One of the first multiversal stories I encountered was a Donald Duck comic. The duck protagonist slid into a parallel world somehow, and had some trouble finding his way back home. I remember next to nothing about this adventure – I'm not even sure if its hero was Scrooge or Donald (I think it was Scrooge) – but I remember the "Ooooh, right" moment when he finally figured out what was going on, and how satisfying it was.
Scrooge (or Donald) suddenly remembered the name of the street where he was when everything started to get weird. It had a different name than it usually did. From this memory came the realisation that he was in a parallel universe, similar to his own but just that little bit off. A classic "what's wrong with this picture" tale, for which I'm always an absolute sucker.
This is the kind of multiversal shenanigans I enjoy the most. I like my Multiverse the way I like my time travel: with plenty of illustrations of how small decisions can change everything (no closed "it always happened" time loop, thank you). Or even a small change in circumstances, that works too. The classic romcom Sliding Doors, which is often brought up when discussing stories with what-if scenarios, hinges not on a momentous decision that the heroine makes, but whether she catches a particular train or not. When it comes to multiversal stories, I tend to get extra-nerdy or cod-philosophical: I don't just want to see a different reality, I want to know how it came to be different.
One of the reasons this kind of plot – the "if it hadn't been for if" story, to translate a Swedish (ungrammatical) phrase – appeals to me is that it's so easy to imagine how small changes could have had large consequences in my own life. Surely it must the same for others too. What if I hadn't got that job? What if I'd chosen another major when studying, or even another university (maybe that's too wild a speculation)? What if I hadn't bonded with one of my besties in primary school? So many important things that happen to you in life seem to happen quite by chance, and could easily have gone another way altogether.
Or could they? Once they're down the rabbit hole of alternative realities, multiversal stories, like time travel stories, can explore "destiny or chance" questions too. It can be just as fascinating to see reality adjust itself in all sorts of improbable ways in order to turn out as it always was (in accordance with the "time as a rubber band" theory) as to see it go completely haywire because someone took another way home from work than usual. The Adjustment Bureau (the film, at least, I haven't read the story) plays with that feeling I think we've all had: that some things were just meant to happen somehow.
But hey, that's just the kind of multiverse stories I like. There are plenty of other kinds. And that, I think, is partly why projects like Marvel's Multiverse Saga have a struggle on their hands. Take the animated Marvel series What If. I happen to enjoy all its three seasons, but the YouTube discussions about the last season that I've seen have tended to be negative.
Apart from the general consensus that season three wasn't as good as the two others, however, views differed wildly. The post-apocalyptic episode was the best one. The post-apocalyptic episode was the worst one. Seeing a megalomaniac version of Mysterio in it was cool. Seeing Mysterio in it made no sense whatsoever. The episode showing Howard the Duck and Darcy (Jane Foster's sidekick, very human) as a couple was fun and frothy. Or no, it was frankly disturbing. The Watcher intervening in events was no big deal. The Watcher intervening ruined his character. And so on. If the creators of What If watched the same vids as I did, they must have felt confused about where exactly they went wrong.
Quite simply, we tend to want different things from our multiverse stories. Some don't want the nerdy small-events-that-change-everything setup. They'd rather see the Multiverse used as a device for crossovers, mash-ups and different team-ups than we're accustomed to. Deadpool and Wolverine used the Multiverse like that: as an excuse for making meta-jokes about the "dying" Fox universe and its characters (Fox having been bought up by Disney). It had little to say about the importance of choices, but it was a blast.
I enjoy crossovers too – when it comes to fictional worlds I'm really invested in, I can become obsessed with them. But much as I've come to appreciate the MCU, I'm not quite there yet. As it is, I'll have good time with a multiversal MCU crossover, but I will feel some regret over opportunities lost. When it comes to blending different characters in "what if X had the powers of Y" scenarios, I have no interest in that at all.
Finally, there are multiverse stories where the other worlds the protagonists encounter are completely different, in a "what if the world was ruled by bees?" or "what if we were all potatoes?" kind of way. That could be fun to watch, but it's not what I primarily want from the Multiverse. That, to my mind, is fantasy, which is a different genre. I'm sure there are plenty who'd disagree, however. The Multiverse can be multiple things to multiple potential fans – and that is exactly its problem.
