We’re back with our 3rd instalment of completely making a mess out of Steins;Gate’s lore. You guys are lucky that Arthifis is around to keep me on track. I had this whole thing about umbrellas and penguins…
Just for a bit of context – we ended last post with me ging on a long rambling tangent about sci fi time travel. It ended this way:
“If I remember correctly, Steins;Gate is based and a multiverse theory and their time travel device creates a small localized wormhole that allows to send a small bit of information from one spot in space time to another, including one in the past. So I figure it falls under the second option. Your not creating a new reality or timeline (as in the first) and you’re not skipping to another timeline all together (as in the 3rd). Your retracing your steps and taking a different fork in the road, but your not bombing the other road…
Does that make sense?”
I think we all know the answer to that question. And now, part 3!
Thank you for the explanation! I just felt my IQ going up! 😀
I agree with you, it must be based in the second one, since when something happens, in that reality it’s like you just didn’t do something. Taking the watch example again.
If Rintaro bought an expensive watch and came back to stop himself from buying it then, he would be the only one knowing that he had bought the watch to being with. And this, only because of his reading steiner. If he didn’t had that he wouldn’t even remember buying it in the first place. Probably would remember that he was thinking buying one and then received a message from himself from the future telling him not to buy it!
Completely makes sense to me.
However, I continue to think that I’m right though. Like I said above, they can’t end the World War 3, as they will need to build the time machine so Suzuha comes back. This is, if Rintaro really goes forward with his objective of not changing the timelines.
I went and rewatched the ending of Steins;Gate just to be certain XD In the end, Rintaro and Suzuha comeback in time a last time. However, this time, Rintaro is able to do everything certain to save both Kurisu and Mayuri, leading him to the Steins;Gate timeline. When they are coming back, Suzuha says to him “See you in 7 years” and when Rintarou is back to the present, no one remembers about Suzuha because in that timeline she never had the necessity to come back.
Does it make sense? I mean that the World War 3 will happen and the Time Machine will be build with the premise that Rintaro, afraid of going again towards the alpha line, will just make everything in his power to not change the timeline.
Now, of course he may be able to prevent World War 3 without a time machine (which I don’t think it’s really possible), but that kind of event will make the timeline change again and they all will move to a timeline where there is no World War 3 (so, no Suzuha), but also with a dead Kurisu which is a outcome that we still didn’t see.
-Maho: Same as above but with Kurisu. Even if we believe that Kurisu is a more withdrawn and private person, Dr. L. was cited in her research paper, Maho should have been as well if they were part of the same lab…
Hmmm, completely agree with you and never thought about this… Maybe Kurisu was so into the time machine that didn’t even remember to talk about her? Moreover, as Maho is always saying, Kurisu was like Mozart. She only thought about getting better and do her best, so maybe she just didn’t remember to mention Maho at all… Nevertheless, it is strange and needs to be explained
-Second Reading Steiner: I mean come on – if there was a second reading Steiner this close to them, surely they would have known,In the dark days of Mayuri’s continuous demise, she saw Natsumi frequently as they were getting ready for comiket, and Okabe was shifting worldlines every 20 minutes, this would have come up.
Didn’t think about it, but completely agree with you!
-Timeline: In terms of passage of time, we should be roughly at the same point as the end of the first season but on the alpha worldline, yet Russian and the US are already conducting time travel experiments even though SERN never created the first prototypes. This doesn’t quite line up with what we know of Suzu’s future past.
I think the key is Kagari. Although CERN is not in the picture, one of the factions had in their custody someone who came from the future and I believe they did all kind of experiments and things like that to get the information how to create a time machine.
You may be right on this one. It makes sense.
OK so let’s say I’m right. What does any of it even mean? Well…I dunno. I think that they are setting us up for a worldline in which the previously existing rules are tweaked. Clearly Okabe should be with Maho but I’m not so sure they’ll end up together because maybe this time love doesn’t conquer all. Kagari obviously needs an actual role and maybe she can be the counter to Suzu. After all, we are desperately saving the world entirely on the speculations of a traumatized little girl here. How do we even know she’s telling the truth. She could have misunderstood somethings.
Moeka and Maho were together and friendly at the very beginning, that relationship needs to be explained and since I’m going with the love doesn’t conquer all route, maybe they’ll pull a bait and switch and Maho will turn out to be an antagonist. That could be truly interesting.
They need to be careful not to unravel the narrative integrity of the story but if they can manage to convey a completely opposite message while doing that – it will be grand!
That would be just so mind-blowing and would put Steins;Gate 0 as my favorite Anime of all time… Ok maybe not the favorite, but in a solid second place!
Those were great details you got there! I didn’t even thought on some of them!
When it comes to things I need explanation is all the things that happened because of coincidence! Starting with Kagari’s lost memory and to appear in just the place to Luka’s father finding her. I mean, they just need to explain these kind of things or all story will just feel flat to me.
Did you guys enjoy going off on flights of fancy with us? Good news then, there’s one last part left! Go ahead to Arthifis‘ blog to catch up with the thrilling conclusion!
This really was so fun to do! Thank you so much for everything Irina! We need to seat down and do another! Maybe go for Chaos;Head? I heard somewhere that it also involves Time Travel? I dunno? I just know that I want to hang out with the cool bloggers (You in this case) – maybe with time I learn how to be almost as funny as you are able to
We will find something awesome for sure. I’ve been ridiculously busy but it should get quieter in the comming months and I can start coming up with projects again
Yeah, don’t worry! It’s the same for me! 🙂 Only in August I’ll be have a little more time to start new projects 😛
Here’s something that bothers me: you only have to invent a time-machine once. You can then go back in time and just hand over the blueprints. An arms race amounts to who can go further back in time, because that’s how you get a time-machine “first”. And that leaves me with the question, why World War 3 isn’t World War 1, or rather the war to precede all wars (and probably end them, too).
The only way that I can make sense of this is that the past doesn’t actually exist, and is as open as the future: that is: at any point of time, minds choose (however) one set of events (which includes memories), but just as many events can follow from a moment, many lines can lead to a moment. That makes minds crucial in unravelling time, and time-lines that contain taime-machine-abuse stop making sense and never manage to co-here into a world line. (World-lines need defining events to focus minds; not as events that need to happen: that’s because “Mayuri dies” is a loose type of events rather than a single event; and you need minds to create the type in the first place.)
I’m suggesting that while time-lines rely on physics, world lines rely on hermeneutics. To see what I mean take the following thought experiment:
You have a photograph of a bird on a branch. That photograph represents a snapshot of an event in time space. Now you draw a random circle on the photograph, and instruct a perfect supercomputer to re-calculate time-space so that what’s inside the cirle will always remain a time-space-unity. You’ll end up with the exact same universe, but you’ll also end up with a way of looking at it that makes no sense whatsoever to anyone. That is: the universe remains the same, but decoheres hermeneutically: a world like this could have time-lines, but no world-line.
Basically, I think Steins;Gate theory of time travel is more complex than any of the three you mention. Although, of course, I may just be overhtinking things as usual. But the key thing is this: if you have reading;steiner, but the past is nearly as open as the future, you can reconfigure the past just by convincing yourself. Worldlines rely on memories. (And that’s basically the ture end of the first VN, no?)
Of course, ultimately that may just mean that things you can’t imagine, you can’t put into fiction. Or differently, if things are sufficiently complicated, plot-holes are a lot harder to prove, and a lot easier to fill with mysticism.
I agree with you. Every time travel theory is more complex than the basic summaries I tried to make.
In the original S;G there was a limit to the time space distance information could travel in any direction before it started degrading. That was one way of not trivializing the plot. I’m not sure if the problem was entirely solved with SERNs complete machine or like Suzu’s you can only go so far before you start losing data.
Hmmm can it be that althought there is a World War 3 they weren’t still able to do the time machine before the war is ended? (In this case the War would have to end – which for plot purposes I think it will :D)
Yeah, the war would end, leave dis-satisfied people, who then, once the time machine is invented, send it back in time to change history… Eventually, the time wars will fill all of history. When time is not an issue, you just have to wait for the bad apple, and then things will have happened yesterday.
One way for this not to work would be time-machines being extremely expensive to run. Of course, you’d have to find a way how the following wouldn’t work: you drop a battery, wait ten minutes, then go back in time to pick it up in one-minute increments, and you end up with ten batteries for the price of one. Energy out of nowhere. Cool, no? I’m sure there’s a way to automate this on the atomic levels. Then you miscalculate and overload the universe with energy… BIG BANG.
I was already impressed with S;G the anime, and then I played the game. The SF runs surprisingly deep.
A few of those writers where obviously fascinated by the subject
im not sure i see the difference between the two multiverse interpretations of time. my understanding is that option 2 advocates a single “source” timeline with multiple branching points, whereas option 3 advocates a sort of “cloud” of time in which every timeline exists simultaneously. however, it would seem that any arbitrary path in option 3 would have the appearance of any timeline in option 2, so i dont see them as separate from a spatial perspective. the distinction i might make is the mechanism by which you “traverse” the timelines. basically, the question of whether you’re forced to travel in a straight line (barring outside interference) or have the option to branch through normal decisions.
Form my limited and butchered understanding option 3 has static preset timeline where choice is an illusion and you can’t in fact change anyting. You were always going to travel back in time and always going to remake that decision ect… Every paralell time is completely preset. Whereas in option 2 they are interconnected and branching out allowing you to choose a different path by going back to a previous point.
From the timetravelers POV they are the same thing though.
Does that make any sense at all?
okay, i think that’s along the lines of how i understood it. they can probably be represented equivalently, but the distinction is how you move through the timelines. in that sense, i would personally lean more towards option 3, since i typically lean more towards determinism (maybe more accurately a form of methodological determinism). and the reason i say that is because i think you open yourself back up to the paradox problems if you allow the time traveler to “return” to a previous point in time. i would argue that it’s impossible to return to the same point by definition, because the fact that you are a time traveler means that the point you’ve reached is no longer identical to the original point in time. if that makes any sense…
I does make perfect sense but it’s not as dramatically satisfying from a narrative point of view.
We have so much fun imagining ridiculous Butterfly effects that would be irrelevant with that option.
well, nothing about determinism stops you from having ridiculous butterfly effects. they’re irrelevant from the perspective of the universe as a whole, but they’re still significant to the individual (or even to humanity as a whole). nothing about the inevitability of events changes the way it is perceived.
pffth if you can’t accidentally unravel the fabric of existence – what’s the point….
hey, you could convince yourself that you’d unraveled the fabric of the universe pretty easily. im sure the universe wont mind.
I donnu…the universe seems pretty miffed with me already…
give it time!
NICE!