We Live in a Pluriverse

Saying goodbye to the Multiverse

Kelly Tatham
5 min readFeb 28, 2023

Back in 2016 when I first started telling stories in the Multiverse, not everyone knew what the Multiverse was. Explaining the concept to one collaborator (justifying how we could switch out one actor for another in the middle of the pilot episode of our web series), I was surprised by their response,

Multi-what?

Having been intrigued by parallel universes most of my life, I assumed everyone shared the same curiosity. Apparently not!

Today, thanks to Marvel superheroes, Stephen Hawking’s final paper, and the release of the brilliant Everything Everywhere All At Once, the Multiverse is smack dab in the middle of the zeitgeist. It’s a mythos we’ve come to readily accept and it’s easy to see why —

The concept of the Multiverse is simple: there are (infinite) parallel realities and, once we tap into them (if we figure out how), the storytelling possibilities are endless.

This is a delicious prospect for cinematic worlds, to be sure, but to my mind, what really makes the Multiverse so enticing is that it speaks directly to our desire and longing to know, “What if?”

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Kelly Tatham

Fugitive. Systemsthinker. Saving the world is easier than we think. There is no world // loveandthemultiverse.substack.com/