Steins;Gate

"Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value."

• Arthur Schopenhauer

Steins;Gate’s beauty is in its insistence to look within the tiny confines of the universe around us – conceding the presence of indiscriminate forces outside of our lens and choosing to brave them head-on. Hououin Kyouma, as a persona of Okabe, happily cherishes in taking the world and manipulating it to his own ends. He is a conscious skyclad observer, one who has experienced the overwhelming Will of the universe, yet “tricks” it with boundless confidence.

It is a time travel smorgasbord, an all-encompassing salad of Thrice Upon a Times and Back to the Futures. Its aggressive self-referential nature is exactly what gives it staying power: it is firmly in the camp of nerd culture. Unsubtle, cheeky in-universe references to JoJo, 2000s 2ch humor, and a litany of shitposts make it feel earnest and conscious in its intention to make a thriller novel collage. Time travel narratives aim to concern themselves with knowledge – to take causality and dissect and make sense of it. Steins;Gate synthesizes its homages and inspirations in order to – above all else – present time travel as clinical, tired, and worn out as a plot point. There is a quiet concession the Science Adventure franchise targets nerds that have picked up on a lot of common science fiction tropes through cultural osmosis. The selling point here is less in revolutionary high-concept akin to Infinity and moreso familiar execution appealing to the audience’s sensibilities as veteran visual novel disciples.

This is made more blatant by centering the narrative in Akihabara, the “otaku haven” of Tokyo. Steins;Gate is consciously smack-dab in the middle of a space where stories like it have been sold, and appeals to the doujinshi roots of the subgenre. Most of the characters follow common visual novel tropes: Kurisu being a tsundere, Mayuri the wholesome childhood friend, Faris being an eccentric maid catgirl. To reiterate, it’s familiar and likely feels deeply at-home to most of its readers.

Unfortunately, this familiarity works against my attachment to the cast members and the staying power of Okabe’s motivations. I’m not invested in helping most of his ragtag team as they feel paper-thin and simulated. Science Adventure as a whole is heavily implied to take place within a simulation and one of the quietly conveyed messages in its better pieces (the Chaos; duology) is rich, realistic characterization and humanism in spite of a binary existence. By not having the weighty, thorough character writing of its siblings, Steins;Gate unfortunately struggles to push that narrative throughline.

The mundanity of the first chunk of the story is deliberate, as it quietly muses on moege slice of life structure and laid-back undergrad bullshit. Okabe’s read plenty of science fiction and the tinkering of the Future Gadget Lab is done slightly tongue-in-cheek with the goal to just fiddle around with stuff he and Daru deem fun and worth playing with. Even when the first D-Mail is sent out, it is never taken that seriously: they’ve seen stuff like this before on TV. The inversion of this Mundane Life in Mayuri’s death exposes the true cruelty of Steins;Gate – the universe doesn’t give a shit about the clean, approachable time travel the Future Gadget Lab anticipates, it throws Okabe into a self-imposed hell of ephemeral knowledge and lived experience.

Okabe has the means to personally tamper with the lived existences of his friends, to peer into the sheer algorithmic horror the world decides should be allowed as it smashes together LEGO pieces of causality. And in all his sins, all of the blood he has on his hands, he will never be brought to justice. His unforgivable, irreversible manipulation of the universe for his own ends is becoming of a mad scientist. As Operation Skuld is triggered in the end, Okabe stares the formless will of the universe in the face and laughs directly at it – as Hououin Kyouma has marginally managed to achieve Steins Gate against its desires.