tomBitonti
Hero
I feel like we are in an intentional confused state, both us and the characters, so hopefully that will resolve with time.
Ultimately, my issue right now is my general problem with the multi-verse itself, the stakes are so high that I just don't care. When the branches were being pruned they were saying "thats millions of lives!"....which I thought, "um no, I mean these are entire universes right? It is a number beyond counting. The pruning incident made Thanos' snap look like a quaint Banzai tree reshaping in comparison"
But the issue is also that, well if the branches are effectively infinite, that means infinite branches will keep appearing, and as universes die to the infinite probability...again uncountable numbers of lives are snuffed out every second until the end of time.
When it was the sacred timeline versus the branches, you could argue in your head that the sacred timeline lives were "important" and the branches "were not". But now if they think all branches are equal....than everyone is equally unimportant.
I kindof figure the branches to be limited in extent, with each branch being a distinct bubble which expands at the speed of light. (FTL breaks this, but perhaps most places don't have access to FTL.) Perhaps less than FTL. That would allow pruning to be still dramatic, but also, to be more limited in extent.
This is working from the idea that (1) deviations are local; and (2) identical regions are actually the same region. That is, branching does not occur in a region until a deviation propagates into that region.
(This creates a rather wild topology if deviations are occurring in multiple locations simultaneously, or, if we consider the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics, where deviations are occurring everywhere all of the time.)
TomB