The Gate of the Stone of Destiny: ‌ of one second, you will be my forever.

This time travel anime visually touches on the main themes of The Butterfly Effect, 12 Monkeys, and Back to the Future, as well as elements like Groundhog Day and 50 First Dates. I do not have a deep understanding of the second element, so I will not talk about the two adorable scenes in the harem and other things, but talk about my understanding of the context of time travel.The Stone’s Gate theory of time travel is based on “world lines,” which are supposed to be parallel universes. To change the present and the future by influencing the past is to cross another world line. There are three forms of time travel in the film. The first involves sending text messages to your past self or someone else through an accidentally discovered “telephone oven,” and altering history by influencing the behavior of those in the past, an effect that may be too large to measure due to the butterfly effect. This is very similar to the pattern in the movie The Butterfly Effect.

The second is that the hero transmits the memory of the present to his past brain through the device he develops, which is more controllable than texting to influence behavior (because only his memory is changed), and also equivalent to being able to constantly repeat a history based on the memory experience. From the perspective of learning, it is equivalent to being immortal. This is also the case for the hero of Groundhog Day, but not by choice. However, the hero discovers that this does not change the fact that, no matter what happens; the great destiny will not change (the argument of 12 Monkeys). The third is to travel directly to and from time in a time machine, which is the same as Back to the Future model, but also has problems such as avoiding meeting yourself in another era. Since only the hero has the ability to retain memory across the world line and time, his memory is a mixture of multiple world lines, so he also has to explain to other characters after each change of the world line, and even get to know other characters again, which is a bit like 50 First Dates. Don’t think that being able to time travel makes you invincible. The hero’s memory ability is the basis of winning the time travel battle, so if the hero dies anywhere, everything will be ruined.

American commercial films and TV series must hit the ground running or they will be cancelled. While Japanese anime can be as slow as you like, for example, this one, about the 11th episode of the plot began to tense, 12-18 episodes is the most exciting part in my opinion, but at the end because of love dragged. However, on the basis of time travel, the plot of the film is generally quite good, and the logic is relatively complete. There can also be some emotional touch, such as the complex emotions brought by the complex memory of the protagonist many times more than others, the long years of isolation brought by one-way time travel of the braided sister, the father and daughter know each other for a while, and the forgetting brought by knowing the change of the time line, such as the 10-year dream between Phyllis Jam and her father, the transsexual dream of the false mother and so on.

I think these simple emotions are more touching than the three episodes of entanglements between the redhead and the male pig. The Japanese parting of birth and death seems a little artificial to me. Moreover, I think that according to the intelligence of the redhead, she should have known the consequences of canceling the last Dmail early, without waiting for the male pig to tell her; Crazy texting woman plot is also relatively thin distortion. Beyond that, the theory of jumping 1% is a bit far-fetched; every cancellation of a Dmail postpones the death date of the truth by one day. Stein Gate’s theory of the world line is vague and seems to be aimed at a happy ending.

There’s one more question that comes to mind after watching the entire film. If the space and time of the universe are composed of countless world lines, then for us in this world line, the things around us naturally exist objectively, and the people and things in other world lines are just dreams. However, for the “us” who live in other worlds, maybe this one is a dream again. The concept of being becomes a subjective criterion. Can the theory of the world line be considered essentially idealistic?