interesting effect.
But it's shallow. What do caring and cool mean and why do they mean that? Different people have different definitions of both. Too much media and commentary on media doesn't interrogate the unspoken assumptions they are based on. Too many people are unknowingly tautological in their beliefs, which granted there must be a base set, premises, which serve as the foundation for everything else, but oftentimes people just treat everything as a premise, which is literally shallow in the sense that there is no structure underneath.
@@josecarlosmoreno9731 this is a joke right? I want to say “yes”, but I am not certain. The internet is chock full of pseudo intellectual types, so my expectations are always pretty low
Nah, it’s hard to work towards caring and making a better future but it’s hardly shallow looking at a messed up place and still choosing to believe in it. An yway love wins
@@josecarlosmoreno9731 well if you want a clearer idea of what is meant here. I specifically am talking about "caring is Cool" as: "it is generally worthwhile and healthy to invest genuine emotion into art". This being a counterargument to the Idea that it is somehow more mature to separate yourself from media, with a layer of irony and sarcasm. Edit: this also applies to people.
As they were talking about EEAAO, particularly the whole "They _all_ matter" part, my mind flashed to...I think it was "Satirizing Superman" where they talked about the episode where Superman is trapped in the dream where Kal-El is a farmer on Krypton. The people in that universe, short-lived and small-scale as it was, mattered because they were people for however long they existed. And Superman knew that, which is why he took the time to comfort his son while the universe imploded around them.
I like how JoJo handles multiverses, by not handling it at all lmao. Just two separate stories that never interact (+D4C but it's only capable of accessing adjacent universes anyway)
I mean I guess they had THAT alternate Diego right at the end (+the detail that, since Jesus only exists in the home universe, the adjacent universes are looking for diamonds) but otherwise yeah lol
@@apollyon1311 Araki probably felt he'd covered all the ground he was interested in covering with Jotaro and that specific family - much like when he abandoned Hamon I personally trust him enough to go along with whatever new ideas he's exploring
@@apollyon1311 it's not destroyed tho. The canon Rohan spinoff manga has stories that take place after that, showing that Empolio killing Pucci did also restore the old world. Though Jotaro and the gang are still dead, so...
Can we appreciate the fact that Red said "they dodged every single LANDMINE" while showing footage of Quicksilver dodging bullets in DOFP?! That's an A+ visual gag.
I feel like so many of Multiverse of Madness’ problems could’ve been solved if Wanda was an ally instead of an enemy. Multiverse of Madness already had this subtheme of Doctor strange being the biggest threat to any given universe, and they even had an evil Doctor Strange bossfight. The problem is that these elements are sidelined because they have to make room for Wanda being the Villain. If they made Wanda an ally and Evil Strange the main villain, they could then hone in more on the “Strange is a threat” theme, which would’ve been an interesting point of development for his character specifically because he was so irresponsible in No Way Home, retroactively improving his character in that movie.
yeah, not really, because at the end of No Way Home, Strange's lesson is that theres always another way Strange in his 1st movie, Infinity War and Endgame is always puppeteering, deciding who lives and who dies, as he says "in the big scheme of the multiverse you're dead is nothing" it doesn't matter if you are Sandman, Natasha or Iron-Man, they could die for the greater good, that's why America Chavez ask him, How can I trust you, if you have betrayed me before? Thanks to Peter and his sacrifice, now he knows that he can become a hero and not just a time-keeper, that's why he decides to trust in America, instead of killing her, as Defender Strange had planned. What makes "our Strange" different is that he decides to protect people, become a hero that take risks instead of chosing "the logical option" and then close his cycle with Christine.
Oh have an entity thats really powerful actually poses her and wanda occationally comes through or that entity does corrupt her desire and she gets more and more controlled, and yeah at the end chavez doe reach to her, to get her to gt that entity out and wanda doe the most part banishing that entity again. Making wanda being partly controlled, would hav allowed her to be evil, show ho she regressed by that more and more controlle and manipulated, and redeem herself by fighting an eldrich entity and whatever she does, make up for the harm and take reponsibility, even i h wa controlled. An chave, could actually have a point in doing hat she did. hav her snap out and fight that eldrich demon thingy possing her an winning. The movi being about saving anda, would be better if he actually was posessed and she corrupted, by someone else. .
THIS! Sure, if they needed to, they could kill her off at the end of the movie, but making her a villain sucked. What took me out of the movie was when they mentioned the Darkhold, my mind went to the first time I saw it used, which was in Agents of Shield, where it was taken to Hell by Ghost Rider. Then apparently the Marvel show Runaways dredged it up somehow, and a Morgan le Fay got ahold of it but ended up banished from Earth in the Dark Dimension? - But without explanation, Wanda gets it from Agatha in Wandavision?
Or maybe have an evil wanda from a different universe? Our wanda could fight her at the end and if she absolutely has to die to bring in mutant wanda. Then make it the new wanda have to live in her formers shadow? Identity crisis? Her back story could be similar just with mutant powers as the foundation.
@@twobitwackjob the issue with adding an evil Wanda is that it doesn’t add anything to Strange’s character for the movie, and this is supposed to be his movie - having the main antagonist being Sinister Strange highlights the lessons our Strange has learned since his debut and the differences they create to Stranges in other universes. More importantly, Strange being the villain and Strange being the “single greatest threat to any universe” is already a theme the movie uses, it just sidelined those themes to make room for Wanda being the villain. So if you were to add another Wanda, you would have to deal with those issues separately.
Same! And different sails have different purposes. Even a small boat may have multiple sails, and you'll often only use some of them at least for part of the day.
@@samanthakennedy121 Though AFAIK, the other sails are still up there. AFAIK, sailors don't take down the square sails and then put up lanteen sails on the same masts.
I actually went to see Multiverse of Madness in theaters because I thought Wandavision was interesting and was hoping they'd continue doing interesting things with her. And then when weeks later I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once in my living room I felt the most intense regret of my life at having not seen it in theaters for the first time.
It was a real experience seeing it blind and in a theater, I don't think any words can do it justice. I was overwhelmed for a solid two days. People are gonna be talking about it for years.
Yeah, my dad and I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once in theaters because I had insisted, and I am so glad that I did. It was a great bonding experience, since our relationship was on shaky ground.
I really liked Wandavision so I thought about going to see Multiverse of Madness. And then I watched a review of it and they talked about how they treated Wanda, and I decided that I will stay on Wandavision as for how Wanda was in the MCU XD
The point about the Ship of Theseus hits hard for me. I really don’t like when writers don’t take their own continuity seriously, because it breaks my immersion and makes it hard to trust the writer’s ability. I hear people say “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to consider it canon”. And I hate that mindset because _I’m not the writer._ It’s not my job to do the heavy lifting of making a story make sense.
What about headcanons? Like I've heard people headcanon Tom Holland's spider man as trans because of a lot of casual comments in the film and certain moments, to those people that makes the movie incredibly more interesting and adds a lot to the character's sacrifices and struggles even though it clearly wasn't intended
As someone who writes as a hobby I hate that mindset even more. From my perspective I am taking my readers on a journey and if I constantly need to tell them to disregard a part of that journey, then I am doing a very, very poor job. Now I will say that how critical I am of continuity can depend heavily on the tone set by the work. For instance I am not gonna give an action showpiece like most of Plantinum Games games the same level of scrutiny as the Witcher, but that is all down to the fact that most of Platinum Games stuff establish early on that they are priotizing spectacle over logic.
@@balmung7599 thanks for responding, I hadn't considered that, I thought about them in a very isolated fashion and didn't consider their larger impact, I see now that an audience can't simply pick and choose what is and isn't canon most of the time and that adding or subtracting canon both have problematic aspects Btw could you explain the problems with RWBY more indepth? I've heard a lot about the series but never watched it
I didn’t realize this comment got so much attention. I pretty much agree with all of what you guys said. I have nothing against headcannons. Fan fictions are cool, but those are the creations of the fans and not the original author.
“I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself.” Red… you have no idea how hard that hit me and altered my world view, and I’m plastering it to my wall and bringing that line to my next therapy session. Holy crap. Thank you.
Yeah, I've wanted to make jokes about the show called "overly sarcastic productions" being one of the biggest proponents for the importance of caring in my life for _ages_
It's an amazing statement and the only reason it didn't hit as hard for me is because it's very similar to some equally-profound advice a character is given in Babylon 5, that all of us are the Universe trying to understand itself. So my reaction was mostly "YES! Red *gets* it!" And, quite frankly, I'm glad that her *getting* the essence of that message and relaying it here, wherever she found it herself, helped you the same way Delenn's words helped me back when I watched B5.
Just pseudo-scientific nonsense. If you understand the 'hard-problem' of philosophy, you'd realize that materialism is not fundamental. That means you are not a way for the universe to know itself. No; instead, the universe is an emergent phenomena stemming from consciousness itself People claiming consciousness emerges from neurons firing are no conscious. Neurons firing cannot produce the subjective experience you have of literally seeing memories in your mind's eye, or hearing sounds, or smelling or tasting. I can look at your brain activity forever and never be able to deduce, from first principle's, what you are actually experiencing. Hence, there is an obvious non-material component. The only conclusion one could make is that consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world
This whole thing reminds me why I love fanfiction so much. I get to follow my favorite characters through new situations, explore different writers' interpretations and preferences, and watch my two favorite characters fall in love and be adorable over and over and over again.
Crossover is my most favourite tags when it comes to fanfiction, getting to see how a character/ group/ faction would deal with a character/ force/ world from another universe is fun to read. But I would like to see more variety instead of stories that are just isekai shipfest or 1 force curbstomping the other.
This makes me think about a very meta AU I really liked wherein first the author wrote a canon divergence AU; and then in the sequel all of the characters in that AU each ended up getting briefly dispersed into different alternate timelines, and the protagonist ended up visiting a very troubled point in the original canon (the events of which the original AU subverted for this version of our character). She interacts with the original canon versions (let's call them pair!A) of herself and her love interest (let's call them pair!B), urging them to think more critically about their very unfun situation, then goes home and her story continues. And then the author wrote a separate story picking up from the point where she left from the perspective of pair!A, who thanks to their interactions with the protagonist of the previous story, are fundamentally changed and cannot continue on their previous course, and instead go on in a new and much improved direction, effectively becoming pair!C.
This. I have so many things I want to see my favorite characters go through without making it canon or permanent, so fanfic is the best way to see those what ifs and maybes happen in a few thousand words or more
@deathrex9760 I'm also a huge Fanfiction fan, mostly Harry Potter but I dip my toe in Eragon and Star Wars too. I despise most crossovers. But I have read a few fantastic Harry Potter in the Marvel universe ones, a couple of brilliant HP/Supernatural ones, and one surprisingly good HP/Transformers one. I usually only like crossovers if they could believably take place within the same universe, or where multiverse travel is established like in Marvel now. I'd say 95% or more of the thousands of fanfics I've read since I started around 2007 sort of time aren't crossovers. Crossovers just don't scratch an itch for me.
The scene where Garfield's Spidey gets to save MJ and then starts to tear up will always hit me right in the feels. Andrew Garfield is such a tremendously talented actor and the way he can communicate so much feeling with only a few words and a lot of physical/facial emoting is impressive.
okay, but i honestly LOVE how Jason Todd was brought back. the fact that this character, who's story was very realistic, who died in one of the most gruesome and realistic ways possible, was brought back because of super powered weirdness is just hilarious to me.
It also works well thematically with Superboy-Prime's motivations, because his whole thing is "Superheroes are too dark and gruesome and morally gray nowadays. I want to go back to when everything was happy and saccharine!" And in the process he resurrects a purely good character who died in a story that emphasized that good doesn't always win the day, thereby saying that good DOES win in the end, and goodness CAN be pure and strong and it doesn't need nuance or caveats... only for that once very good boy to come back as The Red Hood and be an incredibly dark character who directly challenges Batman's ethical code. Even though they never interact, Superboy-Prime and Jason Todd have such a nice contrast going on, and you can really see what's going on in the minds of the writers when those arcs happened.
@@animeotaku307 yeah, Under the Red Hood re-connect it to make it more realistic and dark, fitting the nature of the story. Personally, I prefer the Superboy Prime explanation of the story.
@@normal6483 where did you get the idea Jason Todd was a purely good character? He was introduced to the audience when he was stealing batmans tires and before he got crowbarred I think he even tried to kill a goon
@@NotAFakeName1 I suppose he's less "purely good" and more "truly good." Before he was brought back, Jason Todd and his parents crimes were all portrayed as sympathetic symptoms of poverty perpetuated by people who are good at heart but compelled by circumstances. And the "killing a goon" thing wasn't canon, rather it was left ambiguous because it wasn't meant to be a smear on Jason's ethics but a smear on Batman's *trust* in Jason. The point was that Batman wasn't certain whether he could trust Jason, and that distrust was pushing Jason away. The writers were driving a wedge between them to lead up to the arc where Jason's bio mom was finally revealed, to create tension and uncertainty about where their partnership would ultimately go. Then some guy robocalled a fan poll, and we all know how that ended.
I really like what red said to summarize "existence" at the end... "I am the instrument through which the universe cares about itself." It's delivered like a throw away line but it really hit me in a way I can't quite put in words. It resonated with me
A more sober, post-edit Red may have emphasized that line more. Lines like that ping your perspective. This, imo, is one of the things multiverses in story are supposed to do. probably why everything everywhere all at once is sung with praise where dr. strange gets less strange love. We already had portals in the mcu. star shaped portals really didn't hit me with a 'huh'. Not mentioned in above is Rick and Morty. The gag of even one's closest friends and family being throwaway plot fodder due to the 'flattening of importance' factor of multiverse is used liberally and frequently for comic effect, but is also checked. Rick, the most prolific abuser, also abuses his OWN multitude the most and suffers the most for his embracing of his status as plot fodder importance. He uses himself and is in turn used. My 'huh' here was a bit slower to develop but it had a similar effect of pinging my perspective.
Jeez, Chekhov's really having a time! He starts with just a gun, then he gets a seafood dinner (Video: Dragon Ball: Super Saiyan (A Prophecy Done Right) - Detail Diatribe), and now a *Gatling gun of retcons*
I'm a huge Umbrella Academy fan. But I do have to agree. The time travel aspect of the story does mean that the relationships and actions of the heroes in those timelines only matter for the characters themselves, they don't actually make an impact on their world other than rewriting and deleting them by the end of each season. Umbrella Academy is a show that primarily focuses on its characters, their relationships with each other, their trauma, their shenanigans, their banter, their wants, and their needs. It's a show in which if you don't like or get invested in the characters, you won't like the show no matter how nice you might find the aesthetic to be. It's not a show made for you to get invested in its world, it's a show made for you to get invested in its characters. Those relationships the characters had? Those do matter, but only to the characters. Alison in season 1 has a daughter, and in season 2 she falls in love and gets married. By the end of season 2 she has lost both of them because of the time travel shenanigans and the universal reset they always do after each season. So, in season 3, that impact of losing her husband and daughter and not being able to find a way to get them back? That's her primary motivation and what drives her whole story. So, the relationships and actions taken in the deleted timelines do matter, but not for the world, they only impact the characters themselves, which again, if you aren't invested in them, yeah, you are not going to like the show, I think that's completely fair.
I'm mainly interested in checking out the comics and I'm curious if the problems laid out in regards to the show are in any way an accurate reflection of the source material. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if the show mainly did its own thing that sucked.
Alison by season 3 made me hate her so much that I stopped watching the show entirely because of it. She speedran going from one of my favorites to my least favorite almost instantly, ESPECIALLY when she mind-control sexually assaults her own stepbrother because reasons? Also i hate that they got rid of Hazel and Cha-Cha they were one of the best parts of the whole show Also the dead brother turning out to be an asshole really got old after like the first 5 minutes of the gag
I think I liked some of the things that show *could* do... I was waiting for character development, exploration and expirimentation with their powers, I wanted to see these massive assholes learn and grow and come together over their terrible youth and neglectful (but actually loving...!?) father. But at the end of season 2 I realized they would probably never get there. The characters were walking in circles around their happy ending because of the hand of the author, and it was very much visible. I feel like they will just continue retconning the entire premise of the show every season finale until they don't get a next season anymore. Haven't watched season 3. Probably won't unless some main character has actually grown as a person by the end of the season. Please tell me if that's the case.
@@lucyisfragile They do. In season 3 you can really see the improvement and character development of most of the characters, some more than others in both their story arcs and their emotional states. They also have grown way closer as a family and while they still argue a lot they are generally way more supportive and loving to each other. The main exception is Alison because as the character who has suffered the most loss due to the time travel, her story arc went on a villainous transformation. Season 4 has already been confirmed as the final season by the creator’s own choice. So, the story will have a proper ending somewhere next year. Edit: As for the superpower thing. Season 3 does experiements with the superpowers. But overall, a major criticism of the show in general is that for a superhero story, there is very little superhero stuff. It’s primarily a scifi show.
As someone who though the Andrew Garfield movies were merely OK, watching Andrew-Spiderman save MJ caused me to legitimately cry in the theaters, and again when I re-watched the movie this summer. And I think Andrew Garfield nailed the emotions in that scene.
Me and my brother watched the Amazing Spider-Man movies together since he's more of a Spidey nerd than me and we both had a lot of good to say about them. I think they're more of a mixed bag than the impression their reputation gives. That Spider-Man put a lot of feeling into the more personal parts of the movies. I love when he's trying to hide an injury from Aunt May and she's angry and scared at the same time. The pain he felt got almost suffocating. His relationship with Gwen felt way more interesting too. It felt like the good parts were too good for a movie and needed a the length of a show to fit them in with the amount of plot they wanted.
I've always felt that two maxims can be drawn from the multiverse concept. If all possible experiences, events and people can exist somewhere in the fabric of reality then either: Nothing matters, as everything that matters as already happened, is happening or will happen. OR that despite how minuscule something might be, how seemingly insignificant or mundane, Everything Matters. I've always preferred the second one.
To me such a things is horror fuel. Everything that could quite possible go wrong is going wrong somewhere. And I mean anything. If a terrorist decided they wanted to attack this place instead of that one, well now they're going to attack that one instead. Of course, that's only if you consider the glass half empty portion. It could be that by doing su h a thing he ends up failing where he could have succeeded, or even causing a domino of an erasure of an entire terrorist group, or solving world hunger for all we know.
The former only becomes comforting if you add the idea that if nothing *inherently* matters, what ultimately has value is what you assign value to. It has been the wedge I have used to try to separate myself from the fatalism of my edgelord 20s.
In a material sense nothing matters, life is driven in a direction, and we ourselves get to choose and define what matters and what does not, all possibilities and choices exsisting does not mean, or invalidate our usefull ness or life struggles,
The "benevolent tyranny" bit reminded me of an elseworld story where Gotham city is ruled by the batmen descendents, who have at this point a thing where a criminal (or rebel or just anyone really) is turned into a joker for them to chase for an annual joker chase. But the latest joker manages to end their tyranny and become the new truer to form Batman, who actually protect the innocent. (The elseworld stories can get soo good! "For the want of a nail" is an especially good one, that actually plays with turning silly silverage stuff into pretty dark consequences. I got into it because of a catwoman fanfic referring to it as the "nail-verse" in its multiverse crisis, because is it really a long running DC fanfic if it doesn't also have a multiverse event?)
Oh thank god, they brought up Everything, Everywhere All at Once as one of the examples of a good multiverse movie. And it's beautiful. It's so, so insanely good. Just from *the plot summary*, the moment Red got to Weimond's speech my eyes started watering. It's easily the best movie I've seen in the last 5 years. Maybe 10. Definitely worthy of a Detail Diatribe.
The point of EEAAO is that no matter the universe evelyn is evelyn and joy is joy and therefore the multiverse is a distraction and they have to live in the now w each other.
The best way to bring up a multiverse is to make it very clear that it is just a one time thing, commit to it and then block any way for it to happen again.
@@TheSUGA1202 Eh. EEAAO is good but not enough for me to say "this is as great as everyone says". A solid 7/10 in my book. I still kinda have to give it minus points for: 1) I cannot give the movie a higher score as it kinda feels like a more epic version of rick and morty's EP "Rixty minutes" (interdimensional cable's debut). and i think doom patrol's EP "Space patrol" kinda conveys what waymond's speech tried to say and better..... that or the flex mentallo's comic book. Or gumball speech from amazing world of gumball's episode, The pest:"everyone is slightly unhappy, life has highs and lows, and for the record, for most people on the planet, life completely blows, so why make it worse by fightning? " 2) i feel they used the "boring but still creative" type of multiverse (like rick and morty does of "only experimenting universes where they existed" (only the "barren of life rock universe" being the exception)), mixed with the "multiverse is composed by all the different paths and actions you could take" type of multiverse (which with each passing day i realize that's the most common multiverse.... which is kinda like dc's hypertime concept) seriously, not do the obvious universe where "joy is the mom, evelyn the daughter" ? You would think evelyn stepping into the "sausage fingers universe" would be forshadowing of how "BOTH of them think they are actually experiencing everything.... but not really. there is still WAY MORE to do". even jobu's line of "who knows what new discovery will make us feel more insignificant", would make you think it teases that but nope. 3) is kinda ironically funny how waymond is so relevant to the story, you would think they are setting up becky (joy's girlfriend) to be joy's equivalent of waymond..... and she is absolutely irrelevant to the story when you think about it. 4) so they set up that universe where evelyn has a blind but talented singer counterpart, and yet during the scene where she is making everyone's dreams come true, she isn't signging? not even once? you would think that would be a perfect moment to have the sappiest song ever being song while evelyn is just making everyone's dreams come true. 5) if you think about it, joy is also irrelevant in the story. as the story kinda prefers to just treat jobu as if she was joy but not really. not even a case of "she is communicating with joy" or "jobu immediately merges with any mental counterpart she possessed". joy is more like a "multiversal ghost possessing multiple versions of herself at the same time at hyper speed" while the actual joy is kinda put "on standby" while jobu takes her body. THIS is more obvious while she was focusing her attention on the others during the ratatouille reference implies jobu is just "possesing different variants of her at hyper speed", and not really "a multiversal hive mind" (evelyn does manages to do that trick at the end when controlling at least 6 versions of herself simultaneously minimum) 6) It kinda felt out of place that jobu had a "just let me live my life" reaction near the end to evelyn (when she is presenting alternate becky to alternate grandpa gong). I am like "you both have shown to be distant from each other (more like joy and evelyn). at what moment we started developing that plot line of evelyn being a beloved smother?" EXTRA: for some reason, and this is more a nitpick of mine, i thought the movie would end with an evelyn eating the "everything bagel" , as in to show how, that thing only has as much value as you give it.
Now Imagining an OSP Timeheist spinoff where the channel never got created, so Red puts on a fake moustache and travels back in time to ask her teenage self what she learned in Greek class that day.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was legitimately one of the best movies I've seen. I walked away from that crying because I was so happy that things ended up the way they did.
I always reccomend that movie telling people that whether they like the film or not, it's going to be one of the most unique movie experiences they will ever live. My favorite movie from last year and probably one of my faves of all time now, to be honest.
Not to bring up Homestuck in 2022, but I recently read it for the first time while recovering from surgery and it was the first thing I thought of while watching this video. The metanarrative exists from the beginning with the fourth wall being an extremely literal thing, so when the story gets into multiverses and even breaking the structure through a character being able to transverse the webcomic itself, it doesn't feel as cheap because this has always been a story where alternate timelines happen (see: davesprite) and the fourth wall is thin (see: the reader and author existing as characters). Now, the comic has... other issues, but the multiverse (mostly) was never one of them for me.
I also love how there is one main timeline where everything matters but thats literally only because the main villain is the worst like he's canonically just the worst person to live and doomed timelines are tragic because of that
The "4th wall being literal" thing reminds me of _Fleabag_ S2 where for the first time she meets a guy who really understands her; and when she turns to the camera to talk to the audience like normal, the guy notices she tuned out and asks her "where she went just now", even as it goes on joining her in looking at the camera like "Hey, what's this going on?" and it makes her super uncomfortable that, for the first time, there's somebody who notices when she stops to talk to the audience
It basically takes all the high stakes and unstable foundation of high-disruption multiverses and has this working golden fix of "but the alpha timeline is THE timeline that matters" Honestly the best and worst part of HS is my favorite part: just how much multiverse timeline and 4th wall fuckery there is.
It's almost impressive how steeply Homestuck fell off a cliff after the REALLY BIG retcon. Act 6 had a rocky start but improved to the point where it was *almost* as good as A5A2 by the time of [S] Game Over, and then was just...crap! Everything after was crap!
Chekhov's Gatling Gun of Retcon would be a fucking baller D&D quest item for a high-level party. Able to have always killed an entire group of people in an instant.
Able to kill 2d8 worth of people you point it at, but only if you've fought them before aquiring the Gatling Gun. By pointing it at them, they become dead at the last time you fought them, reconning their survival of that battle.
I introduced "multiverse" into my stories at one point for a very specific reason - I wanted there to be this one villain who was basically trapped in a reincarnation loop where he keeps getting reborn in different worlds as different people, but the trajectory of his life keeps going the same where he keeps being driven into being a villain. The hook was that although each character is a different person, the weight of having relived the same mistakes is this soul crushing nightmare that, thematically, was all about being stuck in a rut, believing that you can't ever change because you've just screwed up so many times. And I just wanted to play with different versions of the character so that when said character would have moments where he remembers glimpses of past lives, he's actually referencing other stories he's been in. My idea was that the audience would actually feel the weight of his being trapped in an endless loop he can't escape from, so that I could cap it off with his last appearance being the one where he finally said, "You know what? No. I've done this all before, I know how this goes, I don't have to do it again. I don't have to be the bad guy just because I always have been." And I just generaly ignored the multiverse in all other writings, with the exception of certain entities (the elder gods, who I almost never wrote about as more than a passing reference) and treated every story as having no continuity with the rest, because the overarching continuity just didn't matter in any other instance.
@@elijahadkins6195 Never read the comics, so I don't know Kang. It was actually more inspired by Randal Flagg. I liked the aspect in The Stand where it was implied that he'd done work like this many times before in many different worlds, under many different names, but I wanted to give it a more tragic twist and actually use the weight of his appearances to add to the sense of hopelessness of the character. Alas, it seems I'm one of those many failed writers who couldn't make it. Just burned myself out way too hard and have never been able to get back to it. So now, I'm just a guy who talks way too much about stuff I used to do when I was young and still had dreams.
@@malaksafa4074 People give me lots, but it never seems to help. I have some problem motivating myself to focus, made worse by having trouble getting my medications consistently because pharmacies keep deciding not to carry it.
My personal favourite multiverse story was the one where Reed Richards finds out that an interdimensional 'council' of Reed Richardses exists and joins them in their work improve and save the multiverse, but then makes the choice of staying with his family rather than continue with the other Reeds, becoming more and more isolated from his humanity...
"Loki" was my "oh wait none of this matters and in fact none of it ever mattered" moment for the MCU, so I just checked out entirely after it. Seeing how "multiverse of madness" played out in this video has really just reinforced this. 😂 This is also pretty much why I never had any interest in comics despite loving them "in theory", because there's no point to getting invested in anything because they'll just hit reset at random. You hit the nail on the head with liking adaptations pretty much perfectly! I'll definitely be checking out EEAAO.
@dalton russell All I know is, I started reading _New 52 #1_ because everyone swore it was "a good jumping-in point for new readers", and literally the first issue of Batman in this continuity A: has weirdass elseworlds versions of all the characters, and B: _STARTS IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORY I HAVE NO CONTEXT FOR_ That's the _opposite_ of a reset point
@@tompatterson1548 the thing with the incursions and the multiverse ending and Doom using the infinity gauntlet to grab pieces of different universes to make a new world then the Fantastic 4 remaking the multiverse at the end
The third season of Umbrella Academy does go into how the main characters' actions have affected both the universe and themselves. The series is set up with an overarching plot that runs throughout but then each season has its own immediate issues to deal with. It's essentially a bunch of people who were raised by a sociopath trying to put out a house fire but they can't agree on which room to start with or how to do it because they have terrible communication and social skills due to said sociopath, so even more rooms keep catching on fire while they spend time arguing.
I agree, I actually really like Umbrella Academy since I see it as a group of people who were essentially abused and manipulated as children trying to overcome that trauma and learn to be better people with the help of their siblings. I agree that the retcons mean that No Universes Matter, but I wasn't invested in the universe in the first place, I was invested in the characters. That being said, I can totally see how people wouldn't like that kind of show, it isn't for everyone.
Heh. Add in that one or more may have accidentally started the fire and one or more may not even know there is a fire while the others are arguing over it. Until they finally remember that "Oh, yeah, other people are involved in this" and decide to work together to fix the problem... a little too late to keep their problems from getting worse.
People arguing while a situation keep getting worse... Not my thing, really. Five is a very interesting character. They are all interesting. However, I could not stand this series for more than a few episodes for this reason.
@@thunderheadcinema6743 Oof, yeah. The thing with Harlan was interesting but ended real bad. Also, a friend of mine pointed out that they technically got the grandfather paradox sort of wrong, though I can't go into detail without spoilers.
A great way to avoid the time travel problem is something Dresden Files did: the law of conservation of history. This is basically a reverse butterfly effect, where history actively truest to stop and/or minimize any sort of changes, and the more impactful it is. The bigger the change, the more resistance. So it’s sort of hard to just undo your mistakes, which combined with gods, angels, the wizard government, etc not liking people randomly messing with the time line, means it isn’t something that can just resolve everything.
Another great story that utilized this was 11/22/63 from Stephen King, it also made it so the time travel mechanism only goes between two specific points in time so the main character can't just go back and redo every mistake they made unless they also want to erase all the progress they've been making for the past few years.
The way I handle it is with entropy. Not all timelines have the same potential, so some of them just vanish into oblivion, and others blend back into the main timeline. Think of many streams in a drainage area. Some trickle off into nothing, and some make it back to the water table.
I like Niven's Law of Time Travel - if it is possible to change history through time travel in a given universe, time travel will never be invented in that universe. Conservation of history means erasing time travel is the simplest and least impactful way to conserve history. Without conservation of history, constant history changes will proliferate until the only stable state is achieved, which is the state where time travel is never invented.
@@richardkenan2891 not really. The idea is that, if you push hard enough the bolder will move. It will just fight you the whole way, and the fallout will be limited. It would probably be more like altering probably than actually rewriting the laws of physics and/or magic to prevent it. And it’s more about containing the ripple effect than preventing the change in the first place. Ie if you try to shoot hitler, he might make a miraculous recovery, or his death inspire a copy cat, but the universe wont solve the problem by making sure you got hit by a bus before going back in time.
Really happy to hear a full convo on this. The idea of the multiverse is a fascinating one from a storytelling perspective, but I've very rarely seen it utilized in a compelling way, surprisingly.
I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night after hearing you talk about it in this video and I now have a new favorite movie. When the movie ended, I just sat there with my thoughts for about an hour. It, seemingly effortlessly, communicates something I've been thinking about for a long time. In this day and age, it's easy to come to an understanding that nothing we do is all that meaningful. Every bit of progress can be ripped away. And yet we still try. Because regardless of if what we do has any cosmic significance, our connections to our fellow human beings do matter. In an uncaring universe that makes us feel insignificant and small, the innate human ability TO CARE and build ourselves and each other up proves that the universe is not, in fact, uncaring. Because we are part of the universe, and we can choose to care.
To further emphasize how people love side characters. Willrow Hood is a character from Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars) who is on screen for half a second. Willrow Hood is a background character who runs down a hall with a literal ice cream maker as a prop. There is an entire fan base around this character. They dress up as the character and run throughout Star Wars conventions. I agree it is hard to predict who fans will end up loving.
There is also a whole sub community around TK-421, the stormtrooper who’s armor Luke steals in a New Hope. People have been dressing up as him for years. Then, Star Wars did a collection of short stories, one in which it was revealed TK-421 raced mouse droids and was in a gay relationship with a high ranking officer on the Death Star. Said officer is heavily speculated to be Tarkin.
@@lillyb2230 another story in the same collection reveals that the trash compactor creature is 1: sophont 2: force sensitive And 3: baptizes Luke in accordance with her religion Id recommended 'the glup shitto iceberg' video if you like niche starwars characters
As a DCU fan from age 8, but also someone who grew up to study physics and philosophy, I had to re-train myself to be able to become immersed in the possibilities of fiction. I completely understand and empathize with fans who have trouble getting past incongruence; but I know that from my own perspective if I limited my fiction choices and enjoyment only to things that made sense, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of anything. Now that I’m older, it actually helps me relax to know that some of all this isn’t going to line up or might confuse me, because then I can actively make the choice to put “making sense” as a parameter aside and think about things like time skips and space portals as fun, rather than fundamental.
On a smaller scale, I had that problem. One of my hobbies is guns, and seeing fiction not understand things used to make me groan and take me out of it. Now its just funny to look out for. Check this one out: A cartridge is 4 components, the projectile (bullet), the casing, the propellant (gunpowder) and the primer (the thing that explodes on impact to ignite the propellant). 2 disappear on firing, and the casing is too thick to exit the barrel. Next time you see a slow-motion tracking shot of a bullet leaving a gun, see if its the projectile or the entire cartridge! Even Sniper Elite, a game about simulated sniping during a war, has trailers firing the whole cartridge out the barrel. It always amuses me seeing how often anime shows trigger discipline, while live-action hollywood movies don't. Or when shotguns are used for close-range, snipers constantly grazing, rifles never penetrating thin cover, pistols never missing... After a while its just funny.
14:35: Some of the best timeskips I've seen are the ones where the characters explicitly _don't_ change much. They get stuck in a rut, or dissociate from reality for plot reasons, or just settle down in a comfortable place at the end of their character arc. That makes the transition from point A to point B a _lot_ smoother.
I don't particularly like timeskips that change the character too much, but the ones that I don't mind, or even come to enjoy, are the ones that advance the characters strength, life or abilities without actually advancing the character. Settling down types of time skip tend to work best at the end of a character arc (whether thats the last arc the character takes, or the setup to a new character arc), the advancement of strength and abilities type of timeskip tends to work best as an "oh no, the characters are not currently strong enough to pit against what I'm about to pit them against. Let's write a dramatic defeat and use that to convince the characters to train" But timeskips tend to work best with characters that are relatively static.
Or, as in most shonen timeskips, it's just the characters training for an extended period of time while the villains are also in a position where they're not being active threats. They usually don't change all that much, and it's a great way to get the characters strong enough to fight the really strong guys.
And after our hero's resolved their incredibly intense and treacherous predicament they made good on that one time they said they'd take a good, long nap once this was over, did some training, had a few cool and fun but not particularly relevant adventures we might write sidestories for later and have otherwise been living relatively peaceful lives following the lessons they learnt, when one day the recieve a most unexpected visitor.
This is why DBZ has a timeskip every other arc without it being bad. Theres hardly any character arcs or plot elements in the first place, so it just makes sense to go "goku beat the bad guy, and then 5 years later another bad guy showed up." Thats the part ppl are there for.
I think Blue's explanation of "meal vs. cake" really highlighted why I enjoyed Endgame and No Way Home so much. Sure, they're far from being cinematic masterpieces. But they're full of so many fun character interactions and moments that we wouldn't have gotten without time travel and multiversal shenanigans, I at least was willing to overlook the flaws in the plot because I was just having so much fun. Did not watch Doctor Strange MoM or Everything Everywhere, but the latter is on my to watch list, and the former I will watch when sufficiently inebriated
"I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself." I love this sentiment and it reminds me of one of my favorite monologues from D20 Fantasy High Freshman Year that Brennan made. Absolutely words to live by
"The first rule of existence is 'as above, so below'. People are fractal images of the universe. You are as we are. Bad things happen to good people because things happen all the time and it is up to people to determine whether they are bad or good. In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks, you mortal beings are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don't, then it doesn't." "I care." As you say "I care", your heart glows with incredible power, a deep red and pink and then purple expanding out into the void. You can feel warmth and happiness from your choice to care. "If you care, then we care."
Fun fact: When the Arrowverse finally decided to do their version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, once the event was done, they brought in the ACTUAL Marv Wolfman to cameo. I couldn't believe my eyes.
I loved the Arrowverse Crisis on Infinite Earths with zero irony. It is as dorky as anything else the CW DC had done, but a satisfying colnclusion to the story I’d been following since Oliver Queen was a Green, homicide-amenable ripoff of the Dark Knight Trilogy and *wonderful* love letter to all the DC that had come before… but I’d never caught that detail Thanks for sharing that
I actually love the whole "one persons reality is another persons fiction" like in A Flash of Two Worlds. It's a really fun concept for me to think that every book I read is a window into another world.
That was what made me so interested in the Inkheart books so much when I was younger. At least the first one I remember really liking. 2 and 3 were a bit weird
One extra note: I have the feeling there are also a lot of stories with the same issues as 'save the world', where the writer already had a 'save the world'-story and now needed a higher stake, so why not MULTIPLE worlds. But then that led to the major issue of 'why should we care about those other worlds we don't know', similar to the 'why should we care about the rest of the world, which we don't know'
"don't just save the world because Mary Sue lives there, save the worldS, because in this other one Mary Sue's rebellious (but not too much) purple hair streak is blue!"
I liked how Araki did his universal reset in JoJo's. It's a one time ability that came about through tremendous effort and planning. And it was foiled before it could complete it's objective. Now that "made in heaven" can't come back there won't be another reset.
Yeah and once he did that and felt like he gave a natural conclusion he just goes to another universe to tell a new story. No questions or dilemmas were raised just let's try this from a completely different approach.😂 And it worked that bastard made people to actually get invested in it
With the analysys she gave, I think Red would drop JoJo after SO because "he can find another way to reset if he wants and he showed that the Universe doesn't matter at all by resetting it".
It’s not even a reset, it’s just an alternate universe. Parallel, in a sense, because it shares many character names and such, but the actual events are entirely divorced from the Joestar vs Dio story from the part 1-6 universe. It’s literally just a means for Araki to continue writing Jojo without having to indefinitely extend the generations. Like, imagine a part that takes place in 2050, how would he even confidently be able to do that? Part 1-6 is a complete story. It has an ending, so it absolutely matters.
The section about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once made me realize how much similar thematic material there is in Night in the Woods. So much of what Mae had been going through is existentially fraught and the most important thing she does by the end of the game is throwing away her apathy. She embraces the pain of living, of caring, of connections, because there will be no meaningful joy without it. "I get it. This won't stop until I die. But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... pretty amazing to be something, at least..."
As someone running a multiverse D&D campaign, I thank you greatly for this diatribe. This also spurred me to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is fantastic.
The canonical D&D Multiverse is a completely different beast than the ones in Marvel and DC. The D&D multiverse doesn't allow for timy whimy shenanigans, as every plane of existence is a completely different world. You won't find an alternate self of your Forgotten Realms character running around I Dragonlance. (Well not without some incredible coincidence or Devine intervention) and the outer planes and inner planes are so alien that they work by different laws of nature. D&D multiverse campaigns have more in common with star treck or The Devine Comedy than Comic Book multiverse stories.
@@LostInNumbers In D&D there is the Mirror Dimension and the concept of multiversal echos but they are much less emphasized than the completely unique material planes. Part of my research is to make headcannons of all the different inter dimensional interactions in case my players stumble into an odd circumstance.
@@omexamorph To add some additional info: in D&D, the reason it is specifically "THE material plane" is the inner/outer planes are more just dream-stuff of the Astral plane (that's why there's the "astral projection" behavior of interacting with it). In the Astral plane, thoughts/concepts can gather together and sort of solidify into those non-material planes.
I'm relieved, because I felt bad not watching it, especially after hearing about these great performances, but that rundown tells me it is absolutely not made for people like me. It highlights and reinforces every single thing wrong with the current day and its attitudes. That only what you care about matters and you're incapable of caring about more than a small finite thing anyway. And that talk about a worldview that lets you care about things without the need for it to be prescribed, that's.. *dangerously* wrong thinking. Sorry dude you're not an agnostic anymore, that is full fedora territory.
A detail I love about Marvel and its relationship with the multiverse is that it all started because Alan Moore was just having a bit of fun. He and Dave Thorpe introduced the concept in Captain Britain in Marvel UK (at the time not considered canon to mainstream Marvel stories, or even released outside of the UK in some cases) where they decided that the character was part of the Captain Britain Corps, a force made up of the magical protectors of each universe's version of Britain and its ideals. The story was written with a satirical bent, likely inspired by how Flash of Two Worlds ended up feeling like it lowered the tension of stories with the knowledge that other universes had other outcomes. It dealt with Capt. Britain going to another Earth (Earth 238) where he fought a drawn-out battle with a reality-warping villain named Mad Jim Jaspers. That universe was ultimately destroyed in part due to Jasper's powers going out of control, but the punchline of all this was that Capt. Britain returned to his own reality (Earth-616) expecting to relax only to realize "Wait, every reality is the same only slightly different, which means there's a Mad Jim Jaspers here too!" Causing the plot to almost repeat itself, the past events having little impact. This story was meant to just be a fun comic story mocking British plitics, Moore even used prior writer Dave Thorpe's idea of naming Jasper's original world Earth 616 because that was one of the translations of the biblical Number of the Beast. Moore used this idea for naming the mainline continuity Earth-616, thus giving the main storyline the demonic reference. Moore unfortunately has had the bad luck of having his "wouldn't-it-be-funny?" ideas being used as the basis of much of Marvel and DC today; both companies taking bits of ephemera from his work (the different Lantern Corps in the case of DC) and stretching them out into these massive cosmologies that are taken deadly serious.
Moore got touched by Reverse-Apollo, cursed to have little throw away jokes be taken as gravely serious prophecies of how massive media companies should shape their narratives
I love Detail Diatribes, I love Multiverses, and I love any excuse for people to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once so this is right up my alley.
Honestly I think that's the one story I've ever seen that does something from the multiverse shenanigans. The important thing in that story is that it's there for thematic and story telling reasons. I'm sure this is brought up on the video, I was just scrolling comments and saw your comment. Such a good movie
The concept of a fiction multiverse does not make fanfiction canon. Wtf are you even talking about? A multiverse doesn't mean everything that could've happen has happened.
This made me think why I like time loop stories and it’s probably because they are Character focused by necessity. One of my favourite’s spends a long time in the beginning with the main character alone in the loop and there is some amazing character development as he is forced to examine his relationships and grow as an individual. When he meets with the over looper it’s both super exciting and with fresh eyes. The characters really get the chance to shine throughout the narrative
Which story was it? I'm curious :D An amazing time loop story I read is called Mother of Learning, its set in a fantasy world undergoing its own version of the steam revolution and is just excellent in pretty much every way imaginable
"I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself" is such a deep and raw line when you think about it and i want that plastered on everything merch related for all time
I mean, I feel like it’s one of those concepts that is vague enough that it can’t ever REALLY get old, that would be like saying that “aliens” as a concept are getting old. There’s infinite ways to approach such a concept, so it’s never really gonna be a dry well. But lately it feels so… overused, and in the most shallow way possible.
As someone who has read the entirety of “Omniscient Readers Viewpoint”(the novel because the Manhwa isn’t finished), I think it classifies as a very rare example of a All Worlds matter plot. This is because a core factor in the story is the idea that comparing two peoples or stories happiness or tragedy is stupid because we all have individual moments of relative happiness and sadness. Just because one tragedy includes more death and destruction, doesn’t make it more tragic than a small tragedy
Reading ORV made me wanna watch this video lol. You’re right when you say ORV has a unique take on the multiverse sine it encompasses both types described in the video. We didn’t get to see all 1865 timelines but the fact that they all lead up to the 1864th world line which ultimately results in the multiverse taking place is wild. For YJH he would become the protagonist KDJ knew and and for KDJ to lose himself a little every single jump.
ORV also did something interesting with its multiverse. They made it a time loop. Spoilers ahead. Near the end of the novel, our main reader reads the first universe, where the main character was extremely confused about things. However, the reader quickly figures out, and starts helping the mc, eventually leading to the best outcome that the mc ever had, besides whatever events we readers had for them at the end of the story. Only when the MR offers to set the Mc on a path to figure out the truth, did he accepts the power to basically restart over in another universe, and set the whole thing in motion! That, and the fact that the Copy cat writer and the author of the original three-way to survive are basically one and the same, just that they were different versions of themselves sharing the same body.
@@cameronjensen9397 by Damion's summary, it says that comparing lives is stupid because it's relative on good or bad it is. no one has an objectively better or worse life, life is life
Speaking of how cartoon adaptations often mix and match elements of different comics continuities, I loved the bit in the *_Young Justice_* cartoon series where an amnesiac character was given the name "Violet Harper" and later learned that her name assigned at birth had been Gabrielle Daouw -- while in the comic book, her original name had been Violet Harper, and she had taken the name Gabrielle Doe. Cute.
@@nateabels5151 my guy I love EEAAO but it was the most nominated movie at the Oscar’s this year and countless people list it as the best movie of 2022. It’s not criminally underrated, it’s just underrated
@TSD Talks sorry I don't pay attention to awards. So I missed that. Most of the time I strongly disagree with the critics. The only other person that I know personally that even watched it was my wife. (We both loved it.) And I recommended to quite a few of my friends. This is the only place I've heard anyone really talk about it.
@@TSDTalks22 I wouldn't say its underrated at all. It was definitely an underdog, being a non-franchise film coming out around same time as Marvel's movie also dealing with multiverse stuff and despite that it was commercially successful plus loved by both critics and audiences
Multiverse has been a part of my fantasies since childhood so it's really sad that it's been corrupted from "fun way to bring in new stuff" to mostly "way to erase mistakes"
It is actually both. As side note Marvel and DC are actually in same canon Omniverse and Disney actually extend deal with Werner. It is why sometimes characters reference things from other multiverse. And that is not everything. Marvel is canonically also connected to Hasbro Multiverse (Transformers), Toei-verse (through Japanese Spider-Man to Super Sentai) and Star Trek (yup... Kirk meet DC Legion of Superheroes, when Picard encountered X-man, plus Fortress Maximus was impersonating Enterprise). As side note Dark Cristal is also secret Star Wars movie (Skeksis were in Solo).
god i just watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time and i cannot overstate how much it made me sob. we just really need more media that is relentlessly positive and hopeful in the face of despair it changes lives
One of the worst instances of this in the Flash/Arrowverse is that after Barry changes the timeline for like, the 40th time, John Diggle’s daughter vanishes and is replaces by a son. He later FINDS OUT about this and is understandably horrified, but nothing can be done. As a result, all the character moments we got surrounding Diggle’s daughter mean nothing anymore, but the writers keep trying to transplant that character development onto the new character.
Doesn't she get restored as Diggle's daughter (as well as him still keeping the son as her sibling) after all the Anti-Monitor stuff is resolved, though?
My favorite part of Crisis on Infinite Earths was when the Monitor realized he'd recruited the wrong Blue Beetle. The current Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) didn't have the superpowers of the Golden Age Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett), so they just kind of sent him home. Ted was understandably hurt.
I love how Spiderman, who thinks of himself as just a neighborhood protector, could also just look at Thor and say "yeah I've palled around in the interdimensional void with a few versions of myself a couple of times."
I have a friend in the UK who chose to address the MultiVerse Problem from the earliest planning stages of her writing; she has built an InfiniVerse, which started out as a trilogy of trilogies, though she has already published a LOT of supplemental storylines because her readers kept asking about particular characters &/or situations. I believe the final book in the series will bring all the stand-alone stories together, meaning she'll have to merge a magickal universe with a aqueous universe with a classical Greek universe, and incorporate all the backstories and individual conflicts with their unique resolutions into a cohesive whole. I'm impressed with her energy, and not surprised that there are days that she simply can't bring herself to add to this overwhelming infinity! Yet, she continues to create, and we love her for it.
This is why i like Tatami Galaxy - it has multiple stories, and they even intersect, but ultimately the abundance of universes is created to highlight the idea that in none of them the protagonist is truly alone and leads him to grow.
This was exactly what I needed to hear right now. A series I was heavily invested in recently made some writing decisions that, while not full-on multiverse, had enough overlap to make the 'nothing matters,' and 'why should I bother getting invested if you can just do this again' area of the discussion hit very hard. It's nice to hear other people express things that I'd been expressing myself, and how that kind of writing can feel for fans who genuinely care about the story and its characters.
@@ShadeSlayer1911 no, it didn’t go multiverse, but it did show the hand of the author enough to evoke that ‘nothing matters’ and ‘why should I bother getting invested if you can just do this again’. There’s a lot of details I don’t want to get into, but the tldr is that the eighth season was a mixture of a lot of idiot plots and unnecessary character deaths and actions to place specific characters in specific situations. It just made it clear the authors didn’t care about the characters and just care about progressing the plot-even if the character actions that led to that progression don’t line up with the characters as they are.
I watched EEAAO with a group of friends a lot of them found it confusing and bizarre but I was crying my eyes out at how touching some of the scenes was and the message of the movie.
Personally the sequences that stuck with me the most were where Joy and Evelyn were sitting there as rocks. Its so BIZARRE on paper, but it hits different. I think because even in the universes where life just simply doesn't exist at all, Evelyn still loves and cares about her daughter, wanting to be there with her and save her.
@@Jillybean711 For me, the rock part was genius. Joy clearly states "most universes are like this", which in-and-of-itself reinforces the main thrust of the film - so many universes *don't* matter because there's nothing in them *to* matter, so being able to have love, kindness etc. is a cosmic rarity that shouldn't be taken for granted.
I think an interesting multiverse was done by the Manga group clamp in their "Tsubasa" series. Not only did they tie in all of their Manga series together and different story lines, they also did the whole universe hopping quest with a clear objective. It made each new world they went to creative and fun.
@@AeonKnigh432 I'll admit, I didn't keep up with the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, but that's, uh... Sort of a Clamp! thing? or at least it was for a while? Not necessarily with magical love destiny or whatever, but the idea of a love that transcends boundaries like age and whatever was something they flirted with quite a bit back in the day. I dunno if they still do that, but there was usually at least one or two relationships (or one sided crushes in a few cases) that raised a few flags if you spent any time thinking about them in almost anything they did. ... It's actually kind of weird to think about it like that in retrospect, honestly.
@@thaddeusgenhelm8979 it’s fascinating bc CLAMP was one collective who was very open in thought, like they were open to showing gay relationships on the page back in the time where that wasn’t very common, but their underlying logic to why they were open was kind of messed up. In their bid to portray and show empathy for “forbidden” relationships, they weren’t able to understand WHY certain relationships were forbidden. And because of that, they both showed gay “forbidden” relationships and predatory age gap forbidden relationships as both being worthy of pages. They probably figured out eventually that age gaps were actually inherently problematic due to the unavoidable power/knowledge imbalance and stopped, but they likely didn’t have the insight to understand this back then when discourse on subjects like being gay or how gayness was different from predatory relationships was less available.
27:56 No wonder other writers simplified it as "Ra's Al Ghul and the League of Assassins dug him up and dumped him in a Lazarus Pit." 33:40 And thats why the title of Donna's autobiography was "Your Guess is as Good as Mine" 1:11:25 And any bad writing choices that weren't fixed by the timeline reset were cleaned up by Deadpool.
Well, with Donna Troy, the issue was more "they made her new backstory something that had nothing to do with Wonder Woman and a bunch of people got mad at this and wrote their own different reason she existed".
The Archie Sonic comics are an interesting case here, since they introduced their multiverse really early and interacted with it surprisingly often... but then famously continued on for an extremely long time without a reboot. Eggman himself was from an alternate timeline starting something like 75 issues in, since the cast managed to off the one from their home universe. And then of course there was all the Evil Sonic AKA Scourge stuff and later on the Zone Jail zone, from which hailed characters like Zonic and Zector.
And then Genesis happened and retconned Eggman to have always been the Main universe version of Robotnik and _then_ the Ken Penders lawsuit happened and Sonic Crossed over with Mega Man with a _Super_ Genesis Wave that completely altered Sonic's universe and started the Sonic Unleashed shattered world crisis but left Mega Man's world entirely intact (Archie would ultimately wind up losing the rights to Mega Man around the same time Sonic was moved to IDW though and unlike Sonic, the rights weren't moved but dropped, RIP).
I clicked this video knowing that you were going to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once. I concur, it is the single best multiverse story I have ever seen, and everyone’s life can be made better by experiencing it
Somebody I was arguing with on Instagram asked how i felt about eeaao and when I said I love it, they said it told them all they needed to know. What does that MEAN? what does that have to do with nobody asking how you felt about wearing multiple layers?!
LITERALLY! I am always like “it can’t have been that moving, it’s such a basic concept,” like I read fics and romance all the time where the premise is that they always find each other across time, and then I’m surprised every time when I tear up hearing about EEAAO. EEEAAO really did just do it that amazingly.
The problem I have with the Multiverse is that it falls victim to inflation if done poorly. Everything seems so much less special and important if I know the exact same thing is happening in near identical parallel universes. Characters feel less special too if I know there's infinite versions of that character running around out in the multiverse.
I grew up with the Justice League Cartoon, and I LOVED their multiverse story. It quickly made the multiverse my favorite si-fi concept. And it was so niche for so long and now suddenly everything is a multiverse.... and I gotta say way too many don't get it or don't use it right and it's frustrating as hell.
I love how Red simultaneously sounds both very confident and exactly the opposite at the same time. Perhaps it's more that she's confident in what's in her head, and not quite as confident in herself, or maybe her ability to convey her thoughts. Either way, her headlong approach into subjects while also having a touch of "man, I hope this doesn't sound dumb" always strikes me. I think she's swell anyway, and I enjoy listening to her talk about stuff, even regarding a topic like this, where I didn't really care about it in the first place.
One thing that should also be mentioned about Crisis is that during those 50 years, DC bought a lot of other comic companies, so their stories were a part of DC, but on different Earths, such as Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel, Icon, etc. so Crisis was a way to bring the most popular of them into the main DC book continuity.
DC: * kills Fawcett because Captain Marvel was selling better than Superman, Marvel takes over Captain Marvel title, Fawcett goes bankrupt and DC buys some of the characters, DC can't call him Captain Marvel now *
I really enjoyed this. It put to words things that I've intrinsically known, and if you don't mind a mini-story time, I'll explain. I really enjoy crossover stories and all the different versions of the characters in their own timelines/universes so as a result I love the existence of multiverses. To the point that I made a character (I have a tendency to make my own fan fics for EVERYTHING, whether or not I actually write them down) who's whole thing is just going to the different universes and having adventures. Now this character is incredibly jaded about everything, the one universe she will never visit again is her home universe because she doesn't want to face her family since she's convinced she's become a monster, both literally and figuratively. But, the one thing she makes sure to do every time she has to leave her space ship for any length of time is dissemble the Jump engine - the part that lets her universe-hop - to the point that no one but her could put it back together, even with the instructions. Because, while she doesn't use this power for multiverse-shenanigans, it could very easily be used to kick off a Crisis-style incident. And she knows and acknowledges this and feels so strongly about not letting anyone kick off the multiverse apocalypse that she would rather permanently strand herself in a random, probably bad, universe than give anyone the chance. And I literally never realized WHY until Red said it: they all matter. And she KNOWS all the universes matter. She facilitates meetings and crossovers, but she always makes sure everyone gets back home safe because each universe matters because it exists. They may not all matter for story reasons, but she would and has put herself on the line to save a universe full of people who hate her, specifically, because even though she can be a stone-cold killer if the situation demands it, she can't condone a whole universe to death. Especially if it would start a chain reaction and threaten other, nice, universes. Tl:Dr, even my gritty OC knows that multiverses have intrinsic value simply because they exist, why do comic writers keep trying to use their deaths as a reset switch?
Gods I have such a similar tendency. My ocs tend to have the more boring teleport or portal variant but they also are desperately protective over their powers because it's so incredibly dangerous
Honestly I think your discussion of EEAAO touched on one thing I really like in stories of multiple timelines, that being character-driven narratives that ask our hero a question: given all the variables and choices you can take in your life, what is the one universal constant that you value most? What part of your life makes it YOUR life?
The hilarious part of this is how often writers open this door to reconsider thing about their world and attempt to close it. We, the audience at that point can't help but see what they are doing.
this is such an insane concept. Re: "who wrote this stuff?" In the comic, it's theorized that the writer of the Flash comics "dreamed up the stories" and his brain waves sort tuned in on the vibrations of this other dimension while he was asleep. It's discussed in detail in this book called the Physics of Superheroes.
as someone who tried to write a story set in a small scale multiverse, and had the storyline fall apart after the reveal that there was a multiverse at all- I am so stoked for this!
@@liamvalentine6073 XD thanks for the interest! The concept was that an augmented child soldier in a magitech world wanted to escape the war they were conscripted in to fight the Big Bad, and managed to do so, arriving in a Magical Hidden World in another universe, one where magic was never revealed. Fearful for their life, they left the Hidden World and went to the non-magical spaces- until this universes' Big Bad appears a few years down the line, and now the once-child solider realizes that its not exactly a new universe but an alternate timeline-universe, and by not reaching out they've let a few fucked up things happen that they could have stopped. So now they're scrambling to try and protect their alternate self and loved ones discreetly without giving away who they are, until the Big Bad attacks, their angsty backstory is revealed, etc and... now what? They have no way back, their family members are not their family, same goes for their friends, their alternate self is a child with a family and friends of her own, the hidden world is hiding a war from the rest of the planet, and the people who found out who they used to be no longer trust them as anything more than a tool. Assuming they do kill the Big Bad, what's to stop the minions from taking its place? Is there a way home? Should they go home, if so what is there left to return to? I did briefly consider having others from their own universe pop in, like an escaped friend group or a relative, but doing so takes the above questions that could be asked after the big bad is gone and sets them right after the attack, and takes the urgency out of the situation. cause if you can just universe hop then it all becomes background noise to interpersonal dramatics.
@@FeatherVoid oh no big text. not gonna read all that I only asked cause I was being polite. I kid, I kid. The concept of combining magic with technology and then being forced to be in a world that focuses solely on technology is cool. And the irony of the non-magic world being (or at least described as) a hidden magical world. Also I like how the alternate self means that there can be multiple versions of the same person in one universe. The third paragraph reminds of Tolkien's Legendarium. Melkor/Morgoth was defeated but Sauron is still around and plagued the free peoples of Middle-Earth for arguably more time than Melkor himself, and perhaps even came closer to winning in some respects. Sauron was defeated but Saruman was still around thrashing the Shire. Saruman was defeated but there were still orcs, disgruntled kingdoms of men, who knows what other creatures and such which Aragorn and Eomer spent a large chunk of their life fighting in order to defend their lands and people. So yeah as you said technically you can defeat the big bad. But what stops someone else from becoming the next big bad? Though, I think if you build up the alternate self and their/her family as characters that could be worth investing in, I don't really think the audience would lose their investment because of multiverse shenanigans. Maybe the new characters from the main char's universe also have to be built up as characters first and until then the audience has no reason to be invested in these (to them) strangers. And if you think readers will go "ah, it's just a multiverse, nothing matters anyway", then... 1. they didn't watch everything, everywhere, all at once, as red said (though I did expect more of a core sci-fi story with interesting elements and questions raised since I was riding on Shadow Fight 3 hype, I still enjoyed it a lot) 2. it's fiction. multiverse or no, they don't matter anyway, not really. it is the intellectual interest that you invest in wanting to experience something fictional yet poignant made through the intellectual act of creation that makes fiction matter. so if they're looking excuses NOT to be invested, then, why are they even reading it? :haroldface: That's not to say that this can be used as an excuse "Oh you don't like my clonecest time travel love ramiel shape thing? You just WANT to not care, you're looking for excuses". It just means that if something is interesting, does it really matter what the stakes are or are not, what the scale is or is not, if the journey the main character goes through themselves is worthwhile to discover?
I feel you. I had the same issue with my own work, which I managed to mitigate by making it so that the setting is a one way trip. What I mean is the Multiverse DOES exist but you can't travel around it. The characters are from alternate universes sent into my story's setting but they can never return to their old world ever. Which... Hey, is a compromise lol
I think it would be hilarious to subvert this in a comedy where the character prevents every crossover incident by threatening their clones with an axe murder when they cross through.
Honestly I was feeling the same way about the umbrella academy until the end of the third season! SPOILERS but the fact that the characters are in the same boat; scared to get attached and trying to get back what they lost ties into the plot and their decisions
People who don't have faith in things they liked annoy me. Like you couldn't be that invested in it anyway if you're going "Ah, you mean all we've got to be invested in is the characters!?" Like yeah, what else!?
@futurestoryteller yeah I sort of get it. I think other things make it so it's a struggle to even be attached to the characters, but I don't think the umbrella academy takes anything away except the character's lives and motivations, not the viewers. The only thing I dislike about it is Lila because she makes the others feel less important, I have no issue with the universe stuff
After starting a rewatch, I must say “Chekhov’s Gatling Gun of Retcons” is my new way to refer to a multiverse’s introduction into an established fictional setting
The thing I enjoy about the multiverse concept is that it can be the ultimate tool for creative synthesis. You can have literally every and any genre or setting you can imagine and have them all collide and it doesn't break with the tone or setting because you established everything exists in one universe or another.
As a person who only recently watched Spectacular Spider-Man for the first time that little "We will always have Spectacular Spider-Man" quote really resonated with me, it is so good
Oddly, multiverses in the comics were rooted in NOT wanting to change things. The writers back in the 1950s and 2960s wanted to write stories with actual stakes yet needed to stay within the "everything returns to the status quo by the end of the story" mandate. Retconning canon came decades later.
I had never thought about that bit of irony before: That expanding into a multiverse can actually make the story feel smaller, because less of it matters.
I'm pretty sure that's why Rick from Rick and Morty is so messed up. He travels a multiverse, and what he's taken away from it is that nothing matters.
This is why I think everything everywhere all at once is the best multiverse movie, because it includes the themes of nihilism prompted by multiverses
@@tellmeaboutyourgame314 it started fine in season 1 and 2 when it was clearly character focused but after the memory erasure episode in season 3 any good will I had evaporated as it confirmed nothing matters and Rick is a god
It is very similar to one of Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic - that one thing explored in depth is more interesting than an entire universe explored at surface level.
Multiverses and World ending threats have a tendency to do that.
Blue saying "Who's the Boob window?" just sounds like some new hero asking a veteran one about Power Girl, and I find it hilarious.
1:26:14 is the timestamp!
I can picture Blue Beetle whispering this to Captain Marvel/ Shazam/ whatever the fuck hits name is now
I think he said "which has the boob window"
@@VashdaCrash "which one's the boob window?"
@@alexandercandicedad1355 or malik white/thunderbolt to shazam for that matter
In the context of "writing yourself into a corner", multiverse introduction can tear down the walls that previously held you, but if you don't act carefully those missing walls may cause your roof to cave in
Walls can be constricting, but there's only so much you can take away before a house stops being a house.
You don’t need to tear down the walls if you can fit through the window.
@@JustSomeNobody0 but a window is just for viewing, and hardly practical for much beyond telling you just how closed in you are.
@@Integer_Overload feels like we metaphor'd ourselves into a sandwich
Underrated comment
Multiverse is basically just what heros save once the Country, Planet, Galaxy and universe have already been thoroughly rescued.
The thing is they are only saving their multiverse the multiverse is to infinite to need saving completely
wait-- then what's after multiverse
are we going to discover that in the far future or do we do that in a different timeline
@@_Alleypaw_
Existence
Kinda existential but completely fitting along the thread of bigger thing to save
@@_Alleypaw_Unfortunately, there can be different types and scales of multiverse. There can be the small scale ones where it’s just your timeline and a timeline where a few events set it off course. There can be a full blown many worlds interpretation multiverse where all outcomes of different decisions and/or random events exist. There can be an infinite multiverse from the same singularity, where all different worlds that could exist under the laws of physics exist. There could be an infinite multiverse of different singularities, where all mathematically viable sets of laws of physics exist as different multiverses. There can be a multi-multiverse, multi-multi-multiverse, etc. where the author just finds some contrived way to say there are even bigger stacks of infinity (for instance, you can say every universe is a book in some infinite library, but the universe that library is in is also a book in the library of a higher order universe or you can say the multiverse is comprised of infinite universes next to each other on a 5th dimension, but there’s also a 6th dimension with parallel multiverses). There can be extra-multiversal planes, often places where gods that preside over the entire multiverse from outside of it live.
There can be threats to history, where not only does a threat mean the end of the multiverse, but it means the multiverse never began in the first place.
Basically, there’s infinite opportunity for authors to say “yeah the stakes are totally higher” even though they’re all functionally the exact same to an audience.
@@_Alleypaw_ Megaverse.
I'm not kidding. This is what the Transformers wiki uses to refer to the entire Transformers multiverse + every multiverse belonging to franchises that have crossed over with it. From there, it's the Omniverse that encompasses literally everything.
As a huge fan of the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic series from DC, I 1000% approve of this diatribe.
Didn’t expect to see you here
Love your map videos
it's emperor in blue and red! YOO!
I swear youtube is getting smaller. All of my favorite creators know each other!
It's actually been quite cool to see all of the collaboration and crossovers in the history nerd sphere as of late
Tigerstar... I hated the Crisis. It was a great story but it screwed everything up.
Few things can match the kindered spirit energy of Red saying, "40 slide slide-show" and Blue replying "Yes. YES!!!"
Can someone please draw the Sickos guy except it's Blue?
On Wandavision and the Multiverse of Madness: I feel really bad for everyone who went to see Multiverse of Madness and expected Wanda's character to make sense...but the thing is, when my Dad and I finished watching the finale of Wandavision, the FIRST THING WE DID was turn to each other and say "they're setting up for Wanda to be a villain in the next movie/show, while still being sympathetic in this one." And so when we went to see Multiverse of Madness, it just confirmed our worst fears.
I really think that's the only way one can possibly make sense of the heel-turn in writing that happens in the Wandavision finale. Up until that point, everything is slow, subtle, artistically rendered, narrative which is clearly setting up for an actual Wanda redemption arc where she faces the terrible crimes she committed out of grief and makes restitution for it...and then suddenly Agatha Harkness shows up, and everyone's like "Quick Wanda! You have to beat up Agatha Harkness, who is clearly the One True Villain here that's responsible for everything bad, and then fly off into the sunset without thinking too hard about all the crimes you just committed!" It gave me and my Dad the very distinct vibe of "the writers had a particular story they wanted to tell, but then the studio had certain requirements for the ending that didn't fit."
It's scary how accurate this is. Lol
Only difference for my experience is that me, my brother, and sis were watching together and all basically agreed and Imediatly knew exactly that.
I thought the last 2 episodes of Wandavision were a trainwreck when I first saw them, and this comment made me realize that, not only did they have to shoot during the pandemic, but they probably rewrote it at the last second to make Wanda less of the villain because it tested badly or something. And suddenly the continuity stopped making sense lol
Personally I don't like either Wandavision or multiverse of madness...it feels like the universe (writers) choosing favorites. Picking this one girl to have all the bad things happen. And it stops being fun. I stopped watching gotham for similar reasons. There's only so many ways/times the whole world can shit on someone and have it be interesting.
So you think _WandaVision_ was originally supposed to end with Wanda actually being the villain? Because that would make more sense both for that story and for leading into MOM.
All I know is the moment the show started jabbing at SWORD as being the "bad guy" here I noped out. The agent guy being slightly rude to a woman in a meeting doesn't make Wanda the good guy.
@@samwallaceart288 Not exactly - more like an antihero, I guess. What I'm assuming the higher-ups wanted out of the show was a Wanda who people could cheer for for as long as the show lasted, but then boo her when she showed up in MOM doing evil stuff. Which, technically, is what they got! ...Eventually. Thanks entirely to the last two, hastily-rewritten episodes.
And yeah, the lengths they had to go to in order for SWORD and Agatha look worse than Wanda were pretty hilarious.
"im not happy and positive because im stupid, im happy and positive because of survival" kind of hits deeper then i thought.
Then you will LOVE that movie.
Wow. ... Well, damn alright.
A decade or so ago a coworker asked me why I'm always smiling singing and telling jokes at work despite all the sadness in the world. I pretty much told him it was because of the sadness. You can't beat the darkness via submission to it.
My joy is 100% a defense mechanism and this movie was so validating to me.
It's such a true statement.
I think this is actually one of the reasons people (me) enjoy fanfiction so much. It's a bunch of mini multiverses that have little to no effect on each other, so you can have the same story told in slightly different ways by different authors, and have your favorites for each one.
Second "drafts" of stories really have a lot of potential since what worked in the story can be refined and what didn't can be taken out. Stuff like team four star's abridged series really shows the value of it. Overall I think multiverses just drag stories down. It really eliminates the sense of reality stories have to establish for the audience to stay invested. I find most of the multiverse stories work in spite of that plot point not because of it.
Also, one of the most heartwarming parts of No Way Home was Molina's Octavius remarking, "You're all grown up" to Tobey's Peter. Like. I actually got choked up because Ock's fate in 2 was genuinely tragic, especially as he could have been the kind of role model Peter so desperately needed after Uncle Ben's death.
The you play Spiderman ps4 and cry all over again at that beautiful tragedy
“You were my hero!”
@@Betrix5060 "You were everything I wanted to be!"
They knew each other for all of 48hrs (at best) before Ock went mad. Having a "You're all grown up :') " moment would've made more sense & been more impactful had it come from a freshly sane Norman Osborn
@@famousthaneus9810 Norman knew Peter no longer though.
I think what really made a difference for Everything Everywhere All At Once was that they weren’t introducing the multiverse to an established canon. They set out to make a multiverse story from the start, that would begin and end with one film. So the multiverse serves an allegorical purpose to the story, rather than a meta one.
Every different version of a character feels like a different facet of their personality. They all teach Evelyn something new about herself or the people around her. So no matter how crazy and different some of the universes can be, there’s still some level of consistency between them you can latch onto. Evelyn and Joy’s first talk in the parking lot, versus their last, is what made me realize this.
You could honestly ignore all of the multiverse stuff of the moment and still reach the same conclusion. It's just that the multiverse helps communicate really big and subtextual things like how bad Joy's depression really is or just how important Waymond's kindness is
@@shebjess Exactly. At its heart the story is about mending a broken family, and the multiverse exists in service of that story.
The Multiverse is usually used as a setting in most stories, like "Meanwhile, in another universe". But in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it's more used as a plot device to contextualise the main family conflict.
I think this gets to the heart of what is actually being described. This isn't a problem about multiverses, it's about how they are used in narrative structure. Long ongoing narratives and stories that aren't designed around the concept are where these things happen.
EEAAO works as it's a stand alone piece. Umbrella Academy mostly works (as in it generally doesn't cause the observed problems) as it is the deliberate design of the story structure which the effects of the other realities has on the characters and their relationships is what matters. Dr Who (if you consider it in this bag) is an example of a long form show that uses this multiverse ideas regularly without it really hurting the show.
Also, Days of Future Past technically fails as Xmen are a part of/coming into the MCU. The movie is good, but it still fits the criticism of "you may have done it well, but later writers might not".
I have a copy of that movie. Should i watch it?
The SCP Wiki is an interesting case because there was never an adherence to an established canon, so different co-existing timelines and world resets just sort of happen.
A lot of SCP material also points to the existence of a literal, metaphysical fourth wall and I don’t really know if I think it’s pretty neat or lame as hell
@@DannyDog27 This is a certified Pataphysics moment
@@DannyDog27 I think it’s a realisation that what’s real here could be a story somewhere else, no matter how boring.
But also yes, a lot of people think it’s funny and so original to make the monster aware it’s in a story (“I see you, reader” or some spooky words) or try to escape the SCP world(s) and enter ours or something. It’s sometimes done well enough, and other times I’m amazed this SCP was allowed to be put into the final listing because it’s just a meta-reference without saying anything or any original spin.
@@DannyDog27 Both!
Depending entirely on which piece of SCP "lore" you ascribe to, the entirety of the universe/multiverse resets on a near daily basis with all the contrivance of the company coffee maker acting up and needing that one employee to smack it just right...
Or
Not. It doesn't happen. Or it does, and has all the drama and shit to be expected.. its all very "Who's line is it" in that it all doesn't really matter.
"Once you introduce a multiverse, there's no way to put it back."
The "It was all a dream" cliche: Allow me to introduce myself.
@Just Vibing agreed
Crisis on infinite earths, would like to introduce itself
@@themilkman5004 didn’t the multiverse come back though in a later crisis? I kinda forgor.
@@Mointuspointus isn't that what this diatribe literally talked about? Lmao
Or have all the timelines be canonically separate and internally consistent with any crossovers being collected into a universe of their own?
Man, any time a story analyst starts talking about "Everything Everywhere All At Once" they inevitably start revealing the deepest core of their personal philosophy.
It's an interesting effect.
One of those pieces of media where your critique is far too telling.
Please explain
Story analysts? Like who?
elaborate
explain further pls
Always fun to see how these Diatribes always end up having a "caring is cool actually" moment.
But it's shallow. What do caring and cool mean and why do they mean that? Different people have different definitions of both. Too much media and commentary on media doesn't interrogate the unspoken assumptions they are based on. Too many people are unknowingly tautological in their beliefs, which granted there must be a base set, premises, which serve as the foundation for everything else, but oftentimes people just treat everything as a premise, which is literally shallow in the sense that there is no structure underneath.
@@josecarlosmoreno9731 this is a joke right? I want to say “yes”, but I am not certain. The internet is chock full of pseudo intellectual types, so my expectations are always pretty low
Nah, it’s hard to work towards caring and making a better future but it’s hardly shallow looking at a messed up place and still choosing to believe in it. An yway love wins
@@josecarlosmoreno9731 well if you want a clearer idea of what is meant here.
I specifically am talking about "caring is Cool" as:
"it is generally worthwhile and healthy to invest genuine emotion into art".
This being a counterargument to the Idea that it is somehow more mature to separate yourself from media, with a layer of irony and sarcasm.
Edit: this also applies to people.
As they were talking about EEAAO, particularly the whole "They _all_ matter" part, my mind flashed to...I think it was "Satirizing Superman" where they talked about the episode where Superman is trapped in the dream where Kal-El is a farmer on Krypton. The people in that universe, short-lived and small-scale as it was, mattered because they were people for however long they existed. And Superman knew that, which is why he took the time to comfort his son while the universe imploded around them.
I love that blue Brings up the city vs world conflict. It's litteraly just the quote of "10 deaths is a tragedy, 10000 deaths is a statistic."
The quote goes "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." tho there is no evidence that Stalin ever said that.
@@sathrielsatanson666 yea,it was said by a german newspaper satire writer
I like how JoJo handles multiverses, by not handling it at all lmao. Just two separate stories that never interact (+D4C but it's only capable of accessing adjacent universes anyway)
I mean I guess they had THAT alternate Diego right at the end (+the detail that, since Jesus only exists in the home universe, the adjacent universes are looking for diamonds) but otherwise yeah lol
Me and my friend hated it, because they destroyed everything we cared to restart with steel ball run and I can't imagine any good reason to it
@@apollyon1311 Araki probably felt he'd covered all the ground he was interested in covering with Jotaro and that specific family - much like when he abandoned Hamon I personally trust him enough to go along with whatever new ideas he's exploring
@@AB-ee2rg he gave a canon reason for abandoning Hamon in Stardust Crusaders, which is actually a pretty decent nod to it as well.
@@apollyon1311 it's not destroyed tho. The canon Rohan spinoff manga has stories that take place after that, showing that Empolio killing Pucci did also restore the old world. Though Jotaro and the gang are still dead, so...
Can we appreciate the fact that Red said "they dodged every single LANDMINE" while showing footage of Quicksilver dodging bullets in DOFP?! That's an A+ visual gag.
I feel like so many of Multiverse of Madness’ problems could’ve been solved if Wanda was an ally instead of an enemy. Multiverse of Madness already had this subtheme of Doctor strange being the biggest threat to any given universe, and they even had an evil Doctor Strange bossfight. The problem is that these elements are sidelined because they have to make room for Wanda being the Villain. If they made Wanda an ally and Evil Strange the main villain, they could then hone in more on the “Strange is a threat” theme, which would’ve been an interesting point of development for his character specifically because he was so irresponsible in No Way Home, retroactively improving his character in that movie.
yeah, not really, because at the end of No Way Home, Strange's lesson is that theres always another way
Strange in his 1st movie, Infinity War and Endgame is always puppeteering, deciding who lives and who dies, as he says "in the big scheme of the multiverse you're dead is nothing" it doesn't matter if you are Sandman, Natasha or Iron-Man, they could die for the greater good, that's why America Chavez ask him, How can I trust you, if you have betrayed me before?
Thanks to Peter and his sacrifice, now he knows that he can become a hero and not just a time-keeper, that's why he decides to trust in America, instead of killing her, as Defender Strange had planned. What makes "our Strange" different is that he decides to protect people, become a hero that take risks instead of chosing "the logical option" and then close his cycle with Christine.
Oh have an entity thats really powerful actually poses her and wanda occationally comes through or that entity does corrupt her desire and she gets more and more controlled, and yeah at the end chavez doe reach to her, to get her to gt that entity out and wanda doe the most part banishing that entity again. Making wanda being partly controlled, would hav allowed her to be evil, show ho she regressed by that more and more controlle and manipulated, and redeem herself by fighting an eldrich entity and whatever she does, make up for the harm and take reponsibility, even i h wa controlled.
An chave, could actually have a point in doing hat she did. hav her snap out and fight that eldrich demon thingy possing her an winning. The movi being about saving anda, would be better if he actually was posessed and she corrupted, by someone else. .
THIS!
Sure, if they needed to, they could kill her off at the end of the movie, but making her a villain sucked.
What took me out of the movie was when they mentioned the Darkhold, my mind went to the first time I saw it used, which was in Agents of Shield, where it was taken to Hell by Ghost Rider.
Then apparently the Marvel show Runaways dredged it up somehow, and a Morgan le Fay got ahold of it but ended up banished from Earth in the Dark Dimension?
-
But without explanation, Wanda gets it from Agatha in Wandavision?
Or maybe have an evil wanda from a different universe? Our wanda could fight her at the end and if she absolutely has to die to bring in mutant wanda. Then make it the new wanda have to live in her formers shadow? Identity crisis? Her back story could be similar just with mutant powers as the foundation.
@@twobitwackjob the issue with adding an evil Wanda is that it doesn’t add anything to Strange’s character for the movie, and this is supposed to be his movie - having the main antagonist being Sinister Strange highlights the lessons our Strange has learned since his debut and the differences they create to Stranges in other universes. More importantly, Strange being the villain and Strange being the “single greatest threat to any universe” is already a theme the movie uses, it just sidelined those themes to make room for Wanda being the villain. So if you were to add another Wanda, you would have to deal with those issues separately.
I’m absolutely dying over “don’t change the sails”. ⛵️
That’s like saying don’t change the tires! That is the single most changed element on the boat!
Same! And different sails have different purposes. Even a small boat may have multiple sails, and you'll often only use some of them at least for part of the day.
@@samanthakennedy121 Though AFAIK, the other sails are still up there. AFAIK, sailors don't take down the square sails and then put up lanteen sails on the same masts.
@@timothymclean true, although sails do wear out faster than any other part of the boat.
@@timothymclean. Depends on the rig.
I actually went to see Multiverse of Madness in theaters because I thought Wandavision was interesting and was hoping they'd continue doing interesting things with her. And then when weeks later I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once in my living room I felt the most intense regret of my life at having not seen it in theaters for the first time.
I got to see it in a theater where I was the only person, and I was so glad, because I cried like a baby.
It was a real experience seeing it blind and in a theater, I don't think any words can do it justice. I was overwhelmed for a solid two days. People are gonna be talking about it for years.
Yeah, my dad and I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once in theaters because I had insisted, and I am so glad that I did. It was a great bonding experience, since our relationship was on shaky ground.
Best cinema experience for me in a while.
I really liked Wandavision so I thought about going to see Multiverse of Madness. And then I watched a review of it and they talked about how they treated Wanda, and I decided that I will stay on Wandavision as for how Wanda was in the MCU XD
The point about the Ship of Theseus hits hard for me. I really don’t like when writers don’t take their own continuity seriously, because it breaks my immersion and makes it hard to trust the writer’s ability.
I hear people say “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to consider it canon”. And I hate that mindset because _I’m not the writer._ It’s not my job to do the heavy lifting of making a story make sense.
What about headcanons? Like I've heard people headcanon Tom Holland's spider man as trans because of a lot of casual comments in the film and certain moments, to those people that makes the movie incredibly more interesting and adds a lot to the character's sacrifices and struggles even though it clearly wasn't intended
As someone who writes as a hobby I hate that mindset even more. From my perspective I am taking my readers on a journey and if I constantly need to tell them to disregard a part of that journey, then I am doing a very, very poor job.
Now I will say that how critical I am of continuity can depend heavily on the tone set by the work. For instance I am not gonna give an action showpiece like most of Plantinum Games games the same level of scrutiny as the Witcher, but that is all down to the fact that most of Platinum Games stuff establish early on that they are priotizing spectacle over logic.
@@balmung7599 thanks for responding, I hadn't considered that, I thought about them in a very isolated fashion and didn't consider their larger impact, I see now that an audience can't simply pick and choose what is and isn't canon most of the time and that adding or subtracting canon both have problematic aspects
Btw could you explain the problems with RWBY more indepth? I've heard a lot about the series but never watched it
@@airplanes_aren.t_real People headcanon spider man as _what?_
The more you know ig
I didn’t realize this comment got so much attention. I pretty much agree with all of what you guys said.
I have nothing against headcannons. Fan fictions are cool, but those are the creations of the fans and not the original author.
“I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself.”
Red… you have no idea how hard that hit me and altered my world view, and I’m plastering it to my wall and bringing that line to my next therapy session. Holy crap. Thank you.
Yeah, I've wanted to make jokes about the show called "overly sarcastic productions" being one of the biggest proponents for the importance of caring in my life for _ages_
It's an amazing statement and the only reason it didn't hit as hard for me is because it's very similar to some equally-profound advice a character is given in Babylon 5, that all of us are the Universe trying to understand itself. So my reaction was mostly "YES! Red *gets* it!"
And, quite frankly, I'm glad that her *getting* the essence of that message and relaying it here, wherever she found it herself, helped you the same way Delenn's words helped me back when I watched B5.
It reminds me a bit of the Minecraft End poem
Just pseudo-scientific nonsense. If you understand the 'hard-problem' of philosophy, you'd realize that materialism is not fundamental. That means you are not a way for the universe to know itself. No; instead, the universe is an emergent phenomena stemming from consciousness itself
People claiming consciousness emerges from neurons firing are no conscious. Neurons firing cannot produce the subjective experience you have of literally seeing memories in your mind's eye, or hearing sounds, or smelling or tasting.
I can look at your brain activity forever and never be able to deduce, from first principle's, what you are actually experiencing. Hence, there is an obvious non-material component. The only conclusion one could make is that consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world
@@paxcatkin Same
This whole thing reminds me why I love fanfiction so much. I get to follow my favorite characters through new situations, explore different writers' interpretations and preferences, and watch my two favorite characters fall in love and be adorable over and over and over again.
Crossover is my most favourite tags when it comes to fanfiction, getting to see how a character/ group/ faction would deal with a character/ force/ world from another universe is fun to read. But I would like to see more variety instead of stories that are just isekai shipfest or 1 force curbstomping the other.
This makes me think about a very meta AU I really liked wherein first the author wrote a canon divergence AU; and then in the sequel all of the characters in that AU each ended up getting briefly dispersed into different alternate timelines, and the protagonist ended up visiting a very troubled point in the original canon (the events of which the original AU subverted for this version of our character). She interacts with the original canon versions (let's call them pair!A) of herself and her love interest (let's call them pair!B), urging them to think more critically about their very unfun situation, then goes home and her story continues. And then the author wrote a separate story picking up from the point where she left from the perspective of pair!A, who thanks to their interactions with the protagonist of the previous story, are fundamentally changed and cannot continue on their previous course, and instead go on in a new and much improved direction, effectively becoming pair!C.
This. I have so many things I want to see my favorite characters go through without making it canon or permanent, so fanfic is the best way to see those what ifs and maybes happen in a few thousand words or more
@@wantstowatch anytime someone uses the acronym AU I just get flash backs to when I tried to keep up with every Undertale AU
@deathrex9760 I'm also a huge Fanfiction fan, mostly Harry Potter but I dip my toe in Eragon and Star Wars too.
I despise most crossovers. But I have read a few fantastic Harry Potter in the Marvel universe ones, a couple of brilliant HP/Supernatural ones, and one surprisingly good HP/Transformers one.
I usually only like crossovers if they could believably take place within the same universe, or where multiverse travel is established like in Marvel now.
I'd say 95% or more of the thousands of fanfics I've read since I started around 2007 sort of time aren't crossovers. Crossovers just don't scratch an itch for me.
The scene where Garfield's Spidey gets to save MJ and then starts to tear up will always hit me right in the feels. Andrew Garfield is such a tremendously talented actor and the way he can communicate so much feeling with only a few words and a lot of physical/facial emoting is impressive.
bro i thought u were talking about garfield the cat for a sec
@@nwutSpider-Cat, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Cat 6 days a week
@@nwut same I was like what!! Where is Garfield spiderman from 😂
@@samt3412 Spider-cat, Spider-cat, does whatever a Spider-cat does 😄
I thought you meant the cat for a sec
okay, but i honestly LOVE how Jason Todd was brought back. the fact that this character, who's story was very realistic, who died in one of the most gruesome and realistic ways possible, was brought back because of super powered weirdness is just hilarious to me.
In the Under the Red Hood movie, he got brought back with the Lazarus Pits
It also works well thematically with Superboy-Prime's motivations, because his whole thing is "Superheroes are too dark and gruesome and morally gray nowadays. I want to go back to when everything was happy and saccharine!" And in the process he resurrects a purely good character who died in a story that emphasized that good doesn't always win the day, thereby saying that good DOES win in the end, and goodness CAN be pure and strong and it doesn't need nuance or caveats... only for that once very good boy to come back as The Red Hood and be an incredibly dark character who directly challenges Batman's ethical code. Even though they never interact, Superboy-Prime and Jason Todd have such a nice contrast going on, and you can really see what's going on in the minds of the writers when those arcs happened.
@@animeotaku307 yeah, Under the Red Hood re-connect it to make it more realistic and dark, fitting the nature of the story. Personally, I prefer the Superboy Prime explanation of the story.
@@normal6483 where did you get the idea Jason Todd was a purely good character?
He was introduced to the audience when he was stealing batmans tires and before he got crowbarred I think he even tried to kill a goon
@@NotAFakeName1 I suppose he's less "purely good" and more "truly good." Before he was brought back, Jason Todd and his parents crimes were all portrayed as sympathetic symptoms of poverty perpetuated by people who are good at heart but compelled by circumstances. And the "killing a goon" thing wasn't canon, rather it was left ambiguous because it wasn't meant to be a smear on Jason's ethics but a smear on Batman's *trust* in Jason. The point was that Batman wasn't certain whether he could trust Jason, and that distrust was pushing Jason away. The writers were driving a wedge between them to lead up to the arc where Jason's bio mom was finally revealed, to create tension and uncertainty about where their partnership would ultimately go.
Then some guy robocalled a fan poll, and we all know how that ended.
I really like what red said to summarize "existence" at the end... "I am the instrument through which the universe cares about itself." It's delivered like a throw away line but it really hit me in a way I can't quite put in words. It resonated with me
A more sober, post-edit Red may have emphasized that line more.
Lines like that ping your perspective. This, imo, is one of the things multiverses in story are supposed to do. probably why everything everywhere all at once is sung with praise where dr. strange gets less strange love. We already had portals in the mcu. star shaped portals really didn't hit me with a 'huh'.
Not mentioned in above is Rick and Morty. The gag of even one's closest friends and family being throwaway plot fodder due to the 'flattening of importance' factor of multiverse is used liberally and frequently for comic effect, but is also checked. Rick, the most prolific abuser, also abuses his OWN multitude the most and suffers the most for his embracing of his status as plot fodder importance. He uses himself and is in turn used. My 'huh' here was a bit slower to develop but it had a similar effect of pinging my perspective.
You should read Camus.
Jeez, Chekhov's really having a time! He starts with just a gun, then he gets a seafood dinner (Video: Dragon Ball: Super Saiyan (A Prophecy Done Right) - Detail Diatribe), and now a *Gatling gun of retcons*
1:28:00 and then even a Railgun!
I'm a huge Umbrella Academy fan. But I do have to agree. The time travel aspect of the story does mean that the relationships and actions of the heroes in those timelines only matter for the characters themselves, they don't actually make an impact on their world other than rewriting and deleting them by the end of each season.
Umbrella Academy is a show that primarily focuses on its characters, their relationships with each other, their trauma, their shenanigans, their banter, their wants, and their needs. It's a show in which if you don't like or get invested in the characters, you won't like the show no matter how nice you might find the aesthetic to be. It's not a show made for you to get invested in its world, it's a show made for you to get invested in its characters.
Those relationships the characters had? Those do matter, but only to the characters. Alison in season 1 has a daughter, and in season 2 she falls in love and gets married. By the end of season 2 she has lost both of them because of the time travel shenanigans and the universal reset they always do after each season. So, in season 3, that impact of losing her husband and daughter and not being able to find a way to get them back? That's her primary motivation and what drives her whole story. So, the relationships and actions taken in the deleted timelines do matter, but not for the world, they only impact the characters themselves, which again, if you aren't invested in them, yeah, you are not going to like the show, I think that's completely fair.
I'm mainly interested in checking out the comics and I'm curious if the problems laid out in regards to the show are in any way an accurate reflection of the source material. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if the show mainly did its own thing that sucked.
Alison by season 3 made me hate her so much that I stopped watching the show entirely because of it. She speedran going from one of my favorites to my least favorite almost instantly, ESPECIALLY when she mind-control sexually assaults her own stepbrother because reasons?
Also i hate that they got rid of Hazel and Cha-Cha they were one of the best parts of the whole show
Also the dead brother turning out to be an asshole really got old after like the first 5 minutes of the gag
I think I liked some of the things that show *could* do... I was waiting for character development, exploration and expirimentation with their powers, I wanted to see these massive assholes learn and grow and come together over their terrible youth and neglectful (but actually loving...!?) father.
But at the end of season 2 I realized they would probably never get there. The characters were walking in circles around their happy ending because of the hand of the author, and it was very much visible.
I feel like they will just continue retconning the entire premise of the show every season finale until they don't get a next season anymore.
Haven't watched season 3. Probably won't unless some main character has actually grown as a person by the end of the season. Please tell me if that's the case.
@@hollycardinal5294 Thank you for calling out the SA. I feel like the show absolutely failed to address how inexcusable that was. 🤮
@@lucyisfragile They do. In season 3 you can really see the improvement and character development of most of the characters, some more than others in both their story arcs and their emotional states. They also have grown way closer as a family and while they still argue a lot they are generally way more supportive and loving to each other. The main exception is Alison because as the character who has suffered the most loss due to the time travel, her story arc went on a villainous transformation.
Season 4 has already been confirmed as the final season by the creator’s own choice. So, the story will have a proper ending somewhere next year.
Edit: As for the superpower thing. Season 3 does experiements with the superpowers. But overall, a major criticism of the show in general is that for a superhero story, there is very little superhero stuff. It’s primarily a scifi show.
As someone who though the Andrew Garfield movies were merely OK, watching Andrew-Spiderman save MJ caused me to legitimately cry in the theaters, and again when I re-watched the movie this summer. And I think Andrew Garfield nailed the emotions in that scene.
I didn't watch the second Garfield Spider-Man till after I saw NWH and yup, boy still pulled off that emotional "ooomph".
Andrew Garfield is such a good actor that people consistently underestimate
Ie. Parker 3.
Me and my brother watched the Amazing Spider-Man movies together since he's more of a Spidey nerd than me and we both had a lot of good to say about them. I think they're more of a mixed bag than the impression their reputation gives. That Spider-Man put a lot of feeling into the more personal parts of the movies. I love when he's trying to hide an injury from Aunt May and she's angry and scared at the same time. The pain he felt got almost suffocating. His relationship with Gwen felt way more interesting too. It felt like the good parts were too good for a movie and needed a the length of a show to fit them in with the amount of plot they wanted.
@@nickgrout2502 Not enough people have seen Hacksaw Ridge.
I've always felt that two maxims can be drawn from the multiverse concept. If all possible experiences, events and people can exist somewhere in the fabric of reality then either: Nothing matters, as everything that matters as already happened, is happening or will happen. OR that despite how minuscule something might be, how seemingly insignificant or mundane, Everything Matters.
I've always preferred the second one.
Hell yeah, nothing is useless. Everything is useful towards something.
The second option is why I love Everything Everywhere all at once
To me such a things is horror fuel. Everything that could quite possible go wrong is going wrong somewhere. And I mean anything. If a terrorist decided they wanted to attack this place instead of that one, well now they're going to attack that one instead. Of course, that's only if you consider the glass half empty portion. It could be that by doing su h a thing he ends up failing where he could have succeeded, or even causing a domino of an erasure of an entire terrorist group, or solving world hunger for all we know.
The former only becomes comforting if you add the idea that if nothing *inherently* matters, what ultimately has value is what you assign value to.
It has been the wedge I have used to try to separate myself from the fatalism of my edgelord 20s.
In a material sense nothing matters, life is driven in a direction, and we ourselves get to choose and define what matters and what does not, all possibilities and choices exsisting does not mean, or invalidate our usefull ness or life struggles,
The "benevolent tyranny" bit reminded me of an elseworld story where Gotham city is ruled by the batmen descendents, who have at this point a thing where a criminal (or rebel or just anyone really) is turned into a joker for them to chase for an annual joker chase. But the latest joker manages to end their tyranny and become the new truer to form Batman, who actually protect the innocent. (The elseworld stories can get soo good! "For the want of a nail" is an especially good one, that actually plays with turning silly silverage stuff into pretty dark consequences. I got into it because of a catwoman fanfic referring to it as the "nail-verse" in its multiverse crisis, because is it really a long running DC fanfic if it doesn't also have a multiverse event?)
You can't just say this and not give us a name
I’m not a fan of dc as it seems oddly more rigid than marvel with its status quo, but my god do I love its elseworlds more as a result
@@CatNigga Batman: I, Joker (1998)
@@AristeneSilvaPrincipal Thanks
@@taekinuru2 Has marvel ever done a reset?
Oh thank god, they brought up Everything, Everywhere All at Once as one of the examples of a good multiverse movie. And it's beautiful. It's so, so insanely good. Just from *the plot summary*, the moment Red got to Weimond's speech my eyes started watering. It's easily the best movie I've seen in the last 5 years. Maybe 10. Definitely worthy of a Detail Diatribe.
The point of EEAAO is that no matter the universe evelyn is evelyn and joy is joy and therefore the multiverse is a distraction and they have to live in the now w each other.
The best way to bring up a multiverse is to make it very clear that it is just a one time thing, commit to it and then block any way for it to happen again.
LONG LIVE EEAAO
@@TheSUGA1202 Eh. EEAAO is good but not enough for me to say "this is as great as everyone says". A solid 7/10 in my book. I still kinda have to give it minus points for:
1) I cannot give the movie a higher score as it kinda feels like a more epic version of rick and morty's EP "Rixty minutes" (interdimensional cable's debut). and i think doom patrol's EP "Space patrol" kinda conveys what waymond's speech tried to say and better..... that or the flex mentallo's comic book.
Or gumball speech from amazing world of gumball's episode, The pest:"everyone is slightly unhappy, life has highs and lows, and for the record, for most people on the planet, life completely blows, so why make it worse by fightning? "
2) i feel they used the "boring but still creative" type of multiverse (like rick and morty does of "only experimenting universes where they existed" (only the "barren of life rock universe" being the exception)), mixed with the "multiverse is composed by all the different paths and actions you could take" type of multiverse (which with each passing day i realize that's the most common multiverse.... which is kinda like dc's hypertime concept)
seriously, not do the obvious universe where "joy is the mom, evelyn the daughter" ?
You would think evelyn stepping into the "sausage fingers universe" would be forshadowing of how "BOTH of them think they are actually experiencing everything.... but not really. there is still WAY MORE to do".
even jobu's line of "who knows what new discovery will make us feel more insignificant", would make you think it teases that but nope.
3) is kinda ironically funny how waymond is so relevant to the story, you would think they are setting up becky (joy's girlfriend) to be joy's equivalent of waymond..... and she is absolutely irrelevant to the story when you think about it.
4) so they set up that universe where evelyn has a blind but talented singer counterpart, and yet during the scene where she is making everyone's dreams come true, she isn't signging? not even once? you would think that would be a perfect moment to have the sappiest song ever being song while evelyn is just making everyone's dreams come true.
5) if you think about it, joy is also irrelevant in the story. as the story kinda prefers to just treat jobu as if she was joy but not really. not even a case of "she is communicating with joy" or "jobu immediately merges with any mental counterpart she possessed".
joy is more like a "multiversal ghost possessing multiple versions of herself at the same time at hyper speed" while the actual joy is kinda put "on standby" while jobu takes her body.
THIS is more obvious while she was focusing her attention on the others during the ratatouille reference implies jobu is just "possesing different variants of her at hyper speed", and not really "a multiversal hive mind" (evelyn does manages to do that trick at the end when controlling at least 6 versions of herself simultaneously minimum)
6) It kinda felt out of place that jobu had a "just let me live my life" reaction near the end to evelyn (when she is presenting alternate becky to alternate grandpa gong). I am like "you both have shown to be distant from each other (more like joy and evelyn). at what moment we started developing that plot line of evelyn being a beloved smother?"
EXTRA: for some reason, and this is more a nitpick of mine, i thought the movie would end with an evelyn eating the "everything bagel" , as in to show how, that thing only has as much value as you give it.
@@ianr.navahuber2195 lol. Tell me you haven't read Camus without telling me you haven't read Camus.
I’m just glad I’m in a timeline where I get to hear the two of you wax poetic on so many topics!
Still wish I was in the "joker but goofy is the mc" universe but this one is good too
What if you were in a time-line where you could hear them talk about all these topics but in song? 🤔
@@BrenoRanyere I mean, Red sings after videos so we’re already half way there!
Huzzah!
Now Imagining an OSP Timeheist spinoff where the channel never got created, so Red puts on a fake moustache and travels back in time to ask her teenage self what she learned in Greek class that day.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was legitimately one of the best movies I've seen. I walked away from that crying because I was so happy that things ended up the way they did.
I watched it as a teen with my mom and damn that movie just hit us hard
Well written, well acted, well directed. Easily the best film I've seen in a long time.
I always reccomend that movie telling people that whether they like the film or not, it's going to be one of the most unique movie experiences they will ever live. My favorite movie from last year and probably one of my faves of all time now, to be honest.
Yeah I saw it last month and it is legit one of my favourite movies of all time, even though I have only seen it once lol
Not to bring up Homestuck in 2022, but I recently read it for the first time while recovering from surgery and it was the first thing I thought of while watching this video. The metanarrative exists from the beginning with the fourth wall being an extremely literal thing, so when the story gets into multiverses and even breaking the structure through a character being able to transverse the webcomic itself, it doesn't feel as cheap because this has always been a story where alternate timelines happen (see: davesprite) and the fourth wall is thin (see: the reader and author existing as characters). Now, the comic has... other issues, but the multiverse (mostly) was never one of them for me.
It helps that the characters from the Doomed Timelines still have impacts on the story
I also love how there is one main timeline where everything matters but thats literally only because the main villain is the worst like he's canonically just the worst person to live and doomed timelines are tragic because of that
The "4th wall being literal" thing reminds me of _Fleabag_ S2 where for the first time she meets a guy who really understands her; and when she turns to the camera to talk to the audience like normal, the guy notices she tuned out and asks her "where she went just now", even as it goes on joining her in looking at the camera like "Hey, what's this going on?" and it makes her super uncomfortable that, for the first time, there's somebody who notices when she stops to talk to the audience
It basically takes all the high stakes and unstable foundation of high-disruption multiverses and has this working golden fix of "but the alpha timeline is THE timeline that matters"
Honestly the best and worst part of HS is my favorite part: just how much multiverse timeline and 4th wall fuckery there is.
It's almost impressive how steeply Homestuck fell off a cliff after the REALLY BIG retcon. Act 6 had a rocky start but improved to the point where it was *almost* as good as A5A2 by the time of [S] Game Over, and then was just...crap! Everything after was crap!
Chekhov's Gatling Gun of Retcon would be a fucking baller D&D quest item for a high-level party. Able to have always killed an entire group of people in an instant.
Able to kill 2d8 worth of people you point it at, but only if you've fought them before aquiring the Gatling Gun. By pointing it at them, they become dead at the last time you fought them, reconning their survival of that battle.
Same vibe as Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.
Only to be equaled to or beaten by Chekhov's Railgun, that can hit any enemy within line of sight, retconning their existence
@@joethesquatch9867 "Some legends claim it's never been fired, but in truth the legends are wildly inconsistent."
@@beardofknowledge3792 Oh that just sounds like it could destroy a campaign completely.
I introduced "multiverse" into my stories at one point for a very specific reason - I wanted there to be this one villain who was basically trapped in a reincarnation loop where he keeps getting reborn in different worlds as different people, but the trajectory of his life keeps going the same where he keeps being driven into being a villain. The hook was that although each character is a different person, the weight of having relived the same mistakes is this soul crushing nightmare that, thematically, was all about being stuck in a rut, believing that you can't ever change because you've just screwed up so many times.
And I just wanted to play with different versions of the character so that when said character would have moments where he remembers glimpses of past lives, he's actually referencing other stories he's been in. My idea was that the audience would actually feel the weight of his being trapped in an endless loop he can't escape from, so that I could cap it off with his last appearance being the one where he finally said, "You know what? No. I've done this all before, I know how this goes, I don't have to do it again. I don't have to be the bad guy just because I always have been."
And I just generaly ignored the multiverse in all other writings, with the exception of certain entities (the elder gods, who I almost never wrote about as more than a passing reference) and treated every story as having no continuity with the rest, because the overarching continuity just didn't matter in any other instance.
Dude, that sounds exactly like the plot of Kang the Conqueror from the comics. Which is a compliment lol
Good luck on building your multiverse!
@@elijahadkins6195 Never read the comics, so I don't know Kang. It was actually more inspired by Randal Flagg. I liked the aspect in The Stand where it was implied that he'd done work like this many times before in many different worlds, under many different names, but I wanted to give it a more tragic twist and actually use the weight of his appearances to add to the sense of hopelessness of the character.
Alas, it seems I'm one of those many failed writers who couldn't make it. Just burned myself out way too hard and have never been able to get back to it. So now, I'm just a guy who talks way too much about stuff I used to do when I was young and still had dreams.
@@cheezemonkeyeater in need of some words of support?
@@malaksafa4074 People give me lots, but it never seems to help. I have some problem motivating myself to focus, made worse by having trouble getting my medications consistently because pharmacies keep deciding not to carry it.
Sounds like an awesome story, man.
Hang in there, be tough. You will have the chance to tell your tale one day.
My personal favourite multiverse story was the one where Reed Richards finds out that an interdimensional 'council' of Reed Richardses exists and joins them in their work improve and save the multiverse, but then makes the choice of staying with his family rather than continue with the other Reeds, becoming more and more isolated from his humanity...
I need to hear more about this, could you elaborate?
@@Maxi25554 Not really. Just look up the "Interdimensional Council of Reeds".
Reed Richards did the council of Ricks before it was cool!
@@alexandercandicedad1355 it's almost like the council of Rick's was a reference
I agree, and actually would suggest this is only one situation where the FF have created what becomes a trope. They were always way out ahead.
"Loki" was my "oh wait none of this matters and in fact none of it ever mattered" moment for the MCU, so I just checked out entirely after it. Seeing how "multiverse of madness" played out in this video has really just reinforced this. 😂
This is also pretty much why I never had any interest in comics despite loving them "in theory", because there's no point to getting invested in anything because they'll just hit reset at random. You hit the nail on the head with liking adaptations pretty much perfectly! I'll definitely be checking out EEAAO.
@dalton russell All I know is, I started reading _New 52 #1_ because everyone swore it was "a good jumping-in point for new readers", and literally the first issue of Batman in this continuity A: has weirdass elseworlds versions of all the characters, and B: _STARTS IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORY I HAVE NO CONTEXT FOR_
That's the _opposite_ of a reset point
Has marvel hit the reset button? I don't think they have.
@dalton russell No. Marvel has had one multiverse since the 1960s.
@@tompatterson1548 the thing with the incursions and the multiverse ending and Doom using the infinity gauntlet to grab pieces of different universes to make a new world then the Fantastic 4 remaking the multiverse at the end
@@michaeldaniels642 As it was before though, right?
The third season of Umbrella Academy does go into how the main characters' actions have affected both the universe and themselves. The series is set up with an overarching plot that runs throughout but then each season has its own immediate issues to deal with. It's essentially a bunch of people who were raised by a sociopath trying to put out a house fire but they can't agree on which room to start with or how to do it because they have terrible communication and social skills due to said sociopath, so even more rooms keep catching on fire while they spend time arguing.
I agree, I actually really like Umbrella Academy since I see it as a group of people who were essentially abused and manipulated as children trying to overcome that trauma and learn to be better people with the help of their siblings. I agree that the retcons mean that No Universes Matter, but I wasn't invested in the universe in the first place, I was invested in the characters.
That being said, I can totally see how people wouldn't like that kind of show, it isn't for everyone.
Heh. Add in that one or more may have accidentally started the fire and one or more may not even know there is a fire while the others are arguing over it. Until they finally remember that "Oh, yeah, other people are involved in this" and decide to work together to fix the problem... a little too late to keep their problems from getting worse.
People arguing while a situation keep getting worse...
Not my thing, really.
Five is a very interesting character. They are all interesting. However, I could not stand this series for more than a few episodes for this reason.
Season 3 was just an absolute mess imo. I also hated what they did to Harlan and Allison
@@thunderheadcinema6743 Oof, yeah. The thing with Harlan was interesting but ended real bad. Also, a friend of mine pointed out that they technically got the grandfather paradox sort of wrong, though I can't go into detail without spoilers.
A great way to avoid the time travel problem is something Dresden Files did: the law of conservation of history. This is basically a reverse butterfly effect, where history actively truest to stop and/or minimize any sort of changes, and the more impactful it is. The bigger the change, the more resistance. So it’s sort of hard to just undo your mistakes, which combined with gods, angels, the wizard government, etc not liking people randomly messing with the time line, means it isn’t something that can just resolve everything.
Another great story that utilized this was 11/22/63 from Stephen King, it also made it so the time travel mechanism only goes between two specific points in time so the main character can't just go back and redo every mistake they made unless they also want to erase all the progress they've been making for the past few years.
@@saucevc8353 it's one of my favorite Stephen King story.
The way I handle it is with entropy. Not all timelines have the same potential, so some of them just vanish into oblivion, and others blend back into the main timeline. Think of many streams in a drainage area. Some trickle off into nothing, and some make it back to the water table.
I like Niven's Law of Time Travel - if it is possible to change history through time travel in a given universe, time travel will never be invented in that universe.
Conservation of history means erasing time travel is the simplest and least impactful way to conserve history.
Without conservation of history, constant history changes will proliferate until the only stable state is achieved, which is the state where time travel is never invented.
@@richardkenan2891 not really. The idea is that, if you push hard enough the bolder will move. It will just fight you the whole way, and the fallout will be limited.
It would probably be more like altering probably than actually rewriting the laws of physics and/or magic to prevent it. And it’s more about containing the ripple effect than preventing the change in the first place. Ie if you try to shoot hitler, he might make a miraculous recovery, or his death inspire a copy cat, but the universe wont solve the problem by making sure you got hit by a bus before going back in time.
Really happy to hear a full convo on this. The idea of the multiverse is a fascinating one from a storytelling perspective, but I've very rarely seen it utilized in a compelling way, surprisingly.
I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night after hearing you talk about it in this video and I now have a new favorite movie. When the movie ended, I just sat there with my thoughts for about an hour. It, seemingly effortlessly, communicates something I've been thinking about for a long time. In this day and age, it's easy to come to an understanding that nothing we do is all that meaningful. Every bit of progress can be ripped away. And yet we still try. Because regardless of if what we do has any cosmic significance, our connections to our fellow human beings do matter. In an uncaring universe that makes us feel insignificant and small, the innate human ability TO CARE and build ourselves and each other up proves that the universe is not, in fact, uncaring. Because we are part of the universe, and we can choose to care.
To further emphasize how people love side characters. Willrow Hood is a character from Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars) who is on screen for half a second.
Willrow Hood is a background character who runs down a hall with a literal ice cream maker as a prop. There is an entire fan base around this character. They dress up as the character and run throughout Star Wars conventions.
I agree it is hard to predict who fans will end up loving.
WHAT?! I Love that
There is also a whole sub community around TK-421, the stormtrooper who’s armor Luke steals in a New Hope. People have been dressing up as him for years. Then, Star Wars did a collection of short stories, one in which it was revealed TK-421 raced mouse droids and was in a gay relationship with a high ranking officer on the Death Star. Said officer is heavily speculated to be Tarkin.
@@lillyb2230That relationship seems doomed to fail if so lol
@@Novictus the trooper dies, so yeah
@@lillyb2230 another story in the same collection reveals that the trash compactor creature is
1: sophont
2: force sensitive
And 3: baptizes Luke in accordance with her religion
Id recommended 'the glup shitto iceberg' video if you like niche starwars characters
As a DCU fan from age 8, but also someone who grew up to study physics and philosophy, I had to re-train myself to be able to become immersed in the possibilities of fiction. I completely understand and empathize with fans who have trouble getting past incongruence; but I know that from my own perspective if I limited my fiction choices and enjoyment only to things that made sense, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of anything. Now that I’m older, it actually helps me relax to know that some of all this isn’t going to line up or might confuse me, because then I can actively make the choice to put “making sense” as a parameter aside and think about things like time skips and space portals as fun, rather than fundamental.
On a smaller scale, I had that problem. One of my hobbies is guns, and seeing fiction not understand things used to make me groan and take me out of it. Now its just funny to look out for. Check this one out: A cartridge is 4 components, the projectile (bullet), the casing, the propellant (gunpowder) and the primer (the thing that explodes on impact to ignite the propellant). 2 disappear on firing, and the casing is too thick to exit the barrel. Next time you see a slow-motion tracking shot of a bullet leaving a gun, see if its the projectile or the entire cartridge! Even Sniper Elite, a game about simulated sniping during a war, has trailers firing the whole cartridge out the barrel. It always amuses me seeing how often anime shows trigger discipline, while live-action hollywood movies don't. Or when shotguns are used for close-range, snipers constantly grazing, rifles never penetrating thin cover, pistols never missing... After a while its just funny.
14:35: Some of the best timeskips I've seen are the ones where the characters explicitly _don't_ change much. They get stuck in a rut, or dissociate from reality for plot reasons, or just settle down in a comfortable place at the end of their character arc. That makes the transition from point A to point B a _lot_ smoother.
I don't particularly like timeskips that change the character too much, but the ones that I don't mind, or even come to enjoy, are the ones that advance the characters strength, life or abilities without actually advancing the character.
Settling down types of time skip tend to work best at the end of a character arc (whether thats the last arc the character takes, or the setup to a new character arc), the advancement of strength and abilities type of timeskip tends to work best as an "oh no, the characters are not currently strong enough to pit against what I'm about to pit them against. Let's write a dramatic defeat and use that to convince the characters to train"
But timeskips tend to work best with characters that are relatively static.
Or, as in most shonen timeskips, it's just the characters training for an extended period of time while the villains are also in a position where they're not being active threats. They usually don't change all that much, and it's a great way to get the characters strong enough to fight the really strong guys.
And after our hero's resolved their incredibly intense and treacherous predicament they made good on that one time they said they'd take a good, long nap once this was over, did some training, had a few cool and fun but not particularly relevant adventures we might write sidestories for later and have otherwise been living relatively peaceful lives following the lessons they learnt, when one day the recieve a most unexpected visitor.
This is why DBZ has a timeskip every other arc without it being bad. Theres hardly any character arcs or plot elements in the first place, so it just makes sense to go "goku beat the bad guy, and then 5 years later another bad guy showed up." Thats the part ppl are there for.
I think Blue's explanation of "meal vs. cake" really highlighted why I enjoyed Endgame and No Way Home so much. Sure, they're far from being cinematic masterpieces. But they're full of so many fun character interactions and moments that we wouldn't have gotten without time travel and multiversal shenanigans, I at least was willing to overlook the flaws in the plot because I was just having so much fun.
Did not watch Doctor Strange MoM or Everything Everywhere, but the latter is on my to watch list, and the former I will watch when sufficiently inebriated
exactly lol. endgame is, from consistency and practicality, kind of a mess.
but hoooly hell it was a fun watch.
"I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself." I love this sentiment and it reminds me of one of my favorite monologues from D20 Fantasy High Freshman Year that Brennan made. Absolutely words to live by
"The first rule of existence is 'as above, so below'. People are fractal images of the universe. You are as we are. Bad things happen to good people because things happen all the time and it is up to people to determine whether they are bad or good. In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks, you mortal beings are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don't, then it doesn't."
"I care."
As you say "I care", your heart glows with incredible power, a deep red and pink and then purple expanding out into the void. You can feel warmth and happiness from your choice to care.
"If you care, then we care."
Fun fact:
When the Arrowverse finally decided to do their version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, once the event was done, they brought in the ACTUAL Marv Wolfman to cameo. I couldn't believe my eyes.
And he talks to Flash and Supergirl, tells them both they're his favorites. Which is funny when you remember he killed them off
@@chrisw2307 OMG I never made that connection. Oh WOW. Good call!
I loved the Arrowverse Crisis on Infinite Earths with zero irony. It is as dorky as anything else the CW DC had done, but a satisfying colnclusion to the story I’d been following since Oliver Queen was a Green, homicide-amenable ripoff of the Dark Knight Trilogy and *wonderful* love letter to all the DC that had come before… but I’d never caught that detail
Thanks for sharing that
I actually love the whole "one persons reality is another persons fiction" like in A Flash of Two Worlds. It's a really fun concept for me to think that every book I read is a window into another world.
That was what made me so interested in the Inkheart books so much when I was younger. At least the first one I remember really liking. 2 and 3 were a bit weird
Eagerly waiting to see how they milk it for Kingdom Hearts 4
The SCP Foundation has an entire category of this type of story, called Pataphysics. Might be interesting for you.
@@Isaac-hm6ih I will look into it! Thank you!
One extra note: I have the feeling there are also a lot of stories with the same issues as 'save the world', where the writer already had a 'save the world'-story and now needed a higher stake, so why not MULTIPLE worlds. But then that led to the major issue of 'why should we care about those other worlds we don't know', similar to the 'why should we care about the rest of the world, which we don't know'
"don't just save the world because Mary Sue lives there, save the worldS, because in this other one Mary Sue's rebellious (but not too much) purple hair streak is blue!"
I liked how Araki did his universal reset in JoJo's. It's a one time ability that came about through tremendous effort and planning. And it was foiled before it could complete it's objective. Now that "made in heaven" can't come back there won't be another reset.
Yeah and once he did that and felt like he gave a natural conclusion he just goes to another universe to tell a new story. No questions or dilemmas were raised just let's try this from a completely different approach.😂 And it worked that bastard made people to actually get invested in it
With the analysys she gave, I think Red would drop JoJo after SO because "he can find another way to reset if he wants and he showed that the Universe doesn't matter at all by resetting it".
It’s not even a reset, it’s just an alternate universe. Parallel, in a sense, because it shares many character names and such, but the actual events are entirely divorced from the Joestar vs Dio story from the part 1-6 universe.
It’s literally just a means for Araki to continue writing Jojo without having to indefinitely extend the generations. Like, imagine a part that takes place in 2050, how would he even confidently be able to do that?
Part 1-6 is a complete story. It has an ending, so it absolutely matters.
*coughs in D4C*
@@Hypersaiyanike we don't talk about D4C. At least until it's adapted
The section about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once made me realize how much similar thematic material there is in Night in the Woods. So much of what Mae had been going through is existentially fraught and the most important thing she does by the end of the game is throwing away her apathy. She embraces the pain of living, of caring, of connections, because there will be no meaningful joy without it.
"I get it. This won't stop until I die. But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... pretty amazing to be something, at least..."
'I believe in a universe that doesn't care and people that do."
NitW is so good.
YES!
As someone running a multiverse D&D campaign, I thank you greatly for this diatribe. This also spurred me to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is fantastic.
The canonical D&D Multiverse is a completely different beast than the ones in Marvel and DC. The D&D multiverse doesn't allow for timy whimy shenanigans, as every plane of existence is a completely different world. You won't find an alternate self of your Forgotten Realms character running around I Dragonlance. (Well not without some incredible coincidence or Devine intervention) and the outer planes and inner planes are so alien that they work by different laws of nature. D&D multiverse campaigns have more in common with star treck or The Devine Comedy than Comic Book multiverse stories.
I would love to play a campaign like that.
@@LostInNumbers In D&D there is the Mirror Dimension and the concept of multiversal echos but they are much less emphasized than the completely unique material planes. Part of my research is to make headcannons of all the different inter dimensional interactions in case my players stumble into an odd circumstance.
@@omexamorph To add some additional info: in D&D, the reason it is specifically "THE material plane" is the inner/outer planes are more just dream-stuff of the Astral plane (that's why there's the "astral projection" behavior of interacting with it). In the Astral plane, thoughts/concepts can gather together and sort of solidify into those non-material planes.
I'm relieved, because I felt bad not watching it, especially after hearing about these great performances, but that rundown tells me it is absolutely not made for people like me. It highlights and reinforces every single thing wrong with the current day and its attitudes. That only what you care about matters and you're incapable of caring about more than a small finite thing anyway. And that talk about a worldview that lets you care about things without the need for it to be prescribed, that's.. *dangerously* wrong thinking. Sorry dude you're not an agnostic anymore, that is full fedora territory.
A detail I love about Marvel and its relationship with the multiverse is that it all started because Alan Moore was just having a bit of fun. He and Dave Thorpe introduced the concept in Captain Britain in Marvel UK (at the time not considered canon to mainstream Marvel stories, or even released outside of the UK in some cases) where they decided that the character was part of the Captain Britain Corps, a force made up of the magical protectors of each universe's version of Britain and its ideals.
The story was written with a satirical bent, likely inspired by how Flash of Two Worlds ended up feeling like it lowered the tension of stories with the knowledge that other universes had other outcomes.
It dealt with Capt. Britain going to another Earth (Earth 238) where he fought a drawn-out battle with a reality-warping villain named Mad Jim Jaspers. That universe was ultimately destroyed in part due to Jasper's powers going out of control, but the punchline of all this was that Capt. Britain returned to his own reality (Earth-616) expecting to relax only to realize "Wait, every reality is the same only slightly different, which means there's a Mad Jim Jaspers here too!" Causing the plot to almost repeat itself, the past events having little impact.
This story was meant to just be a fun comic story mocking British plitics, Moore even used prior writer Dave Thorpe's idea of naming Jasper's original world Earth 616 because that was one of the translations of the biblical Number of the Beast. Moore used this idea for naming the mainline continuity Earth-616, thus giving the main storyline the demonic reference.
Moore unfortunately has had the bad luck of having his "wouldn't-it-be-funny?" ideas being used as the basis of much of Marvel and DC today; both companies taking bits of ephemera from his work (the different Lantern Corps in the case of DC) and stretching them out into these massive cosmologies that are taken deadly serious.
Moore got touched by Reverse-Apollo, cursed to have little throw away jokes be taken as gravely serious prophecies of how massive media companies should shape their narratives
I love Detail Diatribes, I love Multiverses, and I love any excuse for people to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once so this is right up my alley.
Honestly I think that's the one story I've ever seen that does something from the multiverse shenanigans. The important thing in that story is that it's there for thematic and story telling reasons. I'm sure this is brought up on the video, I was just scrolling comments and saw your comment. Such a good movie
EEAAO is a GREAT film on depression, meaning and nihilism.
My favorite thing about fiction multiverses is that they make _every fanfiction ever _*_written_* canon. And I think the girlies deserve that.
There are several points in the fanfiction multiverse where a mary sue dates Harry Styles. Man has a fanfiction harem and its hella surreal.
My Immortal is a canon part of the Harry Potter universe
@@merrittanimation7721 that's horrifying.
@@merrittanimation7721I rather have that than The Cursed Child
The concept of a fiction multiverse does not make fanfiction canon. Wtf are you even talking about? A multiverse doesn't mean everything that could've happen has happened.
This made me think why I like time loop stories and it’s probably because they are Character focused by necessity. One of my favourite’s spends a long time in the beginning with the main character alone in the loop and there is some amazing character development as he is forced to examine his relationships and grow as an individual. When he meets with the over looper it’s both super exciting and with fresh eyes. The characters really get the chance to shine throughout the narrative
Which story was it? I'm curious :D An amazing time loop story I read is called Mother of Learning, its set in a fantasy world undergoing its own version of the steam revolution and is just excellent in pretty much every way imaginable
is this by chance palm springs?!?
Groundhog day?
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time?
@@ViridianForests groundhog day
"I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself" is such a deep and raw line when you think about it and i want that plastered on everything merch related for all time
It's also in Fantasy High: "you are the instrument through which the universe cares"
The way the multiverse is handled these days I can't help but feel like they've gentrified the concept.
EDIT: With one remarkable exception (1:13:06)
I'd argue it peaked with Spider-Verse.
I know, the overuse of multiverse theory has made it a pest in media
I call it the MCU Effect.
I mean, I feel like it’s one of those concepts that is vague enough that it can’t ever REALLY get old, that would be like saying that “aliens” as a concept are getting old. There’s infinite ways to approach such a concept, so it’s never really gonna be a dry well.
But lately it feels so… overused, and in the most shallow way possible.
@@cartoonishidealism582 Like how zombies were a few years ago.
As someone who has read the entirety of “Omniscient Readers Viewpoint”(the novel because the Manhwa isn’t finished), I think it classifies as a very rare example of a All Worlds matter plot. This is because a core factor in the story is the idea that comparing two peoples or stories happiness or tragedy is stupid because we all have individual moments of relative happiness and sadness. Just because one tragedy includes more death and destruction, doesn’t make it more tragic than a small tragedy
Reading ORV made me wanna watch this video lol. You’re right when you say ORV has a unique take on the multiverse sine it encompasses both types described in the video. We didn’t get to see all 1865 timelines but the fact that they all lead up to the 1864th world line which ultimately results in the multiverse taking place is wild. For YJH he would become the protagonist KDJ knew and and for KDJ to lose himself a little every single jump.
ORV also did something interesting with its multiverse. They made it a time loop. Spoilers ahead.
Near the end of the novel, our main reader reads the first universe, where the main character was extremely confused about things. However, the reader quickly figures out, and starts helping the mc, eventually leading to the best outcome that the mc ever had, besides whatever events we readers had for them at the end of the story. Only when the MR offers to set the Mc on a path to figure out the truth, did he accepts the power to basically restart over in another universe, and set the whole thing in motion! That, and the fact that the Copy cat writer and the author of the original three-way to survive are basically one and the same, just that they were different versions of themselves sharing the same body.
So the main idea of those stories is the "math is math!" Meme?
@@nathanjereb9944 Maybe not that. i don't see the connection myself, so please explain yourself
@@cameronjensen9397 by Damion's summary, it says that comparing lives is stupid because it's relative on good or bad it is. no one has an objectively better or worse life, life is life
Because of how multiverse works, every fanfictions happening in a setting where multiverse is canon, exist in another universe, meaning it's canon.
That's how i view fanfictions, Every author who creates a story will be another universe in canon
I mean not always, Final Fantasy XIV has a multiverse but there are only eight in tact worlds not counting alien worlds like the Dragonstar.
@@debleb166 I mean when you have Infinite universe of course.
it's like how any time a jojo creator makes content if they kill diovolo its made canon
@@lewismartin3430 you get it
So pleased to see Red and Blue talk about EEAAO. That movie is so unashamedly good, kind, complex, thoughtful, and beautifully executed!
Speaking of how cartoon adaptations often mix and match elements of different comics continuities, I loved the bit in the *_Young Justice_* cartoon series where an amnesiac character was given the name "Violet Harper" and later learned that her name assigned at birth had been Gabrielle Daouw -- while in the comic book, her original name had been Violet Harper, and she had taken the name Gabrielle Doe. Cute.
Oh my gosh, a detailed diatribe on Everything Everywhere All At Once would be awesome
Movie was criminally underrated.
@@nateabels5151 my guy I love EEAAO but it was the most nominated movie at the Oscar’s this year and countless people list it as the best movie of 2022. It’s not criminally underrated, it’s just underrated
@TSD Talks sorry I don't pay attention to awards. So I missed that. Most of the time I strongly disagree with the critics.
The only other person that I know personally that even watched it was my wife. (We both loved it.) And I recommended to quite a few of my friends. This is the only place I've heard anyone really talk about it.
@@TSDTalks22 I wouldn't say its underrated at all. It was definitely an underdog, being a non-franchise film coming out around same time as Marvel's movie also dealing with multiverse stuff and despite that it was commercially successful plus loved by both critics and audiences
Multiverse has been a part of my fantasies since childhood so it's really sad that it's been corrupted from "fun way to bring in new stuff" to mostly "way to erase mistakes"
It is actually both. As side note Marvel and DC are actually in same canon Omniverse and Disney actually extend deal with Werner. It is why sometimes characters reference things from other multiverse. And that is not everything. Marvel is canonically also connected to Hasbro Multiverse (Transformers), Toei-verse (through Japanese Spider-Man to Super Sentai) and Star Trek (yup... Kirk meet DC Legion of Superheroes, when Picard encountered X-man, plus Fortress Maximus was impersonating Enterprise). As side note Dark Cristal is also secret Star Wars movie (Skeksis were in Solo).
god i just watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time and i cannot overstate how much it made me sob. we just really need more media that is relentlessly positive and hopeful in the face of despair it changes lives
One of the worst instances of this in the Flash/Arrowverse is that after Barry changes the timeline for like, the 40th time, John Diggle’s daughter vanishes and is replaces by a son. He later FINDS OUT about this and is understandably horrified, but nothing can be done.
As a result, all the character moments we got surrounding Diggle’s daughter mean nothing anymore, but the writers keep trying to transplant that character development onto the new character.
Doesn't she get restored as Diggle's daughter (as well as him still keeping the son as her sibling) after all the Anti-Monitor stuff is resolved, though?
My favorite part of Crisis on Infinite Earths was when the Monitor realized he'd recruited the wrong Blue Beetle. The current Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) didn't have the superpowers of the Golden Age Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett), so they just kind of sent him home.
Ted was understandably hurt.
I love how Spiderman, who thinks of himself as just a neighborhood protector, could also just look at Thor and say "yeah I've palled around in the interdimensional void with a few versions of myself a couple of times."
I have a friend in the UK who chose to address the MultiVerse Problem from the earliest planning stages of her writing; she has built an InfiniVerse, which started out as a trilogy of trilogies, though she has already published a LOT of supplemental storylines because her readers kept asking about particular characters &/or situations. I believe the final book in the series will bring all the stand-alone stories together, meaning she'll have to merge a magickal universe with a aqueous universe with a classical Greek universe, and incorporate all the backstories and individual conflicts with their unique resolutions into a cohesive whole. I'm impressed with her energy, and not surprised that there are days that she simply can't bring herself to add to this overwhelming infinity! Yet, she continues to create, and we love her for it.
What's her name/the name of the books this sounds really interesting and I'd love to read it
That sounds really cool!
This sounds nuts and I NEED to know what the series is
This is why i like Tatami Galaxy - it has multiple stories, and they even intersect, but ultimately the abundance of universes is created to highlight the idea that in none of them the protagonist is truly alone and leads him to grow.
Tatami Galaxy is amazing. Anyone who hasn’t watched it yet needs to.
This was exactly what I needed to hear right now. A series I was heavily invested in recently made some writing decisions that, while not full-on multiverse, had enough overlap to make the 'nothing matters,' and 'why should I bother getting invested if you can just do this again' area of the discussion hit very hard. It's nice to hear other people express things that I'd been expressing myself, and how that kind of writing can feel for fans who genuinely care about the story and its characters.
What series was that?
@@philltheotherguy1868 Enquiring minds want to know!
Was it RWBY?
@@765ZackAttack did RWBY go multiverse?
@@ShadeSlayer1911 no, it didn’t go multiverse, but it did show the hand of the author enough to evoke that ‘nothing matters’ and ‘why should I bother getting invested if you can just do this again’. There’s a lot of details I don’t want to get into, but the tldr is that the eighth season was a mixture of a lot of idiot plots and unnecessary character deaths and actions to place specific characters in specific situations. It just made it clear the authors didn’t care about the characters and just care about progressing the plot-even if the character actions that led to that progression don’t line up with the characters as they are.
I watched EEAAO with a group of friends a lot of them found it confusing and bizarre but I was crying my eyes out at how touching some of the scenes was and the message of the movie.
Personally the sequences that stuck with me the most were where Joy and Evelyn were sitting there as rocks. Its so BIZARRE on paper, but it hits different. I think because even in the universes where life just simply doesn't exist at all, Evelyn still loves and cares about her daughter, wanting to be there with her and save her.
@@Jillybean711 For me, the rock part was genius. Joy clearly states "most universes are like this", which in-and-of-itself reinforces the main thrust of the film - so many universes *don't* matter because there's nothing in them *to* matter, so being able to have love, kindness etc. is a cosmic rarity that shouldn't be taken for granted.
I think an interesting multiverse was done by the Manga group clamp in their "Tsubasa" series. Not only did they tie in all of their Manga series together and different story lines, they also did the whole universe hopping quest with a clear objective. It made each new world they went to creative and fun.
Yooo, I love Tsubasa! It's the best usage of a multiverse I've seen
Tsubasa was my first manga, I think. Got me into them
Didn't they also have a character who was a grown adult dating a child and justify it with "Magical multiverse love destiny"
@@AeonKnigh432 I'll admit, I didn't keep up with the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, but that's, uh... Sort of a Clamp! thing? or at least it was for a while? Not necessarily with magical love destiny or whatever, but the idea of a love that transcends boundaries like age and whatever was something they flirted with quite a bit back in the day. I dunno if they still do that, but there was usually at least one or two relationships (or one sided crushes in a few cases) that raised a few flags if you spent any time thinking about them in almost anything they did.
... It's actually kind of weird to think about it like that in retrospect, honestly.
@@thaddeusgenhelm8979 it’s fascinating bc CLAMP was one collective who was very open in thought, like they were open to showing gay relationships on the page back in the time where that wasn’t very common, but their underlying logic to why they were open was kind of messed up.
In their bid to portray and show empathy for “forbidden” relationships, they weren’t able to understand WHY certain relationships were forbidden. And because of that, they both showed gay “forbidden” relationships and predatory age gap forbidden relationships as both being worthy of pages.
They probably figured out eventually that age gaps were actually inherently problematic due to the unavoidable power/knowledge imbalance and stopped, but they likely didn’t have the insight to understand this back then when discourse on subjects like being gay or how gayness was different from predatory relationships was less available.
27:56 No wonder other writers simplified it as "Ra's Al Ghul and the League of Assassins dug him up and dumped him in a Lazarus Pit."
33:40 And thats why the title of Donna's autobiography was "Your Guess is as Good as Mine"
1:11:25 And any bad writing choices that weren't fixed by the timeline reset were cleaned up by Deadpool.
Well, with Donna Troy, the issue was more "they made her new backstory something that had nothing to do with Wonder Woman and a bunch of people got mad at this and wrote their own different reason she existed".
The Archie Sonic comics are an interesting case here, since they introduced their multiverse really early and interacted with it surprisingly often... but then famously continued on for an extremely long time without a reboot.
Eggman himself was from an alternate timeline starting something like 75 issues in, since the cast managed to off the one from their home universe. And then of course there was all the Evil Sonic AKA Scourge stuff and later on the Zone Jail zone, from which hailed characters like Zonic and Zector.
And then Genesis happened and retconned Eggman to have always been the Main universe version of Robotnik and _then_ the Ken Penders lawsuit happened and Sonic Crossed over with Mega Man with a _Super_ Genesis Wave that completely altered Sonic's universe and started the Sonic Unleashed shattered world crisis but left Mega Man's world entirely intact (Archie would ultimately wind up losing the rights to Mega Man around the same time Sonic was moved to IDW though and unlike Sonic, the rights weren't moved but dropped, RIP).
Still waiting on a Sonic vs Sonc vs Sanic fight
I clicked this video knowing that you were going to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once. I concur, it is the single best multiverse story I have ever seen, and everyone’s life can be made better by experiencing it
Somebody I was arguing with on Instagram asked how i felt about eeaao and when I said I love it, they said it told them all they needed to know. What does that MEAN? what does that have to do with nobody asking how you felt about wearing multiple layers?!
@@faameexplains1192 that’s weird
@@faameexplains1192 why would they do that?
Everything Everywhere All at Once is such a good and emotional movie that just an analysis almost brought a tear to my eye!
LITERALLY! I am always like “it can’t have been that moving, it’s such a basic concept,” like I read fics and romance all the time where the premise is that they always find each other across time, and then I’m surprised every time when I tear up hearing about EEAAO. EEEAAO really did just do it that amazingly.
This brother is camuspilled
I’m so glad you made a point to talk about “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” as that was the best movie I’ve seen this year
The problem I have with the Multiverse is that it falls victim to inflation if done poorly. Everything seems so much less special and important if I know the exact same thing is happening in near identical parallel universes.
Characters feel less special too if I know there's infinite versions of that character running around out in the multiverse.
Yup. It is not a problem with idea but execution.
I grew up with the Justice League Cartoon, and I LOVED their multiverse story. It quickly made the multiverse my favorite si-fi concept. And it was so niche for so long and now suddenly everything is a multiverse.... and I gotta say way too many don't get it or don't use it right and it's frustrating as hell.
I love how Red simultaneously sounds both very confident and exactly the opposite at the same time. Perhaps it's more that she's confident in what's in her head, and not quite as confident in herself, or maybe her ability to convey her thoughts. Either way, her headlong approach into subjects while also having a touch of "man, I hope this doesn't sound dumb" always strikes me.
I think she's swell anyway, and I enjoy listening to her talk about stuff, even regarding a topic like this, where I didn't really care about it in the first place.
One thing that should also be mentioned about Crisis is that during those 50 years, DC bought a lot of other comic companies, so their stories were a part of DC, but on different Earths, such as Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel, Icon, etc. so Crisis was a way to bring the most popular of them into the main DC book continuity.
DC: * kills Fawcett because Captain Marvel was selling better than Superman, Marvel takes over Captain Marvel title, Fawcett goes bankrupt and DC buys some of the characters, DC can't call him Captain Marvel now *
Fun fact, we live in a dystopian timeline that only exists to show how high the stakes are when the protagonists briefly visit this doomed timeline.
The Ship of Theseus comparison at 12:33 felt absolutely perfect for the topic
I really enjoyed this. It put to words things that I've intrinsically known, and if you don't mind a mini-story time, I'll explain.
I really enjoy crossover stories and all the different versions of the characters in their own timelines/universes so as a result I love the existence of multiverses. To the point that I made a character (I have a tendency to make my own fan fics for EVERYTHING, whether or not I actually write them down) who's whole thing is just going to the different universes and having adventures. Now this character is incredibly jaded about everything, the one universe she will never visit again is her home universe because she doesn't want to face her family since she's convinced she's become a monster, both literally and figuratively. But, the one thing she makes sure to do every time she has to leave her space ship for any length of time is dissemble the Jump engine - the part that lets her universe-hop - to the point that no one but her could put it back together, even with the instructions. Because, while she doesn't use this power for multiverse-shenanigans, it could very easily be used to kick off a Crisis-style incident. And she knows and acknowledges this and feels so strongly about not letting anyone kick off the multiverse apocalypse that she would rather permanently strand herself in a random, probably bad, universe than give anyone the chance. And I literally never realized WHY until Red said it: they all matter. And she KNOWS all the universes matter. She facilitates meetings and crossovers, but she always makes sure everyone gets back home safe because each universe matters because it exists. They may not all matter for story reasons, but she would and has put herself on the line to save a universe full of people who hate her, specifically, because even though she can be a stone-cold killer if the situation demands it, she can't condone a whole universe to death. Especially if it would start a chain reaction and threaten other, nice, universes.
Tl:Dr, even my gritty OC knows that multiverses have intrinsic value simply because they exist, why do comic writers keep trying to use their deaths as a reset switch?
Gods I have such a similar tendency. My ocs tend to have the more boring teleport or portal variant but they also are desperately protective over their powers because it's so incredibly dangerous
Honestly I think your discussion of EEAAO touched on one thing I really like in stories of multiple timelines, that being character-driven narratives that ask our hero a question: given all the variables and choices you can take in your life, what is the one universal constant that you value most? What part of your life makes it YOUR life?
Red's explanation of Everything Everywhere All At Once is exactly the reason why it's one of the best movies ever made.
The hilarious part of this is how often writers open this door to reconsider thing about their world and attempt to close it. We, the audience at that point can't help but see what they are doing.
this is such an insane concept. Re: "who wrote this stuff?" In the comic, it's theorized that the writer of the Flash comics "dreamed up the stories" and his brain waves sort tuned in on the vibrations of this other dimension while he was asleep. It's discussed in detail in this book called the Physics of Superheroes.
as someone who tried to write a story set in a small scale multiverse, and had the storyline fall apart after the reveal that there was a multiverse at all- I am so stoked for this!
Why? What happened? I'm interested. Tell me more.
@@liamvalentine6073 XD thanks for the interest! The concept was that an augmented child soldier in a magitech world wanted to escape the war they were conscripted in to fight the Big Bad, and managed to do so, arriving in a Magical Hidden World in another universe, one where magic was never revealed. Fearful for their life, they left the Hidden World and went to the non-magical spaces- until this universes' Big Bad appears a few years down the line, and now the once-child solider realizes that its not exactly a new universe but an alternate timeline-universe, and by not reaching out they've let a few fucked up things happen that they could have stopped.
So now they're scrambling to try and protect their alternate self and loved ones discreetly without giving away who they are, until the Big Bad attacks, their angsty backstory is revealed, etc and... now what? They have no way back, their family members are not their family, same goes for their friends, their alternate self is a child with a family and friends of her own, the hidden world is hiding a war from the rest of the planet, and the people who found out who they used to be no longer trust them as anything more than a tool.
Assuming they do kill the Big Bad, what's to stop the minions from taking its place? Is there a way home? Should they go home, if so what is there left to return to? I did briefly consider having others from their own universe pop in, like an escaped friend group or a relative, but doing so takes the above questions that could be asked after the big bad is gone and sets them right after the attack, and takes the urgency out of the situation. cause if you can just universe hop then it all becomes background noise to interpersonal dramatics.
@@FeatherVoid oh no big text. not gonna read all that I only asked cause I was being polite. I kid, I kid. The concept of combining magic with technology and then being forced to be in a world that focuses solely on technology is cool. And the irony of the non-magic world being (or at least described as) a hidden magical world. Also I like how the alternate self means that there can be multiple versions of the same person in one universe.
The third paragraph reminds of Tolkien's Legendarium. Melkor/Morgoth was defeated but Sauron is still around and plagued the free peoples of Middle-Earth for arguably more time than Melkor himself, and perhaps even came closer to winning in some respects. Sauron was defeated but Saruman was still around thrashing the Shire. Saruman was defeated but there were still orcs, disgruntled kingdoms of men, who knows what other creatures and such which Aragorn and Eomer spent a large chunk of their life fighting in order to defend their lands and people. So yeah as you said technically you can defeat the big bad. But what stops someone else from becoming the next big bad?
Though, I think if you build up the alternate self and their/her family as characters that could be worth investing in, I don't really think the audience would lose their investment because of multiverse shenanigans. Maybe the new characters from the main char's universe also have to be built up as characters first and until then the audience has no reason to be invested in these (to them) strangers. And if you think readers will go "ah, it's just a multiverse, nothing matters anyway", then...
1. they didn't watch everything, everywhere, all at once, as red said (though I did expect more of a core sci-fi story with interesting elements and questions raised since I was riding on Shadow Fight 3 hype, I still enjoyed it a lot)
2. it's fiction. multiverse or no, they don't matter anyway, not really. it is the intellectual interest that you invest in wanting to experience something fictional yet poignant made through the intellectual act of creation that makes fiction matter. so if they're looking excuses NOT to be invested, then, why are they even reading it? :haroldface:
That's not to say that this can be used as an excuse "Oh you don't like my clonecest time travel love ramiel shape thing? You just WANT to not care, you're looking for excuses". It just means that if something is interesting, does it really matter what the stakes are or are not, what the scale is or is not, if the journey the main character goes through themselves is worthwhile to discover?
I feel you. I had the same issue with my own work, which I managed to mitigate by making it so that the setting is a one way trip. What I mean is the Multiverse DOES exist but you can't travel around it. The characters are from alternate universes sent into my story's setting but they can never return to their old world ever. Which... Hey, is a compromise lol
I think it would be hilarious to subvert this in a comedy where the character prevents every crossover incident by threatening their clones with an axe murder when they cross through.
That's some Deadpool energy.
Honestly I was feeling the same way about the umbrella academy until the end of the third season! SPOILERS but the fact that the characters are in the same boat; scared to get attached and trying to get back what they lost ties into the plot and their decisions
People who don't have faith in things they liked annoy me. Like you couldn't be that invested in it anyway if you're going "Ah, you mean all we've got to be invested in is the characters!?" Like yeah, what else!?
@futurestoryteller yeah I sort of get it. I think other things make it so it's a struggle to even be attached to the characters, but I don't think the umbrella academy takes anything away except the character's lives and motivations, not the viewers. The only thing I dislike about it is Lila because she makes the others feel less important, I have no issue with the universe stuff
After starting a rewatch, I must say “Chekhov’s Gatling Gun of Retcons” is my new way to refer to a multiverse’s introduction into an established fictional setting
The thing I enjoy about the multiverse concept is that it can be the ultimate tool for creative synthesis. You can have literally every and any genre or setting you can imagine and have them all collide and it doesn't break with the tone or setting because you established everything exists in one universe or another.
I love how much you can hear in each other's voices how much a fan you two are of each other. It's unbelievably sweet and endearing. :)
As a person who only recently watched Spectacular Spider-Man for the first time that little "We will always have Spectacular Spider-Man" quote really resonated with me, it is so good
Oddly, multiverses in the comics were rooted in NOT wanting to change things. The writers back in the 1950s and 2960s wanted to write stories with actual stakes yet needed to stay within the "everything returns to the status quo by the end of the story" mandate. Retconning canon came decades later.