Lets all think about Lain

SEL is a very nice anime, however I feel as though I miss many of the details and underlying meanings in the layers. Lain is an idea? A representation of the interconnectedness of humanity through technological means? The wishes/dreams/legends of humanity as a whole manifesting itself in 'physical' form? With the lain we're introduced to being a physical connection to the real(?) world? Or is there only one lain, or are there none at all? Please use this thread to discuss the metaphorical meanings and messages lain is trying to convey. It would be nice to hear your thoughts, lain.

This is more or less how I interpreted it; that lain is a physical manifestation of (or if you prefer: representation of) the consciousness created by connecting all of humanity. And then controlling the medium through which we are connected (this is what the Knights are trying to do) means controlling the collective consciousness of everyone, and therefore affecting reality itself (since perception == reality when we all perceive the same thing). But I was shot down by someone on IRC saying that lain is just some god with the ability to connect everyone. I'm not sure what to think, and they both check out.

>>71 >god with the ability to connect everyone That's a very boring interpretation. It's also very Japanese, so it's probably the creators intention.

>>68 > I feel as though I miss many of the details and underlying meanings in the layers. That's OK. People were not expected to grok everything on the first pass. What's important is not to give up. Don't form a solid opinion. Just keep doing research. You need to know a few certain spheres of thought to understand Lain. You also need to be up to date on your tech skills. At least you need to know about the state of the arts. Do you know any alchemy? It will help. Colors speak. Lain is the Magnum Opus. Ancient Myths and legends are handy to know. Look up "Opening of the Mouth" Let's Love Lain!

>>71 That "Just some god" explanation from IRC doesn't have any background to it and isn't very substantive to me. I'm not going to go through and post everything in the show that supports my interpretation right now in some massive wall of text, but if you've got something specific I'll answer about it and we can discuss. Here's what I personally believe happened: When the wired was created by man, it crossed with the collective unconscious made up of all human memories and impulses. Eiri is a transhumanist who believes that human bodies are obsolete and that humans evolved into something pitiful. Working as a researcher for Tachibana, he understood his world's metaphysics and found the collective unconscious in the wired through his research. He came up with the plan to upload everybody's consciousness to the wired and rule over them all as a God. In order to do this, he would need to make the wired suitable for such a feat. This involves creating a three way connection between the wired, Earth, and all human individuals. While working on the wired's Protocol 7, he took the collective unconscious that was in the wired and gave it a human body. This is Lain. The unconscious was already connected to the wired, so that part was more or less finished. Bringing Lain into the physical world allows for her to be the catalyst to scoop up every consciousness into the wired, because she's both connected to every individual on Earth, and the wired. I would assume that the connection to Earth is also important because it's a part of human history and evolution, thus is also tied to the collective unconscious. To connect the wired to the Earth (and thus to also strengthen the connection to the collective unconscious), Eiri used the Schumann resonance frequency in Protocol 7. Lain in physical reality has to willingly finish the job, so throughout the series, Eiri and the Knights are either trying to indoctrinate her into their ideology, convince her that she's a program with a singular purpose, or ruin all of her interpersonal relationships in order to make her so lonely that she is desperate to "connect" with everybody.

I've been fleshing out my understanding of the show lately, and I realized something about Eiri. He claims to exist as a god on The Wired as he uploaded his "information" (thoughts, feelings, history, I imagine he uploaded all of his research as well). However, if that information can be thought of as a parallel to the body, he isn't alive in that right alone. He manifests as a deity because of the Knights, who discover his information and worship him, his ideals and his goal. When his final believer, Lain, renounces him as a god, he vainly attempts to manifest in a physical body, knowing that he cannot exist if he is not believed in. The same concept applies for reality, as our bodies are merely the mediums through which our selves are expressed. Something can be alive yet not biologically. Think of the Christian God, who exists in effect as He is believed in by Christians. Whether or not He is physically real does not matter. "The body only exists to verify one's existence." Here's something I've been wondering about: What exactly did Lain do at the end? Remove her ego from reality? Why does her absence prevent Chisa from killing herself, and Eiri from attempting to become a god?

>>175 >What exactly did Lain do at the end? Remove her ego from reality? Why does her absence prevent Chisa from killing herself, and Eiri from attempting to become a god? I take this pretty simple. She removed herself from everybody's memories. Nobody knows of her existence (though fragments exist here and there because all human information is just there at all times in free motion, and she was at one time made human by Eiri). Because she is not known about by Eiri, or because she is not there to be known about by Eiri, he never got the spark of inspiration to take everybody into the wired. This tells us that Lain is inherently important to both his understanding that he COULD take everybody into the wired, and to the practicality of said plan. As for Chisa, the traditional interpretation that she was convinced by Eiri to join him in the wired tells us that Eiri never getting his idea means he never gains his power and never gathers followers like her, thus she never decides to kill herself. She's very gloomy, and it's likely she has other issues to where Eiri's worldview gives her the final push to kill herself because she can feel like she belongs in the wired.

>>176 Right, but I thought that Lain as an ego didn't exist until Eiri gave her one.

>>177 Well, we can think of it like this. Lain because of her nature is powerful and transcends normal limitations, therefore, she can retain her self and yet also remove herself from the memories of others. If Lain existed prior to anybody else on Earth, her "information" is different and more omnipresent than that of a normal human. She's connected to everybody. Given an ego, she can retain it even after "reset" due to her complete conscious control and refusal to accept that she isn't herself.

>>178 I dont think Lain could have existed before humans, if she represents their collective unconscious. Maybe it's more accurate to think of Lain as Gaia herself, if she represents the collective unconscious of the entire biosphere.

>>176 Didn't the Tachibana Labs guys die and get brought back to life though? They wouldn't have gotten uploaded into the Wired because they wanted to keep the Wired and the real world separate. Lain just erasing the memories of everyone who knew her and reviving dead consciousnesses which were uploaded into the Wired is one thing, because Eiri Masami had the power to create a physical body for himself after Protocol 7 was implemented. But her ability to resurrect the dead who hadn't been uploaded could only be accomplished if her ascension to godhood had given her the power to time travel.

>>223 The black suits knew about Lain. They were a part of this whole debacle, and their entire situation was affected by the presence of Lain, which caused them to have to get involved. And it isn't a single person's desire that affects whether or not they're going to get uploaded as a result of Protocol 7. All people are going to be affected whether they like it or not. You have to think of it this way. Everybody is already connected. The wired doesn't too much matter in who can be resurrected if Lain already has a connection to any and all human data. The wired is simply the space that everyone's supposed to be shoved into. Remember what Eiri says: history isn't a line, it's a collection of points that are made to connect. Time is just an illusion which we can illustrate the change of physical things. This does of course raise lots of questions about the nature of human data like memories and how they affect the composition of reality, but I honestly don't think it's too out of the question to just assume that the creators didn't think that hard about it. In that kind of simple sense, you're just supposed to take away that Lain's existence affected everything that occurred and her erasure fixed it.

>>179 http://reoxy.org/wiki/The_Noosphere_and_The_Gaian_Mind.html Some interesting reading on the subject. Though i dont think lain is gaia, but rather an even greater force that is not bound to earthly existence. My interpretation is that lain represents the individuals ability to tune their awareness into becoming god and the instructions on how to manipulate reality.

>>294 I think Michael Persinger's researches fit well with the model proposed by Serial Experiments Lain. https://thepsionblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/dr-michael-persinger-on-psychic-phenomena/

What's the meaning of the power lines

>>329 They are a metaphor for the social and biological grids, brain-brain + neuron-neuron. Electricity and information shooting from place to place are basic to both the wired and the brain. Lain herself is of both ends of this metaphor, and she can hear this information as ambient tones and distant voices from the lines.

another question, on my second watch through of this and I still don't get why her sister has gone full retard in ep7 and onward

>>331 It confuses me too, but I've heard people suggest that she represents those who can't wrap their heads around the new order. In-story...I really don't know. The second post here (https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/3827/why-does-mika-go-insane) suggests the novel idea that the traffic fatality mentioned at the beginning of the episode was, in fact, referring to Mika. If this is correct, then it's only reasonable that she would find herself in the same limbo in which Chisa resides, which would also explain why similar disappearance animations are used for both Chisa and Mika at different points and why she is given a note that says that the dead will wander the earth. Mika's Wired ghost returns home to find that she has been replaced by a double, potentially as a way of keeping Lain's home environment stable for the same reasons that she was given a family in the first place. Her later behavior of phoning in may be a response to feeling "disconnected" from the physical plane. I don't think that's the only explanation, but I like it.

I feel like there is a connexion between Real World — the Wired personality dichotomy (represented by that little girl from Layer 04) and the concept of 'hidden desire' expressed in 1979 Stalker movie. The Wired exposes the true nature of an individual by removing barriers to it.

>>71 >>176 I couldn't help but see parallels with depression and suicide especially when Lain erases herself from everyone's memory which is the actual, definitive wish of a depressed suicide. The whole argument about the need for a body to be physically there to experience a connection with others but ending up with deleting the very memory others have of you because you are afraid of mistakes, that's lifted from depressive self-talk. It can't be a coincidence, in my eyes the entire series is about suicide - the actual wish behind suicide, erasing every trace of yourself for being disgusted by your flaws, your mistakes, and the versions of yourself you present to others who aren't the real you but a reflection of your need for communication (everything has to be shared).

>>337 >and the concept of 'hidden desire' expressed in 1979 Stalker movie Are you referring to how Дикобраз, returning to the room to beg his brother's return, grows wealthy? I don't think that that was a statement about tacit surpotent greed, but about the room, not even misunderstanding human desires, but being ineffectual---it's just a room. The rumors---myths---are just that: a romantic mysticism from poverty struck by catastrophe; what else do they have? The zone is their only, even if false, hope.

Let's consider the literalist interpretation of Serial Experiments Lain. Let's, for now, ignore any supernatural elements, or explain how they would be in reality. I think there's a clear distinction between what is (diegetically) real, fictional, imaginary. For example, when Lain is talking with Taro in that netgame, it's probably a mentally enhanced image of the lower-resolution picture on display; when Lain is talking with the ``cheshire cat'' mouth (and all those other body parts), it's probably a 3-dimentional mental image of conversations in a chatroom or a textboard where most messages can be only vaguely associated with an author by their personality or transient handle; and when she was speaking with God?, pure hallucination based on months of interacting with less-than-reliable sources talking about rumors and legends about the formation of networking. Is the ``Psyche processor'' a prototype computer network radio?

>>331 Lain hallucinates. Her mother is depressive. My guess is that they're schizoid, and it's heritable. Such disorders tend to start showing symptoms in late adolescence. Her father is probably autistic. Lain, too. I think that Lain is probably going to be OK because she can get obsessed about things when she needs to. That's how she became an early ISP---which explains how she could afford so much powerful hardware. (Not that her family is poor---her father probably works in informatics, and they live in a nice house in an expensive neighborhood; she probably got the seed money for that hardware by siphoning a bit from their funds, and put it back as soon as she got online and people started calling in to read whatever from wherever.)

good show, good yes[spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][spoiler][code][code][code][code][code] [/code][/code][/code][/code][/code][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler][/spoiler]

>>179 Lain-chan is Earth-chan? Cool!

>>68 Frankly, SEL has a bunch of quirks found in Fight Club: 1. exploded house 2. crazy person(a) who promotes something destructive and crazy turns out to be main character's hidden personality 3. HINTS TO RUINED SLEEP. In lyr2 and alike, you can see lain's room is not really accomodated for a regular human's heathy sleepo, with street light shining into room. Aside from that: besides, the layer on K.I.D.S. project smells like a cyberpunk take on Kabba the sacred black square stone.

>>1350 >2. crazy person(a) who promotes something destructive and crazy turns out to be main character's hidden personality I mean, lyr13 lain in cyan dress looks like *chunnibyou* personality representation - aside from Ego, Superego and Id triad many fans know about.

Personally, I got the feeling we got this: * Not-so-haxxor girl named lain decided to crack a case of disappearance of Chisa Yomoda - due to not having enough friends to go and chill out in flashy 1998 Shibuya, despite having the location and financial parts covered. * Her dad knows so much about computers! * Oh, top of the line computer! * *gets a nice computer and a bunch of books related to the idea to crack the case like a shonen detective* *hacking in progress* *got attacked by Eiri's social engineering tricks* *hacking in progress* Layer 08: Rumors: turns out, lain has this very teen stuff found in "Internet hate machine" anons *social engineering in progress* *hacking in progress* *hacking in progress* *hacking in progress* All of that resulted in hacking the entire planet (the entire universe, even?) Having the entire planet hacked, lain has to choose between having everything connected into one entity (very lonely) or dealing with the fact all people are a bit different. The lyr13 story implies lain could have hacked herself into Alice's life as a new student, but... It's a reminder the people who are cold enough to build/deploy destriuctive weapons are people who had been in dire need of love as in "human warmth", but got a [ERROR 404: LOVE NOT FOUND] instead. Oh and by the way. The Knights tried some kind of "love bombardment" on Lain - a tactic used by sects. Indoctrination into a sect-like cult of t3h 1337 h4xx0rz. Scary, actually.