Rintaro Okabe

Rintaro Okabe (岡部 倫太郎, Okabe Rintarō?), often nicknamed Okarin (オカリン) or Hououin Kyouma (鳳凰院 凶真, Hōōin Kyōma), is a self-proclaimed insane mad scientist. He lives in Ikebukuro, where he was neighbours with his childhood friend Mayuri Shiina, but moved into the Future Gadget Lab over the summer of 2010.

Appearance
Okabe is a lanky young man, with a square jaw and bony cheeks. His short black hair is swept back. He has a small amount of stubble on his chin and cheeks. His eyes are brown.

Rintaro often wears a long white lab coat, over a plain white T-shirt (light gray in the anime), and khaki-colored slacks. The breast pocket of his lab coat has a red pen sticking out, and around his slacks he wears a black military-style canvas belt, with a gold-colored buckle. He has dark socks and wears green slippers when inside the lab.

In the visual novel, Okabe appeared much "dustier". His face was pale and unshaven and he seemed a lot more "messy" in contrast to his relatively "clean" appearance in the anime.

In the bonus episodes Steins;Gate - The Sagacious Wisdom of Cognitive Computing, when he was portrayed in 'model-like' clothing and poses, he was perceived as attractive. Mayuri Shiina said that "we cannot imagine Okarin without white clothes", indicating the changes of Okabe's appearance from Steins;Gate to Steins;Gate 0.

In some drama CDs, he is depicted to cosplay with handsome outfits.

In Steins;Gate 0, he is more professionally-dressed compared to his Steins;Gate counterpart, donning a black dress-shirt, blazer, and slacks held by a black belt with a metal buckle. His hair is more neatly combed, likely to follow university standards. He no longer wears his signature lab coat.

Personality
Rintaro is initially portrayed to have a severe case of Chuunibyou with eccentric and sometimes Tsundere tendencies. As a self-proclaimed insane mad scientist, he often makes grand and long-winded declarations instead of getting to the point which annoys Kurisu.

He usually gives off the impression of being delusional and paranoid. He would talk to himself on the phone especially when he can't get his way and engages in fits of maniacal laughter.

He likes to pose as an agent working against a certain "Organization" which he suggests is always after him, as he believes this gives him a cool and mysterious aura. Ironically, this false organization would materialize in the form of SERN, Stratfo, DURPA, and Russian Intelligence. Despite claiming to be wary of spies sent by the "Organization", his loud behavior and lack of filter during normal conversations led several "outsider" characters to unwittingly overhear and find out about the nature of the lab experiments. Over the course of the story, he is forced to "induct" several characters as lab members so he could share "confidential" information about the full extent of his experiments.

Being melodramatic, he likes to introduce himself by his "true name" "Hououin Kyouma". People usually ignore this alias and instead address him by his actual name or by 'Okarin' (his nickname), much to his chagrin. He is slightly hypocritical as he calls Kurisu a number of names that irritate her to varying degrees. On the other hand, there are some who like his nicknames such as Luka Urushibara with the name "Lukako" (るかこ, Rukako), which affectionately alludes to his feminine nature.

Rintaro is socially inept and has poor social skills that Kurisu considers the childlike Mayuri to be normal by comparison. Although very intelligent, Okabe is also shown to be quite naive; when Kurisu sent him a D-Mail saying that he was an airhead, he bought her claim that it was a compliment, only realizing later that it essentially meant his head was full of air.

He lacks management skills and has no sense of priority often rushing headlong into things and cutting off others when conversations do not go his way. This is very evident in his first time leap where instead of telling everyone clearly about what happened and what would happen and coming up with a good plan of action, he kept everyone else in the dark by brushing off their questions of concern and started running around the city to look for Mayuri. For someone prone to using others to achieve his goals, up until that point he has always kept others away and never confide in them when it matters the most.

He does not care about anyone he considers as an outsider and blatantly ignores the messages, opinions and feelings of others which he considers irrelevant to the experiment. Nevertheless, he is not hesitant to lend a helping hand to people whom he had never met, as shown in his first encounter with Luka.

Rintaro is very forceful when it comes to proving a point as seen when he assaulted Luka in order to prove that Luka was a boy dressed up as a girl. He is never seen as remorseful for this and instead declared his punishment as "torture". He also once reduced Kurisu to tears by yelling at her for calling him 'Okabe' instead of 'Hououin Kyouma' but was baffled at her reaction.

It is later revealed that his 'mad scientist' persona is largely a façade he wears in order to make life interesting for Mayuri as well as a coping mechanism for embarrassing or stressful situations and he tends to drop it if the situation becomes serious. There are several occasions that the anime displays what goes on in his mind, portraying him as rational and possessing better situational awareness. After witnessing Mayuri's multiple deaths, Okabe drops his Chuunibyou façade completely, revealing a serious side of himself he has not shown for the first half of the story as he works hard to nullify all the previous D-Mails.

As a result of going through dozens of time-leaps, he becomes rather cynical, depressed and frantic. He develops a guilt complex, believing himself to be responsible for everything that is happening and frequently blaming himself whenever something goes wrong, even when he had no control over it or could not possibly have seen it coming. An example of this is when he blamed himself for stopping Suzuha from leaving during the night of the storm, which resulted in the time machine being damaged, leading to Suzuha's amnesia and her failure in finding the IBN 5100, despite Suzuha's insistence that the entire ordeal was her own fault for stopping in 2010 to find her father.

In the Suzuha Ending of the visual novel, Okabe's personality becomes exceedingly warped and twisted, as a result of his numerous time leaps. He begins to lose his understanding of "consequences", adopting a "do as you want" mindset without regard for others. With this mindset, he nearly let Daru get hit by a truck just to see what would happen and even considered assaulting Suzuha, who then acknowledges that his soul was close to breaking. Despite this, he soon returns to acting like his old self upon being confronted by Suzuha.

He has seemed to develop feelings for Kurisu, along with Faris, Luka, and Mayuri, although these are determined depending on the route chosen in the visual novel. However, he openly displays his affections for Kurisu near the end of the story, regardless of the route chosen.

After Kurisu's death, in Steins;Gate 0, he becomes even more miserable, to the point of experiencing panic attacks from references to her and having to actively consume anxiety medications. Okabe had gradually wallowed in his own misery with his guilt complex weighing down on him, refusing to perform any more time leaps even with the knowledge from Suzuha of World War III's inevitable occurrence within the Beta Attractor Field should he remain aloof to taking action. This is due to his belief that not only is he incapable of changing the future, but as Kurisu sacrificed her life for this world line, trying to change it is dishonoring her sacrifice. He had also abandoned the identity of Hououin Kyouma in its entirety, choosing to live as a normal university student, to great discomfort within his circle of friends. Over the course of the story, he regains the strong desire to see the future of the Lab Mems through to the end and returned to his former conduct; a notable feat is him having time-leaped over 3000 times backwards from 2036 to ensure it.

In the movie Load Region of Déjà vu, Okabe possesses a strong distrust for time travel in general. After his experiences, he believes that no one can alter the past without unintended consequences and would rather be erased from the world line completely over letting Kurisu use time travel to try and save him.

Background
At the end of 1999, Rintaro had a high fever while unconscious and tossing about. The fever lasted for about a month and he first recovered on New Year's, which was a miracle according to the doctors assigned to him. This was relayed to him by his parents as he himself could not remember much of it. When Okabe's fever had gone down, he told a crying Mayuri, the first person that he saw, that he had felt as if everything was "blurry and twisty" and as if the ground shook while he was ill. Later, he suspects that his illness could have been a symptom of Reading Steiner activating because of the Y2K problem.

After the death of Mayuri's grandmother five years later, Mayuri entered a state of depression and, fearing that she would literally disappear and ascend to the skies, Okabe embraced her telling her to stay and, out of embarrassment, said the first thing that came to mind which happened to be the ramblings of a mad scientist that he had seen on television. Proclaiming himself a mad scientist, he stated that Mayuri was his hostage and as such, could not leave him. Mayuri accepted and this incident gave birth to his "Hououin Kyouma" persona.

On the Steins Gate Worldline, before meeting Mayuri at her grandmother's grave, he stops at the train station where he meets a time travelling Kurisu Makise who gave him the idea of Hououin Kyouma and who also took his first kiss. On some Beta world lines, he instead encounters a time travelling Kagari Shiina at the train station who gives him the inspiration for Hououin Kyouma and teaches him a song.

At some point, he started collecting black fingerless gloves to "seal the abomination lying dormant in [his] right arm" and ran around shouting "Burn!" and similar phrases. He stopped doing this after a while, though.

Okabe went to the same high school as Itaru Hashida, though according to Daru, they did not actually become friends until their final year. Following high school, he and Daru both enrolled at Tokyo Denki University as engineering students. In March of that year, he established the Future Gadget Lab, a small homemade laboratory situated above Yugo Tennouji's CRT store, and dubs himself Lab Mem 001 (the first member to join the lab). After half a month, Mayuri began coming by and was made Lab Mem 002. Finally about a month later, Okabe convinced Daru to join by telling him MayQueen was only a three minute walk away and then he became Lab Mem 003. It is an area where he and his fellow Lab Mems create "Future Gadgets for the betterment of mankind".

Some time before the start of the series, he happened to see Luka Urushibara being harassed by some photographers in Akiba. He stepped in and shamed the men. When Luka was feeling depressed because he thought that he was disappointing Okabe by actually being a boy, Okabe stated that it did not matter and took Luka to BladeWorks, where they purchased Samidare, leading to Luka becoming Okabe's disciple.

Quotes

 * “The universe has a beginning, but no end. — Infinite. The stars, too, have a beginning, but their own power leads to their destruction. — Finite. History dictates that it is the wise who are most foolish. One could call this a final warning from God, to those who can still resist.” — Okabe's opening monologue (Japanese dub).
 * “Consider, can the universe be justifiably called infinite? Doubtful. It may not have a discernible end, but it had a beginning and its component parts definitely have a limited cosmological shelf-life. Splitting hairs or not, if history tells us anything, it's that scientists often make very poor poets. We're all just a ship of fools chasing phantoms, heedless of what really underwrites natural law.” — Okabe's opening monologue (English dub).
 * “It's the choice of Steins Gate.” — Okabe's catchphrase.
 * “Theories are nothing more than words. Accept what you have seen!” — To Kurisu.
 * “I won't let you go. I won't let anyone take you. You're my hostage now. My guinea pig! There is no escaping me! Muhaha, muhahaha!” — To Mayuri Shiina.
 * “Uhh... Hey mister, I am mad scientist. It's so COOOOL! Sonuvabitch.” — Okabe to badge maker, trying to speak English.
 * “It's an intellectual drink for the chosen ones.” — Okabe about Dr. Pepper.
 * “I would say the person with the perverted imagination is the pervert.” — To Kurisu.
 * “No one knows what the future holds, that's why its potential is infinite. Just like what this reunion demonstrated.” — To Kurisu during their reunion on the Steins Gate World Line.
 * “Alright! From now on, I am Mommy Uncle Okarin!” — To Nae Tennouji.
 * “Seinem das Jede.” — To Kurisu, Steins;Gate QNP Special.

Trivia

 * On the Gamma Attractor Field, Okabe is a collaborator of SERN, member of the Committee of 300 and becomes the dictator Hououin Kyouma, ruling over Japan with an iron fist.
 * Okabe loves to drink Dr. P, but on the Gamma Attractor Field, his favorite drink is Mountain Dew.
 * The reason Okabe barely calls Kurisu Makise by her real name, but instead by various nicknames, is because he was too embarrassed to call her by her real name.
 * The actions of the Committee of 300 on the Steins Gate Worldline fit Okabe's delusions almost to the letter.
 * Okabe appears as a cameo in the manga Robotics;Notes: Revival Legacy, though only as a black silhouette.
 * Okabe claims he has an IQ of 170. For reference, 145 is considered the genius level of intelligence.
 * In the events of Load Region of Déja Vu, Kurisu Makise is the one who gives Okabe the backstory and name of Hououin Kyouma.
 * His catchphrase, "El Psy Kongroo" means something like "The Mind Agrees" or "The Mind is Congruous" and is supposed to be Latin, but the grammar is not correct.
 * Rintaro Okabe is also playable in the game #COMPASS.
 * Okabe calls his favorite order at Kitchen Jiro "Mad Menchi Katsu Curry" which is curry with two pieces of menchi katsu as toppings.
 * Okabe does not have his driver's license.
 * Okabe dislikes eggplants.
 * Okabe had a hard time noticing when Moeka is in the room, frequently getting surprised that she is behind him.
 * A nickname for the Okabe in Steins;Gate 0 that fans of the series have given him is "Sad scientist" as opposed to "Mad scientist".

Etymology

 * The name Rintaro means “ethics, companion” (倫, rin), “plump, thick, big around” (太, ta) and “son” (郎, rō).
 * Rintaro's surname Okabe means “mount, hill, knoll” (岡, oka) and “section, bureau, dept, class, copy, part, portion” (部, be).

Alias

 * Hououin means “phoenix” (鳳凰, hōō) and “institution, temple, mansion, school” (院, in).
 * Kyouma means “villain, evil, bad luck, disaster” (凶, kyō) and “true, reality, Buddhist sect” (真, ma).