Steins;Gate 2 – Subliminal Imagery

I love this show! Thoroughly fascinating episode. A lot of the new characters seem really great and I continue to love the dialog and directorial style.

What caught my attention more than anything in this episode was the wealth of subliminal imagery. There was at least one subliminal image per scene, generally consisting of a single frame that had some kind of photoshop filter over it. For example:

An altered frame.

What the rest of the sequence looked like. (This is the next frame)

It’s a very subtle difference, but highly noticeably when it flickers by during the episode.

This was the most easily identified altered frame in the ep.

I counted at least twenty of these, increasing in frequency as the episode went on, particularly during the scene wherein Hyououin realized the disappearance of John Titor information.

Only one subliminal image that I spotted wasn’t a discolored frame, and I think it may have been a couple of frames. It comes during a scene transition early in the episode and seems totally out of place.

I have no idea what these blurry red mountains are about.

What’s the meaning of these images? My theory is that they’re there to help give the feeling of a fractured, inconsistent reality. That, at least, was how it made me feel—like this world was constantly lapsing in and out of its own reality.

Subliminal imagery has fascinated me ever since TV became pausable and frame-skippable and I started finding it in the oddest places. It’s always fun to speculate on what the purpose of those images are, be they a message or someone’s random prank.

This one's my favorite since those omelets were awesome already.

I don’t have much else to say about this episode, since the show is still in its introductory phase, but these things definitely caught my attention!

Even the ED had 2 of them!

Besides that, some other stuff I feel the need to mention…

All of the new characters were love

I completely understand this idea.

Of course, there’s always the chance that these things were unintentional or the result of some strange crunchyroll encoding issue (aside from the red mountains). I’m sure one way or another someone will let me know in the comments!

Related: Awesome subliminal prank in an episode of The Colbert Report (sadly no image)