Serial expirments lain

Despite being an one-off anime series, lain is one of the most influential and acclaimed anime series in history. The series explores deep philosophical questions such as the essence of our reality, communication, memory and even identity, foreshadowing our relationship with social media, that exploded about a decade later. The anime had a video game spin-off released in for the PlayStation console, and also a manga title, The Nightmare of Fabrication , which was published in May The shy year-old girl Lain Iwakura lives in a suburb of Tokyo with her tech- and computer-obsessed father, her cool mother and her expressionless older sister Mika Iwakura.

After eighth grader Chisa Yomoda committed suicide, several of her class still receive e-mails from her. Most consider the mail as just a regular Interned-based hoax. Lain also receives an email like this, and Chisa reveals to her in real time via the Wired that she did not die, but only put her body down and found God in the Wired. The Wired is actually an international computer network that is structured like the Internet but functions as an avatar-based social networking platform.

Lain now wants to get to the bottom of these events, but she is also suspected of having written the emails. Only her friend Alice Mizuki stands by her side during these events. During this time, Lain goes to the Cyberia club in Shibuya with Alice and other friends. Strange events occur there and Lain realizes that there is a very well-known Lain in the Wired, whom she is often confused with.

She also meets others of her age who can often be found in the club, according to Taro. Her father also helps her find out more about Wired. During her research, she comes across Masami Eiri. The scenario for the video game was written first, and the video game was produced at the same time as the anime series, though the series was released first. Ueda and Konaka declared in an interview that the idea of a multimedia project was not unusual in Japan, as opposed to the contents of Lain, and the way they are exposed.

Words like "weird" or "bizarre" are almost systematically associated to review the series by English Language reviews due mostly to the freedoms taken with the animation and its unusual science fiction, philosophical and psychological context. Despite the show judged atypical, the critics responded positively to the thematic and stylistic characteristics. It was praised by the Jepan Media Arts Festival, in , for "its willingness to question the meaning of contemporary life" and the "extraordinarily philosophical and deep questions".

In , Newtype USA stated that the main attraction to the series is its keen view on "the interlocking problems of identity and technology".

It concluded saying that "Serial Experiments Lain might not yet be considered a true classic, but it's a fascinating evolutionary leap that helped change the future of anime. In , Lain was subject to commentary in the literary and academic worlds.

The Asian Horror Encyclopedia calls it "an outstanding psycho-horror anime about the psychic and spiritual influence of the Internet" noticing the presence of horror lore like ghost from train accident story and horrific visuals.

The Anime Essentials anthology, Gilles Poitras describes it as a "complex and somehow existential" anime that "pushed the envelope" of anime diversity in the s, alongside the much better known Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop.

In , Professor Susan J. The 'blood pools' represent the Wired's presence 'beneath the surface' of reality. A high school girl commits suicide by jumping off a rooftop late at night. A week later, students are getting emails from the girl named Chisa Yomoda, which claim that she only gave up her body, but is actually still alive inside the virtual world called the Wired, saying that there is a God that exists there.

After getting one of these emails, the introverted fourteen-year-old Lain Iwakura becomes much more interested in computers and asks her techie father, Yasuo Iwakura, for a new NAVI computer system. When she returns to school the following day, the blackboard writes a subliminal message, inviting her to come to the Wired as soon as she can, revealed to be written by Chisa herself. In the hardcore techno club named Cyberia, a man buys a nanomachine drug called Accela.

On the way to school the next day, Alice Mizuki, along with her friends Julie and Reika, tell Lain they saw her during their first visit to Cyberia, but with a far more vigorous and forceful personality. Lain has her father set up her NAVI computer system at home later that evening. After some persuasion, Lain decides to join Alice at Cyberia that night to prove that she was not there before. However, Lain becomes involved with a shooting in the club by the same man under the influence of Accela.

She approaches the man, saying that everyone is connected in the Wired no matter where they are. This leads the man to shoot himself out of psychological shock and trauma. The following day, Lain is scolded by her cold mother, Miho Iwakura, for waking up too late. When she leaves the house, she believes she is being spied on when she sees a black car parked near her house.

Furthermore, she hears a voice calling out to her when she enters the train, telling her that she is not alone. Her life is thrown into further disarray when she is anonymously sent a mysterious computer chip. She asks her father what it is, but he says he does not know. When she goes to see Taro, with his friends Myu-Myu and Masayuki, at Cyberia, he recalls seeing Lain on the Wired once, noting her Wired personality being the complete opposite of her restrained real world personality.

Mika Iwakura, Lain's older sister, comes home the next day, only to see Lain not acting herself as she starts to modify and upgrade her NAVI computer system. Rumors are flying around school and on the Wired in regards to numerous senior students of various high schools committing suicide, with each of the deceased being addicted to the online action game called PHANTOMa.

Interested, Lain investigates only to discover that the game was glitched with a tag game for kids, in which a little girl scares the students to their deaths. Moreover, she finds out that the deaths were most likely caused by the elite secretive hacker group known as the Knights of the Eastern Calculus.

Later at night, she senses the Men in Black, who had been spying on her earlier. When she tells the two to go away, a sound wave penetrates through her window, causing the two to fall back and drive away in their black car. Amidst the events surrounding Tokyo having its traffic information transmission system hacked to cause deliberate accidents, Lain experiences a series of hallucinations that teach her the nature of the Wired in relation to the real world, by means of inanimate objects in her room and eventually her parents.

In the meantime, Mika is driven to terror from the Knights repeatedly communicating in unusual ways for her to 'fulfill the prophecy. At night, when Yasuo checks on Lain, he sees a dramatic change in her room arrangement and the upgrades on her NAVI computer system, which worries him.

As Lain hangs out with Alice, along with Julie and Reika, in the district, she notices that children are looking up into the sky and raising their arms, only to realize that they are looking at an image of herself that appears in the sky. Lain searches for the reason behind the strange happenings and finds Professor Hodgeson, the creator of KIDS, an experiment that started fifteen years ago that tried to gather psi energy from children and store it, though the result of the project destroyed the children.

Now it seems that the Knights have gotten hold of the project's schematics. When the Men in Black return, Lain goes outside to see them. The coolant system in her room bursts, leading the Men in Black to confirm that the Knights planted a parasite bomb there. As Lain gets more and more involved in the Wired world, albeit at home and at school, Alice starts to worry about her closing up again.

It is reported that the Knights cracked the firewall of the information control center of the Wired. As the activity of the Knights begins to surface, the network is in search for Lain.

The Men in Black ask Lain to follow them to an office in the Tachibana General Laboratories, where the Office Worker in charge of the Men in Black, after her help of fixing his computer, shows Lain a projection of herself in the Wired taking out one of the members of the Knights. After the Office Worker deduces that Lain in the real world and in the Wired are one and the same, he questions her about her origins.

However, she breaks down for not knowing, altering her timid personality to that of a more serious one before she shoves her way out of the room. Lain's family has been acting weird lately, much to her surprise. Upon further investigation, Lain disbelieves that she is omnipresent in the Wired, while she is merely a body, more or less a projection of herself, in the real world.

A rumor is spread in the Wired about Alice having sexual fantasies about a male teacher, and a second one says that Lain has spread the first.

To cope with the distress of rejection, Lain acts directly on reality for the first time, finding out that she can 'delete' the event of the rumors. A lookalike duplicate of herself with its own distinct personality starts appearing more frequently, which leads her to question her own existence. Throughout the episode, background information is being shown from 'archives'.

Truman, engineer Vannevar Bush, who developed what is called memex, physician John C. Lilly, who conducted experiments with dolphin communication, pioneer Ted Nelson, who founded Project Xanadu, and the Schumann resonances are all mentioned, explaining how the human consciousness can be communicated through a network without the use of a device.

It is also noted that a man named Masami Eiri has suddenly committed suicide. During that time, Lain gets a computer microchip from J. She then asks Taro on a 'date' and takes him to her home, where she asks him about the microchip.

After becoming frightened, he admits it is a computer code made to disrupt human memory, and it was made by the Knights. Although he defends them, he admits not knowing much about them. He later kisses Lain before leaving. As both are seen to have switched bodies, Eiri introduces himself to Lain as the creator of Protocol Seven, saying that Lain no longer needs to have a body in order to be alive. As she, back in her own body, comes home, Yasuo says his farewell after realizing she knows the truth behind her existence.

Eiri is considered the God of the Wired because he explained that he is worshiped by the Knights.