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Forum - View topicSerial Experiments Lain: Loving the Wired and the Weird
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Firefly251
Posts: 382 |
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to date this is likely the anime that makes me think and rewatch it to understand everything.
Love it so much and I really wish we had more like it. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1482 |
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Serial Experiments Lain has been in my top-10 list for 22 years.
Konaka's script managed to touch on a lot of the themes of an era that saw John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" and a few years earlier was experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks, dolphin speech, and the invention of hypertext (all of which are touched on, along with Roswell and UFOs, in one of the later episodes). And "layers"? Straight out of networking texts (along with Protocol 7, which I've always thought was an allusion to the successor to IPv4 and IPv6). It always surprises me that Lain didn't come out until 1998 --- it really seems more of a contemporary of Snow Crash (1992) or even True Names (1981), or perhaps Stewart Brand's book, on the Media Lab (1988)...... Sorry, like you said, one can go on about this series for hours. I'm glad you talked about Lain's visual style. It came out in the very early days of computer tools for animators, and the artists that worked on Lain were clearly having fun experimenting with the things these new tools made possible. The result is a stylish exploration of the medium that is more experimental, art-house animation than traditional TV animation. It's a great series, and your film commentary did it justice, thanks! |
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cchigu
Posts: 250 |
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I guess I am in the minority but I was unimpressed by Lain. It was too pretentious. All I see is a show that is executed in style over substance manner so people who wouldn't like it could just be told they didn't get it. Too dry. Welp, at least, it is not as bad as Texhnolyze and Ergo Proxy.
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psipsy
Posts: 54 |
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When I first saw this back in '98, it was very much science fiction. Now it may as well be a documentary.
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FlamingFirewire
 Posts: 468 |
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Easily one of the most interesting series to think about and go back to over the years - there's always something new to get from it - it's impressive something so centered on technology to still remain so relevant 22 years later.
While not the most emotionally satisfying show of the Ueda/Geneon works (Haibane Renmei would be the gold standard classic out of that bunch), Serial Experiments Lain stands up very well next to other works like Tehxnolyze and Ergo Proxy very well as proof of unique ideas always being interesting to come back to at different points in the future. |
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gridsleep
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Each "lost in the game" story from the original .hack to SAO are derivative of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
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Netero
Posts: 173 |
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Was it really necessary to wreck the Lain clips by adding blurry sidebars to make the frame up to 16:9? Things made in 4:3 should stay that way.
Anyway, if you want a novel that I think predicts where the Internet is going, try Algis Budrys' 1967 book The Iron Thorn. |
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zatheus
 Posts: 78 Location: Ohio |
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You are not alone, I too am in the minority of not being impressed by Lain. Even though I did name a cat Lain at one point, but Lain is an interesting name. I have never been a fan of symbolism and art house type of entertainment. The last time I watched it, I think I understood the story, I just could never get into it. When I had a conversation with friends about it 20ish years ago at an anime party, the words I used to describe how I felt about it were boring and also pretentious. |
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meiam
Posts: 3451 |
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I don't think so, even without those work "lost in a game" would have naturally arisen from the popularity of game. As far as Lain, love the show but I think it's 90% Abe art. I've cooled a lot on symbolism from when I was a teenager and now I mostly think it's just a way of seeming to say something really profound without actually saying anything exactly so that the audience can just see whatever pattern they want out of the "noise" of the story. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 2698 |
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Major kudos to the columnist, well done synopsis and review!
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FLCLGainax
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Back when I first saw this series through the TechTV airings, I thought Lain was this strange girl who had an unhealthy Net addiction. Nowadays, it looks like everyone born after 9/11 has a serious Eye-phone addiction except atleast they're not confined to a room full of whirring gizmos. Then again, the last few months may have changed all that.
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5514 Location: Iscandar |
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I only watched the first episode of Ergo Proxy, but I agree with pretty much all of your post. Lain is a classic for many; for me it is just a weird anime that never impressed me. |
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FlamingFirewire
Posts: 468 |
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Honestly, I think when it comes to most anime viewers, Lain is impenetrable and too esoteric to be engaging on any kind of emotional level - it's really the minority I've run into that like what the show is trying to do (myself included). It's not too surprising because my understanding is that one of the original director's intentions from the beginning was to make it as hard to understand for westerners (and in the process just made it hard to understand for everyone haha). |
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dm
Subscriber Posts: 1482 |
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(I'm kind-of not surprised that a fellow Lain-fan has a Kyousogiga avatar.) I sometimes think Lain is twelve loosely related stories. Sort of like Black Mirror, but with a single ensemble of characters. A way for Chiaki Konaka to do a brain-dump of all the technogeekery he'd been stewing in for the preceding decade. To call it "pretentious" is to miss the way it links together a lot of concepts that were in the air: John Lilly, Douglas Rushkoff, Memex, Ted Nelson, hypertext, and gives their ideas life in a way that is embedded in the computing fringe of the years preceding the creation of the series. I don't think it's an accident that we see Lain programming her Navi in LISP while the class is being taught C (or maybe it is and it really is pretense). |
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we love lain
Posts: 145 |
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I love how people are so quick to use buzzwords like pretentious to describe a show just because takes an artsy approach to its storytelling. While the show is intended to be mulled over, there's still a character-centric piece to the narrative; that is Lain overcoming isolation and depression through her connection with Alice; and how that one relationship influenced her decision to want to keep her identity in the wired despite not really having a reason to. Behind all the show's technobabble is surprisingly an endearing little story of love and identity.
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