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The Terrifyingly Prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 Years Later

How the anime classic predicted the obsessive and compulsive habits of our online life

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At the onset, Lain Iwakura’s father warns her about the social perils of the internet, alternatively known as “the Wired” in the parlance of Serial Experiments Lain . “When it’s all said and done,” he says, “the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. You mustn’t confuse it with the real world. Do you understand what I’m warning you about?”

Lain is young, and doesn’t yet know how to use a computer, but she knows better than to place her faith in the older generation’s rigid distinction between real life and online performance. “You’re wrong,” she responds.

At age 14, Lain was extremely online. Yes, she’s a fictional character—a cartoon, even — but there is no more frightfully prescient web parable than her story, Serial Experiments Lain , the 13-episode anime series that first aired in Japan in July 1998. Twenty years later, Lain is a distressingly faithful portrait of online life in the 2010s—a hellscape of warring avatars, self-serving mythology, catastrophic self-importance, compulsion, and inevitably, disillusionment.

At his young daughter’s sheepish request, Lain’s father installs a state-of-the-art personal computer—a Navi—in Lain’s bedroom. Lain’s father takes pride in his daughter’s budding technological interest. “In this world,” he explains, “people connect to each other, and that’s how societies function. For communication, you need a powerful system that will mature alongside your relationships with people.” Curiously, Lain’s father doesn’t seem to have many enviable relationships of his own. His conversations with his wife are cold, and his enthusiasm for his daughter is born conditionally from her interest in her father’s profession. Lain’s father wears glasses that are frequently filled with a monitor’s awesome light, even when he’s sitting on the couch with just a newspaper in front of him. He sees the screen at all times.

Fearfully, Lain regards the new, glowing screen stationed at the far corner of her bedroom as a haunted portal. But she’s chasing her former classmate Chisa — a young girl who kills herself in the show’s opening scene only to email Lain the day after she’s thrown herself from the roof of their school. Inevitably, Lain’s search for Chisa leads her into “the Wired,” whence Chisa claims to have retreated. By Episode 3, Lain is assembling a desktop fortress without her father’s supervision. As the series progresses, Lain develops her technical proficiency exponentially, and her hardware expands to turn her bedroom into a dim, electrified jejunum.

Through intensive study and ingenuity, Lain accesses deeper, darker levels of the Wired, which is to say, the internet. By Episode 7, Lain—a character who predates the following phrase by nearly a decade—is glued to her proto-smartphone; her eyes glow, too, lit constantly with a forum troll’s fervor. Online, Lain builds a second life, and she even cultivates a fan base—but her interactions within the Wired mostly anger her. Online, she hacks and bickers. Offline, Lain ditches her friends and stalks through her suburb defensively, evasively, in paranoid silence. Gradually, Lain realizes that the Wired is a disaster and a trap.

For Lain, the web portends intrigue, delusion, and death. In the Wired, Lain is an altogether different person—a much darker person who is easily moved to vengeance. Quickly, Lain sees that her digital presence is a cruel and gutsy perversion of her true self; a cunning doppelgänger who’s already cultivated some fearsome mythology about the girl named Lain Iwakura. As the real Lain watches in shock, the digital Lain confronts a delusional young man, addicted to nanomachines, who shoots up a nightclub. “No matter where you go,” the digital Lain tells the gunman, “everyone’s connected.” She means it as a threat, and the gunman is so horrified by the Wired’s ubiquity that he then turns the gun to his mouth and takes his own life. The digital Lain is a bully, and the real Lain struggles to comprehend her personality and her mission. The real Lain—the meek middle school student who avoids human interaction and confrontation—greets the digital Lain with a gasp.

Throughout the series, the real Lain’s struggle to reconcile herself with the digital Lain drives the former toward a full and fateful resemblance of the latter. The real Lain ditches her friends, taunts her father, and barks back at her pursuers. She turns to a permanent state of obsession and rage. The web bolsters her personal mythology while ruining her mood and disposition. But she cannot log off; nor can she tell her friends or herself why. Without predicting social media as a popular mode for online life, Serial Experiments Lain nonetheless prefigured its addictive and ruinous qualities. The protagonist, Lain, and the antagonist, Masami, both cultivate self-importance and an illusory “control” that the viewer recognizes as a disastrous loss of self-control. They can’t stop posting.

Admittedly—for all its prescience— Serial Experiments Lain looks quaint. The technological sprawl that overtakes Lain’s bedroom includes big fans, black tubes, and bulkheads. There are wires everywhere—from the show’s opening credits through its twisted climax. There’s a great fondness for the word “cyber,” such as the popular nightclub being named Cyberia Café & Club. There’s text-to-speech interludes and ominous command prompts, all recalling so much other Y2K cinema, from The Net through The Matrix . Visually—to an amusing degree, honestly—the series fails to anticipate the great shrinkage and stylistic minimalism of the present century’s consumer electronics. Essentially, however, the Wired is an astoundingly prophetic depiction of the World Wide Web—especially its lawless, anonymizing communities—as a cipher of misinformation and malaise.

Many critics find that Lain often pales in comparison with Neon Genesis Evangelion , another turn-of-the-century anime series that culminates with lengthy ruminations on the self and a sad, messianic transcendence for its weepy protagonist, Shinji Ikari. Evangelion came first, and it’s far more acclaimed than Lain for its dramatization of the subconscious; Lain is widely seen as a smaller, lesser successor to Evangelion ’s intellectual pretensions. Their shared existentialism aside, Lain is uniquely and definitively concerned with web obsession. Literally, Serial Experiments Lain is about a young girl’s reluctant march toward digital martyrdom. Today, Lain’s story resonates more so as an allegory about the perils of forging one’s identity—an alternative identity, however false, misguided, perverse, delusional—using the internet. The Wired is Lain’s world. Other users just live in it at her mercy.

Eventually, Lain dispenses with her real-world pursuers, the Knights of Calculus, the Men in Black; so Lain and Masami export their conflict to the web exclusively. That’s where they live. That’s where they wrestle for singular, godly dominance. It is understood, then, that the web doesn’t require conventional, physical grunts to enforce threats against a human being. The web is perfectly equipped to destroy a person on its own terms and within its own structures. Despite the web’s many catastrophes, Lain never unplugs. Rather, she burrows deeper into the Wired, convinced through equal parts deduction and delusion that humanity lives and dies by her unique participation in the Wired.

Ultimately, Lain’s will wins out over Masami’s plot to demolish the distinction between the material world and the Wired. The series doesn’t climax with Masami’s gruesome disintegration in Lain’s bedroom, but rather with Lain’s friend Arisu barging into her room to drag her from the buzzing cave. Laughing, the real Lain reasserts herself, and she embraces her fearful friend. Serial Experiments Lain ends with a teen girl sobbing over a madeleine, regretting her terminal investment in digital life . In the final scenes, Lain shows no hardware or wires, yet the worrisome murmur of electricity resounds in every corner of civilized life. No matter where you go, Lain feared, everyone’s connected. Presumably, the sound is Wi-Fi.

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God is in the Wired in ‘Serial Experiments Lain’

This experimental cyberpunk animation from the late 1990s depicts our warped reality in the age of mass communications..

Words Miranda Remington

© NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan

Widespread Internet use was still in its early stages in 1998. But Serial Experiments Lain , a single anime series running that year on late-night TV, introduced an extraordinary depiction of all human communication within the realm of ‘the Wired.’

Within the Wired, thoughts float at maximum freedom. At first, protagonist Iwakura Lain, an awkward and isolated high-school girl, does not yet recognise the vast network lying beneath her daily life, having never opened her computer.  Yet, amongst people, telephone wires, and machines, the unconscious  overlaps with reality and the surreal seeps into the everyday.  Lain’s own everyday life is irreversibly upturned after a cryptic email arrives from her dead classmate. Claiming that her soul is still alive in the Wired, it reads, ‘God is here.’

Hooked up to Prophecy

As one of the most ambitious animes to ever exist in history, Serial Experiments Lain was initially deemed ‘an enormous risk’ before being broadcast on TV Tokyo. The story is by Chiaki Konaka, a writer known for developing series like Digimon or Ultraman Gaia, while also harbouring dark Lovecraftian elements in his other works. Iconic characters and other designs were created by his close collaborator Yoshitoshi ABe, an unconventional illustrator whose hyper-realism observes the world around him rather than taking inspiration from previous examples. Addressing late night viewers with cyberpunk themes, philosophical subjects, and conspiracy theories, the project was destined to be unique from the start.

Serial Experiments Lain had a strange omnipresence. Originally conceived as a multi-media project, Lain’s story is pieced together through various other fragments, including  manga by Yoshitoshi ABe and an enigmatic Playstation game.  Even a hardcore-techno soundtrack— relating to ‘Cyberia’, a nightclub Lain visits named after Douglas Rushkoff’s novel —connects themes and unusual velocities beyond its own fourth wall.  While winning prizes at Japanese media festivals, Serial Experiments Lain has an immense cult following with academic texts written until today.

Deux Ex Machina

Visually,  Serial Experiments Lain stands out with a sense of beauty unseen in most commercial anime. It has a cinematography of slow shots and lense flares, with  abstract colours and Godardian uses of texts to communicate the strange depths of a virtual world.  Lain’s story is told in ‘layers’ instead of episodes, and atmospheres instead of linear plot lines.  As she learns of herself through the Wired, her identity begins to warp and reality becomes ambiguous in the face of it. With references to strange theories and events in real life— Schumann resonances , Carl Jung’s collective unconscious , and even the Roswell UFO incident —the Wired’s essence begins to seep out of all screens.

Beneath strange twists and theological undertones, the transformations witnessed in Serial Experiments Lain tells a coming-of-age story for any adolescent girl. Ubiquitous technology can teach one of the implications of a maximum interconnectivity, but ultimately for Lain, learning to overcome loneliness is a human endeavour.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998), directed by Ryutaro Nakamura,  is available on Blu-Ray from Funimation  and has been relesed by MVM Entertainment within the UK.

• Serial Experiments Lain
• Ryutaro Nakamura
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This illustrated black and white album follows its lead through various bars, celebrating the Japanese art of living.

Traditional tattoos were strong signifiers; murderers had head tattoos, while theft might result in an arm tattoo.

This musical genre that emerged online in the 2010s reclaims a consumerist past that it critiques under the guise of idealising it.

The illustrator is the pioneer for a form of hyperrealism that combines sensuality and technology and depicts sexualised robots.

The reedition of the publication ‘The Park’ takes us on a night walk through the parks of Tokyo, out in full sight.

Serial experiments lain

Lain wasn’t interested in computers until she received her first email from a formerly suicidal classmate. Her newfound desire to connect with the dead will lead her into the twisted maze of the “wired world.”

Accela – a designer drug born of nanotechnology – is a big hit with the club kids, but what’s that got to do with Lain? Only a madman who painted the dance floor with blood can answer that question – and he’s dead.

Lain has questions about a computer chip someone left in her locker, and her Dad’s not talking. Some kids at the club say they know all about it – but they want a piece of Lain’s wired wild side.

The more involved with computers she becomes, the more Lain begins to transform. In the cybernetic cocoon that was once her room, she’s hard at work blurring the lines between reality and the wired.

Lain’s friends suspect her involvement in a series of computer errors that caused a lethal traffic accident. Meanwhile, her sister is haunted by mysterious messages demanding that she “fulfill the prophecy”.

When an image of herself appears in the clouds, the “real” Lain enters the wired on a search for answers. Her quest leads to a “child-killer” scientist whose devious work is being exploited by the Knights.

Cast & Crew

Ayako Kawasumi

Kaori Shimizu

Obayashi Ryunosuke

Rei Igarashi

Information

© 1998 Triangle Staff/Pioneer LDC

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Serial Experiments Lain

Yoshitoshi ABe (Texhnolyze) brings to life this existential classic that paved the way for films like The Matrix. After the suicide of a classmate, fourteen year old Lain logs on to the Wired and looses herself in a mess of hallucinations and memories.

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Description.

Season 1, Episode 1 TV-14 HD SD

Lain wasn’t interested in computers until she received her first email from a formerly suicidal classmate. Her newfound desire to connect with the dead will lead her into the twisted maze of the “wired world.”

Season 1, Episode 2 TV-14 HD SD

Accela – a designer drug born of nanotechnology – is a big hit with the club kids, but what’s that got to do with Lain? Only a madman who painted the dance floor with blood can answer that question – and he’s dead.

Season 1, Episode 3 TV-14 HD SD

Lain has questions about a computer chip someone left in her locker, and her Dad’s not talking. Some kids at the club say they know all about it – but they want a piece of Lain’s wired wild side.

Season 1, Episode 4 TV-14 HD SD

The more involved with computers she becomes, the more Lain begins to transform. In the cybernetic cocoon that was once her room, she’s hard at work blurring the lines between reality and the wired.

Season 1, Episode 5 TV-14 HD SD

Lain’s friends suspect her involvement in a series of computer errors that caused a lethal traffic accident. Meanwhile, her sister is haunted by mysterious messages demanding that she “fulfill the prophecy”.

Season 1, Episode 6 TV-14 HD SD

When an image of herself appears in the clouds, the “real” Lain enters the wired on a search for answers. Her quest leads to a “child-killer” scientist whose devious work is being exploited by the Knights.

Season 1, Episode 7 TV-14 HD SD

Covert agents in black suits take Lain in for questioning. When the interrogation hits too close to home, Lain flips from real to wired in the blink of an eye.

Season 1, Episode 8 TV-14 HD SD

Lain’s unsavory behavior within the wired turns her into an outcast at school. Confused and alone, Lain investigates her own cyber-lifestyle only to be shocked by a voyeuristic incarnation of herself.

Season 1, Episode 9 TV-14 HD SD

A DJ at the club passes Lain a plain brown envelope containing a computer chip of unknown origins. Hoping to learn more about the clandestine technology, Lain abducts a young boy for a “date.”

Season 1, Episode 10 TV-14 HD SD

Lain encounters a man who call himself the “god” of the wired, and members of the Knights all across the world log on to participate in a cryptic mass suicide.

Infornography

Season 1, Episode 11 TV-14 HD SD

Lain risks a meltdown by uploading a Navi clone into her own brain. Later, the border between reality and the wired is threatened when Lain forces the world forget a secret that never should have been revealed.

Season 1, Episode 12 TV-14 HD SD

“God” preaches that our bodies are simply an obstacle preventing the evolution of mankind. An exhausted Lain appears willing to sacrifice her own flesh and blood until Alice convinces her to take a stand against the digitalized deity.

Season 1, Episode 13 TV-14 HD SD

Lain’s guilt over the havoc caused by her interaction within the wired provokes her to take drastic – and irreversible – action.

Additional information

Released year, additional terms.

• Cast & crew
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Episode list

Serial experiments lain.

S1.E2 ∙ Girls

S1.E3 ∙ Psyche

S1.E4 ∙ Religion

S1.E5 ∙ Distortion

S1.E6 ∙ Kids

S1.E7 ∙ Society

S1.E8 ∙ Rumors

S1.E9 ∙ Protocol

S1.E10 ∙ Love

S1.E11 ∙ Infornography

S1.E12 ∙ Landscape

S1.E13 ∙ Ego

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Serial Experiments Lain: The 10 Most Confusing Things About The Anime, Finally Explained

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Serial Experiments Lain is perhaps one of the most important cyberpunk anime shows— and one of the weirdest isekai —to have come out in a long time. First of all, there are the minimalist design choices in animation that fans either loved, or that turned off anyone who wasn't ready for the stripped-down style it was going to offer. The story, instead of focusing on a dystopia created by a hyper-capitalist nightmare corporatocracy, was done in a very tasteful way that instead decides to focus on Lain, a young schoolgirl who suddenly develops an interest in computers and the world of the virtual.

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While the show is pretty much unanimously considered groundbreaking, that doesn't mean it isn't also confusing. In this article, we'll be digging into some of the more obscure parts of the show and checking out some background to hopefully dispel some of the mystery surrounding the story.

10 The Bodhisattva

In Buddhism, we encounter a concept known as the Bodhisattva. In the oldest branch of Buddhism, Theravada, we see that, when someone becomes enlightened, they become something called an Arahat, which is someone who is enlightened on their own and then enters Nirvana.

When the Mahayana tradition started, they decided that a true benevolent enlightened person would instead become enlightened so that they could save all of the other unenlightened people and not abide in Nirvana just yet. If we look at  Lain and the way it plays out, when she enters The Wired, she decides on the latter, existing as a goddess between both worlds, knowing that she would meet Alice again in The Wired at some time in the future.

9 The Flow Of Time Is Convoluted

There's a very strange thing going on in Lain, perhaps one of the things that makes it the most difficult thing to follow. The issue here is that we really can't tell what's happening when while we're watching Lain. If she herself is the thing that exists to make the distinction between The Wired and the real world disappear, how is she already the god of The Wired? How does that make sense?

The answer is a concept known in science as non-linear causality. Non-linear causality means that things that happen in the past can affect the future—which is normal causality, the way we tend to think about it—and that things in the future can have an effect on the past .  Lain is an infinite loop, a snake eating its own tail.

8 Schumann Resonances And Consensus Reality

This is where it gets particularly complicated. The idea used in the series is that of the Schumann Resonance. The Schumann Resonance doesn't necessarily hold up when we shine the light of science on it, but that doesn't mean it can't work in the show. They're basically frequencies that humans can't hear but that surrounds our planet.

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In the show, they're depicted as a way for The Wired to spread all throughout humanity, reaching every individual on the planet. This is pretty much given as the explanation for why there's no distinction between everyone else and Lain at the end of the series, as Lain, at that point, basically is The Wired.

7 If Everyone's Special, No One Is

Feeding directly into this entry from the last one is the fact that the end of the series... doesn't necessarily mean anything? If time flows in a way that isn't constant and the future can have an effect on the past and vice-versa, why does it matter that Lain is essentially God at the end of the series?

After she has her encounter with him, watching how intensely he wants it to be true that he is indeed God, she essentially takes on the characteristics of a Goddess. But also, when she goes back to the real world despite the fact that she now is everyone, Alice doesn't remember her at all.

6 One, Both, Or Neither?

What is the world at this point? When Lain finishes becoming God, she has the ability to exist in The Wired, in-between the two of them, or in the real world. But, what are any of these places? Are they at all distinguishable from each other?

As far as we can see in the series, there really isn't a distinction made between any of these places. There are merely minor differences. While Alice doesn't recognize Lain at the end of the series, this most likely doesn't matter since technically, Lain is  Alice. The distinctions between self and others have disappeared.

5 Free Will Or Determinism?

Lain is both the ticket that Masami Eiri needs to make sure that the lines between The Wired and the real world disappear, but, at the same time, she's a child. She has a family. She has a bit of a social life, even though we see that she only has a couple of friends, and the friends that she does have don't exactly treat her like she's valuable.

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Another thing is that she doesn't really have a social life until the series starts. If her father explains that he didn't enjoy "playing house" at the end of the series, it would make sense that Lain's life happened in a way that meant the point-events in her life were predetermined. Lain had no choice in the manner. That being said, she is the goddess of The Wired, so that means... she played herself.

4 Solipsism

Solipsism is an interesting concept that shows up in tons of different philosophical frameworks, and, heck, in a lot of psychoses and sci-fi , as well. Solipsism is the belief that one's self is the only thing that exists. This can manifest itself in tons of different forms. These can be that everyone around the solipsist isn't actually real, and that they're just a simulation of an actual functional person, or that the solipsist lives in a simulation entirely.

The fact that Lain also has what could be considered multiple personalities also means that the whole thing could be chalked up to mental illness.

3 Who Are The Knights Of The Eastern Calculus?

The Knights Of The Eastern Calculus aren't exactly a real organization, but, in  Lain , they're a shadowy organization that does their best to monitor Lain and anyone who's trying to muck up what they have going on with The Wired, rolling around in dark black cars, wearing black suits, etc. They're basically like the Men In Black of the Lain universe.

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In real life, it's an organization that probably got "created" as a joke at MIT, with various "members" passing pins around to other people who got invited into the secret hacker group.

2 Objectively Speaking...

The most interesting thing about  Lain perhaps is the differentiation between subject and object in everyday life, or perhaps the lack thereof. The creators of the anime actually specifically said that they didn't want the show to mired in the dualism of subjectivity or objectivity, which is why they made sure to ground the series so firmly around Lain.

The events of the show could have happened objectively in the real world, just in Lain's head as a manifestation of illness, or not at all. At the end of the day, there's no way to tell and that's done intentionally.

1  To Be Or Not To Be

Perhaps one of the greatest fears for Lain, and indeed for anyone who starts to ponder existential questions, is that, after one achieves "Enlightenment," is that it may be preferable not to exist at all. In  Lain , this takes the form of Lain following her urges to dive deeper and deeper into The Wired with reckless abandon, regardless of what the implications are.

By the time we reach the end of the show, however, it really doesn't matter because Lain both exists and doesn't exist, depending on the individual manifestation we're looking at. There's really no way to explain all of this with words , but that doesn't mean that we have anything else to go on in the show, unfortunately.  Great sci-fi, though !

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The Ending Of Serial Experiments Lain Explained

Years before social media as we know it, before Cambridge Analytica, before even "The Sims" or "The Matrix," there was "Serial Experiments Lain." This one-season wonder anime explored theories of metaphysics and epistemology with a cyberpunk sheen. It was the blueprint that a lot of media followed, like the "Matrix" series, the "Battlestar Galactica" prequel series " Caprica ," anime such as "Paranoia Agent" and " Paprika ," and IP-laden films like "Ready Player One" and " Space Jam: A New Legacy ."

"Serial Experiments Lain" is about a middle school girl named Lain, who receives an email from a classmate that died. The email explains that this classmate isn't really dead, but rather has merely shed her physical form. She now exists in the Wired (what people call the internet in "Lain") and has found enlightenment/met God in there. Lain delves deeper and deeper into the Wired, finding out truths about herself and the world around her. The Wired starts to affect reality, begging the question: Which world is really real?

Is the Wired real? Is reality real?

"Serial Experiments Lain" starts with what seems like a clear delineation between the "real" world and what goes on in the Wired. One is real, and the other is just communication between real people on a simulated plane of existence. When it's all said and done, the Wired is just a "medium of communication and the transfer of information," Lain's father says to her early in the show. "You mustn't confuse it with the real world." As the show progresses, the difference between reality and Wired get very muddy. Humans abandon their physical form to become programs, and programs become human and warp reality.

Part of this is due to how the internet works in the world of "Lain." The Wired is an online space that has somehow connected to the earth's magnetic field . By resonating with the earth, the Wired taps into a Jungian shared unconscious. Thus, what happens online becomes manifest through humanity's shared perception of reality. Our brains make it real.

Lain eventually discovers that she and her antagonist Masami did not start out life as humans. They are programs that have found a way to shift between the Wired and what we think of as reality. Lain realizes that she can control (or program) both the Wired and our physical plane of existence, like Neo and Bane in the "Matrix" sequels , but years before those came out. The show argues that our existence is defined by others' perception of it. We are other people acknowledging that we exist.

The nature of the extremely online self

In the final episode, Lain chooses to erase herself from existence by removing memories of her from her friends and family. This move underscores the sociological and psychological theory that there really is no such thing as a core self. What we think of as a Self is made up of how we are perceived and interacted with by others. Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" posits that the self is a character we play in our interactions with others. If you don't have an audience to play that part to, do you even have a self? As Lain puts it, "I only exist inside those aware of my existence." 

Removing herself from a fixed point in existence frees Lain to do whatever she wants. She visits her childhood friend Alice as an adult, implying that by no longer being tied to a specific time and place in people's memory, she can now freely move anywhere and anywhen. However, this isn't how the internet works in real life. In an essay for the Ringer , Justin Charity argues that "Lain" presaged many of the ways the self would be destabilized by social media, for the worse. The more online versions of Lain are meaner, more reactive, and more vengeful. A girl who seems completely meek in her real world interactions becomes an avenging troll online. As we've seen with YouTube and Facebook , much of the internet exists to elicit strong emotions in us. Combine this with how online profiles decouple our online words from our faces, and you get anonymous trolls.

Echoes of Lain

"Serial Experiments Lain" was one of the first adult-oriented anime to break through to America. Like " Cowboy Bebop ," " Neon Genesis Evangelion ," and "Ghost in the Shell," it was consumed by a western audience that loved cyberpunk philosophizing. The show wasn't as widely seen as those other anime, perhaps because it never ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami block, but the themes of "Lain" have only gotten more relevant.

We see echoes of the show in films like "Inception" and "Transcendance," which the Daily Beast argued ripped off "Serial Experiments Lain" whole cloth. The idea of abandoning one's body and solely existing online pops up in shows like "Caprica" and " Dollhouse ," which question the idea of a soul and whether it can be uploaded to the cloud. Every person who questions whether this reality is a simulation is, whether they know it or not, following in Lain's footsteps.

The creators of the show went on to lend this philosophical vibe to later works, as well. Screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka went on to write "The Big O," which also investigated ideas of simulated reality and the nature of memory and the soul. The main three collaborators on the show — Konaka, director Ryūtarō Nakamura, and artist Yoshitoshi ABe — worked together on a show about the unseen world of ghosts after "Lain." They were set to create another show, "Despera," until Nakamura's death in 2013. According to Konaka's Twitter , work recently restarted on the anime, with a major announcement due to come out in 2022.

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How “Serial Experiments Lain” Explores The Malleability of Selfhood

Content warning: Themes of anxiety, depression, and suicide

Spoilers for the Serial Experiments Lain television show and the Playstation game

“And you don’t seem to understand,” sings Bôa frontwoman Jasmine Rodgers at the beginning of each episode of Serial Experiments Lain. 

This lyric becomes the mission statement of the show as Lain–this innocent, anxious schoolgirl–becomes a mystery within the show herself. No one understands her. As the show continues, she doesn’t seem able to understand herself, either.

The show resolves this issue by the end of its run, albeit in a way that feels cliché. Lain is a program created by some evil tech guy who wants to take over the world, and Lain ultimately resists this plan, becoming one with the network, similar to the end of Ghost in the Shell. To accept this clumsy plot development as the sole explanation of Lain’s nature does a disservice to her character.

Lain is confused, lost. Suffering from anxiety, she has a hard time connecting with other people at her school. Save for her best friend, Alice, most of her friend group doesn’t check in on her. Although they acknowledge her physical presence, emotionally they are not concerned about her as a person.

When Lain’s father buys her a computer, she finds comfort in technology. Exploring the show’s equivalent of the internet–The Wired–Lain gains a renewed self confidence. She makes friends through The Wired. During class lectures, she secretly texts the friends she has made online with a smile on her face. She starts going straight home right after class to log into The Wired. These new friends don’t know much about Lain; many of them don’t seem to know that she is a girl, let alone a child. This excites Lain. Without a physical appearance, within the comfort of her own room, Lain can get along with people just fine.

Lain goes through a very similar arc in the Serial Experiments Lain Playstation game. The game–developed and released around the same time as the show–invites the player to interact with an odd computer interface, accessing audio files and videos that tell a story separate from the one seen in the show. Imagine “Her Story” except it’s about a sad anime girl and her awful therapist who struggles to treat her patient’s mental illness.

Playstation Lain suffers bullying at school. Students vandalize her desk with violent messages and gossip behind her back. The few friends she makes abandon her and act as though they never knew her.

When Lain connects to The Wired, it is one of the few places in her life where she isn’t subject to scrutiny.

“Everybody is friendly,” Lain writes in her diary. “No one can bully me here.”

As Lain gets more involved in The Wired, we see her teleport to different locations, both within The Wired itself and in the real world. We see her visit a developer at the end of his life inside a digital mansion he has built for himself. We see a version of Lain visit her friend Alice, mocking her as she reveals that she has been spreading rumors about her. Lain’s knowledge of The Wired grants her the ability to transcend the rules of reality, becoming more than just a body in the physical realm.

At some point in the story, in both the TV show and the game, it is revealed that Lain has multiple personality disorder. But Lain is not conscious of this. She doesn’t know that multiple personalities reside within her, causing harm to her loved ones without her knowledge. This leads to Lain questioning her sense of self.

By the end of the show, Lain accepts herself despite being a mystery to those around her. With the help of Alice, she is able to carve a path forward for herself, rather than being complicit in the violence she was created to participate in. She finds peace and transcends the physical realm.

In the Playstation game, Lain lacks this self-acceptance. Living with an abusive mother and having no real friends to turn to, Lain spirals out emotionally. At the end of the game, Lain again transcends the physical realm, but this time doing so by taking her own life, leaving a version of herself that only exists through The Wired.

Despite having two wildly different tones, both versions of Lain tackle themes of selfhood. In the show, Lain is able to achieve a sense of selfhood, albeit one that is abstract. Playstation Lain, however, encourages the player to construct their own version of Lain’s selfhood. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with the player having to wade through the game’s logs in order to piece together the full story, and to come up with their own conclusions. After viewing the game’s ending, the game invites the player to dive back in, presenting new files that give additional context to the events the player just witnessed. If the game were ever localized in the west, one could imagine the infamous ‘How do I decide when I’m satisfied?’ comment would have been applied here as well. Where and when the player decides to disengage with the story–and with Lain herself–is entirely up to them. 

This is why I love and connect with the character of Lain: She refuses to be defined by anyone. In the show, she defies her original creator, rejecting his will and forging a path for herself. In the game, she is a mere presence, indifferent to the player sorting through her computer files, leaving them to their own devices. By the end of either scenario, Lain doesn’t care about how she is perceived, or of what others think she should do. She simply is .

It isn’t surprising that many Letterboxd (yes, it’s on there) and Backlogged reviews for their respective Lain media are filled with comments about how Lain made them trans. What makes Lain relatable isn’t just her social anxiety, her depression, or her interpersonal relationships and lack thereof. Lain is fluid, Lain is malleable; Lain exists on the border between the digital realm and reality, with the knowledge that the lines between the two are blurred beyond human comprehension.

Amidst a multiple years-long global pandemic, Lain represents the obfuscation between digital and physical. She is the representation of the workers who interface with digital technologies for the sake of labor, only to clock out and explore digital chat rooms and worlds for play. Lain, decades before its existence, anticipates the Doordash order you are making, knowing that the digital presence doesn’t exist without the upkeep of a physical body. Lain, alone in her expansive, nightmarish computer room, oversees the obfuscation of selfhood, labor, and consumption. Alone, she tries to reach out with you, trying desperately to form a connection.

“I am hurting, I have lost it all. I am losing. Help me to breathe.”

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