Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT.<p>Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.<p>Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0].<p>A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go.<p>Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series?<p>0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.
It's interesting how two people can have diametrically opposite readings of the same piece of art.<p>I read the Wired as not less real than the real world, as the influence could flow in both directions, with events in one place causing effects in the other. The ultimate confirmation of that is the final scene, which was actually depicting Lain meeting her grown up school friend some 10 years later, while Lain stayed - timelessly - a child.<p>I once read a story which dealt with the lack of purpose in a world dominated by technology, where humans had nothing left to do, nowhere obvious to progress. The story presented an escape into tradition and slavery along with the progression into virtual reality, where new worlds could be built, shaped by the will of the participants as opposed to the hard rules of physics, therefore granting a whole set of new universes in which to search for meaning.<p>While we don't have fully fledged universes yet, we have gotten to various lengths along that road thanks to the Internet. Why should we say that experiences of the people who value their Internet goals more than the real world are invalid?
Lain catches a lot of flak in anime circles for being "edgy" or "deep for the sake of being deep" in that it tries too hard to be something thought provoking, but lacks any real substance. People still assign what they think the show is trying to say, but because the show is so abstract anything sticks.<p>I tend to agree with the above point, but it has been quite some time since I watched it. I wonder if a new personal perspective and rapidly changing tech landscape would change how I feel about it today.
Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example:<p>Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the protagonist, due to a risk of infection with off-planet viruses. Here’s where it gets kinda scary:<p>- all interactions are done via advanced telepresence. It’s been perfectly replicated to mimic physical interaction. People only meet in person, apprehensively, for reproductive purposes<p>- one of the main supporting characters is an extreme extrovert who subliminally craves physical human contact. Due to society’s rules, the only thing she’s able to do is take lots of socially distanced telepresence walks with a friend.<p>This book was written in 1957.
There's a certain brooding, existential atmosphere and mystique to anime like Serial Experiments Lain, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Steins;Gate that really make them stand out and stick with you.<p>Even if the show turned out to not be prescient at all, it would still be one of the top classics. Combined with the fact that it was, it's really something special.
I like SE Lain but I don’t hold it as my favorite anime series. I’m more of a Texhnolyze fan and I do like Yoshitoshi Abe’s character design.<p>His designs are present in Lain, Niea Under 7, Haibane Renmei, Despera, Phenomeno, Texhnolyze and others. I really like his artwork and I made a habit of buying one of his artbooks everytime I visit the Akihabara Mandarake building.
Lain does seem quaint when viewed today. But, it was thrilling at the time. A frequent theme was hearing background conversations of random users traveling through the wires. The idea of a couple having a fight and breaking up over “The Internet” was still weird. When the series was made, people were just starting to mainstream the practice of having serious personal interaction online and no one knew where it would lead.<p>Previously you had in-person conversations, letters and phone calls. But, then the whole world quickly ramped up dealing with love, hate, sex and all the depths of humanity through the network. It was a exciting and worrying transition. For me, Lain was there to reflect on a lot of that angst.
I thought this was a good article, but I wonder at the author's background.<p>>her hardware expands to turn her bedroom into a dim, electrified jejunum<p>I'd like to think I'm well read, but who the hell pulls "jejunum" out of their duodenum!
I wouldn't call it prescient. It came out in 1998? At that time, I was already living like Lain, cooped up in my room spending my entire evening/night online, building computers and tinkering with stuff. Lots of people were already like that. In fact, it just accurately represented a person like that, who's an outlier in their obsessive interest in the net and online communities. I felt huge relation to Lain when I watched it at that time. It was "current" for me. I imagine many others felt this way as well, though probably not the article author :)
Fun fact, the creative team who did Lain was working on a show called Despera but it was cancelled when the director died. Apparently it's likely to come out in a few years under a new director as it was near fully funded right before Covid hit:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despera" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despera</a>
fan websites: <a href="https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag=lain" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag=lain</a>
Aside Chiaki Konaka from Lain, I would recommend some of the works of Sadayuki Murai (who, coincidentally, co-worked with Konaka in Bubblegum Crisis 2040):<p>- Moryo no Hako (not sure what's the English name, but it's a nice horror/detective story from a novel)<p>- Millennium Actress (an IMO nice way to show the evolution of the Japanese cinema)<p>- Perfect Blue (mostly Satoshi Kon's work, but Murai worked in the screenplay)<p>There's also Boogiepop Phantom, but you lose a bit of the plot if you haven't read the original novels.
> lawless, anonymizing communities<p>i am safe from physical harm online, i can block people online.<p>i am not safe from physical harm in person, i cannot block people in person, they insult me when i try to assert boundaries, knowing that they can mistreat me with impunity since I'm financially dependent on them.<p>and i don't know anyone i relate to who lives nearby to talk to, and i can't meet even if i knew them.
How are people watching all of these different animes? I don't see many of the titles listed in comments here available for streaming online or through any of the torrent sites in aware of. I recently subscribed to VRV so that I could easily watch Attack on Titan and a few others but it's missing Lain and a lot of the other titles mentioned in here.
Serial experiments lain is my favorite anime of all time. I'm shocked at hoe obscure it continues to be, even in hacker circles.<p>I figured that coding in lisp is all she needed for the show to become a cult classic - but here we are...