Needless to say, the essence of the work is heavily defined by the anime series and not the sum of every media product, which is all well-and-good considering how much of a beast it is to dissect the show on its own. The other, covering a PS1 'game' (in reality an interface to travel through Lain's story in a non-linear, very convoluted, and not very fun manner) and a single-chapter manga tossed around magazines and artbooks, is decidedly much more obscure and something that only hardcore fans of the show know about, especially given how the game was never localized to the US, while an official English version of the manga only exists in one localized artbook. One, covering only the series itself, has rarely stayed out-of-print in both Japan and America, thus being the accepted and preferred way of experiencing the world of the Wired.

Originally intended to cross over several different forms of media, as a sort of experiment in how a central idea mutates and adapts its information based on the means a person has to access it, the end result of this experiment resulted in merely two forms of continuity, which is a lot less interesting than my theorized approach. Forming a trifecta of late 90’s anime mindfucks alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena, a series like Lain was always destined to have niche appeal, something people will say is 100% the best while fully knowing that it's nowhere near accessible as something like Cowboy Bebop or, hell, even Evangelion to a certain degree (at the very least, the latter eased one into its philosophical content and had giant robots in the mix, whereas the obtuse philosophizing about the gestated meaning of Lain's world, characters, and the viewer watching the events unfold comes right out of the gate swinging). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED).įew series have had their legacy defined by mystique and complete obliqueness like Serial Experiment Lain, delving into complex themes like the nature of reality, identity, and communication just as the internet’s interconnected stream of information began taking the form it takes today. AS SUCH, SPOILERS ARE PRESENT ALL-AROUND. (NOTE: THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE ENTIRE SERIES EPISODE-BY-EPISODE.

Serial experiment lain anime theme