Thread:Marvelus/@comment-26838855-20190116120806/@comment-26838855-20190507145413

Yeah, it doesn't seem possible that you could have two timelines in the same universe, but it also seems odd to me that the universe could "split" into two universes. That if you trace two different universes back in their timelines at some point they somehow merge. Parallel universes seems to make more sense to me as completely distinct alternate worlds. The The Flash TV show, for example (not a good example for time travel rules and things because it's all over the place, but just giving the example of what I mean), has numerous distinct universes ("Earth-1", "Earth-2", "Earth-3", etc.), but within each universe you can also change the timeline. Characters pop over to Earth-2, the Flash changes the Earth-1 timeline, but then the Earth-2 characters pop back over to Earth-1 and they remember it all, while none of the other characters do (except the Flash), because they were unaffected by the time travel on Earth-1.

But then again, maybe that's the Russo distinction about rewriting time rather than just creating diverging timelines. I always took things like X-Men: Days of Future Past (weirdly, also another film set in 2023 where the present is horrible and they have to travel back to the past to fix it) or The Flash to be that you create an alternate timeline with your time travel, just when you "return", you come out in the same date you left, but in the new timeline (which is the main thing the Russos and Markus and McFeely seem to, correctly because it doesn't make sense, have a problem with), and the old timeline becomes inaccessible/cut off. The Flash does whiteboard-drawing explanations line. I always took it in fiction that that is the "Butterfly Effect", not literally rewriting time but splitting the timeline and cutting out the last one. The Russos and Markus and McFeely seem to feel, however, that with things like this and Back to the Future, you are literally rewriting the one timeline (which they are correct in saying is not possible). So if that were the case, then that could explain why Earth-1 in The Flash, for example, could keep having its timeline changed without making more Earths - that there aren't "multiple timelines in one universe", but rather one timeline per universe. But the show does specifically talk about splitting timelines.

It's not important, I'm not trying to justify that show's version of time travel because it's nonsense and makes it up as it goes along, but what I'm trying to get at is the subtleties of how you define these various terms. Does literally every universe stem back to the one universe with a Big Bang divergence point, and ever since then events have split and split and split into more and more splitting universes? Or do different parallel universes each have their own Big Bang and tree of events. Essentially, if you think of the branches like a tree, is the multiverse one big tree, or is it lots of thinner trees side-by-side? Which would mean branched timelines within each universe. But yes, it does seem odd to think of a universe with branched timelines, so maybe each branch on the tree is defined as a "universe", and each tree is a "reality", so there's a "reality" with lots of different branched timelines/universes, and "timeline"/"universe" can be used interchangeably.

I'm not looking for answers from you guys to these questions and there's far more questions I could ask, I'm just giving examples of the kind of spiralling questions one can ask when you get into all this timeline reality dimension multiverse stuff, and how messy it can get.

As for different pages, I don't really get involved in those sorts of wiki decisions, but when someone started making different pages, Uskok deleted them and said that that's a Marvel Database thing, not an MCU Wiki thing. But I wonder if perhaps, if the MCU starts going deeper into this sort of stuff, that that might change.