What makes SciADV special to you?

[Maypews]

Some time ago @alix left a very touching story in an introduction post about how seeing Okabe jump from timeline to timeline gave them the courage to keep progressing and moving forward. This got me wondering; do other users also have their own stories about how SciADV became special to them?

For me personally, Steins;Gate was one of the very first visual novels I ever read. I had read DDLC, Corpse Party and the first Danganronpa before, but S;G felt like my first proper "Real" one without any gameplay mechanics or more mass appeal concept like DDLC has. If I'm honest I fell in love with it basically immediately; everything about it, from the sciencebabble (I have something of an interest in the topic) to the loveable characters to all of that 00s internet & otaku culture and whatnot that's present in the novels.

But I think one of the big things for me came later in the story. It's when [S;G Spoils]

Spoiler

Suzuha goes back to the past but hits her head and leaves that "I failed." letter before killing herself.

For some reason I as a person always seem to find more motivation in negative emotion rather than positive ones, and that mental comparison just ate at me since I was at a downwards point in my life at the time and felt I may end up in the same situation. Really gave me a kick in the ass that I really needed and I'm forever grateful for that.

Then after I finished S;G I also binged C;H which I think I ended up liking even more because of how much the story speaks to me and the rest was history. So what say you, labmems? How did the series touch you on a personal level; what made you a big enough fan to join a dedicated forum for it?

[deha28]

I encountered the Steins;Gate anime a long time ago, back when I wasn’t even capable of appreciating art on a deep enough level. Naturally, my interest in this anime was quite considerable because of its sky-high ratings. After watching it, I was pleased, though I wouldn’t say I felt any particular excitement at the time.

But thanks to me, or rather my goldfish memory, I was able to truly savour this wonderful story. When Steins;Gate was on a massive discount last summer, I decided to give the visual novel a try, having almost completely forgotten the plot. Hoo boy, that visual novel really sucked me in. There were several moments when I was on the verge of tears. The characters began to seem deeper and more interesting as the story unfolded. And the explanation of all the phenomena through quantum physics (which, btw, I’m passionate about) – rather than just because – has placed Steins;Gate in my top 5 favourite games ever.

[Parzival]

I first found SciADV in 2011. Or, rather, it found me. I was just a boy, when I stumbled upon the Chaos;Head anime on Netflix of all places. It wasn't great, isn't great, but something about the story and Takumi resonated even despite the anime's flaws. I could tell that this story, if done right, could really be something amazing. There was atmosphere, there was a prodding at greater themes that if only elaborated on I knew would hit harder than a truck driven by an Indian immigrant.

Most of all, I saw in Takumi; myself. All my life, I've been alone. For as long as I can remember I've basically never left my room except to go to school, use the bathroom, and grab something to eat. While I didn't have a caring little sister to annoy me, I do have family that try to check in every once in a while, and I'm ashamed to admit that for most of my life I treated them much how Takumi treated Nanami for most of the story.

When I went to complain on /a/ about how much the anime sucked but clearly had so much potential, a kind anon called me a faggot and told me to read the VN. I didn't know there was one but I sought it out after that and the rest is kind of history. At around the same time I learned about the then airing Steins;Gate anime, but decided to wait until I was done with Chaos;Head because I was told S;G was C;H's sequel. I expected something more like what we eventually got with Chaos;Child, but instead got... A vision of dream come true, in a way. If Takumi, alone in his room all the time at the start of the story was "literally me", then Okabe, with his lab full of friends who were just as nerdy and enthusiastic about all things anime, video games, memes, and science as he and I am, was what I wanted and wanted to be. As I child I'd actually wanted to be a mad scientist when I grew up. Inspired by all the goofy and fun 80s scifi flicks like Buckaroo Banzai and Back To The Future and tokusatsu like Godzilla and Kamen Rider with their plots of mad scientists creating kaiju and kaijin that I grew up on, I wanted to do just that. To delve into the mysteries of the universe and learn their secrets so I could manipulate the very fabric of our world. For most of my life, that was all I focused on. I justified my reclusiveness as studying and researching, away from the unwashed wrong-sider hordes who cared not for particle physics or virology and the frontiers of nanotechnological manipulation of genetic information, Gurren Lagann, Xenogears, or anything cool. It wasn't until the double whammy of Steins;Gate and then, just a few years later, Chaos;Child - that I realized that was what I really wanted. A Future Gadget Lab of my own. My own Newspaper Club. My own Robotics Club. My own Kiri Kiri Basara crew, Nakano Symphonies, Black Knights of Ghladioul. Somewhere I wasn't ignored or shunned just for liking what I like. Somewhere I could belong.

A B plot to all of this was... The content of SciADV's world. That is to say... Well, let me put it this way. One of my first PC games ever was a little number called Deus Ex. The Game of The Year, for all years, forever. Indeed, I'm reinstalling as I type this.

Anyone who's played it knows that it's as conspiracy-laden as SciADV as a whole is, if not more. I've always loved stuff like this. I grew up watching X-Files with my mom on the few nights she wasn't so tired as to immediately go to bed when she got home late at night just to do it all over again in the morning. I would hop and skip on over to the library when I got off school as a little boy, and would surf the 2000s internet in all its glory, stumbling upon all kind of incredibly passionate and creative conspiracy and paranormal websites, boards, and forums. At a time when my life felt so constricted, the internet was this beautifully open and free... world, ripe for exploration and interaction and comradery. Nowadays a lot of the media from back then depicting the internet as this big open dimension unto itself can seem a bit... Well, I imagine to many of the younger folk who never had a chance of seeing it, or the older folk who missed out on it, that notion can seem rather hard to believe in a time when the internet seems so small, hostile, closed off, controlled, and censored; but that's really what it felt like. It genuinely seemed like we weren't too far off from being able to jump right into the Digital World like in Digimon, like it really could be like Lain's Wired, like we could someday soon play in The World of .hack. It was a digital frontier to reshape the human condition. The possibilities were endless.

Anyways, in that free and open cyberspace, I learned a lot. I saw a lot. In my eyes, what I had long suspected since my earliest memories had been confirmed: there was something wrong with the world. What was there to do, though? As the years progressed, the full breadth of those suspicions began being confirmed one by one, in waves, in leaks and cables released to the public. Slowly but surely, what was once relegated to the realm of fringe conspiracy nuttery: that the governments of the world and their corporate lackeys were spying on you and using that information to try to control you, became just common knowledge. The baseline. A joke.

In 2013, a former NSA employee now residing in Russia revealed that the ECHELON system of longtime conspiracy lore and featuring in Steins;Gate was real. A few years after that, studies that largely went under the radar confirmed that, while not exactly "weather manipulation", another conspiracy staple featured in Robotics;Notes - HAARP - can in fact manipulate the ionosphere so as to generate artificial aurora. Secret networks of offshore, off the books assets for the rich and powerful, strings of scientists disappearing or being found mysteriously murdered, international corporate programs designed to manipulate the public into believing what they want you to believe at the behest of and funded by your own tax dollars, laser weaponry, secret, malicious cyberattack tools developed by intelligence agencies to infect and monitor some of the biggest networks on the net, AI, internet "cancel culture" mobs- coordinated by federal agents or otherwise, "post-truth", fake news...

"... Is the scenery your eyes perceive truly real?"

Since I was a little boy, watching the 2006 Gaza-Israel conflict unfold on television, or later watching Russia take Crimea, or seeing the tension, anger, and bubbling divisions fomenting in the protests and riots in the aftermath of the '08 crash and the first Obama administration, I could see. I knew that by my adulthood the world order couldn't hold, but it also wouldn't fold so easily. I felt crazy. Told I was a pessimist, for pointing out what were clearly the beginning hints of greater wars, of greater strife and division and death and suffering down the line. Since I was a young teenager, I have feared I would live to see the breakdown into myriad civil wars seen across the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring be reflected on the European and North American continents, and worse still- the terrible conclusion to the world war trilogy. All for the benefit of those ruling this world.

For a long while, I was despondent. It seemed like everything was falling apart and was only going to keep falling apart. Some days, it still feels like that. The Snowden Leaks just become jokes about "my FBI agent", Epstein just became fodder to use against loli enjoying otaku for some reason, everything just became about petty culture war nonsense, tribalism, and atomization. Everything got worse, more expensive, harder. Like how civil wars only serve to destroy civil societies, culture war only serves to destroy culture. After COVID, and the conspiratorial revelations in its aftermath, the alienation and anger only accelerated. It seems as though everything had become either a joke or fuel to bash one's political enemies with. "Nothing ever happens", netizens would and still do opine, even as everything happens; it's just that no one does anything about it.

SciADV was a... Kind of dark comfort. I could see the Committee furthering and accelerating its Human Domestication Program, and so could SciADV. And it was nice knowing I wasn't alone in seeing that, even if I still felt powerless to do anything about it.

Then, I got my hands on Robotics;Notes, and Anonymous;Code, and it clicked. What SciADV has been trying to tell me all along. That, though it could see what I could see, all the plots and schemes to debase and control the world and its populace- there was still hope. That there was a reason that, unlike most scifi, SciADV was contemporary or very near future, with casts of... Outcasts. Otaku. Nerds. Digital Natives. Omnipresences on The Wired. That there were people just like me who could see all this too, and if we all got together, put our minds and wills to it, we could do something about it. We could, if only in a small way over time, fight back. I just had to find A Will. That even if it sounds ridiculous, I just have to focus on those dead spots in people's visions, transmit antiparticles in the shape I envision, reject THEIR reality- and substitute my own.

SciADV posits, or maybe it just made me believe, that the story of the 21st century will be much akin to The Lord of The Rings.

A story about the unassuming folk of the long forgotten digital shires, how they saved all of (Middle) Earth, and how nobody saw it coming.

[Maypews]

I first found SciADV in 2011. Or, rather, it found me. I was just a boy, when I stumbled upon the Chaos;Head anime on Netflix of all places. It wasn't great, isn't great, but something about the story and Takumi resonated even despite the anime's flaws. I could tell that this story, if done right, could really be something amazing. There was atmosphere, there was a prodding at greater themes that if only elaborated on I knew would hit harder than a truck driven by an Indian immigrant.

Most of all, I saw in Takumi; myself. All my life, I've been alone. For as long as I can remember I've basically never left my room except to go to school, use the bathroom, and grab something to eat. While I didn't have a caring little sister to annoy me, I do have family that try to check in every once in a while, and I'm ashamed to admit that for most of my life I treated them much how Takumi treated Nanami for most of the story.

When I went to complain on /a/ about how much the anime sucked but clearly had so much potential, a kind anon called me a faggot and told me to read the VN. I didn't know there was one but I sought it out after that and the rest is kind of history. At around the same time I learned about the then airing Steins;Gate anime, but decided to wait until I was done with Chaos;Head because I was told S;G was C;H's sequel. I expected something more like what we eventually got with Chaos;Child, but instead got... A vision of dream come true, in a way. If Takumi, alone in his room all the time at the start of the story was "literally me", then Okabe, with his lab full of friends who were just as nerdy and enthusiastic about all things anime, video games, memes, and science as he and I am, was what I wanted and wanted to be. As I child I'd actually wanted to be a mad scientist when I grew up. Inspired by all the goofy and fun 80s scifi flicks like Buckaroo Banzai and Back To The Future and tokusatsu like Godzilla and Kamen Rider with their plots of mad scientists creating kaiju and kaijin that I grew up on, I wanted to do just that. To delve into the mysteries of the universe and learn their secrets so I could manipulate the very fabric of our world. For most of my life, that was all I focused on. I justified my reclusiveness as studying and researching, away from the unwashed wrong-sider hordes who cared not for particle physics or virology and the frontiers of nanotechnological manipulation of genetic information, Gurren Lagann, Xenogears, or anything cool. It wasn't until the double whammy of Steins;Gate and then, just a few years later, Chaos;Child - that I realized that was what I really wanted. A Future Gadget Lab of my own. My own Newspaper Club. My own Robotics Club. My own Kiri Kiri Basara crew, Nakano Symphonies, Black Knights of Ghladioul. Somewhere I wasn't ignored or shunned just for liking what I like. Somewhere I could belong.

A B plot to all of this was... The content of SciADV's world. That is to say... Well, let me put it this way. One of my first PC games ever was a little number called Deus Ex. The Game of The Year, for all years, forever. Indeed, I'm reinstalling as I type this.

Anyone who's played it knows that it's as conspiracy-laden as SciADV as a whole is, if not more. I've always loved stuff like this. I grew up watching X-Files with my mom on the few nights she wasn't so tired as to immediately go to bed when she got home late at night just to do it all over again in the morning. I would hop and skip on over to the library when I got off school as a little boy, and would surf the 2000s internet in all its glory, stumbling upon all kind of incredibly passionate and creative conspiracy and paranormal websites, boards, and forums. At a time when my life felt so constricted, the internet was this beautifully open and free... world, ripe for exploration and interaction and comradery. Nowadays a lot of the media from back then depicting the internet as this big open dimension unto itself can seem a bit... Well, I imagine to many of the younger folk who never had a chance of seeing it, or the older folk who missed out on it, that notion can seem rather hard to believe in a time when the internet seems so small, hostile, closed off, controlled, and censored; but that's really what it felt like. It genuinely seemed like we weren't too far off from being able to jump right into the Digital World like in Digimon, like it really could be like Lain's Wired, like we could someday soon play in The World of .hack. It was a digital frontier to reshape the human condition. The possibilities were endless.

Anyways, in that free and open cyberspace, I learned a lot. I saw a lot. In my eyes, what I had long suspected since my earliest memories had been confirmed: there was something wrong with the world. What was there to do, though? As the years progressed, the full breadth of those suspicions began being confirmed one by one, in waves, in leaks and cables released to the public. Slowly but surely, what was once relegated to the realm of fringe conspiracy nuttery: that the governments of the world and their corporate lackeys were spying on you and using that information to try to control you, became just common knowledge. The baseline. A joke.

In 2013, a former NSA employee now residing in Russia revealed that the ECHELON system of longtime conspiracy lore and featuring in Steins;Gate was real. A few years after that, studies that largely went under the radar confirmed that, while not exactly "weather manipulation", another conspiracy staple featured in Robotics;Notes - HAARP - can in fact manipulate the ionosphere so as to generate artificial aurora. Secret networks of offshore, off the books assets for the rich and powerful, strings of scientists disappearing or being found mysteriously murdered, international corporate programs designed to manipulate the public into believing what they want you to believe at the behest of and funded by your own tax dollars, laser weaponry, secret, malicious cyberattack tools developed by intelligence agencies to infect and monitor some of the biggest networks on the net, AI, internet "cancel culture" mobs- coordinated by federal agents or otherwise, "post-truth", fake news...

"... Is the scenery your eyes perceive truly real?"

Since I was a little boy, watching the 2006 Gaza-Israel conflict unfold on television, or later watching Russia take Crimea, or seeing the tension, anger, and bubbling divisions fomenting in the protests and riots in the aftermath of the '08 crash and the first Obama administration, I could see. I knew that by my adulthood the world order couldn't hold, but it also wouldn't fold so easily. I felt crazy. Told I was a pessimist, for pointing out what were clearly the beginning hints of greater wars, of greater strife and division and death and suffering down the line. Since I was a young teenager, I have feared I would live to see the breakdown into myriad civil wars seen across the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring be reflected on the European and North American continents, and worse still- the terrible conclusion to the world war trilogy. All for the benefit of those ruling this world.

For a long while, I was despondent. It seemed like everything was falling apart and was only going to keep falling apart. Some days, it still feels like that. The Snowden Leaks just become jokes about "my FBI agent", Epstein just became fodder to use against loli enjoying otaku for some reason, everything just became about petty culture war nonsense, tribalism, and atomization. Everything got worse, more expensive, harder. Like how civil wars only serve to destroy civil societies, culture war only serves to destroy culture. After COVID, and the conspiratorial revelations in its aftermath, the alienation and anger only accelerated. It seems as though everything had become either a joke or fuel to bash one's political enemies with. "Nothing ever happens", netizens would and still do opine, even as everything happens; it's just that no one does anything about it.

SciADV was a... Kind of dark comfort. I could see the Committee furthering and accelerating its Human Domestication Program, and so could SciADV. And it was nice knowing I wasn't alone in seeing that, even if I still felt powerless to do anything about it.

Then, I got my hands on Robotics;Notes, and Anonymous;Code, and it clicked. What SciADV has been trying to tell me all along. That, though it could see what I could see, all the plots and schemes to debase and control the world and its populace- there was still hope. That there was a reason that, unlike most scifi, SciADV was contemporary or very near future, with casts of... Outcasts. Otaku. Nerds. Digital Natives. Omnipresences on The Wired. That there were people just like me who could see all this too, and if we all got together, put our minds and wills to it, we could do something about it. We could, if only in a small way over time, fight back. I just had to find A Will. That even if it sounds ridiculous, I just have to focus on those dead spots in people's visions, transmit antiparticles in the shape I envision, reject THEIR reality- and substitute my own.

SciADV posits, or maybe it just made me believe, that the story of the 21st century will be much akin to The Lord of The Rings.

A story about the unassuming folk of the long forgotten digital shires, how they saved all of (Middle) Earth, and how nobody saw it coming.

Sometimes when talking about Current Events™ with a buddy it occasionally hits us how fake and gay it all really is. Like all of this fodder in the culture war zeitgeist that's all over social media and whatnot impacts almost nobody in the real world. It's all just loud 1% minorities on social media platforms (which themselves represent minorities of the overall populace) that got trapped in algorithimic slop holes regurgitating whatever talking point they were fed about the Opposition.

So we will make jokes along the lines of "this isn't even real" and things like that. That's kind of the point I reached it all some time ago, a solid 80% of it is merely theatre and I simply cannot bring myself to care anymore. Your post here sort of makes me realise just how perfectly that Sena quote suits our modern world in this respect, even if you don't believe in any of the schizo theories (which, if you're here, you probably do)

thereisanotherpsyop.jpg (8.47 KiB) Viewed 79 times

[Parzival]

Sometimes when talking about Current Events™ with a buddy it occasionally hits us how fake and gay it all really is. Like all of this fodder in the culture war zeitgeist that's all over social media and whatnot impacts almost nobody in the real world. It's all just loud 1% minorities on social media platforms (which themselves represent minorities of the overall populace) that got trapped in algorithimic slop holes regurgitating whatever talking point they were fed about the Opposition.

So we will make jokes along the lines of "this isn't even real" and things like that. That's kind of the point I reached it all some time ago, a solid 80% of it is merely theatre and I simply cannot bring myself to care anymore. Your post here sort of makes me realise just how perfectly that Sena quote suits our modern world in this respect, even if you don't believe in any of the schizo theories (which, if you're here, you probably do)

The worst part is that it doesn't matter if it's real or not - not in terms of the consequences these figments have on the world. It is all theater, but it's theater that drives the thoughts and actions of real people in the real world, most importantly among them those driving policy in governments, corporations, and international, non-government organizations. Admittedly, it's more like all this subterfuge is being used by those organizations to justify their actions than the other way around, but the more they can convince more people of these justifications, the more their fictions reign over us all until the eventually supplant reality. Becoming more real than real.

The truth will set you free, but only you.

Most everyone else is still stuck getting their view of reality from all the journalists and news pundits who are part of the small minority of internet freaks living in hyperreality.

[NonoEnjoyer]

I find very few stories that I actively latch onto in a meaningful way. Fate/Stay Night probably the first time this kind of thing really happened to me, first through the DEENime and then the VN.

I played Steins;Gate last year after buying it on a whim. I used to frequent the Fate reddit and the anime adaptations were always getting shit on (for good reason most of the time). People always said that S;G was basically a "perfect" adaptation of a visual novel (no the fuck it isn't). I kept that in my back pocket for a long time and, like I said, bought it on a whim.

Had no idea how much I would love it. Then I played 0, and then I bought chaos;head and child. Chaos;child ended up being my favorite, but at certain times of the year steins;gate can creep pretty close. It's still got my favorite true ending.

I think Science Adventure at large really encapsulates great storytelling through the VN medium. Strong art direction, compelling characters (most of the time), fantastic OST (always), and amazing voice acting (every time). You can do without some of these and still have a great VN of course, I just feel like Science Adventure really does it exceedingly well.