Post-Show Suffering
Steins;Gate has emotionally wrecked me in the past. As I have begun to put the puzzle pieces together on my emotional reactions to shows, movies, and games, I have started to engage media in my mind a bit differently. I think Steins;Gate provides a strikingly clear example of my problem in the main character, Rintaro Okabe. The show introduces us to a young man who presents himself as a self-proclaimed "mad scientist" in the setting of a very real and normal, modern-day Japan. He works on "gadgets" which usually consist of combinations of random, household items (like a microwave and a cellphone) which all turn out to be flops (until the inciting incident). He doesn't really have a job, just some friends who he hangs out with in the "lab" (a small rented apartment) and often pretends he is being hunted by a shadowy government agency. It is later revealed that much of what he does is in order to help a friend cope with loss through distraction and it is not until later, when one of his inventions turns out to be world-altering, that he takes the role a bit more seriously.
This character leaves me with two notions. The first is a transition from doing arguably nothing important with his life, to doing something very important with his life (once one of his inventions finally does work). As I am writing, I realize that perhaps helping someone else cope with trauma is meant to be the really important thing in life that he is doing, but that's not really the things that initially struck me. I feel like I want more than that and maybe that's bad. I relate to his character before he succeeds. The things I do feel unimportant and any importance I give them is just part of a charade.
Which leads me to my second point: the concept of facade and charade. This is something I want to talk about more in a different post, but mainly the idea/feeling of a need to make life less mundane through facade such as acting like a mad scientist or pretending that the mundane things I do are part of something more important. I often feel an urge to do this but at the same time shoot down that urge with the bleak reality that what I am doing is not important in the grand scheme (or even the small scheme) of things.
On both my first and second watching of this show I was left with the deep, hallow feeling. A temporary depression really; not dissimilar to what I describe in my previous posts. The first time I didn't really understand it. The second time it impacted me more than usual and it honestly affected my day to day life. I sort of moped around for at least a week and couldn't really explain why to other people (both due to a lack of understanding and perhaps a perceived stigma around such responses to fiction). The show itself does have emotional elements to it and of course these play a role (themes of loss, desperation, and sometimes hopelessness), but I have to believe that much of the core of my response came from my own feelings of a lack of importance and purpose. I'm not trying to save the world or save a friend; I just eat, sleep, work, and interact in mostly mundane ways. The feeling never really truly goes away either; it just seeps into the backdrop of my mind where I can ignore it, but it still lingers.