The cyberpunk world is always shockingly recognizable—it is our world, gotten worse, gotten more uncomfortable, inhospitable, dangerous, and thrilling. — Rosenthal

Recently, the anime community has labeled Steins;Gate as cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk. But hold on a minute now — before we crown the king, putting it up there with the likes of Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Japan’s own Ghost in the Shell, we must answer one question: what is cyberpunk?

As always, let’s ask the experts:

Cyberpunk art… captures “a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech and the modern pop underground. — Sterling

That does sound suspiciously like Akibahara. Or, y’know, Tokyo at large:

Tokyo at night.

“Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns—all that towering, animated crawl of information—said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.’ And it was. It so evidently was.” — Gibson

From the movie Blade Runner.

But something’s missing from Steins;Gate: the corporatocracy. Advertisements aren’t emblazoned across the streets of Steins;Gate. In fact, the world is rather stark and minimalist, dominated by shades of grey. Cyberpunk landscapes tend to bombard and overload the senses, rendering its populace comfortably numb to the real horror lurking underneath the glitz and glamor of the neon lights. Commentators on 2DT’s blog remark that the urban sprawl of Steins;Gate’s Tokyo brings to mind cyberpunk influences, but I’m not quite convinced.

The landscape of Steins;Gate.

The city in the anime is somewhat dystopian, but it doesn’t come across as “heavily corporatized” or “media-saturated” — elements, I think, that would belong in any true cyberpunk story. Dystopia and cyberpunk often go hand-in-hand as genres, but I would suggest that dystopia is a bigger, more general idea of which cyberpunk belongs as a subset. That Tokyo resembles an urban sprawl in Steins;Gate might make it dystopian, but not necessarily cyberpunk. Modern day Los Angeles is both an urban sprawl and, I would argue, dystopian in many respects, but I wouldn’t call my hometown cyberpunk. Adding sci-fi elements to the mix also doesn’t make it cyberpunk.

In another post, 2DT remarks on the fate of Steins;Gate’s protagonists, i.e. their futility against “the man.” In this case, “the man” would be SERN (or is it CERN? — I’ve seen it both ways). Similar to the genre of dystopia, the (futile) struggles of the individual or individuals against a faceless organization, entities bigger than anyone can imagine, goes hand-in-hand with cyberpunk, but does this make Okabe’s fight in Steins;Gate cyberpunk? Remember, however, that the fight against “the man” isn’t a recent phenomenon. Would we consider a Brave New World cyberpunk?

I will concede that Steins;Gate renders a somewhat dystopian world, but I’m hesitant to call it a cyberpunk world. What’s the one key element missing from the anime? Anxiety:

Cyberpunk texts ask questions about what makes us “human” in a heavily corporatized, media-saturated world. How do we differ from higher forms of artificial intelligence? How do we distinguish objects, places, and experiences from their mediated copies? Where do we draw the boundaries between nature and technology? …

…the ontological anxiety underlying these metaphysical questions is intertwined with and expressed through social anxieties that arise from destabilization of identity markers such as race, gender and class in an increasingly multicultural, multiracial, and multisexual society. — Park

The issue of race is non-existent in Steins;Gate. The same can be said of culture; Steins;Gate is distinctively postmodern Japanese. Of course, the notion of “distinctively postmodern Japanese” might strike one as oxymoronic. Modern Japan was, after all, an amalgamation of old Japanese and Western influences. But I say that the anime is postmodern Japanese; it is modern Japan that has been allowed to stew in its own juices for the past two decades. What has emerged is a new creature unlike anything else. But I’ve digressed… Finally, sex — sex is sparse in Steins;Gate; sex is neutered and muted much like the anime’s landscape. Ruka’s genderswapping is but a trifle in the larger narrative picture.

Androgyny in Ghost in the Shell.

Ultimately, identity is the prime concern in cyberpunk stories. The lines that separate us in modernism are blurred in postmodernism, cynically so in cyberpunk. Thus I ask, “What line is being blurred in Steins;Gate?” I could be wrong — Steins;Gate may very well be a cyberpunk story. I’m just not convinced, from the episodes we’ve seen, that it is. Cyberpunk isn’t just a series of related story elements; cyberpunk evokes a certain feeling, one I find lacking in Steins;Gate.

Some postulate that Steins;Gate might instead be an example of a new genre descendent of cyberpunk, i.e. post-cyberpunk. But I haven’t seen anyone really define what post-cyberpunk really means (if postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, what is a reaction to cyberpunk?) other than the fact that it shares some common traits with its ancestor. As such, I can’t really consider the idea in good faith.

* * *

Steins;Gate Ep. 14: Thoughts and impressions

As always, I’ll stay away from plot speculation, even if Suzuha did drop a bomb as juicy as “I’m the time traveler John Titor.”

It appears to me that Okabe is trapped in his own head.

The episode opens with a confession from Okabe: no matter how many times he tries to change the past, Mayuri never survives. What becomes even more apparent as the episode unfolds is that Okabe doesn’t truly want to save Mayuri — he only wants to save her on his own terms. He never reaches out to his friends; it takes Kurisu’s intervention midway through the episode to break Okabe out of his destructive cycle. What I just said probably sounds outlandish. “After all,” you might say, “look how broken up Okabe is over Mayuri’s multiple deaths.” Well, I dunno… what’s hitting him harder — that she dies or that he can’t change the world as he’s always claimed? Curiously enough, Okabe gets a second wind when Kurisu reminds him of his aspirations:

Of course, Kurisu’s involvement doesn’t guarantee Mayuri’s survival, but as I mentioned the last time I blogged about the series, it strikes me as odd that Okabe would continually strive against fate all by his lonesome. This is especially damning when his plans are continually foiled. He has become a contemporary Sisyphus. Do you remember why Sisyphus was punished? He defied the Athenian gods. Are there gods in the world of Steins;Gate? Not any that we can see, but was man ever meant to play with time?

It makes me laugh though — the gang’s microwave is the contemporary Pandora’s box.