Steins Gateとその影響
I think particularly like internet celebrities, VTubers, or not exactly VTubers, but like YouTubers, or other people who have put like lots of like, content based on their own personalities onto the internet, have been able to create AIs of themselves in order to have those AIs interact with their fans and be like, well, it's basically just like me. So yeah, I think this show did a great job of anticipating what that was going to look like in the future and really kind of got it right.
Konnichiwa! I am your host Mayu for 2AM OTTACK! In this podcast, we talk all about anime, manga, movies, music, and history through our distinct perspectives as a born and raised Japanese non-otaku. That's me and an American anime fan, Cisco.
That's me.
So this is not our first time to talk about today's anime, but not the first either. What did I say?
I don't understand.
You said this is not our first time to talk about this anime, but not the first either. And then I just got really confused.
I confused myself. So this is not our last time to talk about this anime.
Probably not.
And not the first either.
No.
That's what I wanted to say.
There we go.
We made not only one, but also two episodes of Steins Gate in the past, simply because...
It's awesome.
Yeah, that's how much we like it. Now, we are going to dive into Steins Gate Zero, which is a series that explains Steins Gate and its after story.
Well, yeah, it fills in some of the gaps in between episodes 23 and 24, I think, of the original series. Something like that. Or 22 and 23, but I think it's 23 and 24.
If you haven't listened to our Steins Gate episodes, you should probably listen to it, I think.
I mean, I think if you've seen the first 22 or 23 episodes of Steins Gate, you could follow this even without having seen it. But like, yeah, I think this is a good one to decide whether Steins Gate Zero is worth your time or not.
Yeah. So let's go.
All right.
So for people who don't know Steins Gate, can you explain really simply what Steins Gate is?
That's a big assignment. I'll try.
Steins Gate is about a guy named Rintaro Okabe, who is a self-proclaimed mad scientist and acts like a chuunibyou, like a guy who thinks he's still in middle school.
But he somehow succeeds in making a microwave into a time machine that can send text messages to the past.
He winds up changing the past a bunch of times by doing kind of like dumb experiments with it.
Then he hits a situation where he realizes he has to like actually change the past in order to prevent a certain tragic event.
They build another time machine that can send his memories back in time.
How long is it? Like a day?
Very short.
Or like a couple hours or something? Anyway.
He calls that the time leap machine, so it sends his memories back, but nothing else.
He finally figures out how to overt one tragedy by letting another one happen, and then is searching for a way to get to quote Steins Gate, which is the better outcome than the other things that he has.
Steins Gate Zero picks up where Steins Gate leaves off in about episode 22 or 23, where he doesn't build it, but he uses an honest-to-God time machine to travel to the past and make a choice which changes things a lot, but then fails to reach Steins Gate.
Then the series has one more episode after that, but it's implied by the first series that there's a whole future that happens in which many things occur.
Steins Gate 0の心理的側面
Before the events of episode 24, this series explores that alternate future that is implied by the second-to-last episode of the original Steins Gate show.
Thank you.
That wasn't that brief. I'm sorry.
The Steins Gate, the first one, you can see the main character, Okabe Rintaro, being kind of ridiculous, and he wears a white lab coat the whole time.
Sometimes you can tell he's being serious or just joking.
Yeah. In the very beginning, especially, it's really confusing before you realize that he's either actually kind of crazy, might be suffering some real delusions and be borderline schizophrenic, hearing voices and stuff, or he's one of the biggest posers of all time and is just intentionally acting out a made-up situation a lot of the time, and it's hard to figure out which of those it is.
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of visual imagery. In the first one, he's wearing a white lab coat almost the whole show, and in the second one, his normal clothes are just all black, so you can interpret that a lot of way.
He's grieving, he's in mourning for the death of someone close, or he's sort of gone to the dark side, or he's given up that sort of idea of being a mad scientist or a real scientist or whatever.
There's lots of different ways to, I think, interpret that clothing change.
I mean, the first Steins Gate series is a kind of slow burn, but I feel like they start changing stuff pretty early on in that show, and you just sort of don't understand the significance of what's being changed for a while, or it seems like low stakes.
And then about midway through the series, all of a sudden, the stakes get much higher, and it becomes a really dramatic show for the second half of the show.
This one, you kind of don't understand where it's going.
It really feels like it took maybe six to eight episodes, maybe even 12, for this one to really get going.
It was interesting all the way through, but it was sad.
Instead of being the sort of lighthearted, quasi-comedic situation, the main character is deeply in grief, and all of the people around him are also sad.
The plot seems to be about this AI rather than about time travel, which just makes it less exciting.
It's interesting to see his sort of psychological attachment to this AI thing, but it doesn't really have the same pizzazz as the first season.
And then in the last four or five episodes, this one really gets going and finds its mojo and is a lot like the first Steins Gate again in a really satisfying way.
And he was a little bit embarrassed.
To go back to being Hououin Kyouma?
Yeah.
I think this show is more psychologically satisfying because you sort of understand what's going on with everybody, and it feels less like a visual novel.
It feels, in a lot of ways, just more normal.
Well, I don't know.
More normal for better and for worse, for a lot of it.
And then it's awesome.
The sort of peak of the show is great.
So you mentioned about AI.
In Steins Gate 0, there is an app or system called Amadeus, using a person's memory to create AI, and you can interact with AI.
And the main character and the sub-character keep interacting with AI and having a feeling, like a different kind of feelings to AI.
And then at some point, they had to delete it.
It was so hard for them to delete it because they had special feelings.
Yeah.
Steins Gate 0 was aired in 2018 and not 2024.
AI技術の未来考察
We actually have that kind of AI technology.
You can choose a person's voice and then talk to it.
It's beyond our expectation what you can do.
Yeah, I think the show is pretty prescient in terms of understanding what an artificial AI based on a person might be like.
And the more content and, I don't know, stuff you have to feed these AIs, the more realistically like the person they can act.
And so I think particularly internet celebrities, VTubers, or not exactly VTubers, but YouTubers or other people who have put lots of content based on their own personalities onto the internet, have been able to create AIs of themselves in order to have those AIs interact with their fans and be like, well, it's basically just like me.
I think this show did a great job of anticipating what that was going to look like in the future and really kind of got it right.
It also reminded me of the movie Her.
Did it win Academy Awards?
I don't remember if Her won Academy Awards or not.
But it was a great movie about this sort of same idea.
I think the AI in Her is an actual general AI that has its own thoughts and things, not a large language model that's just faking it.
In this show, I think, again, they probably conceived of Amadeus as a general AI, but it acts and behaves kind of like a large language model, which makes a lot of sense.
And so I think in a weird way, this one was more realistic than the one in Her.
And I was thinking about Her the other day and just realizing that his job in that movie is to write love letters from one person to another based on the contents of their lives.
And I think, ironically, in the world of Her, in our actual world, we definitely have AI that could take over his job really easily.
But we don't have AI that could be the role of the AI in Her.
So that one feels a little bit more like a miss, whereas this one, I guess they're sort of positing that it has access to all of Her memories and sort of is Her but in computer form.
Whereas our AIs today are fakes, right?
They just guess what you might say next as opposed to having your actual memories and stuff.
But I still feel like this one was closer to predicting the future than Her was.
キャラクターの魅力
Did you have any favorite characters or favorite moments, scenes?
So I really like the American professor who's in this one just because of his hilarious pronunciation of Japanese, which is clearly a Japanese voice actor trying to think of what an American would sound like in Japanese.
But it's just not on the nose.
Some of it is really entertaining to listen to.
For example, the main character's name is Rintaro, and the American version is rendered as like, Rintaro!
And I'm just like, yeah, this guy sounds vaguely Italian, but not very American.
It was really weird because he has such a thick English accent, yet he still used very sophisticated, difficult Japanese words.
I think there are people like that who study Japanese for a long time and never master the pronunciation, but do get big vocabularies.
I wouldn't rule that out.
He sounds like a Japanese person pretending to be an American, not like an American who would have actually spoken Japanese and sort of chopped Japanese.
Anyway, that character is hilarious, and the way that he keeps saying Rintaro always got me.
I liked Suzuha. I mean, Suzuha was in Steins Gate, too.
But I felt like she was more important in Steins Gate Zero, because she was trying really hard to fix the problem and get back on the time machine and everything.
キャラクターの成長と関係性
And she was intense the whole time.
Yes, that's true.
She knows the relationships between those people around her, and they kept calling with the name she called in the future.
So even though they're about the same age or maybe a little bit younger than Suzuha, but she kept calling uncle blah or auntie blah, which questioned everybody, like, why is she calling like this?
But when she was being so intense, like she's been thinking about the World War III, and then we have to do something about it.
She met her parents, basically, and she was trying really hard at making sure the parents get together.
And when finally they started dating, there was a scene like, let's take a picture.
Mom, future mom, and Suzuha, the daughter, took a picture together.
I think right before that, she started crying, because that's what she wanted, three families together being happy, even though they were not together or married or anything.
So I liked the character Suzuha in this series.
Yeah, I think that's a good pick.
Yeah, recently, I started thinking maybe there's another world line today, and I'm just living in a different line.
Like, everything is fine.
You know, when something like big happens, like I started thinking about like beta line.
Like, maybe I live happy. I mean, I'm happy. I'm happy with my life and everything.
But as a world, I thought about maybe there's a beta line.
There are other world lines out there.
Yeah.
You never know.
If we don't have the reading Steiner, though, which is Rintaro's ability to remember the other world lines that he's going between, then it won't matter, right?
Because even if we shift to another world line, we won't be aware of that change.
Right.
Or we've only got the world line we're living in.
声優のキャリア
Okay, so let me explain a little bit about voice actors.
Okay.
Voice actor, Japanese voice actor who did Rintaro Okabe is Mamoru Miyano.
He's very famous now.
He's such a celebrity right now in Japan.
Interesting.
He used to be a child actor when he was a child.
Like, he had more work, but as he grew up, like he had less work.
And it's like he got a job offer of voice acting, and he was like, I do whatever.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So he started doing the career, and now he's a singer, and he does live concert.
He's like an idol.
I was going to already compare him to Arimakana, but now you're just making it even easier, honestly.
That's so true.
He's like that.
Yeah.
I wonder if he can cry in 10 seconds.
Probably he can.
I'm sure he can, actually.
So he has done a lot of famous anime voices.
But for me, the notable one was the Super Mario Brothers movie.
He did Mario in Japanese.
What?
What?
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
The reason his work is the guy with glasses in Oshinoko.
Do you remember him?
Is that the character's name?
Character's name is Kamiki Hikaru, but I don't think we know his name in anime yet.
So he's like the bad guy from the end.
I think he's the guy who visited the graveyard at the end.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The real father, obviously.
We don't know yet.
Okay, yeah, sure.
We don't know yet.
Okay, we'll go with that.
I think, yeah, he does a voice for that.
And we know Kana Hanazawa, who did the voice for Mayuri Sina.
She also did the voice for Demon Slayer, Kanroji, Dark Gathering, Eiko.
声優の変遷
Okay, yeah, she's been on a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
And for Itaru Hashida, it's by Seki Tomokazu.
This person.
Oh, I recognize this name.
Why?
I think Initial D, actually.
Oh, yeah, he was in Initial D. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Got it.
This is our friend, manga artist, favorite voice actor.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
She actually saw him in person in the event.
Okay.
He did the voice for...
Oh, Shinazugawa?
Shinazugawa.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Hashida Itaru and Shinazugawa are maybe as far apart as characters as you can get, right?
That's so true.
Damn.
Yeah.
Very talented.
Okay.
And I don't know anything about Jujutsu Kaisen, but he did the voice for Panda.
Okay.
I don't know.
Yeah.
There's a panda.
In the future, Hashida Itaru, he got so much thinner.
Do you know why?
I don't think they explained this, actually.
Yeah, the anime doesn't explain, but according to Wikipedia, it's because in the future, they don't have enough good food.
Yeah.
I don't think he was eating good food in the past, either.
They just don't have enough food, period.
Right.
Yeah.
So everybody's skinny.
That's kind of sad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if people's bodies actually change that much at the age that they're at, but we'll just roll with it.
It's fine.
You know, you can hear his voice changes when he gets thinner.
That's true.
I also was impressed by you, Kobayashi, who did voice for Ruka.
Ruka-ko.
Yeah.
She's a female voice actor, but she nailed this teenage boy's voice.
She voiced him in the future version of him, too.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, there's not that many lines in the future, but yeah, I agree that that's a pretty good transition.
Holding the character while changing the voice was effective.
And I think you're going to be happy to hear this.
Suzuha Amane's voice.
You know, this person's voice.
Hayashibara Megumi?
No, no.
What?
She did the voice for I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying.
Yes!
Oh, that's perfect.
I would have rather had her be the one that ends up marrying Daru instead.
The mom rather than the daughter, but that's still great.
I'll take it.
Can you explain what this anime is about?
I'm not going to watch it again.
I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying?
Yeah.
Oh, please.
I don't want to watch.
Will you sing the opening theme song?
No.
I don't like it.
Okay, yeah.
It's about a woman who marries a guy who's kind of an otaku.
And their marriage seems like not a really wise marriage.
It was like she was getting older and working at a company and just picked a random guy
and then found out he was a super otaku after they got married.
So you've got to wonder how strong that marriage is.
But whatever.
Anyway, she marries him and he's super weird.
And he says a lot of net otaku slang all the time that she doesn't understand.
That's pretty much the whole show.
Yeah, it's very short.
It's like me and Roboco.
It's like five minute episodes.
It's really funny.
I don't know.
I really enjoy it.
I don't have to watch it again.
Why not?
What didn't you like about it?
It's cringy.
I don't know.
What parts are cringy?
The whole thing.
I disagree.
I think it's fine.
I don't want to watch it.
Anyway, she also did the voice for Yumehara Chiyo in Saiki.
Do you remember the character?
The kind of regular girl?
Yeah, who has a crush on him at first.
And then he mind manipulates her to have a crush on some other random guy.
Yes, I do.
So funny.
And then lastly, Kagari Shina is by Megumi Han who did voice for Arimakana in Oshinoko.
Oh, okay.
They sound totally different.
They sound very different.
Yeah, I wouldn't have made that connection.
Okay.
シュタインズ・ゲート ゼロの最終回の疑問
So, Steins Gate Zero has 23 episodes plus OVA.
Is that the thing we watched at the end?
Yes.
Oh, that was questionable.
Because we thought there are 24 episodes in total.
Yeah.
And the series ended at 23 and we watched 24.
We were like, what is happening?
I mean, it's set temporally earlier in the show and it's just jokes.
It's not a serious episode.
And we were so disappointed.
We were like, wow, it really feels like they should have ended the series after that.
Where can this possibly go in the last episode?
We start watching it just being like, what?
What?
What's going on here?
And then by the end, you're like, that didn't go anywhere.
Finally, you realize it's just an Omake episode that they didn't actually air.
Yeah, I really would have preferred to have that in the middle where it belonged as just a throwaway.
Or be like, this is an Omake with a big warning sign or something.
Watching it at the end was very disappointing.
It just kind of subtracted from the experience of having finished the show and feeling good about the ending.
The last episode is 23.
Yes.
And not 24.
Correct.
You don't need to watch episode 24.
You can watch 24 much later.
Yeah, when you are like, oh yeah, I remember this show.
But not right after you finish 23.
Okay, let's do word of the day.
All right.
日本の七夕祭りの伝説
Why don't we do Tanabata on July 7th?
Oh, that's a really good one.
Yeah.
So this is a major theme of this show, actually.
Do you want me to explain or do you want to explain?
Okay.
So the Tanabata Festival is a midsummer festival in Japan celebrated on July 7th in the evening or at night that celebrates the day of the year when two of the stars in the night sky, Altair and Vega, get closest together.
And in Japanese culture, these stars represent a swine herd.
He has like an agricultural job, I feel like.
She's a weaver.
She weaves like cloth.
And they fall in love, but her dad or her parents don't want her to leave her job.
No, that's not how I remember.
Okay.
What's your version?
Well, they fell in love so much, they stopped working.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
They become totally lazy.
Right.
And the dad, I don't know which, I think the girl's dad was like, you guys should be separated.
Yeah.
You can only see each other one night a year.
And the rest of the year, you have to like go away from each other and get your work done.
And so they're sort of like banished, you know, and they're only allowed to reunite once a year on July 7th.
For Tanabata, you usually take like a specific kind of tree.
Bamboo tree?
A bamboo.
Oh, it's just bamboo.
Okay.
You take bamboo and you attach wishes to like, you know, some shoots of bamboo and to some branches expressing like a wish for something to come true.
七夕とキャラクターの関係
I don't really know why.
Why?
Because it's that this is Vega and Altair getting reunited?
Probably.
Okay.
Romantic.
It's a wish-making holiday.
And are there foods that are associated with this holiday?
Not specifically, no.
Yeah.
So it's really just like you make a wish, that's it?
And you look up at the sky.
You look up at the stars.
And am I right that, yeah, the Amanogawa separates Altair and Vega, right?
So the Milky Way spills in between these stars.
And I think in some versions of like the myth, they're on opposite ends of a river.
And so they're like physically separated from each other.
So this is a big day in the series in Steins Gate Zero.
I didn't think it was explained enough in English.
For Japanese people, it's custom we do.
So it's like naturally, oh, it's Tanabata.
The date Nintaro Okabe wants to go back is July 7th, right?
I think so.
Well, are you sure?
I don't know.
In the first show, my impression is that most of the action is taking place in August.
So if he wants to go back to July, I'm not totally sure why.
Is that the first day that he meets?
Oh, wait.
No, that's the date they are about to get in the time machine, July 7th.
I mean, the scene of Mayuri has been talking about Mai Hikoboshi the whole time.
And I think I'm pretty sure the date Mayuri was going in the time machine was July 7th.
And that's when Okabe Nintaro kept coming back, making sure they can get in the time machine.
There are a lot of dates in this show, and I'm not totally sure I was up on each one enough.
For July 7th, this is not being explained in anime, but Kagari was born on July 7th, 2026.
Oh, interesting.
And this is my question the whole time.
Why does she look like Chris?
Yeah, that's not explained at all.
Right?
Right?
Because she looks like Chris.
She looks a lot like Kurisu, yeah.
We know she was an orphan.
Orphan.
Yeah.
But we don't know her parents or background or anything, so maybe somehow related.
Time Slate Gate Infinity will explain this plot hole at some point in the future.
Did you want to say something about the opening theme and the ending theme songs?
So the opening theme song is also really good, just like last season.
But the ending theme songs are kind of hit and miss.
They are a couple.
They're a couple, yeah.
The ending theme song that's just like the phone rotating in a really weird pattern, that one sucks.
Sorry.
I listen to it every time, and it just never got better.
Thumbs down.
It's one that's like, it really reminds me of Evanescence.
Did I talk about this in some other episode?
I don't know.
Okay, well, whatever.
It's got this early 2000s emo feel to it.
It's all in English.
It's very slow.
The animation is boring, and the song isn't good.
Sorry.
I like most anime songs, but that particular one does not do it for me.
So that one's bad.
Some of the other closing theme songs are pretty good.
And when they use ones that aren't that one, it's pretty satisfying.
I like the Kagari and then Mayushii's little song, small song.
Yeah, that was cute.
That was really cute.
Would you like to add anything?
Just that I think if you decide to give Steins Gate Zero a chance,
it's important to really get deep into the show.
ストーリーの進行と展開
You can't give up on it after a couple episodes being like,
why is it about AI and everyone's so depressed and so boring now?
You have to really stick with it to allow it to build.
And just like in the first Steins Gate, if you get as far as the part,
like midway through the series, you get to episode 12 or 13,
you're going to be hooked for the back 12.
With this one, I feel like you got to go a little bit farther
until he at least gets sent to like the alternate timeline
where he goes back to like the Alpha Sekai Sen or whatever
and is like, whoa, how did I get here?
And what do I need to do to get back?
And if you make it through that part of Steins Gate Zero,
you'll be hooked to the end of Steins Gate Zero.
Okay.
リスナーへのお願い
Check your local library if you're interested in reading
this week's manga for free.
Wait, really? There's a Steins Gate Zero manga also?
Not Zero, but the LA Public Library has Steins Gate.
The original Steins Gate.
The original.
Complete. Yeah, yeah, they do.
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
If you like this week's episode, please give us how many stars?
Five stars.
Why?
I don't like asking for five, you know?
Like give us your honest opinion, but like if it's one,
like maybe just it's okay.
We would like five.
That would be very nice.
Please and thank you.
Why are you being Japanese and being American?
I don't like bullying people into liking me.
It's not bullying.
Okay.
You have to be kind of.
If you liked it at all, five stars, please.
I don't know.
I can't like bring myself to like browbeat people into five stars.
Okay.
We need it.
Okay.
Okay.
Five stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or like and leave a comment on YouTube.
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We would appreciate it very much.
Yes.
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Bye.
