Another Heaven

-The whole John Titor aspect. For one thing, the only reason Okabe even got in touch with “Titor” in the alpha worldlines was because he was bothered by how no one remembered the Titor that appeared in the year 2000. And him getting in touch with Suzuha in alpha is obviously a part of the story you can’t really change.

Meaning, Suzuha had to have traveled back in time in the beta worldlines, too (so she could be the John Titor Okabe knew about). And if we go by what the “real” John Titor said, then that means WW3 happens in the future of the beta worldlines. So…how does that work with the ending where Kurisu stays dead? Or are we just supposed to accept that WW3 happens it the worldline Okabe tried so hard to return to, because, hey, that’s life?

-Secondly, and this is much less important, but without the whole “Steins Gate worldline” thing, the reason for the series being called ‘Steins;Gate’ in the first place gets pretty weak. It’s just a thing Okabe says sometimes…and I don’t think he even uses it anymore at the end (in the ending where Kurisu stays dead, that is). What’s the point of naming the series after this chuunibyou name Okabe thought up when the whole story is about the death of Okabe’s chuunibyou identity? I guess you could say it would be ironic, but that would feel out-of-place to me.

-Last but not least, Steins;Gate is also a coming-of-age story. Okabe starts out as an innocent child (figuratively speaking, of course) and loses his innocence over the course of the story with all the terrible things he has to go through.

If the story stops here, then the message is pretty much ‘Well, you were a child, but now you know how much the world sucks.’ Which would…technically work, I guess, but I like how S;G goes a step beyond that, with Okabe’s 'Hououin Kyouma’ identity at first being something born from innocence/ignorance, then the harshness of life strips it away, but in the end Okabe regains this identity despite what he’s been through and uses it as a source of strength. I think that’s what’s important, not the fact that Okabe gets an “ideal” ending.

...Unless we're working under the assumption that everything had to happen from the beginning because there was "already" another Okabe at the Radio Kaikan in the prologue. In which case... yeah, I don't like that. I can accept causal loops that occur within individual worldlines, but I don't like worldline-crossing loops at all. So much so that I actually invented a way to make it not a loop. But I'd rather not get into that theory right this second.

But anyway, let's talk about the ending. I think you have a good point here. A lot of the ending does just involve stuff getting dumped on Okabe's lap, so to speak. And I think a lot of the reason I'm not bothered more by S;G's ending simply because SG0, well...exists. I never really had the opportunity to chew on S;G's ending by itself because I played SG0 like, less than a week after I finished the first S;G.

(As for how ALL the Alpha Suzuhas came from 0%, I’m assuming that her arrival in each worldline is like the arrival of a D-Mail. D-Mails don’t just arrive in the first worldline after they are sent; they arrive in ALL the worldlines after they are sent.)

(Minor Steins;Gate 0 spoilers under the cut)

In the anime this is an easy question, because it’s exactly 0 times. (Kurisu stops him from time leaping at this part.)

But what about in the original VN? Well, in the S;G VN itself, it isn’t clear. However, in S;G 0, Okabe says that he tried to save Mayuri “hundreds of times.” Also, in Annularly-Chained Ouroboros (which is basically a novelization of the original VN), he leaps four-hundred-something times during this part. So let’s just say it was ‘450’ times. We know that Okabe is repeating a span of time about 26 hours long, so that would be 487.5 days total.

 Now, I’m not saying it definitely would have been good. It was never released, so obviously, I wouldn’t know whether it was good or not. Maybe it would have sucked. But I think the idea itself had potential. Here’s why:

-Normally when a story ends with two characters in love, you can just sort of assume that they ended up together afterwards. But things are a bit more complicated with Okabe and Kurisu because they live in completely different countries (different continents, even), and neither of them is really in a position where they can just pack up and move to the other’s country. So it would be nice to see this be resolved somehow.

-I’ve always been curious about Okabe’s relationship with his Hououin Kyouma persona in the SG worldline. He still seems to use the persona, but we don’t really know how he feels about it. For example, is it easy or hard for him to keep up the act? We have the OVA and movie but a) in those we don’t get inside his head the same way we do in the VN, and b) we’re not even certain that they’re canon.

-When you think about it, it seems kind of odd that Okabe would want to form/join a resistance against the Committee of 300. For example, with Tennouji and Moeka, he seems to just want to let the sleeping dogs lie. He was finally able to save both Mayuri and Kurisu, so it’s hard for me to imagine him getting involved unless there was some concrete threat to someone he cared about. So maybe Antimatter could have showed us how he became involved.

-It could show us where the characters were at between S;G and Robotics;Notes. As it is now, we’re just going to suddenly see (or hear about) where they are ten years later in R;N DaSH, with nothing in between. In that situation, it’s easy to fall into the trap of either changing the characters too much, or not changing them enough (I would say that the latter is more common, though).

-It could potentially tie up loose ends from S;G and S;G 0. Of course, 0 wasn’t out at the time, but the Epigraph trilogy, which 0 was based on, was out, so the loose ends still could have been tied up. I won’t go into detail about what the loose ends are, since they involve S;G 0 spoilers, but there definitely are a few.

Okay, Okabe obviously isn’t a literal orphan. His parents may not play that big a role in the story, but they both seem to be alive and well, and Okabe doesn’t even seem to be particularly estranged from them.

However, I think one might be able to argue that because of his Reading Steiner, Okabe is a sort of “causality orphan.” You can’t “account for” who he is by looking at a single worldline. True, there’s other people who have traces of RS, but they also have all their memories of the current worldline, meaning that they’re always going to “belong” to that worldline to an extent Okabe never will.

I think this is one of the reasons Okabe always goes to Kurisu for help. Obviously, he values her advice, but she also seems to act as a sort of anchor for him, giving him a sense of stability. It’s like that part when Kurisu says, “Never forget. Whatever worldline you’re on, you aren’t alone. I’m there for you!” (In the anime, anyway, I can’t remember whether she says it in the VN or not.)

So I don’t think he regrets going to her even when her advice turns out to be not-so-helpful (a rare occurrence, but the advice she gave regarding Okabe’s date with Luka, for instance).