“The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture,” Sam Kriss argued in The Atlantic all the way back in 2016. That was long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s massive “Multiverse Saga” even started to unfold, although the groundwork was laid that same year in Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange. Two years later, the creative and popular triumph of the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse offered a powerful counter-argument to Kriss’s thesis—and multiverse storytelling continued to expand with no end in sight.
Others have carried Kriss’s concerns forward, arguing that multiverse stories are boring and calling the multiverse “where originality goes to die.” Meanwhile, among many other things, Tom Hiddleston’s god of mischief (or one variant of him, among many others) charmed viewers on two seasons of the Disney+ series Loki; the crowd-pleasing 2023 Oscar favorite Everything Everywhere All At Once took direct aim at some of the arguments against multiversal storytelling; and a second excursion into the Spider-Verse proved as ambitious and thrilling as the first. Looking ahead, the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine is the latest reminder that the multiverse is still very much with us.
At this point, though, we may be living through the slow bursting of the multiverse bubble—a pop-culture big crunch that, for some, can’t arrive too soon. The vanguard of the phenomenon, the MCU, has been slipping awhile both creatively and popularly (a decline not helped by domestic violence convictions against Jonathan Majors, whose character Kang the Conqueror was slated to become the main heavy in the Multiverse Saga). Loki got a second season, but there are no plans for a third. DC’s Extended Universe was late to the multiverse party with last year’s box-office bomb The Flash; if last year’s Aquaman sequel didn’t need the multiverse to mark the death knell of the DCEU, it’s still one multiverse we won’t be seeing more of.
On the one hand, as I’ll argue in this series, I do think there’s a sense in which, the more we learn about the MCU, the more nihilistic a place it seems. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that this is intrinsic to multiverse storytelling—which, of course, is another way of saying that I’m not convinced that multiverse hypotheses are debilitating to moral thinking in reality.
Is this finally at least the beginning of the end of the multiverse?
Multiverse controversy extends far beyond pop-culture concerns about creative, compelling storytelling. In the scientific community, multiverse hypotheses (or speculation) have been criticized as unscientific, belittled as “religion,” and even condemned as immoral—for proposing immense cosmological concepts that can be neither verified nor falsified. (Other scientists disagree, obviously.)
Another type of resistance comes from religious philosophers and apologists attached to arguments for God’s existence based on the concept of cosmological fine tuning or anthropic coincidences. Apologetically speaking, multiverse hypotheses may appear as a nonbeliever’s cosmological Hail Mary play casting our just-right universe as a statistically inevitable winner in a multiversal lottery, much like our just-right planet Earth in a visible universe of 10 million billion billion planets. (Again, other apologists see it differently.)
A third kind of objection is raised by a certain type of moralist who considers the multiverse concept to be debilitating to moral thinking, or even antithetical to morality itself. For example, if everything that can happen does happen—say, if Hitler always loses and always wins an infinite number of times in an infinite number of worlds—then it might understandably be wondered just how pressing anyone’s duty really is to suffer and sacrifice in the struggle against the Nazis.
This last concern is, of course, the one most directly relevant to multiverse storytelling: Is it possible to tell meaningful stories in a multiverse premise? Or does the multiverse idea tend toward nihilism? While this question is obviously much bigger than superhero storytelling (in particular, Everything Everywhere All at Once confronted this question head-on), in this series of essays I’m primarily concerned with the two biggest venues of ongoing multiverse storytelling, the MCU and the Spider-Verse.
First, some back story…
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