Christ, you guys make me feel like a totally terminally online weeb loser.
My story with SciADV begins in late 2011. I'd just barely entered middle school but at this time I was already (almost) always online and a total otaku at that. I'd been watching anime on YouTube in parts for years at that point, and I'd already gone thru some Key VNs and Ever17 that I'd acquired via completely legitimate and legal means and totally not thru pre-patched torrents. I was the kid who loved NGE, Ergo Proxy, GitS, .hack, and of course: Lain. So, one day, when going through the latest anime catalogue on- iirc and of all places: Netflix, after my mother switched from the mail-order DVD service to their newer streaming service; I found an interesting looking title named Chaos;Head. Yes, that's right, my FIRST contact and introduction to the series was actually the Chaos;Head anime. I stumbled upon it in the middle of the night, and something about it fascinated me. It had a kind of quality that actually reminded me of Lain a bit. It wasn't quite to that height, but I felt like there was definitely something there that I felt- if just expanded or elaborated on a bit and less clumsily- could make for something really special.
Now, why precisely did I feel this way? Well, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I was not only terminally online as a child but was also on parts of the web as a kid that even those others my age who were as online as I didn't really venture into or care about. I was involved, if only in very crude ways, in the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement that were occurring at that time. I was a rather idealistic young boy, I had stumbled onto cypherpunk and "hacktivist" blogs and other websites, the IRC "scene" and other circles where I was taught how to use LOIC on MENA government and banking megacorp websites, and believed the internet could be utilized to help spread truth to the masses, and liberate us from those ruling over and seeking to fully control us. I suppose some part of me still does. Regardless, at that point though, the Arab Spring was proving to be a disaster. Not only just a disaster either but one orchestrated by and in service of the US State Department. Civil War, brutal warlords, all manner of death, rape, and suffering still plague many of the regions we thought we were helping to this very day. It's something that began to haunt me almost immediately and still does even as I type this. Even if I didn't do much, or anything at all really, to come to the realization that I'd happily let myself be swept up in a narrative carefully crafted for me by forces I couldn't even begin to truly fathom, that I'd just been a pawn in somebody else's game, that I'd been played- it hurt. I was so sure of what I believed, of my world, so sure that I was... On the right-side. Only for everything I thought I knew to fall apart like a mere house of cards.
At the same time, Occupy had come and quickly was already going, buckling (though most involved will never admit it) under the weight of its own contradictions, overzealous ideologizing, and identity politics. Both events proved to be less than worthless. One only helped the intelligence community deep state and their corporate allies destabilize the Middle East both in service of keeping certain powers that were anti-Western Finance down and in the hopes that they could eventually use refugee populations to buttress themselves from the inevitable full blown effects of the 08 crash that they were trying to suppress (and make no mistake, what's happening today in 2026 is those effects having finally built enough pressure to start pushing on the cork of the bottle) and that led to Occupy to begin with. Which itself ultimately proved to be just a tool to light the fuse of the stick of culture war dynamite that wouldn't go off for another 3 years or so. And so, I was set on a journey that I'm technically still on today, of unraveling the world I thought I knew, that I was raised to believe in. I was in a way lucky too that I grew up just before "conspiracy" became a dirty word on that side of things, because that journey I was set on includes as part of it a quest to unravel the very real conspiracies all around us, that I'd been enthralled by, and which were part of a cybernetic process by which we all become slaves to a "Selection for Societal Sanity". All in a name of keeping a tiny few rich and in power.
Needless to say, I was rather depressed, paranoid, and felt uncoupled from any sense of reality. So, even as a kid, Takumi struck a cord with me. I related and still to this day relate much to him and his struggle(s) in Chaos;Head. I felt just as lost, just as unsure as to what was real and what was delusion. I felt like I was being watched, like a force larger than me was out to get me for the mere crime of existing- and seeing someone else, even if just a character in an anime, feel similarly brought me some small comfort as the older and supposedly more mature members of the circles I was swimming in double, triple, and quadruple downed on stances that seemed to be completely counterproductive. And, of course, I hoped that a Rimi would descend upon me to save me from the madness, from the chaos in this world and in my head, with a soothing, caring, and calming love. This never happened.
Though my experience with the Chaos;Head anime was ultimately positive, I wasn't fully satisfied and so I went to go complain on the anime board of a website that had become my stomping grounds after some years mainly sticking to older forums and the comment sections of blogs: The Hacker Known As 4chan. After complaining on /a/ about how Chaos;Head's anime could have been an incredible 10/10 experience on par with many of my and the board's all-time greats, a kind anon called me a retard and/or faggot (I can't remember) and informed me that the anime was based on a VN that was much better and that I should just read since it had gotten an English fan TL by then. So I did. And I got exactly the experience I'd been looking for. It was beautiful, it was sad, I felt so understood, and I also felt like I could cry, because I'm sure anyone who could understand me so well must think I'm pathetic. There are no Rimis on this World Layer.
Anyways, I then learned that Chaos;Head has a sequel that had received an anime adaptation that same year (2011), so I hunted it down and watched it. I was rather surprised at first, as Steins;Gate was not at all what I had expected for something billed as a sequel to Chaos;Head. It had nothing to do with the events of that story minus a reference here and there, and didn't feature the return of gigalomania but was instead a time travel narrative. In fact, though I'd heard about it before I'd even stumbled upon the Chaos;Head anime, I hadn't initially considered they were related because I even anticipated that the art style would be the same and my awareness of Myself;Yourself made me think Japan just had a thing for titles with random semicolons added in the middle. Nevertheless, I adored, and still adore Steins;Gate. Okabe is just as painfully relatable as Takumi in his own, unique ways and I found the connections he has with the lab members to be precious and something worth striving to forge with others in real life. It was my childhood dream come to life on screen.
As a very little boy, if you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, you'd get only one response: "A mad scientist!". I was always tinkering and building random contraptions. My grandmother even got me a tiny little lab coat that I wore all the time that she'd sown a t-rex patch onto because, well, what little boy DOESN'T like dinosaurs? But I was also a lonely boy, I never really had friends, and though I would never admit it out of pride: I wanted a group of friends I could make cool, silly stuff and talk about nerdy shit with. My own Future Gadget Lab. All I got irl was ridicule and rejection, though, and so eventually I put away the lab coat and turned inward, became reclusive, stopped trying. It's not like I would get invited to go play or hang out or anything so, might as well just spend any moment I'm not at school on the computer. At least there I have games, I have anime, and I have the only people who have ever welcomed me as a friend.
Eventually, I got my hands on the rest of the series, and I feel much the same about those entries as I do the first two. Painfully relatable MC's, incredible casts that leave me yearning for a real life place and group to belong to with such close bonds and dynamics, and fascinating narratives that draw me further down my journey of questioning if the scenery my eyes perceive is truly real in their own, unique ways. And I was absolutely enamored with those narratives of conspiracy that in some sense mirrored by own experiences, of learning just how complex and complicated, vast and sprawling and interconnected the control system and its nodes are. The paranoia and anxiety that oozes from much of the series as characters have to learn to navigate a world that they learn is not at all what they were told it was growing up, the loneliness and despair as they're faced with situations and recognize patterns that seem insane to the rest of the world, the sense of smallness in a world of constantly moving, ginormous parts that you feel you can do nothing else but TRY to take on, the labyrinth of information that is as much a trail to the conspiracy as it is a snipe hunt filled with purposeful misinformation and disinformation sitting on a desk or held on our fingertips. It captures something about the modern mood that I've never really seen captured elsewhere, and for that alone, SciADV is special.
Now the rest, as they say, is history. I joined the online SciADV community around when Anonymous;Code was first announced iirc, some time way back in 2015. It wasn't terrible then, there were many Reddit tier anime onlies who only cared about Steins;Gate after it became popular due to the dub, but there was also a sizeable population from imageboard culture. Alas, the Total Culture War we've been embroiled in since 2016 eventually began to take its toll, and eventually the Redditors became even more Reddit than Reddit had been before, the channers succumbed to Troll's Remorse, and those who didn't were either outright kicked out or marginalized in some way. I left the SciADV community in 2018 as things got worse post-Charlottesville and the beginning of a troon-out epidemic reared its ugly head. I wouldn't rejoin the discourse until 2023 when I made my current Twipo account, and by then the newfag cycle meant no one I knew was around anymore because they'd all secluded themselves in small private Discord servers.
I love Science Adventure, and nothing will ever change that, even if most of the fanbase is gay and retarded (but I repeat myself). If anything, I'm actually hopeful. When I left, things seemed grim. Everyone was some kind of rainbow warrior Epstein mindrape victim, but I'm so glad to have found genuinely cool people now like you guys who are into SciADV and really /get/ it, even if no one thinks about it quite like I do (and no one ever has so it's whatever). It's thanks to this series that I finally said fuck it and started my own lab, met most of my lab mems and auxiliaries, made my website(s) and now am here on Deluoode and Twipo with you guys. It's thanks to this series that I'm cautiously optimistic for the future, that I've come to think that maybe that blue sky I desire is somewhere just on the horizon...
And that perhaps this, too, was the choice of Steins Gate.
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