Best of All Possible Worlds

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."

— The Silver Stallion (1926) by James Branch Cabell

Ever wonder what would happen if something in your favorite series changed? Do you wish The Scrappy had never been born, the Big Bad would get his comeuppance, or that The Adjectival Superhero and his love interest would just get married already?

Well...

Look! It's an Alternate Universe, in which all of these "problems" are fixed! Let us see what happens:

Oh noes! This other universe is a terrible place! Tropeman's enemies have discovered his secret identity by hacking the internet, and now they've horribly murdered his wife. Since the Big Bad is in jail, the power-vacuum caused by his absence has resulted in an even worse villain stepping up to the plate, and now Cthulhu is running for president. Also, The Scrappy was somehow responsible for preventing World War III.

There now. See how terrible change can be? But don't worry, we can fix it: at the last moment, a magical imp shows up and changes this universe into an almost perfect copy of the original one. Now Tropeman and his girlfriend are in an unsatisfying quasi-dating relationship, the Big Bad is causing trouble, and The Scrappy is getting plenty of screen time. Everyone's happy!

In other words, the canon is treated like the Best of All Possible Worlds for the characters, and an Alternate Universe / Elseworld / What If? has two options: have a Downer Ending, or revert to match the original canon. Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act often runs on this.

See also: Because Destiny Says So (which generally runs on this trope); Rubber-Band History (the general tendency for alternate histories to end up more like the "real" history); It's a Wonderful Plot (a specific history change that almost always makes things worse); Expendable Alternate Universe (when the characters from the main universe would rather just go home than try to fix the alternate one or save anyone in it). Contrast Screw Destiny.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Inverted (so far) in Rebuild of Evangelion. It is by no means a happy place, but (so far) no main characters have died, making it markedly happier than the original Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • Played Straight in Rebuild 3.0. Its arguably worse than the original series, what with Shinji having caused 3rd Impact and killing most of humanity, making him the most hated person on Earth. Also Eva pilots are Cursed with Awesome or Blessed with Suck as the Evas make them immortal so they have to keep piloting and fighting Eldritch Abominations forever. And 4th Impact is on the way. In one movie Rebuild went from Lighter and Softer to Darker and Edgier.
• Deconstructed and back in the series Noein. Haruka has the ability to jump dimensions, and spends an episode or two observing possible parallel or future time lines. One is 'perfect' in a Stepford Smiler kind of way, one is seriously post-apocalyptic, and most are pretty average, but after all of it she comes to decide there really isn't a best world, and even if there was, it's really not where she belongs.

Comic Books

• Pick a DC Elseworlds. Any DC Elseworld.
  • And throw in the old "Imaginary Tales" for good measure. Superman and Lois Lane get married and have kids? Something goes horribly wrong. And the moral of the story, dear children, is that Superman should stay single forever for the safety of himself and others.
    • Averted in the Imaginary Story "Superman Red and Superman Blue" after accidentally splitting himself in two, Superman not only fixes all of his personal problems (now he can marry BOTH Lois Lane and Lana Lang!) he also turns the world into an Utopia (thanks to the Super-Intelligence he also conveniently gained) curing all diseases and turning ALL criminals good.
• This was the heart of the original Marvel Comics What If? series. Only one or two stories ever came out happier than Earth-616's story. (Ironically one of the few that had a happy ending was a version of the original Clone Saga years before The Clone Saga came to be rued in the minds and hearts of fans.)
  • Averted in the Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. There's a scene where Cap and Tony are seen playing table tennis, one of the characters states they had an awful dream in which Civil War took place. Both of them laugh and assure everyone that it would never happen.
  • In Matt Fraction's The Defenders, the entire 616 universe is what it is because of the miraculous intervention of gods, who used strange "Concordance Engines" to ensure that the world would be populated with superheroes (and that futures with bad outcomes, like the What-If universes, never come to be).
  • In All-New X-Men, a sojourn into the Ultimate Universe leaves Laura Kinney suffering a Freak Out because, as the status of mutants is objectively worse (i.e. all mutants are the product of Weapon X), every alternate reality they is worse for them (given all the apocalyptic realities for mutants) and theirs is this trope.
  • This is subverted in an issue that gives the "What If?" treatment to Civil War (2006). Tony, at Cap's funeral, meets a mysterious being who tells him the story of a universe where he died some years before Civil War occurred—and in that universe, without his presence, Cap was able to bring together all the heroes into a united front against the government. However, this meant that without Tony on the inside, the government was commandeered by the corrupt Henry Gyrich, who escalated the conflict from law enforcement to an out-and-out massacre. Tony is somewhat pleased at this, as it suggests his presence was ultimately a good thing... and then the stranger continues, and tells him about a different what-if scenario, where the negotiation between him and Cap didn't break down thanks to him entering it with a genuine attempt to work things out. In this version, though the negotiation still goes south due to the presence of Thor clone Ragnarok, the two of them reforge their bond by fighting together against Ragnarok, and decide in the aftermath to actually talk rather than going for Might Makes Right. Cap agrees to personally manage the registration act, leveraging his Loved by All status in ensuring it goes smoothly and the heroes aren't co-opted by a corrupt government—and guided by his leadership skills, a new golden age of heroes dawns. Tony is, of course, horrified at hearing this, as he realizes that the conflict could have ended peacefully, and it was his aggressiveness that caused it to escalate, making the whole thing his fault.
• DV8: Freestyle has this as her superpower. She can see what will happen if she takes a certain course of action, choosing the best outcome from dozens of parallel universes and making it a reality. It puts a lot of strain on her; a task with a lot of variables, like bypassing a security door with a combination lock, will cause her to age rapidly, though she will revert back to normal after a while.

Fan Works

• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: When Nico hears about Clockwork and his Time Master powers, and how he only intervenes in the timeline if something egregious messes with it, he wonders if the ancient ghost would have intervened if Kronos or Gaea had won, and if he has something similar to the limits the Olympians have on interfering with humanity, meaning that he would be unable to interfere with things like the slave trade, Holocaust, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then he wonders if Clockwork did intervene then, and this is merely the best that humanity's managed so far.

Live-Action TV

• The Framework in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was originally designed to resolve the biggest regret of every inhabitant. Daisy and Jemma are surprised to find a Crapsack World run by HYDRA caused by undoing Melinda's regret over killing an Inhuman child in Bahrain.
• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Alternate Universe where Willow and Xander were vampires and its Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies at the end would qualify. Though given the point of the episode wasn't so much that the world they had was good as that Buffy had done a lot less harm than good over the course of the series, the bar is set low enough to be highly reasonable.
  • Anyanka invokes this, or possibly its inverse, in the climax, asking Giles how he knows the original reality was any better. Giles responds, "Because it has to be." Smash.
• Doctor Who: The alternate universe created when Donna turns right in "Turn Left", which causes the Doctor to die at the Thames Barrier when he defeats the Racnoss, and several contemporary attacks on Earth to cause mass casualties, and/or wipes out several of the Doctor's allies (including Martha, who he never met here). Naturally, Donna sets her timeline back on its proper course at the end of the episode.
• Played with in Fringe after Peter is erased from history. While many things have changed, the bad things and the good things changed are sprinkled evenly across both universes, and no Reset Button seems forthcoming.

Philosophy and Theology

• This is one of the answers to the argument of the Problem of Suffering, particularly suffering created by nature: Designing creation any other way would lead to other, more destructive consequences. No one actually supports this as a theological theory anymore due to two serious problems with it. One was soundly mocked by Voltaire in Candide with the character of Pangloss: one could call the universe in which we live the best possible no matter how hellish it is, because we are naturally incapable of knowing what other universes could be like. The other is that, granting that this is the best possible world, since it apparently requires so much evil why should God have made it in the first place?
• Inverted in Schopenhauer's philosophy, who was rather pessimistic and tended to the opposite idea.

Webcomics

• Dragon Ball Multiverse has this vibe frequently, as nearly every universe outside of the "main" one is in some way worse. Of the twenty universes introduced, there are only seven where humanity as a whole is confirmed to be doing well (as in, not extinct, struggling out of Back from the Brink territory, or under the control of a villain, and only two where Goku is shown to be alive (and he's evil in one of them). Even relatively pleasant-to-live-in universes still tend to feel generally worse off than canon, with things like the Namekians being wiped out, swathes of the main cast being permanently dead, or the universe largely surviving at the whims of a capricious omnipotent being of dubious morality. Quite a number also arise from seemingly beneficial or innocuous things—for instance, the timeline where Cell never traveled back resulted in Babidi in control of the world, and the timeline where Krillin refused to let Vegeta go ended with the Namek Saga having one hell of a Downer Ending.

Western Animation

• The Family Guy episode "Stewie Kills Lois" deals with Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Stewie finally carries out his long running threat to kill his mother. Over the course of the episode and the next he takes over the world, culminating in an action movie style showdown between him and his parents (Mom was Not Quite Dead), which results in his death. The we see it was all just a simulation, and Stewie concludes he's not ready to kill Lois yet. Brian lampshades the cheapness of this ending.
• Futurama's non-canon episodes, such as "Anthology of Interest", result in a lot of the cast getting wiped out. In the original "Anthology", Bender being 500 feet tall ends in him dying and taking most of New New York with him, Leela being more impulsive causes her to become a full-on serial killer and wipe out the cast, and Fry not going to the future results in the entire universe being destroyed in a Time Paradox.

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