Well that’s precisely why I hate it. Nothing ever means anything.
Captain America is a Hydra agent and it means nothing because there are an infinite Captain Americas who aren’t a Hydra agent.
Death means nothing because there’s an infinite other [Insert character]
And DC uses Multiverse stuff ( FLash ) to reset the setting every 20 years.
If a canon story beat is ever particularly unpopular it’s always possible to retcon or maybe it was set on Azeroth #362 rather than the True Timeline.
Just be glad we haven’t gotten a zombie arc where we must flee to another dimension to escape the undead world-eating titans.
yet
(inten)
I accept no blame for manifesting terrible lore with my distressingly frequent prophecies.
There is an ideology behind multiversal theory, described pretty well here -
Basically - the theory of the multiverse reflects the theory of individualism. The idea that each individual creates a seperate, subjective reality through their own thoughts and perceptions. This has the odd effect of making collective action in favour of change less likely, because people don’t believe in objective stories to guide them.
Reality, principles, and morals are the product of subjective viewpoint, rather than fitting into any kind of grand narrative to shape the chaos into a kind’ve order.
I had more thoughts relating to this, when I realised there is in fact one game that does evoke the old familiar pathos/gameplay-led story of old Warcraft.
It’s Helldivers 2.
Very little in Helldivers 2 is presented to you in the form of exposition. While there is an overarching story and some lore, most of the ‘story’ per se is driven by the players’ own actions, similar to the Opening of Ahn Qiraj or the Blood Plague of Vanilla. No one plays as hero, and there are no real characters. You’re a cog in a massive world-machine.
Your foes draw from familiar sci-fi archetypes and are meant to evoke familiar feelings in the viewer so they intuitively understand what they’re dealing with.
The Terminids are at once the Zerg, Xenomorphs, and Tyranids.
The Automatons are a combination of The Terminators from Terminator, the Battle Droids from Star Wars and the communist baddies from a thousand 80’s American klyukva movies.
The warbond outfits draw on everything from Rambo to Judge Dredd. The game isn’t an adaptation of any of these works, it draws upon them to create a prevailing, uncannily familiar mood richly immersed in its own genre trappings.
One thing I found fascinating as I reflected on this is very little of the material it draws upon is Post-2000’s in terms of obvious inspiration. It’s all VHS-era. The same way Blizzard’s older games drew much of their general mood and trappings from 70’s-80’s comic books.
While Starship Troopers is an obvious inspiration, I feel like it as much draws upon the Bush-era War on Terror, an idealistic and civil-liberties diminishing conflict with no clear victory or end point, heavily dependent on air dominance and artillery. The entire thing is a satire about the glamorization of war.
Individualism once more proving itself the greatest evil Mankind ever cursed itself with.
These arguably tell a story as well, if you look at them closely but whether it’s intentional… You went from getting more explosive gear, to some cutting edge stuff, some commissar-esque gear as SE took some losses right down to civil militia gear as supplies got hammered to the minimum.
But yeah i don’t think Helldivers takes a great deal from more recent sci-fi. A lot of it relies on older stuff. War of the Worlds, Starship Troopers etc.
Edit: now that you’ve mentioned it. I don’t think there’s anything modern that’s really stuck as a cultural icon like with Asimov or Herbert.
While the themes of the warbonds are vaguely related to the events in the Galactic War, I am so tired of people trying to spin a 40k-esque grand space opera around them. Much like horoscopes you could rotate them in any order and spin a similar narrative. I think Helldivers 2 might have the highest concentration of fans clamoring for the nastiest, grittiest and most deprived fictional worlds despite HD2 being, most importantly, a comedy.
Like when most of the fanbase convinced themselves the automaton marching voices has actual lyrics about Cyberstan when it’s made up of random grunts and shouts from HD1 cyborgs passed through a voice filter. Or that Eagle 1 had her limbs surgically removed and slotted into the cockpit like a Dreadnought.
Edit: My personal favourite when it comes to the theme of Helldivers 2 is one of the sentry gun upgrades which is very expensive and has a lot of flavour text that basically boils down to an engineer slapping super glue on it.
This oddly enough, is also very relevant to Warcraft.
It’s a sign that the audience cares. Most people wish the writing in WoW was better or otherwise deeper, because they’ve become so invested in it, and a great way to get someone invested in a work is to use humour as a sweetening agent.
Once people -are- invested, they’ll want the story to deepen in complexity and ambiguity to soothe their own anxieties about their own complex, ambiguous natures.
There is no human being on Earth who isn’t in some way messed up. Stories and myths are how people make sense of the world and their place within it, and the ones we cleave to often provide us with what we need to balance our perception of order in the world, hence we desire more.
Warcraft 3 might’ve had a dark, melancholy story about a great kingdom falling to a prince’s moral injury, a scheming prisoner of demons seeking revenge even under great constraints, an once-evil horde of outcast monsters struggling to find redemption, and an isolated civilization dealing with the end of their immortality.
But it also had tons, and tons of jokes. Almost every NPC, including monsters and non-essential characters, had something humourous to say, reference, or allude to.
While this ‘ironic’ and quirky style of comedic writing has become less in vogue since Marvel intensified it, I still believe that humour, dark, dry or otherwise, plays a role in any broadly popular or successful fictional work.
If you don’t have that, and mistake severity for depth, you end up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
For them to stop clamouring, they’d have to realise that it IS comedy/satire, first.
And, much like with Too Many 40k fanatics… they’d first need to NOT be Like A Sack Of Rocks…
It’s worth noting the decision to make the Horde a ‘good’ or morally ambiguous faction in WC3 as opposed to the plainly evil one they were in WC2 was partly because the humour of their silly monstrous units endeared them both to players, and the developers.
Rightly or wrongly, we care for the ideas of people who make us laugh.
I am working so I can’t run a YouTube video, but, where do I begin.
This kind of stuff is very sketchy to say the least. From your discourse, and I assume it’s the YouTube video saying it.
So for the last decade or so you did not like multiverse movies, and for a century there has been around that theory called individualism that you do not vibe with. There needs to be a connection!
This is a soup of bad reasoning and false beliefs. If you can avoid it, don’t dive into broad and grandiose theories.
Let’s pick two statements: “Unicorns exist.” And then another statement: “Unicorns exist, and today I am writing on the WoW forums.”
From a purely logical point of view, the second statement is less likely to be true than the first, because in order to be true, it deems that more things about the world I am describing have to be true.
Now, the first statement is what, in logic, you’d call a weaker claim, because less things about the world have to be true, whereas the other claims one more thing, namely that I am also writing on the forums, and hence is a stronger claim, because it “grabs” more things about the world, and claims that those also true.
Furthermore, the first statement in order to be true claims that only “unicorns” exist, whereas the second statement has actually a hidden claim, namely that I exist, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write on the WoW forums!
The thing’s that, the more things a vision of the world needs in order to be true, and the less likely it is to be true.
What is more likely: that a system of beliefs which has been in vogue for more than a century somehow reached the late stage corruption and BAM! Oh no, suddenly your movies have multiverses! Damn you individualism!!
Or maybe a group of people realized the fanbase for super-hero stories did not wear out after the story at the movie was finished, and so in order to keep telling a story about Captain America and Iron Man, they decided to create alternatives that are kind of the same?
After all, individualism was there when you played old Blizzard games and non-multiverse movies, too.
I’m going to offer with full respect, an elaboration. I’ll start with the caveat that I’m not smart enough to properly argue any of my positions, so yeah, maybe.
If you actually watch Adam Curtis’ documentaries (Hypernormalisation and Can’t Get You Out of My Head are highlights), his general argument isn’t -against- individualism per se, so much as an observation of individualisms’ flaws at addressing the challenges of a post-industrial, post-truth world.
In the past, mass democracy evolved as a product of mass employment in heavy industry. Whole communities would work at factories, creating power through collective action - as the workers, even if they weren’t wealthy themselves, had some power over the flow of resources, providing them with leverage to affect policy.
His argument is that over the course of deindustrialisation, western societies have moved into a property and service based economy. There are two issues with this, namely:
Politicians, and by extension, the people, do not have any ability to challenge this, partly because their economies are dependent on the investments of international corporations, and on a property bubble to facilitate growth. In essence, you can’t tax corporations or attempt to lower property prices without losing jobs or land revenue.
There is a lot of anger and judgment in online spaces, but rarely does that convert into lasting action and change. This is because because people can’t latch on to a narrative or myth that makes sense of their increasingly economically precarious life circumstances.
As a correlation, though not causation, people have shifted from attempting to self-actualise through collective movements - be they religion or political protest, towards the consumption and propagation of artwork, media and culture. The aim isn’t to seize control over the means of production, it’s to express yourself, and so resist the effects of capitalism by turning your individual story and self merit into a product.
Social media filter bubbles and algorithms served to ring-fence individuals into walled gardens where their opinions are not substantially challenged, and where their emotional reactions can be manipulated to provide clicks - fuel for the data harvesting engines fuelling the new systems of power.
While considered to be free individuals with their own opinions, many people, especially the working classes in various western countries, feel atomised and isolated, desiring change and not knowing where to find it, which leads them to turn towards nostalgia and re-iteration, vulnerable to populist leaders with simplistic and emotionally-charged narratives that draw upon nostalgic currents.
Part of the problem of this is that people do not have enough confidence to write new and challenging stories, new myths to present different and provocative ideals to work towards, and few large organisations (for example, microsoft) are willing to devote money towards them due to the risk of loss and alienation.
Shareholders desire consistency, not novelty. Even AI largely depends on mining old material to regurgitate it back.
While correlation is not causation, this process of societal change happened to occur around the same time the Many-Worlds Theory became popular in physics, and popular culture started getting interested in multiverses. The term in Jungian psychology is synchronicity, it’s the mysticism of contrived coincidence.
Under a multiversal form of writing, you can have the same story or characters you wrote before - conserving resources, but with differences emphasing an atomised, individualised perspective.
Rather than having to imagine something new, you work within the limits of what existed before and iterate on a theme. This costs less effort, less time, and when successful, can reveal nuances in a fiction’s characters or setting that didn’t exist prior, and make bank on people who are already invested.
It’s worth noting that the kind’ve libertarian-consumerist individualism marketed by tech-firms may be flawed, but a world without individualism is also arguably a world without individual freedom. Be careful what you wish for.
These are however, opinions.
Point is, sometimes a spade is a spade, but every spade exists for a reason, and that is usually to dig for something. Multiverses are a narrative spade.
I think broad and grandiose theories are useful topics to discuss and debate, because every idea within what might be described as common sense, was once novel and prevailed against the established norms of society and culture.
You cannot create fire without a spark, and you can’t create a spark without friction.
TLDR:
Correlation is not causation, but all correlations have some meaning behind them.
As an aside, Curtis in Shifty talks (with some omissions) about the history of remixes.
Here’s one I like -
I like how it starts as a nightcore-esque sithpost version of Cassie Ventura’s Me & You, only to break down and devolve into a kind’ve dadaist hyperfeminine slurry. It’s the musicial equivialent of Barr lemonade.
=
Keeping on topic, I feel like Shadowlands’ concept of a multiversal afterlife could’ve been genuinely interesting. Planescape is my favourite D&D setting. The problem was, that kind’ve setting doesn’t suit an MMORPG. There is no way the intended gameplay, dependent on repeated grinding of resources, could have adequately served the plot or themes.
I think they should’ve set it in the Twisting Nether instead. I distinctly remember there being a mention of the Legion destroying a ‘nexus world’. You could’ve easily made something out of that.
Leaving Tidestone back in ToS was a pretty dumb thing to do.
And then an expansion later, Aszhara’s genius solution to the approaching fleet of land dwellers? Uhhh well drain the part of the ocean right next to her submarine home so they’d have an easier time killing everyone in the area and invading the palace.
But I liked BvS 
It has the coolest Batman scene ever
Crush entire enemy fleet by moving the ocean is a solid, if high concept plan. She then does nothing to cancel the tidestone magic and drown the trapped survivors because that’d make sense. Just flaunting that she could, because ego and if you’re really bad at writing an egomaniac you have them smugly allowing their enemy an advantage to prove a point rather than showing a crum of intelligence.
Ricky Gervais makes me laugh, never cared for his ideas though.
Or his comedy.
Maybe it’s the wrong type of laugh.
The whole idea was to lure the Champion of Azeroth there with the Heart of Azeroth so she could free N’zoth, no? I reckon if she just drowned them , the Heart would’ve been lost somewhere on the seabottom. That’s atleast the logic I can come up with, even if some things still dont make much sense.
Edit: Actually seem to recall even the characters themselves wondering “Why doesn’t Azshara just drown us?” .
The type of ‘comedian’ that will blame everything under the sun for people not finding his comedy funny.
Stupid thing is, I have no idea who the guy is other than facebook/youtube at times trying to push him onto me.