//Okay, let’s see if I can try to explain the multiverse AU logic that Barry’s character is working off of on this blog. (This isn’t a canon theory, this is just my overactive imagination working to make this blog accessible to any variation of the timeline it may come in contact with.)
It largely revolves around the trans-dimensional portal that’s at the end of the movie. We all saw a portion of the cast walk through it and into what was hopefully the real world. This is gonna get really fucking weird and confusing fast, so bear with me.
This AU takes effect if it ultimately didn’t work the way they had all intended it to.
The portal most likely transported them somewhere else, but not necessarily to a different place entirely. It could have altered the course of events leading up to that moment entirely, leading to them to a different history than the one they came from - technically still another dimension. I guess everything from here on applies to the others that went through the gate as well (Frank, Brenda, Teresa, Sammy, Vash, Firewater, and Gum), but since this blog only concerns Barry, I’ll focus on him.
Consider that there are now dozens of instances of these characters scattered around that all originated from the same source of the character’s iteration end-game. They would all innately possess the memories from their time spent in the main timeline but because they’ve been placed into a different outcome and given the correct memories to survive there they don’t remember what happened clearly, if at all, and are only left with the feeling that they’ve forgotten something important (be that emotions towards another character they can’t explain or remembering someone’s death even though they’re standing directly in front of them and they know they haven’t died yet). It’s important to note that this is only applicable to canon (or can be inferred to be canon) interactions.
Now where are these different Barry’s? Two of them probably ended up exactly where they started - nothing changed, the battle won and friends still lost. Why two? Without bringing too much logical thinking into this and nixing the possibility that they would all expire before being able to accomplish much, there’s two ways things could have played out from there: time enters a frozen-like state where nothing ever happens to the supermarket and the products are allowed to live freely within its walls and do whatever they want OR the humans return to reopen the doors and their plight begins all over again.
That first option is pretty easy to explain - it’s the “best possible outcome for events post-film”. I think this is what most people have been using if they choose to assume the battle scene took place. I’ll elaborate more on the second one in a bit.
Now say there were other Barry’s that landed in seemingly the same place but with minor differences. Maybe in this one things played out relatively the same way except Carl ended up escaping alongside Barry and is still alive. Perhaps Douche somehow wasn’t lodged up Darren’s asshole when he exploded and is still wandering around this time. It’s possible Darren didn’t turn into a firework at all here and they had taken out the dark lord in a different manner. These all are viable to reach similar conclusions to the original timeline in their future events only with their added differences. I like to refer to these as the “what should have happened” timelines.
But not all of them could wind up in times where the plot of the movie had already taken place. Now one is back at the beginning, everyone still inside their packages and hoping to be chosen by the gods. Another is somewhere that seems familiar but still somehow off (-cough- script-verse -cough) and another still is in a world where everyone can come and go as they please, a strange place where all the rules are thrown out the window and while the humans’ existence is still acknowledged, they are rarely, if ever, seen. This is the other situation I think people are making the most of - events are pre-movie but they aren’t confined to the constrictions we see given to them on screen.
I’ll deviate for a moment here to explain something no one probably cares about but is important nonetheless for me to include here and that is how all of these time-hopping shenanigans affect Lunick, seeing as he is the other half of this blog. And really it doesn’t all that much. He isn’t inhibited by the memory loss at all and each instance of him is constant. Lunick’s backstory is the important part here - Barry is the one who initially finds him after the incident and patches him up. At the moment I can only think that this would cause Lunick to be dead in any of the original timelines since Barry would never canonically meet him and he’d die from the knife injury, meaning he would only exist in non-canon timelines. Lunick’s interaction with any canon material is usually vague and limited to begin with, so this isn’t much of an issue.
Now back to that other possibility I mentioned numerous paragraphs ago. This is most definitely the part where I took my creative liberties and crafted my own post-film scenario. It probably deserves its own post, but I’ll leave the basics here.
Shopwells is reopened an indeterminable amount of time after the liberation battle putting all of the products searching for freedom back at step one again. Feelings are mixed - some are doing their best to fight back, others are clinging onto old dreams despite what they’ve lived through and others still have given up completely. The number of products that know what’s waiting for them outside those doors is substantially larger than before and slowly begin to band together to form a rebellion. The only place safe enough for them to hide out at is the dark room and they quickly set up base there, helping anyone who is thrown away. Firewater and Gum are the universally agreed upon leaders while Barry is Gum’s right hand man. Things aren’t happy in these timelines. Every day is a fight to survive and a new struggle to find a way to come out on top. Try to imagine a safe camp in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and you’ll get an idea of what this is like.
If you made it this far and don’t think I’m a complete nutjob, congratulations! If you made it this far and actually understood anything that you just read, I’m proud of you! This is something I’ve had in my head for weeks even though I’ve slowly been implementing it into my writing already. If anyone’s got any thoughts, opinions, suggestions about this, I’d love to hear them!//
