lain iwakura tbh creature

Finished watching Serial Experiments Lain. It is... complicated at the end.

Though at this point in my life I’m generally able to resist any impulse to say “The experience of encountering such and such media at the tender age of/in the year-whichever was qualitatively different than for some putative Johnny come lately,” special exception must be made in the case of Serial Experiments Lain.

Accepting that the set of subjective impressions is so varied and so buried in the terms of qualia as to make general comment meaningless, nevertheless, I think that Lain, which so explicitly positions itself within a certain era’s body of technology, superstition, and crackpottery, is necessarily decontextualized by the fresh eyes of 2023, particularly as the series has acquired an iconic status that extends beyond the mere status of a cult classic.

This is a pretty frivolous inquiry, and I can only speak from my own experience of it (which while very much Web 1.0 was nevertheless not contemporary to the fiction). But because this is my special and self indulgent blogging space I’m going to proceed anyway.

Putting aside specific and subjective qualia (cigarette smells and playing darts in a dusty garage-turned-rec-and-storage-room, burning my eyes on the burned-in images on the great CRT TV of my adolescence’s basement, curled on the ground in my friend’s bedroom after my first and only OD related hospital stay, afraid to stay in my empty house alone) there was a singular feeling of expectant uncertainty about the era, a sense of supernatural possibility. Anxious expectation of a world connected by the internet is, of course, the central concept of the narrative. But one absolute cure for the belief in unrestrained possibility is time, and the interim has seen plenty of it, of the most mundane character.

This is not to say that anyone who saw Serial Experiments shortly after its release believed the events depicted in the show were possible. The technology, culture, and narrative even in ‘99 were familiar but fundamentally implausible. But they seemed to share a possibility space with things that existed and that felt very real. Homebrew computing culture with its various aesthetics, LAN parties, water cooling. Spatial conceptions of the internet, netiquette. The decentralized, largely un- or self-indexed web. The general sense that computing, conspiracy theories, occult research, and animation (as entertainment not explicitly intended for children) (god, I feel old just writing that)) were in some respect antisocial or counter cultural.

What does Serial Experiments Lain look like divorced from this context? Does Lain—which explicitly draws the reader from the world of the fiction into the real world, projecting surreality—make any sense without its cultural markers?

Alright, let’s be honest, it’s probably not that different. But don’t get me started about Haruhi.