>>2865
>It's generally a way for people to avoid consequences, so it's at odds with good writing.
Could you give some examples? When I've seen it handled well, one of the recurring points was that that these other timelines, these other worlds, are real. They're as real as it gets. They're as real as the protagonist. The people in them are alive, they're real, and they matter as much as anyone else does.
Small digression: this point also came up in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories, in which men are recruited by a secret society of time travelers who take it upon themselves to preserve the general course of history, as they must in order for human civilization to create time travel eventually. They can make small changes, but not large ones. In one of the stories, "Delenda Est," the protagonist, a Time Patrol member born in the early or mid 20th Century in the US, abruptly finds himself in a very changed world as a result of a rival time-traveling group's meddling. He learns the language and learns about the world in which he finds himself. He becomes romantically involved with a woman. The changed world, the new timeline, is a world full of real people, whose lives matter. It has wonders and horrors and triumphs and a storied history. And, our protagonist, who may be the only one with a working time machine, the only one with memories of our world, is duty-bound to travel back in time to the Punic Wars, where things diverged, and "fix" it so that our world and the Time Patrol can come into existence. He wrestles with the questions. It can be found here:
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/A/Anderson,%20Poul%20-%20Guardians%20of%20Time.pdf
I think a lazy writer can use multiverses lazily (*cough* Rick and Morty *cough*) but there's nothing about the concept that necessitates it as an inescapable logical conclusion.