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 such an enigma.  There is 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.

Gnosticism in Anime and Video Games

TVTropes has a page called UsefulNotes/Gnosticism where it talks about Gnosticism and then lists examples of fictional stories that were or are thought to be influenced by Gnosticism.

As an Amateur Christian Theologian, I think it's a problem how often Gnosticism is defined based on it's mythological archetypes rather then the actual Philosophical/Metaphysical point.  If your view of the After Life is an intangible spirit realm where we are free of the confines of the Carnal Material World, you're a Gnostic no matter how Orthodox, Nicene and Trinitarian your Theology and Christology is.

One question that is particularly relevant to the accuracy of calling some of these fictional cosmologies Gnostic is, can you be Gnostic but not even nominally Christian?  According to Religion for Breakfast no one called themselves Gnostics in antiquity, and all the known specific groups we call Gnostics were Christian sects who identified each of these Gnostic Mythological archetypes with at least one person or concept in The Bible or some other Judeo-Christian source.  

However they are also the result of these Christians being influenced by older gentile ideas that in my opinion Christians shouldn't have allowed to influence them, Neopythagoreanism, Middle Platonism, Hermeticism, Hellenistic Mystery Religions and since they mostly started in Alexandria aspects of native Egyptian Mythology and Mysticism (thing is the "Proto-Orthodox" were also being influenced by at least the first two of those during this time period, simply to different degrees or in different ways.  The difference between whether you were called a Heretic or not was chiefly rejecting a Bodily Resurrection).  So you take the mythological archetypes that comes from those influences but subtract the explicitly Christian stuff, and you get a framework that can be compared to a number of fictional Fantasy/Sci-Fi cosmologies.

But going back to my distinction between Gnostic Mythology and the actual point of Gnosticism.  I don't think any currently existing "developed" culture is less inclined to sympathize with the point of Gnosticism then Japan.  Shinto Mysticism I actually view as fairly compatible with Stoic Metaphysics, and Stoicism was I'd say antithetical to all of the Non-Christian antecedents of Gnosticism, even if by the second century they were using a lot of the exact same Greek key words and phrases.

And so when I look at a lot of the Anime or other Otaku Media that has been or can be argued to resemble Gnostic mythology, I kind of feel like they're using the Gnostic Mythological framework to convey the exact opposite attitude.  

This is most explicit in SSSS.Gridman where the Sophia figure is trapped in an Idealized Platonic World of Forms and the Carnal Physical Real World is what she needs to return to.  But I think on some level the same is true of the use of Gnostic or Gnostic adjacent ideas in classics like Serial Experiments Lain or Revolutionary Girl Utena.  

I would not apply a Gnostic reading of any kind to most Isekai however, in modern Isekai the other world is just as much of a carnal/material world as ours, it's the culture being different that makes it often a world the Otaku/Neet protagonist feels more at home in then Modern Japan.  Sword Art Online does sometimes feel like it's making Gnostic Mythological references, but that isn't proper Isekai.

But in the case of Final Fantasy VII (and perhaps then every FF that's been argued to be Gnostic) I go back to what I said before about the Stoics and Gnostics being antithetical even in their use of a lot of the same terms.  I think every argument for Final Fantasy VII having a Gnostic cosmology is actually better explained by a Stoic reading, The Lifestream is the Pneumatic World Soul and Mako (like Mana in other JRPGs and Manga/Anime inspired by them) is a Pneumatic Substance.  The Physical world being Evil and Dirty couldn't be more the opposite of what a story like Final Fantasy VII is trying to say about Nature.  These are stories where the Spiritual and Carnal are in a symbiotic relationship with each other, it is Man's Sins (especially Capitalism) that create the problems.

The western world however has been very influenced by Gnosticism, for all the talk about the Gnostics as some minority the Roman Church persecuted into extinction, I'd argue they kind of indirectly won, all of Mainstream Christianity has become at least mildly Gnostic.  Gnosticism is essentially Platonism taken to it's logical extreme, and so that's why a lot of the Japanese media I just talked about and others get interpreted by westerners more Gnostically then I feel the Japanese could have possibly intended.

Update September 26th: It's occurred to me that I should explain the Final Fantasy VII part a bit more.

The Gnostic Reading of Final Fantasy VII in large part revolves around equating the Lifestream with the Gnostic Pleroma.  The Lifestream and Pleroma have in common being both the source and destiny of each individual Soul  However the Gnostic Pleroma is distinctly outside the physical world, the physical world is basically a prison to the pieces of it stuck here.  The Lifesream however is the World, it and the physical Earth are intimately connected, they form a Symbiant Circle what happens to one will effect the other.  It is quite literally the Soul and Spirit of The Earth.

The World Soul is a concept in a few schools of Greek Philosophy, but it is the Stoic Version that has all the same similarities to the Lifestream the Pleroma has but also is part of the world rather then separate.

Basically Gnosticism has more in common with Scientology then it does the Lore of FFVII.

Further Update October 14 2022: I just obtained Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250 by George Boys-Stones and chapter 8 talks about the World Soul and Nature.

Much of the thesis of the chapter is that while Middle Platonists and Stoics agreed on the World having a Soul, for the Stoics it was a pretty natural product of their Metaphysics as it's virtually synonymous with their God, while for the Platonists it kind of didn't fit so well and proved awkward.

So to Middle Platonists the World Soul was a lesser god at best, and to Plutarch it was actually Evil, but in-between it was also presented as a sort of force without much will or agency of it's own.  

But reading this has only strengthened my Stoic interpretation of The Lifestream and Final Fantasy VII.

I also view the Original Pre-Romanization Stoics as having been the Communists of the Hellenistic World.  And so here's a good Marxist Analysis of Final Fantasy VII.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EWCLHkqRQNkPHiCAYcIUrJ3twpAmD2o