Serial Experiments Lain is a show I like Weirdly

Honestly I really struggled to decide what to name this post and still don't think I made the right choice.

Serial Experiments Lain is an  Anime I like a lot but for seemingly very different reasons than most people.  Or at least not the things people usually talk about in their Video Essays.  

All the talk about it as Prophetic about the nature of the Internet is the product of Zoomers and Younger Millennials who don’t remember how quickly the Internet caught on.  The theories about it being related to the Collective Unconscious concept are possibly valid but not my main reading.  And nothing is more disappointing than watching a video that just explains what happened in the plot.

It is a part of my Reverse Gnosticism in Anime thesis, that is the closest I come to thinking about the show Philosophically. 

Its fascinating simply how for a show so incredibly popular NOT influential it’s been Aesthetically speaking, to my knowledge not many other shows look and sound like Lain even in exactly the time period when all the Lain knockoffs you’d have expected the industry to greenlight in the wake of its success would have aired.  The only one I can think of is Boogiepop Phantom from 2000, so yeah I recommend that to Lain fans who don’t already know about it.

It’s also very fascinating in how it tells its story.  I can’t think of any other show where we spend most of our screen time with one specific character and yet that character remains an enigma.  This a moment very early in the pilot, before she even becomes aware of the plot’s inciting incident where how she acts still confuses me.  In Anime especially it’s very rare for me to question if the main character might actually be the villain, but in Lain I do even on a rewatch where I know what’s going to happen.

In the episode focused on her sister, the first time I watched it I thought the only ambiguity was if she did that to her sister on purpose or by accident, that she wasn’t responsible at all never even occurred to me. It also wasn’t till the third time I watched the show I figured out when it happened.

But another thing about Lain is that I like the show a lot even though I also lament the non-existence of what I thought the show was before I watched it.

TrixieTheGoldenWitch on her old YouTube Channel currently named YGG Studio has an old video titled Aesthetic Is Narrative, a segment of the video is about what a certain Lain related image means to her, in which she describes Lain as a girl who’s become a Goddess of the Internet even though she’s lonely offline.  Now that is not exactly an inaccurate description, but the first place it led my brain too was a show that would not necessarily have any SciFi or Supernatural elements.  A Girl accidentally or intentionally building a cult of personality around herself on the early Internet, in ways that would fundamentally not work the same today.