#lain telephone wires

[bipolarism2047]

[aideshou]

Crescent Day. Crescent Sky.

[studentofetherium]

@previous anon: FUCK YOU

Serial Experiments Lain (stylized as serial experiments lain) is a Japanese anime television series created and co-produced by Yasuyuki Ueda, written by Chiaki J. Konaka and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura. Animated by Triangle Staff and featuring original character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe, the series was broadcast for 13 episodes on TV Tokyo and its affiliates from July to September 1998. The series follows Lain Iwakura, an adolescent girl in suburban Japan, and her relation to the Wired, a global communications network similar to the internet.

Lain features surreal and avant-garde imagery and explores philosophical topics such as reality, identity, and communication.[3] The series incorporates creative influences from computer history, cyberpunk, and conspiracy theory. Critics and fans have praised Lain for its originality, visuals, atmosphere, themes, and its dark depiction of a world fraught with paranoia, social alienation, and reliance on technology considered insightful of 21st century life. It received the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 1998. Contents1 Plot 2 Characters 3 Production 3.1 Writing 3.2 Character design 3.3 Themes 3.4 Apple computers 4 Broadcast and release history 4.1 Episode list 5 Reception 6 Related media 6.1 Art books 6.2 Soundtracks 6.3 Video game 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

Plot

Lain Iwakura, a junior high school girl, lives in suburban Japan with her middle-class family, consisting of her inexpressive older sister Mika, her emotionally distant mother, and her computer-obsessed father; Lain herself is somewhat awkward, introverted, and socially isolated from most of her school peers. The status-quo of her life becomes upturned by a series of bizarre incidents that start to take place after she learns that girls from her school have received an e-mail from a dead student, Chisa Yomoda, and she pulls out her old computer in order to check for the same message. Lain finds Chisa telling her via email that she is not dead but has merely "abandoned her physical self" and is alive deep within the virtual realm of the Wired itself, where she claims she has found "God" there. From this point, Lain is caught up in a series of cryptic and surreal events that see her delving deeper into the mystery of the network in a narrative that explores themes of consciousness, perception, and the nature of reality.

"The Wired" is a virtual realm that contains and supports the very sum of all human communication and networks, created with the telegraph, televisions, and telephone services, and expanded with the Internet, cyberspace, and subsequent networks. The series assumes that the Wired could be linked to a system that enables unconscious communication between people and machines without physical interface. The storyline introduces such a system with the Schumann resonances, a property of the Earth's magnetic field that theoretically allows for unhindered long-distance communications. If such a link were created, the network would become equivalent to Reality as the general consensus of all perceptions and knowledge. The increasingly thin invisible line between what is real and what is virtual/digital begins to slowly shatter.

Masami Eiri is introduced as the project director on Protocol Seven (the next-generation Internet protocol in the series' time-frame) for major computer company Tachibana General Laboratories. He had secretly included code of his very own creation to give himself absolute control of the Wired through the wireless system described above. He then "uploaded" his own consciousness into the Wired and "died" a few days after, leaving only his physical self behind. These details are unveiled around the middle of the series, but this is the point where the story begins. Masami later explains that Lain is the artifact by which the wall between the virtual and material worlds is to fall, and that he needs her to go into the Wired and "abandon the flesh", as he did, to achieve his plan. The series sees him trying to convince her through interventions, using the promise of unconditional love, romantic seduction and charm, and even, when all else fails, threats and force.

In the meantime, the anime follows a complex game of hide-and-seek between the "Knights of the Eastern Calculus" (based on the Knights of the Lambda Calculus), hackers whom Masami claims are "believers that enable him to be a God in the Wired", and Tachibana General Laboratories, who try to regain control of Protocol Seven. In the end, the viewer sees Lain realizing, after much introspection, that she has absolute control over everyone's mind and over reality itself. Her dialogue with different versions of herself shows how she feels shunned from the material world, and how she is afraid to live in the Wired, where she has the possibilities and responsibilities of an almighty goddess. The last scenes feature her erasing everything connected to herself from everyone else's memories of her and everything else that has happened since the premiere. She is last seen, unchanged, encountering her oldest and closest friend Alice once again, who is now married. Lain promises herself that she and Alice will surely meet again anytime as Lain can literally go and be anywhere she desires between both worlds. Characters

Lain Iwakura (岩倉 玲音, Iwakura Rein) Voiced by: Kaori Shimizu (Japanese); Bridget Hoffman4 The titular character of the series. Lain is a fourteen-year-old girl who uncovers her true nature through the series. She is first depicted as a shy junior high school student with few friends or interests. She later grows multiple bolder personalities, both in the physical world and the Wired, and starts making more friends. As the series progresses, she eventually comes to discover that she is, in reality, merely an autonomous, sentient computer program in the physical and corporeal form of a human being, designed to sever the invisible barrier between the Wired and the real world. In the end, Lain is challenged to accept herself as a de facto goddess for the Wired, having become an omnipotent and omnipresent virtual being with worshippers of her own, as well as an ability to exist beyond the borders of devices, time, or space.

Masami Eiri (英利 政美, Eiri Masami) Voiced by: Shō Hayami (Japanese); Kirk Thornton4 The key designer of Protocol Seven. While working for Tachibana General Laboratories, he illicitly included codes enabling him to control the whole protocol at will and embedded his own mind and will into the seventh protocol. Because of this, he was fired by Tachibana General Laboratories, and was found dead not long after. He believes that the only way for humans to evolve even further and develop even greater abilities is to absolve themselves of their physical and human limitations, and to live as virtual entities—or avatars—in the Wired for eternity. He claims to have been Lain's creator all along, but was in truth standing in for another as an acting god, who was waiting for the Wired to reach its more evolved current state: Lain herself. According to another Lain, however, he has never truly existed all along and would not have had any self-obsessed ideas about being God if he had.

Yasuo Iwakura (岩倉 康男, Iwakura Yasuo) Voiced by: Ryūsuke Ōbayashi (Japanese); Barry Stigler4 Lain's father. Passionate about computers and electronic communication, he works with Masami Eiri at Tachibana General Laboratories. He subtly pushes Lain, his "youngest daughter", towards the Wired and monitors her development until she becomes more and more aware of herself and of her raison d'être. He eventually leaves Lain, telling her that although he did not enjoy playing house, he genuinely loved and cared for her as a real father would. Despite Yasuo's eagerness to lure Lain into the Wired, he warns her not to get overly involved in it or to confuse it with the real world. Miho Iwakura (岩倉 美穂, Iwakura Miho)

Voiced by: Rei Igarashi (Japanese); Dari Lallou Mackenzie4 Lain's mother. Although she dotes on her husband, she is indifferent towards both her kids. Like her husband, she ends up leaving Lain. She is a computer scientist. Alice Mizuki (瑞城 ありす, Mizuki Arisu) Voiced by: Yōko Asada (Japanese); Emily Brown4 Lain's classmate and only true friend throughout the series. She is very sincere and has no discernable quirks. She is the first to attempt to help Lain socialize; she takes her out to a nightclub. From then on, she tries her best to look after Lain. Alice, along with her two best friends Julie and Reika, were taken by Chiaki Konaka from his previous work, Alice in Cyberland. Mika Iwakura (岩倉 美香, Iwakura Mika)

Voiced by: Ayako Kawasumi (Japanese); Patricia Ja Lee4 Lain's older sister, an apathetic sixteen-year-old high school student. She seems to enjoy mocking Lain's behavior and interests. Mika is considered by Anime Revolution to be the only normal member of Lain's family:[5] she sees her boyfriend in love hotels, is on a diet, and shops in Shibuya. At a certain point in the series, she becomes heavily traumatized by violent hallucinations; while Lain begins freely delving into the Wired, Mika is taken there by her proximity to Lain, and she gets stuck between the real world and the Wired.[6] Taro (タロウ, Tarō)

Voiced by: Keito Takimoto (Japanese); Brianne Siddall4 A young boy of about Lain's age. He occasionally works for the Knights to bring forth "the one truth". Despite this, he has not yet been made a member, and knows nothing of their true intentions. Taro loves VR games and hangs out all day at Cyberia with his friends, Myu-Myu and Masayuki. He uses special technology, such as custom Handi Navi and video goggles. Taro takes pride in his internet anonymity, and he asks Lain for a date with her Wired self in exchange for information. Office Worker Voiced by: Shigeru Chiba A top executive from Tachibana General Laboratories. He has a personal agenda, which he carries out with the help of the Men in Black. He looks forward to the arrival of a real God through the Wired, and is the man behind the Knights' mass assassination. There are many things he does not know about Lain, but he would rather ask questions about her than disclose his agenda. Men in Black Karl Haushoffer (カール・ハウスホッファ, Kāru Hausuhoffa), Voiced by: Jouji Nakata Lin Suixi (Chinese: 林随錫; pinyin: Lín Suíxī), Voiced by: Takumi Yamazaki The Men in Black work for the above "Office Worker" in tracking down and murdering all of the members of the Knights. They are not told the true plan, but they know that Masami Eiri is somehow involved, despite having been "killed." They see no need for an almighty, all-powerful God—let alone Lain—in the Wired. Chisa Yomoda (四方田 千砂, Yomoda Chisa)

Voiced by: Sumi Mutoh (Japanese); Lia Sargent4 A teenage girl who committed suicide at the beginning of the series. After her death, she e-mails Lain, Julie, and a few other kids, saying that she is still alive in the Wired, leading to the series events. Reika Yamamoto (山本 麗華, Yamamoto Reika) Voiced by: Chiharu Tezuka (Japanese); Lenore Zann4 One of Alice's friends from school. She does not seem to care for Lain, since she harasses her quite a lot. She is more serious than Julie, and also somewhat meaner. Julie Kato (加藤 樹莉, Katō Juri)

Voiced by: Manabi Mizuno (Japanese); Gracie Moore4 Another friend of Alice. She also harasses Lain, but not as severely as Reika does. She is sometimes insensitive to other people's feelings. Masayuki (マサユキ) Voiced by: Sora Fujima (Japanese); Dorothy Elias-Fahn (English) Taro's best friend. He is usually seen hanging out with Taro and Myu-Myu. Myu-Myu (ミューミュウ, Myūmyuu)

Voiced by: Yuki Yamamoto (Japanese); Sandy Fox (English) A young girl who hangs out with Taro and Masayuki at Cyberia Café. She has feelings for Taro, so she gets jealous when he flirts with Lain. Narrator Voiced by: Takashi Taniguchi (Japanese); Paul St. Peter (English)

Production

Serial Experiments Lain was conceived, as a series, to be original to the point of it being considered "an enormous risk" by its producer Yasuyuki Ueda.[7]

Producer Ueda had to answer repeated queries about a statement made in an Animerica interview.[6][8][9] The controversial statement said Lain was "a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we [Japan] adopted after World War II".[10] He later explained in numerous interviews that he created Lain with a set of values he took as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures. When he discovered that the American audience held the same views on the series as the Japanese, he was disappointed.[9]

The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media (anime, video games, manga). Producer Yasuyuki Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products". The scenario for the video game was written first, and the video game was produced at the same time as the anime series, though the series was released first. A dōjinshi titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication" was produced by Yoshitoshi ABe and released in Japanese in the artbook An Omnipresence in Wired. Ueda and Konaka declared in an interview that the idea of a multimedia project was not unusual in Japan, as opposed to the contents of Lain, and the way they are exposed.[11]

Writing

The authors were asked in interviews if they had been influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, in the themes and graphic design. This was strictly denied by writer Chiaki J. Konaka in an interview, arguing that he had not even seen Evangelion until he finished the fourth episode of Lain. Being primarily a horror movie writer, his stated influences are Godard (especially for using typography on screen), The Exorcist, Hell House, and Dan Curtis's House of Dark Shadows. Alice's name, like the names of her two friends Julie and Reika, came from a previous production from Konaka, Alice in Cyberland, which in turn was largely influenced by Alice in Wonderland. As the series developed, Konaka was "surprised" by how close Alice's character became to the original Wonderland character.[12] A young girl in a white shift sits with her back to us in the dark, focusing her attention on many glowing computer screens which surround her. Lain's custom computer features holographic displays and liquid carbon dioxide cooling.

Vannevar Bush (and memex), John C. Lilly, Timothy Leary and his eight-circuit model of consciousness, Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu are cited as precursors to the Wired.[11] Douglas Rushkoff and his book Cyberia were originally to be cited as such,[6] and in Lain Cyberia became the name of a nightclub populated with hackers and techno-punk teenagers. Likewise, the series' deus ex machina lies in the conjunction of the Schumann resonances and Jung's collective unconscious (the authors chose this term over Kabbalah and Akashic Record).[10] Majestic 12 and the Roswell UFO incident are used as examples of how a hoax might still affect history, even after having been exposed as such, by creating sub-cultures.[10] This links again to Vannevar Bush, the alleged "brains" of MJ12. Two of the literary references in Lain are quoted through Lain's father: he first logs onto a website with the password "Think Bule Count One Tow" [sic] ("Think Blue, Count Two" is an Instrumentality of Man story featuring virtual persons projected as real ones in people's minds);[13] and his saying that "madeleines would be good with the tea" in the last episode makes Lain "perhaps the only cartoon to allude to Proust".

[14][15] Character design

A young girl in a white shift kneels facing us with scissors in her hand, and hanks of her own hair on the ground, leaving one forelock uncut. The background is blue. ABe came up with Lain's hair by imagining Lain cutting it herself and making a ponytail of what was left.[8] This was later included in his An Omnipresence in Wired artbook.[16]

Yoshitoshi ABe confesses to have never read manga as a child, as it was "off-limits" in his household.[17] His major influences are "nature and everything around him".[6] Specifically speaking about Lain's character, ABe was inspired by Kenji Tsuruta, Akihiro Yamada, Range Murata and Yukinobu Hoshino.[8] In a broader view, he has been influenced in his style and technique by Japanese artists Kyosuke Chinai and Toshio Tabuchi.[6]

The character design of Lain was not ABe's sole responsibility. Her distinctive left forelock for instance was a demand from Yasuyuki Ueda. The goal was to produce asymmetry to reflect Lain's unstable and disconcerting nature.[18] It was designed as a mystical symbol, as it is supposed to prevent voices and spirits from being heard by the left ear.[8] The bear pajamas she wears were a demand from character animation director Takahiro Kishida. Though bears are a trademark of the Konaka brothers, Chiaki Konaka first opposed the idea.[12] Director Nakamura then explained how the bear motif could be used as a shield for confrontations with her family. It is a key element of the design of the shy "real world" Lain (see "mental illness" under Themes).[12] When she first goes to the Cyberia nightclub, she wears a bear hat for similar reasons.[18] Retrospectively, Konaka said that Lain's pajamas became a major factor in drawing fans of moe characterization to the series, and remarked that "such items may also be important when making anime".[12]

ABe's original design was generally more complicated than what finally appeared on screen. As an example, the X-shaped hairclip was to be an interlocking pattern of gold links. The links would open with a snap, or rotate around an axis until the moment the " X " became a " = ". This was not used as there is no scene where Lain takes her hairclip off.[19] Themes

Serial Experiments Lain is not a conventionally linear story, being described as "an alternative anime, with modern themes and realization".[20] Themes range from theological to psychological and are dealt with in a number of ways: from classical dialogue to image-only introspection, passing by direct interrogation of imaginary characters.

Communication, in its wider sense, is one of the main themes of the series,[21] not only as opposed to loneliness, but also as a subject in itself. Writer Konaka said he wanted to directly "communicate human feelings". Director Nakamura wanted to show the audience — and particularly viewers between 14 and 15—"the multidimensional wavelength of the existential self: the relationship between self and the world".[11]

Loneliness, if only as representing a lack of communication, is recurrent through Lain.[22] Lain herself (according to Anime Jump) is "almost painfully introverted with no friends to speak of at school, a snotty, condescending sister, a strangely apathetic mother, and a father who seems to want to care but is just too damn busy to give her much of his time".[23] Friendships turn on the first rumor;[22][24] and the only insert song of the series is named Kodoku no shigunaru, literally "signal of loneliness".[25] A series of drawings depicting the different personalities of Lain—the first shows shy body language, the second shows bolder body language, and the third grins in an unhinged fashion. The different personalities of Lain have their names written using different scripts.

Mental illness, especially dissociative identity disorder, is a significant theme in Lain:[19] the main character is constantly confronted with alter-egos, to the point where writer Chiaki Konaka and Lain's voice actress Kaori Shimizu had to agree on subdividing the character's dialogues between three different orthographs.[19] The three names designate distinct "versions" of Lain: the real-world, "childish" Lain has a shy attitude and bear pajamas. The "advanced" Lain, her Wired personality, is bold and questioning. Finally, the "evil" Lain is sly and devious, and does everything she can to harm Lain or the ones close to her.[12] As a writing convention, the authors spelled their respective names in kanji, katakana, and roman characters (see picture).[26]

Reality never has the pretense of objectivity in Lain.[27] Acceptations of the term are battling throughout the series, such as the "natural" reality, defined through normal dialogue between individuals; the material reality; and the tyrannic reality, enforced by one person onto the minds of others.[22] A key debate to all interpretations of the series is to decide whether matter flows from thought, or the opposite.[22][28] The production staff carefully avoided "the so-called God's Eye Viewpoint" to make clear the "limited field of vision" of the world of Lain.[27]

Theology plays its part in the development of the story too. Lain has been viewed as a questioning of the possibility of an infinite spirit in a finite body.[29] From self-realization as a goddess to deicide,[14] religion (the title of a layer) is an inherent part of Lain's background.[29] Apple computers

Lain contains extensive references to Apple computers, as the brand was used at the time by most of the creative staff, such as writers, producers, and the graphical team.[12] As an example, the title at the beginning of each episode is announced by the Apple computer speech synthesis program PlainTalk, using the voice "Whisper", e.g. say -v Whisper "Weird: Layer zero one". Tachibana Industries, the company that creates the NAVI computers, is a reference to Apple computers: the tachibana orange is a Japanese variety of mandarin orange. NAVI is the abbreviation of Knowledge Navigator, and the HandiNAVI is based on the Apple Newton, one of the world's first PDAs. The NAVIs are seen to run "Copland OS Enterprise" (this reference to Copland was an initiative of Konaka, a declared Apple fan),[12] and Lain's and Alice's NAVIs closely resembles the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the iMac respectively. The HandiNAVI programming language, as seen on the seventh episode, is a dialect of Lisp; the Newton also used a Lisp dialect (NewtonScript). The program being typed by Lain can be found in the CMU AI repository;[30] it is a simple implementation of Conway's Game of Life in Common Lisp.

During a series of disconnected images, an iMac and the Think Different advertising slogan appears for a short time, while the Whisper voice says it.[31] This was an unsolicited insertion from the graphic team, also Mac-enthusiasts.[12] Other subtle allusions can be found: "Close the world, Open the nExt" is the slogan for the Serial Experiments Lain video game. NeXT was the company that produced NeXTSTEP, which later evolved into Mac OS X after Apple bought NeXT. Another example is "To Be Continued." at the end of episodes 1–12, with a blue "B" and a red "e" on "Be"; this matches the original logo of Be Inc., a company founded by ex-Apple employees and NeXT's main competitor in its time.[32] Broadcast and release history

Serial Experiments Lain was first aired on TV Tokyo and its affiliates on July 6, 1998, and concluded on September 28, 1998, with the thirteenth and final episode. The series consists of 13 episodes (referred to in the series as "Layers") of 24 minutes each, except for the sixth episode, Kids (23 minutes 14 seconds). In Japan, the episodes were released in LD, VHS, and DVD with a total of five volumes. A DVD compilation named "Serial Experiments Lain DVD-BOX Яesurrection" was released along with a promo DVD called "LPR-309" in 2000.[33] As this box set is now discontinued, a rerelease was made in 2005 called "Serial Experiments Lain TV-BOX". A 4-volume DVD box set was released in the US by Pioneer/Geneon. A Blu-ray release of the anime was made in December 2009 called "Serial Experiments Lain Blu-ray Box| RESTORE".[34][35][36][37] The anime series returned to US television on October 15, 2012, on the Funimation Channel.[38] The series' opening theme, "Duvet", was written and performed by Jasmine Rodgers and the British band Bôa. The ending theme, "Distant Scream" (遠い叫び, Tōi Sakebi), was written and composed by Reichi Nakaido.

The anime series was licensed in North America by Pioneer Entertainment (later Geneon USA) on VHS and DVD in 1999. However, the company closed its USA division in December 2007 and the series went out-of-print as a result.[39] However, at Anime Expo 2010, North American distributor Funimation announced that it had obtained the license to the series and re-released it in 2012.[40]

Episode list

No. Title Directed by Original air date

1 "Weird" Ryūtarō Nakamura July 6, 1998 A high school girl commits suicide by jumping off a rooftop late at night. A week later, students are getting emails from the girl, named Chisa Yomoda, which claim that she only gave up her body, but is actually still alive inside the virtual world known as the Wired, saying that there is a God that exists there. After getting one of these emails, introverted fourteen-year-old Lain Iwakura becomes much more interested in computers and asks her techie father, Yasuo Iwakura, for a new NAVI computer system. When she returns to school the following day, the blackboard writes a subliminal message, inviting her to come to the Wired as soon as she can, revealed to be written by Chisa herself.

2 "Girls" Ryūtarō Nakamura July 13, 1998 At Cyberia, a hardcore techno club, a man buys a nanomachine drug called Accela. On the way to school the next day, Alice Mizuki, along with her friends Julie and Reika, tell Lain they saw her during their first visit to Cyberia, but with a far more vigorous and forceful personality. Lain has her father set up her NAVI computer system at home later that evening. After some persuasion, Lain decides to join Alice at Cyberia that night to prove that she was not there before. However, Lain becomes involved with a shooting in the club by the same man under the influence of Accela. She approaches the man, saying that everyone is connected in the Wired no matter where they are. This leads the man to shoot himself out of psychological shock and trauma.

3 "Psyche" Jōhei Matsuura July 20, 1998 The following day, Lain is scolded by her cold mother, Miho Iwakura, for waking up too late. When she leaves the house, she believes she is being spied on when she sees a black car parked near her house. Furthermore, she hears a voice calling out to her when she enters the train, telling her that she is not alone. Her life is thrown into further disarray when she is anonymously sent a mysterious computer chip. She asks her father what it is, but he says he does not know. When she goes to see Taro, with his friends Myu-Myu and Masayuki, at Cyberia, he recalls seeing Lain on the Wired once, noting her Wired personality being the complete opposite of her restrained real world personality. Mika Iwakura, Lain's older sister, comes home the next day, only to see Lain not acting herself as she starts to modify and upgrade her NAVI computer system.

4 "Religion" Akihiko Nishiyama July 27, 1998 Rumors are flying around school and on the Wired in regards to numerous senior students of various high schools committing suicide, with each of the deceased being addicted to the online action game known as PHANTOMa. Interested, Lain investigates only to discover that the game was glitched with a tag game for kids, in which a little girl scares the students to their deaths. Moreover, she finds out that the deaths were most likely caused by the elite secretive hacker group known as the Knights of the Eastern Calculus. Later at night, she senses the Men in Black, who had been spying on her earlier. When she tells the two to go away, a sound wave penetrates through her window, causing the two to fall back and drive away in their black car.

5 "Distortion" Masahiko Murata August 3, 1998 Amidst the events surrounding Tokyo having its traffic information transmission system hacked to cause deliberate accidents, Lain experiences a series of hallucinations that teach her the nature of the Wired in relation to the real world, by means of inanimate objects in her room and eventually her parents. In the meantime, Mika is driven to terror from the Knights repeatedly communicating in unusual ways for her to "fulfill the prophecy."

6 "KIDS" Ryūtarō Nakamura August 10, 1998 At night, when Yasuo checks on Lain, he sees a dramatic change in her room arrangement and the upgrades on her NAVI computer system, which worries him. As Lain hangs out with Alice, along with Julie and Reika, in the district, she notices that children are looking up into the sky and raising their arms, only to realize that they are looking at an image of herself that appears in the sky. Lain searches for the reason behind the strange happenings and finds Professor Hodgeson, the creator of KIDS, an experiment that started fifteen years ago that tried to gather psi energy from children and store it, though the result of the project destroyed the children. Now it seems that the Knights have gotten hold of the project's schematics. When the Men in Black return, Lain goes outside to see them. The coolant system in her room bursts, leading the Men in Black to confirm that the Knights planted a parasite bomb there.

7 "SOCIETY" Jōhei Matsuura August 17, 1998 As Lain gets more and more involved in the Wired world, albeit at home and at school, Alice starts to worry about her closing up again. It is reported that the Knights cracked the firewall of the information control center of the Wired. As the activity of the Knights begins to surface, the network is in search for Lain. The Men in Black ask Lain to follow them to an office in the Tachibana General Laboratories, where the Office Worker in charge of the Men in Black, after her help of fixing his computer, shows Lain a projection of herself in the Wired taking out one of the members of the Knights. After the Office Worker deduces that Lain in the real world and in the Wired are one and the same, he questions her about her origins. However, she breaks down for not knowing, altering her timid personality to that of a more serious one before she shoves her way out of the room. 8 "RUMORS" Shigeru Ueda August 24, 1998 Lain's family has been acting weird lately, much to her surprise. Upon further investigation, Lain disbelieves that she is omnipresent in the Wired, while she is merely a body, more or less a projection of herself, in the real world. A rumor is spread in the Wired about Alice having sexual fantasies about a male teacher, and a second one says that Lain has spread the first. To cope with the distress of rejection, Lain acts directly on reality for the first time, finding out that she can "delete" the event of the rumors. A lookalike duplicate of herself with its own distinct personality starts appearing more frequently, which leads her to question her own existence.

9 "PROTOCOL" Akihiko Nishiyama August 31, 1998 Throughout the episode, background information is being shown from "archives". Information regarding the Roswell UFO incident, the Majestic 12, which was formed by President Harry S. Truman, engineer Vannevar Bush, who developed what is called memex, physician John C. Lilly, who conducted experiments with dolphin communication, pioneer Ted Nelson, who founded Project Xanadu, and the Schumann resonances are all mentioned, explaining how the human consciousness can be communicated through a network without the use of a device. It is also noted that a man named Masami Eiri has suddenly committed suicide. During that time, Lain gets a computer microchip from J.J., the disc jockey from Cyberia. She then asks Taro on a "date" and takes him to her home, where she asks him about the microchip. After becoming frightened, he admits it is a computer code made to disrupt human memory, and it was made by the Knights. Although he defends them, he admits not knowing much about them. He later kisses Lain before leaving. 10 "LOVE" Masahiko Murata September 7, 1998 As both are seen to have switched bodies, Eiri introduces himself to Lain as the creator of Protocol Seven, saying that Lain no longer needs to have a body in order to be alive. As she, back in her own body, comes home, Yasuo says his farewell after realizing she knows the truth behind her existence. Eiri is considered the God of the Wired because he explained that he is worshiped by the Knights. Knowing this, Lain deals with the Knights once and for all by leaking a list of all of its members onto the Wired, leaving a trail of murder by the Men in Black and suicide in its wake. Even with the Knights gone, Eiri still claims he is the God of the Wired, since he says that the real Lain exists in the Wired, not the real world.

11 "Infornography" Jōhei Matsuura September 14, 1998 Lain lies exhausted in her room, and wakes up to find herself all wrapped in electrical cords. After a really long and complicated memory flashback, seen throughout the series, Eiri appears in her room and congratulates her, for having succeeded in downloading her NAVI into her own brain to see and hear all that is happening. However, he warns her about her "hardware capacity," and that she is merely a sentient and autonomous software computer program with a physical body in the form of a teenage human girl. Lain later appears to Alice in her room to make things right with her again concerning the false rumors. Lain declares that anything is possible now, as devices are no longer needed anymore to enter the Wired freely. The next day, nobody seems to remember the rumored incidents and Lain smiles at Alice's complicity.

12 "Landscape" Ryūtarō Nakamura September 21, 1998 Lain witnesses the frontier between the physical and the Wired worlds finally beginning to collapse. The Men in Black are approached by their Officer Worker, who gives them a final "payment" for their services, telling them to leave town away from any power lines or satellite coverage. After he leaves, both Men in Black suffer death from an image of Lain etched in their retinas. Alice enters Lain's eerie house and goes inside her room. Lain explains that she is actually a computerized program designed to destroy the barrier between the two worlds. Lain is still affixed on the fact that humans no longer need a physical body to stay alive, but Alice shows that her heartbeat proves otherwise. Suddenly, Eiri, first unseen to Alice, appears behind Lain, assuming she needs to be "debugged". Lain argues that Eiri was just an "acting god", for she is the true Goddess of the Wired. Eiri retaliates by transforming into a monstrous form to attain the vastly limitless power and strength that she possesses, but Lain manages to crush Eiri with her electrical equipment, wiping him out for good.

13 "Ego" Ryūtarō Nakamura September 28, 1998

Lain's attempts to protect her from Eiri's attack result in traumatizing Alice, Lain's only true friend; in order to fix this, Lain decides to do a "factory reset" on her life, deleting herself from everyone's memory. Distraught from doing so, Lain is determined to discover her true form and identity and takes radical action. She is confronted by her separate bolder self of the Wired, who reminds her that the Wired is not an upper layer of the real world. Her bolder Wired self then assures her that she is the true Goddess of the Wired, saying she is an omnipotent and omnipresent virtual being that can go and be anywhere she desires and merely watch the real world from afar. After causing her bolder self to disappear, Lain sees her father. Alice, now older with a spouse, spots Lain standing on an overpass, having some déjà vu about Lain but not recognizing who she is. Alice says goodbye and that she may run into Lain again someday. Lain asserts that this is true, since she is everywhere at once. Reception A suburban scene on a sunny day, showing houses and telegraph poles, but the shadows contain unnatural red splotches. Lain's neighborhood. The "blood pools" represent the Wired's presence "beneath the surface" of reality.[6]

Serial Experiments Lain was first broadcast in Tokyo at 1:15 a.m. JST. The word "weird" appears almost systematically in English language reviews of the series,[23][41][42][43][44] or the alternatives "bizarre",[45] and "atypical",[46] due mostly to the freedoms taken with the animation and its unusual science fiction themes, and due to its philosophical and psychological context. Critics responded positively to these thematic and stylistic characteristics, and it was awarded an Excellence Prize by the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival for "its willingness to question the meaning of contemporary life" and the "extraordinarily philosophical and deep questions" it asks.[47]

According to Christian Nutt from Newtype USA, the main attraction to the series is its keen view on "the interlocking problems of identity and technology". Nutt saluted Abe's "crisp, clean character design" and the "perfect soundtrack" in his 2005 review of series, saying that "Serial Experiments Lain might not yet be considered a true classic, but it's a fascinating evolutionary leap that helped change the future of anime."[48] Anime Jump gave it 4.5/5,[23] and Anime on DVD gave it A+ on all criteria for volume 1 and 2, and a mix of A and A+ for volume 3 and 4.[42] Lain was subject to commentary in the literary and academic worlds. The Asian Horror Encyclopedia calls it "an outstanding psycho-horror anime about the psychic and spiritual influence of the Internet".[49] It notes that the red spots present in all the shadows look like blood pools (see picture). It notes the death of a girl in a train accident is "a source of much ghost lore in the twentieth century", more so in Tokyo.

The Anime Essentials anthology by Gilles Poitras describes it as a "complex and somehow existential" anime that "pushed the envelope" of anime diversity in the 1990s, alongside the much better known Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop.[50] Professor Susan J. Napier, in her 2003 reading to the American Philosophical Society called The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation (published 2005), compared Serial Experiments Lain to Ghost in the Shell and Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.[51] According to her, the main characters of the two other works cross barriers; they can cross back to our world, but Lain cannot. Napier asks whether there is something to which Lain should return, "between an empty 'real' and a dark 'virtual'".[52] Mike Toole of Anime News Network named Serial Experiments Lain as one of the most important anime of the 1990s.[53]

Despite the positive feedback the television series had received, Anime Academy gave the series a 75%, partly due to the "lifeless" setting it had.[54] Michael Poirier of EX magazine stated that the last three episodes fail to resolve the questions in other DVD volumes.[55] Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network noted that the English dub was decent, but that the show relied so little on dialogue that it hardly mattered.[56] Related media

Art booksAn Omnipresence In Wired: Hardbound, 128 pages in 96 colors with Japanese text. It features a chapter for each layer (episode) and concept sketches. It also features a short color manga titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication". It was published in 1998 by Triangle Staff/SR-12W/Pioneer LDC. (ISBN 4-7897-1343-1) Yoshitoshi ABe lain illustrations ab# rebuild an omnipresence in Wired: Hardbound, 148 pages. A remake of "An Omnipresence In Wired" with new art, added text by Chiaki J. Konaka, and a section entitled "ABe's EYE in color of things" (a compilation of his photos of the world). It was published in Japan on October 1, 2005, by Wanimagazine (ISBN 4-89829-487-1), and in America as a softcover version translated into English on June 27, 2006, by Digital Manga Publishing (ISBN 1-56970-899-1). Visual Experiments Lain: Paperback, 80 full-color pages with Japanese text. It has details on the creation, design, and storyline of the series. It was published in 1998 by Triangle Staff/Pioneer LDC. (ISBN 4-7897-1342-3) Scenario Experiments Lain: Paperback, 335 pages. By "chiaki j. konaka" (uncapitalized in original). It contains collected scripts with notes and small excerpted storyboards. It was published in 1998 in Japan.(ISBN 4-7897-1320-2)

Soundtracks

The first original soundtrack, Serial Experiments Lain Soundtrack, features music by Reichi Nakaido: the ending theme and part of the television series' score, alongside other songs inspired by the series. The second, Serial Experiments Lain Soundtrack: Cyberia Mix, features electronica songs inspired by the television series, including a remix of the opening theme "Duvet" by DJ Wasei. The third, lain BOOTLEG, consists of the ambient score of the series across forty-five tracks. BOOTLEG also contains a second mixed-mode data and audio disc, containing a clock program and a game, as well as an extended version of the first disc – nearly double the length – across 57 tracks in 128 kbit/s MP3 format, and sound effects from the series in WAV format. Because the word bootleg appears in its title, it is easily confused with the Sonmay counterfeit edition of itself, which only contains the first disc in an edited format. All three soundtrack albums were released by Pioneer Records.

The series' opening theme, "Duvet", was written and performed in English by the British rock band Bôa. The band released the song as a single and as part of the EP Tall Snake, which features both an acoustic version and DJ Wasei's remix from Cyberia Mix. Video game Main article: Serial Experiments Lain (video game)

On November 26, 1998, Pioneer LDC released a video game with the same name as the anime for the PlayStation.[57] It was designed by Konaka and Yasuyuki, and made to be a "network simulator" in which the player would navigate to explore Lain's story.[12] The creators themselves did not call it a game, but "Psycho-Stretch-Ware",[12] and it has been described as being a kind of graphic novel: the gameplay is limited to unlocking pieces of information, and then reading/viewing/listening to them, with little or no puzzle needed to unlock.[58] Lain distances itself even more from classical games by the random order in which information is collected.[12] The aim of the authors was to let the player get the feeling that there are myriads of informations that they would have to sort through, and that they would have to do with less than what exists to understand.[12] As with the anime, the creative team's main goal was to let the player "feel" Lain, and "to understand her problems, and to love her".[11] A guidebook to the game called Serial Experiments Lain Official Guide (ISBN 4-07-310083-1) was released the same month by MediaWorks.[59] See alsoNoosphere

References

"Serial Experiments Lain BD/DVD Box Delayed 4 Months". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on June 28, 2018. Retrieved June 26, 2018. "FRUiTS October (No.15_1st/Oct./1998)". Cornell Japanese Animation Society. Archived from the original on January 22, 2021. Retrieved October 27, 2019.

Napier, Susan J. (November 2002). "When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain". Science Fiction Studies. 29 (88): 418–435. ISSN 0091-7729. Archived from the original on June 11, 2007. Retrieved May 4, 2007. "Serial Experiments Lain (1999 TV Show)". Behind The Voice Actors. Archived from the original on January 31, 2022. Retrieved January 31, 2022. A green check mark indicates that a role has been confirmed using a screenshot (or collage of screenshots) of a title's list of voice actors and their respective characters found in its opening and/or closing credits and/or other reliable sources of information. "[SEL] Character Profiles". Anime Revolution. Archived from the original on March 23, 2007. Retrieved December 30, 2006. "Otakon Lain Panel Discussion with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe". August 5, 2000. Archived from the original on October 26, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006.

Scipion, Johan (March 1, 2003). "Abe Yoshitoshi et Ueda Yasuyuki". AnimeLand (in French). Anime Manga Presse. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved September 16, 2006. The Anime Colony (August 7, 2000). "Online Lain Chat with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe". Archived from the original on October 24, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006.

"Anime Jump!: Lain Men:Yasuyuki Ueda". Archived from the original on August 4, 2008. Retrieved September 26, 2006. Animerica, (Vol. 7 No. 9, p. 29) Animerica, (Vol. 7 No. 9, p. 28) "Serial Experiments Lain". HK Magazine. Hong Kong: Asia City Publishing (14). April 2000. in "HK Interview". Chiaki J. Konaka. Archived from the original on November 24, 2010. Retrieved September 25, 2010. and "HK Interview". Chiaki J. Konaka. Archived from the original on November 1, 2010. Retrieved September 25, 2010. Serial Experiments Lain, "Layer 01: WEIRD"

"Movie Gazette: "Serial Experiments Lain Volume : Reset" Review". Archived from the original on May 21, 2006. Retrieved October 11, 2006. Yasuo: "I will bring madeleines next time. They will taste good with the tea." Serial Experiments Lain, Episode 13, "Ego". Lain has just erased herself from her friends' memories, while for Proust the taste of madeleines triggers memories of his childhood. ABe, Yoshitoshi (1998). "Hair cut 01-04". An Omnipresence In Wired (in Japanese). Pioneer LDC. ISBN 978-4-7897-1343-6. "Anime Jump!: Lain Men: Yoshitoshi ABe". 2000. Archived from the original on May 10, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006. FRUiTS Magazine No. 15, October 1998.

Manga Max magazine, September 1999, p. 22, "Unreal to Real" Benkyo! Magazine, March 1999, p.16, "In My Humble Opinion" "T.H.E.M.Anime Review of Serial Experiments Lain". Archived from the original on October 11, 2006. Retrieved November 24, 2006. "DVDoutsider Review of Serial Experiments Lain". Archived from the original on March 5, 2012. Retrieved November 24, 2006. Toole, Mike (October 16, 2003). "Anime Jump!: Serial Experiments Lain Review". Archived from the original on June 10, 2008. Serial Experiments Lain, Layer 08: RUMORS "List of Serial Experiments Lain songs". Archived from the original on January 13, 2007. Retrieved December 7, 2006. ABe, Yoshitoshi (1998). Visual Experiments Lain. Triangle Staff/Pioneer LDC. ISBN 978-4-7897-1342-9., page 42 Manga Max Magazine, September 1999, p. 21, "God's Eye View" Serial Experiments Lain, Layer 06: KIDS: "your physical body exists only to confirm your existence".

Study on Lain, Buffy, and Attack of the clones by Felicity J. Coleman, lecturer at the University of Melbourne. From the Internet Archive. "Conway's Game of Life". Carnegie Mellon University. Archived from the original on July 22, 2009. Retrieved June 24, 2009. Serial Experiments Lain, Layer 11: INFORNOGRAPHY. "Be, Inc". Archived from the original on November 28, 2003. Retrieved November 27, 2006. "Serial Experiments Lain – Release". Archived from the original on February 16, 2010. Retrieved September 16, 2009. "Serial Experiments Lain Blu-ray Box RESTORE". ImageShack. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved April 14, 2015. "serial experiments lain Blu-ray LABO プロデューサーの制作日記". Archived from the original on December 26, 2010. Retrieved September 16, 2009. "Playlog.jp Blog". Archived from the original on August 17, 2009. Retrieved October 15, 2009.

"Lain on BD announced – Wakachan Thread". Archived from the original on February 27, 2012. Retrieved October 15, 2009. "FUNimation Week 43 of 2012". Archived from the original on January 23, 2013. "Geneon USA To Cancel DVD Sales, Distribution By Friday". Anime News Network. September 26, 2007. Archived from the original on March 28, 2010. Retrieved January 30, 2010. "Funi Adds Live Action Moyashimon Live Action, More". Anime News Network. July 2, 2010. Archived from the original on July 4, 2010. Retrieved July 3, 2010. Bitel, Anton. "Movie Gazette: 'Serial Experiments Lain Volume 2: Knights' Review". Movie Gazette. Archived from the original on August 21, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006. Robinson, Tasha. "Sci-Fi Weekly: Serial Experiments Lain Review". Archived from the original on July 20, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006.

Beveridge, Chris (July 13, 1999). "Serial Experiments Lain Vol. #1". Mania.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved September 16, 2006. Southworth, Wayne. "The Spinning Image: "Serial Experiments Lain Volume 4: Reset" Review". Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved September 16, 2006. Silver, Aaron. "Anime News Network: Serial Experiments Lain DVD Vol. 1–4 Review". Archived from the original on March 25, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006. Lai, Tony. "DVD.net: "Lain: Volume 1 – Navi" Review". Archived from the original on September 20, 2006. Retrieved September 16, 2006. Japan Media Arts Plaza (1998). "1998 (2nd) Japan Media Arts Festival: Excellence Prize – serial experiments lain". Archived from the original on April 26, 2007. Retrieved September 16, 2006.From the Internet Archive. Nutt, Christian (January 2005). "Serial Experiments Lain DVD Box Set: Lost in the Wired". Newtype USA. 4 (1): 179. Bush, Laurence C. (October 2001). Asian Horror Encyclopedia. Writers Club Press. ISBN 978-0-595-20181-5., page 162. Poitras, Gilles (December 2001). Anime Essentials. Stone Bridge Press, LLC. ISBN 978-1-880656-53-2., page 28.

Napier, Susan J., Dr. (March 2005). "The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 149 (1): 72–79. JSTOR 4598910. Napier 2005, p. 78 Toole, Mike (June 5, 2011). "Evangel-a-like – The Mike Toole Show". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on October 10, 2015. Retrieved November 20, 2015. "Serial Experiments: Lain". March 16, 2002. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved April 17, 2015. "Serial Experiments Lain – Buried Treasure". May 11, 2000. Archived from the original on August 26, 2011. Retrieved April 17, 2015. "Serial Experiments Lain – Buried Treasure". November 20, 2008. Archived from the original on April 3, 2015. Retrieved April 17, 2015. "Serial Experiments Lain". Archived from the original on January 22, 2021. Retrieved September 25, 2010. "Games Are Fun: "Review – Serial Experiments Lain – Japan"". April 25, 2003. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved November 10, 2006.シリアルエクスペリメンツレイン公式ガイド [Serial Experiments Lain Official Guide] (in Japanese). ASIN 4073100831.

Further readingBitel, Anton. "Movie Gazette: 'Serial Experiments Lain Volume 3: Deus' Review". Movie Gazette. Archived from the original on May 21, 2006. Retrieved October 11, 2006. Horn, Carl Gustav. "Serial Experiments Lain". Viz Communications. Archived from the original on February 19, 2001. Retrieved September 25, 2010. Moure, Dani. "Serial Experiments Lain Vol. #2". Mania.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved September 25, 2010. Moure, Dani. "Serial Experiments Lain Vol. #3". Mania.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved September 25, 2010. Napier, Susan J. (2005) Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation ISBN 978-1-4039-7052-7 Prévost, Adèle-Elise; Musebasement (2008)

"Manga: The Signal of Noise" Mechademia 3 pp. 173–188 ISSN 1934-2489 Prindle, Tamae Kobayashi (2015). "Nakamura Ryûtarô's Anime, Serial Experiments, Lain (1998)". Asian Studies. 3 (1): 53–81. doi:10.4312/as.2015.3.1.53-81. ISSN 2350-4226. Sevakis, Justin (November 20, 2008). "Buried Treasure: Serial Experiments Lain". Anime News Network. Retrieved September 25, 2010. Jackson, C. (2012). "Topologies of Identity in Serial Experiments Lain". Mechademia. 7: 191–201. doi:10.1353/mec.2012.0013. S2CID 119423011.

External links Wikiquote has quotations related to Serial Experiments Lain. Look up Appendix:Serial Experiments Lain in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

this is definitely the new weirdest anon ive gotten

[horrorofthebeast]

SEL anon from forever ago here, i heard u were watching it what do u think?

Im really not to good at watching shows/movies alone... its easier if someone is watching with me.. im really sorry i forgotten.... but i know kinda remember about the story...

I really take no offense with it. Its just showing how schizophrenia works and feels like. In each episode when they incorporate the buzzing of the telephone wires, i can hear sounds like that no one else can hear. Its not a hallucination tho....

I knoe the wires are forshadowing, but i can still relate to it.. its all about Lain falling into psychosis, and taking time to explain it metaphorically, she simply can no distinguish what is real and what is not.

I remember people calling her god in the wired, is possibly related to an audio hallucination accompanied by a grandiose delusion.

I cant still try ro watch and take more specific incidences. But i strongly relate to the SEL series, i dont understand how it is offensive

[theblackshit]

Tumblr can be a wild and … fascinating place. If you can think of it, there is a probably a Tumblr blog dedicated to it. From Law & Order & Food to the classic Awkward Stock Photos to a Tumblr dedicated to other weird Tumblrs, there is something for everyone. But every so often, amid all the hyper-specific strangeness and absurdity, something emerges that shines a light on some previously unexplored facet of the world. We know what you’re thinking: Why are there so many shots of power lines in Japanese anime cartoons?

The Tumblr Power Lines in Anime is dedicated to appreciating the truly lovely and surprisingly ubiquitous depictions of mundane power lines that appear in a large number of Japanese animation series. The blog is run by Tumblr user whitequark, who first started to notice the trend while watching a romantic comedy anime. “I first noticed that power lines were ‘A Thing’ while watching Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun and looking at the background behind the reflection in the glass,” says whitequark, who prefers to use their online handle. “That made me think it over. Why, indeed, are there so many power lines? Why are these industrial constructs with lots of time-consuming detail drawn so consistently true to their nature?”

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Anime series can cover any number of genres, including sports, high fantasy, office life, and, of course, science fiction, but no matter what it’s about, it seems that if the story is set on modern-day Earth, it will contain some amazingly detailed images of power lines, telephone poles, and other wired infrastructure. While a number of anime series (and cartoons in general), opt for a style of hyper-detailed backgrounds before which relatively simpler characters can interact, power lines stand out for the detail and complexity required to illustrate them. Speaking about one such power line shot, whitquark says, “It serves no purpose to the story. It is not repeated, emphasized, seems to have no useful purpose. Yet it is there! Someone cared about it, cared about it so much to go outside, take a photo, lovingly trace and color it to utter perfection.” They might be mundane, but their consistent presence could point to a deeper significance.

“It puts the power infrastructure first and foremost as narrative and visual elements of the anime,” says Marc Steinberg, a scholar of film studies at Concordia University in Montreal and author of Anime’s Media Mix. For years, he has been studying and teaching anime, and he has also noticed the prevalence of power lines. He traces the origin of the trend to one of the most popular anime series in recent memory. “I think it’s basically a post–Neon Genesis Evangelion phenomenon,” he says. “One of the peculiarities [of the series], besides the crazy storyline, is that it really focused on objects in everyday life in a way that anime before that had not, as much. This includes shots of telephone booths, shots of doorways, train crossings. Things that were associated with everyday life in Japan at that moment in time.” In that anime specifically, Steinberg says, power lines are specifically highlighted as a visual connection to the theme of power that runs through the series—most fantastically and prominently seen in the colossal power cords connected to the titular giant robots.

The trend didn’t stop with the series, but instead became a kind of signifier. “[Evangelion] had all these shots of power lines, and it became this signature for the more experimental, slightly more adult-oriented anime that became popular in the late 1990s, early 2000s,” says Steinberg. He also mentions another influential anime that may have helped cement anime power lines as a recurring trope, Serial Experiment Lain, released in 1998. The series, set in suburban Japan, focused heavily on themes of communication and electricity, and unsurprisingly had a number of illustrated power lines and telephone poles. whitequark says that they consider it “*the* power lines anime” (although their favorite anime power lines belong to a series called Monogatari).

Maybe the most obvious explanation for the trend of power line shots is that many anime stories take place in and around some version of Tokyo, which contains a great number of power lines and electrical pylons IRL. “You’re kind of covered in power lines. A lot of the power grid is above ground. In places where the power grid is mostly underground, it’s not as evident and visible an aspect of everyday city life. In part because of the trains that run on electricity,” says Steinberg. Power lines act as a signal of the mundane and the normal in the modern Japanese landscape. They aren’t the only image that appears regularly in anime to signal everyday life, they stand out as both one of the most common and the most visually complex. “Train crossings are one of the other big ones,” says Steinberg.

Over the last two decades, the power line trope can now be found in all kinds of anime, including smash hits such as One Punch Man. The presence of detailed background infrastructure in a cartoon might seem like a small thing, but once you notice them, these seemingly innocuous images take on a whole new significance. whitequark certainly won’t see anime the same way again. “This, to me, seems like a reflection of anime’s soul in general: Spend all of yourself on the things almost no one will notice, and spend yourself thrice on things that truly are important.”

[finalmediaprojectethos0706]

Serial Experiments Lain and its take on Dystopia

While the majority of Lain is set in suburban Japan, there are a lot of dystopian themes and messages at play throughout the series, the main setting to find a lot of these themes and ideas are within Lain's bedroom, which over the series becomes more infested with computer hardware and technology as Lain further immerses themselves in "The Wired".

Lain is probably the best piece of media that utilizes a "show don't tell" technique in it's storytelling, some can argue that the show uses it to such an extreme that it could be a detriment to its storytelling but I would argue otherwise.

The show intentionally uses vagueness to make the viewer wonder what is real and what isn't, this serves to deliver the message that the real world and the internet (The Wired) aren't so separate and that there are tangible impacts that the internet has on the real world and vise-versa. Its because of factors like this that I believe this show was WAY ahead of its time, whilst it aired in 1998, it has on of the most accurate predictions of the internet that I've seen in media in general.

The sound design of the show serves to further the above concepts as well, with a constant electrical humming paired with images of electrical wires and telephone poles being omnipresent in the show throughout it's run-time it conveys that "The Wired" is a constant presence in the world of Lain and is almost inescapable.

This show has influenced how I think about sound design (and storytelling as a whole for that matter), specifically ambience and how it can make the player/viewer feel as well as how it sets the tone for the game and its world. I have also drawn inspiration from Lain for my artwork and world décor, with its cyberpunk-esque, edgy and colour-lite design being particular stand outs when it comes to the composition of the show.

[myrefall]

𓆝⋆ ┊ general oc post #1 - Angelo, Katsuya, Ripley, and Laine

because viktor has terminal “I can’t talk about my ocs that’s so embarrassing” disease.

These characters are CURRENTLY? the more important of mine, but I intend on fixing my focus upon others or adding them to this group in the future.

𓆝⋆ ┊Relations

Angelo Laureano is a 19 year old living with their.. friend? partner?, Katsuya. Angelo holds few interests and is generally aimless about his future. He suffers from paranoid delusions and struggles to be present in his own life, especially so after he returns from being missing for several weeks.

Katsuya Aiso is 21 and met Angelo through a mutual midnight shift at their local gas station. Katsuya makes a point of appearing sociable and open, but most people couldn't say more than that about him. He suffers from chronic joint pain and spends much of his off time asleep.

Katsuya is fond of Angelo, but entirely uncertain how Angelo feels about him. He finds Angelo difficult to read.

Ripley/Ridley Valliant is a 20 something vampyre with too much money and no job. They live recklessly and are both a good and terrible influence on Katsuya and Angelo depending on the situation.

Ripley and Angelo met in high school. Despite Ripley’s age, they were in the same grade as Angelo. They also shared a majority of their classes. Ripley is Angelo’s oldest and closest friend.

Ripley and Katsuya know each other mostly through Angelo. However, they have become pretty good friends in their own right. Despite this, Ripley enables some of Katsuya’s worse self destructive behaviors. Katsuya does similarly for Ripley, though she likely would behave this way regardless.

Laine Laureano is Angelo’s older sibling. They are 21. They suffer from agoraphobia and religious delusions. Laine is the sole developer behind Heartwire, a horror game series they created in order to work through their skewed perception of reality. Laine strongly believes in the existence of angels and their ability to communicate through electronic devices.

Laine and Angelo’s relationship is strained. Angelo is aware of Laine’s unusual beliefs, and often avoids talking about them. Angelo suffers from similar paranoid tendencies. He believes indulging in Laine’s beliefs will worsen them.

Ripley and Laine were extremely close in years past. While Ripley and Angelo were friends, Ripley and Laine were something different entirely. In current days, both avoid speaking about the other when the topic is brought up.

𓆝⋆ ┊ Individual Details

Ripley - any/all

Extroverted . Energized . Assertive . Childish

Visual Symbolism - Sharks . Aliens . Bright neons + 2000s internet visual motifs . Furbies . Garfield . Sonic

Smells of cheap, sweet perfume and weed.

Katsuya - he/his

Friendly . Easygoing . Emotionally walled off . Impersonal

Visual Symbolism - Cats . Crucifixes . Chains . Fences . Winter + Snow . Arctic foxes (?) . White tigers . Black + Vibrant blues . Self torture/imprisonment

Smells of cucumber, honey, and cigarette smoke.

Laine - they

Diligent . Empathetic . Paranoid . Neurotic

Visual Symbolism - Computers . Wires . Telephone poles . Angel wings . Old TVs . Machinery . Old web . Robots . Owls . Angels

Smells of dust, coffee, and sweat.

Angelo - they/he

Direct . Polite . Placating . Stubborn

Visual Symbolism - Metamorphosis . Teddy bears . Insects . The body . Nervous system . Forests . Decomposition . Fungi

Smells of petrichor, powdery perfume, and cigarette smoke. The latter settling in his clothes as he lives with Katsuya.

𓆝⋆ ┊CURRENTLY CONSIDERING LINE OF PLOT. ?

Laine is contacted frequently by an entity through their electronic devices. Initially horrified, Laine assumes the entity to be someone attempting to harm them, playing on their delusions to do so. However, through the entity's persistence, it gains both the trust of Laine and access to them directly. It begins making contact within dreams and visions, consuming more of Laine's time.

Angelo takes notice of Laine's worsened behavior and questions them about their beliefs becoming further detached from reality. Angelo is also victim to certain delusions and paranoid thinking. He believes Laine's developing behavior to be directly related to similar factors. In response, Laine is insistent on them being of sound mind. Angelo does not further press the issue.

Despite their words, Laine comes away from this encounter unsure. As they begin to question their beliefs, Laine's entity presents them with a concerning and difficult to decipher omen regarding the safety of Angelo.

Laine is sent into a panic. They are certain they must do something to protect Angelo, but entirely unable to discern what they are supposed to protect him from.

Throughout this, the four have been planning a road trip to visit Katsuya's mother for the holidays. Despite the tension between the two, Angelo and Laine agree to go. Laine hopes their presence will allow them to ensure Angelo's safety. Angelo hopes traveling will help Laine ground themself.

The day of the trip begins with little issue, but as the night draws on, tensions rise between the four. With Ripley in the drivers seat, she and Laine are mid argument when a large animal runs in front of their car. Distracted, Ripley barely manages to swerve past it before the vehicle loses stability, unable to return to their lane soon enough. Their car slams through the guard rail and plummets past the edge of the incline they were driving up.

Rushed to the hospital, Ripley, Laine, and Katsuya are met with confusion about there being a fourth passenger in the vehicle. According to paramedics, it was only the three of them present at the crash site. The three argue vehemently about Angelo's presence, as well as the severe nature of his injuries. He is reported missing that night.

During their hospital stay, Katsuya and Ripley begin to experience otherworldly contact not dissimilar to Laine's. This contact results in a severe deterioration of their mental states.

Katsuya additionally begins to have night terrors during his stay at the hospital. They primarily revolve around Angelo. In one, Angelo crawls over Katsuya's hospital bed, melting to reveal something chitinous under his flesh.

After several weeks, Katsuya is discharged from the hospital and returns to the apartment he shared with Angelo. Though things are smooth for the first few days, Katsuya's night terrors quickly return. Most notable is the very first of them, in which Katsuya enters Angelo's room to find their bathroom light on. Further investigating, he is met with their shower being occupied by a writhing mass stuck directly to the tile and glass.

Horrified and unable to discern dream from reality, Katsuya swears against entering either room. He refuses to confirm or disprove whether this truly was a dream. He hopes that he won't ever have to.

Days later, Katsuya is woken up by Angelo crawling into bed with him, just as they would before the accident. Katsuya's horror at this is met with confusion by Angelo. He remembers nothing of the accident, or what may have happened to him after.

Those not present at the accident also seem to forget Angelo's disappearance. His parents reference times he wasn't present as if he was, and his employers behave as if his absence was entirely of the same nature as Katsuya's. Katsuya, Ripley, and Laine find themselves as the only ones capable of remembering the time he was gone for.

Angelo's behavior does little to ease tensions as well. He displays extremely dulled responses to painful stimuli, and far more listless behavior than he would have in the past. He additionally wakes at odd hours, disappears for long periods of time, and most strange, begins to unnaturally change in appearance...

The three find that only they- outside of Angelo himself- are capable of noticing these things. They are forced to either accept their new reality, or accept being seen as detached from it. Though, they may have to accept this eventually either way, as the entity contacting them continues to escalate in method and frequency. blah blah whatever.

[pichlive]

... Telephone lines are a huge reoccurring image in lain... I feel partially from dialup? But also the wired. reminder we're always connected in some way to the digital, now inescapable

[warningsine]

A supercut of all of the scenes in which the telephone wires hum in Serial Experiments Lain.

[gertritude-art]

maybe lain from serial experiments lain? i dunno if you watched that but <3 ...we love to see women be fucked up.

computer girl

[canmom]

started watching serial experiments lain. this is an incredible window into a time when computers, despite being vastly less capable than today, still seemed supernatural, foreign... a place which could be inhabited by ghosts. when the camera lingers on overhead telephone wires, you get a sense that this was still something quite novel, that there would be this communications infrastructure all around you carrying peoples’ conversations to and fro.

i don’t think you could tell a story like this today... at least, not without leaning heavily on deliberately retro aesthetics and nostalgia which would automatically feel very different. we’re too familiar with the limitations of computers, they’re banal now. i can’t approach lain as people would have at the time...

it’s interesting though that like... people created a new place for the supernatural to live, and then destroyed it, in the space of just a couple of decades. in fact it's pretty much reversed now, at least for me: the internet, however full of unpleasant things, is comforting and familiar; the ‘real world’ is all too often strange and potentially hostile.

[queernuck]

Virtual Valentines

this should hardly come as news in general, or even in particular since i am already listed by @klonopin-cruise-control in her bio as her fiancée (and the only reason she isnt listed in mine is because I havent fucked with the code on my blog in ages and i need to do that, i may do it soon to see what new colors and information i can put, update pages as necessary, so on) and that while I describe her both as my girlfriend and as my fiancée, neither is incorrect and both feel as if they capture a different essence of our relationship in that girlfriend has that vibe of nostalgic and new all at once, is flirty and fun, while fiancée evokes shopping for wedding dresses and getting advice from your gay friends on what the best wedding hall in town is. And both are a part of our relationship, both are very much a part of us much in the same way that our own love affairs with drugs and self-destruction are parts of who we have been and who we are, how romance and rage at the things that we cannot stand are guiding forces for us, how much Charlie and I both are brought together by firm senses of what should and should not be, and how one thing that should be is the love between us, how naturally and quickly we became engaged and how easy it is to just refer to that offhand, to want to explain to befuddled friends who think they missed some major life event rather than the extension of who two people are, a foregone conclusion from the moment we met. She is lovely, she is adorable, she is taller than me and so so sweet and I very much cannot wait to visit her and get absurdly irresponsibly intoxicated with her.

But life is full of surprises, many of them pleasant ones, others less so. While Patrick Mahomes having a Super Bowl Ring is a pleasant surprise, that Brady and the Patriots lost to the Titans after a downward spiral that the Ravens kicked off, the Ravens who in turn lost to those same Titans, seems as if it is some sort of cosmic shift, a kind of alignment that is so rare, so wonderful that it must denote some kind of moment of cosmic importance despite so many apparent insignificants going into it, the way in which our own interpretation of it becomes what it is, how our love and growing into affinity with the world we see becomes a means of knowing, how a rejection of the metaphysical or material is itself a materialism or metaphysical claim, specters of Marx and the marks of the spectral continually reinscribing themselves upon us in the rituals and means of being and becoming that we choose for ourselves, the ways that we mark our bodies and how our bodies are striated, how exactly we make our lives that which they are.

Now, they aren’t going to see this on their dash because I don’t think they’ve looked at their dash in weeks (if not months) but I have very, very recently also started dating Maggs @ultraheavensdoor after reaching out to them on Instagram. That is an opportunity I would not have had until recently, as my previous iPhone 4 made tumblr look even more broken than usual, had made facebook unusable, served to text and send selfies to my email for later download onto an antiquated MacBook Pro and little else. I could reach out to the world in a certain way but it was not much. With the refurbished iPhone I recieved, I at least gained some means to contact people like Charlie while away from the house, a sense of the new hybrid of Digital and Virtual that contemporary interfaces lead to one being faced with, how the transformation of the world through the overarching Virtual is interfaced with when one has even remotely contemporary Digital devices at one’s disposal. Many of my relationships have been profoundly shaped by the Virtual, last night was the first time I Skyped with Maggs and I was immediately grinning, so incredibly awestruck by their face, their voice, their very being. Truthfully, it was not the first time I had been stricken in this fashion, I had harbored feelings of warmth and care in my heart toward them for some time, had an unfinished crush that dated back for about as long as I had known them on here.

But I reached out, I attempted to throw a wire, a new means of connecting, a digital strand within the Virtual, which is always a scary thing to do. And not only was it caught, it was pulled tight, it began flowing as if it had been plugged into some output I could barely comprehend, the way that a PS2 would look if plugged into a 4K HD display, how your image feels reflected back not by a mirror, but by a Jumbotron. Their feelings returning to me were so amazing, so wonderful, but most of all, so much in tune with what I had hoped for, what I had wished for, the most wonderful of wonders I could expect.

When I gave them my number, I may as well have been telling them to rent a UHaul. One might contend that it is not as sudden as imagined, as it seems, because of how this traces back through crushes, through mutual admiration, through Charlie and I having a relationship not closed but not lacking sans opening, a relationship defined neither positively nor negatively by a lack of other partners, a relationship gorgeous unto itself, one of love and support and phone calls from telephones that have not been replaced since the mid-90s with yellowed exteriors and scuffs and scratches, phones that are merely trying their best just as we are, whispers and discussion of how parents or police or nurses or whomever may be a reason to hang up for now but always always always part of why we will come back, why we will always come back to one another, just as Maggs will always go back to Ellen, their wife and someone I am so glad exists for how happy and amazing I see Maggs thanks to them, how we have both entered places in our lives where the polyamory that Maggs and I extend to one another and to our own partners is a form of assemblage, of re-negotating the hierarchies of friendship and romance in our own lives, of finding new ways to make and re-make our bodies, our identities, with one another. 

As a bisexual trans girl with a GNC appearance, attraction often comes at a premium, often the denial of some part of myself either in writing and naming myself or in showing myself as if I am something else entirely. But when I bare myself for them, when I reveal as much as I can, I do not fear rejection because of how these exchanges are a vital part of how all of us relate. Maggs is my girl/boyfriend because of their fluidity, their own understanding of my adjacency to the idea of the faggot, to how I may have identities that give me a great deal of affinity with those marked by the same label, the community of fags that I love and the larger community around me that endures so much, that has to contend with so much merely in surviving that being able to be ourselves and to experience one another in so many different ways is a vital expression, a vital act of creating ambiguity and discursive potentiality when it is so often limited by contingency and supposedly untranslatable acts of differentiation, a differance that must be italicized, bolded, realized as a translator’s note rather than finding later life as a rich warm broth of love and comfort, cut and pasted and edited until it forms a kind of continuity that could not be imagined except through working through that difference, difficulty, the act of subtilting the body such that i am a trans woman exploring my own identity with my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my partner, their wonderful ways of being and becoming mirroring mine so wonderfully.

I am making sure that this is the first thing I post on Valentine’s Day specifically because I want it to be a declaration of love, admiration, of just how amazing and special this turn is, how absurdly lucky I feel that this is when and how things have turned out, that I am here at this very moment. Things may not always be easy, in fact I am certain that they are not, but at the very least they include these people, they include my love and joy and all of the things I have come to know and all of the wonders I have yet to discover.

I love you, Charlie.

I love you, Maggs.

I love all of you reading this, lets all love lain, thank you Srećko Horvat for your help and thank Instagram for allowing Maggs and I to have corresponding Rei and Asuka icons in this day and age as children of the 90s.

Happy Valentine’s Day

[thewebcomicsreview]

Liveblog: Serial Experiments Lain, Episode 1

Watching Serial Experiments Lain since I never really got into it the first go-round but maybe I’ll like it more now that I’m older and more appreciative of slow-paced stuff than I was in High School. I’ll liveblog it because why not and we’ll see if anyone enjoys this Content. 

Man, I forgot how much of 90s anime was shots of wires. If I came into this blind, I’d think this was maybe symbolic of like the internet and shit, but I’ve seen Kare Kano and know that you can have a drawing of telephone wires and put it  on screen for ten seconds and people will think your show has passable animation. If you have good drawings, you can make an entire movie out of still shots and people will think you have great animation.

Mmm, that’s good NPCs. I was able to take two screenshots without pausing because they held this shot for a full five seconds, did an insert to Lain  saying a line, and then  cut back to this shot for three seconds before anyone reacted to it. 

Well, one guy reacted, and another guy got a new face drawn on top of his old face without erasing the old face

This whole episode was made on a budget of 3 dollars, a coffee, and some lint, which was AAA studio money at the time. It’s sort of not fair to make fun of the animation, because the budgets they were working with at the time weren’t enough to animate a flipbook, and there was a lot of making do. 

And wires. 

But it’s still weird watching this classroom scene with like a ten second shot of the classroom where everything’s static except for two repeating frames of a talking animation not synced to anything. 

And wires

And I seriously wonder if the the reason so many 90s anime where about lonliness was an excuse to draw the characters in featureless voids. Is Lain emotionless because that was the moe trend at the time, because they’re making an artistic point about lonliness in the digital age, or because they don’t  have to animate her reacting to things? I honestly don’t know. 

LOOKIT HER WIDDLE HANDS

I like that her mom just  doesn’t acknowledge that Lain got an email from the dead. Not even blowing it off, she just keeps chewing. 

Lain: Can  I have a new computer [.....] Her  Dad: Why? [.....] Lain: I want to meet  someone [....] Her Dad:  [Sound of Yoda faking an orgasm]

The hell noise was that? 

Anyway, here are some wires. 

I’d talk about the plot, but....there wasn’t any.  1. A girl killed herself  2. Lain got an email supposedly from the girl  3. Lain had a dream  about the girl dying. 

And they stretched it out for an episode’s length by literally having Lain pause for 3 seconds before each line. 

I sincerely hope this show gets better :|

[disabilityfest]

Disability in Anime: Part 1/? → Lain Iwakura from Serial Experiments Lain: Dissociative Identity Disorder*

…OK, let’s see… I guess that I’m confused again. Am I here, or am I there? I don’t know. Over there, I’m everywhere. I know that. But here is connected to over there. Is that right? But then, where is the real me after all is said and done. Oh! There is no real me. I guess that’s it. I only exist inside those people aware of my existence. But what about this me that I can hear talking right here and now? It’s me, isn’t it? 

*From Wikipedia: “Mental illness, especially dissociative identity disorder**, is a significant theme in Lain: the main character is constantly confronted with alter-egos, to the point where writer Chiaki Konaka and Lain’s voice actress Kaori Shimizu had to agree on subdividing the character’s dialogues between three different orthographs.”

**From TVTropes (spoilers at link): “It’s clear at the beginning of the series that Lain suffers from some kind of mental health issue: likely schizophrenia and/or dissociative personality disorder, with Lain regularly hallucinating and witnessing the “other Lain” act without her control.”

[Image: A digital graphic edit of six screenshots from the anime Serial Experiments Lain. From left to right, top to bottom:

1) A background shot of the inside of a train, with Lain standing and looking out of a window to the right.

2) Lain in a classroom, staring down at her hand which has smoke coming out of her fingers.

3) Lain in her bear pajamas in her bedroom, looking slightly to the right.

4) A screenshot of some black telephone wires against a white sky.

5) A screenshot of Lain at her computer in her dark bedroom, which is filled with various computer monitors and wires.

6) A front shot of Lain, where she is surrounded by floating blue lights that are meant to represent a futuristic computer monitor. She is frowning and looking slightly downward.]

[elegiac-proximal]

Prokaryotic Wires

[Type: Fragment, Wired, Intranetic-Circuitry.]

—

G.: “Wires make up everything. Forests are the original power grid.”

B.: “Literally. _(To K.) _Google “Mycelium”.

—

I looked out the passenger window and I daydreamed the passing forest as a tangle of power lines draped over a dense node-network of living-bark telephone poles; their trunks adorned with endless branching cross-bars and protruding knotted prokaryotic-electrical power transformers.

—

My tinnitus has been extremely bad lately. In my quiet room, a piercing-flat-note shrieks in my head. At first I thought it was the mosquito-pitched sausermanhymmes of electronics, but when I unplugged everything in my room, the ultra-sonic-hymm continued.

—

I watched Serial Experiments: Lain for the first time. I loved it. I related a lot to Lain. I love power lines now. I’ve always loved the way liked the way some anime portrays them, but now I love the real thing, too. Nevertheless. The deep hymn Lain hears is downright angelic, but the sound I hear is the shrill clarion call of electricity-harpies. It’s ok. I know the wires are doing their best. I am too.

-Made of Wires

—