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.

After watching my Lain blu-ray, I was curious about the production - there's lot of effects that feel like they would've been original done in standard-def and either had to be upscaled or recreated for an HD presentation. It did not take much searching to turn up full ISO rips of the 1999 Pioneer DVD set of Lain! Apparently the Internet Archive is totally okay hosting that - the catch being that the ISO rips are 1:1 byte-for-byte copies - ie they are still encrypted, so it's up to you as the downloader to get around that yourself (it's as easy as mounting the ISO and then opening it in VLC, since VLC does its own DVD decryption, or there's like 8 programs out there for decrypting the ISO if you want to burn it to physical disc).

So that makes me wonder if it would be Chill of me to upload 1:1 ISOs of some of my own discs to IA - primarily stuff that's really expensive, OOP, or just difficult to find.

I'm of two minds about how easy it is to find pirated stuff on IA - on one hand, it's delightful and fun to stumble across that sort of stuff, on the other hand it feels like exploitation of a system - knowing that the people behind IA can't check every single upload and so piracy will almost certainly slip through the cracks, and then this pirated stuff could be used against IA in court to harm it at some point down the road - I mean they're already embroiled in lawsuits over the trick they pulled with ebooks during 2020, so adding any more potential fuel to that fire feels kind of mean-spirited.

Unless the people behind IA are totally cool with stuff like 1:1 encrypted disc rips. In which case oh boy.

Oh yeah I never finished the point I started with here, which is that, Yeah, a lot of the effects in Lain were originally done at 60i, giving them a "video look" which all got converted to 24p for the blu-ray. This because very few blu-ray companies want to do 1080i releases, because they're all cowards (the real reason is that 60i video would have constant 3:2 pulldown stutter). It's very interesting to see those effects in their original form on the 1999 DVDs - even though by all other regards the old DVDs are extremely mediocre. They pulled the classic "just plug a pro VCR into an MPEG-2 encoder and call it a day" option.

Still, there's something to be said about how all the digital effects move distinctly differently to the animation of the real world. It also helps the cool computer UI look more like an actual computer UI, since those usually run at 60Hz.

My main interpretation of Lain up until the end was that it was a fairly direct metaphor for how the internet can completely consume people who are more socially isolated, dissociative, etc. As a character Lain reads to me as someone who struggles with some sort of schizoaffective disorders and gets addicted to online validation, and begins to lose her ability to delineate between the Real and the Wired as her sense of identity becomes fractured.

and then the last 3 episodes kinda shat all over that interpretation. From the moment Lain meets "God" up until the end, the show seems to spiral out of control and collapse in on itself. I thought the two Lains was pretty clearly about how people can behave completely differently online than they do in real life, but no, actually there are two different Lains. I think. I guess. She's never sure, so neither am I.

The little grey alien bit is completely opaque to me, I have no clue what the show was trying to communicate by sticking Lain's head on E.T. Something about how she feels alien and distinct from humanity? I guess. I loved the question posed by her ability to edit memories by deleting things from the Wired - if there is absolutely no record anywhere of an event, did it still happen?

I feel like there's a layer I'm missing. Lain ending up as some benevelont God, watching over the Wired and the world as an unaging, lonely being feels like a bad ending, I don't care if she's smiling, it feels like something is missing. Albeit Arisu's "actually being alive is cool because you have a heartbeat" argument was a little schmaltzy, I wanted to see the flesh automaton Lain or whatever she is forge her own path an identity - but maybe that's the point, that she can't do that without hurting people, that the Wired and the real world must stay separated and that's what her job is now.

If that's the case, it feels funnily similar to the end of Loki Season 2? I feel like an idiot comparing this show to some Disney+ Marvel slop, but the ending of that show surprised me by genuinely dedicating itself to a pretty bleak and melancholy conclusion. In both Lain and Loki, the main character can only save those they love by removing themselves entirely from the world and spending the rest of their lives holding everything together on their own. Damn.

Anyways good show.