Ｓｅｒｉａｌ Ｅｘｐｅｒｉｍｅｎｔｓ Ｌａｉｎ
Serial Experiments Lain is a 1998 Japanese animated series.So this will be very brief, and is just my own interpretation of the anime. I highly recommend watching this series several times to see everything it has to tell. But here is a synopsis of Serial Experiments: Lain.
Serial Experiments: Lain, is a series that came out in 1998 and ran for thirteen episodes. It was written by Chiaki J Konaka and directed by, Ryutaro Nakamura. The story follows a shy junior high school student named Lain Iwakura who receives an email from a girl she walked home with once named Chisa Yomoda, the weird part of this is that Chisa had committed suicide a week before by jumping off a building. Chisda explains she continues to live in a virtual world called “the wired”. The wired is a virtual space that expands throughout television radio, the internet, and computer networks. Lain finds this interesting even though the other kids in her class who got emails from Chisa just think it’s a hoax. Lain goes to her father and talks to him about the wired, the next day she comes home from school and there is the newest and best model of a personal computer, or “Navi” in her room. Lain logs in and begins to explore the wired.
After she digs deeper into the world of the wired, events from the real world begin to mix with the reality of the wired. Lain begins to realize that there seem to be multiple versions or “alters” of herself that exist not only in the wired but possibly in reality. Lain begins to travel all over the wired, and becomes more and more popular there with many different groups of people. She starts to notice she is being followed and is being watched by a group of hackers called “The Knights of Eastern Calculus”. People begin to recognize Lain outside of the wired as one of her alters leaving Lain disoriented and confused.
Things get worse when her evil “alter” spreads a rumor about Lain’s only true friend Alice, causing trouble for her and Alice in the real world as well. Then things are even more difficult when a wants to be god, Masami Eiri appears and reveals that he is the creator of Protocol Seven of the Wired. Masami injected his own code into the wired through protocol seven to give him control over the wired and make him godlike. He then left his body behind and uploaded his consciousness into the Wired. Masami uses the Knights to do his bidding because they believe him to be a god. He tells Lain she is like a god and will tear down the walls between the real world and the wired. He repeatedly tries to get her to give herself completely to the wired in an attempt to control her because he wants to bring the wired world into reality.
Lain continues building her Navi computer to be more and more complex until it is completely filling her bedroom with wires. By the end of the series, she is connecting her own body to the Navi and can log in just using her own body. Her family was never very attentive, becoming more and more distant from her, and it is revealed that they may not even be who they say they are. At the same time, Tachibana General Laboratories is chasing the Knight of Eastern Calculus while trying to regain control of Protocol Seven from Masami. Lain’s friend Alice who she spread the rumor about comes to Lain’s home to find her and finds a Lain fused with her Navi in her room. A manifestation of Eiri Masami begins to attack them both, sending computer parts flying everywhere. Lain confronts her "creator," Eiri Masami, who still claims to be the God of the Wired. She rejects his claims of divinity and asserts her own identity defeating him.
In the end, Lain realizes she has to remove herself from the wired and reality to reset everything, and that she must embrace her powers to make things right. She has to remove memories like bad data. Everything is undone and in the final moments of the anime Lain who remains in the form of a middle schooler meets with a now grown and married Alice in the street, Alice tells her she seems familiar and wonders if they will see each other again. Lain says she is sure they will. The implication is that Lain has ascended in some way and lives between both the real world and the wired. It is assumed Alice’s life is also better because the rumor about her never got out because Lain never existed to tell it.
That’s about as short as I can get, and admittedly, this may not even be truly what is going on. On a deeper level, there are many theories as to what is actually happening in this series. There are so many theories, too many to name, but I’ll name a few of the more popular ones for some context, and then I’ll get into why we all love Lain.
BRIEF THEORIES
So some of the theories are, Lain is actually just a sentient software program, Lain is actually an alien, (there is a scene that could support this I guess?) or Lain has DID or Schizophrenia and is slowly losing her mind, Lain had powers and hallucinated having a family, Lain had powers and was being held by the government and was assigned a family to keep her in control and let her attend school to monitor her, Lain is a true story and we live in the aftermath, therefore, Lain is god, Lain is just an anime but she is god in the anime, it is what it seems, Lain was born in episode one, lain is a dead girls memories, lain is just about loneliness in the 20th century and so many others.
I think everyone who watches this series finds a slightly different meaning in it. I think all of the things I read are interesting and I find many of them are pretty convincing even though they seem outlandish. Thinking about the series is half the fun and the think pieces I’ve read about Lain are always really interesting and entertaining. There are whole Reddit threads and essays about Lain. The mystique about Lain is one of the reasons many people Love this anime and it continues to find new fans because people who saw it years ago still talk about it for this reason.
Throughout the series “Let’s all Love Lain” is a phrase that’s repeated very often and has become a kind of way for fans to self-identify as “Lain people”. But other than the mystery and the puzzle that the series is for most people, why do so many people personally feel so connected to Lain, both the series and the character? Maybe because there is more to it than just the need to figure out what it’s about. Maybe it is because people relate to the characters, or maybe it’s because LAin captures the spirit of our lives right now, even though it was made in 1998.
