El Psy Congroo
Why I love Steins;Gate so darned much -- a brainstorm that, I hope, gets people talking about fictional works that have touched them on a profound level:
Potential spoilers ahoy!
* It's character-driven. There's no question that, especially in the second half, everything happens because of who Okabe Rintarou is. When the show shifts in tone, it not only changes what you think the show is doing; it changes how you see the main character. That's brilliant.
* The main character seems at first to be oblivious to everyone but himself, with an awkward, off-putting personality(*) that holds everyone at a distance -- but the story carries emotional weight precisely because Okabe cares so very deeply about people he encounters, and wants desperately for the right thing to happen to them, even at his own expense... even though he keeps screwing that up. That's exactly the kind of person I want to be (minus the "screwing up" part, even though I seem to do that in spades). In this way, it feels like the show was written just for me(**). He wants to form real bonds, but he sucks at expressing that, and he's often his own worst enemy in building the things necessary for relationship. I can relate.
* It gave me something that I can point to in order to corroborate my claim that animation is not an infantile way to tell a story -- it's a medium with its own strengths and weaknesses, and allows the careful artist to tell a story that could be told in no other way.
* I love time-travel fiction, but one aspect that many stories tend to gloss over is its loneliness. You can never talk openly about everything you've seen or everything you've experienced or everything you know(***); there is always some distance between you and others around you that can never be bridged. Steins;Gate doesn't hold back here. You can see what the loneliness does to his character over time. This is especially devastating because he has tried to commit his life to being close to someone; it's even explicitly paralleled in the story to a hostage situation, where the other person cannot escape.
* It recognizes that not every close relationship is romantic in nature. Yes, there's a romantic relationship, and I like that relationship plenty -- heck, I usually detest romances in fiction that build out of couples who can't stop fighting, but this one felt so organic and vulnerable by the end that I couldn't help but adore it. Even besides that, though, there's a fierce friendship that the main character is very protective of, and I feel like that dimension of humanity is often completely missing in stories that explore human relationships.
* When you like a character, you want him to succeed; you want his happiness. When that character's success and happiness are defined as the happiness of other characters you're learning to care about, you root even harder.
* Makise Kurisu is an intelligent female character. I adore intelligent female characters. And there's more to her than meets the eye, too. At the beginning of the series, one might be inclined to write her off as a stereotypically cold and hostile character, for whom strength is measured in bitchiness. It's fairly common for this cold exterior to slip by the end of the narrative in a lot of stories, but Steins;Gate showed us why this exterior existed in the first place, in a way that made us want her to get what she wanted. That explanation, in my experience, is much more rare; even stories that bother with an explanation rarely offer more than a cursory nod in that direction (or it simply tells us rather than shows us).
* For a while, even characters that want to help simply cannot, even though their hearts are in the right place. That helplessness tugs on the heart in several tender scenes. I think this creates a powerful connection to the viewer, who (by that time) probably wishes he could help on some level, but is unable to.
* Even the minor characters, in my opinion, have enough intrigue in them to support their own series -- even though we only get hints. (Who'd have guessed at the beginning that the shopkeeper who lives downstairs lives in constant fear for his vibrant and innocent daughter's life -- or that the cosplayer who owns a business downtown spends most of her time missing her father, but has the strength of character to relinquish her deepest desire in order to help her friends?)
* As much as I like sci-fi that reminds us that we are not our memories, and that our humanity transcends our memories(****), it's nice to be reminded just how valuable our memories really are.
* The narrative reminds us that everyone is deeper than we expect and is fighting his or her own battles, and forgetting these things is narrow-minded and senseless. Anything that reminds you to care about people has got to be a good thing.
* The music is incredible. The timing of the cicadas (as background noise) is amazing. The animation in some places is absolutely stunning. Most of the time, these things seem pretty ordinary, even pedestrian -- and then there's a little touch out of nowhere that's just brilliant.
Enough gushing. Other people, please -- what fictional work do you just adore for its connection to you on an emotional level, and what has it meant to you?
---
(*) Full confession: I thought him over-the-top and annoying at first. But the more you get to know him, the more those very things that seemed weird become the things that make him endearing. I have felt for a long time that that's how people are (except that some people try their best to hide the weird parts); I'm always drawn to people in the hopes of learning about the weird stuff, and the ardent wish that they'll let me stick around long enough to learn why those things are so important to them. (But there's that "screwing up" thing that I do... it never seems to work out that way.)
And when you learn why he seems so over-the-top -- where that persona comes from -- it endears him to me all the more, because he created it out of his love for his friend and her needs. In a very real way, the thing that he extended out of love became part of who he is. And when it is stripped from him, he learns how to use it even better to care for his loved ones.
In that way, I think the story fooled me, but in a good way. If I had only seen the first half of the series, I might find it easy to convince myself that I didn't care that much about the quirky characters the show presented outside of some simple entertainment value. The second half convinced me that I really, really did -- probably more than any other televised characters I'd ever known -- and caused me to think and reflect in ways that probably wouldn't have occurred to me on my own. I feel expanded by the story, and that's a tremendously rare thing.
---
(**) In a superficial way, I almost thought this going into the show. So, it's about time travel? Nice. And the main character likes to pretend to be a mad scientist? Awesome. And he drinks Dr. Pepper religiously? That's quirky fun. In Japan? Okay, this is getting kind of creepy... are you specifically targeting me, here?
But as the series continued, I found that I was being challenged personally, in my ability to empathize with others and my desire to know them on a deep level. It's hard to communicate exactly what it means to be touched by something like this, and even harder to convince the uninitiated to watch a 24-episode series with a very slow beginning to see what you're talking about.
---
(***) This, it suddenly occurs to me, is also why I love spy stuff. If we're honest, the main character has got to be lonely. And if he can save the world in spite of that loneliness, putting himself at great personal risk in the process? Fantastic.
---
(****) I'm looking at you, just about every cyberpunk movie I've ever seen.
Potential spoilers ahoy!
* It's character-driven. There's no question that, especially in the second half, everything happens because of who Okabe Rintarou is. When the show shifts in tone, it not only changes what you think the show is doing; it changes how you see the main character. That's brilliant.
* The main character seems at first to be oblivious to everyone but himself, with an awkward, off-putting personality(*) that holds everyone at a distance -- but the story carries emotional weight precisely because Okabe cares so very deeply about people he encounters, and wants desperately for the right thing to happen to them, even at his own expense... even though he keeps screwing that up. That's exactly the kind of person I want to be (minus the "screwing up" part, even though I seem to do that in spades). In this way, it feels like the show was written just for me(**). He wants to form real bonds, but he sucks at expressing that, and he's often his own worst enemy in building the things necessary for relationship. I can relate.
* It gave me something that I can point to in order to corroborate my claim that animation is not an infantile way to tell a story -- it's a medium with its own strengths and weaknesses, and allows the careful artist to tell a story that could be told in no other way.
* I love time-travel fiction, but one aspect that many stories tend to gloss over is its loneliness. You can never talk openly about everything you've seen or everything you've experienced or everything you know(***); there is always some distance between you and others around you that can never be bridged. Steins;Gate doesn't hold back here. You can see what the loneliness does to his character over time. This is especially devastating because he has tried to commit his life to being close to someone; it's even explicitly paralleled in the story to a hostage situation, where the other person cannot escape.
* It recognizes that not every close relationship is romantic in nature. Yes, there's a romantic relationship, and I like that relationship plenty -- heck, I usually detest romances in fiction that build out of couples who can't stop fighting, but this one felt so organic and vulnerable by the end that I couldn't help but adore it. Even besides that, though, there's a fierce friendship that the main character is very protective of, and I feel like that dimension of humanity is often completely missing in stories that explore human relationships.
* When you like a character, you want him to succeed; you want his happiness. When that character's success and happiness are defined as the happiness of other characters you're learning to care about, you root even harder.
* Makise Kurisu is an intelligent female character. I adore intelligent female characters. And there's more to her than meets the eye, too. At the beginning of the series, one might be inclined to write her off as a stereotypically cold and hostile character, for whom strength is measured in bitchiness. It's fairly common for this cold exterior to slip by the end of the narrative in a lot of stories, but Steins;Gate showed us why this exterior existed in the first place, in a way that made us want her to get what she wanted. That explanation, in my experience, is much more rare; even stories that bother with an explanation rarely offer more than a cursory nod in that direction (or it simply tells us rather than shows us).
* For a while, even characters that want to help simply cannot, even though their hearts are in the right place. That helplessness tugs on the heart in several tender scenes. I think this creates a powerful connection to the viewer, who (by that time) probably wishes he could help on some level, but is unable to.
* Even the minor characters, in my opinion, have enough intrigue in them to support their own series -- even though we only get hints. (Who'd have guessed at the beginning that the shopkeeper who lives downstairs lives in constant fear for his vibrant and innocent daughter's life -- or that the cosplayer who owns a business downtown spends most of her time missing her father, but has the strength of character to relinquish her deepest desire in order to help her friends?)
* As much as I like sci-fi that reminds us that we are not our memories, and that our humanity transcends our memories(****), it's nice to be reminded just how valuable our memories really are.
* The narrative reminds us that everyone is deeper than we expect and is fighting his or her own battles, and forgetting these things is narrow-minded and senseless. Anything that reminds you to care about people has got to be a good thing.
* The music is incredible. The timing of the cicadas (as background noise) is amazing. The animation in some places is absolutely stunning. Most of the time, these things seem pretty ordinary, even pedestrian -- and then there's a little touch out of nowhere that's just brilliant.
Enough gushing. Other people, please -- what fictional work do you just adore for its connection to you on an emotional level, and what has it meant to you?
---
(*) Full confession: I thought him over-the-top and annoying at first. But the more you get to know him, the more those very things that seemed weird become the things that make him endearing. I have felt for a long time that that's how people are (except that some people try their best to hide the weird parts); I'm always drawn to people in the hopes of learning about the weird stuff, and the ardent wish that they'll let me stick around long enough to learn why those things are so important to them. (But there's that "screwing up" thing that I do... it never seems to work out that way.)
And when you learn why he seems so over-the-top -- where that persona comes from -- it endears him to me all the more, because he created it out of his love for his friend and her needs. In a very real way, the thing that he extended out of love became part of who he is. And when it is stripped from him, he learns how to use it even better to care for his loved ones.
In that way, I think the story fooled me, but in a good way. If I had only seen the first half of the series, I might find it easy to convince myself that I didn't care that much about the quirky characters the show presented outside of some simple entertainment value. The second half convinced me that I really, really did -- probably more than any other televised characters I'd ever known -- and caused me to think and reflect in ways that probably wouldn't have occurred to me on my own. I feel expanded by the story, and that's a tremendously rare thing.
---
(**) In a superficial way, I almost thought this going into the show. So, it's about time travel? Nice. And the main character likes to pretend to be a mad scientist? Awesome. And he drinks Dr. Pepper religiously? That's quirky fun. In Japan? Okay, this is getting kind of creepy... are you specifically targeting me, here?
But as the series continued, I found that I was being challenged personally, in my ability to empathize with others and my desire to know them on a deep level. It's hard to communicate exactly what it means to be touched by something like this, and even harder to convince the uninitiated to watch a 24-episode series with a very slow beginning to see what you're talking about.
---
(***) This, it suddenly occurs to me, is also why I love spy stuff. If we're honest, the main character has got to be lonely. And if he can save the world in spite of that loneliness, putting himself at great personal risk in the process? Fantastic.
---
(****) I'm looking at you, just about every cyberpunk movie I've ever seen.
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