Thread:Zeldakasumi/@comment-118.172.180.23-20160415171812/@comment-7888499-20160415192245

EDIT: And, while I was writing the following, BBHQ posted an answer. I'm just going to leave my answer just as it is, though, since my opinion was asked for and it's too difficult for me to go back edit this wall of text. Sorry that there's a bit of reiteration.

Fans all seem to differ in opinion when it comes to titles like this one that have elements that seem less serious or more over-the-top; like SERN's time machine being a car in volume 3 of this manga.

It's kind of hard to answer, because the only titles in the whole SG franchise that have been explicitly called canon/official are -to my knowledge, and I haven't read all of the creator interviews, etc. so I might be missing something important- the original Steins;Gate visual novel, the Steins;Gate 0 visual novel, and the Holy Day short story. Though the Alpha, Beta, Gamma dramaCDs and the Distant Valhalla short story were also treated in a seemingly canonical manner in the world line flow chart in the Chaos;Head/Steins;Gate maniacs official guidebook. And, well, I would be highly surprised if the Braunian Motion manga isn’t canon too.

Regardless of whether one thinks that the story of Rebellion of the Missing Ring is canon or that elements like SERN's time machine and Kayano make this manga at the most a mixture of canon and non-canonical parts -which I find highly probable-, I find it an interesting read in complement to the original VN. Kayano's story shows readers of the original VN a bit of a look at a similar upbringing as a human weapon of SERN that Tennouji Nae probably went through in the world line in the VN where she joins SERN after her father's death. Not quite the same because there is a few decades difference, of course, but the two characters have some similarities.

As to your question about if it was the broken time machine or was it Kayano that caused Suzuha to lose her memories: let me dust off my memory and work through this a bit, 'cause I haven't thought this all through yet… If I recall correctly, the VN describes Suzuha’s memory loss being due to the broken time machine malfunctioning; the anime actually shows a glimpse of Suzuha lying unconscious by a wrecked time machine. Now, leaving the anime aside just for a moment, since some would argue that the anime and its movie belong to their own branch of canonicity. The time machine malfunctioning would, of course, seem to be plenty of reason for Suzuha to be injured to the point of amnesia. After all, if you want to count Braunian Motion as canon then even in the world lines where the FG204 doesn’t get broken and Suzuha doesn’t lose her memory, she was still unsuccessfully shielded from all the strain of time travel and dies of slowly being turned into a Jellyman in her internal organs. So experiencing the strain of time travel in an unstable machine that crashes due to a malfunction -according to the anime glimpse- would be plenty to cause her brain trauma.

On the other hand, Rebellion shows her going through enormous strain while travelling to 1975, and she seems barely conscious by the time when Kayano suddenly kicks her head into the metal railing and throws her off the building. The way it is drawn, I wouldn’t be surprised if Suzuha never even got a good look at Kayano, so it wouldn’t surprise me if those moments always remained unclear even after most of Suzuha’s memory returned in 2000. She might have assumed that something else about that process of landing had caused her to fall off the building. The fact that the machine malfunctioned and caused her to be injured which caused her to be unable to defend herself is, however, a cause-and-effect way of making it fit into the less detailed explanation given in her letter in the VN. -I do like the manga’s explanation of how Suzuha got rid of her time machine, since I had wondered what happened to it when I first watched the anime and later read the VN. And, it being wholly gone fits with the Braunian Motion story and the Alpha dramaCD-

So, basically, you can make this manga kind of fit if you want to, you can ignore it with no harm done if you don’t want to. -It's certainly not a perfect manga and has weird, clear errors, like the size of Suzuha's badge pin.- I did include the Rebellion events in the Committee of 300 page -which is in sore need of updating. Wanna get back to it soon! ^^; -, because I think that Kayano is illuminating in understanding SERN Nae, it gives us more insight into the Valkyrie Resistance and a depiction of what they were up against trying to fight an opponent that could get the drop on you at any time via time travel, and that using real-world John Titor’s 1967 Chevrolet Camaro as SERN’s time machine was just a brilliant joke twist.

I’ve noticed that some SG fans seem to only wish to count the very clearly canon titles as canon and leave it at that. I personally enjoy almost all of the titles including even the more iffy ones -so I'm biased that way-, and I tend to like to include them when I’m working on timelines when possible, because they often explore new aspects and give insight that couldn’t fit in the more “main canon” works, regardless of whether those events are supposed to have actually happened in this fictional, infinite worldlines that are supposed to contain any and all possibilities... I think it is a hole that you can keep digging yourself into, and since, in my opinion, the creators of the franchise like to keep things a bit ambiguous to give themselves as much play room as possible -and milk the franchise to its utmost ^^; -, I try to roll with it.

There is a statement that Shikura Chiyomaru made in a rare English interview -albeit this interview is about the Phenogram VN and the movie, not the Rebellion manga- that makes me appreciate the titles even when they seem less logical or well-meshed with the main canon. "Unlike with the original, there's also a group of writers working on the sequel[Phenogram VN], not just Shikura himself. 'That was decided pretty early on,' he explained. 'I realized this while working on the anime, but the world of Steins;Gate is pretty much already concepted out, so if I can leave it to writers who truly understand it, that'll help put some more edgy and neat ideas into it. That was the philosophy behind the novelization and the comedy spin-off[Darling VN], too. It's something I learned while deploying all those different takes on the project; that each writer can put their own color into the world.'"

Sorry, this answer became a deluge. ^^;

-Btw, fun fact: this is one of the few titles in the SG franchise that has an official English translation. It’s English title is printed on the back of the art book that came with the limited-edition of vol. 3.-