Media has always gone through trends. Whether it be zombie stories, superhero movies, musician biopics, or YA dystopian novel series, every form of media goes through its trends. One that’s been a hot topic in just about every media format over the past handful of years is the multiverse.

It’s not a new idea by any means, being showcased in stories dating back to the days of The Twilight Zone, the original Star Trek series, older issues of DC Comics, and other early works of science fiction. However, it’s become the central topic for a lot of media as of late. This is likely due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films and TV shows popularizing the idea of the multiverse in such a public fashion.

Some modern examples of movies, TV shows, and video games that have predominantly focused on the multiverse include Academy Award Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, the animated Netflix series Sonic Prime, Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse animated movie series, the DCEU’s The Flash, the Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty, and the now-defunct platform fighting video game MultiVersus. That’s just to name a few.

It’s not necessarily a bad trend and using the multiverse as a plot device doesn’t inherently lead to bad stories. Most of these examples are actually quite great. However, unfortunately, I’ve grown incredibly tired of multiverse stories.

It’s become extremely overused. Not everything needs to be about the multiverse. It doesn’t fit every story or IP. Most modern stories, with some exceptions, don’t use the story mechanic in new or unique or meaningful ways. They’re sort of just there to tell lazy stories that ask the question “what if this character met that character.” This makes a lot of them feel like the same story told again and again.

With so many movies, shows, games, books, and comics about the multiverse, and with so many of these stories feeling too samey, they no longer feel as interesting or as special as they could be.

The sheer amount of multiverse-related media that releases nowadays potentially hurts other media. Now, there’s this weird expectation that many audiences have when approaching a story. There have been odd moments of disappointment among audiences when certain characters don’t show up in certain works, or if two characters from different IPs never officially meet each other. Now when something focuses on being a standalone story, there’s outrage from the minority, and it isn’t fair to the artists.

It will certainly be a relief to see media trends shift to something new. Let’s hope it’s a topic that’s especially exciting.

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