The multiverse doesn't not matter
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Some neat descriptions of the book are being thrown at me, my favourite this week is "American Psycho meets The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole”. Actually, that’s probably not my favourite from this week so much as my favourite thing that has ever been said about one of my books.
Your support does mean so much to me.
Combined with the ongoing love affair with the multiverse – a state where anything can happen, so everything is meaningless – it’s just much harder to care about Marvel than it used to be.
Variety ran a piece the other day about the crisis Marvel is currently facing - it’s pretty clickbaity, mixed with good old fashioned leaks to try and lower expectations for The Marvels box office receipts (and in doing so also happens to drag Nia Dacosta, the director of the film). And of course, the whole situation with the domestic violence allegations that Jonathan Majors is facing has kind of screwed their plans for the next run of films.
It’s all fairly insider baseball and reflects why I generally could care less about what Variety runs. There are, to be sure, a few elements that are concerning (sure sounds like the film VFX industry is facing similar crunch issues as the video game industry, so let’s hope they unionise pretty soon. And Disney is being pretty overt in that the end of the day they just want ROI).
What caught my eye more was The Guardian’s piece on the Variety piece (linked to above under the quote).
This idea that the multiverse means that nothing matters is nothing new is not something that is new. Hell, I’m pretty sure on the mammoth record for Thor: Love and Thunder that I did with That Reminds Me Of… that this very point came up (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness had just come out, so the multiverse was on the tip of everyone’s tongue).
It has to stop.
Let us not forget that this very year (2023) Everything, Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars (and damn did it deserve to) and proved the exact opposite of that quote up top is arguing. Actually, because everything was possible due to the multiverse, everything mattered.
Even Racoonnooie.
I get the critical instinct to throw out pithy lines like that. It’s easy, it resonates with your readers. But it’s reductive.
Marvel doesn’t have a multiverse problem. They have a storytelling problem.
The multiverse as a concept is just a tool for a writer. Good storytelling will use the multiverse to refract the characters. If every outcome and choice could be possible then what does that mean for the character? Does that lead to regret that certain paths weren’t taken? Do they learn something about themselves through witnessing how they could have turned out? Do they integrate those elements presented to them by the multiverse into themselves?
Much like zombies, it’s not an issue in them being used. It’s how it is used. Film school kids want to make zombie movies cause they are cheap, you get to do some cool effects, and you’ll have a cool fight scene (or 3) in it. But most zombie films suck because the filmmakers don’t realise that if you are going to make a zombie film you have to make the zombies mean something1.
Writers have many tools to tell their stories and make their point. The multiverse and zombies and time travel are just some of them.
If you are going to go down the Marvel route and simply use the multiverse as bigger stakes cause last time it was Thanos wiping out half the universe but now it’s the multiverse and that’s just so much more stakes man, then that is a problem and chances are the stories are going to feel inconsequential. But the problem isn’t with the multiverse. The problem is with your storytelling.
Which has always been the case with Marvel and the MCU. For sure there are some good films within their output, and they certainly have been successful as a franchise. That success has often been based on 2 things.
First, it presents a weird power fantasy (I say weird cause it’s kind of this ‘'maintain the status quo late stage capitalism almost jingoistic’' way). When Alan Moore talks about current superhero stories being a fascistic power fantasy for white males, the MCU is pretty much exhibit A.
Second, it absorbed the lesson of comics and so nothing ever ends. While people can point to certain runs by certain writers that have a distinct beginning, middle and end (I just read Grant Morrison’s X-Men run and it is a perfect example of this), come that end the toys are put back in a place where the status quo is maintained and the next writer can pick them up. In the context of the MCU, this means that nothing is ever properly resolved and catharsis is never properly achieved.
Because there will always be a next phase, even if the big bad of this one has been defeated and Robert Downey Jr’s contract is up.
The net result of this is that any stakes that are raised feel weightless. Combined with the fact that we never see any characters that could be impacted by those stakes (“Quick, the end of the multiverse is coming, trillions upon trillions of lives are at stake across the multiverse, we need to save the day. But have no fear, no one in this room is in actual danger and even if we were to fail, the audience hasn’t seen any of those trillions and trillions of lives so they won’t care”).
What’s odd about how Marvel is using the multiverse is that their endgame seems to be based on Jonathan Hickman’s years long Avengers run. He was the one that introduced the idea of incursions (essentially two universes smashing into each other and both being destroyed in the process) which the MCU seems to be seeding for the endgame of this run of films.
The run wasn’t without it’s flaws but what it didn’t do is just say ‘well, the multiverse means that everything is possible and with these incursions, won’t someone think of all the lives that are lost’ but instead grounded the story in the characters that people have come to know and love. And to top it all off, he destroyed the Marvel Comics Universe in the process. Like over and done. It even got a tombstone2.
The multiverse may not have been a way of refracting the characters (that had been happening for years - and still is, look at the Spiderverse films, which again show that it isn’t the multiverse, it’s just telling a great story), but instead it was presented as something that couldn’t be punched. It couldn’t be defeated. It just was. It was Nietzchean nihilistic horror. It was happening and would happen, the only question is whether anyone could find a way to survive.
It was good storytelling (at least by Marvel comic standards).
There’s a hundred reasons to take aim at what Marvel and Disney are doing (and have previously done) with the MCU. The sheer abundance of content being put out is exhausting. The VFX staff are burning out. They don’t tell compelling stories. They, as I once said, lay bare the cynicism that filmmaking is just about ROI and nothing more.
But all those things that are thrown around in shorthand as being the problem like the multiverse aren’t problems themselves, it’s just that in the hands of Marvel, and how they tell stories, they become meaningless.
Or in the case of The Walking Dead, you need to be saying something in the story you are telling during a zombie apocalypse. I raise this because while I may not be the biggest fan of the property, it is fairly good in what is doing. The zombies themselves are pretty meaningless but what it does do is put its group of survivors (who are coded libertarian) up against a series of forms of government as a means of examining and critiquing power structures. It’s not always successful and what it has to say often rubs me the wrong way but it has something to say throughout.
And then of course post Secret Wars there was a new status quo established because comics never end. I just said this, I’m not sure why you needed a footnote to say it again. You think Marvel Comics actually ended their universe they’d been building up for near enough 7 decades? And then what, all the staff went and started working at the local Java Juice? Come on.