I Don’t Know Why I Still Care About Fictional Timelines (But I Do)

Some nights I’ll just sit at my desk, half-finished coffee going cold, and fall deep into some rabbit hole about a crossover that happened 20 years ago. I don’t mean to. I swear I open my browser to check something “real” — like the weather, or maybe email — and then, somehow, I’m comparing two different versions of the same character who died in one universe and became a god in another. It’s dumb. But it’s also kind of beautiful.

The Multiverse, as a concept, isn’t new. Comic nerds like me — and I say “nerd” with love, I promise — have been arguing over this stuff forever. Who’s canon? Which timeline is “prime”? What counts? What got retconned into oblivion? It’s messy and contradictory and no one fully agrees, and that’s kind of what I love about it. Even the Wikipedia page for Marvel’s Multiverse is a disaster of nested entries and footnotes and confusing chronology. It’s exhausting — and it’s perfect.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. I remember being 14 and thinking that if I could just figure out the logic behind the timelines, the world would make more sense. Like, if Jean Grey can die three times and still come back stronger, maybe my teenage heartbreak didn’t mean everything was over. Maybe there was still another version of me out there that didn’t mess up.

I’m older now. Still nerdy. Less idealistic. But that feeling hasn’t gone away. That hope. That maybe somewhere — not even somewhere real — but somewhere in a story, there’s a version of me who said the right thing at the right time. A version of me who didn’t back down. Or who kissed her back. Or who left earlier. Or stayed.

I think that’s why this site — this weird little Multiverse-DB thing — still matters to me. Not because it’s flashy. It’s not. It’s full of broken links and outdated graphics and way too much text. But also… it’s got heart. It’s a digital archive of all the times writers tried to say, “What if?” and then followed it all the way down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes people ask why I still care. Why I reread stuff like Crisis on Infinite Earths or some obscure crossover issue from the ’90s where nothing really made sense but everything still somehow fit together. I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s just comforting. Real life doesn’t always give you closure. Fiction, sometimes, does.

And hey, if you’re here reading this? Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’re just looking for a version of yourself that feels a little more okay. Or maybe you just like the chaos of characters fighting their evil twins in other dimensions. Either way, welcome. There’s room for you in this timeline, too.