Love Is a Paradox (a "Steins;Gate" review)
When I was young, I adored time travel stories for the paradoxes(*). I enjoy paradoxes in general. The way you can describe them, but peeling them apart logically by themselves is impossible, makes my brain spin a little bit. The vertigo that reaults from perspective ratcheting back and forth and upside down is something I find pleasurable. I would go nuts for a really well-executed grandfather paradox or bootstrap paradox(**), and I kind of still do.
As I got older, of course, I craved character-driven drama. A story is interesting because of what it tells us about people. So even though my brain enjoys the exercise of a good mental tale, if there isn't anything in there to show us characters growing and changing, it feels a bit empty and pointless.
What I love about Steins;Gate is that it does both. The story is deeply moving, paradoxically allowing a lot of character growth and change despite not really leaving a few days' worth of time. It's about as character-driven as it's possible for any story to be. At the same time, there's stuff to play with your brain(***); the cause that kicks off events in the show becomes the effect of the entire series, and yet, without actually creating a paradox, it never actually happened. It's perfect logic that, to all appearances, looks perfectly illogical.
The main character cheats fate in the same fun way that paradoxes do, and manages to escape time loops to take care of people he loves without ending up in the completely unfamiliar by being more clever than himself.
Steins;Gate is a masterpiece. I don't know if it's my favorite television series of all time, but it's definitely in the top one.
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(*) I was hoping my daughter would, too, since she's really good at logic. Not really, though. Ah, well.
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(**) In case you care: A grandfather paradox is one in which performing an action in the past makes the journey into the past unnecessary or impossible in the first place. It gets its name from a particular phrasing of the problem. Let's say you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he ever meets your grandmother. If that happens, you should be erased from existence. But if you are erased from existence, you should not have been able to kill your grandfather.
The bootstrap paradox concerns the origin of something. For example, let's say a time traveler really likes the works of Beethoven, and so goes back to visit the composer as a young man -- and accidentally leaves behind some sheet music of Beethoven's works, which the young musician copies and publishes as his own work. In that scenario, where did Beethoven's works actually come from? This paradox gets its name from the notion of picking oneself up by one's own bootstraps, an impossible action in the real world.
... I'd love to come up with a taxonomy of time-travel paradoxes and make a cool infographic about them. :)
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(***) There's a fair amount of exposition so that the handwave-y stuff about the time travel in the story can be thoroughly explained, but there's also a lot of the logic that they simply show you and expect that you're intelligent enough to understand the implications on your own -- including why one of the common objections to time travel stories generally ("If time travel is such a hassle, why don't they do something to the past to prevent all of the problems in the first place?") simply won't work here.
As I got older, of course, I craved character-driven drama. A story is interesting because of what it tells us about people. So even though my brain enjoys the exercise of a good mental tale, if there isn't anything in there to show us characters growing and changing, it feels a bit empty and pointless.
What I love about Steins;Gate is that it does both. The story is deeply moving, paradoxically allowing a lot of character growth and change despite not really leaving a few days' worth of time. It's about as character-driven as it's possible for any story to be. At the same time, there's stuff to play with your brain(***); the cause that kicks off events in the show becomes the effect of the entire series, and yet, without actually creating a paradox, it never actually happened. It's perfect logic that, to all appearances, looks perfectly illogical.
The main character cheats fate in the same fun way that paradoxes do, and manages to escape time loops to take care of people he loves without ending up in the completely unfamiliar by being more clever than himself.
Steins;Gate is a masterpiece. I don't know if it's my favorite television series of all time, but it's definitely in the top one.
---
(*) I was hoping my daughter would, too, since she's really good at logic. Not really, though. Ah, well.
---
(**) In case you care: A grandfather paradox is one in which performing an action in the past makes the journey into the past unnecessary or impossible in the first place. It gets its name from a particular phrasing of the problem. Let's say you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he ever meets your grandmother. If that happens, you should be erased from existence. But if you are erased from existence, you should not have been able to kill your grandfather.
The bootstrap paradox concerns the origin of something. For example, let's say a time traveler really likes the works of Beethoven, and so goes back to visit the composer as a young man -- and accidentally leaves behind some sheet music of Beethoven's works, which the young musician copies and publishes as his own work. In that scenario, where did Beethoven's works actually come from? This paradox gets its name from the notion of picking oneself up by one's own bootstraps, an impossible action in the real world.
... I'd love to come up with a taxonomy of time-travel paradoxes and make a cool infographic about them. :)
---
(***) There's a fair amount of exposition so that the handwave-y stuff about the time travel in the story can be thoroughly explained, but there's also a lot of the logic that they simply show you and expect that you're intelligent enough to understand the implications on your own -- including why one of the common objections to time travel stories generally ("If time travel is such a hassle, why don't they do something to the past to prevent all of the problems in the first place?") simply won't work here.
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