YMMV / Serial Experiments Lain

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • There's a popular theory that the PS1 game isn't in an Alternate Universe. It's a prequel that stars Lain of the Wired.
  • One of the major questions of the series is this: Who, or what, is Lain, really? Is she truly the Goddess of the Wired, or simply a young girl with paranoid schizophrenia? Is she perhaps a plural system (that is, a group of multiple personalities occupying one body), or are her seemingly multitudinous selves just copies of the single "true" Lain?
• Anvilicious: Even if you're connected to someone virtually, you need real-world human connection and relationships to survive.
  • This has been part of Lain's success in predicting internet culture of The New '10s, via the show's themes of loneliness, alienation, and internet reliance.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Bizarrely enough, producer Yasuyuki Ueda wanted this to happen, hoping to create, in his own words, a "culture war" between American and Japanese values that would provoke discussion on the differences between their cultures. It seems to have failed, as American fans interpreted (and appreciated) the plot in much the same way as Japanese fans did.
• Awesome Music: The opening theme, "Duvet" by boa, as well as the long psychedelic jam that plays over the Info Dump in "Infornography".
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Given the show's Mind Screw nature, there's a ton of these. Some do get Call Backs that prevent them being "true" BLAMs, but they usually remain completely inexplicable scenes that happen throughout the show without clear context, including:
  • The scene in which ectoplasm starts emanating from Lain's fingers in Layer 01.
  • Pretty much all the scenes involving PHANTOMa in Layer 04.
  • The alien in Lain's doorway in Layer 09. At least at first glance. Note that it's wearing Freddy Krueger's shirt. Additionally, one of the voices heard in Layer 03 when Lain connects to her NAVI is panicking about a small 'person' in her room wearing a red and green striped shirt...
  • The... something that killed horribly The Men in Black, which is never even referred to again.
• Creepy Awesome: Lain, herself. A particularly memorable example is the scene where she apropos of nothing approaches and talks to the shooter at Cyberia, which leads to him killing himself. It's creepy, messed-up, and badass.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: A large number of fans view Lain as autistic thanks to her social ineptitude (which includes an inability to understand interpersonal relationships), her rigid adherence to particular habits, her obsessive tendencies (which are easy to read as special interests), her stunted speech when offline, and her savantlike talent with mathematics and computing.
• Genius Bonus: As mentioned on the main page, the series gets easier to understand if you're familiar with some of the more esoteric concepts it talks about.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A sizable portion of the fanbase is Latin American. This is because Lain got a Latin American Spanish and a Brazilian Portuguese dub, which were broadcast in the Latin American satellite TV channel Locomotion.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Certain ideas about the users of the Wired are eerily similar to the users of a very popular real-life imageboard.
  • The themes mentioned above under Anvilicious became sadly ironic in 2021, when head writer Chiaki Konaka revealed he'd become terminally online himself, by writing political buzzwords like "cancel culture" into a Digimon stage play and taking them seriously. (He did apologise after it caused controversy.) Apparently being able to recognise a bad thing ahead of time is no protection against being swept up in it yourself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Layer 06, "Kids," it looks like the titular kids are praising the sun.
  • The idea that there exists a "God of the Wired" predates a plot point in Deus Ex as well as the Played for Laughs "Final Boss of the Internet" meme.
• LGBT Fanbase: Lain has a big one with the transgender community. Some of this is the cyberpunk style setting, which has always been popular there, but Lain in particular stands out even amongst those.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Let's all love Lain. ^Explanation A phrase that, due to how often it's repeated in the series, has naturally been repeated by fans as well.
  • It's a new club that plays really great hardcore techno for a really hip young crowd! ^Explanation A line from the dub, which is not a meme by itself, but is a meme in the comments section of the linked video featuring the line, where practically every comment is the line or some variation of it.
  • "Present day... present time! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-!" ^Explanation The voice that opens each episode; another popular line in the fanbase.
    • And you don't seem to understand^Explanation The first line of the anime's opening theme; often applied to viewers confused by the Mind Screw story.
  • Calling the show "Cereal Experiments Lain" and depicting Lain with cereal.
  • Lain itself became relatively dominate among anime "doomers", mainly due to it's depressive/somber vibe. It does help that Lain is a Moe, albeit creepy of course.
• Misaimed Fandom: Producer Yasuyuki Ueda said he wanted to be interpreted differently by American and Japanese audiences. He was disappointed to find this didn't happen. Apparently confusion is a universal phenomenon.
• Moe: Lain has a number of the physical characteristics and early on is often presented in a "cute" way (with her bear outfit or hanging out in just her nightgown). She absolutely does not have a matching personality, though, and as the series goes on it feels far more like a Deconstruction or even an attack on the trope.
• Narm:
  • Somewhat overlaps with Narm Charm: "Present day...present time! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-!"
  • "Protocol 7 is expected to allow the seamless sharing of information, information that will be shared between the Wired and the real world. And now, the following message. Let's all love Lain. [Slasher Smile] Let's all love Lain, let's all love Lain, let's all love Lain, LainLainLainLainLainLainLainLainL-l-l-l-l-l!"
  • "What's dying like?" "It really hurts! :)" Clearly meant to be nightmarish in its naivety, it instead falls a bit flat.
• Older Than They Think: Many people have noticed◊ the show is essentially a cyberpunk predecessor to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, featuring some characters with similar roles and a borderline identical ending. There is some fanart dedicated to this.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • During the title sequence, we see Lain being watched on television by people. She's staring back at them. Those people are you. She can see you.
  • But then it crosses into Tear Jerker territory when you realize the people may not actually be paying attention to her, so she is just there staring with this sad look in her eyes.
• Periphery Demographic: Lain was initially aimed at a general young adult audience. The first Periphery Demographic was the moe fandom around the time of the original series release, who became taken with Lain's cute appearance and bear motifs. The second came after the series had a resurgence in popularity on the social media app Tik Tok in mid-2021 due to 'Duvet' by Bôa, the show's opening theme, becoming a popular sound. This led to an influx of new fans, most of whom can kindly be described as 'NYC art student' types.
• Special Effect Failure: Nezumi's goggles show him the world as what is quite clearly just processed live-action footage shot on the streets of Tokyo. This is fine, except for later on when the Knights come to kill him for meddling in their business. They're clearly just still images, perhaps even concept art of the characters.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The cyberpunk aesthetics, the idea of humans becoming gods, all of these and more that are presented in Lain make for a great Shin Megami Tensei anime.
• Stoic Woobie: Lain, being an at-first Emotionless Girl and all.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: So much so, that even the creators couldn't agree on what Lain is supposed to be about.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: It can be one for the history of computers, the Roswell Crash, and hacking culture, among other things.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Despite being set 20 Minutes into the Future and its portrayal of the internet being well ahead of its time, the show does have typical trappings of 1998 sci-fi culture. Lain's Navi, for example, carries a strong similarity to the Apple Mac 'Studio Display' monitors, and the Wired interface is delightfully Matrix-esque, with blue swirling visuals and voice-activated commands.
• Values Resonance: The anime first aired in 1998, when the internet was still in its infancy; for real-world context, a tiny 13% of Japan's population used the internet in 1998, making up part of the 3.6% of users worldwide, and it was mostly used for communication via email and chatrooms, along with browsing the small amount of available websites. The anime uses the internet as a tool to explore an overarching theme of human connection. As a result, the anime accurately predicted the online culture of The New '10s, where the internet and social media became much more fundamental to a lot of people's lives, and the lines between a person's online and offline identity and reality are far more blurred than they were in 1998.
• What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Just for starters, it's a severe Mind Screw, there are references to Timothy Leary, it has Fantastic Drugs...
• The Woobie: Lain herself. Whether viewed through the lens of a young girl experiencing severe mental illness, an Amnesiac God who is made to live up to enormous expectations, or anything in-between, one thing can be agreed on: she has a really bad time.
• Woolseyism: In the Argentinian (Latin American) dub:
  • The word "Wired" was translated as "Nexus", partly because "Cableado" sounds kinda silly, partly because "Nexus" is more descriptive and fits the context much better. (The European Spanish did the same by translating it as their word for "Net".)
  • Several parts were changed from vaguely prophetical nonsense to ominous prophetic awesome, such as the line that Lain says when confronting the drugged-up clubber in the second chapter.
  • Also, the distorted voice that says the title of the chapters was made creepier and scarier by a very large run.