Tuned in to Retro Anime / Manga!

A lot of them watched the show for mostly the aesthetic. "Wow look at this super kawaii anime girl thats depressed and into tech, she's literally me" and don't look past anything surface level like that. It's alright to watch a show like that ig but there's barely any discussion beyond that there. A lot fandoms are like that now, it is what it is.

>>2902
>super kawaii anime girl thats depressed and into tech, she's literally me
Isn't that the show though? Lain is the depressed tech girl internet dweller who's exactly like lonely internet addicts. But SEL is saying this is actually a bad thing while a lot of the fans think its a good thing. Its like they get that Lain as a character is meant to speak to them but take it entirely the wrong way: being a fake depressed asocial basement dweller is good and Lain is our god.

>>2903
What I meant is what you said. They see it as a good thing instead of a critique of that behavior. Which is why i included "That's literally me".

I kinda like the mystical interpretation of Lain though

>>2901
It's about a lot of things, because everything is interconnected in some invisible way, which again is one of the themes of the show. I think a lot of it is about death. Not just the one big death, but all the kinds of little death. Death of ego, death of innocence, death of the spirit, death of the body, death of the mind, death as a means of escapism, a quiet death of society that no one really even notices. Suicide, social suicide, decentralized unintentional mass suicide, murder without killing.

Or maybe I'm just some wacko.

>>2901
I wish Serial Experiments Lain covered more Internet history.

>>3021
The show seems to be saying that interconnectedness is a bad thing. This isn't a mystical metaphysical interconnectedness, but everyone's interactions being mediated by a single technological system they have no control over. Slowly some people's existence gets forgotten, they become faceless nobodies or people don't notice other important people in their lives are dead or need help or like Lain they are easily manipulated by freaks on the internet. So in that sense its about social death and the death of society. SEL is sort of weird because on the one hand its very anti-tech and pessimistic but on the other its fascinated with tech.

I mean , you're talking about 14-15 year olds who think the "weird pc girl" is just food for their "mysterious aesthetic"

>>3134
A lonely death leaves a shadow like the shadows left by an atomic bomb. The Japanese seem to be quite taken with this paradox. Utter destruction, yet something remains, but it's something utterly without substance, without humanity, without anything that matters. Just a form. Something you can't save. Something you can't understand or interact with.
Anonymity, as much as I love it, is ultimately dehumanizing, and dehumanization is ultimately a form of death. Especially, when your only outlet in the world is social media, like so many people these days, where a glitch in an algorithm can erase them entirely, and leave just some artifacts that say nothing.
>This video has been removed
>This account no longer exists
>404
A shadow on the floor.
I wonder if this was foresight, coincidence, or something else. I think it also has a lot to do with Gnosticism, but I don't know enough about Gnosticism to tell you.

What about laintrannies? How badly do you have to miss the fucking plot to take it as "become a sissy frengot" and praise Nick Land's non-sense bs

>>2901
It's weird seeing a show I bought randomly as a kid and took kinda at face value and didn't think of the symbolism (which funny enough the show works that way) blow up into everything we see now vs back then it was just some AMVs and reviews online also the remaster sucks watch the original version from Pioneer.

>>2901
>>3333
I honestly find Noa Izumi more interesting as an icon of man's relationship with technology.
She doesn't know anything about engineering or computers, but still manages to get a lot of mileage out of her vehicle by treating it as a friend/pet.
Never underestimate the power of skeumorphism.

>>2901
>The general themes seem to be on Japanese family breakdown, lonliness and atomization, and technology causing a hyperreal breakdown of the world. There's also the conspiracy history of the internet being invented by aliens but also theological stuff about the soul and religion too, which I'm guessing is just added on as a way to create artificial depth.

so it is tech gnosticism and accelerationist philosophy? i mean i dont like lain fans in same i dont like eva fans but ur just wrong

im watching the show for the first time right now and am enjoying it. It really does feel like trannie bait with the le shy girl thats addicted to the computer so far. if the thread is still up i'll give my retarded take when i finish it.

>>3415
go back

>>3412
A japanese boomer struggles to understand the negative changes occuring to japan/japanese society during it's economic crisis and wonders if maybe the internet is to blame (note: japanese boomer doesnt really understand the internet). I never finished watching lain because I understand exactly what was wrong with (japanese) society at the time while fully understanding what the internet is(was). So feel free to correct me if my following assumptions are wrong and that i should finish watching this meme show if theres even deeper themes im missing out on:

The japanese have a tendency to shroud things they dont understand with mysticism, and children being able to communicate with one another instantly was a completely forign concept to the people raised in a time period where you'd only ever talk to your family/neighbors which directly led to strong community bonds. The japanese boomers also got the 'we just lost the war, better hunker down together' bonus multiplier so their childhoods where unironically fairly comfy even when their parents were doing poorly economically. however, as a consequence older japanese people were fairly out of touch with the rest of the world and lived on the copium propaganda bubble pushed by the japanese mass media/government. Thats why they love their child soldier stories piloting robots and space ships. Its just alternate timeline ww2 slop (our boomers fetishized ww2 in the same way, just different since we 'won'). The ironic thing being, after japan was chosen by the globalist to be the world's new factory the japanese cope became reality as their economy soared, which created a feedback loop of nippon #1. So the boomer intrinsically believes to trust the propaganda, to work hard, and that this hard work is rewarded by nature of hard work leads to rewards. This of course, is a fallacy.

so youve lived your life cut off from the rest of the world. you only have family and friends to rely upon. your government tells you to be positve, work hard, and everything will be good. You do it, and it turns out well (for you). But then all of a sudden, your economy has its legs cut out from under it by the international banking class (you do not understand this at all) and everything you know no longer applies to the next generation. But you notice them spending a lot of time on this weird computer stuff. This generation has access to the internet, they can find out the truth if they want to and not just blindly consume copium/propaganda, and it makes them depressed as fuck so they start retreating from society and/or killing themselves. So you blame the internet for making them sad and try to express your feelings about the subject the only way you know how: you make a cartoon featuring a child exporing the subject because thats what most of the media in your life involved.

>>3425
you're not nearly as clever as you think you are

>>3425
That's a lot of fucking words for a guy in the Lain thread who hasn't watched Lain.

>>3412
No. Lain isn't making a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality. Its really more of a sociological point. In the past, we drew a line between reality and the representational world of print media and when computers became a thing we drew a line between irl and cyberspace. But now everyone's connected and always using the internet, stuff happens online and moves into the meatspace so the line bertween irl and cyberspace has become really blurry. The vast amount of unfiltered information makes it hard to know what's true or false so we end up confused and misled. You see this happen to Lain. She gets wrapped up with a hacker group online run by Masami, but it just turns out that Masami is trying to get revenge on his former employer and he seems to be luring teens into suicide for the fun of it. The narrator tells us Masami is dead but how do you know that's true? He sounds like an authority figure, you know those voice overs in documentaries, but it could easily be fake. Maybe Masami is dead and one of his flunkies is using his persona over the wired?

The tone of SEL is very negative. You see a kid playing a computer game not realizing his mom is dead, the power lines and machines are always dark and scary looking, Lain's entire family is dysfunctional. Her father is addicted to his computer, her mother is cold and distant, her sister is living a double life having sex with older men, and Lain starts acting cruel towards Arisu for the thrill of it. There's hamfisted alien imagery that symbolizes how tech is like an invader colonizing our lives and conspiracies about human experiments. The show is mourning the loss of a more traditional Japan so its not accelarationist.

For the Oshii whining in some Lum circles, you'd think he didn't direct some of the best Lum action in the entire show.

>>2901
Like all things, tourists have ruined Lain.

>>3429
>>3426
thank you for your contribution.

>>3430
In a way, the themes are very similar to Videodrome.

>>2901
Saw 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.

>>3643
The PS1 game is more of an alternate version than a sequel. It shares some characters and concepts but is otherwise separate from the anime.
Based on some of your criticisms, you might like it more. It's a more cohesive experience even if the way the story is told is very scattered. There's a good english web version here if you're interested.
https://laingame.net/

>>2901
Loved this show when it was originally airing. I think the reason modern audiences don't understand it is because they don't remember what it was like before the internet/global network/wired was everywhere and connected to everything. When this show originally aired there was still a huge divide in society where most people either didn't interact with the internet (and the people on it) at all or they only interacted with it through limited or secondary means. By that I mean. You might have an email address for the company you worked with but you rarely used it for anything beyond getting reports from 2-3 people. Or you saw print outs of stuff someone else printed off from the web. Maybe you dialed in for a couple of hours now and again to browse a handful of websites. But most people weren't doing stuff like building up a friend group online on BBSs/forums/IRC. The people that were really into the internet and doing those things were seen as strange by most of society. Even they unplugged now and again either by choice or not. Since you had to disconnect from time to time to maintain a normal life. There was no internet in your pocket at all times. You had to be at your "home base" to interact with it or you had to rent time on someone else's system at places like the library or school.

Those of us that were already really into the internet *got* the show because we could see the internet invading more and more activities in life at that time. Even the people that watched it a few years after it aired didn't have that kind of experience. Since things like broadband were starting to become available to most people (thus allowing 24/7 connections) and flip phones were becoming affordable. Society changed rapidly from about mid-1999 to 2002. It's really had to describe to someone that didn't live through those years just how much change happened in that short amount of time. Most people I know in the states weren't even aware of Lain until 2004+. Since tape trading/early digisubs were kind of a closed circle and Lain didn't get dubbed+aired on America TV until years later. I forget the actual date the dub aired in America but I think it was after ZDTV/TechTV changed its programming blocks for geek stuff to start including gaming+otaku stuff. So I'd say it was after 2003 at least and maybe later.

I actually don't remember how I first stumbled upon Lain. Probably in an IRC channel somewhere and when I first got a copy of it you could only watch it raw. It was awhile before anyone was even interested in fansubbing it from what I remember. Since there were so many old series people were interested in that hadn't been subbed yet and Lain wasn't one of the currently airing shows people were fighting with to rush out first like stuff like Love Hina.

At any rate, I think it's hard for someone born post mid-80s-early-90s to really *get* Lain. We're way past present day present time.

>>3643
>different Wired Lain and "Real" Lain are
There's a nuance here people miss. There is Iwakura Lain (irl one) and Lain of the Wired. Afaik an iwakura is a sacred rock where a kami resides. The name Iwakura is never used for Lain's wired self. Usually, people see Lain as someone who's become a goddess via the wired, but the show seems to be suggesting the opposite. There is an original sacred human nature which is lost as someone interacts with the wired. By the end of the show, Lain isn't a god, she's just an internet schizo.

>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
Not sure this really is a flaw. A good chunk of the anime is visualizing Lain's experiences on the wired. Like most people online today, she's constantly cycling through masses of information, fixating on one thing, then shifting to whatever else that titillates her short attention span. It feels erratic and it should because the internet makes us erratic consumers of ultimately meaningless and incoherent data.

>>3646
This. SEL is filled with that 90s zeitgeist. Well into the 2000s, socializing online still felt like a relatively niche thing. Physical media (newspapers, VHS, cassettes, letters) were on the cusp of obsolesce but still widely used.

Its not just lain. virtually every popular anime is popular for the wrong reasons.like they werent paying attention to what the animators were saying.

>>2901
>>3425
Agree with some of what you're saying, but disagree with other parts for the following reasons.
Lain's family isn't real and even if you consider them an analogy to a real dysfunctional family, it's hard to believe the creators intended for this to be a central theme.
Even as an analogy, it doesn't really work, since Lain turned out alright under her parents, more so compared to her video game version who became suicidal without real human connections. In the end, Lain's parents were good parents, despite not being real, as they helped her reach a positive conclusion.

I don't think anyone really focuses too much on Lain being a cyber goddess, but I do agree that they shill the whole 'transcending the material for the internet' deal, and I think that's a mixup. Lain chooses to leave things be and the people who all wanted to integrate were shown as unstable throughout. At the same time there are many aspects of the show that cater to these kinds of people.

Lain has a lot of denpa appealing aspects/references: it aired past 12AM, the power lines humming, the VR headset guy, etc. I think the show is intentionally appealing to the denpa audience of, at least, Japan and so it resonated to the American alternative, which isn't real, but is the younger audiences experiencing the effects of the effects this show had on the older audience who integrated it into the zeitgeist. When the newer audience began watching it, its effects were already ingrained into that younger audience before experiencing it. Most of the younger audience likely saw it already having an idea of what was going to happen or what it was about. Their connection is a feeling of being denpa without knowing what denpa is, a copy with no awareness of the original. They are wrong about the literally me aspects, but those aspects are intentionally there and integral to the whole meaning of the show, which is a callout to those kinds of people.

The show being 'denpa' opposes that its general themes are loneliness, atomization, and breakdown by technology. For one, those aspects are part of what makes it denpa, and for that reason it could be argued that focusing on those aspects is the same as people focusing on the "literally me" aspects. They are aspects that are details relevant to the setting, but not necessarily what it conveys. The setting is all that's appealing to denpa otaku, but that doesn't make the general theme denpa. Lain breaks out of those aspects and chooses to use her omnipresence, not to break people out of reality, but to leave the world as it is. The central theme is neither a depressing outlook of the world (you mistaking the denpa aesthetics for the message), nor a push for material transcendence (younger audiences mistaking the denpa aesthetics for the message), but hope for our advancements in technology to help us accept the world as it is.

>>3663
You are probably right about the denpa angle. But it does feel like there's a tension running throughout the whole anime between lamenting what technology is doing to the world and being fascinated with tech as a new kind of magic that makes radically new experiences possible. SEL doesn't seem to resolve this tension, being deliberately ambiguous about how it feels and what to do about it. I've always seen the ending as open ended, an attempt at just trying to live with the new world and let it be but without passing any real judgement on it or trying to hammer home a hamfisted message. So you have this mix at despairing at this new world while being drawn into it at the same time. And its perfectly possible for a family to be dysfunctional and still good loving parents. Sometimes Lain feels like an iyashikei anime but its inverted the aesthetic into something darker and more uncomfortable and mysterious.