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The best thing about Steins Gate is how elegantly it deconstructs the notion of determinism within the framework of a story-driven character study. The idea of a choice between two equal but different outcomes, either of which we could have taken, is mostly unrealistic. This is because we don't care about most things equally. For example, there's a sort of unspoken priority in most people's minds of who/what you would save in a burning building and in what order.

But Steins;Gate does present us with that scenario: the choice between the lives of Mayuri and Kurisu, two people Okabe cares about deeply. Instead of making the hard choice, like he had in the past, when Okabe was presented with two equally bad options, he simply couldn't make a decision. In the end, Kurisu had to make the decision for him, since she saw things from a different perspective. Okabe prioritized both Mayuri's and Kurisu's happiness, making it a perfect zero-sum scenario, whereas Kurisu prioritized Okabe's and Mayuri's happiness, which would be fulfilled much more by her own death than Mayuri's. Presented with the same scenario, Kurisu was free to actually make her decision.

And that might be the key to free will. A choice is just the ability to cause one of multiple possible outcomes, and maybe we could consider free will as getting to use one's own unique priority list to make a decision, instead of being forced onto one outcome by an outside force. In that sense, Okabe does exert free will: he had options that would have fulfilled some or most of his priorities, and he chose between them, instead of being railroaded down that path. Nobody was forcing their decisions onto him. The tangled mess of if-statements and priorities that was Okabe's brain made those decisions on its own.

I hit my lover. (They like it.)

Spank her daddy