"Bluntly, multiverses kill emotional stakes. No one is going to care about a character if infinite iterations of that character could be running up and down infinite timelines. Stories must conclude, and they can’t conclude if another version of the character can reset things at a writer’s whim."
Some writers and filmmakers can make this work, though. A great deal of Michael Moorcock's fiction, for example, deals with characters who are said to be the same "person" through different physical and time incarnations...
I can see what you're saying if the differences between the characters are acknowledged. (I confess I'm not super familiar with Michael Moorcock's fiction. I know of Elric, and that's it.) No Way Home, for example, I believe works because the audience still sees the trio as different people. They're not looking at Spider Man so much as Tom, Andrew, and Tobey. The movie leans into this rather than trying to ignore it. That allows the audience a chance to relax instead of worrying too much about the mechanics because the writer isn't trying to sneak something past them.
I think one of the reasons the trope doesn't work in something like Multiverse of Madness is because the audience is supposed to ignore the question of whether or not the Wanda in universe A is the same as the Wanda in universe B. This question has major ramifications for whether or not her children would really be her children. If the children are different because they've had a different set of experiences (they exist in reality instead of inside Wanda's mind) then for all intent in purposes they are not really Wanda's children. They are somebody else's. This creates a hole in Wanda's logic, which creates a plot hole in the film because the question is never addressed. I believe the audience picks up on this issue, even if not consciously, and those kinds of questions are what cause people to start to check out of a story. The story becomes harder to follow, but they aren't sure why. That's my theory anyway. The same can be said for the Gamora in Endgame. Gamora b isn't the same as the original Gamora. The writers didn't try to downplay this as hard as the questions in Multiverse, but any investment in Gamora and Quill's relationship is gone because this Gamora is a new person and the audience knows it.
As to what I was referring to in this article, I believe I was talking about the infinite regress issue created by the Terminator series. I think they were planning to do something similar with Wanda before the Dr. Strange movie flopped, but the problem created by what the Terminator franchise did is that, sooner or later, the audience will inevitably figure out that the story can't end because, whenever the studio wishes, they can just pull another John and T-800 out of the ether because they've created a scenario where endless Johns and T-800 can be summoned from an infinitely branching timeline, which is basically a simpler version of a multiverse. I believe this was the studio trying create a situation where they could cash in on the same IP endlessly, but it was destined to fail because the audience is always going to understand that the John A and John B are different people because they've had different experiences. Nothing is going to change that so the differences have to be acknowledged, not ignored, to make a multiverse story work. Perhaps, I should've added the word "can" to the first sentence because I was writing with a specific scenario in mind.
"Bluntly, multiverses kill emotional stakes. No one is going to care about a character if infinite iterations of that character could be running up and down infinite timelines. Stories must conclude, and they can’t conclude if another version of the character can reset things at a writer’s whim."
Some writers and filmmakers can make this work, though. A great deal of Michael Moorcock's fiction, for example, deals with characters who are said to be the same "person" through different physical and time incarnations...
I can see what you're saying if the differences between the characters are acknowledged. (I confess I'm not super familiar with Michael Moorcock's fiction. I know of Elric, and that's it.) No Way Home, for example, I believe works because the audience still sees the trio as different people. They're not looking at Spider Man so much as Tom, Andrew, and Tobey. The movie leans into this rather than trying to ignore it. That allows the audience a chance to relax instead of worrying too much about the mechanics because the writer isn't trying to sneak something past them.
I think one of the reasons the trope doesn't work in something like Multiverse of Madness is because the audience is supposed to ignore the question of whether or not the Wanda in universe A is the same as the Wanda in universe B. This question has major ramifications for whether or not her children would really be her children. If the children are different because they've had a different set of experiences (they exist in reality instead of inside Wanda's mind) then for all intent in purposes they are not really Wanda's children. They are somebody else's. This creates a hole in Wanda's logic, which creates a plot hole in the film because the question is never addressed. I believe the audience picks up on this issue, even if not consciously, and those kinds of questions are what cause people to start to check out of a story. The story becomes harder to follow, but they aren't sure why. That's my theory anyway. The same can be said for the Gamora in Endgame. Gamora b isn't the same as the original Gamora. The writers didn't try to downplay this as hard as the questions in Multiverse, but any investment in Gamora and Quill's relationship is gone because this Gamora is a new person and the audience knows it.
As to what I was referring to in this article, I believe I was talking about the infinite regress issue created by the Terminator series. I think they were planning to do something similar with Wanda before the Dr. Strange movie flopped, but the problem created by what the Terminator franchise did is that, sooner or later, the audience will inevitably figure out that the story can't end because, whenever the studio wishes, they can just pull another John and T-800 out of the ether because they've created a scenario where endless Johns and T-800 can be summoned from an infinitely branching timeline, which is basically a simpler version of a multiverse. I believe this was the studio trying create a situation where they could cash in on the same IP endlessly, but it was destined to fail because the audience is always going to understand that the John A and John B are different people because they've had different experiences. Nothing is going to change that so the differences have to be acknowledged, not ignored, to make a multiverse story work. Perhaps, I should've added the word "can" to the first sentence because I was writing with a specific scenario in mind.