Full transcript of “Why JoJo's Multiverse Works (And Marvel's Doesn't)”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 I think it's fair to say that most of us are exhausted with multiverse stories right now. And I don't think it's just because of bad CGI or fatigue with companies like Marvel in general. I think the problem is a lot deeper than that. The problem really is philosophical. The problem is that infinite possibilities of the multiverse leaves behind a void of meaningless noise in its wake. Think about it. If Spider-Man can be a wisecracking teenager, but in the next dimension, he's a gritty noir detective, and in the next, he's a literal pig, then what even is Spider-Man? Philosophers have a word for this. It's nominalism. The belief that Spider-Man isn't an idea or an essential soul, but instead just a label, a
0:46 sticker. And if you peel that sticker off one thing and slap it on a pig, it means the exact same thing. It's difficult to care about stories if we find out that they were arbitrarily written with no overarching plan or lessons. It makes the whole thing feel pointless to have experienced. And ultimately, what leads people to care about stories? It's the idea that characters, world, and lessons matter. In the modern MCU, the multiverse is treated like a director's playground. It's a place where writers can change the definitions of characters whenever they want, depending on the story they want to tell. Identity is fluid and really consequences are optional because there are an infinite number of equally valid universes where the writing decision people didn't like actually
1:32 didn't happen. It's through this infinity that the story ironically collapses into nothingness. But there is one writer who solved this. one writer who is able to take the chaos of the multiverse and constrain it in a way that makes every story within it matter and leaves its different universes deepening certain truths within his writing. Hirohiko Iraqi creates the perfect multiverse by actually constraining it through strict rules. In Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, you can travel to infinite dimensions and you can even reset the universe. But you can never escape the reality of gravity. To Iraqi, gravity isn't just a force that pulls apples down from trees. It is a metaphysical
2:18 anchor. It's the force that ensures that no matter how weird the universe gets, a joar is always a joar. A zeppily is always a zeppily. And despite the disperate and chaotic forces of the world, reality always bends back towards the truth of nature. Today, we're going to talk about why the Steelball Run universe in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is far more than a simple reboot. It is a thesis statement on why humanity matters. Because you can only ever be you. Do you believe in gravity? Because by the end of this video, I'm sure that you will. The multiverse is supposed to make stories feel bigger and deeper, like our understanding of reality itself is expanding. But far too many multiverse
3:05 stories don't feel that way at all. Instead, they feel even shallower than a normal single universe story. And the reason is simple. Infinite possibility, if done wrong, can be antithetical to meaning. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the cleanest example because it's the most culturally visible and because its multiverse logic has become a kind of default template. Once you introduce variants, timelines, and infinite worlds, you inherit a new problem. Why should we care about this? Or any particular version of the universe for that matter? If there's always another universe where characters have completely different motivations and moral alignments, universes where some characters live instead of dying, and some where the
3:51 villains won, then the story starts to feel like it's not grounded in anything real at all. The MCU attempted to achieve this grounding using the sacred timeline plot device, but ultimately the sacred timeline wasn't based on the metaphysics of the universe and was instead arbitrarily enforced by a Kafka-esque bureaucratic system in the TVA. There was no essential or necessary reason why the universe needed to adhere to the sacred timeline. It was just a relatively lazy plot device to attempt to create some structure and coherence where there really was none. The idea of the multiverse in Marvel isn't in and of itself bad. Some properties like Into the Spider-Verse deal with the concept far better than the MCU, in fact. But
4:37 the main issue is that the system itself doesn't enforce weight. And when weight isn't enforced, the audience starts to lose interest in the story being told. Because if any story is reasonably possible within a multiverse, then why does this one matter? They'll just undo it. Nothing matters. Everything is optional. Here's the philosophical core of this issue. Difference becomes all the more insightful when contextualized within sameness. A character isn't defined by how many versions they can have. A character is defined by what they cannot abandon without ceasing to be themselves. If everything is flexible morals personality history even species, then identity stops being identity. It becomes costume design or
5:24 some kind of brand. And once identity becomes a mere brand, characters become largely irrelevant. Because honestly, why do we care about characters within stories? Is it because they're cool or funny? Or is it because they serve some function for the plot? Not really. The reason why people care about characters is because certain essential things about who they are as people illuminate different aspects of ourselves and allow us to appreciate ourselves even more. Without identity, we lose the very thing that makes characters shine. That's what I'm getting at when I say that infinity collapses into nothingness in multiversal storytelling. Not that infinity is logically impossible. It's quite possible within these stories, but that infinity without constraint becomes
6:11 noise because people don't really experience infinity as liberation within narratives. We experience it as like a sort of disorientation that leaves us unmed and disinterested. So, let me explain why Infinity without constraint feels so devoid of purpose. Imagine you're exploring an endless Minecraft world, infinite biomes in every direction. At first, it feels pretty exciting, but then after a couple hours, you realize something. No matter how far you travel, you're mostly getting more of the same. Different permutations, but nothing more substantially. No special destination and no reason why one place matters more than any other rather than just pure aesthetic preference.
6:57 The world is infinite, but it lacks any real orientation other than what you, as the player, choose to give it. And sure, you can still make a place meaningful by building a base. But now imagine that you have 100 infinite Minecraft worlds all connected, all equally real. If everything is interchangeable, then meaning starts to thin out a bit. Now imagine you install a 100 random mods and all of them are forcibly randomly assigned to all of these worlds. In one world, the blocks are circles. In another, the end dragon is replaced by Hugh Morris. in another. You can't break blocks. It might be funny for a couple hours, but you can't really do anything with this. Without a consistent underlying structure, without consistent
7:43 rules, it stops being Minecraft and just becomes a template for nonsense. That's what a lot of multiverse storytelling feels like right now. It's not that there are too many worlds. It's that the multiverse lacks a stable orientation system, a rule that tells you what matters, what persists, and what actually has weight. But like I said before, there is a legendary series that saw this issue in multiversal storytelling and found a way to ground its fans to maximize meaning and impact within the infinite. That series is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Because Jojo's gives infinity a compass by constraining infinity within the concept of gravity. In Jojo, alternate worlds are not a license for arbitrariness. Iraqi doesn't
8:29 treat identity as infinitely malleable. He treats it as something that has a center, a core, something with mass to speak in scientific terms. So, while Iraqi will remix characters and ideas in New Worlds, he still won't entirely dissolve what makes them special. When you move from the original universe of Steelball Run, you don't get a chaotic parade of anything goes variants where Johnny and Diego have nothing in common with their original counterparts of Jonathan and Dio. You get something more disciplined and more mythic. They have different lives and different circumstances, but they retain recognizable gravitational centers to their characters and situations. Johnny still grew up in aristocracy, had a precious pet named Danny, and had a
9:15 father who deeply impacted his [music] worldview. But it's all given a different recontextualization based on those circumstances. That's why Johnny can feel like the spiritual negative of Jonathan while still reading as the same kind of soul. That's why the echoes of the Zeppily family tradition persists across universes, subscribe. >> Jojo's doesn't let character identities become random because Jojo's doesn't believe that identity is random. Steelball Run makes this explicit in a way that almost feels like Iraqi is
10:00 stepping outside of the story to explain his own cosmology. Gravity is described as the force that doesn't just pull objects together, but binds a person into a coherent self. Gravity is what holds identity together, body, mind, and form. And here's the key line of reasoning. When Funny Valentine travels to other universes with his stand dirty deeds done dirt cheap, the force of gravity necessarily travels to other universes with him because without that structuring force of gravity, his person will not remain whole. He will break apart and scatter into nothing after losing all coherence. So Iraqi is essentially saying identity is not just psychological or arbitrarily decided. It's structural. The universe
10:48 itself has a metaphysical force that makes people who they are. Gravity is the reason why something can persist through change. In this way, it's as if Iraqi is saying that circumstances might differ, causing characters to move in different directions, but the mass that is a character's soul will always pull their identity in the right direction that it was meant to go. It's what makes a person remain the same person even when the conditions of reality shift around them. So in Jojo's, gravity isn't only physics. It's the metaphysical rule that prevents infinity from becoming meaningless. And this is also why D4C itself is so important. A lot of multiverse fiction treats dimensional travel as freedom.
11:35 You can go anywhere and you can be anything. But D4C isn't really freedom. It's still pretty limited by some important constraints. Even the way it handles duplicate selves is pretty telling. Multiversal equivalents cannot coexist casually. They annihilate each other. Reality rejects the overlap. The structure of the universe forces the gravitational pole of two identities to collapse in on themselves, leading to complete annihilation. Through this hard rule, Iraqi prevents JoJo's multiverse from becoming a playground of hackneed ideas and arbitrariness. He builds it as a strict metaphysical machine that leaves us with a wealth of meaning to interpret the purpose behind every character and their
12:21 place within Jojo's story at large. Iraqi creates this monumental feat through making Infinity legible, meaningful, and gravitational. This also reframes Stone Ocean's ending in a really interesting way. Enrico Poochie's goal throughout the entire part is basically to eliminate suffering for all of humanity by granting everyone the fornowledge of their own fate. And to achieve this goal, he weaponizes gravity to force all living things into his vision for the world. He tries to impose inevitability onto human identity to make fate an absolute weight that no one can escape. Now, we won't be going into the full nature of what Pooie's plan means for free will or for humanity. And if you want to see more of
13:07 that, check out my video that's annotated above. What is very interesting to understand how gravity works within Jojo's is what happens when Poochie kills somebody before the universe properly resets. Spoilers for part six if you haven't seen it already. But when Poochie kills Jodoro and Jolene, it creates a kind of identity misalignment. Their roles in the universe generally persist, but without the same gravitational pull as before. The second cycle universe versions of Jodoro and Jolene look pretty different to the original ones and seem to have their identity unmed and drifting apart from their original truth. Almost like through dying before a reset, the mass that united their identity and pulled who and what they
13:52 were as people together became weaker and would continue to grow weaker unless something were to change. But when Emporio defeats Pooie, Emporio removes Pooie's gravitational identity from the universe, invalidating his actions, leading the gravity of Jolene and her crew to emerge once more. The system stabilizes and the universe recalibrates by removing Poochie's distorted mass from the equation. Everyone has slightly different names and circumstances, but the uniting gravity of what makes them who they are remains. So the character's gravity returns, their essence, their relational magnetism, the truth of who they are without the gravity of Poochie's evil shaping their suffering. That's why
14:39 Irene isn't Jolene in a literal sense, but she's still unmistakably the main character of part six. This is why Jojo's Bizarre Adventure continues to persist as an incredible manga and anime series with a rabid [music] fandom. I would know. I'm one of them. Fans don't stick around because it's random and bizarre. They stick around because Jojo's Bizarre Adventures bizarre nature is underpinned with a great deal of care and meaning. that dares to believe that identity has weight and that the struggles and triumphs of humanity matter in the grand scheme of the universe. Iraqi establishes that people and characters can change but not infinitely. True narrative freedom is not found within the absence of constraint but rather
15:26 through its presence. And while infinity without weight becomes noise, infinity with gravity becomes myth. So now, do you believe in gravity? Because in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, gravity is more than a force that pulls you down. It's the force that holds everything that is you together. It's the reason the universe can reset and still remain meaningful. It's the reason a multiverse can be infinite and still matter. And it's the reason that no matter how far reality bends, a joar is always a joar. because you can only ever be you. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe if you like videos like this. I'm going to be making a ton more awesome analyses on
16:13 Steelball Run and other JoJo's parts leading up to Steelball Run. Um, and also I'm trying to hit a milestone of 10,000 subscribers soon. So be sure to like, subscribe, share the videos with your friends, do whatever you have to do. Either way, I really appreciate all the love and support everybody in my community has given me. So, be sure to keep it up and uh I'll keep making great videos. Until next time.
