Or perhaps just Dunbar’s Number. The general concept here is the limit of people through which you can have a stable relationship. Obviously, for each person this will be different but in general terms this floats around 150 people. Past that point, you lack the time/resource/memory to have meaningful relationships. Personal anecdote here, but my kids are the first to be annoyed at the number of people my wife and I know, and with whom we stop to chat. It’s well above 150, but in terms of meaningful relationships, the number is closer.

I bring up this topic because Loki Season 2 + the entire multi-verse structure of MCU brings a flaw to this model. A mutliverse in itself is not super hard to grasp, the concept has been around for some time. Meaningful mutliverses is a harder things to grasp. Like picking which flavor of toothpaste to buy should have a larger impact than say, having kids. Did they all start at the same time? Do new ones start all the time? Do they ever merge? Those are more philosophical in nature, and up until Loki, there were only minor additions to the MCU multiverse.

Loki blew this up and made the pitch that new branches of the multiverse are growing all the time, and a TVA organization is responsible for pruning them to maintain a core reality. Season 1 ended with the explosion of that pruning, and branches growing everywhere – but the stakes made no real sense. This is because we are on the main timeline and the cuts never impacted us.

Season 2 makes this worse because the main driver of weight is that there are people in these other multiverses, and that by pruning these, it’s effectively ending the lives of entire universes. Thanos had weight to remove half the people in 1 universe. The TVA effectively destroyed entire universes multiple times per day. How is Thanos viewed as a villain and not the TVA?

The answer boils down to the ability to relate to a multiverse, in that there are other “yous” out there. And that if you met them, that you’d feel they are as important as you are, even if they’ve only been around for a day or less. No human on the planet can relate to that level of empathy, and therefore the stakes in Season 2 are all but meaningless. Even less so when you don’t see these people in other universes, only a line on a screen.

There’s a reason the comics have gone to great lengths to avoid the multiverse problem, with multiple resets of the universe to simplify the larger world and reset the true stakes. You can’t worry about 62 versions of Spider-Man. You can enjoy it for a small period, sure, but have it be meaningful? No.

Loki is only 2 episodes in, so time will tell where this finally lands. But it would be fair to say that the natural conclusion in all of this is a consolidated universe. When is the question.