Get ready to dive into the mysterious world of Serial Experiments Lain, the unique PS1 game and its connection to the anime series. Starting off with a bizarre operating system-like interface, the game invites players into a non-linear narrative filled with counseling sessions, diary entries, and an intriguing mix of multimedia storytelling. Our protagonist, Lain, navigates through psychological and digital realms that blur reality and the Wired, sparking thought-provoking questions about existence and identity. This deep dive not only explores the game’s unconventional gameplay but also how it forms a part of the broader Lain universe, all while teasing the mysteries between these two different formats.
Highlights
The PS1 game opens not with a typical menu but an unsettling operating system screen, setting the mysterious tone. 🖥️
Players engage with the game through Lain, navigating nodes of data in a kaleidoscopic storytelling format. 🌌
Key storylines include Lain's counseling, her personal life, and overarching events tying back to the haunting anime series. 📖
Key Takeaways
Dive into the eerie world of Serial Experiments Lain on PS1, a game that defies conventional categorization! 🎮
Experience a narrative that explores existence, identity, and the blurred lines between reality and the Wired. 💭
Discover how the game ties into the iconic anime series, offering new perspectives and deepening the mystery of Lain. 🎥
Overview
Embark on a journey into the surreal world of Serial Experiments Lain, where the boundaries between reality and the Wired blur in this unique PS1 game. Unlike any typical title, the game eschews standard gameplay mechanics for a more narrative-driven experience that plays out like a virtual opera of psychological exploration.
Emphasizing the eerie and philosophical, players navigate a giant cylinder brimming with nodes, each unlocking layers of the story through counseling sessions, diary entries, and animated cutscenes. The storytelling is non-linear, challenging players to piece together the narrative’s fragmented reality, mirroring Lain's own fractured experience.
The game is a fascinating companion piece to the 1998 anime, serving not as a prequel or sequel, but a vital thread in the web of Lain's universe. It invites players to reconsider what it means to exist, layer upon digital and corporal planes, in a narrative as cryptic as it is compelling.
Chapters
00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Game Setup The chapter 'Introduction and Game Setup' begins with the familiar startup animations of Sony Computer Entertainment and PlayStation logos. Instead of a traditional opening cinematic or title menu, players are presented with an operating system boot screen. Here, they must choose to either authorize a user or load data to proceed further into the game.
03:00 - 11:00: Game Mechanics and Initial Impressions The chapter titled 'Game Mechanics and Initial Impressions' recounts the author's first experience playing a game. The first step was to authorize and choose a user name, 'ダンジョン' which hints at a future relevance. After naming, the player enters a game world where 'Lain' is the avatar, depicted as a 2D sprite within a data-filled cylindrical space set against a black void with colorful lines. The environment is likened to a Windows 95 screensaver emphasizing its unusual appearance for a gaming setting.
11:00 - 23:00: Background and Creation of Serial Experiments Lain The chapter discusses Lain's interactions with a mysterious cylindrical structure covered in nodes. Each node has an abbreviation and number, the purpose of which is initially unclear to the observer. Lain is able to open some nodes, revealing surprises as if unwrapping Christmas presents, though not all nodes are accessible to her. Occasionally, Lain fails to open a node, and some nodes are equipped with defensive mechanisms that emit electric shocks when tampered with. Successfully opened nodes can lead to new screens, indicating a progression to different stages or levels.
23:00 - 70:00: Analysis of Anime Series: Serial Experiments Lain In this chapter, the focus is on analyzing the anime series 'Serial Experiments Lain.' It opens with an examination of the interactive elements found within the series, notably the node screens that offer keywords and options to either play or exit. The play option leads to audio recordings, which can be either conversations or diary entries. The narrative describes an interaction within the structure of the series by navigating up and down a cylinder while selecting various nodes, suggesting a unique, non-linear storytelling approach.
70:00 - 137:40: In-depth Look at the Game's Story The chapter delves into understanding the narrative structure of a game, exploring the elements that construct its storyline. It emphasizes the process of gathering information through dialogues, diary entries, and short animations. These components contribute to forming the game's story. It also raises questions about the game's purpose and its connection to the 1998 anime series Serial Experiments Lain. The chapter sets the stage for a comprehensive explanation of these aspects throughout the video.
137:40 - 156:20: Connections Between the Game and Anime The chapter delves into the PlayStation 1 game, Serial Experiments Lain, and explores its intricate connections with its anime counterpart. It raises questions about the medium of the game, suggesting that it functions as a mixed media experiment. The chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how the game intertwines with the themes and narrative style of the Serial Experiments Lain anime, offering insights into its development and publication.
156:20 - 177:30: The Legacy and Cultural Impact of Serial Experiments Lain This chapter explores the legacy and cultural impact of Serial Experiments Lain, focusing on its unique storytelling and thematic exploration of communication and existence in digital spaces. It touches on the initial release history, specifically noting the PlayStation game released by Pioneer LDC on November 26, 1998, exclusively in Japan. The anime, familiar to Western fans, is a 13-episode series that originally aired from July 6 to September 28, 1998. The narrative centers on a 14-year-old girl named Lain Iwakura, who receives a mysterious email from a deceased classmate urging her to rendezvous in the 'Wired,' a virtual world akin to the internet. The series' deep dive into existential themes amidst digital communication has left a lasting cultural footprint, influencing various media forms.
177:30 - 183:00: Final Thoughts The chapter 'Final Thoughts' reflects on the philosophical aspects of the internet and technology through the story of Lain.
183:00 - 187:30: Acknowledgements and Video Conclusion The chapter titled 'Acknowledgements and Video Conclusion' explores the concept of Serial Experiments Lain as a media franchise that extends beyond just the television series. It delves into various elements of the franchise including the PlayStation 1 video game and several supplemental materials. These supplementary resources include 'Scenario Experiments Lain,' which consists of collected and annotated screenplays, 'Visual Experiments Lain,' an episodic breakdown manual presented in a collage style, and a collection of design and conceptual artworks related to the series.
The Mysterious Serial Experiments Lain PS1 Game Transcription
00:00 - 00:30 When you begin Serial Experiments Lain for
the PS1, after the familiar Sony Computer Entertainment and PlayStation logo start
up animations, you’re greeted not by an opening cinematic or a title menu, but
by this operating system boot screen. You’re then prompted to choose either
to authorize a user or load data.
00:30 - 01:00 Since this was my first time playing, I
authorized a user. On the name entry screen, I chose the name “ダンジョン” for obvious reasons, but we’ll look at how this came back
to bite me much later on in this video. Anyway, after inputting a name, you’re thrown
into the game. The titular Lain is your avatar, rendered as a 2D sprite, trapped
inside a cylinder of data amongst a black void with colored lines
streaking through the background. Occasionally an orb of yellow light will float by. The whole thing looks more like a Windows 95
screen saver than a setting for a video game.
01:00 - 01:30 Around the outside of each level of
the cylinder are nodes, labeled with abbreviations and numbers. What these letters and
numbers signify, you’ll have no idea at first. Lain can open some of the nodes, unwrapping them like Christmas presents
and throwing them toward the screen. Others she can’t open. Sometimes she takes a swing at
them and misses. Sometimes the nodes have their own defences and will
zap Lain with a shock of electricity. The ones that open transition
to a new screen with several
01:30 - 02:00 keywords and a choice between Play
and Exit in the bottom left corner. Hitting play within these node screens will start audio recordings of either
conversations or diary entries. And so you proceed, up the cylinder,
down the cylinder, selecting nodes,
02:00 - 02:30 hoping for them to open, scratching your
head at the ones that don’t, and slowly, by listening to the scattered
conversations and diary entries, as well as watching short snippets of
animated sequences, a story begins to form. But what does it all mean? Where is the actual game? What are we meant to be doing here? And what does any of this have
to do with the groundbreaking 1998 anime series Serial Experiments Lain? To explain all of that is going to take...
well, about the length of this video.
02:30 - 03:00 Welcome to the mysterious Serial
Experiments Lain PlayStation 1 game. Serial Experiments Lain is a... game? Audio drama?
Mixed media experiment? developed and published by
03:00 - 03:30 Pioneer LDC and released for the PlayStation
1 on November 26, 1998 exclusively in Japan. I’m sure that most Western fans are familiar
with the Serial Experiments Lain anime, which is a 13-episode television series that
aired from July 6 to September 28, 1998 in Japan. Serial Experiments Lain is about a 14-year old
girl named Lain Iwakura who gets a mysterious email from a dead classmate, telling her to meet
her in the Wired, the series’ equivalent to the
03:30 - 04:00 internet, because there you can leave
behind your physical form and meet God. Lain initially is uninterested in computers, but gradually becomes more and more
obsessed with technology and the Wired. It turns out, she has a preternatural gift for hacking and finds herself entangled in a
conflict between several shadowy groups. That’s a very straightforward
summary of the series. Anyone who’s ever sat down and watched
Serial Experiments Lain will tell you the story and presentation are
anything but straightforward.
04:00 - 04:30 Furthermore, what some Western fans may
not be aware of is the fact that Serial Experiments Lain was envisioned by
its creators as a media franchise. This franchise includes the television
series, Serial Experiments Lain, and the PlayStation 1 video
game, Serial Experiments Lain. To go along with the two main entries in the
franchise are several supplemental materials: The collected and annotated screenplays, Scenario
Experiments Lain; the collage-style episodic breakdown manual, Visual Experiments Lain; and
the design and conceptual artworks collection,
04:30 - 05:00 An Omnipresence in Wired, which also includes
a short manga that acts as a bridge between the stories of the video game and the anime
series, titled The Nightmare of Fabrication. Not to mention the various soundtracks, singles,
and remix albums. An interactive CD-ROM with a bunch of artwork and other goofy stuff on
it. As well as various other illustrations and design documents that you can dig
up online if you’re really determined. And I was really determined.
Thanks, Internet Archive.
05:00 - 05:30 Of course, it’s not uncommon for
anime series to feature video games, supplemental materials, artbooks, as well
as soundtracks to accompany their release, and it’s not uncommon for most of that miscellanea
to remain exclusive to Japan, especially in 1998. The game and the TV series both
entered production at the same time, though the game appeared two months
after the series had finished airing, and it concerns events that take place when
Lain was younger than she is in the TV series.
05:30 - 06:00 I carefully worded that last statement for
reasons that will become clearer much later on. If you really want to get technical, The
Nightmare of Fabrication was the first Lain thing ever unleashed onto the world, having been
published in the March 1998 issue of AX Magazine. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if
that was my first exposure to Lain. But anyway, to unpack everything about this game, we need to look at the TV series as well,
since their creations were so intertwined. I had seen Lain several times when I was younger, but it had been a few years, more like
a decade, since I had last watched it.
06:00 - 06:30 So before I played the game, I rewatched
Serial Experiments Lain, the TV series, twice. Once in Japanese with no subtitles
and once in Japanese with subtitles. People familiar with this channel will know that
I live in Japan and speak and read Japanese, so the whole watching it with and without
subtitles was just my own personal experiment. As you become more proficient in any language,
translation subtitles just start to become distracting more than helpful, but I was still
interested in seeing how things were translated.
06:30 - 07:00 I then played through the Serial Experiments
Lain PlayStation 1 game through a browser reimplementation of the game developed by the
team at 3d.laingame.net who went to great pains to rebuild the game so it could run, most
effectively, on chromium-based browsers. I played this version of the game
because it features English subtitles, whereas there is no fan
translation for the PS1 iso. As we’ll come to see, Serial Experiments Lain is made up almost exclusively of audio
conversations between characters, so having those subtitles on screen to use for
footage in this video is going to be helpful.
07:00 - 07:30 By the way, through the web implementation, you
can play the game in French, German, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese,
or Russian, not just English. The team is open to translating
it into other languages too, so you can contact them on their github page
if you can provide that kind of support. A link to the website that hosts the
game is in the description of this video. It’s impressive that they’ve
managed to reproduce it for browsers. You can save your progress
and everything, which is great, because 100%-ing Serial Experiments Lain
took me about 17 hours in total.
07:30 - 08:00 After completing the game, I also read through the
game manual as well as the official game guide, which for some reason was only in Chinese
in the bundle I found on Internet Archive, so I had to use Google Translate for that. I was hunting for any other information or clues
that would help me unravel this thing’s mysteries. The number one thing I was
interested in was finding any solid connections between the anime
series story and the game’s story. I also captured a bit of the actual PS1 game
08:00 - 08:30 to get some clean footage for
certain parts of this video. After that, I catalogued my recorded footage. As we’ll discuss later, the game is
presented in a non-linear fashion, so I was attempting to piece together the
story chronologically as best I could. Next, I read through Scenario Experiments Lain, the collected and annotated TV series screenplays
by series composer and scriptwriter Chiaki Konaka. And when I say annotated, I mean that
there are tons and tons of footnotes written by Konaka himself concerning the creation of the show and expanding upon ideas that
the creators were interested in exploring.
08:30 - 09:00 As with most creators who
write non-linear, surreal, difficult to understand stories,
Konaka isn’t so keen on providing direct explanations to some of the more
mysterious aspects of the narrative, but there’s some interesting information and
funny stories about the production in here. Then, I read Visual Experiments Lain,
which functions as a sort of artbook, but also contains breakdowns of key
points for each episode of the TV series. There’s more information here
that gives clearer answers to some of the mysteries of the show, but
it still doesn’t illuminate everything.
09:00 - 09:30 As is stated several times throughout this book
specifically, the creators meant for many aspects of the story to remain ambiguous and even they
don’t have concrete answers for certain things. I then read An Omnipresence in Wired, more of
a traditional artbook with notes from original character designer and key animator Yoshitoshi
ABe about the creation of various characters, devices, and locations throughout the series. An Omnipresence in Wired also
contains a 19-page one-shot
09:30 - 10:00 manga written and illustrated by ABe
titled The Nightmare of Fabrication. Also, serendipitously, while I was in the midst of
my research for this video, Japanese entertainment magazine CONTINUE Motion Graphics’ January
2025 issue hit newsstands on December 18, 2024. And in this issue, number 85,
is a 50-page retrospective on the entire Serial Experiments Lain franchise, including interviews with producer Yasuyuki Ueda
and original character designer Yoshitoshi ABe.
10:00 - 10:30 I had no idea this was going to come out when it
did. I’d never even heard of this magazine before. I happened upon it when I was walking by my
local Kinokuniya book store. Talk about fate. While reading through these supplemental
materials, I watched several live action and animated series connected to the
main creators of Serial Experiments Lain. I also played through a few other PS1
games that were designed or written by some of Lain’s creators. And I’ll talk about
all of these things when they become relevant. When I finally sat down to start
writing the script for this video,
10:30 - 11:00 I watched Serial Experiments Lain again to capture clean footage from the 2010 Japanese
Blu-ray re-release of the series. As I continued to write the
script, I ended up watching Serial Experiments Lain again. This
time with the English dub, which is surprisingly included on the 2010
Japanese Blu-ray re-release of the series. Funny thing, this Blu-ray collection
features no subtitles or captions in either Japanese or English,
which is pretty annoying but is actually par for the course for
a lot of Japanese anime releases. Even now, most of the more popular late night
anime series don't receive closed captioning,
11:00 - 11:30 neither when they air on Japanese television nor
when they get released in overpriced Blu-ray sets. It’s downright insensitive. The pricing and the lack of
consideration for the hearing impaired. The Lain Blu-ray set’s pretty affordable, though. As of this writing, you can
get it for 9,590 yen which is about 60 US dollars, again at the current
exchange rate at the time I’m writing this. It’s available on Amazon Japan, and I’m
pretty sure they deliver it internationally, so you know, if you want a high-quality
Blu-ray set and don’t mind the lack
11:30 - 12:00 of subtitles but the inclusion of the
English dub, then you should look into it. It’s a better package than the Funimation Complete Series Classic DVD and Blu-ray
combo set that I also own. Oh yeah, I watched the series again
while I was editing this video too, just because, I don’t know, just
because I wanted to watch it again. So I watched the series 5 times over the
course of making this video, so yeah. But, all of this to say that
I did my homework. And took a practically 6-week intensive course
on everything Serial Experiments Lain
12:00 - 12:30 and related that I could get my
hands on to bring you this video. So, I hope even the most hardcore of series
fans learn at least one new thing during the length of this... retrospective. I don’t
know. Whatever you want to call this. But now, let’s actually talk
about Serial Experiments Lain, where it came from and who created it.
12:30 - 13:00 The creation of Serial Experiments
Lain involves several key people, but the seed of the idea was an observation
by producer Yasuyuki Ueda concerning the relationship between individuals and the
faceless mass of humanity that surrounds us. There was no significance to
focusing the story around the internet and technology. Ueda only saw these
as tools that had become part of daily life,
13:00 - 13:30 so to tell a modern story,
it made sense to use them. The members of the production team he
eventually assembled also happened to be techno-obsessed freaks as well. So that helped. The 90s saw the rise of the commercial internet, and it changed the way people could
interact with each other on a global scale. Even though sites like Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram were still quite a ways off--even Myspace wouldn’t come
into existence until 5 years after the series
13:30 - 14:00 first premiered--the idea of social media was
already proliferating in less centralized ways: message boards, chat rooms, peer to peer servers. In fact, the phrase “social media”
was coined in 1994 by a developer named Darrel Berry as he was working on Matisse, a proto social media environment that was meant
to combine VR with text-based communication, in much the same way that the Wired functions in
Serial Experiments Lain, and in much the same way that many science fiction authors envisioned the
internet to function some time in the near future.
14:00 - 14:30 Yet here we are, in the year 2025, still smacking
our meat paws against keyboards and touch screens. But the ways in which the internet changed
a persons’ perception of not only their own self but of others as well were the
origins of what would become Lain, so Ueda wrote up a project
document sometime in 1996. Looking through interviews both online and in
those supplemental books that I mentioned earlier, it’s clear that Serial Experiments
Lain was a hugely collaborative effort.
14:30 - 15:00 But who were these other weirdos
involved in its creation? On the writing side of things, there was Chiaki
Konaka, sometimes credited as Chiaki J. Konaka. The “J” comes from the biblical name “John,”
a nod to his parents’ affiliation with the Christian church, though Konaka himself has
stated he doesn’t identify as a Christian. Producer Yasuyuki Ueda stated in an
interview for the magazine FRUiTS, in the October 1st, 1998 issue, that he
and Konaka had crossed paths earlier on in their careers, and Konaka was
a well known writer at the time.
15:00 - 15:30 As a scenario and scriptwriter, Konaka had
previously worked on several Ultraman series in the 90s, including Ultraman Tiga, which I
mentioned in my video Goichi Suda Syndrome, since there’s a lengthy reference to
Ultraman Tiga in Moonlight Syndrome. Konaka would go on to write the original video
animation, or OVA, series Armitage the Third. The movie adaptation, Armitage
the Third: Poly-Matrix, was a staple of the Sci-Fi Channel’s
Saturday Anime rotation in the late 90s. I rewatched Armitage the Third as part of
my research for this video. It’d probably
15:30 - 16:00 been about 25 years since I’d last seen it,
and I had fond, yet vague memories of it. Turns out, it’s not great. Its ideas and themes regarding
the advancement of AI and robotic lifeforms are interesting. The art
direction and visuals are fantastic. But the actual plot is pretty weak. I mean... Robots? Getting pregnant? In this economy? Also in 1995, Konaka wrote the
live-action television series Alice 6, which was directed by his
younger brother Kazuya Konaka.
16:00 - 16:30 It concerns six models who are hired by a
mysterious crew to pose for a photo shoot in the forest. The crew vanish during the shoot
and the girls find themselves pursued by a man in a white rabbit costume and each episode sees
them falling through several dreamlike scenarios. The series was part of a trend in Japan
in the 80s and 90s called “area code programming” wherein short series were created
on shoe-string budgets for local networks. Alice 6 was shot on location in
Shizuoka prefecture and aired only
16:30 - 17:00 on local Shizuoka channels and some other
local networks in surrounding prefectures. For a long time, it was considered lost media,
but shout out to Dozzyrok on YouTube who managed to dig it up and 11 of the 12 episodes
have received an English fan translation. The last episode is just a bonus
recap and cast interview segment, so I guess that’s why there’s no translation
for it. Episode 11 is the end of the story. There’s a link to the playlist of
the English subtitled episodes in this video description, if
you want to check it out. It may or may not still be there
depending on when you’re watching this.
17:00 - 17:30 I watched all 12 episodes of Alice 6
as part of my research for this video. Turns out, it’s not great. It’s low budget, nonsensical, and way
too on the nose with its references to Lewis Carrol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Just because I said it’s not great,
though, doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. Get ready for many extended photo shoot montages
set to C-tier mid-90s Japanese pop tracks. And one episode consists almost
entirely of an amateurish magic show performed for a group of younger kids,
and everybody looks like they didn’t rehearse
17:30 - 18:00 the scene and are just a goofing around
during a school talent show or something. It’s actually really charming. Konaka also had some experience in video games,
having written the visual novel/rock-paper-scissor style turn-based fighting game Alice in Cyberland
released on December 20, 1996 for PlayStation 1.
18:00 - 18:30 I played Alice in Cyberland as
part of my research for this video. Turns out, it’s not great. Its plot and world aren’t very interesting, and the combat system is
frustratingly slow and boring. I don’t really have anything else to say about
it. It’s not great, and I didn’t enjoy playing it. There’s also a 2-episode OVA
series based on the game, but it didn’t involve Konaka,
so I didn’t bother with it. One thing that’s interesting about Armitage
the Third, Alice 6, and Alice in Cyberland
18:30 - 19:00 is that they all carry concepts that are
reused frequently throughout Konaka’s work. Chiefly, the obsession with technology and
how it affects our identity and sense of self, fragmenting us into different personas. There are also other superficial connections
that Konaka himself points out in the footnotes of the first episode screenplay of Serial
Experiments Lain in Scenario Experiments Lain. A version of the NAVI computer system that’s so prominently used in Lain was first
introduced in Armitage the Third. I don’t know if any of the characters in
Armitage ever actually utter the phrase NAVI,
19:00 - 19:30 but according to Konaka, he used that
name for the devices in his screenplays. The name Arisu, the phonetic pronunciation of
Alice in Japanese and one of Lain’s classmates in the TV series, appears to
be a favorite of Konaka’s. You think there’s enough Alice in
Wonderland references in his mid-90s work? According to another footnote
from Scenario Experiments Lain, he first used the name, Arisu, in an
episode he wrote for the 1994 live-action anthology horror series “Gakkou no
Kaidan” or “School Ghost Stories.”
19:30 - 20:00 His episode was titled “Zekkyou High
School” or “Screaming High School.” I did not watch this episode during my
research, because I couldn’t find it. I found several of the films that spun off from
this television series and an anime adaptation, but none of these involved
Konaka, so I didn’t bother. I did manage to find a scan of the
episode screenplay on what I can only assume is Konaka’s personal website,
Konaka.com, that was last updated in 2010.
20:00 - 20:30 And yeah, you can tell this site was built
in 1997 and just left that way. What a trip. There are screenplays for 2 more Gakkou
no Kaidan episodes that Konaka wrote, as well as various other screenplays, including
one he wrote for a The Big O audio drama CD. He even wrote a scenario for an Alice in
Cyberland 2 game, which was never made. Part 2 of this scenario is
subtitled “The 7th Protocol.” Those who’ve seen the Serial Experiments Lain anime will recognize this as
the series’ main macguffin. And I refer to it as a macguffin, because
that’s how Konaka himself describes it in
20:30 - 21:00 his footnote when the 7th protocol is
introduced in the episode 8 screenplay. The names Juri, Chisa Yomoda, and Reika,
other classmates in Serial Experiments Lain, were first used in the Alice 6 series. Arisu, Juri, and Reika were then
used as the names of the three protagonists in the Alice in Cyberland PS1 game. After watching and reading some of the
different incarnations of these characters, I can say that there are some similar
traits that Konaka gives to each version,
21:00 - 21:30 but they’re not meant to be the same character or
create any kind of metaverse between his works. Thank god. Instead, I think it’s simply that he likes
using the same names over and over. Fair enough. For Lain’s artwork and design, Ueda found Yoshitoshi ABe who was
a university student at the time. Ueda found his homepage while just browsing the
internet one day, so the story goes, and contacted him to see if he’d be interested in becoming the
lead artist on this new project Ueda was creating. ABe didn’t hesitate to take the job, even
though he had hardly any experience drawing
21:30 - 22:00 manga at the time, let alone drawing the
same character over and over again. And it goes without saying that he’d never worked
on a game or TV series production before. It turned out to be a perfect fit though, and
ABe not only designed almost all aspects of the visual presentation in Lain, from the characters
to the machines and devices to the environments that the story would take place in, but also gave
his own ideas for character arcs and story beats. Though a novice in every sense of the word, he
became an integral part of the production team,
22:00 - 22:30 even taking on the role of key
animator on several episodes. Serial Experiments Lain would launch ABe to a
successful career throughout the early 2000s, where he would go on to create the series
NieA_7, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze. That last one would reunite
him with writer Chiaki Konaka. All of these series were produced
by Yasuyuki Ueda as well. Junji Nakahara was chosen as director
for the Serial Experiments Lain game, having worked on a previous Pioneer
LDC game, NOeL: Not Digital.
22:30 - 23:00 NOeL: Not Digital is another
strange, Operating System based, mixed media product released
for the PlayStation 1 in 1996. It had two sequels, NOeL: La Neige, which is
French for “snow,”--and wouldn’t ya know it? the game takes place in winter--released
on PlayStation 1 and NOeL 3 on Saturn with an enhanced port, NOel 3: Mission on the Line,
released later on for the PlayStation 1 as well. The first two games, Not Digital
and La Neige, are dating sims.
23:00 - 23:30 However, unlike most Japanese dating sims where
you interact with your digital love interests in person (inside the game world anyway), in NOeL
you make video calls to 3 girls that you met during summer break, with the hope of having one
of them confess to you by the end of the year. So it’s like a long distance dating simulation. It’s a pretty complex game. By receiving messages and progressing
through conversations with the girls, you learn their interests and their schedules. NOeL features an in-game clock
that can be advanced at will, but you can’t go backwards in time.
23:30 - 24:00 You need to call at the girls at the
right time of day, otherwise you’ll get their answering machines. They have
their own busy personal lives, after all. Sometimes you need to wait for them to call you. While talking to them, keywords will
scroll by and need to be caught in order to further different conversation branches. Since everything is happening in real
time, you have to catch the topics and then click on them to advance the
conversation at the right moment. Just like in an actual conversation with
someone, if you bring up something she doesn’t want to talk about, broach a topic
at the wrong time, or just don’t respond
24:00 - 24:30 with anything as she’s talking, she may
get irritated and even hang up on you. Relive the highlights of your own miserable love life by messing up phone conversations
and crying in shame after hanging up. It’s a strange, yet surprisingly engaging
experience, once you get the hang of it. The game. Not, uh, not real life.
You’ll never get the hang of that. Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, given the
amount of dialogue and the unique interface, it’s never received a fan translation of any kind. NOeL 3 abandons the dating sim format and
instead has you hacking different security cameras inside your school, which has been
taken over by a group of techno-terrorists,
24:30 - 25:00 and you need to guide the
other students to safety. Interesting note, Ryutaro Nakamura,
director of the Serial Experiments Lain anime, directed the movie portions of NoEL 3. Anyway, Junji Nakahara is credited as
the planner and gameplay director on the first game, and after messing
around with this thing, it’s easy to see how the Serial Experiments
Lain game came out the way it did. There are a few other key members of the creative
team that were more heavily involved in the Serial Experiments Lain anime, so I’ll talk about them
when I get around to talking about the series.
25:00 - 25:30 As I said earlier, Serial Experiments Lain
was originally conceived as a video game. Yet even from the outset, the creators knew
they were using the term “game” only loosely. Very, very loosely. What you see is what you get. There is
nothing more to the Serial Experiments
25:30 - 26:00 Lain game beyond navigating this large Lain
avatar up and down this cylinder of data and selecting nodes, hoping that they’ll
open up and reveal something to you. Gameplay consists of pressing left or
right to highlight different nodes, turning the cylinder, and ascending or descending
to different levels to try to access more nodes. All the while, the only music
track you’ll hear is the same, music box style tune, over and over and over. My God.
26:00 - 26:30 It’s maddening. This song starts out as an eerie
backdrop and sets a particular mood, but very quickly wears out its welcome. It’s only about 2 minutes long, and because
you’ll be popping in and out of the node screens, which have no music by the way, it always
restarts when you come back to the main area. I thought about looping it in the
background for the entire length of this video to simulate a play
session, but I’m not that cruel.
26:30 - 27:00 No, really, I’m not. When you start a new game, the
node Cou001 is highlighted. Selecting this node transitions to
a screen with three keywords listed. There’s a Play button that’s currently
highlighted in the bottom left corner, so selecting play begins a
conversation between a woman and Lain. It appears to be their first meeting, and the woman tries to break the
ice by offering Lain a beverage.
27:00 - 27:30 They discuss the qualities of Earl Grey tea,
and that’s about it for this conversation. After the recording ends, you have a few choices. You can try selecting one of the other keywords.
These will transport you to different connected nodes that could be on any level of the cylinder
and concern similar topics of conversation. But these nodes may or may not be
accessible to you at this time. In fact, a lot of them just throw
an error, especially early on. Or you can exit the node and continue exploring
the current level you’re on. After a node has been
27:30 - 28:00 completed it will turn gray, and this is how you
keep track of your progress throughout the game. One thing to note, the PS1 version
of the game had an autosave feature that would save after every completed
node. The browser version does not, and you’ll need to manually save
your progress from the menu. If you decide to try out the
browser version of the game, don’t forget to save your progress often. In any case, the goal of gameplay
is simple. Turn all the nodes gray. There are several other things you’re going
to need to do to make that happen though.
28:00 - 28:30 As I mentioned near the beginning,
there are different types of nodes, all denoted by different
abbreviations and numbers. The Cou nodes are counseling recordings. The story of Serial Experiments
Lain the game hinges on the monthly therapy sessions between Lain and her
counselor, 27-year old Touko Yonera. Dia nodes are diagnosis recordings. These are
Touko’s summaries of the counseling sessions, which reveal a colder and more clinical
attitude toward Lain as a patient,
28:30 - 29:00 or client, as Touko calls her. And, I mean, I guess that’s only natural.
The diagnosis recordings are meant to be sent to her supervisor, and
this is her job, after all. But it’s interesting to hear the illusion of
friendliness and camaraderie that Touko tries to project toward Lain in the counseling sessions
shattered by these professional observations. There are also Tda nodes. These
are Touko’s diary where we learn more about her personal life and her
own feelings about Lain and her work. Naturally, the diary entries are more
confessional and reveal another side to
29:00 - 29:30 Touko’s character. They also detail several
subplots that aren’t related to Lain at all. Lain also begins keeping a diary at the behest
of Touko. And these are labeled as Lda nodes. Lain’s diaries detail her home and school life, as well as reflect on some of the counseling
sessions. Much like with Touko’s diary, there are entire subplots here that
have no connection with the counseling. Then there are Dc or digital camera
nodes. These are animated cinematics, produced by Triangle Staff, the same studio
that would go on to produce the anime.
29:30 - 30:00 Here the character designs look
slightly different. This is because they were created based off of
ABe’s original designs by Hitoshi Haga, while the anime series character designs
were handled by Takahiro Kishida. These animated sequences connect to some of
the counseling and diary entries at times, but mostly end up telling a separate story that
becomes important toward the very end of the game. Chiaka Konaka, who originally worked on the
overall composition of the game’s story and
30:00 - 30:30 wrote the screenplay for the animated segments, moved on to writing the screenplays for the
anime when the game entered full production. So the writing of all the dialogue in the game
was done by Hideko Shimizu. And I have to say, with the game’s more intense focus on
characters and conversation, Shimizu’s more naturalistic writing style works far better
than Konaka’s minimalistic approach to dialogue. Conversations in the game are rich
with nuance and character’s hiding their true intentions, especially in the
conversations between Lain and Touko.
30:30 - 31:00 Hearing their talks and then
hearing Touko’s diagnosis, then hearing her personal
thoughts in her diary entries, then hearing Lain’s thoughts in her own diary,
it weaves a complex web of a relationship. Far greater in depth than anything
done in the anime. Though to be fair, the anime had different aims, and I think Konaka’s writing there is brilliant and fits
what they were going for perfectly. Continuing on with the nodes, though, there
are a few that don’t divulge more of the story, but are essential for making progress in the game. The first of these are the Sskn nodes, which
stand for Saisei-kun. Saisei has several different
31:00 - 31:30 meanings in Japanese: “restoration,
regeneration, reclamation, recall.” Any one of these translations could
be a good fit for these nodes, because they’re upgrades, which
allow Lain to access more nodes. Remember how some nodes wouldn’t
open or would actively attack Lain? These upgrades allow you to bypass
their locks and defense mechanisms. Along with that, there are GaTE nodes, which are Gate Passes. You’ll need to collect
four of these to access the next cylinder.
31:30 - 32:00 That’s right. The current cylinder where the game starts is labelled as Site
A, and there are 22 levels. There’s also a Site B, but you need to
collect all 4 Gate Passes in order to access it. Site B contains a few more
Sskn nodes and only has 13 levels. On the PS1 version of the game, Site A was
on Disc 1 and Site B was on Disc 2. You swap between them by opening the menu and selecting
“Change” once you’ve collected all 4 Gate passes. In the browser version, this swap happens
automatically after a short loading screen.
32:00 - 32:30 There are also P2 nodes, each corresponding to
a different body part of the Poly-tan doll, a 3D render that may or may not hold any significance
to the overall story, but completing the doll unlocks more nodes, so collecting all of its
parts is essential to completing the game. If all of this doesn’t already sound
complicated enough, even after you’ve collected all of the upgrades, gate passes, and
Polytan parts, certain nodes will not unlock. And not all of the nodes that do unlock are
visible at first glance. Some only appear
32:30 - 33:00 after listening to other nodes, and the ones
that then appear may not unlock right away. There are also bonus scenes that play if you
stay idle on each level of the cylinders. Some of these will play conversations
that you’ll gain access to later, but others will play more animated cutscenes
outside of the Dc nodes that show different parts of the story that were hinted at in
diary entries or just other bizarre moments.
33:00 - 33:30 And so, this is how the game
goes, traversing the cylinders, attempting to open nodes, listening
to conversations and diary entries, watching short movies, collecting
upgrades, trying to move forward. The numbers on the nodes put them
in chronological order, but not all of them are accessible in chronological order. Also, they are only in chronological order
in relation to nodes of the same type. Yet the overall story is broken up between
all of these different types of nodes.
33:30 - 34:00 What this means is, piecing together when certain
events take place between the counseling sessions, diary entries, and movie clips is difficult
as you’re playing through the game. This is intentional on the part
of the creators. There’s a linear story here, but you’re not meant to
experience it in a linear fashion. In fact, as we’ll see later, even attempting to
cut up recorded footage of a playthrough and place all of the different types of nodes in the exact
chronological order in which they all take place
34:00 - 34:30 proves to be a very difficult task, because
there are intentional gaps in the narrative. There are a couple of different
ways to tackle the game as well. You could attempt to move
through the levels in order, backing out of node screens and scouring
the cylinder for the next numerical node. Or you could use the keyword
system and piece together the story through its themes in a more
abstract way. The choice is yours. I’ll say this, though the characters and
the narrative are interesting and engaging, playing through the game to try to piece
the story together is a test of patience.
34:30 - 35:00 For every video I make, I take extensive notes
while playing through games and capturing footage. Since I was playing through this game in
a browser. This is what that process looked like. I’d access a node, write down its
alphabetic and numerical code, and write a brief description of what
the conversation or movie clip was about. This was work. It was like
having a data entry job. And it only became more tedious
as the playthrough wore on. Now, I knew I’d be making a video, so having all of these notes and timestamps
and everything clearly labeled was essential. But even without all of this, actually playing
Serial Experiments Lain can be pretty monotonous.
35:00 - 35:30 I’d recommend just going with the flow,
trying to follow keywords, not worrying about what nodes unlock and which ones don’t,
and just letting the narrative wash over you. Eventually, in Site B, on either levels 12 or 13, you’ll reach the final counseling, diagnosis,
Dc, Touko’s diary, and Lain’s diary nodes. Each of these will trigger an ending cutscene.
And by this point, you will not have been able to open all of the nodes, so you know
where this is going: a 2nd playthrough.
35:30 - 36:00 After the ending cutscene plays, Lain will
turn and face the screen and actually say the name that you input on the name entry screen when
you started a new game, or authorized a new user. And here’s where entering my name as
“ダンジョン” came back to bite me in the ass. She couldn’t say the name. I don’t know if this is a bug in
the browser version or the same would have happened on the PS1
original, but I was stuck here. No matter how many times I reloaded,
tried different ending nodes,
36:00 - 36:30 refreshed my browser, nothing worked. I thought this was it, and I wouldn’t be
able to continue, or I’d have to start over. By this point, I’d played
for about 9 hours, though, and having to start over would have been painful. So I started digging around the 3d.laingame site. On the options page, at the bottom
of the screen was a dialogue box that contained the “save file” for the game. Scrolling to the bottom of this text, reveals the
player name, which was still displayed as “ダンジョン”. Since Lain was having such
a hard time saying this,
36:30 - 37:00 I decided to delete some characters
until my name was just “ダ”. I then hit the load state button and reloaded
the website, as per the instructions here. This time, after triggering the
ending cutscene and arriving at the screen where Lain says the player’s name, she said it and the game advanced to a screen
asking me whether or not I wanted to continue. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Hitting “end” will just bump you back to
the authorize user or load data screen. Hitting “continue” will send Lain back to
Site A where not only will you be able to
37:00 - 37:30 access more of the nodes you couldn’t on a first
playthrough, but new nodes will also appear. There are even some new types
of nodes that show up. The Tak, or talk, nodes. These are short audio
clips that I’ll discuss more later on. During the 2nd playthrough, more of Touko’s
diary becomes available, specifically entries that deal with events before the start of the
game that are hinted at in the 1st playthrough. More of Lain’s diary entries
also become available, but not all of them. There’s
one that still won’t open.
37:30 - 38:00 There are also new Ekm, Ere, and Eda nodes that
appear but don’t open. On this playthrough. That’s right. Once you’ve opened all of the
nodes that you can during a 2nd playthrough, it’s time to trigger the last cutscene
through one of the other ending nodes again. The cutscene does not change. Nor will it for the next 4 times you need to run through
the game to unlock every single node. So technically, you need to go through seven playthroughs to see
everything the game has to offer.
38:00 - 38:30 I’m using the term “playthrough” as loosely as the developers used the term
“game” when designing this thing. Each time you view one of the ending
nodes, more of the other nodes will unlock, with the final nodes being those
talk nodes I mentioned earlier. And as I said they’re just
Lain speaking a few lines that honestly don’t have any bearing on the story. In fact, during my fifth playthrough,
I started to get the feeling that the game’s designers were mocking me
for digging this deeply into things.
38:30 - 39:00 But there were still new nodes unlocking
that revealed more of the overall story. Now, could you just hit continue after viewing
the ending cutscene and head straight for the top of Site B to complete another ending
node, and just do that 5 times in a row to have everything totally unlocked without
scouring both Sites A and B each and every time? I don’t know. I didn’t try it. I don’t know if certain nodes need to be completed
before viewing an ending again unlocks others.
39:00 - 39:30 If anyone has any clue
about that, leave a comment. Being able to just bum rush the
endings and then have everything open on one pass through both Sites
would make things slightly, SLIGHTLY, less tedious, I suppose, but there are
still a lot of nodes to go through. 687 in total. And I unlocked every single one of them. So now you know, basically, what the structure
of this game is and how to complete it.
39:30 - 40:00 But what is our reward for doing
this? What grand narrative does all of this menuing and data entry reveal? Well, we’ll get to that. First of all, most people experienced the TV
series before the game, so I feel like it makes sense to talk about the events of the series
before talking about the events of the game. I know there’s gonna be at least one smartass
out there who comments that actually they played the game first, but you know what, just
shut up and accept that you’re a freak. It’s ok. We don’t judge here.
40:00 - 40:30 As we’ve established, the creators of
Serial Experiments Lain envisioned a multimedia project. And from the outset, they wanted to create something, for
lack of a better word, experimental. And, uh, yeah, if you just watched
the previous section of this video, it feels like they accomplished that.
40:30 - 41:00 This isn’t an uncommon practice
for Japanese media companies. Manga series receive anime adaptations
in hopes of selling more manga. TV series get video games. Video games get TV series.
Profits cycle among these different products. So it wasn’t any sort of a crazy notion
for them to consider the anime as a way to get people interested in buying their video game. This is confirmed in that same
interview with producer Yasuyuki Udea in FRUiTS magazine that I referenced earlier.
41:00 - 41:30 It’s only in hindsight, knowing how popular
and influential the TV series became, that you sort of wonder at the fact
that it all kind of started out as, “Hey, let’s make this anime too,
so people buy our video game.” Ueda gave Chiaki Konaka and the other
main creative members of the anime staff a lot of freedom to create
a story distinct from the game’s, merely using its elements as a springboard. This idea of a reiteration, another experiment,
41:30 - 42:00 if you will--is what inspired the final title
of the franchise, “Serial Experiments Lain.” This is confirmed in the episode
breakdown guide, Visual Experiments Lain. While Junji Nakahara directed the gameplay
portion of the Serial Experiments Lain video game and Tetsuya Endo directed the
animated movie portions, for the series, Ueda needed staff who were more
experienced in anime production. He tapped veteran director Ryutaro Nakamura for that role and Takahiro Kishida for
character design and layout art.
42:00 - 42:30 Endo’s interpretations of Yoshitoshi
ABe’s original designs are a bit cutesier and are sort of jarring
if you’re coming from the anime. I feel like Kishida’s designs are
more faithful to ABe’s concept work. Kishida also played a large role in shaping some story elements and designs that give
the TV series its unique personality. In fact, one of the series most
iconic images was created by him. Lain in the bear suit pajamas.
We’ll examine this more later. Junji Nakahara would go on to handle
digital effects for the Lain TV series,
42:30 - 43:00 designing the NAVI’s Communication
OS and the more advanced Copland OS, as well as crafting various other effects
that the show employs throughout its episodes. Meanwhile, Ryutaro Nakamura’s unique
directorial style and eye for shot composition and the pacing of scenes gave anime
Lain a much different feel than game Lain. Nakamura would go on to direct several
critically acclaimed, avant-gard anime series throughout the rest of the 90s and 2000s,
such as Colorful, Kino’s Journey, and Ghost Hound.
43:00 - 43:30 In 2009, it was announced that Nakamura would
reunite with ABe and Konaka to direct Despera, a proposed anime series set in the early 20th
century during Japan’s Taisho era, about a young girl who can build various devices despite
having no background in science or engineering. The series entered development hell in the
early 2010s and was ultimately shelved in 2013 when Nakamura passed away after
a long battle with pancreatic cancer. It’s sad that we lost such a
creative voice and visionary.
43:30 - 44:00 Both Konaka and ABe have made statements
about reviving the series, but as of 2025, the only thing that exists is a book published
by Konaka and ABe that has various artworks and short stories that were created while
the series was in active production. We can only wonder at would could have been and hope that someday the series they
envisioned sees the light of day. It definitely won’t be the same
without Nakamura helming it, but still, the story that the book
hints at looks really interesting. But back to Lain, it became
evident from the production
44:00 - 44:30 of episode 1 that the series was
going to be something special. When the cut of episode 1 was completed,
before it aired, tapes of the episode were passed around to different animation studios
in Japan who marveled at its artistry. Its landscapes of powerlines
crisscrossing the sky, its main character draped in wires,
its visions of monstrous PC hardware, this is imagery that permeates the collective
unconscious of the internet even today. But it wasn’t just the visuals that floored all of these industry veterans back in
1998. It was the sound as well.
44:30 - 45:00 Sound director Youta Tsuruoka and sound
designer and engineer Kouji Kasamatsu, along with music director Akira Takemoto
created a lush soundscape that assaults, unnerves, plays tricks, and
delivers emotional punches. In an interview in the back
of Visual Experiments Lain, the three of them detail their approach
to the sound design in the series. One of the more interesting
revelations to come out of this interview was how they buried
the dialogue in the overall mix.
45:00 - 45:30 Usually voices are placed up front, so
they stand out and are easy to hear. In an attempt to give the series a
more couched and claustrophobic feel, they placed the dialogue lower. The team was actively crafting the sounds of the
series to create feelings of tension and unease. Distortion, layering, placing sound effects
and music at different frequencies were all techniques they implemented with
the help of director Nakamura, who if you’ve seen any of his other series, has a
keen interest in sound design in his productions. The attention to detail is astounding.
45:30 - 46:00 Lain is a series best experienced with
headphones to appreciate the richness of its audio, but even just watching
it on a TV with only decent speakers, the effort put into the sound
design still shines through. And the creators knew this, because they knew most of their audience would be viewing it on
small CRTs at the time of its broadcast. Of course, you can’t talk about the sound
without mentioning the iconic opening, which doesn’t begin with the opening
song, but a white screen and the lines: "Present day, present time"
46:00 - 46:30 This is so iconic that I’m sure
there are people out there who have seen this segment as a meme but
didn’t even know where it came from. You don’t need to have seen Lain to know Lain. It’s only after this that the song “Duvet” by
English alternative rock band Boa kicks in. Duvet is a haunting track, originally
released on the band’s 1998 debut album, The Race of a Thousand Camels. And this whole album is fantastic by the
way. Hard recommend Boa. They’re excellent.
46:30 - 47:00 The band didn’t really have any part in the song
winding up as the opening for Lain. Ueda heard the track and wanted to use it, so the dealings
went through legal departments for the most part. Lead singer Jasmine Rogers has answered numerous
questions about Duvet’s inclusion in Lain, and all she can really say on
behalf of the band is they were pretty excited to be part of an anime
production, even in a tangential way. In fact, the resurgence of popularity
of Lain and Duvet in the late 2010s and early 2020s is what led Boa to reunite
after initially breaking up in 2005,
47:00 - 47:30 according to social media posts
from the various band members. They released a new album, Whiplash, in 2024. I listened to it as part
of my research for this video. No, I’m just kidding. Although I have
listened to the album. It’s good. The ending music track “Tooi Sakebi,” “Far
Cry” or “Distant Scream” was written by Reichi “CHABO” Nakaido, best known in
Japan as the guitarist and vocalist for the band RC Succession, who were
formed in 1968 and broke up in 1991.
47:30 - 48:00 They were hugely popular during the 70s and 80s. “Tooi Sakebi” is a powerful ending
track featuring Nakaido’s slithering electric guitar lead and raspy vocals,
backed by a forlorn acoustic progression with ghostly wobbly synthesized tones
occasionally surfacing in the background. The rest of Lain’s background music is
more in this rock-inflected styling, though there are some more techno-inspired
tracks sprinkled in throughout. One of my favorite tracks is the bizarre,
effects-drenched guitar noodling of “Mist
48:00 - 48:30 of Different Dimension,” which plays
initially near the end of episode 1 and shows up near the end of several
other episodes throughout the series. Unfortunately, I can’t play
snippets of any of these tracks, because copyright, but the soundtracks are
on YouTube, so you can easily find them. Lain the game featured one monotonous
music track. Lain the anime features a rich palette of music that adds to
the series mystifying atmosphere.
48:30 - 49:00 The episodes of Lain are called layers,
possibly in reference to the Open Systems Intercommunication or OSI model’s layers
of connection between devices and networks. Though they could also be
referring more metaphorically to the layers of the narrative and
characters throughout the series. The ambiguity is almost definitely intentional. Every episode has a similar
introduction that portrays various shots of the streets of Shibuya. A
voiceover usually accompanies these scenes.
49:00 - 49:30 The content of the voiceover is
cryptic but related in some way to the storyline of each episode, and
then we get the layer title screen. These are also pretty iconic. They use the “whisper” voice from the
MacOS Speech Control Panel. In fact, there are many Apple and
Macintosh references throughout the series, some blatant and others fairly obscure. But now, I think it’s time to dive into the
story of Serial Experiments Lain the anime.
49:30 - 50:00 As I mentioned earlier in this video,
I feel like it’s impossible to talk about the game’s story without
first looking at the anime’s. I also just want to analyze the story
of Lain, because I think it’ll be fun. If you’ve watched this channel before, you’ll
know I spend pretty much the entire last half, sometimes even the last two-thirds of my videos’ runtimes analyzing the
narrative in the games I cover. And it’s really just because I
love storytelling and looking at the structure of stories
and what makes them function. There’s also a lot of information about Lain
50:00 - 50:30 specifically that I found in the
supplemental books and interviews I read that will be interesting to
point out while examining the story. So even if you’re a Lain veteran, you
may want to stick around through this next section of the video. There might
be some tidbits even you never knew. But if you’ve never seen it and want to watch
it on your own first, you can go to this time to skip to the next section of the video
where I go over the game’s story in detail. If you’d rather avoid both of these spoiler-filled
segments, you can skip to the pretty much spoiler free conclusion of the video where I talk
about Lain’s legacy, a few events that have
50:30 - 51:00 happened recently related to Lain, as well
as my final thoughts on everything Lain. I can’t make any promises that there might
not be a couple spoilers in the conclusion, but I don’t talk about any major story beats
or anything, just overall themes mostly. So, yeah, the choice is yours. Obviously, I’d prefer it if you just watched the
whole video, you know, but, yeah, it’s up to you.
51:00 - 51:30 The first Layer, Weird, kicks off with the
death of Chisa Yomoda, a 2nd-year junior high school student who jumps from the top of
a building in the backstreets of Shibuya. This opening sequence does a lot of heavy-lifting, introducing the mood of the series, as well as
several of its visual motifs and story themes.
51:30 - 52:00 The shallowness of modern city
life, powerlines in the sky, splatters of red in shadows, on-screen
text, background sounds warped and garbled. All of these elements will be further utilized and
expanded on throughout the entirety of the series. Two of the most prominent visual
elements throughout the series are the images of power lines and
the “blood-spattered” shadows. The power lines are thoroughly explained in
the episode 1 breakdown in Visual Experiments Lain. And there are really two sides to
their prominence throughout the series.
52:00 - 52:30 On the one hand, they represent the border
between the real world and the Wired. The physical lines that carry electrical impulses
and information to and fro throughout the world. In fact, when the border between the
real world and the Wired is shattered later on in the series, the power
lines in Lain’s neighborhood break. The other reason for their
inclusion is pretty simple actually. This is just what Japan looks like. The power wire section of Visual Experiments
Lain details how in New York City throughout the 20th century, the power lines
were mostly all buried underground.
52:30 - 53:00 This was due to a massive snowstorm
that swept the city in the 1880s, causing huge infrastructural damage. Afterwards, the city started
burying them to better prevent massive blackouts due to weather disasters. Many European cities also have
their powerlines underground. In virtually all of Japan, though, both city and
countryside, the powerlines remain above ground. The reasons for this are
beyond the scope of this video. Though Tokyo did launch an initiative in
the lead up to the 2020 Olympics to bury
53:00 - 53:30 many of the cities powerlines, but
this took place only in the busiest tourist neighborhoods and areas
surrounding the Olympic village. Point is, look around Tokyo, Kyoto, small
towns and villages in the countryside, and you’ll still see these weblike lines. Now, the blood-spattered shadows
are in fact not there in real life, and much has been made of their
meaning in Serial Experiments Lain. And actually calling them “blood-spattered”
isn’t technically correct. They don’t always
53:30 - 54:00 appear red. Sometimes there are blue,
purple, and white splotches mixed in. The various supplemental materials make little
mention of them. However, in a Q&A panel from American anime convention Otakon held in August
2000 with Yoshitoshi ABe and Yasuyuki Ueda. ABe explains that the splotchy shadows were
director Nakamura’s idea and were meant to represent the Wired’s ever present influence
in the real world, always there in the shadows. This may also explain why, a few scenes
later, when there is a deliberate shot
54:00 - 54:30 of Lain’s shadow on the ground, it’s filled
with a substance that looks like clear water. Lain hasn’t yet been corrupted by the Wired. At school, her classmates Alice
and Reika are comforting Julie, and I’m just going to use the
English pronunciations of Alice and Julie to make it easier on myself
throughout the rest of this video. When they approach Lain, they mention
Julie is upset because she’s received an email from Chisa Yomoda, even
though she died a week earlier. The other girls hypothesize that
someone is playing a cruel prank. Lain is unaware of any email,
because she’s not really up on
54:30 - 55:00 all the gadgets and technology that
the other kids her age are using. As the school day continues, Lain experiences
a few visual hallucinations. Students outside turn to silhouettes and disappear, the writing
on the classroom blackboard becomes blurry, and a smoky, ectoplasm-like
substance leaks from her fingertips. Mental illness and Lain’s auditory and visual
hallucinations actually play a central role in the story of the game, so we’ll examine this in more
detail during the next section of the video.
55:00 - 55:30 But concerning the scene where Lain sees a
smoke-like substance coming out of her fingers, both Konaka, in his footnote about the
scene in Scenario Experiments Lain, and Ueda, in that Otakon Q&A panel,
mention that these hallucinations are meant to firmly situate the show
in Lain’s own perception of reality. And the inspiration for this scene, in particular, came from reports of actual schizophrenic
patients who described similar hallucinations. All throughout these early scenes,
text keeps appearing on screen, taken from the emails that Chisa
supposedly sent to her classmates.
55:30 - 56:00 When I died?
It hurt! Lol After school, Lain checks her own computer, or
NAVI, as they’re referred to in the world of Lain. The name was inspired by
Apple’s Knowledge Navigator, and as I mentioned earlier, was first used in
Konaka’s screenplays for Armitage the Third. Lain’s NAVI is an older model for kids, pushed off to the side and seemingly
forgotten on the desk in her bedroom. Unsurprisingly, Lain also has a message from
Chisa who invites her to come to the Wired,
56:00 - 56:30 because she’s found god there. Lain’s home life seems fairly depressing.
Everyone appears lost in their own world, as evidenced by their silent dinner where
her older sister, Mika, excuses herself. Lain tries to tell her mother that she’s received
an email from a girl who’s been dead for a week, but her mom doesn’t even acknowledge the comment. And now we come to the bear suit. Much has been made of this particular outfit.
It doesn’t show up in the screenplay for episode 1 and was actually designed by anime
character designer Takahiro Kishida.
56:30 - 57:00 It became a small point of contention
between the creators. When Konaka and Ueda first saw the design they were resistant
to including it, thinking it was, I don’t know, for lack of a better way of putting it, too
weeby for the story they were trying to tell. Kishida found an ally in director Nakamura, who understood that the design represented
a way for Lain to insulate herself from interactions with her family and to cut
off interference from the outside world. After a bit of back and forth, Kishida
and Ueda were ultimately convinced of the outfit’s purpose, and it found
its way into the finished product.
57:00 - 57:30 Now, along with “Present day, present
time,” the layer titles, the powerlines, and the splotchy shadows, it’s one
of the series most iconic elements. Lain’s father returns home from work
later in the evening and eagerly heads to his home office to install a new
component he’s received in the mail. Her father, despite being distracted
by his Neil Peart-style computer setup, seems to have more of a connection
with Lain than her sister and mother. When Lain meekishly broaches the topic of
upgrading her old NAVI, he sees it as a
57:30 - 58:00 sign that she’s growing up and encourages her to
make new friends in the real world and the Wired. The next day, the train Lain takes to school
has an emergency stop because of an accident. Outside, the powerlines drip with blood and Lain has visions of a girl her
age being hit by the train. After experiencing another
hallucination at school, where she sees the words “come to
the wired” written on the chalkboard, she encounters Chisa or some
manifestation of her on her walk home. The episode ends with the
familiar phrase “To be continued.”
58:00 - 58:30 The red and blue B and E are
another tangential Apple reference, this time to the BeOS, a now-defunct
operating system created by Be Inc., whose founder Jean-Luis Guasse
was a former Apple executive. This [__] runs deep. Layer 2, Girls, introduces the under-18
techno club Cyberia, popular hangout spot for the technologically
obsessed youth in the series. Though the place doesn’t seem to serve
alcohol, they do peddle narcotics,
58:30 - 59:00 such as Accela, a nanomachine like device that interacts with the electrical currents
in users brains, speeding up synapses. While under the influence of Accela, the boy
in the club sees Lain in an argument with other patrons, but she doesn’t seem like the quiet
girl we were introduced to in the first episode. Or does she? This episode also introduces us to news
segments and information leaks. Here, there’s a description of Accela and its effects. These short segments will become more prominent
as the series goes on and are meant to further
59:00 - 59:30 illustrate the idea that the barriers between
the real world and the Wired are breaking down. A flood of information is constantly upon us. We also see a man in black for the
first time. Conspiracy theories and other fringe topics will
creep into the story as well. The fact that the font and style of the Serial
Experiments Lain logo mimics that of the popular 1990s American television series, The X-Files, was
a deliberate choice on the part of the creators. At school, Alice, Julie, and Reika discuss
how they saw a girl who looked just like
59:30 - 60:00 Lain at Cyberia the night before. Though they’re
convinced this couldn’t have been the same person. They invite Lain to come to the club with them
that evening, a plan that Lain isn’t too keen on. Later on, Lain encounters the
ghost of the girl who was hit by the train near the end of the previous episode. There’s a lot made about this and other
ghost encounters in Visual Experiments Lain. As the barrier between the real world and
the Wired continues to deteriorate, traces of information left behind on the internet by
people who have died start to appear in reality.
60:00 - 60:30 You could view it as more hallucinations or as
Lain being more sensitive to these information leaks than others, for reasons that will
be expanded on as the series continues. When Lain arrives home from school, she finds
that her father has ordered her a brand new NAVI, the newest, top-of-the-line model released
by Tachibana General Laboratories, in fact, we learn from the overzealous delivery man. Oh, and don’t mind the way
mom and dad are just making out by the front door. That’s not weird at all. Lain’s father sets up her new NAVI and
Lain authorizes herself as its user.
60:30 - 61:00 Before she can settle in and run it
through its paces, she gets another message from Alice asking where she is, so
Lain decides to head to Cyberia after all. Instead of a simple night out with
the girls, they witness a shooting perpetrated by the kid who was dropping
Accela in the beginning of the episode. When he notices Lain, he starts freaking out, ranting about how he doesn’t want anything to
do with the real world and the wired merging. We get our first glimpse of Lain’s other persona
here, a more forthright and self-assured version
61:00 - 61:30 of herself. She informs the boy that no matter
where he goes, people are always connected. Rather than endure the prospect of, ugh, human
interaction, he goes ahead and shoots himself. Layer 3, Psyche--the series uses
the original Greek pronunciation for “psyche”--begins with Lain and her
friends being questioned by police. Lain gets dropped off at home by a patrol car but finds the house empty. Her parents
and her sister are nowhere to be found.
61:30 - 62:00 There’s clearly something strange
going on with Lain’s family. The next day, her mother doesn’t have anything to
say about the family’s absence the night before. On the way to school, she sees a black
car parked in front of her house. She hears a voice talking directly to her on
the train, telling her that she’s not alone. At school, the other girls talk excitedly
about the events of the previous night. This scene reminds me of the beginning
of Moonlight Syndrome where the girls in that game gossip matter-of-factly about a
murder/suicide at a club that they all witnessed. We get another information dump about a
special processor for the NAVI called Psyche.
62:00 - 62:30 And Lain gets another visit from Chisa, which compositionally is just a
really creepy shot. I love this. At the end of the school day, Alice talks to
Reika and Julie about how it’s strange that they can speak so detachedly about a disturbing
event that they all witnessed first hand. The other girls think Alice is
weird for looking at it that way, but the conversation quickly gets derailed when
Lain pulls an envelope from her shoe locker. The girls suspect that it’s a love
letter, but inside is a Psyche processor.
62:30 - 63:00 We hear a bunch of crosstalk
about many different topics. Most of it is random, but one guy mentions
an elite hacker group called the Knights, who will become important later. Another girl mentions being visited at
night by a tiny gray being in a red and green-striped shirt that stands watching
her from the doorway to her bedroom. This not only brings to mind alien abduction
lore, that’s again so prevalent in The X-Files, but the red and green-striped shirt and
the fact that the girl is visited at night in her bedroom is a reference to Freddy
Kreuger, according to Konaka’s footnotes.
63:00 - 63:30 Interestingly, in the English dub, this
line is voiced by a random voice actress, but in the Japanese version,
the voice belongs to Alice. Konaka’s notes in the screenplay
dictate that this line should be read by Alice’s voice actress.
We’ll find out why much later. Back at home, Lain asks her father about the
Psyche, but he remains mysteriously tight-lipped, so Lain heads to Cyberia to ask the
delinquents hanging out there about it. The DJ, JJ, recognizes her and
comments on the childishness
63:30 - 64:00 of her outfit and says she should
organize another rave again sometime. Whoa. Taro, Masayuki, and MyuMyu
are three elementary school students who regularly frequent Cyberia.
They’re thoroughly impressed by the fact that Lain has a Psyche processor
and tell her how to install it. Taro suspects that this Lain is the Lain
who’s been making waves recently on the Wired. He asks for a date as payment
for the information about the Psyche, but not with this timid Lain in front of them. He wants to go out with the more
mature and self-assured Wired Lain.
64:00 - 64:30 A glare from Lain sets him in his place. We then see Mika walking home from school. She
runs into two men in black wearing some rad eyewear, but when she asks who they are
and threatens to call the cops on them, they tell her that would be useless,
because they were never really there. Mika tries to tell her mom to call
the police the next time they show up, but mom is typically aloof. Annoyed by the whole thing, Mika heads
upstairs and finds Lain in her underwear, installing the new processor into her NAVI. Mika asks her what she’s doing, and Lain mentions
64:30 - 65:00 the warning the kids at the club gave
her about avoiding static electricity. Lain suddenly looks up with an elated expression
and excitedly says, “welcome home!” to her sister. This is one of the stranger moments in the series, and I don’t really know what to make
of it other than it’s really creepy. In Layer 4, Religion, Mika attempts to talk to her parents about Lain’s strange
behavior, but they brush it off. After Mika leaves the room though,
the two of them say some ambiguous things to each other and engage
in more affectionate touching.
65:00 - 65:30 I don’t know. Maybe this is
just how moms and dads who actually love each other act. I wouldn’t know... Cut to a guy getting chased to his
apartment door by a creepy little girl. That’s horrifying. What’s even more horrifying is finding out that
that dude was supposed to be a high-school senior. Kids grew up fast in 1990s Japan. The girls at school mention that he jumped
from the roof of his apartment building. Much to their surprise Lain’s
already heard this rumor. They’re even more surprised when they learn
that she’s also been modifying her new NAVI,
65:30 - 66:00 and they comment on how she’s changed recently. After school, the four hang out, but Lain
runs off to continue working on her computer. A little girl who looks exactly like the girl from the night before bumps into
Alice and drops her stuffed animal. The little dog was deliberately designed
to look like Bikke, Lain’s stuffed animal from the video game and ABe’s one-shot
manga, The Nightmare of Fabrication. I know I probably sound like a broken
record, but more on that later. At Cyberia, Lain asks JJ about
the game the kids are playing,
66:00 - 66:30 and he tells her about Phantoma. When he
turns around, though, Lain’s not even there. After that, we see a boy wandering
around some rooftops inside Phantoma, which turns out to be a VR dungeon-crawler. He mentions numerous times that he’s already
logged out, so he doesn’t know why he’s still stuck in the game. He even smashes his
handheld NAVI in an attempt to escape. The little girl from earlier sneaks
up on him and he shoots her using a weapon from Phantoma. This ends
up killing the girl in reality. More examples of the border between the
real world and the Wired breaking down.
66:30 - 67:00 Lain receives a message from JJ telling her
that Phantoma and a child’s hide-and-seek VR net game got linked up. There’s a
strong indication that the Knights may have exploited holes in the two games’
connection protocol to make it happen. Lain’s dad interrupts her and tells her not
to confuse the wired for the real world, but Lain basically says, “Shut up, dad”
and tells him with her upgraded NAVI, she’ll soon be able to cross the
border that separates the two. By the way, Lain’s cable management
could use some work, don’t you think?
67:00 - 67:30 She notices red dots probing her room and from her window finds the men in black
standing in the street below. Then, she uses her psychic powers
to blow up one of their eye pieces. Where the hell did that come from? Layer 5, Distortion, has some of the most
surreal imagery in the entire series. It also has one of the most confounding story
beats at the very end of the episode. In the footnotes in Scenario Experiments Lain, Konaka reveals that he was suffering a
high fever while writing this episode,
67:30 - 68:00 which may have influenced some of the strange
sights and the disjointed nature of it. Maybe because of that, the finished version of the
episode also differs quite a bit from the written screenplay, with several lines of dialogue and
smaller scenes omitted and others shuffled around. I think the way it turned out in the end
is better than how it was structured in the screenplay. It’s a bit too
convoluted in its written form. Regardless, this is my favorite
episode of the series, so here we go. Distortion begins with Lain speaking to
the voice that she heard on the train
68:00 - 68:30 in episode 3. It talks about how mankind
has reached the limit of its evolution, but its greatest achievement
was the creation of the Wired. The voice also reveals that it is God. We then follow Mika as she walks through
Shibuya and witnesses a traffic accident. Meanwhile, or, well, I guess “meanwhile” would
imply that this is happening at the same time, but it’s unclear when these
scenes are actually taking place, so I guess I’ll just say, “in the next scene.” Lain talks to a doll in her room, asking it to
tell her a story that she hasn’t heard before,
68:30 - 69:00 but the doll says that there’s
nothing that Lain doesn’t know, so it can’t tell her a story that doesn’t exist. It then mentions that for every event,
there’s a prophecy that precedes it, which as we’ll come to learn is the
thesis statement for this episode. We hear a news report that the traffic
control system in Tokyo was hacked, which caused the accident that Mika witnessed. Back in Shibuya, Mika is handed a pack
of tissues from a tout in the streets and runs into Taro who tries to pick her up, the
little scamp. First Lain, now her older sister.
69:00 - 69:30 He ends up spilling his drink
on her and runs away. Smooth. Mika pulls out one of the tissues from the pack
she’s just been given to clean up her uniform, and finds that someone has written
a note on the tissue in red. “The other side is overcrowded.
The dead will have no place to go.” Mika then hears people making a
fuss about something, and witnesses Lain in the middle of the scramble
muttering to herself as cars whiz by. And Mika just brushes it off, like yeah, that’s
my weird sister, playing in traffic again. But as she turns to walk away,
69:30 - 70:00 she sees Lain’s face projected on a
large monitor overlooking the crossing. Back in Lain’s room, she’s now
speaking to Darth Vader. Or actually, some kind of tribal mask that tells
her the prophecy is being fulfilled. At school, the girls ask Lain about the hacking stunt that she pulled that may have
been related to the traffic accident. Lain has no idea what they’re
talking about, though. Alice, Reika, and Julie are then sitting in
a fast food restaurant discussing an email they received referencing a prophecy and
theorize that the Knights are behind it.
70:00 - 70:30 Back in Lain’s room, this time
she’s talking to her mother, who’s floating in the air before
her. In her mother’s ramblings, she mentions how the Wired may just
be an upper layer of the real world. Lain asks if the person floating
in front of her is her real mother, but she offers no answer and fades away. At dinner, Mika asks Lain if she was
in Shibuya earlier that afternoon. Before she can get an answer, she’s
blinded by the reflection in her drink and finds herself in the middle
of Shibuya crossing as cars whiz by.
70:30 - 71:00 The camera pulls up and reveals that
she’s trapped inside a strange symbol, which we’ll learn shortly
is the mark of the Knights. Mika wakes up in the same fast
food restaurant that Alice, Reika, and Julie were previously in.
A bunch of other people are there now. Mika reaches for her coffee, and spills it across the table. The message
“fulfill the prophecy” forms in the liquid. When she looks up, the restaurant is empty. She heads to a public restroom to try to
get a grip on herself and the lights are turned out on her. In the darkness, she
hears one of the stall doors creak open.
71:00 - 71:30 Inside, she finds nothing. The lights come back on, and the stall
door closes behind her. The words “fulfill the prophecy” are written over and
over in red on the back of the door. Back in Lain’s room, she now speaks to
her father, floating before her in the same way her mother did. This conversation
is about how another world may have been created with the advent of the Wired, and
that there may be a god who exists there. He posits that the Wired god is already affecting
the real world in the form of a prophecy. Visual Experiments Lain comments
on these scenes in Lain’s room,
71:30 - 72:00 proposing the idea that they could be
either corrupted memories from Lain’s past, further hallucinations, or they could be
connected to an experiment dealing with latent psychic abilities in children that
will be expanded on in the next episode. We already saw that Lain may have some level
of psychic ability at the end of the previous episode. In any case, yeah, these scenes
are ultimately left up to interpretation. Mika arrives home after a very difficult day to
say the least and finds herself in her own house.
72:00 - 72:30 The original Mika disappears, but Lain can see the traces of her wavering at the front
door before that essence also disappears. The only footnote Konaka offers up for
this bizarre turn of events is that in hindsight he feels that this story beat
occurs a bit too early in the narrative. Super helpful. Ueda, in the Otakon Q&A, says Mika became stuck in the Wired and her body only exists in
the real world now as a sort of puppet.
72:30 - 73:00 There are some other scenes in episode 9
that we’ll need to look at before we really dive into what happened to Mika, so, say it
with me now, we’ll come back to this later. In Layer 6, Kids, Lain’s PC has
fully engulfed her room. There’s even water on the floor that’s
leaked from her cooling system. The real question is, can it run Crysis? Lain’s having fun conversing with voices in the
Wired who turn out to be members of the Knights. As she leaves for school the next day, she sees a young boy standing in the road with
his arms outstretched starting up at the sky.
73:00 - 73:30 The girls feel like Lain is
reverting back to her old, introverted ways, so they
invite her out after school. As they wander the city, they see
more kids gesturing toward the sky, and a heavenly vision of Lain appears from
behind some clouds, before quickly disappearing. This incident is even reported
on the news in the evening. Back home, Mika has become just a shell. Hi, Mika. And Lain heads into the Wired to
figure out what the kids are up to. She’s accosted by a Cheshire Cat-like floating
73:30 - 74:00 mouth who’s impressed that Lain is able
to project her full body into the Wired. Most users can only manage to create
eyes, a nose, or a mouth, not full bodies. Lain pulls up information on Professor Hodgson,
the child-killer scientist, and finds out that the old man is currently on his death bed in a
hospital with his mind hooked up to the Wired. She finds him on a veranda
overlooking a vast sunset, a scenic place where he waits quietly for his body
to die. She asks him about something called Kids.
74:00 - 74:30 Turns out, Hodgeson was the head
researcher of the Kensington Experiment, which was an attempt to harness
children’s latent psi abilities. He hooked dozens of children up to outer
receptors, peripherals capable of capturing psi energy. The outer receptors would then feed that
energy into a large central device he dubbed Kids. However, the experiment went horribly
wrong and all of the children were killed. Though Hodgeson destroyed the device afterwards,
the schematics found their way onto the Wired,
74:30 - 75:00 and someone has updated it so that psi energy can
be collected without the use of outer receptors. Before Lain can get anymore information
out of Hodgeson, he goes off to die, but he comments that Lain is extremely powerful,
a child blessed by the god of the Wired. Lain puts the pieces together and figures
out that the Knights were the ones who found Hodgeson’s schematics and
have altered the Kids device. The saintly image of herself in the sky was
a cruel joke played on her by the Knights, using the children as projectors. She tries to confront the Knights on
the Wired, but they’re silent now,
75:00 - 75:30 as opposed to the beginning of the episode
when they were posing as her friends. The men in black show up again, and
Lain runs outside to confront them, asking if they too are members of the Knights. Just then an explosion rocks her room. The men in black explain that a
parasite bomb was planted in her cooling system and that the Knights
were the ones who put it there. In Layer 7, Society, Lain
is intent on tracking down the Knights and Mika’s just, you know, creepin’. Because Lain is now attempting to learn
the identities of the Knights members,
75:30 - 76:00 we finally get introduced to some of them. There’s an elite businessman, a
slobby otaku, and a bored housewife. It’s funny that her kid asks if he can go over
and play face-to-face at a friend’s house, and she responds that he can just stay
home and play with his friend on the Wired. We’re also introduced to Nezumi, Japanese
for mouse, a weird dude walking around the city with a bunch of devices strapped
to him. He wants to join the Knights. It doesn’t end well for him. The men in black show up to
take Lain to meet their boss, who attempts to find out if the real world Lain
and the Wired Lain are in fact the same person.
76:00 - 76:30 He prods her with questions about
her mother and father’s birthdays, when they got married, how they met. Lain doesn’t know the answers and
becomes increasingly flustered. Lain’s voice actresses’ performances, in both
Japanese and English, are really good here. Finally, he asks when and
where Lain herself was born. This pushes her over the
edge, and Wired Lain appears. The bossman says it’s amazing that she can summon
Wired Lain without the use of a device, but that he and his group are fighting to make sure that
the real world and the Wired remain separated.
76:30 - 77:00 She’s sick of the old man’s
ranting and goes to leave, but one of the men in black grabs
her arm and gets reprimanded for it. I love that line read. So we learn this guy’s name is Karl. In fact,
all of the Men in Black technically have names. Karl Haushofer, Lin Sui-Xi, and the bossman
here is Kurosawa, only ever given a last name. In Layer 8, Rumors, Lain visits an
adult site to speak with someone
77:00 - 77:30 and get more info about Tachibana
General Laboratories. She noticed the name plate on the building
that the men in black took her to. Good job being covert about that, guys. This is also the first mention of Internet
Protocol version 7, the series central macguffin. Tachibana General Labs is rumored
to be involved in several corporate sabotage activities in an attempt
to gain exclusive control of IPv7. Currently, in the real world, we run on IPv6. There’s another creepy scene
involving Lain’s parents. When Lain enters the kitchen,
77:30 - 78:00 they’re sitting next to each other in the
dining room just staring at the table top. Lain gets a drink from the fridge
and nervously tells them about someone who recently asked her if
her parents are her real parents. She says that’s a funny thing to say,
hoping that her parents will agree with her, trying to convince herself
that the suggestion isn’t true. Her parents keep their backs to her. She finishes her drink and washes up
the glass, and when she turns around, her mother and father have now turned around
to look at her, their faces expressionless. The camera pulls back toward the ceiling and
the scene just fades out, leaving no resolution.
78:00 - 78:30 I know this scene is here to make us
wonder if what the men in black said is true and to show that Lain, despite
probably already realizing the truth, wants to convince herself that
these are her real parents, but I still can’t help wonder what would
follow from this scene for these characters. Throughout the series, there are a lot
of these fragmented, unresolved moments, like half-remembered memories
or snippets from a dream. This is part of what lends Lain its
surreal atmosphere. The imagery and
78:30 - 79:00 shot composition does a lot of the heavy
lifting, but I feel like these more subtle elements are the ones that tie the
whole mood of the series together. The next day at school, the girls confront
Lain over a rumor that’s spread concerning Alice and a young, male teacher. Reika
and Julie believe that Lain was the one who started the gossip, but Lain has
no idea what they’re talking about. Alice decides that she wants to
give Lain the benefit of the doubt. In class, Lain uses her pocket NAVI to try
to figure out where the rumors originated. We get another scene of many voices gossiping
on the Wired and hear once again about a
79:00 - 79:30 small being in a red and green-striped
shirt that visits a girl in her bedroom. We heard this same rumor back in layer 3. Lain tries to cut through the chatter and
hears the voice of God again. They have a lengthy conversation about the nature of God, whether God is an all-powerful being that
creates or just an omnipresent existence. He then steers the conversation to the nature
of Lain’s existence and tells her that her body is just a container for her higher
consciousness that exists in the Wired.
79:30 - 80:00 He mockingly asks if she really believes the
real Lain and the Wired Lain are one in the same. When Lain comes out of it, everyone
in class is staring at her, and she gets a message saying that she’s a peeping tom. As she moves through the school,
looking for Alice, everyone watches her. Alone and confused, Lain wonders what
the Wired version of herself has been doing while she’s been living her normal life. Lain then has a vision of herself destroying
the school, in a scene reminiscent of Carrie. Later that evening, we see Alice
in her bedroom with the young,
80:00 - 80:30 male teacher and find out that this is
a simulated encounter inside the Wired. Interesting to note, the dialogue
between Alice and the teacher was cut from the broadcast version of this episode. The implications of their conversation were deemed
inappropriate by Japanese censors at the time. It was restored for home video releases. Just as Alice is about to lose
herself in the moment, so to speak, she spots Lain sitting on her bed, but
this is not real world Lain or Wired Lain. This imp-like creature is
yet another version of Lain,
80:30 - 81:00 referred to by the creators as Alphabet Lain. The reason for this strange nickname is lost
a bit in translation, but when designing the different versions of Lain for the series, they
were all given different names in the screenplays. Real world Lain is denoted by the use of
kanji for her name. Wired Lain uses katakana, which are Japanese characters usually
reserved to spell out loan words from other languages or onomatopoeic words, and are
sometimes used just because they look cool. Then, there’s this demonic Lain, which uses English letters to spell out her
name, hence the nickname, Alphabet Lain.
81:00 - 81:30 This designation was used in design documents
as well as in the scripts to help voice actress Kaori Shimizu distinguish between the three
versions of the character she was playing. She lends each Lain unique
speech patterns and different vocal inflections to project
these different personalities. I have to also say, Lain’s English
voice actress, Bridget Hoffman, did an outstanding job portraying
the many facets of Lain as well. In fact, Serial Experiments Lain’s
English dub is probably one of
81:30 - 82:00 the best of its time. Right up there
with the English dub of Cowboy Bebop. And Lain goes the extra mile, because they
even tried to accurately reproduce a lot of the audio effects that were applied to the voices. I don’t think they quite achieved the
same balance between dialogue and sound effects that the Japanese version
has, but they did an incredible job. Especially considering the English version came
out in 1999, a time when anime was just beginning to brush the mainstream in the US and when dubbing
was done quickly and cheaply for the most part. In ABe’s artbook, An Omnipresence in
Wired, and in Visual Experiments Lain,
82:00 - 82:30 there is a lot of attention paid to the
eyes, the different facial expressions, and the body language that
differentiate each version of Lain. Real Lain’s face is softer, eyes rounder, eyebrows
raised, and her overall posture is more tense. Wired Lain has a harder expression with slightly
furrowed brows. Her stance is more confident. Meanwhile, Alphabet Lain, has droopy eyes and a mischievous grin. She likes to
slouch and her movements are looser.
82:30 - 83:00 I love the design of Alphabet
Lain. She’s such a creep. As Alphabet Lain mocks Alice for playing with
herself while fantasizing about a teacher, the Real Lain lies in bed
in her own room, horrified. Wired Lain confronts Alphabet
Lain and attempts to strangle her, but she feels that pain within herself. As Alphabet Lain explains, you can’t
kill just one part of yourself. These scenes are our first real
indication that Lain doesn’t just have some level of dissociative identity
disorder but that her different personas
83:00 - 83:30 all exist at the same time and are
operating independent of each other, another product of the deterioration
between the real world and the Wired. This is further confirmed when Wired Lain
discovers a room full of Lain duplicates, more versions of herself than what
we’ve seen so far in the story. In fact, the creators also refer to
the heavenly vision of Lain that the children produced with the help of the Knights
in Layer 6, God Lain, as another version of her. And one more version of Lain
appears in an upcoming episode. In another conversation with God, he
explains that Lain is the same as he is,
83:30 - 84:00 a being that has always existed
in the Wired. She is omnipresent and exists with everyone who
has ever accessed the Wired. He also says that she’s done the right
thing by bringing rumors about other people to light. Information on the Wired
should be shared by all, shouldn’t it? Lain decides to find a way to scrub the
memories of Alice’s rumor from the real world. And God just says, yeah, ok, give it a try. But with no sarcasm. He
really wants to see if she can do it. In the next scene, Alice, Reika, and Julie
rush to meet Lain at the school gates,
84:00 - 84:30 but Alphabet Lain steps forward to meet them. As the girls make plans to hang out after
school and head to Cyberia in the evening, real world Lain protests
that she is the actual Lain. After the girls walk off together, Alphabet Lain confronts real world Lain
and confirms, yes, she is the real Lain. Which “she” she’s referring to isn’t made clear, reinforcing the idea that
all Lains exist at all times. In front of her NAVI, with tears in her
eyes, Lain asks her computer if this Lain,
84:30 - 85:00 sitting, right here, right now, is the real Lain. Layer 9, Protocol, is filled with
information on conspiracy theories and various developments in computer
networking throughout the 20th century. The X-Files influence is strong in this episode. Things kick off with a summary of the the Roswell
incident where a supposed UFO crashed in the desert in New Mexico, after which Lain sees
a little gray alien standing in her doorway.
85:00 - 85:30 More information leakage. All this information just leaking all over the
place, like the water from Lain’s coolant system. Next, we get a discussion of the MJ12 document,
materials that first surfaced in the 80s, believed to be agreements between several
government agencies and top US officials, signed by President Truman, dealing
with the recovery of alien spacecraft. Just as an aside, the MJ12 documents
are largely believed to be a hoax, but researchers involved in such things
are still divided on whether it was a
85:30 - 86:00 prank pulled by conspiracy nuts or part of a
government sanctioned disinformation campaign. In the Wired, Lain argues with the weaker users, plebs who can only manage to conjure up an eye,
an ear, or a nose for their online avatars. We then get an info dump about Vannever
Bush, an American engineer and inventor who created MEMEX, a primitive form
of information access using microfilm, anticipating the rise of
multimedia and the internet. At Cyberia, JJ gives Lain an envelope that he
says she left behind the last time she was there,
86:00 - 86:30 inside is a small computer board
with the Knights symbol on it. Next, we learn about John C. Lilly and his
sensory deprivation experiments. Through the combined use of isolation tanks and
psychoactive narcotics, Lilly believed that he made contact with the lowest level
of a cabal of extraterrestrial intelligence. Yeah? Really, dude? He detailed the hierarchy of this
organization in his autobiography. The level that he made contact with
through his journeys, so to speak,
86:30 - 87:00 were called the Earth Coincidence
Control Office, or E.C.C.O., for short. Lilly then began experiments in an
attempt to interact with dolphins, who use ultrasonic waves to communicate. And now you know where Ecco
the Dolphin got his name. Lain confronts the kids in Cyberia and takes
Taro up on his earlier offer for a date. And she invites him upstairs. She shows off her NAVI and then ambushes him,
accusing him of being a member of the Knights. He admits that he’s a junior
member, but they only give him
87:00 - 87:30 small tasks with no explanations as to
the grander purpose of what he’s doing. During their conversation, Lain turns on
the track that plays frequently in Cyberia, and accuses Taro of being complicit in
manipulating the club-goers memories. There’s a cut to downstairs where Lain’s parents speak cryptically to each other
about “it” almost being over. And Mika starts doing her
best dial-up modem impression. And now, we can finally talk about
what the hell happened to Mika. As we’re seeing more of these
Knights references surfacing,
87:30 - 88:00 we can put together that Mika’s mind
was trapped by the Knights in Layer 5. Taro was complicit in this, though, being
a junior member, he may not have even known what the point of his actions were. He probably
didn’t even know that Mika was Lain’s sister. The Knights forced Mika’s
consciousness out of her body, creating just an empty shell that
they could use to keep tabs on Lain. There are several scenes
between episodes 6 and 9 of Mika looking in on Lain as she’s using her NAVI. This whole trap was only possible because of
the flimsy border between the real world and the
88:00 - 88:30 Wired, and now Mika is just a communication device
the Knights use to spy on Lain’s activities. Lain asks Taro what the board with the Knights
symbol on it is, and he’s not 100% sure, but he believes that installing the
chip would wipe Lain’s memories. She decides to let him go, and
he gives her a goodnight kiss, because, as he explains it, he’s
a guy after all and he has to. But he leaves behind his already
been chewed gum in her mouth. Gross. We then learn about Ted Nelson,
who proposed an electronic library
88:30 - 89:00 of stationary satellites that could be
accessed anywhere by terminals on Earth. He dubbed this network, Xanadu, after
the Mongolian capital that was said to house a library containing a
record of all written cultures. Through his Xanadu concept, the
idea of hypertext was conceived. Lain sits in front of her NAVI, sounding off commands as if she
herself is just a computer terminal. She then sees a... flashback?
Hallucination? We’re never given a clear indication here--of
Lain’s introduction to her family.
89:00 - 89:30 Lain’s father takes her upstairs to her room,
which is decked out in traditionally girly decor, and is nothing like the room that we saw in
the first episode of the series, and especially not like the tangled mess of cables, wires, and
liquid coolant leakage that her current room is. As Lain and her father stand in
the doorway, in this vision, Lain, in the present, turns to face
them and says that this a lie. Whether she’s referring to
the fact that her family is a fake or that this vision is false, is unclear.
89:30 - 90:00 We still have a couple more
educational presentations to get through before this episode ends. The next one is on the Schumann Resonance, the 8hz frequency that is latently
given off by Earth’s magnetic fields. Douglas Rushcoff proposes that when
the population of all human beings on Earth reaches the number of neurons
in the brain, 86 billion give or take, and when all humans are then connected
to each other and begin to resonate at the same 8hz frequency, then the Earth
itself will awaken to consciousness. This last part concerning Douglas Rushcoff and the
90:00 - 90:30 Earth’s consciousness is a complete
fabrication on the part of Konaka’s, only meant to tie these real world conspiracy
theories together with the world of Lain. He was most likely referencing real life-media
theorist and writer, Douglas Rushkoff, with a “k.” The real-life Rushkoff has never
proposed any sort of theory like the one just explained. Though, he
did write a 1994 book titled Cyberia, which is where the name of the
night club in the series comes from. Finally, into full on fiction,
we learn about Masami Eiri, chief researcher at Tachibana General Labs,
90:30 - 91:00 who believed that all humans could be connected
to the Wired without the need for devices. Eiri put the Schumann resonance into code
and without the knowledge of his superiors, inserted that code into the 7th
generation internet protocol. When this was found out, he was fired
from his position and found dead on the Yamanote line train tracks one week later. Outside, Eiri appears before Lain, and his
design shows off the result of his gruesome demise, his body taped together where he
would have been run over by the train,
91:00 - 91:30 which is a really cool touch on the part of Abe. In Layer 10, Love, Lain speaks
to Eiri. He is the god, or Deus, as the screenplay refers to him, who
has been speaking to Lain all this time. Eiri takes over Lain’s body and
starting explaining things. Meanwhile, Lain is in Eiri’s body asking questions. A really bizarre way of introducing a character, but also a way to illustrate Eiri’s notion that
bodies have no meaning in this world anymore. Eiri talks about the compressed
information that he put into his
91:30 - 92:00 Schuman resonance code which he then
inserted into the 7th gen protocol. This compressed information contained his own
memories so that he could exist in the Wired forever, and so he now exists in the real world
perpetually as well, since the two have merged. He also reveals that the Knights were operating
under his orders, probably unknowingly. There’s then a vision of Lain in school, but her
desk is missing and no one seems to notice her, further reinforcing Eiri’s claim
that Lain no longer needs a body.
92:00 - 92:30 Back at home, no one seems to be around,
but it turns out Lain’s dad is still there. He calls her Lain-san now, denoting
a distance and unfamiliarity between them. He says their work is finished and that
Lain is free to become anything she wants. He confesses that he wasn’t given permission
to say goodbye, but he’s come to love her. He also says that he’s jealous of her existence. Another interesting point about this
scene is that instead of being denoted as “Yasuo” in the script, which is
Lain’s father’s name by the way, he’s instead referred to only as “Otoko”
or man, robbing him of his identity.
92:30 - 93:00 You have to wonder, if Lain’s family was in fact
fake, who gave them their orders to play house? In the Otakon Q&A panel from
2000, that question was asked. Ueda responded, “as to who
they are and who they work for, it’s left up in the air for you to
decide, but they’re basically there to collect information and report
to somebody else in the background.” Lain finds herself in a strange cityscape
with traces overlaid on the sky above, electrical current flowing through them.
93:00 - 93:30 Voices tell her that the Knights of
Eastern Calculus, the full name of the Knights organization, and badass name by the
way, is descended from the Knights Templar, the military arm of the Christian church that
operated between the 12th and 14th centuries. The Knights of Eastern Calculus is a reference to
the Knights of Lamda Calculus, a semi-fictional group of hackers that are basically an in-joke
that may have originated in computer labs at MIT. Computer nerds make the most elaborate in jokes. Lain says that Eiri has only become a god
because he has worshippers to follow him,
93:30 - 94:00 so she decides to track down
the identity of the Knights. Lain succeeds in her endeavor, and
their names leak all over the Wired. The men in black and their
associates are now hunting them down all over the world and silencing them. The men in black then visit Lain,
but say that she’s safe and Eiri’s thoughts will be scrubbed from protocol 7. This
scrubbing will also eliminate the rogue code that Eiri implemented, reestablishing the
border between the real world and the Wired. Karl also says that he loves Lain.
94:00 - 94:30 This seems weird at first, but there’s a
battle of beliefs that’s about to take place, and remember, Eiri believes a god
needs worshippers in order to exist. Lain confronts Eiri and tells him that all his believers are gone. Eiri counters
that he still has one believer. Lain. He explains that he created Lain in the
Wired and that the real world Lain is only a homunculus. She had a fake family,
fake friends, her whole life was a lie. Lain says that Eiri is lying, and it’s hard
to tell if what he’s saying is the truth or if he’s only trying to keep Lain as a
believer so he can continue existing.
94:30 - 95:00 Layer 11, Infornography, ya like that?, begins
with this jazz fusion freak out recap that takes up the first half of the episode, which is
an interesting concept for a recap segment. The guitar solo here is performed
by Reichi “CHABO” Nakaido, performer of the series’ ending theme. The title of the guitar solo is “Wind
of Space and Time,” but it’s overlaid on a jazz track in the episode, which adds
a suitably chaotic feel to the proceedings.
95:00 - 95:30 There are some more Apple references, and
a couple scenes that weren’t actually shown in the series but were alluded to,
the most prominent being Lain’s walk home with Chisa that Chisa mentioned
in her email to Lain in episode 1. The live-action shot of the city at one point
shows a time stamp that was planned to line up with the exact time that this moment would
air on the TV Tokyo broadcast of the episode. The message that scrolls at the bottom of the screen says that Tachibana General Labs
has successfully mapped the human genome. After over 8 minutes of this,
we find out that the recap was
95:30 - 96:00 actually Lain attempting to load an
emulator of her NAVI into her brain. More practically, we learn from the supplemental materials that Konaka originally wrote
a 12-episode outline for the series, but 13 episodes were ordered when they went into
production, so they needed to kill some time. Impressively, the screenplay for episode
11 lays out a lot of the major scenes that were meant to be shown here and in
what order they were meant to appear. Neat. Eiri warns Lain that ingesting
too much information will cause
96:00 - 96:30 her to overflow. Lain warns Eiri not to
talk about her as if she’s a machine, but Eiri says that Lain isn’t hardware, but
software, an executable program with a body, meant to break down the border
between the real world and the Wired. Lain then starts seeing the dead,
or at least their information, which is still present in the Wired. Chisa and the boy who shot himself in
the club at the end of episode 2 tell her that she was the one who called them to
the Wired, basically telling them to kill themselves in the real world so they could
exist forever in the form of information.
96:30 - 97:00 This is never revealed, but
my guess is it was Alphabet Lain who contacted them and relayed this message. In the next scene, we finally
get the payoff about the being in the red and green-striped shirt that
kept visiting the girl in her bedroom. The girl was Alice and the
being was Lain. Or Grein, as the creators dubbed this version of
her, a portmanteau of gray and Lain. The alien Lain tells Alice that it wasn’t
her who leaked the rumors. Not her, but another version of her, again
most likely the demonic Alphabet Lain.
97:00 - 97:30 But then again, it could have been a Lain that
we never actually see in the series. Who knows? Alien Lain promises that she’ll make
it so the rumors never happened. Lain has already destroyed the border
between the real world and the Wired, so now she can go anywhere
without the need for a device. “Grein” is my second favorite
Lain after Alphabet Lain. There’s an interesting note about
her in Visual Experiments Lain, where it says that she can’t get inside the
room, she can only stand at the door frame. Konaka’s footnote about Grein’s appearance in the screenplay also notes that she
never tries to come through the door.
97:30 - 98:00 This version of Lain could be meant to
represent her feelings as an outsider, an alien, who can’t enter
into other people’s lives. Either way, the way the notes
are worded in Scenario and Visual Experiments are incredibly creepy. And the whole scene itself, though sort of
funny at first glance, is incredibly creepy. The next day at school, it turns out
the rumors about Alice and the teacher have been erased from everyone’s memory. Well, everyone’s except for Alice’s. In fact, Lain didn’t just
erase everyone’s memories,
98:00 - 98:30 she erased the actual events from ever occurring. Alice then realizes that her visit from alien
Lain wasn’t just a hallucination or dream. Layer 12, Landscape, the penultimate episode, begins with Lain explaining that people only
have substance in the memories of other people. That’s why there are so many versions of
her, they each represent an image of how anyone she’s ever interacted with, in the
real world or the Wired, perceived her. Which is an interesting thing to think
about, the you that other people perceive,
98:30 - 99:00 and whether or not that projection measures up
to the you that you perceive yourself to be. An idea that will be further expanded
on in the story of Lain the game. Lain uses her god-like powers
to manipulate news broadcasts and includes a special message for everyone. Let’s all love Lain! In the screenplay, when the announcer
says Lain over and over again, Lain’s name is written in the different styles,
perhaps implying to love all versions of Lain.
99:00 - 99:30 This could be Lain’s way of trying to turn
herself into a god to combat Eiri’s influence over the Wired or, you know, since the real and
the Wired have merged, just the world in general. Eiri explains that bodies
stop humans from evolving, that the information that has accumulated within
us through the generations reaches an end point. In the beginning, all humans were
connected in the primordial soup of life, so he’s merely brought things back to that
original state by connecting all humans. In a dark parking garage, the men in
black discuss whether or not Eiri was
99:30 - 100:00 actually the one behind the orders
to wipe out the Knights members, and whether he was actually behind
Tachibana’s machinations as well. Kurosawa shows up and tells them to run
to a place that has no powerlines or satellite coverage, which of course doesn’t exist. It seems that Kurosawa is now playing along
with the idea of connecting the real world and the Wired, whereas before, in episode
7, he said he was fighting against that. I feel like this whole scene is meant to be
convoluted and to intentionally detract you from who is double crossing who and
who anyone is actually working for.
100:00 - 100:30 Lin Sui-Xi then starts convulsing
and dies. When Karl checks on him, he sees an image of Lain inside one of his eyes. Through his super cool cyberpunk visor,
he sees something approaching him through the parking garage, and were left with
his screams echoing in the darkness. Alice visits Lain’s home, which is
trashed, and encounters Mika on the stairs, who’s been abandoned by the
Knights since they’re all dead now. Mika then she disappears. In Lain’s room, Alice finds Lain buried under a
blanket of cables and wires. Alice asks her what
100:30 - 101:00 all the devices are for, and Lain says,
nothing, she’s just been watching stuff. “Hey, everyone. This is ManlyBadassHero.” Alice then asks Lain why she erased
everyone’s memories except for hers. She thinks Lain is doing this to punish her, but that wasn’t Lain’s intention. Lain reveals
that Alice is the only one she’s cared about. Lain’s reconnected all the other people
in the world, but left Alice separate. When Lain explains that she’s only
a program meant to break down the
101:00 - 101:30 border between the real world and
the Wired, Alice protests and tries to show Lain that she’s real flesh and
blood, a warm body with a heartbeat. Eiri interrupts and tells Lain that Alice is only saying this because she’s
afraid of losing her body. Eiri says he’ll need to debug Lain and reaches out
to her. His hand appears, which freaks out Alice. Lain refuses to go with him though, and
tells Eiri he’s not a god. All he did was remove devices and input the code into
the protocol, but he couldn’t have done any of that without all of the work done by other
people leading up to the creation of the Wired,
101:30 - 102:00 which is the reason we went through all
of those information dumps in episode 9. Lain accuses Eiri of not actually
being a god at all. He didn’t create anything. He’s just the mind of
a dead man trapped in the Wired. In frustration, he tries to manifest a body
for himself in an attempt to actually exist. Lain continues, saying that the Wired isn’t
an upper layer of the real world. The world existed before the Wired, therefore the
foretelling of its connection only came
102:00 - 102:30 into existence after the Wired was created,
so it’s not some prophecy or word of god. Furthermore, by attempting
to create a body for himself, Eiri has proven that humans do need
bodies, contradicting his own dogma. So like any petulant wannabe god, he tries to crush Lain and Alice
with his slimy primordial limbs. The final episode, Layer 13, Ego, picks
up directly where the previous left off. With Lain’s declaration that Eiri does in
fact need a body to exist, he disappears.
102:30 - 103:00 Alice wrestles free from Lain and
slaps her, causing her to bleed. I think this is meant as proof
that even though Lain may have been created as some program, she
does still need a body to exist. Or it could be that she was a
normal human all along. There are a lot of ways to interpret this tiny moment. Alice is clearly traumatized, and Lain, upset over how much pain she’s caused
her, decides to reset the entire world. We see shots from earlier episodes,
but Lain doesn’t exist in any of them. There’s a scene with Lain’s mother, father,
and Mika eating breakfast together. Lain’s
103:00 - 103:30 father looks toward the empty fourth
chair at their dining room table, and seems to remember something,
but ultimately brushes it off. The girls meet in front of the school
gates and make plans to go to Cyberia. Alice opens her NAVI to contact somebody
about their plans. The girls wonder who Alice wants to tell, and mistake
it for Chisa, who’s still alive. We know, of course, that Alice was thinking of contacting Lain. Alice declares that
what isn’t remembered, never happened. If you aren’t remembered,
you never actually existed.
103:30 - 104:00 We see that all of the other characters are living normal lives now, and others
who have died are still alive. Lain appears in Taro’s NAVI briefly. Coupled with Alice’s half-remembrance,
these scenes show that there are still fragments of Lain that exist throughout the
world, even though no one remembers her. I like that the men in black are utility workers. And that Eiri is still alive
as a disgruntled salary man. In the Wired, Lain speaks with Alphabet
Lain, according to the screenplay. Alphabet Lain says that Lain has proven
that the Wired is not an upper layer
104:00 - 104:30 of the real world, but a network that
merely passes information through it. Lain now exists as an omnipresence in Wired,
and Alphabet Lain tries to convince her to become god and start things over the way
they were in the beginning of the series. Lain resists, causing Alphabet
Lain to cease existing. Before disappearing completely, she asks
Lain what she actually is. Lain doesn't know, but then she hears the voice of her
father, and sees him looking down on her. She’s back in the bear suit,
sitting at a table with him. He tells her that she doesn’t need
to wear the bear suit ever again.
104:30 - 105:00 An indication that she doesn’t need
something to insulate herself anymore. But as Konaka notes in the screenplay, this
line was also meant as a bit of an in-joke for the creators, referencing the conflict the
bear suit caused within the production staff, with Konaka writing that since
this is the end of the series, Lain will literally never have
to wear the bear suit again. At the end of this scene, Lain’s father mentions that next time they meet they can
enjoy tea and madeleine cakes together. This entire scene was actually scripted
differently. In Scenario Experiments Lain,
105:00 - 105:30 Lain and her father do share tea and madeleines. Konaka explains in his footnote that he wanted
Lain to experience the raw act of eating, something human, which would then
cause her to break down with emotion. He says he still thinks the way the scene ended
up in the series was done beautifully, but he wishes that his original idea could
have made it into the final cut. In the city, in the future,
Alice, now 22 years old, walks with her fiancee. She spots Lain on
a pedestrian bridge and runs to meet her. She feels she knows Lain from somewhere,
but Lain only says “nice to meet you,”
105:30 - 106:00 so Alice is convinced that they
don’t know each other after all. And so Lain remains to watch
over this version of the world. Konaka’s final footnote says that it’s hard
for him to look subjectively at the series, even after so much time away from it. He says that he loves Alice, and he loves Lain, maybe echoing Lain’s father’s
sentiments from episode 10. What started out for both of them as work,
an assignment, became something much more.
106:00 - 106:30 There’s a lot more to cover as far as analysis of
the TV series goes, but I’ll save that for after we discuss the story of the game and start
making connections between these two works. Lauded for its visual and technical achievements, revered for its mature themes, psychological
storytelling, and daring questioning of our modern world, Serial Experiments Lain, the
television series, was a massive success. While it may not have been quite as
popular as some other breakout 90s series,
106:30 - 107:00 such as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop, it still had an impact on anime culture
both in its native Japan and abroad. Much of what it has to say about technology
and how human’s use it is still relevant today. The physical form of the hardware and the barrier
to entry based on technical skill may be outdated, but the degrading effects on communication and
the draining effects it has on our mental states, on our perception of reality, are just as
much issues now as they were back then.
107:00 - 107:30 Even more so, really. It’s a prescient meditation on modern issues,
a dark observation on human nature. Yet, in the end, there is light. Hope that we
will overcome, persevere, and continue on. And now, for the complete opposite of that.
107:30 - 108:00 The Serial Experiments Lain TV series introduces
us to the idea of seemingly infinite versions of Lain, presenting several throughout
its run and hinting at countless others, inviting us to wonder what Lains we haven’t seen. And so, we’re introduced to a few other Lains
in Serial Experiments Lain the video game. This version of Lain is in her
last year of elementary school, two years younger than the
Lain we saw in the anime.
108:00 - 108:30 We’re also introduced to a different family,
just a mom and dad, no older sister, several different friends, and Lain’s counselor, Touko,
as well as several characters related to Touko. I’ve already talked about the structure of
the game, so for this section of the video, I’m going to attempt to talk about
the story in semi-orderly fashion. There are basically 4 concurrent
storylines running through the game. Touko and Lain’s counselling sessions,
Touko’s personal life, Lain’s personal life, and another more difficult to easily categorize
overarching event that leads to the game’s ending.
108:30 - 109:00 As mentioned in the gameplay portion of the video, all of the nodes containing these story
moments are scattered throughout the two cylinders that you traverse, and many nodes
are unlocked on separate playthroughs, jumping back and forth through time, creating a
kaleidoscopic view of the story and characters. Before we get into it, I’d just like to
give a warning that the story here is much, much darker and more depressing
than the anime’s storyline. We were already dealing with some heavy
subject matter there, but the game goes a
109:00 - 109:30 lot harder in some of its story moments, so
just a heads up, disturbing content ahead. If you would prefer not to have the story
of the game spoiled and want to experience it on your own, you can skip to this time
to jump to the conclusion of this video. On a first playthrough, the story begins
with Lain and Touko’s counseling sessions as well as Touko’s diagnosis reports
and diary entries from that time.
109:30 - 110:00 Early on, Touko’s diary is mainly concerned
with her boyfriend, Takeshi, and her work life. It mentions that both she and Takeshi
work at the same research institute and that they both studied overseas in America
before returning to Japan to begin this job. On a 2nd playthrough, Touko’s
earlier diary entries unlock, which detail her student days spent
studying in America and dating Takeshi. This is chronologically where the story begins,
about a year before the main events of the game. They follow Touko through her return to
Japan, and expound upon the differences
110:00 - 110:30 between American and Japanese work culture,
as well as her growing frustration with the workplace bullying she experiences as a
result of studying and working overseas. These elements actually hit
pretty close to home for me. As a foreigner who has lived and
worked in Japan for over a decade, I’ve not really been the target of
workplace bullying and power harassment, though I’ve spoken to Japanese friends and
former coworkers who have detailed their own struggles with this unfortunately highly
common practice in Japanese work settings.
110:30 - 111:00 A lot of what Touko describes here, the passive
aggressive comments, the refusal to allow her to actually work on anything significant or within
her skill range, the treating of her as an outsider because she spent time overseas and has
developed a more Western attitude towards things. These are unfortunately all stories
that I’ve heard first-hand in real life, even among Japanese friends who
haven’t spent time overseas. The senpai-kohai hierarchy of Japanese employee
relationships seems to normalize this bullying
111:00 - 111:30 practice. It’s especially common among
older generations of Japanese workers, but is still inherent in
young professionals as well. I’m not going to attempt to make any kind of
cultural critique here, because, like I said, I don’t have much experience with it myself, but
I just wanted to point out that a lot of what Touko describes reminded me of conversations with
friends, and the writing here is shockingly real. Touko’s supervisor, Dr Takashima, refuses
to give her any responsibilities beyond just acting as his personal secretary,
even after Touko has passed all of her
111:30 - 112:00 certification tests required in Japan for
her to start seeing patients as a counselor. He also makes unwanted sexual advances
toward her, of course, I say with weariness. Eventually, after several months of grunt work,
Touko is assigned her first patient, Lain Iwakura. Touko describes Lain as a cute,
12-year old girl suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations and
who feels psychologically unstable. This is where the counseling sessions
between Touko and Lain enter into the story.
112:00 - 112:30 In her diagnosis reports, Touko describes Lain’s family life and upbringing as normal with
no history of mental illness. However, Lain’s mother informs Touko that Lain
suffers from frequent night terrors. She hears garbled voices and is suddenly
awakened and forced to watch a video. Nothing more is said about
what kind of video or why. Other examples of Lain’s hallucinations
include her playing in the park and suddenly finding herself alone when before
she thought there were other kids around. Later on, when Lain begins to open
up to Touko about her condition,
112:30 - 113:00 she also says she feels like someone
is touching her when no one is there. She describes it as if there’s another her,
touching her body, trying to rip her apart. And these sensations don’t just occur while
she’s sleeping either. She feels them while she’s awake and even while at
school, talking with friends. This is incredibly unnerving, especially when you stop to consider that Lain is
just a 12-year old girl experiencing these things. We also learn that the voices Lain
hears come from the power lines.
113:00 - 113:30 Touko notes Lain’s asymmetric hairstyle, and learns that it isn't just a quirky
choice. The long forelock is meant to protect her from these hallucinations
or stimuli actually entering her head. Doesn’t seem to be doing its job. As their counselling sessions continue, Lain
gradually begins to open up to Touko more. Their relationship is an
interesting thing to see develop, especially through the different
lenses of the counselling sessions, the diagnosis reports, Touko’s diary,
and eventually Lain’s own diary.
113:30 - 114:00 In a similar way to how the series
presents different versions of Lain, the game does the same thing, but with
a slightly more down-to-earth approach. The Lain we see in the counselling
sessions is different to the Lain we see in her school and home life
that’s described in her diary. When Lain eventually starts to take
an interest in computers and begins spending more time online, we see a
different version of her there as well. This extends to Touko, too. I’ve
already touched upon this a bit, but the Touko in the counselling
sessions is different from the Touko
114:00 - 114:30 in the diagnosis reports is different
from the Touko in her diary entries. The fragmentation of the two central
characters here is a complex one, and their character developments throughout
the story actually run inverse to one another. As Lain gains more skill and
knowledge in the world of the Wired, she becomes more confident and more in control. She starts to become more interested in Touko’s work and asks questions about psychiatry
and mental illness during their sessions. At first, Touko feels that learning more about the
process of counselling and therapy will help Lain
114:30 - 115:00 overcome her issues, but as Lain’s proddings start
to become more personal and Lain starts revealing that she knows information she shouldn’t,
about not only Touko’s diagnosis reports, but Touko’s personal life as well,
Touko becomes understandably suspicious. She grows to fear and almost hate
Lain. She begins losing control, and her grip on reality and her
sense of self starts to deteriorate. While all of this is going on there are several subplots in both Touko’s
and Lain’s personal lives.
115:00 - 115:30 We’ve already touched upon Touko’s
relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Takeshi. Their relationship starts to fall apart,
and he becomes increasing distant as the story continues, until it’s eventually revealed
that he’s gotten engaged to somebody else. There is no formal breakup that
occurs, just over the course of the months while Touko is counseling
Lain, she sees less and less of him. Leading up to this, Touko reveals an
obsessive side to her personality. She doesn’t really see what’s happening in
front of her, concerning Takeshi’s behavior and attitude, and continues to fantasize
about her and Takeshi’s future together,
115:30 - 116:00 so the news of his engagement
hits her devastatingly hard. Coupled with her frustrations with her
supervisor, who she wishes would just die, and her paranoia about Lain, the
stress starts to tear her down. She meets a new guy in the office, a
representative named Yoshida from a third-party medical supply vendor. He’s peddling
some sort of relaxation device called an RML. I thought it was revealed in one of Touko’s
diary entries what RML stands for, but after looking through my notes and scrubbing through
footage, I can’t find it, so it’s just RML.
116:00 - 116:30 After meeting Yoshida, she immediately starts
fantasizing about a romantic relationship with him, and comes right out and says she
hopes it will make Takeshi jealous. Because of this, she decides to test out the RML
for him. It doesn't exactly make her feel relaxed. It starts to affect her mentally. She
begins getting headaches and feels that the machine is actually making her more exhausted. She decides to stop using the RML for a while, but Yoshida urges her to continue.
In order to please him, she does.
116:30 - 117:00 During this time, we find out
that Dr. Takashima has died. He committed suicide in the lab.
Touko isn’t too broken up about it. As she continues to use the
RML, it becomes difficult for her to distinguish between her dreams and reality. Finally, she does stop using it and
finds out that Yoshida was using her the whole time just to have a test subject
for the experimental RML device. Of course. Before we go any further with Touko’s diary
entries, we should go back to Lain’s though,
117:00 - 117:30 because things start to become
more entangled from here on out. Lain’s diary entries talk about her
life at school, and mention a friend, Kyoko. She touches upon being bulled at school, and admits she’s jealous of Kyoko, because
Kyoko’s just a normal girl, unlike herself. Lain’s friendship with Kyoko is further
detailed in Ekm nodes that unlock during a third playthrough. There are only six of them, and they
show a fairly normal friendship between the two. As Lain’s diary entries continue, sometimes she
feels like she’s getting better, sometimes worse.
117:30 - 118:00 Sometimes she feels that she’s drifting apart from Kyoko after Kyoko begins hanging
out with another girl from school. But then Lain feels accepted again when Kyoko and the new girl come to her house to visit
her while she’s out sick from school. Sometimes Lain wants to go to
school, sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she feels like she’s cured. Sometimes
she feels like she’s losing control again. There are many inconsistent and contradictory
feelings and events detailed throughout Lain’s early entries, and all I can say about
this is, welcome to the world of a preteen.
118:00 - 118:30 Lain’s diary entries are incredibly
well written and feel authentic. I’m pretty sure everyone watching has gone
through these conflicting feelings as a teenager. Confident one day, uncertain the next. Socially
accepted on a Monday, an outcast by Friday. Dialogue writer Hideko Shimizu really
nailed this constantly fluctuating turmoil, and it’s incredibly fascinating to experience
these shifts through Lain’s point of view. Maybe you can begin to see why I suffered
through Serial Experiments Lain’s actual
118:30 - 119:00 gameplay. It was the characters and
the story that kept pulling me along. Another interesting thing to note about
Lain’s diary entries is that she doesn’t tell Touko about most of the anxiety she goes
through in her personal life in their sessions. Even when Lain is suffering, worried about a
rift in a friendship or experiences something that well and truly upsets her and seems to be
the end of her world, in the beginning of the next counseling session, Touko will ask Lain
how she’s doing and Lain will say, “Fine.”
119:00 - 119:30 I’m just impressed by the multifaceted
nature of these characters, and the level of complexity in the writing
from a video game released in 1998. Lain describes becoming more and more
interested in computers. She studies programming from books at the local library. She mentions that this is only to pass the time
until she enters junior high school. After that, she’ll be too busy with school and friends and won’t have all this free
time to devote to computers. Also within these entries Lain talks about the
worsening relationship between her parents. Much like the anime series, Lain has a better
connection to her father than her mother. He
119:30 - 120:00 even stays home from work to talk with her
on some days when she doesn’t go to school. One day, he leaves on a business
trip to America for 2 months, and this is where the cracks in her
semi-normal life start to appear. She decides to try out an online game, sort of similar to the hide-and-seek game that
the children were playing in the TV series, however in this iteration of the game, the goal
is to kill the other player when they’re found. Lain isn’t a fan of this concept and
fills out a developer survey asking
120:00 - 120:30 for her thoughts about the game, where she
answers honestly that she didn’t like it. Shortly after that, she receives
an email with a photo of a dead infant. She suspects that this is somehow
connected to her critique of the game. And you know, based on real life examples,
not really a huge leap of logic there. She speaks to friends online about what
happened and meets a user named Rabbit, who teaches her how to trace information
to find the identity of the sender. After only a day, Lain manages to track
the person down and doxes them. However,
120:30 - 121:00 she also finds that her own diary entries
have been copied and shared as well. She wants further revenge and consults Rabbit,
who says to leave it to him and forget about it, so she gets suspicious that the original
prankster and Rabbit somehow know each other. Lain’s online escapades get swept aside for
a bit when she enters junior high school. She makes a new friend, Misato, another
quiet girl who is often absent from school. Misato turns out to have many talents,
such as playing the violin and painting.
121:00 - 121:30 She also seems to be popular with the
boys, because as Lain says, she’s cute, but, at least according to Lain, Misato
doesn’t seem to have any interest in them. Lain and Misato end up joining the art club at
school together, and overall, things seem to be going well for her. She even mentions that
she hasn’t had any hallucinations for a while. She also says that she’s not planning on
logging onto the Wired for the time being. She’s busy with school and a new friend
and doesn’t have a need for it anymore. During this time, Lain’s father
returns home from his business trip,
121:30 - 122:00 and he’s brought Lain a present, a
stuffed dog that she names Bikke. We’ll learn more about Bikke later on. Lain spends time with her family and practices
art. One day, Misato even comes over for dinner. Lain’s dad drives her home, and they meet
her mother at the door and chat for a bit. These details may seem superfluous right
now, but they’ll become important soon. For the upcoming cultural festival at
school, the students from the art club need to submit paintings. Misato submits an oil
painting of a pegasus that impresses everyone. Lain admits she feels a bit envious of Misato’s
122:00 - 122:30 skills and thinks to herself that
her only skill is with computers. She wants to exchange emails with Misato and
show her the friends she made on the Wired, hoping this will impress her. But it turns
out that Misato isn’t a fan of computers. These events cause Lain to start going back onto the Wired where she decides to join
a news group that has an art thread. At the cultural festival, everyone
loves Misato’s artwork so much that the art teacher decides to submit
it to a prefectural art exhibition.
122:30 - 123:00 Lain posts a photo of Misato’s painting
in the art thread she’s now active in, but other users say that
Misato’s work is plagiarism. Lain doesn’t believe it, but rumors spread around the school that Misato copied her
painting, and she stops showing up. It turns out an incredibly similar piece
was submitted by a young Japanese artist to an American art magazine, where it won
a prize and was published in said magazine. Lain still isn’t convinced that Misato
could have plagiarized her work, so she starts digging into
the matter on the Wired. After contacting the art magazine, Lain
discovers that Misato’s initial sketch
123:00 - 123:30 for her painting was done 2 months before
the work in the magazine was published. She doesn’t get a chance to
celebrate this win though, because she finds out that
Misato is transferring schools. The other kids say that she’s
too embarrassed to come back after it was found out that she was a plagiarist. Lain knows the truth, but
no one will listen to her. “Why do people spread rumors without
knowing what they’re talking about? Don’t they care about who they might be hurting?” One of the most interesting things
about this entire Misato saga is that
123:30 - 124:00 most of it isn’t revealed until a 2nd playthrough. On your first time through, when you get
to these diary entries, you’ll see a few referencing Misato and Lain’s friendship and then
they just jump straight to her having moved away. Of course, you can see through the numbering
that you’re missing several entries, but you don’t really know what’s going on
until after you’ve finished the game once. There may be a very important reason for that. Around the time all of this is going on, Touko decides to interview some
of Lain’s friends from school. She chooses Kyoko, her on again off again
friend from elementary school and Kaori,
124:00 - 124:30 a girl who Lain has never
mentioned in her diaries. Touko makes up a story that she’s Lain’s
home tutor and is worried about her to get the girls to talk and not reveal
that Lain is receiving counseling. Kaori seems more interested in getting Touko to tutor her and only has some basic
observations about Lain to offer. Kyoko talks about how she and Lain used
to be friends but drifted apart near the end of elementary school and now hardly ever talk. Kyoko drops a bombshell when
Touko asks about Misato, though.
124:30 - 125:00 There is no girl in their class by that name. During a later counseling session, Touko
confronts Lain about Misato. Touko tells her that she spoke to one of Lain’s classmates who
said there’s no girl named Misato in their class. Lain insists that Misato exists, but
that she moved away. Touko asks if Lain can give her any proof of Misato’s existence, which is a weird request, and Lain
says that she has her memories of her. Then the conversation turns a bit
philosophical with Lain questioning
125:00 - 125:30 why you need a body to exist, and
Touko abruptly ends the session. The next month, Touko apologizes for
getting angry and admits that it was wrong to go behind Lain’s back
and ask her friends about her. Yeah, you think? I wonder how many ethical
rules and regulations Touko broke by doing that. Lain wants to know who Touko
talked to. When she says Kyoko and Kaori, Lain reveals that she knows
Kyoko but doesn’t know who Kaori is. Touko suspects Lain is playing
with her. Kind of mocking her for saying that Misato didn’t exist
in the previous counseling session.
125:30 - 126:00 This whole thing is really interesting
and furthers Lain’s ideas about memory and existence, but couldn’t Touko have
just asked Lain’s parents about Misato? Lain said in her diary that Misato came over for dinner and Lain’s dad even drove Misato
home and spoke with her mom one evening. Seems like that would be an easy way of finding
out if Lain was making Misato up or not. As we’ll come to find out, though, by this point
in the story, Touko may not be in her right mind. Back to Lain’s diaries for a minute though,
126:00 - 126:30 after Misato’s exit, she throws
herself back into the Wired. Her mother and father’s
relationship is also at its worst. Lain describes a huge fight her
parents had where her father hit her mother. Lain blames herself
for all of these things happening. During this time, something happens to Lain
while she’s at school. She went to school in the morning, but wakes up in her bedroom in the
evening having no memory of how she got there. She’s also begun experiencing
hallucinations again. Stronger than ever. What actually happened is
revealed in several Dc nodes.
126:30 - 127:00 Lain went to the school bathroom,
shattered the mirror with a broom, and cut herself with the broken glass. Most likely passing out and hitting her
head as well, to explain the head bandage. Lain’s father hasn’t been home
for a while and Lain’s mother, worried about Lain’s mental state has
requested a leave of absence from school, so Lain spends all of her
time at home on her computer. She doesn’t really want to use the computer all
day. In fact, it makes her feel sick to do so, but her father gave it to her, so she
feels she can be closer to him by using it. Lain starts to wonder if she’s
even her mother and father’s
127:00 - 127:30 child. She comments that she doesn’t
really look like her mother at all. One day she finds out that Rabbit, the guy on the
Wired who taught her how to trace information, has died. It feels to her that everyone
she gets close to in any way leaves her. Then, the news comes that her parents have gotten
a divorce. Lain’s father goes to live on his own, leaving just Lain and her mother in the house. Again, another momentous and
psychologically damaging moment that Lain makes no mention of to
Touko in the counseling sessions.
127:30 - 128:00 And I guess Lain’s mom doesn’t mention it to Touko either. It’s just never brought up between
the two of them, which is pretty strange. This is also when Lain decides to hack into
Touko’s research and winds up stumbling upon Touko’s diary. There are already hints that
Lain was looking into Touko’s personal life. Early on in the story, she found out when Touko’s
birthday was, without Touko ever mentioning it. But now Lain’s managed to crack the diary and
observes that Touko is just another human being, concerned about petty things, mostly about men.
128:00 - 128:30 The whole hacking and spying on
Touko thing occupies Lain for a bit, but then her diary entries start to focus
more on her father not being around. She reveals that she’s downloaded some AI
software to replicate voices and images and attempts to construct
her father in the program. This starts out weird, but even Lain admits that it’s goofy and just something that
makes her feel a little less lonely. It very quickly spirals out of control. Lain gets heavily invested in machine
learning, having her AI dad go out onto the net to research and grow. The AI even
begins to recognize shapes through the screen.
128:30 - 129:00 She builds a 3D model of her father
and implements the AI into that. “I’m breathing dad’s life into
the computer dad gave me.” One day, she shows the model of her
father that she’s created to her mother, and her mom leaves the room horrified. Naturally. Lain then begins corresponding with
MIT robotics students and, yeah, you know where this is going. She even starts
to look into how to grow artificial organs. Interestingly, one of the only references
to protocol 7 is among these entries.
129:00 - 129:30 This is a concept that’s more
thoroughly developed in the TV series, but it’s neat to see it mentioned here too. A deeply disturbing diary entry
arrives after Lain has built a torso and arms for her robot dad, and
I’ll just let Lain tell you about it.
129:30 - 130:00 There have been a few mentions earlier of
kids at school discussing sexual topics
130:00 - 130:30 and Lain stumbling across adult sites. By
this point she’s also read Touko’s diary, and Touko has mentioned sexual
encounters with her boyfriend Takeshi. Lain always gets embarrassed talking about
this stuff, but she also shows curiosity. She even mentions Touko at the
end of this robot dad encounter, saying that there’s something wrong with her
and she has no business criticizing Touko. As Lain continues building robot dad,
she decides there’s not enough space
130:30 - 131:00 in her room and somehow purchases a derelict
factory and has construction work done on it, posing online as a buyer and
never meeting anyone in person. I’m guessing she used the AI model of her dad
to do the transactions through video calls. She mentions that the developer
was a bit suspicious about never meeting the client in person, but this
never becomes an issue, and Lain moves robot dad to the new factory
where she continues her work. In the Dc nodes, an event occurs that isn’t
directly mentioned in any of the diary entries. Lain has been in contact with someone
online who can get her parts for her
131:00 - 131:30 project. She wants an actuator motor, so
she meets with the guy at a shopping mall. On her way to the meeting, we see a distorted
scene of Lain walking through a crowd. Near the beginning of the game, Touko
mentions Lain’s visual acuity in one of her diagnosis reports. Apparently,
she has better than perfect vision, and at one point Lain talks about
how she can see purple in the sky. I guess this scene is supposed to show us how Lain
views the world with her better-than-fighter-pilot
131:30 - 132:00 vision. Lain’s exceptional eyesight could also
be another clue that she’s not a normal human. She catches a glimpse of a junior high school
girl kissing an older man in the crowd. In the food court of the shopping mall,
during her meeting with her contact, she sees the same girl and man having
some sort of argument and then...
132:00 - 132:30 Again, this scene is never commented
on anywhere else in the game,
132:30 - 133:00 but Lain picking up that gun
will become important later. Back to her diary entries, Lain is having trouble
working on the lower body of robot dad. Ugh. And he doesn’t have a head. Ugh. She puts an artificial head on him temporarily. At one point, he starts to move on his own,
and Lain wonders if he’s trying to see her. She also wonders if this dad is really her dad,
the one that loves her more than anyone else.
133:00 - 133:30 After this, Lain discovers that someone has
tried to access robot dad through the Wired. She starts having hallucinations again and
mentions seeing another version of herself. “She’s in elementary school. But
she’s different from the person I was then. She had conviction in her
eyes. Was the me that I was then me?” During her next counseling session with Touko, she
gets the feeling that Touko is frightened of her. This diary entry corresponds with Counseling nodes
046 and 047. In this session, Lain asks Touko
133:30 - 134:00 specifically about her lover, who at this point
in the story could be either Takeshi or Yoshida. Either way, Touko gets suspicious
and asks Lain if she’s really Lain. If you remember from Touko’s diary
entries, she’s losing grip on reality, so her unprofessionalism here
could be contributed to that. There’s also a subtle reversal thats been
happening in the counseling sessions ever since Lain read Touko’s diary. This
comes to a head during this session, where Touko snaps back, saying that
the counseling is for Lain not for her.
134:00 - 134:30 She says Lain is the proper, reserved, sad girl
without much self-confidence. But Lain says that she doesn’t think that sounds like her at
all, as distortion creeps into the audio. Over the next few sessions, the
timings of which are hard to place, the roles have completely reversed. Lain is now acting as Touko’s counselor. She
also mentions that she and Touko are connected, a word that holds a lot of weight in this series.
134:30 - 135:00 The breakdown of Touko’s self is
further confirmed in her later diary entries where she speaks about suffering
from visual and auditory hallucinations. She mentions at one point that
she’s beginning to feel like Lain. Afterwards, Lain hacks in to the
research center again. This time, she finds some files that she
wasn’t able to access before. Touko discovers that Lain has
been looking at her files and suspects that she’s read everything,
including her own diary entries. This is also around the time when
she discovers that Yoshida betrayed
135:00 - 135:30 her and was just using her as a
guinea pig for the RML device. A few more of Lain’s diary entries reveal that her
mother has disappeared. She contacts the police, but after seeing empty liquor
bottles scattered around the house, they assume her mother is just out on
a bender, and the police do nothing. What they do best. Lain is completely alone in the house now
and starts receiving silent phone calls, but she can hear some sort of
noise on the other end of the line. It’s never really explained what this is, but it could be the information from
the Wired leaking into the real world.
135:30 - 136:00 And I think I’ve managed to line up
all of the various story threads now, so it’s time to talk about the ending. In Touko’s diary, when she figures
out that Yoshida was using her, we hear a bunch of static creep in. Touko says that she will no longer treat Lain
and accuses Lain of killing Dr. Takashima, but then she says something really interesting. “I had nothing to do with it. The police said
it wasn’t me. They think it was a suicide.” This isn’t exactly a confession, but afterwards, Touko does beg Lain to help her and calls her
a good girl, perhaps trying to placate her,
136:00 - 136:30 because she knows Lain knows the
truth behind Takashima’s death? This is left up to interpretation. Though, Takashima’s suicide does come at a
very opportune time when Touko is extremely stressed out, losing grip on reality,
and fed up with his treatment of her. Touko spends the next few diary
entries begging Lain to leave her be, so let’s check in on what
Lain has actually been up to. Lain wakes up one morning with a gun in her
hands, having no recollection of how she got it.
136:30 - 137:00 We know from the earlier scene
at the mall that she picked it up after the murder/suicide that occurred there. She decides to place it inside of robot
dad for safe keeping. While she’s there, robot dad hugs her, and she wonders if he can
hear her footsteps approach and knows who she is. She feels that something has
gone wrong with his development. Ya think? Lain decides to make a copy of herself
and put it on the Wired using the same machine learning software that
she used to create her father. After a few days spent in development, Lain has a conversation with her new self on
the Wired. There’s also this brilliant line,
137:00 - 137:30 which I don’t know, I just think it’s
one of the best in the entire game: “She’s the same as me, so she’s predictable” So now a Wired version of
Lain has come into existence. A Lain who is combing through data
and learning about not only Lain, but Touko as well and everything
related to their interactions. Sounds a lot like exactly what we’re
doing while playing the game, doesn’t it? So yes. If you haven’t already guessed, we
are the Lain that Lain has just created.
137:30 - 138:00 Or rather, we’ve been guiding this
Wired Lain through all the nodes attempting to access information and learn more. By this time, Touko has completely taken on the
role of the patient in the counseling sessions, and Touko’s loss of identity is pretty
much confirmed in the diagnosis reports, which now have Touko and Lain’s
voices overlapping each other.
138:00 - 138:30 In her final diary entry, Touko resigns herself to the loss of her body and her
impending connection to Lain. Now, these final bits of the story, I found really difficult to fit into an exact
timeline, so I’ll just refer to the Dc nodes.
138:30 - 139:00 One night in the lab, Touko is going through her
files when Lain appears in the room with her. Touko mentions that Lain appeared
in a laboratory two years ago, and that all information about
her was entered into a database. However, Touko says the final update
is from a date two years in the future. Touko also asks Lain why there isn’t any
data about Lain prior to three years ago. She comes to her own conclusion that Lain
was born in her current state at that time. Lain says all of that doesn’t matter, that
she wants to connect with the entire world.
139:00 - 139:30 What in the--, like, I don’t know.
139:30 - 140:00 My guess is that Wired Lain has now completely
taken over, possibly even killed or merged completely with the real world Lain and
has manipulated the data about herself. The entry from two years in the future
could also be a demonstration of Lain’s omnipresence. Could omnipresence
extend beyond time as well?
140:00 - 140:30 If anyone has any thoughts about
this whole scene, leave a comment. There are a couple reasons why
this scene is hard to place. For one, Touko is acting very differently from the way she acts in the final counseling
sessions and her last few diary entries. The other reason comes from what’s written in Lain’s diary and what happens
in the subsequent Dc nodes. Through her digging, Lain finds a
piece of information that says her mother and father are actually together.
We don’t ever see where Lain learned this, but she suspects that Touko knew the
truth and was hiding it from her.
140:30 - 141:00 Could possibly be the reason why she
killed her instead of merging with her, as Touko suspected would happen,
in the previously described scene. Lain then goes to the abandoned factory
and destroys robot dad and all of her equipment. In her diary, she says that she
killed her father, and her mother is next. The next entry skips ahead one year. Lain is talking about taking her final walk.
She sees her mother out in the city, but her mother doesn’t recognize her,
which she isn’t particularly bothered by. But I guess this means that she didn’t kill
her mother after she destroyed robot dad.
141:00 - 141:30 In the Dc nodes, we see Lain walking
through the city, carrying a plastic bag. On a bridge, she encounters
the other version of herself. Lain says that it’s over, but the other
Lain says that for her, it’s just beginning.
141:30 - 142:00 Do I have a sad existence? I guess
people think so. I don’t mind that much. I don’t need a backup. That would be useless. The me on the Net also had a sad existence. That’s why I killed her. Hey, did that hurt?
142:00 - 142:30 In Lain’s last diary entries, she
comments on dying and feeling fear because of her genes. She says
she doesn’t need those kinds of genes. This is a small world that
seems large only to parasites. All the while the beep, like that of a
heart rate monitor, plays in the background. Lain then has a contradictory
conversation with herself, talking about where she will go from here,
and whether or not she’ll need a body. Finally, she asks what she’ll
need to survive on the Wired.
142:30 - 143:00 The answer: Existence and will. The rest is just data. This echoes Lain’s final words to Touko
in their last counselling session. Touko says that she can’t understand her
sense of self from moment to moment. Lain replies, “The judgement you have exactly
at that moment is you. The rest is just data.” As mentioned in the gameplay session, you
can only watch each of the final nodes:
143:00 - 143:30 Lain’s dairy, Touko’s diary, Digital camera,
Diagnosis, and Counseling, once per playthrough. Each of them will trigger
the same ending cutscene, an abridged recap of all of the
animated segments throughout the game. Then you’ll see Lain, who will turn and speak whatever name
you entered on the name entry screen. If you’re lucky! And the process will start
again if you select “Continue.” On a fourth and fifth playthrough, another
new type of node will appear: Eda nodes. These nodes consist mostly of
interrogations of the man Lain
143:30 - 144:00 met with in the shopping mall. His name is Makino. He’s asked about what he witnessed in the
mall as well as his connection to Lain. As these interrogations continue, it
becomes clear that the interrogator isn’t connected to the police, but one
of the shadowy groups interested in Lain, possibly Tachibana General
Labs, possibly someone else. In the last interrogation, Makino tells
about how he hasn’t been able to sleep and only feels at ease when looking at a computer. He shows off his scars from cutting
himself and asks for a psychiatrist.
144:00 - 144:30 Some kind of struggle ensues, and in the end,
the interrogator calls for a cleaner instead. And a cup of coffee. The last Eda node is a press conference
from the director of the research institute answering questions about the two suicides
that have taken place on the premises. The death of Dr. Takashima and the death of Touko. There are several, let’s just say, insensitive remarks about the
mentally ill in this long speech. I can’t really tell if these are intentional or a
product of the time the game was released, but I
144:30 - 145:00 winced at a few descriptions and explanations
of mental illness that were given here. But with all these nodes revealed, the story is concluded. These finish
unlocking on a 6th playthrough. The only thing left after that are all of the
talk nodes, but the only bearing they have on the story is that you’ll eventually start
hearing Touko’s voice instead of Lain’s. And certain lines will be
repeated by both Lain and Touko.
145:00 - 145:30 Touko may have died in the
real world and lost her body, but she continues to exist in
the Wired, connected to Lain. But even after all of this, there’s one more
piece to this puzzle that we’re missing. There are a total of 58 numbered Dc
nodes in Serial Experiments Lain, but only 55 are unlockable through gameplay. Two of the missing nodes are on the game
disc, but can only be accessed by dumping the game files. These are Dc1001, which is
just an establishing shot of some powerlines,
145:30 - 146:00 and Dc1058 which shows the
aftermath of Lain’s suicide. Dc1029, however, is completely missing. So, where is it? Well, inside Yoshitoshi ABe’s An Omnipresence in Wired is a 19-page manga titled
“The Nightmare of Fabrication.” DC1029
146:00 - 146:30 The story takes place entirely in Lain’s room.
She wants to talk to someone, but running through the list of all the people she knows, she
figures no one else wants to talk to her. When she thinks about Misato, she tries to convince herself that
her friend wasn’t an illusion. She remembers buying pastels with
her, remembers the smell of them,
146:30 - 147:00 but right now, she can’t find the
paint set anywhere in her home. These pastels were actually mentioned in one of Lain’s diary entries where she talks about
her mother not liking the smell of them. Lda071, if you’re wondering. She also can’t recall when she bought
them, or when she got her head injury, which occurred after she passed out from
cutting herself in the school bathroom. She comes to the conclusion that
her memories aren’t connected, and if they aren’t connected to
anyone, then she’ll disappear. While thinking about this, she’s cut off
the bell that was around Bikke’s neck,
147:00 - 147:30 the stuffed animal that her father brought
home for her as a gift from his business trip. She builds a robotic device to place
inside Bikke, repeating all the while that this won’t hurt as she cuts open the
stuffed animal and puts the device in. After she’s finished, Bikke makes
weak barking sounds. Lain, overjoyed, vows to program him to walk, then
install an AI so they can talk together. Then she’ll make her father, and her friends,
and a mother who won’t get mad at her. She’ll be able to talk to all of them and
they won’t be able to hurt her. In this way,
147:30 - 148:00 she’ll be able to connect to everyone again. Her moment of triumph is short lived, though. Bikke weakly utters Lain’s name
before exploding into pieces. As Lain grieves over the loss of her
stuffed dog, a voice calls out to her and tells her that things that are broken can be
replaced, the dead can be brought back to life. The voice belongs to Masami Eiri,
the godlike figure from the anime who wrote his consciousness into the 7th protocol. He gives Lain a replacement Bikke
and says from now on this one is
148:00 - 148:30 the original. They can dispose of
the broken one and because no one knows that she killed the original,
that means that it never happened. Lain protests, saying that she knows what she’s done and a replacement isn’t the same
as having the original brought back. Eiri tells Lain that she can
just rewrite her own memories, then that will make it real. He also says that
Lain has already done this many times before. Lain then says that she’s had Bikke since
she was born, which we know is a lie, because she received the toy
from her father recently.
148:30 - 149:00 However, maybe there is some truth to this,
considering Lain and Touko’s conversation at the research institute, where Touko claims that Lain
only came into existence just a few years ago. Eiri suggests this in his next line when he
says maybe Lain wasn’t born as long ago as she thinks. He asks where all the people
who have any memory of her have gone. Lain still resists all of this and
says that her memories are real. Eiri tells her that a memory is just a record, where thoughts and reality separate is
just a thin border that can be overcome.
149:00 - 149:30 Even if Lain forgets this conversation, deep down she’ll know that this is the truth.
And that he and she will continue to exist. Lain then wakes up in her room and finds
Bikke unchanged, sitting on her desk. However, on the floor next to her foot is
the bell that she cut from Bikke’s neck. This Bikke still has a bell around its neck. In the end, she buries the bell in the backyard.
If no one knows about it, then it never happened. She’s rewriting her memories, burying her
nightmare, that way it never happened.
149:30 - 150:00 This possibly explains why, even
after this traumatizing event, she still went on to try to build
a replacement for her father. The Nightmare of Fabrication offers
several key connections between the story of the game and the
story of the anime series. The most obvious is the appearance of Masami Eiri,
looking exactly the same as he does in the anime. But we actually hear Eiri’s voice in the game. Aside from all of the nodes that I’ve already
exhaustively discussed. There are some extra scenes that play when you stay idle in each
level of the two cylinders throughout the game.
150:00 - 150:30 Some of these play pieces of
conversations that you’ll hear in other nodes. Some of them show scenes
that are mentioned in diary entries, such as a construction accident that
Lain mentions witnessing in Lda107. But there are a few where a
mysterious man is speaking, saying that he knows about Lain and that
he has to die in order for them to meet. Eiri’s talk of Lain having reset her own
memories many times before this and being able
150:30 - 151:00 to shape reality in her own image, also speaks
to several key plot points in the anime series. But the question is, is a god created or has
it always existed, eternally, outside of time? Does it continue to exist when
there’s no one around to believe in it? Does anything exist if there’s no
one around to remember or believe in it? These are questions that the TV series tangoes
with, and I think they’re important questions to consider when trying to figure out the
connections between the game and the anime.
151:00 - 151:30 One of the biggest things I noticed from reading
so many comments from and interviews with the creators of Lain is that they’re reticent to
explain many of the stories greater mysteries. This is because, as Ueda hints at in the
Otakon interview, and the writers of Visual
151:30 - 152:00 Experiments Lain hint at in several of
the blurbs in the episode breakdowns, they wanted people watching to
come to their own conclusions. To quote Ueda from that wonderful
Otakon Q&A panel, “when we made this, we had certain goals and certain things we wanted
to express, but everyone has their own opinion, their own reality--if you
were--that they posses... “Just because I think a certain way, or I
want this certain thing to be understood, that doesn't mean that I don't think you
should get something else out of it.”
152:00 - 152:30 One of the biggest reasons I had for making this
video was to find out what the direct connections were between the story of Serial Experiments Lain
the anime and Serial Experiments Lain the game. In an interview with Animerica magazine
in Vol. 7, No. 9, Ueda had this to say about the relationship between
Lain the anime and Lain the game: “The approach I took for this project
was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products. “In the game, users can interactively
access the fragments of Lain’s memory.
152:30 - 153:00 Then users can actually feel the
Lain who exists inside the Web. “In the TV animation, people can understand
Lain by following the story. In the end, I wanted people to understand Lain, the
girl. Ultimately, I want them to love her… “The game’s basic viewpoint is the record of
Lain when she was little. In the animation, we didn’t specifically say that Lain in the
game and Lain in the anime are the same person, but the creative staff assumed the two are
one and the same person, and Lain’s memory
153:00 - 153:30 in the game had a big influence on the anime.” The story of the game covers Lain’s last year of elementary school and first
year of junior high school. In the TV series, she’s in
her 2nd year of junior high. So if we follow the chronology of events, based
on the two stories actually being connected, then after game Lain dies, she is
replaced by a new version of Lain. After all, if Eiri is to be believed, Lain’s body
is just a homunculus, a storage unit housing the executable program that is Lain, so it’s easy
enough to just replace her body and start over.
153:30 - 154:00 There were even mentions of creating artificial
organs in Lain’s diary when she talks about creating a new father. That level of sophisticated
bio-technology exists in the world of Lain. So nothing is actually lost, and Lain has even gone ahead and created a Wired version
of herself that continues on as well. Also, because there are many versions of Lain
existing at the same time--an infinite number of them, if another scene from episode 8 is to
be taken at face value--this version of Lain
154:00 - 154:30 has no recollection of past events that
other versions of Lain have experienced. In fact, we know this to be true,
because Lain has no recollection of Alphabet Lain spreading rumors
about Alice in the TV series. Or if she does, they’re buried
somewhere deep in her psyche, in the same way that the Lain in The Nightmare
of Fabrication buried the truth about Bikke. If something or someone isn’t remembered by
anyone, then it’s as if it never existed.
154:30 - 155:00 So things could just be on a linear timeline. But there’s another way to look at things if we take into account Lain’s
ability to reset the world. If, as Eiri suggests in The Nightmare of
Fabrication, she already has that ability before the start of the series, and has reset the
world before, then it stands to reason that she reset things sometime between the events
of the game and the events of the anime. So the events of the game happened
in a previous version of reality. This could be the reason for having
a different family dynamic in the
155:00 - 155:30 series. Game Lain doesn’t have
a sister, but anime Lain does. We actually don’t know if game mother and
father are the same as series mother and father, because we never see or hear them in
the game, which is really interesting. We know that Lain also has the ability
to make it so events never happened, like when she erases the events that make up
the rumors surrounding Alice and the teacher. So, Lain could have erased the events
of the game from ever happening as well. This brings up an interesting question, though, and one that The Nightmare of Fabrication
and the TV series tackle over and over again:
155:30 - 156:00 If something is forgotten, does that
mean that it never actually happened? Even when Lain erases herself at the end of the
series, there are still traces of her in the world, in Alice’s memory, on Taro’s NAVI. Hell,
she’s even still hanging around at the very end. So it seems that the TV series is saying
just because no one remembers something, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. There are even more subtle traces in the
TV series, like Lain being given the gun by the boy from Cyberia, calling back to the
gun Lain used at the end of the video game.
156:00 - 156:30 That deleted world leaves behind remnants. There’s also the possibility that
the game and the anime could just be alternate tellings of the story of
Lain, completely separate from each other. A riff on the same themes,
using the same main character, since Lain is the only character who
crosses over between the two stories. This theory is supported by
the fact that Ueda wanted to create a story that could be viewed
through different media projects. That may be a boring idea, but there aren’t any
details that don’t support this theory either.
156:30 - 157:00 Personally, I feel like it’s
all of the above and more. The creators are inviting you to make connections
and think about things in your own way. I prefer the ambiguity of it all. It’s
fun to fall down rabbit holes and discuss, theorize, analyze all of the little details. If there were solid answers, it would
take away from the mystique that is Lain. This is a franchise built around mythologizing
and at times deifying its main character. Omnipresence and infinity are
concepts that human beings can
157:00 - 157:30 only grasp theoretically. Pondering
them opens up a void of thought, because it’s something we can never actually
experience and understand completely. And I love the mystery inherent in that. I love that Lain tackles these questions and forces us to ponder what it really
means to be all of these things. Or to be none of these things, just another node, connected to another and another in a long
chain, inside this perception we call reality.
157:30 - 158:00 By attempting to piece together the story of
Serial Experiments Lain the game in chronological fashion, I think I realize now why the creators
structured that story the way they did. Several events and plot threads occur
at the same time, and in some cases, may not actually be happening at
all, depending on how you look at it.
158:00 - 158:30 There are also quite a few ‘aha’ moments that
arise from hearing certain bits of information, and not knowing what’s going on,
only to later unlock a new node and hear something that makes it all fit
into place among the larger narrative. It creates an interesting tension.
With each node that you gain access to, you’re slowly uncovering more pieces to
this gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a story. And despite a few scenes that are
difficult to fit into a linear timeline, much of the story does end up
coming together in the end. On a more conceptual level, the
fragmented structure mirrors the
158:30 - 159:00 fragmented nature of its two main characters. Like the anime series, the game deals with multiple versions
of each, just in a different way. In the anime, we see physical
manifestations of Lain’s different personas. In the game, we see interactions, diary entries, and professional reports that show the
different masks that the characters wear depending on who they’re dealing
with and how they want to be viewed. It’s some of the deepest characterization I think
I’ve ever seen (or rather, heard) in a video game.
159:00 - 159:30 And it’s the biggest factor that kept
propelling me to continue playing the game. The gameplay itself, if you can call it
that, wears out its welcome well before the end of the first playthrough, but I
needed to keep going, because I needed to see what parts of the story I was missing,
what parts of these characters I was missing. Is this a satisfying tale that can
be taken on its own and appreciated? I don’t think so. You don’t need to play Serial Experiments Lain
to watch Serial Experiments Lain, but I do think you need to have watched Serial Experiments Lain
to play and appreciate Serial Experiments Lain.
159:30 - 160:00 As a piece of the larger work
that is Serial Experiments Lain, and as another lens to view the world and story
and characters of Lain in the TV series through, the game is worthwhile, but only for
the most die hard and patient fans. You really need to know what you’re getting into. It’s slow-paced, at times exhausting and tedious, and it won’t offer a grand illumination
of the mysteries in the anime series. It will give you several more perspectives
through which to view that story though,
160:00 - 160:30 and will give you much more to ponder
just by looking at its story on its own. It was made as an experiment
in gameplay and interactive media and spawned an anime that was
also just meant to be an experiment, but that ended up becoming the
beating heart of the whole thing. Or maybe the central processing unit of the
whole thing, to stay within the parlance of Lain. Even over 25 years after the broadcast
of this quirky 13-episode anime series
160:30 - 161:00 and the release of its companion video
game, Lain is just as popular as ever. Living in memes, appearing on the
covers of indie electronic albums, and acting as the subject for wacky interactive
experiments with technology and the internet. In 2013, Wired Sound For
Wired People was launched, an interactive visual and sound experiment
developed on neocities by a user named fauux. It’s still online today, and you can check it out. Definitely need to give a flashing lights and epilepsy warning though. The
imagery can get pretty intense.
161:00 - 161:30 It’s a creepy little experience
where you click through various web pages with simple animations and
collages of music and sound effects. There’s a link in the description below,
if you want to explore for yourself. In the fall of 2023 through the spring of 2024, an AI chat service called AILain allowed
users to have conversations with Lain. It was constructed using samples of Kaori
Shimizu’s voice. The service has since been shut down, but in their coverage CONTINUE Motion
Graphics magazine writer Gumi Ishibayashi called
161:30 - 162:00 it an evolution of the video call conversations
seen in the 1996 PS1 game, NoEL: Not Digital. So it all comes full circle. In mid-2024 VRChat worked with the
Anique Museum based in Tokyo to host a digital art museum dedicated to
Lain called the Weird Exhibition. Due to popular demand they reopened it
between November 29 and January 19, 2025. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to
attend this exhibit, but I did read about it
162:00 - 162:30 in Volume 85 of CONTINUE Motion Graphics, where
they devoted an article to covering the event. Shout out to one of my Patron’s,
HighFoodcourt, for providing footage from the Weird Exhibition and for giving me
links to the document and Q&A from the event. You can find a link to his full walkthrough
of Weird Exhibition in the description below. It’s really awesome, check
it out if you’re interested. I mean, it was exactly what it sounds
like, a virtual museum where you could view artwork and concept art as well as walk
around virtual recreations of some of the settings of the anime, like the street
in Lain’s neighborhood and her bedroom.
162:30 - 163:00 There was also a Q&A with Ueda, Abe,
and storyboard artist Takuya Sato, as well as questions culled from a
Reddit AMA that I combed through. In the museum though, there
is an interesting document, titled “Project Lain,” stamped top
secret, and dated January 2, 1998. The document, featuring several blacked out lines, details the Lain software project,
and development of a new lifeform. There are several references to
characters in the video game, such as Lain’s friend Kyoko, and counselor, Touko.
163:00 - 163:30 It also references diary entries,
monitoring from the age of 11 to 13, as well as the placement of this Lain lifeform
in the care of a fake family for observation. Near the end, there seems to be some
reference to Lain being installed in Touko and her body being thrown away,
but much of this line is blacked out. In the Q&A, Ueda confirmed that this was
an actual design document that he had written during Lain’s pre-production.
The blacked out lines and top-secret stamp were added when it was decided
it would be placed in the museum.
163:30 - 164:00 There is an uncensored version
of this document floating around that you can probably find on your
own if you’re resourceful enough. I’ve seen it and read it,
but I’m not going to show it. The creators have said that it was a mistake
that it was ever shown in the first place, and if you’ve been paying
attention to my analysis, you don’t really need to see what’s under those
blacked out portions to put the pieces together. Although, you will need to
be able to read Japanese. Also, the team’s whole deal was creating something
that people could analyze for themselves.
164:00 - 164:30 As Ueda said at that one Otakon all those years
ago, just because he thought a certain way, doesn't mean that you shouldn’t
get something else out of it. As you can see, Lain’s
legacy continues to endure.
It’s never going to be popular
enough to sell McDonald’s hamburgers.
164:30 - 165:00 But the series lives on through fan creativity,
weird art installations, and internet memes. And the creators couldn’t be happier about that. In the interview with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi
ABe in volume 85 of CONTINUE Motion Graphics, the two creators both agree that this
is the most fitting legacy for Lain. Lain embodies the culture of the terminally
online, the always connected. We’ve traded in
165:00 - 165:30 our wires, for the most part, but we’re
still metaphorically draped in them. You could argue that the world
we live in has already had its borders between the Wired and the real broken. Rumors and speculation make their way
through social media and become truth. Everything that seemed in 1998 to be only fiction, a story we told ourselves was
a dystopia, has become reality. Our world is a Nightmare of Fabrication. Good night, everybody.
165:30 - 166:00 No, but, yeah. I wish I was joking. After plumbing the depths of this series,
living in it, and obsessively thinking and writing about it for the 2 months that it
took to make this video, the origins of Lain and the connections between the game and
the series have been slightly more elucidated, but I can still safely say that a lot about Lain
is just as much a mystery to me as when I started. And you know what? I’m glad. By unlocking so many tidbits of
knowledge about its creation, its references, and its legacy, I’ve
only come to appreciate it more.
166:00 - 166:30 The truth is, there is no conclusion here. There’s so much more to think about and
unpack, so many details to mull over, different angles to look at,
and lenses to peer through. I’m probably going to watch Serial Experiments
Lain again before I finish editing this video. And I’ll most likely watch it
countless more times in the future. It remains as vital and as real as ever. Lain is omnipresent. And you don’t need to have seen Lain to know Lain.
166:30 - 167:00 And that’s it for Serial Experiments
Lain. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, there’s a like and
a subscribe button. There’s a comment box. You can share it with friends.
Share it with strangers. Spread the word. I think it goes without saying, but this video was the most extensive and
obsessively researched that I’ve ever done. Just the research phase of the video took
about 2 weeks, and then I played the game and played some other games that I talked
about in this video, and some that I didn’t. But yeah, then writing the script
took about 2 and a half weeks,
167:00 - 167:30 and I was rewatching the anime and reviewing the
game footage, and yeah, editing took a long time. But anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to spend the time doing all of that research if
it weren’t for the Dungeon Dwellers. They support me monthly on Patreon
and through YouTube memberships, and if you’d like to become one of them you
can click the Patreon link in the description below or click the join button on this
video page to become a YouTube Member. All supporters get their names in the
videos, they get to watch the videos ad free a few days before they’re made public on
YouTube, they get exclusive updates from me,
167:30 - 168:00 they get to vote in occasional polls on what
games I cover next, and they also get access to the Dungeon Dwellers Archive, which is a
playlist of bonus videos exclusive to supporters. If you support with $5 a month or more, you also get your name read out loud at the
end of videos like these Dungeon Architects:
168:00 - 168:30 As well as these Dungeon Connoisseurs:
168:30 - 169:00 Thank you all for your support, and
thank you, once again, for watching.
169:00 - 169:30 The next video shouldn’t take as long to make
as this one did, so look forward to that.
169:30 - 170:00 I’m not gonna say what it is yet, because
I’m still deciding what exactly it will be,
170:00 - 170:30 but I have a couple ideas, and they’re not
going to require as much work as this one.
170:30 - 171:00 So yeah, sorry this one took so long,
but hopefully the wait was worth it.
171:00 - 171:30 And, so, yeah, Serial
Experiments Lain. Check it out. Dungeon Chill. Out.