Last week I told you guys I didn’t know if I would be posting weekly on Steins;Gate and I meant it entirely. But then CactusMatt told me that I would keep doing it in my comments and who am I to argue. I’ve never met Matt be we get along well. It’s one of those things, where you could have sworn you’ve known someone for way longer than you actually have…
You know, I’m going to assume you’ve seen the episode. At least you’ve read someone else’s real review and don’t need a recap at this point.
I’m a time travel otaku and like many people, I’m guilty of emphasizing the quantum physics technobabble in the Steins;Gate franchise and really not giving enough credit to the beautiful piece of creative neuroscience that’s included. It deserves way more credit and is a lot more detailed and plausible then the time travel stuff.
The tricky nature of sentience is another long time fascination for me that I’m illequipped to properly appreciate. What are we exactly. We take it for granted that our higher identity resides somewhere separately from our physical body. We are quick to accept sci fi premises where a head or even brain transplant allows someone to survive in an entirely different body but still be themselves. On the other hand, a Borg or zombie still has its body but the person behind it is gone….
There’s a popular theory that teleportation would be possible by essentially encoding all the information that makes up an individual breaking it down at point A and simply reassembling that info at point B. Essentially 3d printing the physical components and uploading the data. In a sense, this is a perfect copy and the original is gone but does it matter. Is the copy any less that person?
The question of what exactly is the fundamental essence of the self is what 0 is exploring right now. What’s the bare minimum needed for someone to be who they are. For lack of a better word, how do we quantify the spirit? I am really enjoying this take.
Like I said last week, I’m Okabe. I can’t see a Steins;Gate Story in a different way.
So as Okabe, I was relieved to meet Maho. Finally, someone who I can relate to on some level. United by our love of science and our grief. Comrades is some secret war that might never happen. I realize that Okabe and I are a man without a country. In this worldline, we’ve accepted that we cannot fix anything and did the best we could to simply patch things. Trying to make life as smooth as possible for our friends. As a result, no one has the slightest idea what we’ve actually gone through and we’ve purposefully isolated ourselves from them. In that light, Maho is the closest thing to a friend we can be honest with, in a weird way, this strange girl who we’ve just met may be our closest confident now.
And then of course, there’s Kurisu herself. Or is it Kurisu at all. This girl doesn’t know us. She’s just a picture of someone we use to know in another life. She’s too playful and soft. She giggles. She believes time travel is reasonable. Clearly this is a pale copy. This is not the spirited spitfire we knew and loved…or is she?
When Okabe called her Christina I screamed at him to stop being an idiot. Stop fooling himself. Maho had warned him that this would be painful. When Amadeus hung up on us I screamed at my TV: Wait..Christina….
This is a bad idea. It’s a bad idea to fall for someone blindly because of they remind us of someone we loved. They aren’t the same person, not really. It’s a bad idea to get completely enamored with a show at the second episode because it feels like a series we adore. This can’t end well…
