so the premise of “what if there are infinite other universes with all possible things happening in them?” gets a lot of fantastic stories started

But I wanna see more about the aspect of, “all possible things, including the vastly improbable things”

which can go so delightfully off the rails so fast

like. imagine the universe where there’s one guy who just happens to always roll a 6, any time he rolls a die.

Not that he’s got any superpower, or all his dice are loaded or he’s got some extra special way of rolling them, none of that. But just– this is the universe where, by random chance, every time in his life that he rolled a die, it just happened to come up 6.

imagine his life.

and then imagine the other universes that are similar to this one but not identical.

the universes where he always rolls a six right up until some particular moment in his life, and then it stops forever. (All the variations on that. The ones where it stops at the moment he needed it most. The ones where it stops after he’s achieved the greatest thing he could achieve with that ability. The ones where it stops and then switches to some other improbable thing, like always rolling a four. The ones where it stops when he turns fifteen years old, and from then on he’s the guy who rolls dice normally but used to always roll sixes as a child. and nobody believes him, and eventually he stops believing his own memories of it.)

the universes where he starts always rolling a six at some particular moment in his life. All the variations on that.

the ones where he starts always rolling a six, and it lasts a while, and then stops. The ones where it comes and goes in periods of weeks or months or years, and he never knows when his luck will change.

the ones where it comes and goes and it does follow a regular pattern throughout his life, and he’s able to plan things around it.

The ones where it follows a regular enough pattern for him to plan around, and then deviates from that pattern suddenly– maybe only once– maybe several times at random.

The ones where there are also other people who happen to have similar improbable experiences with dice. And all the variations on that.

….and in any of these versions, it doesn’t have to be dice! Assuming a multiverse where every technically possible scenario has a universe where it really happened, it could be anything.

like, “he always correctly guesses what someone else is thinking”

or “each time he points at something with finger guns, the molecules in it just happen to fly apart in an explosion”

most “superpowers” could theoretically be explained this way. As an effect of living in a universe where you just randomly happened to have super weird luck.

and, in any version of any of those scenarios, he probably doesn’t imagine that explanation for it.

I mean, that would be too much of a coincidence, right? What are the odds of living in a universe where the whole timeline of events is such a statistical outlier?

you’d theorize pretty much any superpower origin story before you’d consider that.

…