i don't mean occasional time-travel works that vaguely imply by the rules of their narrative structure the existence of a multiverse, or other works that involve just one or a few alternate-realities (like fringe kind of)

i mean full on, balls-off-the-wall, multi-dimensional storytelling.

show me a character in 1000 variations! explore their character from a thousand stories, explore your narrative as a thousand narrative. as a narrative device it's fucking bonkers. you can draw meaningful and interesting parallels between anything, anytime!!

by exploring all these possibilties, you break the edge of chance. this gives you a great way to talk about big ideas, to talk about universal truths. you can attach deep meaning to any story. the best recent example of this is Everything Everywhere All at Once which talks about big ideas and universal truths while also being a deeply personal story about a family.

and you can get whimsical and weird. rick and morty, spiderman into the spiderverse, and the recently released very good movie everything everywhere all at once a: these are all delightful.

by the way, i include time loops as a narrative structure almost identical to multiverses. you're simply constraining the characters in how they can interact with the multiverse, forcing them to understand both universal truths, and extremely specific truths only applicable to their interaction with the time loop. russian doll and outer wilds are two recent examples that employ this well, and they fuck exttrmely. especially outer wilds, a good game you should place.

basically, the multiverse as a storytelling tool kicks ass !!!!! and now it's MAINSTREAM!!! It's not just buff assholes in spandex! It's not just Homestuck and Rick Mortey!

i really love seeing these kinds of stories all over the place!! like, "disney has a movie about it" is a pretty high bar to meet! the multiverse is mainstream now! you can talk to anyone about it!

like look, i need to break it, i'm a math asshole. i love linear algebra because it lets you reason at like, 10000 dimension space. i've been fascinated with imagining four+ dimensional space for awhile you see. turns out you can do it, up to like 6 dimensions, kinda. the problem is, the "multiverse" and these branching paths are (narratively) best expressed as an extremely high dimensional manifold. (like, zillions of dimensions.) but a discretization over that manifold (say, clustering + partitioning) could be expressed as a 3D graph. (not all graphs can be embedded as points on a piece of paper without crossings, but they can in 3D at least). but how to express such a wacky graph in 3D? just a big fucked up ball of yarn? and would that be meaningful to show to anyone who didn't have this niche thought process?

THE ANSWER IS YES!! i see this exact thing brought to form in rick and morty, and in everything-everywhere-all-at-once! the voronoi map, partitioned and coalesced like buds of dew on a leaf, both are brought to a similar visual in the previously mentioned works, and the visualization is meaningful, not just pretty. just. chefs kiss

anyways i'm busy rewriting ur favorite literature to have a multiverse element to it (so it can talk about big ideas)