Seems to be greater and greater emphasis on timelines in Western popular culture. The concept itself has been around for a long time, but Community managed to turn it into a meme and now Marvel are really leaning into it with the whole multiverse thing,
You can chalk it up to just a clever way of recasting roles, recycling IPs and dealing with plot holes, but it clearly runs deeper than that as it's deployed in response to current events too. I don't know how many times I saw people going on about being in "the darkest timeline," during Trump's time in office, but it was a lot.
My current feeling's that this stuff stems from a certain fatalism re: things like corruption and climate change. We can't imagine a solution and too few of us are willing to seriously attempt to come up with and implement one anyway, so there's this desire to just escape the whole thing and go somewhere the bad things and people simply don't exist.
You can chalk it up to just a clever way of recasting roles, recycling IPs and dealing with plot holes, but it clearly runs deeper than that as it's deployed in response to current events too. I don't know how many times I saw people going on about being in "the darkest timeline," during Trump's time in office, but it was a lot.
My current feeling's that this stuff stems from a certain fatalism re: things like corruption and climate change. We can't imagine a solution and too few of us are willing to seriously attempt to come up with and implement one anyway, so there's this desire to just escape the whole thing and go somewhere the bad things and people simply don't exist.