Steins;Gate

I realize that this show has lots of good qualities about it and has a very clear appeal, which is why I want to start this review by commending it for what it does well.  The time travel mechanics kinda worked and made more sense than most time travel media, so that’s a pretty big accomplishment in and of itself. Also it doesn’t do a half-bad job of planting payoffs for later. Uhhh, the animation isn’t terrible and the editing is mostly not bad I guess. I feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel now because I can’t think of other things about this show that I like.  So anyway on to what I don’t like. First up is the characters. Holy hell the characters. All of them have one or two personality traits that they’re defined by (which I mean sure I guess I don’t need the highest level of complexity) and they’re all different kinds of annoying or obnoxious. The main character is a delusional egotist and the only way to justify the fact that women are habitually drawn to him is to say that the plot necessitated it. Mayushi is super infantilized and treated like an object for most of the story. Krisu has the character traits of smart, helpful, and combative, which makes her the most complex character with no agency (surprise: the only character with any agency in the story is the lead). The gamer pervert has exactly those two traits. To stop myself from going down the list further and just listing every character’s absurdly reducible traits, I’ll just add that no character is much more complex than can fit into one sentence, and they’re all annoying and it doesn’t make any sense that they’re interacting with each other.  Additionally, at the outset of every episode it feels painfully clear what’s gonna happen that episode, and the “twists” that people kept taking about just kinda made me laugh at the fact that they were supposed to be surprising or impactful when this show has some truly obnoxious characters. For almost every episode, I was able to call out what would happen later in the episode, and then usually I would laugh at how my cynical prediction was exactly right because this show is incredibly predictably written. The occasions in which I couldn’t predict what was gonna happen almost always had to do with mechanics of time travel as well, never with narrative elements.  Thematically it’s just a lot of stuff that might’ve impressed me if I watched this early in high school, stuff about living your life without any redos and whatever, but they don’t lean too hard into that and it feels like a lot of good ideas to explore were mentioned and dropped in the interest of having a tighter story (which isn’t even that tightly written I must say).  Plus there’s some wonderful little homophobia, transphobia, and outright sexual assault of course, in case you forgot that it’s anime.  So yeah, I’ve got big problems with this and I can’t pretend that I really enjoyed it, but I hesitate to call it bad outright because it does have at least a couple things going for it. I just can’t stand the characters and I get nothing out of it narratively or thematically, so it just felt like vibing with characters I don’t like for 24 episodes.