So, I just finished watching Steins;Gate. I must say, I'm really impressed. It has a slow start, but an excellent application of foreshadowing, and once it begins to speed up halfway, and it really feels like you slowly come full circle as you progress.
I'm quite ambivalent about the complexity of the divergence system surrounding it's time travel mechanics that combines both consistency theory and parallel worlds theory. It's very solid and cleanly deals with most loopholes, but you gotta read up on A LOT of background that the anime alone doesn't provide, and by then it's so vividly rationalised that it loses part of that mysticism that makes playing with time so uncertain and dangerous. It's the most novel interpretation of time travel I've ever seen though, I'll give it that.
*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.*
[SPOILER=Warning: Spoiler!]I would like to talk about one part in particular though that made me think of animals. In fact, it resonated very strongly with me. It's when Mayuri dies, and no matter how hard Okabe goes back in time to try to save her, she just keeps dying over and over. Eventually, Okabe is overwhelmed by how many times he sees her die, and becomes extremely desensitised. He never lets go of his desire to save her, but starts to allow her to die in the most gruesome ways because he reasons that he can just go back in time to try again. He tells himself that her deaths are 'necessary' to allow him to discover the parameters behind their incidence, and that it doesn't matter what he puts her through as long as his intentions are good. In short, he stops empathising with her, and becomes increasingly detached and rationalistic. He allows his subjective experience of her death to mean more than the suffering she has to endure each time she dies. To him, they don't matter as long as they can be reversed and rendered 'nonexistent'. In the end, he puts her through a devastating amount of suffering, and the emotional cost it has on him is equally pronounced.
Most omnivores, unfortunately, aren't willing to perceive the pain of animals. However, if they've watched the videos and know what goes on in slaughterhouses, then they are put in a similar position. When we're forced to grasp the suffering and death of animals not on an individual level, but to billions and billions of them, and realise that we've personally inflicted this pain to hundreds and thousands of animals ourselves, the easiest way to deal with it is to become desensitised. We comfort ourselves that their lives are so short, and all their suffering ceases to exist when they die, so it won't make a difference in the long run. We can be as cruel as we want to be, so long as they die and are no longer around to remember it. We tell ourselves that it's 'necessary', or is even justified because at least we bring them into this world. This when we allow our subjective experiences of their deaths to define how we see them.
What Okabe did to Mayuri was wrong. Momentary suffering matters, even if it eventually dissolves to nothingness. Our lives are all short, be it the few precious hours Okabe relives with Mayuri whenever he goes back in time, the months that animals inhibit this planet, and the years that we do. Nobody deserves to suffer for the time they uniquely exist.[/SPOILER]
