Steins;Gate
a review by CosmicCuune
a review by CosmicCuune
Steins;Gate has a very interesting premise but ultimately gets very mid because of two lethal problems.
The plot holes, oh there's just too many to list, many of the time travel events in the show are plot holes that shouldn't happen the way they do according to the established rules. Before we get into any of that let me briefly address two criticisms,
The show is about (insert something fantastical), so how does it even make sense to talk about plot holes?
A story can be fantastical, it can have any unrealistic premises, none of these prevent it from presenting a logically consistent story. You can have rules on magic, you can have rules on how the Death Note works, and those rules can be whatever the author wants, as long as they are followed throughout the rest of the story, there is no issue. What I mean by "plot holes" is when rules are established but aren't followed.
In other words, "realism" is not the same concept as "logical". A realistic story must be Logical because real life follows logic, but a logical story does not have to be realistic.
It's about time travel, so plot holes are unavoidable because time travel makes no sense.
This is simply wrong, there are time travel models or rules sets about time travel used in many other stories that if followed, will strictly not produce any contradictions or plot holes. One of these models is complete determinism, as seen in Attack On Titan, there can't be any temporal contradictions because everything that happens has always happened and will always happen, whenever you travel back in time to try and change something, you will only discover your action was always part of the history, nothing has changed, and nothing will ever change.
#Endless Plot Holes
The main source of plot holes within the show's internal logic, is the ambiguity of when will the timeline "reconstruct" and when will it not. A "reconstruction" happens when you travel back in time to change something that would cause a paradox in history, for example killing your own grandfather. The show establishes that if you were to do this, the timeline will "reconstruct" and the world will change to a new state where your grandfather is killed and you were never born. This doesn't even completely solve the paradox because he would still have been killed by you, yet you were never born, but don't worry about that for now. The real problem is, this "reconstruction" does not always happen, whether or not it happens is totally arbitrary and up to the author to decide case-by-case. If "reconstruction" were not to happen, then you will still have killed your grandfather, but your parents still exist, you still exist, all of you still remember being with your grandfather, but suddenly he's been dead since forever, somehow.
This inconsistency is required because the author wants the protagonist to have the special ability to remember things after a time travel has changed the past, but if he's the only one then time travel cannot be demonstrated to any other character because they will never remember right? That's why this "reconstruction" mechanic must sometimes be suspended, so that the plot can continue. If this is not contrived bad writing I don't know what is.
Except that doesn't solve the problem either, because the story claims that in the background the entire world is in a race to create the first time machine and dominate other countries. This makes no sense because if anyone were to make a "significant" change to the past then the timeline will "reconstruct", causing everyone but the MC to forget about having time traveled. This means scientists at research institutes, project managers and national leaders will never be able to observe a successful time travel, which means the only conclusion they could ever get from any time machine trial runs, is that it doesn't work. Yet the show claims that one of these organizations will create a time machine and will use it to dominate the world turning it into a dystopia, HOW?
There will also be cases where "reconstruction" totally should happen (if crashing a giant time machine into the 1970s Tokyo is not "significant" I don't know what is) but does not, since otherwise the plot can't work, or vice-versa. Basically all of the story's most important plot points often violate established rules, including the "final battle", which somehow breaks more rules than any other time travel maneuver in the rest of the show, delivering one of the cheapest, least satisfying endings only matched by complete garbage shows like Promised Neverland S2.
The other major issue with this show is the horrific moral implications from the actions of the protagonist. It starts with the MC playing with time travel and makes a big mistake half way, then he spends most of the second half to try and undo that mistake. How does he do it? He convinces each of his harem girls to sacrifice their most precious things in life, so that the MC can fix his mistakes, which makes the MC one of the most evil inconsiderate selfish protagonists ever.
I've already mentioned that in this show all characters other than the MC do not remember time travel, they will have lived out their entire lives in their own timeline/universe, this is all they've ever known. And now in their present, if the MC were to initiate a time travel to change their past, all these other characters and their entire universe disappear. The MC and MC alone effectively travels to a different timeline/universe where different people have lived their entire lives with that change having happened in the past, so they think nothing special of it.
To put this into perspective, this is like if one of your friends suddenly tell you hey you know your mother she's supposed to have died when you were 3yo, that's the "real" timeline, because that's the timeline I prefer. So why don't you help me here do this time travel thing so that she can stay dead like she’s meant to? Would you buy that? would you play along?
Either way you look at it, there are two possible consequences to the MC using time travel. Either you die, or absolutely nothing happens. Yet the MC never stops to consider what happens to his harem girls, is this heroic? Or is this just being a selfish coward? There’s this one scene where assassins are here to kill them, and one of the girls sends the MC away through time travel, ok so what happens to her?
The "hero" has saved no one, he merely escaped into another reality by himself. We are our memories, loosing them is no different from being killed, you can't just casually be like oh they're totally alive and well, except they have none of their previous memories, and they're kinda different people. That's the same as admitting they died.
The show desperately tries to avoid this potential moral crisis by framing the timeline preferred by the MC as somehow "original" or "correct" but this is just pathetic because in the end the MC does not stay in the actual "original" timeline, no he abandons it for another one he prefers more. So much for trying to stay "original" right? Who cares what my harem girls want? Fuck them they only exist in service for ME and MY preferences is the only thing that matters. There's also an attempt to say the timelines leftover by the MC are "inactive", whatever that's supposed to mean. Are they paused? a timeline is already 4-dimensional it can't be paused because all of past and future already exist on a timeline, it doesn't make any sense. The only real difference that would make sense, is the MC's consciousness we follow in the show uniquely resides in one timeline but not the rest, but that doesn't mean those other timelines don't exist or are "inactive", you're just not observing them.
I also suspect there's a disturbing undertone of anti-intellectualism and sexism both of which I absolutely hate. Kurisu the main girl with red hair in the show she's supposed to be a super genius, she's like Tony Stark but does she invent the time machine? No, this elite professional scientist here is no match for some Japanese unemployed fat otaku, who is actually the expert in time travel technology and world class hacker. Kurisu's father is also a professional scientist, and he's also complete garbage, he's so dumb he can't even win an intellectual debate against the MC who is only a high school graduate. In the second half of the show one of the Harem girls is supposed to sacrifice herself and fix everything for the MC on a solo mission but she botches it for no reason other than pure incompetence. Basically the MC and his fat otaku sidekick are the only capable people in the world, all the harem girls are damsels in distress, the only good they can do is sacrifice their benefits so the MC can escape to the timeline he prefers the most. The background EVIL institution about the take over the world? They're CERN, the real-life scientific organization operating the Large Hydron Collider, most expensive physics experiment facility in the world. I know it's fiction but why out of all the potential bad guys you could choose or make up, you go for real life professional scientists?
The show starts off with an amazing premise but the characters are kind of standard, the two main girls are obviously derivative of the classic Rei+Asuka combo. They then add an athletic girl, a big boob girl, a cat girl and a trans/gender-ambiguous girl for the complete Harem.
Presentation is good, this is a good looking show without any problems but also without any standout visuals.
Story is very solid in the first half with minimal plot hole issues, but after that it quickly disintegrates into a mess as more and more time travel maneuvers are involved and more "exceptions" to the rules have to be made to have the plot work out.
This show gets the worst possible 0 points for message because not only is the protagonist a horrible person who gets rewarded for being horrible, he also gets no arc. In the end after all is done, he learns nothing, he didn't even save the day actually, he gave up. A different character shows up in the end with the key to winning the final battle to save the day. And by "save" I obviously mean they escaped into a different timeline where things are more preferable, so very few people are actually saved.
50% is certainly not horrible, turn off your brain this would still be worth watching, or like half watching while you browse social media. It's just that the plot cannot stand up to even the slightest scrutiny, the more you think about it the less sense it makes.
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