Before the Multiverse

Japanese IPs That Resist the Multiverse Discussions of the multiverse are often anchored in high-tech spectacle, speculative futurism, or contemporary anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence and computational infinity. Yet some of the most revealing engagements with multiplicity—or with its refusal—emerge retrospectively from Japanese popular culture that predates the current multiverse boom. This temporal displacement is analytically productive: works that never explicitly set out to imagine infinite worlds nonetheless illuminate how multiplicity can be embraced, resisted, or rendered pathological. Placing Pokémon Go alongside other Japanese media franchises helps clarify that its multiverse logic is neither technologically inevitable nor industrially automatic. Rather, it is a specific cultural configuration that becomes visible only through comparison. Some franchises actively resist multiverse expansion, anchoring meaning in closure and irreversibility. Others engage multiplicity but frame it as a psychological fracture rather than a possibility. These alternatives matter because they remind us that parallelism is not a neutral or universal solution to narrative exhaustion; it is a choice with affective and ethical consequences. Slam Dunk, a Japanese basketball manga created by Takehiko Inoue, was serialised from 1990 to 1996 and later adapted into a popular television anime. Centred on high school basketball and adolescent growth, it became one of the most influential sports narratives in East Asia. The basketball manga offers a striking example of resistance. The series is defined by a closed temporality centred on a singular period of youth. Its narrative power derives from finality: the season ends, the team disbands, and the story refuses continuation. Characters do not branch into alternate futures or parallel selves. There is no invitation to replay or reconfigure outcomes. Time in Slam Dunk is irreversible, and identity is anchored in a specific moment that cannot be repeated. The emotional intensity of the work emerges precisely because multiplicity is denied. Unlike the narrative closure that defines Slam Dunk, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996), created by Hideaki Anno and produced by Gainax, has been marked by continual revision and expansion. Blending mecha spectacle with psychological and theological introspection, the series generated multiple cinematic reinterpretations and reboots, becoming a paradigmatic case of how a franchise can reopen and reconfigure its own narrative universe rather than remain bound to a singular, closed temporality. Multiple versions of events do not coexist peacefully; they accumulate as unresolved contradictions. The self fragments under the weight of possibility, and the multiverse becomes a site of existential paralysis. Here, multiplicity signals crisis rather than agency, reinforcing the sense that too many possible worlds threaten coherent subjectivity. Placed against these examples, Pokémon occupies a third position. Pokémon Go is an augmented-reality mobile game developed by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. It extends the world of Pokémon—itself based on the long-running game and media franchise—into locative, embodied play by allowing users to capture virtual creatures in real-world spaces through their smartphones. In this article, I distinguish between Pokémon as the anime text and Pokémon Go as its augmented-reality franchise iteration, in order to examine how narrative animation is transformed into a spatialised, participatory experience. In the Pokémon-related franchised world, it neither rejects multiplicity outright nor treats it as catastrophic. Instead, it integrates parallelism into routine cultural practice. The absence of narrative closure in Pokémon does not produce despair; it enables continuity. Worlds proliferate without demanding reconciliation, and identities multiply without imploding. This contrast helps explain why Pokémon Go remains culturally resonant at a moment when multiverse discourse has migrated into everyday life, from platform identities to algorithmic selves. Where Slam Dunk sacralises singular time, and Evangelion dramatises its breakdown, Pokémon normalises plurality as a stable condition. Its database-driven, embodied multiverse does not resolve anxiety or constraint, but it renders them playable—offering a model of how multiplicity can be lived with rather than overcome. Pokémon Go from Spectacle to Practice The multiverse has emerged as the dominant narrative architecture of the early twenty-first century (Medlock). Propelled by the industrial scale of franchises such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the concept is frequently articulated through visual excess—as Whissel argues, digital effects in cinema, particularly “the vertical” (21), function as emblems that visualise complex historical or cultural anxieties amid the vertigo of infinite contingency. In this hegemonic mode, the multiverse functions as a spectacle of crisis—a disruption of order that demands to be watched, decoded, and ultimately resolved. It frames multiplicity as a narrative emergency, where the proliferation of worlds threatens the stability of the one we inhabit. However, to theorise the multiverse solely through the lens of the cinematic blockbuster is to overlook how deeply its logic has permeated the mundane rhythms of daily life. Beyond the screen, the multiverse operates not as a cosmic catastrophe, but as a routine condition of contemporary experience. This is perhaps most visible, as Steinberg suggested, in the "media mix strategies of Japanese popular culture” (1), specifically the augmented reality phenomenon of Pokémon Go. Here, as Adriana de Souza e Silva argued, the parallel world is not a distant dimension accessed through a portal, but a digital layer superimposed seamlessly onto physical geography. Players do not escape their reality; they navigate a hybrid space where the virtual and the actual coexist (Hjorth et al.). This article argues that Pokémon Go exemplifies a shift from the multiverse as a spectacle of observation to the multiverse as a practice of habitation. While cinematic narratives dramatise the shock of multiplicity, the augmented multiverse normalises it, embedding the logic of layered realities into everyday spatial practice (Manovich). By examining this transition, we can see how the multiverse functions less as a science fiction trope and more as a cultural logic for subjects navigating the fragmentation, acceleration, and uncertainty of the neoliberal present. This article asks a simple but consequential question: what happens when the multiverse is not narrated, but inhabited? Rather than focussing on texts that explicitly thematise parallel universes, it examines Pokémon Go as a cultural system that normalises multiplicity without framing it as a crisis. For over two decades, Pokémon has invited players to inhabit personalised worlds structured by variation, repetition, and divergence. Each playthrough—such as card game, team composition, or branching formation—unfolds along parallel timelines that never converge; each player occupies a distinct version of the same world. These differences are neither resolved nor hierarchised but coexist without contradiction. By treating Pokémon Go as a lived multiverse, this article shifts attention from narrative representation to cultural practice. It argues that Pokémon Go offers a model of multiplicity grounded in everyday engagement rather than exceptional spectacle. Through play, collection, and embodied movement, players learn to navigate fragmented identity and flexible temporality as manageable and even pleasurable conditions. In this sense, Pokémon provides a revealing counterpoint to more anxiety-driven multiverse narratives, suggesting how multiplicity has become an ordinary, habitual feature of contemporary cultural life. Within cultural studies, the multiverse can therefore be understood as a way of thinking about how subjects navigate multiplicity under contemporary conditions. Rather than asking whether multiple worlds ‘exist’, the more productive question is how multiverse logic shapes everyday practices, affects, and expectations (Brown). By approaching the multiverse as a cultural logic rather than a narrative gimmick, this article positions Pokémon as a particularly instructive case: one in which multiplicity is neither spectacular nor traumatic, but lived, sustained, and quietly normalised. Pokémon as a Database Multiverse and a Cultural Logic Unlike cinematic multiverse narratives that hinge on causal divergence and temporal paradox, Pokémon Go operates through what can be described as a database multiverse. Rather than unfolding along a single canonical timeline, the franchise is organised around an expandable repository of characters, attributes, and rules that can be endlessly recombined. This structure resonates with accounts of database consumption, most notably articulated by Azuma Hiroki, in which narrative coherence gives way to modular elements that users assemble according to preference and context. As Lev Manovich argues, digital media privilege the database as a cultural form that stands in tension with linear narrative, replacing sequential storytelling with structured collections of elements that can be accessed, arranged, and recombined without a predetermined order. In Pokémon, there is no definitive or authoritative sequence of events that binds all versions together. Each game within the franchise generation restarts the world with minor variations: new regions, revised mechanics, and additional creatures. While certain narrative motifs recur—beginning a journey, defeating gyms, confronting an antagonist—these do not accumulate into a unified history. Instead, they function as familiar templates that support repetition without progression, a logic also evident in the temporal recycl