M-moe…

2DT, a fellow blogger, quibbles over my vernacular when I last wrote about Steins;Gate.

In a recent post of his, 2DT touches on Steins;Gate’s cyberpunk influences, primarily the very idea in these dystopian works that cyberpunk characters are mired in futility. He then goes to suggest that this has been “going down” all season long. More specifically, he suggests that I was wrong in asserting that “shit finally went down” only in the latest pair of episodes.

I already had a brief back and forth with 2DT on his blog, but let me just offer a rebuttal that isn’t so disjointed. Plus, a long reply in his comment sections would just be rude! Here’s what I suggest: think relative (which is only apropos considering the time-traveling nature of the anime’s plot!). This is not so much a post about Steins;Gate but a post about how different people perceive the same story. Since 2DT decided not to use my vernacular in responding to me, I will thus overuse it! — enjoy.

Yes, the plot of the anime has been in motion since the start of the show. Yes, the characters of Steins;Gate have always been screwed since the beginning. The audience can afford this God’s eye POV and in its employment, they can pull back and observe the invisible tendrils of fate extending their grips around Okabe’s neck since the first episode. I won’t dispute any of this.

So am I wrong in my casual usage of “shit just got real” vernacular? No. Look — as I tried to explain in my comments to 2DT’s post, we are on different pages in assessing the anime. He’s looking at the story as a whole in which the characters’ fates have been sealed since the beginning — that’s 2DT’s prerogative. Unfortunately, as interesting as his viewpoint might be, it doesn’t dramatically change how I personally view Steins;Gate. Episodes 2-11 don’t magically become “un-boring” to me.

Episodes 12 and 13, on the other hand, are “un-boring” to me. As a result, I claimed in my previous Steins;Gate post that shit finally went down. After all, something must have occurred in these couple of episodes to distinct themselves from the episodes which failed to engage me. To take stock, viewers certainly do have the ability to pull back and view the story as a whole. Here’s another trick the audience can do: make comparisons.

We have seen similarly structured stories before where the audience is quite aware of the dangers that the story’s characters remain blissfully ignorant of. From the very first episode, some viewers knew that something akin to the events of episodes 12 and 13 would occur — we didn’t know how it would unfold, whom it would involve, and necessarily why, but we knew.

The characters of the story, however, didn’t know. They reside in the story from a day-to-day, scene-to-scene perspective. When the characters finally do realize the predicament of their situation, as it finally hit Okabe literally as a bullet through Mayuri’s ditzy head, that’s when I suggested that shit finally went down.

The previous episodes had been building to this moment — that is undeniable. This is “shifting gears,” so to speak; this is “shit going down.” Yes, from a broader, absolute plot perspective, shit had always been going down. But I have never said that the story hadn’t begun til the latest episodes. That’s a preposterous notion. Clearly, the story began at episode one.

But despite shit going down since the very beginning, we are also keenly aware that the creators of the story are in control: they manipulate how the audience receives and reacts to the events of the plot. Even if shit has been going down all this time, there are highs and lows, crescendos and diminuendos. From the vantage point of the characters in-universe, the moment Moeka shot Mayuri was a crescendo like no other this anime had seen. As a result, what’s so wrong with saying “shit went down” just now?

What it really boils down to is this:

(1) You can look at the details of the plot in which you’ll see that things have been set in motion since the start, much in the tradition of a cyberpunk story,

(2) or you can abstract the plot away and observe the form of the story. No plot would flat-line as that would be ineffective storytelling. Stories rise and fall in tension and emotional impact and, I suggest, the recent episodes represent a critical turning point.

There are no right and wrong ways to tackle any plot, especially Steins;Gate’s. There is only the path you choose to take. I’m suggesting that 2DT and I have been on different paths since the very start.