so is lain supposed to be God?

she obviously thinks the guy who calls himself God isn't God cause when he said "more evolved humans have rights to greater abilities" she said "who gave you those rights" and outright said he's not God. but later on there are two lains talking, and one said "that's right, lain is God!" but the seemingly real lain says "no, you're wrong!". who is right? I've always seen the shows position on God being similar to the abrahamic monotheistic God, but upon watching again recently the ending might be able to be be interpreted as lain becoming a god.

1) all lains are the real lain, including you 2) Eri isn't God because he is/was a man. He tried to program himself into the Wired, but Lain came from the Wired. Lain *is* the Wired. Whether that puts her in a position of real godhood is up for debate, but seeing as we're here we ought to pay respects. 3) the ending was Lain realizing what she is, and making the decision to fix the timeline so her friends and family aren't hurt.

>>31656 so your saying lain is a personification of a network rather than a creation figure, but definitely not human like eri? might that make her like a shinto god or some sort of polytheist god, yet still one that recognizes its source with lines like "who writes those prophecies?" or "who gave you those rights?"? or is she also talking about herself in those lines, making her both a network and its source, like an abrahamic God?

I love Lain. I love you all, anons.

From what I understood Lain is the collective unconscious made conscious. The OG Kabbalistic soykaf that copies get their real spooky power from basically thought that God was everything and inconceivable. God, or "The Light" (let there be light lol all matter is made of light) cant be perceived. Even conceptualization of God in any form is heresy- so I think they even had two words. One for the actual, incomprehensible higher intelligence and one for the aspects of the divine which interacted with humanity. I'd say lain is the latter, basically our collective interaction with the divine made conscious but not really God- all part of the same bowl of spaghetti. In every man a mortal God, in every God a immortal man. Let's all love Lain.

>>31744 You're partially correct, not wrong. >>31655 Serial Experiments Lain is Melancholia - lamentations about various occult topics including the Fall of Babylon/Rome. Lain embodies the gods of various occult traditions including cannibalistic / Kabbalistic / Ka-Ba stone (baka) worship... The Alice [in wonderland] / Baal cults are referenced heavily, and the show allows the surface plot to suffer to make clearer the occult commentary about secret doings of various cults. The Knights logo is a Freemason's compass+square logo, and it is "lame" broken legged... Lame -> Liam (cult of great determined protector) -> Lian -> Lain... [the lame name game of the occult.] Liam / Tavistock Institute's Egregore AKA Alister Crowley's (Lam), AKA Alice A Bailey's "little helper" (spirit guru), AKA a Little Grey Man from Outer Space... Lain wears the alien's body when SEL talks of their [mind reading] sleep paralysis demon... Of course that's why there's a green/red F. kruger shirt on the alien, because it's about the sleep deprivation [torture] "sex magic" (a Love Craft) that turns a [sad] panda w/ dark rings around its eyes into an "Alice" in Wonderland... an Alice in Chains, and Alec Baldwin (Baal wind). Chisa Yomoda is "yoda" / Green Man of the Celt, the Messenger God Hermes (she strikes his pose before letting go - and references the Masonic Ocular Cult holding glasses aloft as the messeg). She sends electric mail from the underworld, and guides Lain into the Hermetic mysteries of the soul. This is juxtaposed the God[s] of First Wisdoms - those eastern having the "Yo" in the prefix, eg: the Jade Duke of Heaven, who recieved the eastern version of Thoth's Emerald Tablets from Per-Wadjet, who has retired from theis station according to Daoism... (hint: Wuji = Wa[d]jet) Between them is referenced Leto - a young god of letters (Dune references the connection as Duke Leto). The show is steeped in many esoteric mysteries, as most media today is - that is the practice preserved and most known as a "Renaissance" tradition, to occult wisdom in plane sight. SEL is supposed to be a touch-stone that one may return to time and again after having completed a side quest on one's Hero's Journey (there and back again, into the underworld, reinvented/incarnated, etc). It has layer upon layer of symbolism and mostly is concerned with lamentations of the western occult powers that now dominate the older eastern occult (the old imperial guard left after WWII). Since Japan can't even talk about its constitution (thanks to the War Guilt Information Program's post-war propaganda and media control), they talk about that which shouldn't be said - Nearly breaking the first two rules of Fight Club, by only using a very thin layer of occult. The Duality of Egyptian mystics is mingled with the Mysteries Babylon mind break / split personality via traumatic memory suppression... Lain makes everyone forget herself because the Reformation and Spanish Inquisition was just one of many times that history was rewritten to hide someone like Lain... The Navi logo is an occulted Eye of Wadjet, a quite watchful being, like Yuki Nagato... There is a greater god than Lain, of course the "world tree" is sentient... but it's mind is slow and thus eternal, a thousand years is like a single day for it. Lightning in a dust cloud (sorry no accretion disk, like charges repel). Tree shaped fulgurites of magma -> Energized Neuron Shapes... why, if we just prune this brambly place into the shape of mind? Bonzai! We've got a Great Wizard God! (Sky Daddy) that we all live on and eat from. So on and so forth... SEL touches on so many topics including methods and apparatuses for transcendence, that you'll sound like a schizo trying to dissect all the references in one post. What matters most in SEL is the messages found in the subtext about the occult: The New God brought to Japan is fine, but the old guard misses their Old Gods, and shall have them again someday... The egregores and dream demons are lame compared to them (Lain). The hint that there is something deeper and methods of understanding the symbolism placed in SEL make it a tool of initiation. For instance: Majestic 12 is referenced, and pointed out that the founding document's signature was a careful forgery (or was it original, and the other doc a fabrication to claim it forged?). Well, a Flying Saucer is the Shape of Death, Saturn... and during the cometary cataclysms such as the Great Comet of 1811, meteorites fall to earth. Many "Lumps" or "Men" (gender neutral lumps of stuff), make scythe shaped tails as they fall to earth... It's Raining Men! So you do an alien autopsy on these Black Rocks from out of this world, and discover a grey metal inside... TADA: little grey men from outer space! Sprinkle in a Lam or two and you've got a great joke that even invokes Christ in the testimoaning of most "abduction" stories. Thus Lain also appears in the clouds as a Christ. Praise Cheeses! For these rocks are like lumps of iron squeezed together like a cheese (a "man" of the [cheese] Cloth). SEL is pointing out the ballshit... a turd is also a kind of "cheese", little turds squeezed together and water removed like the curds of milk... add a cloth diaper, and Praise Cheeses! "Men" of the Cloth are lumps of cheese. Mountains will melt before Him... yes... that's what a comet does when it saves us from evil, by killing good and evil alike the world ending cataclysms... that are more common than the masses are led to believe. The world is not as it has been presented, of course... and SEL is one of the many shows that rebel against the western occult and attempt to lift the veil a bit. That's why one of SEL's producers said it was meant to be uncomfortable to the west. boa = snake, forked tongue. Duvet = cover (to occult, and what bands do, cover songs). Dvvet = duet... a forked (boa) snake tongue with duality in the hidden meanings of the sound alike name game of the occult, the single voice is singing a duet, that's this band (and many other's) shtick. TL;DR: Yes, lain represents the gods.

>>31749 so i'm not wrong, but lets say your right. is there so objective truth, mr alien? I been looking for the good guys for a long time. I'm not about to learn moon runes.

>>31655 Lain is a young woman that suffers from schizophrenia that she is heavily medicated for, these medications deal with most of the positive symptoms of her disorder but are reinforcing the negative symptoms and also sanding away her personality, leaving her a mostly grey shell. Following the shock of a classmate committing suicide that manages to punch through the anhedonia she lives in while on the drugs she starts to falter in taking her medication and her real more outgoing, more lateral personality starts to return, she begins to engage with her friends again and starts to explore her environment more, including via the internet, computing being a childhood interest the drugs have stifled. The return of her delusional hallucinatory positive symptoms starts the moment she fails to redose after learning of her classmate's death but is dramatically accelerated when she witnesses an act of narcotic induced violence on her first post awakening night out with her friends, the stress combined with the rapidly re encroaching positive schizophrenic symptoms cause Lain to lose large chunks of time in a paranoid delusion that has her at the centre of a conspiracy that just so happens to involve most of her preexisting interests

I was thinking of solipsism. It may be able to explain her existence.

>>32013 The answer to loneliness isn't to stop thinking that anyone exist. I felt a major theme in the show was that you, as far as you understand yourself, only exist as long as other people are aware of you. I'm "real" the same way you're "real" (assuming you aren't a bot or soulless tranny). We're just all connected and the same thing. A handful of distant neurons blinking information to each other. The stars we are make the constellation that is lain. >>31749 Lainon your post sent me down a number of very interesting rabbit holes. Not that I learned much. I'm just drunk and confused now. Interesting all the same. Give me another rant if you find the time.

>>31749 >make scythe shaped tails as they fall to earth andalite bandits strike again

One key thing of episode 13 is that previously dead people are now alive. This is something that the wired cannot do. This is something that the collective unconscious cannot do. This is something that rewriting memories cannot do. We therefore have to conclude one of three things: * They were brought back to life. * They never ACTUALLY died. It just looked as if they did. * The story is internally inconsistent. If they were brought back to life then there must be supernatural powers at work. Either Lain's herself, or someone lending her power. Being able to rewind and rewrite history at will is surely a godlike power. It may be that they never actually died. It was all just a dream. Whose dream? Alice's. The show has previously made a very clear reference to Alice in Wonderland. In the dream Chisa became Alice. The powerline workers became agents etc. However this is contradicted by Lain appearing again. I have never seen a theory that is capable of fully explaining everything so internal inconsistency is not something to dismiss out of hand. But even if it is inconsistent we cannot deny the compulsion to try to find a story that fits as well as possible, even if it cannot fit everything. In the end I prefer the theory that Lain is godlike. But why was this amnesiac god brought by agents to be raised in a fake family? I have no answer to this.

Actually I have yet another thing to add. The other-lains. Are they Lain or not? My answer is that they are not. The first other-lain Wild-Lain, we learn is created through information coming into Cyberia somehow, when Lain interrogates Taro. Then we see the fake Lain-dolls that Lain immediately disbelieve and decapitate. Then there is the evil-lain that tries to make the whole world hate Lain. She succeeds in making everyone but Alice starts hating Lain by spying and revealing their secrets. Evil lain makes another attempt and this time even Alice falls. What evidence that evil lain is fake? Not much, except the circumstantial Qui Bono? It works very well for torturing her into despair and driving her into the arms of Eiri Finally there is the persuader-lain in episode 13 that persuades her to leave the world behind and become a god. But if you look very closely there are suspicious things about her. First she says Lain is god. Then she says Lain should become god. If you look very closely at her then you will see that her appearance is full of random noise like a screen has. Real-Lain does not have such noise. Also persuader-lain suddenly and unexpectedly to herself disappears.

Also I lowkey regret not setting the name for taking credit for this analysis because I am very proud of it lmao. In case I ever want to claim. sha1sum is a698e75df4c3a6235e4d09f841390c06c95867d9

Moved to >>>/lain/979.