January arrived, and snow began falling across several regions of Japan.
Over the past two years, the Japanese anime industry had practically been pressed beneath the weight of a single person: Sora. The year before last, at the Tokyo Anime Festival, he had taken home the two greatest honors of the night: Best Kantoku of the Year and Best Anime of the Year.
At the award ceremony held just a few days ago, however, things had been slightly different. Since the first season of Re:Zero, which aired the year before last, and its second season, which aired the previous year, were essentially part of the same work, the committee decided not to grant the Best Anime award to the second season, even though it had achieved the impressive feat of surpassing 6% in viewership. Even so, the award for Best Anime Kantoku was once again handed to Sora.
It was somewhat regrettable, but it also meant that he had won Japan's Best Anime Kantoku award for two consecutive years.
In the eyes of many anime fans, his position was already approaching that of the legendary names in the history of the industry.
That was why his new January work had drawn the attention of the entire anime world before it had even premiered.
Steins;Gate.
AD.
The Demon of Time, from Seiun TV.
Crimson Scales, from Aobane TV.
The Mystery of the Dark Detective, from Shirakawa TV.
Sea of Clouds, from HaiOn TV.
Six anime. In any other year, each of them would have had enough investment and weight behind it to compete for seasonal dominance. Every single one had a production budget exceeding seventy million yen. And yet, this season, all six would be airing in the same slot.
The clash between these six works turned Japan's winter anime season into the most suffocating and competitive quarter the industry had seen in the last decade.
Would Sora finally be suppressed by the veterans, his work squeezed by a wave of strong productions until it ended with merely average results?
Or would he, as always, maintain his absurdly high standard, overpower the senior Kantokus, and take the Best Anime Kantoku award at the Tokyo Festival again this year?
If that happened, he would achieve something no one had ever accomplished since the award was established: a three-year winning streak.
That was the question occupying the minds of anime media outlets and fans all across Japan.
On Friday, while it was still only afternoon, Steins;Gate had already climbed to first place on NatsuYume's trending rankings.
In second place was The Mystery of the Dark Detective, from Shirakawa TV, scheduled to premiere at nine that night.
Starting at six in the evening, the comment section under Sora's account descended into chaos.
"I've waited half a year. Finally, Kantoku Sora's new work is here."
"Half a year? Didn't Five Centimeters per Second premiere in July? How is that half a year?"
"What do you think Steins;Gate's premiere rating will be? Can it break 5%?"
"I think it can. Maybe it'll even hit 6%."
"Forget 6%. Re:Zero Season 2 only broke 6% in its final episode, when its popularity was at its absolute peak. Steins;Gate is just premiering now. It hasn't built up an audience yet. On what basis would it break 6%? Kantoku Sora has strong pulling power, sure, but not to that ridiculous extent."
"Honestly, Kamakawa fans need to stop fantasizing. A premiere rating over 6%? What if the work is boring? What if it can't even beat Kantoku Renji Hayama's The Mystery of the Dark Detective? Now that would be hilarious."
"Exactly. One weird sci-fi anime and you people are already losing your minds, almost ready to slap the title of number one in the anime industry onto Sora's forehead. When there are no tigers in the mountain, the monkey crowns itself king. After tonight, that 'god-tier Kantoku' of yours is going to fall from his altar."
"Renji Hayama, Fumiya Makino, Yuu Arata, and especially Shoji Kurosawa. Four Kantokus of that level are all making their move this season, and Kamakawa fans are still thinking about Best Kantoku of the Year? That isn't confidence anymore. It's arrogance and ignorance."
"Never heard of those four. Never watched any of their works. A bunch of old men abandoned by the times, and you still want to brag about them? Just wait and see how Kantoku Sora crushes your idols."
"Hey, person above, don't fall for the bait. These people are obviously haters of Kantoku Sora, deliberately trying to start a fight between us and the fans of those four Kantokus. Reacting like that is exactly what they want."
"I checked their profiles. They're packed with posts attacking Kantoku Sora. Dozens of them. They're probably paid accounts hired by the four major networks to stir up trouble. It's obvious those networks don't like Kantoku Sora. But the veteran Kantokus themselves simply accepted commissions to produce anime. They don't necessarily have any ill will toward him. At the very least, we should show basic respect to our seniors."
The noisy arguments continued deep into the evening, dragging on until around seven-thirty.
Riku Sawamura watched the online fighting with a relaxed expression.
Kantoku Sora's anime were fascinating.
But the competition outside the screen had its own flavor too.
Snacks and beer were already arranged on the table. The lights in his room had been dimmed, setting the proper atmosphere. As an old fan of Sora, someone who had followed his works weekly since Voices of a Distant Star, Riku took this ritual seriously.
"All right, Kantoku Sora. Let's see what kind of divine work you'll bring us this season."
After so many years of consistently high quality, Riku's confidence in Sora had become almost blind.
At eight o'clock on Friday night, millions of anime fans sitting in front of their televisions saw the image on the screen shift.
Steins;Gate.
The title appeared, then faded away.
Then a lonely male voice echoed.
The universe had a beginning, but it has no end. Infinite. The stars also have beginnings, but they perish by their own power. Finite.
As the voice continued, the screen flickered constantly, displaying strange words that seemed to jump and scatter like fragments of code.
A sequence of seemingly meaningless images appeared. On the rooftop of a skyscraper stood a man in a white researcher's lab coat and a fragile-looking young girl with an innocent expression and a gentle smile.
The man looked up at the sky and muttered to himself, as though delivering a speech to fate itself. His aura of middle-school delusion was so intense it nearly overflowed from the television screen.
The girl, apparently long used to his monologues, simply smiled and said:
"Okabe."
"Let's go."
That first minute of dialogue left Riku thoughtful.
Had the style changed this much? Leaving aside the characters' personalities, the visual style alone was completely different from Re:Zero.
Kantoku Sora really did change with every work.
Voices of a Distant Star, Natsume Yuujinchou, Re:Zero, Five Centimeters per Second... and now Steins;Gate.
What followed was a scene in which the man named Okabe and the girl named Mayuri Shiina attended a scientific lecture.
The subject of the lecture was the creation of a time machine.
Before the event began, Okabe and Mayuri, with her sweet and slightly absentminded manner, stopped in front of a capsule toy machine and inserted a few coins to test their luck.
And, by pure chance, they drew a limited item.
A "Metal Upa."
After that, during the lecture, Okabe took on the role of a professional contrarian. Right in the middle of the event, he tore apart Dr. Nakabachi's theory on time machines and launched into a public argument with him.
Riku stared at the screen, confused.
"Hmm... this work by Kantoku Sora really is strange."
Up to that point, he still could not tell what kind of anime he was watching.
Romance?
It did not seem like it.
Action?
No supernatural or combat elements had appeared.
Science fiction?
Maybe. But the protagonist himself seemed half-baked. And above all, extremely theatrical.
The next development left Riku even more lost.
A beautiful red-haired young woman rushed into the lecture hall and pulled Okabe outside.
Then she asked:
"You had something to say to me, didn't you? Fifteen minutes ago."
The girl's question surprised Okabe.
And left Riku completely bewildered.
He was absolutely certain he had not missed even a single second of the episode.
When had Okabe met that red-haired girl?
And when had he tried to say anything to her?
The protagonist's reaction did not help either. After discovering that the red-haired girl was Makise, a genius young scientist, Okabe immediately fell into a conspiracy-fueled delusion and imagined that she was an agent sent by some secret organization.
"A protagonist with middle-school syndrome and a genius scientist heroine?" Riku murmured, blinking a few times before continuing to watch.
At that moment, most of Japan's anime fans also had no idea what this work was trying to tell them.
And that was only natural.
Because the first episode of Steins;Gate could only be fully understood after watching episode twenty-five.
It was a closed loop in time.
On first viewing, the first episode seemed dull, confusing, strange, almost meaningless.
Only on a second viewing would the audience understand how many clues had been planted there.
And how extraordinary the story truly was.
Soon after, the Metal Upa that Okabe and Mayuri had pulled from the capsule machine disappeared.
While helping search for it, Okabe ended up entering a storage room inside the building.
There, he saw Makise, the genius young scientist, lying in a pool of blood.
At that instant, the phone in Okabe's pocket began to vibrate.
An ordinary university student, faced with something like that, would have called the police.
But our delusional protagonist first backed away and fled. Then, unable to believe what he had seen, he began wondering if he had hallucinated it.
Dazed, Okabe left the building. In the middle of the street, at a crossing that seemed to mark both a road and the direction of his own life, he took out his phone.
Then he sent a message to the person who had tried to call him moments earlier.
Makise seems to have been stabbed by someone.
The instant his finger pressed the send button, the timeline was disturbed.
He felt as though something had gone wrong inside his head.
The people around him disappeared.
When he came back to his senses, Mayuri was beside him, smiling as always.
On the rooftop of the building where he had just attended the lecture, a strange metal machine shaped like a capsule had smashed into the top floor, cracking the ground open.
It was almost as if a satellite had fallen from the sky.
And the development that followed nearly made Riku's head explode.
Originally, Okabe and Mayuri had gone to watch Dr. Nakabachi's lecture on time machine theory. Okabe had even argued with the man during the event, practically calling him a fraud.
But after Okabe sent that message, not only had the satellite-like object fallen onto the roof of the building where he had been moments before.
According to Mayuri, the reason the two of them had come there in the first place was because that supposed satellite had already fallen earlier, and they simply wanted to see the commotion for themselves.
As for Dr. Nakabachi's lecture, it had been canceled from the start because the satellite had fallen onto the lecture building's rooftop that morning.
Canceled.
The lecture had been canceled?
Then what had that argument between the protagonist and Nakabachi been during the previous ten minutes?
At the beginning of the episode, there had been no satellite on the roof of the building at all.
How, after the protagonist sent that message, did the story suddenly claim that the satellite had fallen that same morning, before the two of them had even arrived?
What the hell was that?
Could a phone message change the past?
Riku could tell that the message sent by the protagonist was extremely important. After all, the moment it was sent, the background music changed, and the entire atmosphere of the anime shifted.
It was the kind of indirect technique a Kantoku used to tell the audience where the true focal point of the episode lay.
But even so, how could a message saying that Makise had been stabbed cause a satellite to fall?
"What kind of plot is this?" Riku muttered, his gaze strained.
In all his years watching anime, this was the first time he had doubted his own intelligence.
Why couldn't he understand this work?
"Ah, so that's it. All of this is the choice of Steins Gate."
Unable to find any logical explanation, the protagonist smiled and uttered a sentence that made no sense.
"Huh?"
Riku became even more confused.
He had thought Okabe would try to resolve those contradictions.
But no. His memories were clearly wrong, and instead of thinking about it, he simply had another theatrical episode and blamed everything on the so-called "choice of Steins Gate."
Was this a joke?
The story that followed did not explain any of those inconsistencies either.
Instead, new characters appeared. Itaru Hashida, the protagonist's best friend. A malfunctioning microwave inside the small research laboratory. Okabe, Mayuri, and Itaru. And also the landlord of the building where their makeshift base was located, a large, muscular man known as Mr. Braun.
Of course, the camera also lingered for a few moments on the cathode-ray tube television sitting in the room on the first floor.
The second half of the first episode became even more absurd.
The protagonist and the others carried the repaired microwave back to the small laboratory on the second floor.
They said they were going to conduct some sort of banana experiment, placing a banana inside the microwave to heat it.
"What are they even doing?"
Riku was already starting to feel a little impatient.
He could understand a slow-burn story.
But a story that was directly incomprehensible was hard to endure.
Something was wrong here.
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