This song is new to me

a runabout...

i'll steal it for you

no one will ever know...

ENHANCE

"Now let me get this straight Skinner, you call hamburgers Steamed Hams?"

"It's a reigonal dialect lieutenant, Steamed Hams is what we used to call hamburgers in upstate New York"

"Now that's strange because my wife's from Utica and i've never heard her use the phrase 'Steamed Hams' before"

"Well it must be some sort of Albany expression then"

"Albany huh I'll have to look into that. Now you call them steamed hams, despite the fact they are obviously grilled?"

"Could we get going Columbo, I've had a busy day and I have no more time for your pointless small talk"

"One more thing Seymour, what is happening over there?"

"Um, Aurora Boreali"

In the comic, Laurie points out that the unlikelyhood of her own specificity isn't actually less unlikely than the circumstances by which billions of other people came to exist- and that, exactly, is Manhattan's point. He expressly extrapolates this logic to the rest of humanity- Earth is a miracle factory by virtue of being the one place that can support humans, all of whom have the exact same kind of contradictory history and interiority as Laurie, all of which he was paradoxically blinded to due to his power-induced self-absorption.

This, in turn, ties into one of the biggest ideas that the comic has regarding the superhero genre, which is that it's necessarily myopic, because it's very difficult to tell a superhero story that doesn't on some level implicitly buy into the idea that the superhero specifically is uniquely worthy of attention- the world contorts itself around the person who's name is on the cover. Structurally, non-superhero characters in superhero stories find themselves in an orbit; supporting cast members, love interests kept in the dark, civilians to be saved. Cape stories that deliberately defy this dynamic exist- Watchmen itself is one of them!- but are visibly positioning themselves opposite the standard assumptions of the genre by doing so. Many of the other characters embody this myopia. Rorschach's whole opening spiel is about how intellectually and morally elevated he is over the teeming masses, and his mask killer theory is fundamentally motivated by an ego-flattering desire for the neutered institution of costumed heroism to be relevant enough to sit at the center of a widespread conspiracy. Comedian's gleeful amorality is a means of justifying his horrible actions as the work of a man who's fundamentally above and smarter than every convention and concern of the little people. Dan is the most "normal" and in ways the most cynical about the change-making potential of heroism, but when he finds out about Hollis's murder it takes less than a second for him to start throwing his weight around and threatening Comedian-tier atrocities against the entire neighborhood- because Hollis was one of the characters who mattered. And, of course, Ozymandias, who positions himself as above the sophomoric dynamics of traditional superheroism, is nonetheless still pursuing a plan by which he, the Big Man Of History, unilaterally sacrifices countless nameless NPCS in order to trick the rest of the unthinking hordes into behaving themselves, eschewing anything remotely involving collective action. Almost everything untoward that happens in the book can be directly tied to a failure to internalize what Manhattan did- that other people are important. That everyone who gets blown up at the end of issue 11 could have been the subject of a whole comic book themselves.

The human brain is barely equipped to handle the fact that there are ~8 billion real people in the world right now, who all putatively deserve the same level of humanity and consideration, and many of whom are in rather dire situations. I don't think Dunbar's Number is a hard upper limit or anything, but...okay, let's say I'm a heartless monster and you (general you, not OP) care about little kids in Bangladesh dying of preventable diseases in a way that I simply don't and never will. What does that cash out to? Do you have the money and expertise to heal all of them? Well, what about just one? Then how on earth do you pick? What happens to the rest of them?

And outside of moral considerations, the ability to cleanly and discretely chart cause and effect, action and outcome soon runs into similar problems of scale and complexity. "How did the 2008 financial crisis happen?" Well, do I start with Bush's banking policy? Reagan's? The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act? The Baby Boomer era making everyone think a nice cheap house in a good suburban neighborhood is the natural order of things? The original American 'every man a smallholding farmer' dream 200 years before that?

My point is, psychologically dealing with the enormity of human existence, let alone human suffering, is something that will drive anyone crazy who thinks about it too much, thus most philosophies and religions will allow that not fixing it all yourself doesn't make you a bad person.

So, bluntly, why on earth would I expect one person's made-up story, an artificial construct grasping for the rings of both 'artistic merit' and 'commercial success' to be better at it?

If there's one thing that surprised me the most about rubbing elbows with some genuinely successful professional writers at conferences and such was the hardcore focus on structure. Plot, theme, character, are all whatever, but the viewpoint character has to make active choices and those choices have to have a visible effect and both the character and the world around them have to be changed in some way. It's why 'it doesn't feel like anything is happening here' can apply to even stories that on the surface seem bursting with Plot, and why so many amateurish protagonists are just People That Things Happen To. (Yes, a good enough writer can nibble at this with postmodernism and stuff, but there's a reason it doesn't usually break containment from academia.)

"Impossible" is a loaded word in conversations like this, so I'll just say it's hard enough to craft a handful of convincing POV characters for a book of normal length, and it takes an extraordinary amount of talent to even begin to capture the feeling that OP is talking about here, where every single character matters just as much as the protagonists. In 2004 there was a movie called Crash which followed 12 different characters whose lives only intersected in minor ways, and people hated it! "Everyone's connected and our actions have consequences? No fucking shit, dude, any other brilliant insights?" And people have more specific complaints about the script and characters sure (and ofc it beat Brokeback for best picture, can't forget that), but like, is there a director you think could have made it work? Get an audience to care equally about a dozen different people over the course of two hours, in a non-fart-sniffing way that would actually sell tickets?

Literature is a better shot, but odds are good a publisher won't take a chance on your 1,000-page multi-generation 20-different-povs opus unless you're David Mitchell or Steven Erikson already. Or you could be Wildbow and try and fully ensoul your fictional universe through sheer word count while even your biggest stans say things like "It gets good after the first 200,000 words". It's difficult, is what I'm saying.

outer wilds is a manifestation of the end!