Multiverses

For this week, in this particular timeline, we’re going to talk about multiverses. Now before we get into the real complicated stuff, let’s make a distinction right at the beginning as a lot of stories in this format can go two different ways, particularly regarding the word “parallel”.

First off, we have a multiverse story, which typically explores parallel universes. In these stories, you’re typically dealing with characters jumping between universes and encountering other similar (or not similar) versions of themselves or others. An obvious example would be like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which takes place in a variety of different universes.

Secondly, though extremely similar or occasionally used the same way, we have a parallel worlds story, where the characters are jumping to other similar worlds, but they’re not necessarily encountering alternate versions of themselves but a world that evolved from different decisions or timelines. This one is a bit murky as, for example, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series follows characters finding their way between coexisting worlds, but similar worlds are not necessarily the same and the characters never encounter alternate versions of themselves. That being said, I believe at one point he maybe did address that alternate versions of the characters might have existed across the other worlds, but it was not something he got into (probably for simplicity’s sake, if I had to guess).

Confused yet? So am I.

Potential Spoilers ahead for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and His Dark Materials.

Anyway, what got me into this multiversal mood was (I know, I’m extremely late to the party on this one) finally getting to watch the fantastic movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. It was quite possibly one of the wildest movies I’ve ever seen with a breakneck combo of suspense, comedy, and drama that leaves you reeling pretty much the entire movie. Before I ramble too much though, what really got me thinking about this movie is that it handled multiverses in a way that I thought was really unique and clever.

Within this movie, one universe has discovered technology that allows them to communicate with other parallel universes, which they use to try to defeat the “villain” character who is someone with the ability to access and jump between all versions of themselves instantaneously. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’m trying my best to keep it simple. Early on in the movie, the main character Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), is given a headset by an alternate version of her husband that allows her to access the consciousness and skills of other versions of herself across the multiverse. To access these skills however, a person jumping typically has to trigger the jump by doing something that doesn’t make any sense, which leads to a lot of the comedy of the movie.

This is what I thought was so clever about that sort of set up though. Typically, multiverse stories have one version of a person leave one universe and physically enter another one. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the person literally just engages and accesses the consciousness of their other selves. This specifically means that, for one thing, you don’t have a bunch of different people running around in a universe that isn’t theirs causing trouble, but it also means that you have instant access to any skill you may need and you can sort of momentarily swap places with your universal equivalent. More importantly, this actually introduced something I thought was really helpful for suspense and character safety purposes as you could only be killed in your own universe. Now granted, as shown several times in the movie, if you were connected to an alternate version of yourself and they died, you would experience the death and be thrown back into your own body, but you specifically wouldn’t be harmed. This means though that anytime the villain was chasing Evelyn in her own universe, you were way more on edge than when she was going after an alternate version.

This scenario actually reminds me of a fusion between how Zachary Levi’s character would download new information or skills from the Intersect (a computer in his brain) in the TV show, Chuck, and the way the way people would jump into other bodies in a show called Travelers (people from the future would send their consciousness back in time to someone at the exact moment they died, therefore assuming their life from that moment on humanely and working to prevent the nightmare future they’d been originally sent from).

But see how well it works? You can have any skill you need, plus the bad guy can only get you if they’re in your reality. Granted, you don’t want them killing off a bunch of alternate versions of yourself (for one thing because that’d be bad, but also because it would limit the pool of experience you could draw from), but if everyone can only jump into one person, Evelyn also knew which people she had to avoid or find to stay safe.

This leads me to my point. I think this movie is a great example of putting limiters on a story to help keep it reigned in. A multiverse or parallel worlds story, from the get-go, is going to be a hot mess of complexity, so you’re going to want to do everything in your power to keep things as controlled as you can writing-wise. Now, that doesn’t mean your story can’t be as wild as it can be- nearly every multiverse story I can think of is- but you have to make it plausible and contained.

So, how do you write a multiverse story?

Governance and Travel

Well, first off, let’s think about how things work, shall we? Just like worldbuilding any magic or government system in a story, you’re going to have to determine the basics. More specifically, the rules of how things work. How do characters travel between multiverses/parallel worlds and why? Is this something a lot of people do or a select few? Is it some kind of magic or technological advancement. Let’s look at a few examples.

As stated above, in Everything Everywhere All at Once (I’m going to start calling it EEAO as that is an extremely long title to type), the ability to access various experiences and skills from your other selves is a technological advancement developed by one universe. You can jump into someone’s mind, feeling their thoughts and experiences of the past and their real-time placement, but you’re not physically stepping between worlds. Which, as I said, is real helpful if someone’s going around killing other versions of yourself. You’re not ever physically in danger (beyond overloading your brain) unless the villain is in your world.

Let’s take another fantastic set of multiverse movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In the first movie, Into the Spider-Verse, all the various versions of…Spider-People?...end up accidentally pulled into one universe by a supercollider. As set up in the first movie, if you’re in a universe you don’t belong in, you “glitch” painfully. In the second movie however, it becomes clear that there are hundreds of versions of Spider-People that are traveling between multiverses, maintaining the Cannon, wearing wristbands that allow them to select where to travel to and prevent the glitches. (Also, coincidentally, both EEAO and the Spider-Verse movies make multiversal references to bagels and I’m like is this just a coincidental joke or is this poking fun at some actual theory? If you know, please tell me in the comments because I’m really curious.)

I think this Cannon sort of theme is something a lot of multiverse stories are playing around with. The other big one that comes to mind is the “Sacred Timeline” from Loki. Beyond the actual transportation and location control of technology, this adds an extra layer of governance to a story. This makes the larger, overarching plotline about preserving the integrity of time or multiversal structure, despite what a character may want to do.

Across the Spider-Verse gives several great examples of this as there are “Cannon Events” which are specific events (usually horribly tragic ones) that must happen or else the multiverse will be disrupted: Spider-Man loses someone close to them (Uncle Ben for Peter Parker, Peter Parker for Spider-Gwen, Uncle Aaron for Miles Morales) or, more specifically, the cannon event they’re going to be working to disrupt once the third movie comes out, a police captain close to Spider-Man dies. For Gwen, all throughout the second movie, she was concerned this was her own father, but he says he’s quitting at the end of the movie. Unfortunately for Miles, his father was just promoted to police captain and there is a very real concern the timeline will take him out. We also see in Across the Spider-Verse what happens if a cannon event is interrupted when a police captain is saved and that entire multiversal world becomes unstable.

Consequence is a big theme in multiverse or time-travel stories. Much like the wristbands used in Across the Spider-Verse, the time-travel show I mentioned above Travelers requires constant monitoring of the timeline, or more specifically what actions can be taken to change the future without screwing up things that need to still happen. Often in stories like these, you see characters striving to do a good thing, either because it’s the right thing to do or because they have a personal, emotional reason, that eventually blows up in their face because it was done rashly. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In a slightly different example, Pullman’s His Dark Materials also puts limiters on travel between parallel worlds as the only way to get between worlds is to cut a window through with a mystical item known as the Subtle Knife. Will, the main boy in the story, becomes a keeper of the knife and is taught that every time he opens a window, he should go to great pains to close it. Any time a character wanders through a window between worlds they happen upon, it’s clear that a previous knife bearer created it and did not close it. As Will eventually uncovers, cutting through the fabric of the universe has unintended consequences as it creates specters that are wreaking havoc in one of the more neutral worlds. This means that there is a natural deterrent to using the knife to create portals beyond whatever lies in the world beyond.

Doppelgangers and the Concept of Place

As I mentioned before, one of the very first distinctions you’re going to have to make with a multiversal story is whether we’re dealing with multiple versions of a similar reality or if we’re just dealing with different worlds. To make things really simple, are your characters going to be seeing themselves or not?

I think I’m going to eventually do a blog like this on time travel, but you know that was the big deal in the Back to the Future movies as you weren’t supposed to run into a different version of yourself. Multiverse stories seem to go the exact opposite, funny enough, to where it’s almost like we’re trying to see how many versions of yourself you can run into.

Keeping with the current examples, in EEAO, Evelyn never physically runs into a different version of herself, although her consciousness experiences the lives of the other Evelyns and she is able to temporarily swap places. A lot of this is used, in her case, to help her better understand her family, as she experiences many different versions of her father, husband, and daughter.

In the Spider-Verse movies, it is a bit different as the plot tends to focus on characters, many the same but also many different, who have taken up the mantel of Spider-Man (or woman or pig…people. Spider-People. All the spiders.) This leads to many different characters being at the forefront of the story, although all of them have the connection point of what it is to be a secret hero. That being said, although there are universes where a specific person might have become Spider-Man, it is clear that there are others where that person might not have as well. In fact, this is a theme I expect will come out a lot in the next movie. Either way though, it’s clear most (don’t want to say all as that’s probably not likely) universes are inhabited by similar versions of the same people.

As listed in the His Dark Materials example earlier, which gets a bit more into parallel worlds, there are worlds that house completely different people or ones that can hold similar versions of you. I’m trying to remember what the book did get into, but as I said, we never got into meeting different versions of the characters.

Running into various versions of yourself or characters that are in the same place as you serves a dual purpose. For one, it allows a character to be introspective and come to terms with their place in the grand scheme of things. Evelyn in EEAO is determined to be the one who can finally stand a chance against the movie’s Big Bad because she’s, as stated in the movie, not particularly good at anything. I don’t want to get into spoilers, but Across the Spider-Verse really deals a lot with Miles’s place as a Spider-Man and whether he deserves to be there. Essentially, playing a lot with the theme of “if there’s millions upon millions of versions of you, why are you the one that matters to this story?”

Doppelgangers, or other versions of you, also allow a lot of fun room to express a wide variety of story possibility in terms of experience and viewpoint. Think about what different things could have happened within each version of your character’s life to create a different, unique person, where divergence points might have been. Is this character a hero, a villain, a normal person? Why are they being sought out? Are their relationships different across the worlds?

Multiversal Romance

            Ah, this is what we’re all really here for, isn’t it? The ships.

            Much like the other considerations, any romantic interactions across different worlds might need some rules or guidelines to consider as well. First and foremost, I think you need to determine going into the story from the beginning where any romance between characters from different universes is headed. Essentially, are they going to end up together and, if not, why? Are their background worlds too different? Are there rules built into your worldbuilding that are going to be in the way and can those be overcome?

            In EEAO, most of Evelyn’s romantic interactions occur primarily with her husband, who in her universe is asking for a divorce. Over the course of the story however, as Evelyn interacts with more versions of her husband and grows to understand him better, what they have rekindles. Now there are versions of her that are romantically involved with others or versions where she was involved with her husband but they did not get married. Essentially, with each new interaction, she learns more about herself and others, and eventually gets to a place where she realizes she has something she wants to save in her own universe.

            In Pullman’s His Dark Materials, we have a much different scenario where his worldbuilding rules are what actually keep the characters apart, despite their own feelings. First, Pullman establishes that anytime a character chooses to stay in a world beyond their original one, they tend to have drastically shortened lives. By the end of B3, The Amber Spyglass, Will and Lyra realize they’ve grown to love each other over the course of their adventures, but finally they’re faced with an impossible choice: stay together for a short time and either cut short one or both of their lives or go their separate ways and live out full lives in their own worlds. It is devastating.

            I don’t have an answer to this one yet, but I’m really curious to see how the Spider-Verse movies handle the subject of Miles and Gwen as they’ve set them up with such a great story of understanding each other when no one else does. This one is tricky because in the second movie Gwen mentions from observing the Cannon that anytime a Gwen Stacy gets involved with a Spider-Man, it backfires on her. Is this time different as we’re dealing with a Gwen that is a Spider-Person?

            In the broader scheme of things though, as far as I remember, there’s not really been a stated rule about residing in different universes having an adverse effect on someone- beyond being super confusing. Well, Miguel (another Spider-Man) did try to assume the life of another version of himself and it went horribly wrong, but that might have been due to being unable to avoid a Cannon Event more than a worldbuilding rule. I think it all depends on how the writers have set up the world.

If Miles and Gwen don’t get screwed over by the all-encompassing Cannon or some specified rule, then it is possible (I hope) for their relationship to move forward. If it can, we know they have the technology to travel between universes to see each other, offsetting the problem between the first two movies. I mean, as there’s not some kind of neutral world similar to His Dark Materials, I’d think you’d have to eventually pick one world to be in most of the time together or just constantly go back and forth between them. I’m curious to see how they resolve the story, especially since they’ve set up such a strong connection between these two and I really hope the solution isn’t “Something bad happens to Gwen”. Again. I have a guess the fandom would riot if that happened though, so I’m really hoping it gets worked out and we’re not all crying.

So, to recap, the core factor in a multiverse story- as probably usual- is how you set up your world and the intent with which you tell the story. Make sure you know how your multiverse works and that your own rules don’t mess up your plot or character development. Think about the technology or magic used to traverse the different worlds and if there are consequences from using it. What things can change and what cannot and how does this effect your characters? Are they even aware of the rules that govern them- granted, they probably have to become aware of this at some point- but initially aware, at the very least, and what problems does that ignorance cause? Can your ships be together or not? How do they overcome the built in distance of different worlds or any other obstacles you might have put in their way?

Multiverses are a complex tangle of storytelling that will take a lot of figuring out ahead of time, but I hope these thoughts and examples help you out if you’re considering writing one. If you know of any other great examples of multiverse or parallel world stories, let us know!

Thanks for reading. Write on.

-Kamryn