The plot of episode twenty-three of Steins;Gate was more depressing than anyone had imagined in its first half, and more electrifying than anyone had expected in its second.
Who could have guessed that this anime would bring in a version of the male lead from more than ten years in the future to serve as the strongest support of all?
And as if that were not enough, the episode connected perfectly with the very first one. All the confusion viewers had felt back then, all the details they had mistaken for flaws in the script, suddenly turned out to be foreshadowing planted from the beginning.
For anime fans in Japan, however, since the original Steins;Gate visual novel did not exist in this world, no one had any idea who that future version of the protagonist truly was.
In the original game, the story had multiple branching routes.
For instance, at the end of the Alpha worldline, Makise ran to the laboratory. There, the protagonist's choice between remaining in the Alpha line or entering the Beta line led to two different endings.
After entering the Beta line, the time machine Suzuha used had enough fuel for two temporal jumps.
If the protagonist collapsed mentally after traveling back for the first time and killing Makise, choosing to accept fate, the story would branch into Steins;Gate 0.
In that route, the male lead gave up on saving Makise, became entangled in a world war, spent years in a vegetative state, and later had the memories of his younger self implanted into him. Through that, he finally understood how to deceive the worldline, personally guiding Suzuha's return to the past so she could help his former self lead reality into the Steins;Gate worldline.
"So what does deceiving the world even mean?"
"Is it some kind of logical paradox?"
"I don't know. Just understanding the plot has already killed too many of my brain cells. If I try to predict the rest, my head might explode."
"The way to overcome worldline convergence is to change the fact of Makise's death without changing anything in the past. What does that even mean? What kind of word game is Kantoku Sora playing?"
"I curse Kantoku Sora. Every week he ends the episode at some ridiculous cliffhanger. Couldn't he make the episode a few minutes longer and get past these suffocating breaks before stopping?"
"Fine, then let's think about it. What does deceiving the worldline mean? Since the premiere, Kantoku Sora has always been several levels above us. We've gotten so many predictions wrong that I refuse to believe he can stay this many steps ahead until the end. This is the final stretch. We have to figure out how the protagonist will keep Makise alive in the Beta line despite the convergence of death."
"I thought that among this season's popular TV works, Liar Game season two was already the most brain-burning. I really didn't expect this. Steins;Gate, you hid yourself too deeply."
"Right now, I'm only interested in how Kantoku Sora's brain is wired. He's someone who graduated high school and went straight into anime production. How does he understand so much and come up with so many strange new concepts?"
"You have to understand: a phone, a microwave, a television, and headphones together become a time machine. If you went to university, you might never think of such a ridiculous setup. In Steins;Gate, only the method of building the time machine is pure nonsense. Everything else can justify itself within the story's logic. In the end, that can only be called Kantoku Sora's talent."
All night long, discussion about Steins;Gate refused to die down.
The next day, the ratings for episode twenty-three were announced: 5.96%.
It was a number many people in Japan had expected, yet it still left them deeply shaken.
It was absurd. This work had really gone from an almost reputation-crushing premiere to a comeback that was now on the verge of breaking the 6% ratings barrier.
On top of that, the anime's score had risen to an astonishing 9.6.
What kind of divine ratings trajectory was this?
Soon after, Japan's major media outlets and anime critics began publishing articles.
The god of Japan's anime industry, Sora, is about to achieve an unprecedented feat: two consecutive anime series surpassing 6% ratings.
The word genius is no longer enough to describe Steins;Gate. If it concludes its story perfectly, this work will become a milestone in Japanese animation.
The crushing defeat of the four major networks: on this night, Japan's television industry was filled with mourning. Sora helped Southern Alliance TV overturn the four giants in both drama and animation. This is the greatest industry earthquake Japanese television has seen in the past decade.
Can one person influence the stock price and revenue of a listed television network? If Steins;Gate breaks 6% again, Sora will become an undeniable force in the television industry as a creator.
Six works in four years. From a debt-ridden teenager to a billionaire worth ten billion yen, Sora's life is even more legendary than the protagonists he creates.
The most brilliant anime in the history of Japanese animation. If it ends successfully, it will inevitably sweep every major anime award in Japan this year.
The media spared no praise.
From its premiere until now, Steins;Gate had astonished nearly the entire Japanese animation industry with the strength of its story.
It was slow-burning, yes. But every anime fan who had followed it this far felt that the slow pace had been worth it.
After all, a plot point introduced in the very first episode was still able to reveal an enormous hidden clue more than twenty episodes later.
In the following days, a wave of demand for Steins;Gate Blu-rays swept across Japan. The volumes released so far saw their average sales per volume soar past 250,000 copies.
Alongside its ratings, the work's influence continued to rise.
During this process, a huge amount of emotional value generated by the first season of Anad and by Liar Game was absorbed into Sora's system space.
The three works had been airing for nearly half a year, and each had already contributed more than one hundred million emotional value points. As a result, the balance inside Sora's system space was rapidly approaching the four hundred million mark.
While he was still thinking about how to use that massive reserve, another Friday arrived.
The broadcast day of Steins;Gate episode twenty-four - the most important and most thrilling episode of the series - had finally come.
In Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and the major otaku commercial districts of coastal cities, Yume Animation and Southern Alliance TV poured enormous funds into promotion. Character posters covered streets and stations, and official merchandise came with limited-time bonus gifts.
At anime conventions, Makise cosplayers led the trend. At any slightly larger event, there were at least a hundred of them moving through the halls, and several promotional activities dedicated exclusively to Steins;Gate had also been arranged.
Sora came out of his salted-fish mode and posted five promotional comments about episode twenty-four on his own account in a single day.
Everyone was tense.
After all, whether this anime could break through the 6% ratings barrier basically depended on episode twenty-four.
Episode twenty-five would only be a supplementary story, mostly sweet fanservice, with little direct connection to the main plot.
That was why Southern Alliance TV understood exactly what it was doing by investing so heavily in aggressive promotion that week. The better Steins;Gate performed, the more ridiculous the four major networks' blockade against Southern Alliance TV would look this year.
On NatsuYume, four topics related to the Steins;Gate anime entered the top ten trending searches.
As the administrator of eight Sora fan groups, Yuna became active in the chats from the afternoon onward, repeatedly reminding members not to forget to watch the episode.
Starting at seven in the evening, Southern Alliance TV's ratings began climbing rapidly.
At seven-thirty, all kinds of haters appeared, launching online battles against Steins;Gate fans across the forums.
At seven-fifty, Southern Alliance TV had already begun warming up for the premiere of episode twenty-four. The network invited several well-known anime critics and produced a ten-minute special analyzing the foreshadowing from earlier episodes.
With Sora's approval, and after receiving certain details from him, the program also moderately mentioned possible developments from the various routes of the original game.
For example, in one Alpha line, after Mr. CRT died, his daughter came to hate the protagonist and, after growing up in the future, inflicted cruel and inhuman torture on him as revenge.
They also touched on the reason the protagonist possessed the ability to observe worldlines.
All of these were detailed settings from the original game. For Steins;Gate fans, watching that content was pure enjoyment, and the ratings rose once again.
By exactly eight o'clock, when episode twenty-four began airing, Southern Alliance TV's ratings had already surpassed 5.5%.
Next came the execution of Operation "Goddess Who Governs the Future."
At the very beginning of the episode, the protagonist Kōren appeared in his white lab coat and, in his exaggerated chūnibyō tone, announced the name of the operation to deceive the world and fate. Then the opening song of Steins;Gate began to play.
In the past, Yuna had always felt that anime openings were a waste of time.
But today, watching those familiar visuals accompanied by the stirring music, she felt her emotions being pulled into the story all at once.
It was as though she herself had become Kōren, the warrior charging against the fate already written in the past.
If the world had decreed Makise's death, then he would say no to the world.
It was childish, excessive, almost ridiculous.
But it was also romantic.
After the opening ended, Kōren returned to the laboratory and took out one of the "Future Gadgets" created there, one of those toys drenched in chūnibyō delusion.
It was a tube filled with extremely realistic fake blood.
Then Kōren explained his plan.
First, he had to deceive his past self.
The current Kōren, the one who had chosen to save Makise after passing through countless loops, only existed because, at the very beginning, he had seen Makise stabbed, sent a message, and fought desperately to return from the Alpha worldline to the Beta worldline.
If this Kōren returned to the past and changed all of that, the rescue plan would lose its very foundation.
Without his experiences in the Alpha line, without falling in love with Makise, why would he try to save her?
And by what right would his current self continue to exist?
Kōren's plan was to go back to the past, use the fake blood to simulate Makise's blood, make her faint in the red pool, and deceive his past self into believing that Makise had truly died.
At the same time, he also had to destroy Makise's paper. Otherwise, once the time machine was created in the future, world war would become unavoidable, and all of Kōren's friends would die in the years to come.
Yuna's eyes widened.
Was that actually possible?
But the problem was elsewhere. He could deceive his past self, but could an action like that really deceive the world?
Wasn't it worldline convergence that caused Makise's death?
The same doubts existed in the minds of countless viewers.
But in truth, that was one of the central rules of Steins;Gate.
In the second game of the franchise, Steins;Gate 0, the protagonist's fate converged on death in 2036. However, in one worldline, he merely entered a vegetative state without dying completely. Since his consciousness no longer existed in that world, reality itself spared his body.
Afterward, his companions used future memory-transfer technology to send the young Kōren's memories into his aged body, accomplishing a different kind of resurrection.
Even so, the world accepted that solution, allowing them to avoid the outcome imposed by worldline convergence.
"Then you have to save her. No matter what happens, you have to save her."
Just before he departed for the past, Shiina held Kōren's hand and said those words in a gentle voice.
Even though Yuna still could not fully untangle all of that logic, the scene touched her all the same.
Shiina, little angel.