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| - Anything can happen in an Alternate Universe, since it isn't our world. People could be talking lizards over there, or maybe their Abe Lincoln was never assassinated, or maybe they can all fly. But if heroes from our world visit the Alternate Universe, they won't care what happens there. Typically, neither do the audience. Things are even worse if there's only one world, but Time Travel can change it back and forth. People in the future can die a hundred times each, but since the Time Travel will bring them back, who cares? Compare For Want of a Nail, which is the Time Travel equivalent.
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| abstract
| - Anything can happen in an Alternate Universe, since it isn't our world. People could be talking lizards over there, or maybe their Abe Lincoln was never assassinated, or maybe they can all fly. But if heroes from our world visit the Alternate Universe, they won't care what happens there. Typically, neither do the audience. Suppose Bob from Earth-2 dies. Our heroes still have Bob from Earth-1, the Bob they know and (mostly) love, so what's the loss? Earth-2 Bob was a stranger to them. As long as Earth-1 Bob escapes back through the portal alive, nobody will shed a tear. You'd think Bob would be unnerved by seeing himself murdered, but Earth-2 Bob was just as much of a stranger to him as to the rest of the dimension-jumpers. (Merely the fact that our world is "Earth-1" tells you how little respect there is for the alternates.) This goes further than individual death. Absolutely anything horrible can happen in an Alternate Universe -- Zombie Apocalypse, life-threatening plague -- and our Earth will still be safe, if we can close the portal. Many heroes will not leave the Planetville of the week until its problems are solved, but for the Alternate Universe, all they care about is getting out alive. The reason for this is that an Alternate Universe often feels like a cheap copy of our own. It's just an extra us, so its people aren't unique characters. Under the Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics, that makes it expendable. It is extremely rare for so much as a single refugee to escape a doomed Alternate Universe, because that refugee will ruin Cast Speciation for the Earth-1 version unless the refugee will become a Suspiciously Similar Substitute. In universe, this is often simply pragmatism from the characters: Works that feature alternate universes heavily often use the "infinite variations" model of the multiverse. The leads simply can't afford to worry about saving every single possible universe. Things are even worse if there's only one world, but Time Travel can change it back and forth. People in the future can die a hundred times each, but since the Time Travel will bring them back, who cares? A related issue is that too many alternates can cheapen established stories. If the heroes have saved Earth from the Planet Looters, the Zombie Apocalypse, The Virus, the Nietzsche Wannabe and the Circus of Fear, that's impressive. If there's an Alternate Universe for each one of those villains winning, it means our heroes aren't impressive -- they lost as often as they won, and we're from the universe where they just happened to win five times in a row. This gets even more Egregious when there are infinite alternate universes; for every event in "our" universe, there are infinite others in which it didn't happen... On the other hand, "You can have an infinity of apples but still not a single orange", as a scientist explained this theory: So it's still perfectly possible that the heroes win everywhere, or at least more often than they lose. This callousness doesn't apply to worlds that are less obviously mirrors of our own. Wonderland, Narnia, and dimensions with only nonhuman life are all technically alternate universes, but they're so different that losing them actually hurts. This trope is named after a short story by Larry Niven that is essentially a Lampshade Hanging on the trope. Compare For Want of a Nail, which is the Time Travel equivalent. Examples of All the Myriad Ways include:
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