Some stories are more equal than others
Mar. 5th, 2009 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomI had a realization while discussing the old DC multiverse and all its successors, and I wanted to share it here on my own journal.
Once upon a time, DC had an established structure for how all stories about their characters could be true (even the ones that seemed to contradict each other) as well as worlds full of talking animals, Evil Twin worlds, etc - a fairly straightforward implementation of the "many worlds" parallel universe model. But then, back in the early 80s, they decided that this was too unwieldy and confusing, especially since authors couldn't resist having characters from different worlds interact. So they got rid of it in one of the first big multi-title Events, the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and they tried to confine everyone to one world and one unified story.
What they soon found out, however, was that people didn't want to be confined. Some wanted the multiverse back out of pure nostalgia, but on a more practical level, no one seemed to be able to agree what the new "official story" was going to be. Everyone had their own ideas and forcing them to all work together in the same small kitchen was a recipe for disaster.
Since that time, there have been various attempts to bring back the multiverse in some form, most fueled by some combination of rose-colored memory and the need for more room to tell stories in. The problem that's arisen, however, is the same problem kicked up to the next meta-level: everyone wants to tell the definitive story of how "all stories are possible." And so every few years, we get a new explanation of how it's all supposed to work, as some new creator's vision gains ascendance. It's all gotten rather muddled and confusing... but at least we have a multiverse again, right? Just like we wanted... sort of.
Moral of the story? "Too many cooks" and/or "be careful what you wish for."
(Not that it's confined to DC, or comics, or even big corporate properties - an issue in any sort of shared fiction setting is that some people are going to try, consciously or not, to make their ideas and their ground rules the ones that all the other creators have to follow; to write the series bible, if you like.)
Once upon a time, DC had an established structure for how all stories about their characters could be true (even the ones that seemed to contradict each other) as well as worlds full of talking animals, Evil Twin worlds, etc - a fairly straightforward implementation of the "many worlds" parallel universe model. But then, back in the early 80s, they decided that this was too unwieldy and confusing, especially since authors couldn't resist having characters from different worlds interact. So they got rid of it in one of the first big multi-title Events, the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and they tried to confine everyone to one world and one unified story.
What they soon found out, however, was that people didn't want to be confined. Some wanted the multiverse back out of pure nostalgia, but on a more practical level, no one seemed to be able to agree what the new "official story" was going to be. Everyone had their own ideas and forcing them to all work together in the same small kitchen was a recipe for disaster.
Since that time, there have been various attempts to bring back the multiverse in some form, most fueled by some combination of rose-colored memory and the need for more room to tell stories in. The problem that's arisen, however, is the same problem kicked up to the next meta-level: everyone wants to tell the definitive story of how "all stories are possible." And so every few years, we get a new explanation of how it's all supposed to work, as some new creator's vision gains ascendance. It's all gotten rather muddled and confusing... but at least we have a multiverse again, right? Just like we wanted... sort of.
Moral of the story? "Too many cooks" and/or "be careful what you wish for."
(Not that it's confined to DC, or comics, or even big corporate properties - an issue in any sort of shared fiction setting is that some people are going to try, consciously or not, to make their ideas and their ground rules the ones that all the other creators have to follow; to write the series bible, if you like.)
