>>2901Saw the series relatively recently with some uni friends (we got together one day a week on an empty classroom to binge a few episodes).
The inmediate message I understood from it is that it was saying the internet will become (or had become) another factor of the fabric of reality, and one that could very much have an impact on the "real" world, and that this is most likely a bad thing, after all, characters kill themselves to live on within the Wired (which is certainly social commentary), the usage of religious language being used to touch on these points.
The noosphere and ESP stuff referring to how the internet is similar to Jung's collective unconscious idea given a virtual form, you combine that with some of the allusions to godhood that the Wired is given and you get something about perhaps God being brought to life due to human belief in it and not the other way, in that sense that would explain why Lain becomes a goddess by surpassing the old guy whose name I can't remember at the end of the series, because she fully became one with the wired which is already supercharged with psychic energy or whatever.
Lain as a character is also used to comment on the nature of a person acting different on the net (hence how different Wired Lain and "Real" Lain are).
That aside, something we noted is that it felt like the anime went through a midseries change in plot, or that there were a good number of rewrites after some episodes, mostly due to how quickly some plot elements were ignored or quickly passed over, the Accela stuff being the prime example, in that sense, it felt like it lost a fair amount of coherence on its topic and that perhaps that's why it felt so erratic, it's all conjecture on our part thought.
In my entirely personal opinion, the story just didn't push on its final point, at the end, Lain should've either completely disconnected from the wired, or killed herself and forcefully terminate everyone's goals for the wired, I think that's how SEL could've mantained some coherency.
I didn't bother playing the PS1 game but its apparently a super important sequel.