My throat is feeling mostly better, but I’m scared that in a couple of weeks it’ll just go bad again! Because that’s a thing that happened. And I don’t like that idea.
Last day of the local Greek Festival! It’s not the full festival, just a drive thru of the food, but it’s good to support the local Greek Orthodox community and so I recommend you check it out if you’re around!
There are some spoilers from Multiverse of Madness in this Note. Hope you don’t mind. Surprise! I wasn’t that huge a fan of the movie.
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On the Multiverse
Alright I’m kind of tired of movies about the multiverse. Scratch that, it’s more like I’m tired of movies using the multiverse and using it badly. It comes down to this: a bunch of stories use the multiverse to show off characters and ideas that fans are interested in seeing, but the writers have no intention of using beyond saying, “Look! You like this thing! It’s on screen and it exists somewhere in the multiverse! Isn’t that cool?”
It’s cheap fanservice, basically.
Not every story about the multiverse is like this. Into the Spider-Verse is notably not–most of the characters who are important to the story are either from Miles’s dimension or are developed enough as characters that they are fully parts of the narrative. And The Flash television show is guilty of doing dumb stuff with the multiverse, but there are important characters who are developed and become important recurring figures in the story.
And I get that movies don’t have time to necessarily develop characters over a long time like most television shows do. But they can do better. For them, the multiverse is a way to answer fan wishes but not actually have any accountability over it or make it work too strongly with the story and characters. It’s a cheap way to get something done quickly.
We want the MCU Spider-Man to fight Doc Ock. Okay, fine. But in No Way Home, instead of going through the effort of introducing a new character to the storyline, a character established in another movie from another studio over a decade ago arrives and tries to kill Peter because… he happens to dress like the guy he actually wants to kill. The villains in the movie don’t have any history with this Peter Parker at all, and so their enmity with him is as contrived as it could get. And while I think overall it’s a compelling narrative that Peter, because of who he is, decides he wants to save them despite them being villains who tried to kill him, it would have been stronger if these had been actual enemies of the MCU Peter Parker.
Likewise, Multiverse of Madness includes the Marvel Illuminati, including some characters that fans have been wanting to see in live-action, like Mr. Fantastic, Captain Carter, and Professor X. Except they’re from an alternate universe, one that’s separated from the one the main Marvel Cinematic Universe characters inhabit. AND they all get horribly murdered within a few minutes, meaning it’s not as if they’ll come back and be important characters. They don’t mean anything, really–and to be honest, they’re not really like the comics Illuminati anyway, they’re more like an alternate version of the Avengers.
And it’s really bizarre that they’re trying to act like all of these movies and shows about the multiverse are all in the same continuity. No, I don’t think that there’s anything between them that directly contradicts each other, but they don’t exactly fit either. Multiverse of Madness asserts that dreams are actually viewing the lives of your alternate selves across the multiverse, which is weird. And a large Plot Point is that America Chavez is the only one who can physically travel through the multiverse… except we’ve seen that it is possible in No Way Home since different characters make their way through the multiverse. Mind you, by nearly breaking reality, but it is technically possible.
In this case, it’s an awkward result of shuffling things around. Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness was originally scheduled to come out before Spider-Man: No Way Home, and America Chavez was supposed to appear in both. But with the pandemic, along with a strike among crew members across Hollywood, Marvel shuffled their slate around leading to one move featuring characters leaking in from the multiverse, followed by one claiming there’s only one way to travel the multiverse.
And the Darkhold. It’s clearly not the same book as in Agents of SHIELD but that’s not related to the multiverse thing.
[Also random side note on a thing that bugs me: I keep seeing articles about how Marvel plans to use characters and ideas that don’t quite fit in the setting and they usually say something like, “Well, No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness and Loki opened up the multiverse, so it’s easy to get it all together!” as if the multiverse has been combined in the MCU the way it was at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths? Except it hasn’t. It plainly hasn’t. So they’re just making stuff up for clicks.]
If you’re going to include the multiverse in a story, you absolutely shouldn’t just have it for cheap fanservice. You shouldn’t use it to throw in tons of characters you don’t actually intend to do anything with other than show you listened to fan concerns before tossing them aside. And you shouldn’t just use it to lazily bring in characters without doing the groundwork, giving them a reason to care about the protagonist or be in the story. Elements brought into the story, especially something as big as the multiverse, need to matter. To the story, to the characters, and to the audience.
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