With an approach that is as prone to melting your heart as it is to hardening it, Steins;Gate’s
anime adaptation is impressive in that is rarely overplays anything.
From a holistic perspective, it’s a very balanced story in terms of presentation and
execution, always doing what it needs to do and knowing how to use moderation.
It can be hilarious and silly, but never overindulgent.
It ponders the mechanics and theories of the plot, but never becomes a confusing lecture
and maintains a natural and down-to-earth charm to keep things grounded.
It’s very emotional, but never overdramatic.
It subtextually ponders free will and fate without preaching, it splices bits of darkness
into the narrative during the lighter opening half, and bits of light in the darker second
half to avoid habituation.
Overall it just does all the things it needs to to create the foundations of a finely tuned
story, and from there the great writing and character work allow all of the huge moments
and impactful story beats to drive everything home.
But aside from the emotions pertaining to the characters, the connective tissue of all
of those concepts - the element that allows them to strike deeply and hit with as much
impact as they do - is the overlying yet understated tone of the series, a tone that captivated
me nearly as much as the story itself did.
Steins;Gate, through its entire run, covers a barrage of styles.
A pulsating sci-fi thriller, a philosophical pondering on the nature of time and destiny,
an emotional romance, a slice-of-life comedy, a tragedy.
But something that pervades this narrative a lot of the time throughout all of that is
this intangible aura, melancholic and reflective.
Like a feeling that something precious is consistently at risk of being lost even before
the plot makes that more obvious, and that these silly and lighthearted moments that
take up a great portion of the story need to be valued and cherished because of how
easily they could slip away - whether it be due to death, or lost memories.
Somehow, even ignoring the foreshadowing and hints at how dangerous the time travel experiments
were, this sort of thing is felt before the big shift at the end of episode 12, making
that event one of inevitibility and confirmation rather than something out of the blue.
And, aside from elements such as the masterful musical score, this is helped through the
integration of rare, tiny sprinklings of heartfelt dialogue here and there - strong enough to
plant a seed in your subconscious and provide that feeling, yet subtle enough so that you
may not even remember exactly what was said.
And there is one character that captures this abstract feeling better than ever with just
a small little line.
In particular, there’s a unique sort of pain attached to *this* idea.
In this sort of situation, experience and knowledge and connections can feel like a
curse, where times gone by of great value to you that enrich your memories are entirely
void and lost to the others who have experienced them as well.
The severity of this sort of pain can differ depending on the person, situation and memory,
but at best it is a bittersweet sense of isolation, at the very least.
A sad sense of loneliness and loss.
And this is one of the primary ideas that imbues Steins;Gate with such a melancholic
sentiment throughout.
Initially, Okabe being the sole person who is able to remember these worldline changes
is seen as interesting and revelatory, and he’s all too willing to continuously change
things in the name of science and in order to help his friends in spite of the danger.
And speaking personally, I was caught up in the intrigue of it all - the mystery, SERN,
the mechanics of the D-Mails, how far these experiments could go - until Mayuri uttered
that line.
And then I realized that this feeling was there from the beginning - I just wasn’t
able to quite understand what it was.
It’s a sad little sentiment that cuts through all of the excess and gets down to the heart
of what really matters.
In the end, is any of this really worth being subjected to so many alternate timelines where
only you can remember all of the conversations you’ve had and all of the times that have
been shared?
Is that not too lonely to bear?
As a man who has admitted to creating the Future Gadgets Lab in order to make friends,
who puts on a facade and act in order to mask his awkward yearning for affection, is Okabe
not the exact type of person who isn’t suited to bearing this burden?
While he did FEEL this, he rarely if ever pondered or confronted this sort of idea at
this point in the story, yet it’s one of Mayuri’s foremost throughts.
And I think this knack, this innate understanding, and this microcosm of this feeling is very
indicative of the type of person who would say this.
It’s the sort of thing that speaks of Mayuri’s deep, undeniable intuition and intelligence.
She cannot even begin to grasp the science that Okabe, Kurisu and Daru discuss for what
seems like hours on end, but she’s always there to support them and most importantly,
she just has this way of understanding who people are and how they are feeling, with
a desire to keep everyone happy and healthy.
She tries her best to make Moeka feel welcome, she can’t stomach any conflict between Kurisu
and Suzuha, she immediately catches on to the fact that Daru and Suzuha are connected
in some way..
And she’s continuously able to sense Okabe drifting further and further away as he goes
through the world lines fruitlessly trying to save her, feeling as if she
is at fault.
Mayuri is the character furthest from book-smart, but she is the one who sees things the clearest,
feels her way towards the truth, and has her priorities straight the entire time.
She’s the one who instinctually reaches the furthest into the sky to find what truly
matters.
And even disregarding how wonderful of a person she is and how much Okabe loves her, she needed
to be saved in a thematic, symbolic way as well.
Because if you don’t have that genuine human element, that sense of what truly matters
in life that Mayuri represents.. what is even the point?
A future without this heart and soul is a future that misses the forest for the trees,
so while the two events are not directly connected, it is darkly appropriate that the attractor
field where her death is inevitable leads to a world completely devoid of most of what
makes life worth living.
Mayuri needed to be saved, otherwise everything would have been in vain - in more ways than
one.
And though she voices that with all of their new friends, Okabe doesn’t really need her
as his hostage anymore, she couldn’t be more wrong.
There is no one like Mayuri in the world, no one who understands the beauty of life
and love and connection as much as her, and who lives their life in as much correspondence
with that value.
No one who can immediately understand the things that are important and at stake here.
And no one that means more than him to her, and her to him.
It’s an idea that can be applied to the story on the whole as well.
When it came right down to it, nothing really mattered to anyone as long as their loved
ones were safe (Show Mr. Braun).
We may get tangled up in peripheries and prideful habits and wild adventures, but in the end,
when all is said and done, what we value most is simple home and hearth, affection and love.
And the beautiful thing is that it was Okabe who helped Mayuri see this and reach this
place of understanding.
After declaring her to be his hostage, he prevented her from being metaphorically sucked
into the sky due to the grief of her grandmother’s death, he prevented her from being lost forever
- and this helped her realize that she was loved and valued, and that the connections
she forms in her life and the well-being of those she loves are of utmost importance.
The two continuously find themselves saving one another, and it’s quite a lovely thing.
Mayuri is invaluable because she’s infectiously heartfelt and endearing, endlessly compassionate,
consistently supportive and empathetic, and able to see things clearer than anyone else
in the story.
And all of this is pretty obvious right from the start, but more impactful in retrospect
because it really helps explain the origin of that sad and melancholic tone I mentioned.
Appropriately for someone who just intuitively saw the truths of the world in a way exclusive
to her, after initially being proud of the accomplishment, Mayuri was never totally comfortable
with the time machine once she realized the unsettling risks involved with genuine human
time travel.
She never could have predicted the specifics, but once the potential consequences and changes
were made known to her, she immediately gave her reservations.
She supported everyone with a smile, but behind that, something always just felt off with
the experiments once they moved into genuinely serious territory.
And that probably should’ve been the biggest red flag to Okabe.
Knowing the type of person she is, it follows logically that Mayuri would be overjoyed at
the idea of being rid of the time machine, this figment of unknown danger, and going
public with the findings.
And concurrently, the reason that I think the show established that strangely sad tone
early on is because from the minute Okabe accidentally sent the first d-mail, he took
his first path on the road to losing that which he held most dear.
And it isn’t something we as the audience could ever have understood the ramifications
of in that moment, but the anime helps us feel, in an abstract way, what Mayuri can
sense later on.
Through presentation, the show helps us get a subconscious inkling of the type of trepidation
Mayuri felt, those very specific vibes.
Like something isn’t quite right, like although we may not know why, there is something afoot
that feels deeply sorrowful.
Deeply lonely.
And her decision to once again use her intuition despite not fully understanding the situation
to slap some sense into Okabe and force him to realize that he can save Kurisu is a huge
part of what finally dissipates that sadness.
Steins;Gate is without a doubt the story and study of Okabe - not to disregard the monumental
role of Kurisu, of course, nor the importance of Suzuha’s trials.
But whenever I think of the *feeling* of the series, the tonal identity - my mind can’t
help but land on Shiina Mayuri.
I feel as though the structure of the series centers around her, that the tone and soundtrack
often reflect her state of mind, and that the story’s messages about connection are
representative of what she had in her heart from the start.
Mayuri is a big part of why everything in this story ticks.
She is absolutely essential to everything that Steins;Gate does, and she remains one
of the best, most important and most iconic anime characters of all time for good reason
- because in a story that gets caught up in cold calculation in times, she’s always
there to bring things back to a warm and heartfelt center, always able to prioritize life and
love - and that is something that cannot be valued enough.
Many thanks for watching.