huh. serial experiments lain is on internet archive. I'm kind of curious.

fitter happier has got to be my favorite poem of all time it never ceases. will always permeate everything and make me cry.

electroneering just started playing, this has to be.. my thousandth listen-through of this album. i forget how much i love that song, it always reminds me of lain's theme from serial experiments since i got into both RH and lain at around the same time in late elementary early middle school. thom has such an underratedly sexy voice by the way.
https://youtu.be/WAhFBhCXbrg?si=pBfVc61vxNgN_B4x

I don't know why I expected anything else from Reddit of all places, but of course all the discussion there about Lain is just hilariously overcomplicated "theories" about the Knights' grand evil plan to take over the world or whatever, and how every element can be interpreted literally to be a piece of said plan.

A desperate need to force these people to watch Dan Olsen's video on Annihilation.

I was trying to look into the events of Layer:05, specifically regarding Lain's sister who experiences some terrifying events that lead up to her mental collapse. One of the most haunting moments in the entire series is this... thing hovering in the front hallway, that Lain looks at with some sort of concern on her face before it fades away.

I wanted to know what exactly the show might have been getting at with that whole little plot thread and the final image of some kind of digital ghost. There's a doppelganger metaphor in the sequence as well. Perhaps it's another prod at the idea of our digital selves having completely different lives to our real selves? I'm not sure, I'd like to hear someone who's better at analyzing media than me talk about it.

Reddit is not the place to go for that kind of talk, because the first theory I heard was that the Knights of the Eastern Calculus harassed/used Lain's sister until she went insane, and the next theory I read was that her sister had been - in Sixth Sense fashion - dead this whole time, killed in a car accident.

One of the most stark and irritating parts of all the threads I looked at was that none of them even mentioned the digital ghost in the hallway, despite it clearly being the thematic punctuation at the end of the entire sequence. Nobody wanted to even acknowledge that part of the scene, because it's not immediately interpretable as a logical and grounded real-world event. It doesn't fit into a timeline, you can't build an Ending Explained video around it. By the logic of these people, that part of the scene - the most important part, honestly - is irrelevant, to be discarded, just Lain being schizophrenic and having crazy schizophrenic hallucinations that don't mean anything, or if they do mean anything, only to her personally.

What a sad way to look at a piece of art. The sort of people to look at a Picasso and criticize the inaccurate infrastructure and imperfect representation of humans. To think of everything as just a clear linear narrative buried under a style that exists only to obfuscate and mislead, like the show's just trying to trick you into thinking about its themes, and you need to push past all that nonsense and suss out the simple narrative facts. Fuck outta here.

Not trying to be an elitist here but good lord, let media affect you, try to appreciate it, understand it, contemplate it. Otherwise you'll become a fucking Redditor.

I don't know why I expected anything else from Reddit of all places, but of course all the discussion there about Lain is just hilariously overcomplicated "theories" about the Knights' grand evil plan to take over the world or whatever, and how every element can be interpreted literally to be a piece of said plan.

A desperate need to force these people to watch Dan Olsen's video on Annihilation.