would going from woman to woman be problematic if it's technically the same woman?

The hero is what I classify as a "lazy prodigy" super smart to genius level but no ambition, career student, happy with his life, his small social circle, apartment over an arcade and most of all his girlfriend who he has been with since the 11th grade(he is 26) who it took him 4 years to win over.

The hero protagonist is one of the only reoccurring male characters in the story, other male characters are either one off villains or obstacles. his Ishmael type companion on his quest is actually female whom I'm writing as a very butch lesbian(based on my real life friend of 10 years) and her girlfriend (based on my friends wife). And the love interest is going to be fully fleshed out from a gazillian angles do to the type of story it is.

Cliff notes summery, hero loses the love of his life**(do to death or a breakup, I have not decided yet)** and in grief over the end of the relationship he becomes obsessed with the idea that there is a version of her out there that is still alive or would still love him(depending on whether she is dead or just dumped him), so he creates a way to travel the multiverse and find the right one of her alts in order to get his happy life back.

Though I plan on a happy ending, there will be many false starts, some versions are too different, some have way different lives, such as being a single mother or handicapped etc etc.. or sometimes she is basically the same woman and she is into him but the world is too different, such as being post-apocalyptic, dystopian, racist in a Jim-crowe apartheid kinda way.(our hero is multiracial)or it's a world where they are still together and he struggles with the temptation to take HIS alt out and replace him.

I showed what i have so far to a few people and though they like short stories they feel the love interest is a problem because there are billions of her, and the hero has an unfair advantage because he knows so much about her going in(friends 4 years a couple for 10), while most of her alts know nothing about him(just met some guy who knows all her favorite things....Wow).

Question is would any off you view the love interest/'s as problematic simply based on set-up and if so how would it not be problematic in your eyes?

 

It could be problematic. Especially given he is obsessed with her, he could easily come off as a stalker. Well some of her alts might accept him, more than a few are probably going to have a 'what the hell?' moment, and I would expect at least a few to react pretty badly.

 

I don't know, it feels a bit like something a villain would be doing. Possibly a sympathetic villain, but a villain all the same. Loved ones aren't supposed to be replacable.

 

I agree - with both tings actually.

Your hero sounds like a mad-stalker-villain... - granted someone you could be sympathetic for as the loss of love is dramatic - but, still, he doesn't sound like a hero at all.
Plus: I don't really suppose any woman would really be glad to run into a guy basically telling her she's an alt of his love and they want to be together. This could (or better should) come off with a lot of conflict.

 

I don't know, I think this could work. The hero is using foreknowledge that the alts know nothing of, so yeah, a bit stalker-y, but if you look at Groundhog Day, it's a similar concept, at least in the pursuing of the love interest. That worked very well. And if the hero has a change over time, I think it would be a story I would read. So long as he has an arc, and realises the errors of his ways, or finds someone new, then yes, this story could work. Not all heroes start off as stellar people; that's why they have a story.

 

I do agree not all heroes begin as such - and I do write turn-arounds as well, but this has to be a complete u-turn.
As far as describe above I didn't see a change in the planning.

 

Infinite Worlds Theory would be like a ripple in a pond, with the closest being
pretty similar to the one you left, with very minor differences that you might
not even notice, so you would have to get pretty far out before you hit one that
is the mirror (opposite) of the point of origin. So it will take a good long while
of dimension hopping to find one where she is alive, and where she isn't dating
the 'MC' in that reality.
Might be awkward to waltz in on the two, and the hero is all kidnapper from the
same person that they are.

Would that be like stealing the girl from himself?

 

yep depending on the degree of difference her reaction will be different to his approach, like Hope prime grew up lower middle class and gravitated towards the artsy crowd, say one of her alt's grew up poor, she would have grew up with not enough free time to develop her interests and hobbies, and she may never have found our hero appealing. or by the same token if an alt grew up rich she may not find his apartment over the arcade he works at appealing.

but technically it's not a replacement, depending on when the POD(point of divergence) was. like say you and your wife got into a car wreck last night you were both thrown from the car but you landed in a shallow pond with only a few scrapes and bruises but she hit a tree and was dead on impact. there is another universe where everything happened exactly the same except the car slid a little more to the left and you hit the tree and she landed in the pond just a little shaken up but not seriously harmed. if the car sliding to the left was the POD then up until that point it WAS THE SAME UNIVERSE splitting at the point of the car slightly turning thus producing the different outcome, so the living and dead versions of your wife were the same person prior to the divergence, so if you traveled to the reality where she survived the wife you find IS your wife in every way. problem is in some worlds you both survived in some your both in a comma, or headed to a wheel chair, or she is ok but your alt is a vegetable etc etc...

Exactly most of the nearby worlds he would either exist on at best and exist and be with his love, so he would have to venture out into worlds where the POD was 20+ years ago, and the farther back the POD the more differences that world may hold. though I could write it in that his travel device is key'd to her DNA so he always ends up within a few miles of her alt on a world where she exists..

 

I guuuuueeeess, if you cut it that fine, but it didn't sound like that was what you were after. If the guy is shopping around among all the possible ways his wife's life could have gone and trying to find a version that doesn't offend his sensibilities, then it does come across an awful lot like he doesn't care about the person he lost, just about how she made him feel.

And even in this case, if her being alive but in a wheelchair makes him go, "no, that one's damaged, I'll keep looking until I find a pristine version," then that makes me kind of want to smack him, honestly.

 

actually you are more describing my first version where he built the device to find a woman period, but I scraped that idea because he came off as an incel, so with the current version I started him off with a happy life with a girlfriend that loved him for who he was for many years, until the death or breakup that came out of the blue(still haven't decided how to end the original relationship).

Below is a concept video for the original idea pardon the fake voices. the finished version and story would have voice actors.

 

well, it all depends on how you play it out, really. I kind of like the idea. I read webcomics that actually have the multiverse theory, Crossoverlord comes to mind which is about a madman who wants to combine all the multiverses together because of what the almost senile multiverse steward did to his wife. Another multiverse comic, done as a sequel to to crossoverlord, is Crossoverkill. Alternates of one person are collecting death personas for an unknown reason and its up to a ragtag band of heros from across the multiverse to find out and stop them. Both tales have some zany moments and are a fun read, in the first one there is a very cute part involving the cloned version of a villain. In the second one there's this super good parody of a famous movie dropped in that really suits the scene.

But I digress, I think her death would make it more tragic of a tale and the hero strikes me as a hero spiraling into villainhood as he crosses the multiverse to find a copy of his one true love. What would make it interesting is he eventually chooses to first kidnap his other selves, then starts killing them because they always figure out how to escape and cause problems. All the single wives would be like no way, and need to be won over again. From the sound of it he's almost, or is, over 30 so that wouldn't appeal to him, for by the time he won her he would be middle age and have to spend his silver and golden years with her. To make it super interesting, one of his alternates that he thought he killed follows him and becomes the hero that saves the multiverse from him, or maybe a target escapes. What's important is his spiral into madness and how to rescue the multiverse from him.

As for the spurned lover, to me, that just doesn't make much sense, for he could work super hard in getting her back, change in a way that she needs and live happily ever after. It really doesn't have much of a story, even if a huge rift caused the breakup. What true reason would he have to go on a multiversal jaunt to find a wife who didn't leave him? That might make the reader think he's a shallow, lazy man who wants his cake and to eat it too. They, myself included, might look down on him and possibly put down the book or worse, leave a bad review.

A good villain is often like a good hero but with corrupted morals that they justify as good, or got to the point where they just don't care. Take some of our villains in history. Do you think Hitler thought of himself as evil? Yes he had a deep rooted hatred of the Jews but he thought he was in the right by ridding the world of "scum." Perhaps he had a bad experience with a Jew that tainted his perceptions. I'm not trying to trivialize the Holocaust or anything, but to understand what made Hitler tick. How about Bin Ladin? His situation is totally different. His very religion tells him that non Arabs are trash to be exterminated by any means possible. For each non Arab he kills he gets a wife in "heaven" that he can have his way with however he likes. He conned the suicide bombers into thinking the same thing and terrorized the rest of the world. (I studied their religion in my youth.) In both cases, Hitler and Laudin thought they were doing right by the time they were stopped, despite what the world thought. Neither one was evil for the sake of evil. Those kind of villains are like paper cutouts. They look good but just isn't that kind of person that readers love to hate.

I also suggest instead of just magically crossing, unless the world is set in a magic world, the hero obsessively creates the portable technology to do so then talks himself into using it. Perhaps he hides the multiverse crosser in a secure place so not to lose it to an alternate.

Those are my ideas on how you could go. In one of my unpublished works I have two alternates working together and there are some wife complications that must be ironed out before all hell breaks loose between them. One has his wife and is the father to her unborn children and the other has yet to rescue his wife from [spoiler.] That story needs lots of work, especially to turn it into deep third person POV. The backbone of the story is there, it just needs an overhaul.

Your story has a lot of potential to be a great book. I would love to read it, but I simply don't have the time, nor the experience yet to critique another's work. of course I could always start somewhere, but still, not just yet. I need to save the rest of my creativity into tying my own story back towards the first draft's ending. I thought of a what if and ran with it. The story improved dramatically but I need to get it back on track somehow to be similar to the draft's ending. There's things that my hero must do and acquire for the next books. Plus my ipad is currently outdated and does not have Word on it to allow easy commenting and editing.

 

That would if anything be more justifiable. It would make less sense, because honestly, if you can't find a match among the three point whatever billion women in this world, I don't think roaming the multiverse is going to help you, but you're allowed to set your dating preferences to whatever you like as long as you accept that having unreasonable demands may result in you being lonely for a long time. But the kind of person who turns down an alt of his dead wife because she's in a wheelchair seems a lot like the kind of person who'd divorce his wife if she ended up in a wheelchair, and that kind of person is a shit person.

Look, bottom line, you asked a question. "Would going from woman to woman be problematic if it's technically the same woman?" And the answer, of course, is no, because "problematic" is a horrible little weasel word that needs to die in a fire. But if your question had been, "would it be weird, creepy and sort of indicative of being divorced from normal human emotion?" then I would have to say yes, yes, and absolutely.

Make of that what you will.

 

actually it would, there is a real life phenomena were some people do better at dating in one city or region over another, yes some people will draw in the opposite sex no matter where they are, either through being very charming, successful or they simply won the genetic lottery in a big way, but others may have done great at dating or hooking up in their hometown but when the move to another city in another part of the country and they can't find a date to save their life, and I've often heard the reverse, where someone did very poorly in one city or many cities but found him/herself in a town where the women(or men) are lining up around the block.
I chalk it up to them just happening to find themselves in an area where they happen to be the local flavor or the opposite of what the local flavor is. hell I've heard beautiful women talking about Moving to LA ruining their self esteem because they went from being the hot girl in their hometown to being just another girl in LA. or guys who were unlucky in love ending up in a town were women outnumber men by a wide margin and now they have their pick.

Now imagine a multiverse of all kinds of possibilities, like maybe a world where sport were outlawed in the 70's because of head injuries, so gamers became the jocks of that world getting endorsement deals and scholarships.
or a world that is still a farming based economy so chubby women are still the beauty standard. or some post apocalyptic world where some grundgy redneck is viewed as sexy cause he knows how to hunt, fish and fix on cars.
in other words there is a universe out there more suited to who you are than this one no matter who you are.

Actually I would write it as her turning him down for that reason(not wanting to burden him).

How so if he finds a woman that is his love in every way that matters?

 

"It's the entire universe's fault that I can't get a date!!!" is still a sentiment that's so fundamentally whiny that I'd want to slap anyone who made it. Especially anyone who was smart enough to figure out a way to travel between dimensions, because someone like that shouldn't be discouraged by his preferences being less than near-universal. But whatever, you've already decided against that premise anyway.

Fine, but that's not how you said it.

First off, if you can't figure that out, maybe don't throw around words like "problematic" and "incel."

Secondly, like I've already said - sure, if all he does is go into a temporal branch that split from his own five minutes before the accident, he might find a woman who was his wife "in every way that matters." But that wouldn't give you all the interesting alternate realities that you really seem to want. The more changes you introduce, the more shallow your protagonist comes across for going, "meh, close enough!"

Thirdly, even an exact copy is still not the same person, it's just another person that looks and acts the same. True love is supposed to involve a level of empathy whereby you care about another person for themselves, not just how they can make you feel. If anyone with the same attributes is a valid replacement for a loved one, then that means you never had that level of empathy, because while the copy can make you happy, the other person - whose own happiness you supposedly cared about - is gone.

Fourthly, here's something you need to understand: problematic doesn't go away because you argue with it. That is part of why it's such a hateful concept. It's a sentiment. It doesn't respond to logic. When you ask whether something is problematic, what you mean is, will it skeeve people out? I'm telling you, yes. Yes, it will. Either you decide not to care about that, or you scrap the idea. But either way, stop arguing that it shouldn't skeeve them out.

 

I attracted more women in Cleveland and Seattle with little to know effort(just being me) than I do in Dallas, but saying that is not like me saying it's Dallas's fault nor am I saying it's impossible to find a date in Dallas, it's just a case of I happen to be "The Type" of a larger pool of women in those other 2 cities.

I agree with most of what you said here, and I have already mentioned of his device being keyed into her dna, but now for that reason I'm thinking his jumping should be random, still keyed to her but with some worlds very similar some she had a totally different life. I have an ending in mind(a happy ending), I'm just trying to fill out the middle.

So would showing hope primes happiness during their good times(the majority of their relationship) help with that? Also this is a question not an argument, how in your opinion is this different than romantic imprinting?(when a first positive romantic experience causes someone to try to replicate it for the rest of their life, basically every future mate has a similar look and personality, think of it as an extreme version of having "A Type" it often caused by your first real love not having a real break-up, like say your high-school sweetheart moving away before graduation or something to that effect), or to that point how is it much different than having "a type"? just trying to understand the point of view.

 

Mh, I don't see how the hero would have an advantage in knowing too much about his girlfriend of his dimension... think about it, most versions of his girlfriend in other dimensions would be completely different, with differing interest, hobbies, quirks and even her appearance could be completely different (as in scars, missing limbs, dyed hair, contacts, different fashion style, etc.).
If anything, I see a huge disadvantage for the hero in not knowing the alternate versions of his girlfriend... like buying the favorite flowers of the 'first' girlfriend, might kill a different version of her due to allergies, or he gets slapped for bringing flowers the alternate version connects with a traumatic experience. Essentially, in most new dimensions, he has to start over to get to know her, which is actually the interesting part of your idea, in my opinion. For your hero it would be a desperate "I can make that work..." situation.

Also, when thinking about a happy end, do you mean he finds a version of his girlfriend, that matches perfectly? Or does he finds another girlfriend entirely?

 

Good point, and I wrote it that way for some versions of her she was very similar some wildly different, as in a multiverse some worlds would almost be unrecognizable and some worlds would be identical except for some Brooklyn apartment having one extra or one less cockroach. One of the short stories I made her twins, he ended up choosing neither as they were both very much like the original but opposites of each other, as if hope primes personality traits got split up and exaggerated with new traits thrown in to each of them to fill in the blanks.

Correct again, there will be a lot of that, and most of the ones that are closest to the original will already be with an alt of him(barring similar worlds where HE does not exist). Though I did make a perfect match he had to pass up in a world where Rock'n'Roll did not hit the scene until the 70's so the free love hippy movement happened in the late 80's/early 90's instead of the 60's and 70's so a 3rd of the population has GRID's (the original name for AIDS in our world).

He meets a version or her from a futuristic high tech world that was looking for a version of him. (in her world his alt died or broke up with her and she found his alts design notes while boxing up his stuff and built a device)
Twist being her worlds gravity is slightly different so time moves macroscopically faster so her world is roughly 20 years ahead of ours so she is in her 40's so while he's been searching for months she was searching for years took years to even understand his notes.

 

I was just going to mention this!!

 

Honestly, I think death would be more suited to your story. It will make it more interesting, as he would be a grieving widower who is desperate to find his one true love alive and well, never minding that she might be wheelchair bound or something.

 

Mh, may i suggest to look at your hero's 'wants' and 'needs', like this:

Wants: his girlfriend back.
Needs: to move on.

There's one think he can't change, and that is the memory of his girlfriends death. This could mean that, no matter how perfect the new version is, that she will always remind him on his original girlfriends death.

This offers an alternative ending: Your hero finds the version that is closest to his girlfriend, but she rejects him because she already moved on. Or they meet, spend some time with each other but realize, that it is not the same and thus break up with each other to move on. Think of it as your hero's final revelation, him realizing that his original girlfriend was truly unique and could never be replaced, despite the many alternate versions of her.

I know that this would be quite a sad ending, but a period of grievance can be devastating. For the final end, your hero could find a new girl, or maybe you end it with your hero starting to date other girls, thus leaving it open if he found a new one or not.

But I think it would be a really great message, that his original girlfriend simply can't be replaced, and thus shows how much we should value loved ones in real life.

 

I am leaning that way also, though there are benefits to both narrative wise.

Thanks for the suggestion, but one of the things that bother me about modern books and movies in the lack of a happy ending, the real world seldom has happy endings and I read and watch movies to escape.

I saw a movie a few years back where a woman leave the hero for some asshat he gets her hooked on drugs (she was a recovering addict when he met her), he rescues her she gets back with him for like 2 weeks and leaves him again, I swear I wanted to throw a brick at my TV.

 

narrative wise, yes, but as for catching the reader's attention and sympathy then it should be death. Every adult and possibly teen has grieved someone's passing at some time.

Here's an idea for you and I give you full permission to use it.

Draw out the death a little, she's in ICU, for days he visited her, has a ring to propose because he was planning to do it at the fancy restaurant, which needed months long reservations because they are so popular that they were going to. He holds the ring box in his hand as he clutches her hand, his shoulders hitching with sobs. He slides it on just as the heart monitor goes flat. he calls for the nurse but they cannot do anything.

Grief stricken, he visits her fresh grave with something they held dear. Then, as he is clutching her gravestone, or however you want him to grieve over her grave, he realizes there might be another version of her that can possibly fill the bleak fracture of his heart and the ball gets rolling on the multi dimensional roller coaster. of course he has a picture of her tucked with him at all times. Steeling his resolve, he flips the switch.

 

For me it depends on the definition of a happy ending. Sure, a woman who leaves the hero for some crackhead is, without a doubt, a bad ending. For your hero, when he manages to move on and you describe him finding a new girlfriend (preferably one who was friends with him from the start, and maybe even helped him to get out of tricky situations) and establishing a new happy relationship, could still count as a happy end. Much in a sense of, being able to move on after a period of grievance after a loved one died and being able to remember the loved one in a positive manner, should count as a good thing.

However, these are just suggestions. Settle with what feels right for you.