Characters Across the Multiverse in Contemporary Screen Media

This article investigates the narrative features of characters within contemporary multiverse narratives. After positing the multiverse as a distinctive narrative storyworld, the article is structured around three core aspects: naturalization, identification, and interaction. Drawing on narratological research on fictional characters—­from structuralist reflections to transmedia character studies—­we explore: (1) how the proliferation of characters’ variants (or counterparts) and their encounters are naturalized by recipients through contextual, textual, and cognitive strategies; (2) recipients’ process of identifying characters across the multiverse, understood as both the recognition of one character as another’s counterpart, and the ability to identify a specific counterpart within a group of variants; and (3) how such narratives thrive on the interaction between characters’ variants, which can foreground thematic concerns, foster intertextual references, and subvert characters’ narrative functions. The essay demonstrates that the complexity of multiverse narratives can be fruitfully addressed by focusing on the infinite number of their characters. Discussing the multifaceted nature of what we call “multiversal character” enriches our understanding of this crucial narrative category within the context of contemporary transmedial storytelling.