Steins;Gate

Note: I last watched Steins;Gate a couple years ago. This review is written long after the fact.

There's a scene in Steins;Gate's first half where Okabe and Makise are bickering (as they have been for the past few episodes) and Okabe's assistant (whose name I can't remember) says out loud that it's obvious the two of them like each other. This is the first indication we get that there's anything more between them than antagonism and a shared interest in physics, and it certainly wasn't the conclusion I came to while watching the series. We aren't shown the moment where their relationship shifts, or the changes in understanding that allow it to happen. Outside of the very end of the show and one scene near the midway point, Makise's perspective is almost completely absent from the story, and exploring that more thoroughly would have helped explain how she could fall in love with a guy who is, frankly, an intolerable prick.

One of the fundamental issues I had with the story is that the central romance never clicked for me because I had only the vaguest understanding of why Makise found Okabe attractive. It's not that this couldn't have been done. Two of my favorite romances, Pride and Prejudice and When Harry Met Sally, are built entirely around the premise of exploring how two people who initially can't stand each other end up falling in love. But they spend a lot of time showing the shifts in the ways they think about each other, and why they come to view each other differently. Not coincidentally, those stories also occur over a period of months or even years whereas Steins;Gate takes place over what feels like a week or two. Perhaps not coincidentally, both of them are written by women.

Makise's character virtually does not exist and as a result she ends up feeling flat, which to be fair applies to the supporting cast as well. The harem of girls in Okabe's life are cartoon characters who are portrayed in the broadest strokes, to an extent that I just couldn't take any of them seriously (the idea that one of them is secretly a freedom fighter from the future could have been a pretty funny moment if the show wasn't trying to play it for drama). Mayuri in particular is aggravatingly cutesy. The one moment of character development she gets, right before the story's second half, was nice and the only character moment in the whole show that really worked for me, and if the show had more moments like that then I might have enjoyed it. As is, it's just not enough.

The show's first half is slow, focused on introducing its large cast of characters who all have simplistic and repetitive interactions with each other. I actually think it's the stronger half of the story. The second half is a conspiracy thriller more focused on life-and-death stakes. It tries to squeeze tension out of the setup, but it's all fake. The source of tension isn't just the possibility of bad things happening to a characters, it's also about what it would take for the characters to avert the worst-case scenario. The character psychology is just too thin and ill-defined to sell the show's idea of establishing drama by forcing Okabe to undo the changes he's made to the world, particularly since we don't get enough of the other characters' perspectives to fully feel their loss when it happens. The actual mechanics of the setup are also so contrived that there's no way to squeeze any tension out of the mechanics of the physical aspects of the conflict, though to be fair this is not something Steins;Gate tries to do. I can't remember a single moment in the show's second half where I felt even a little tense, or a single emotional beat that worked for me.

I'm just not impressed. Noein is just better. The love story is better, the pacing is better, the action is better, and the whole thing is just a lot more fun.