Management: Finally posting the sequel to this piece, which focuses much more closely on four commercially successful romantic comedies: Sakurasou, Toradora, Clannad, and Chuunibyou.
Question:
I can see where you’re coming from when you talk of judging a show according to its goals, as well as your reservations regarding some goals. How would you apply these metrics to Sakurasou?
Question:
People often describe shows they don’t like as “emotionally manipulative.” Don’t all shows do that anyway? What do people mean when they talk about “emotional manipulation” like it’s a bad thing?
Legacy is a funny thing. It can inspire the greatest acts of artistry or heroism, but has no tangible form. It can form the cornerstone of societies or empires, or just as easily lead to their ruin. It can inform all our actions, but when our actions are reduced to mere history as well, what does legacy leave us?
Management: This is a two-parter that I’ve split up because while the original question was based on my panning of Sakurasou, it also concerns a lot of media evaluation theory that is much more generally relevant. I’ve divided it as best I can into separate questions to reflect this – Part 1 here should be relevant to everyone.
Question:
It seems impossible to fairly evaluate shows unless you take those shows’ own goals into account, and try to respect their specific priorities. Do you think some of the shows you rate poorly are merely a result of approaching these shows with the wrong mindset, or wishing they were different shows entirely? How do you reconcile your personal taste, or the nature of taste in general, with your attempts to assess art in a general way?
Question:
What makes a show “mature” or “for adults?” I see people throw these terms around in a condescending way, saying that shows like Steins;Gate or Madoka are inferior to shows like Monster because they’re aimed at teenagers. Are there any actual guidelines or metrics here?
Well, this one was definitely simpler than Nise. Simple enough that I figured this writeup would be redundant – but I looked around online and, surprisingly, I couldn’t find a piece that really dove into the central theme. I’d planned on working on my backlog, but…
Alright. Fine. Hey guys. It’s Bobduh. Let’s talk Nekomonogatari.
Question:
Many people seem extremely dismissive of otaku culture and anime in particular, claiming anime is an inferior cultural medium to books, movies, etc. How would you go about refuting this argument?
Management: As per usual, questions rewritten to better map to responses.
Question:
Why do all harem anime contain casts of unbelievable characters and avoid all long-lasting drama or relationship changes like the plague? Do we need a deconstruction of this genre to make it worth anything?
Someone Else’s Answer:
We had a deconstruction. It was called School Days.
Question:
From what I’ve heard, School Days doesn’t make the harem genre make sense in the way Madoka and Evangelion do – those shows make their genre elements make sense in the context of a specific world. Couldn’t there be a harem where the characters actually make sense as people in the same way?
Bobduh:
Evangelion and Madoka work not because they’re deconstructions, but because they’re good stories that happen to have the aesthetic trappings of certain genres. The fundamental nature of harems is to be unrealistic power fantasies, making good storytelling pretty close to impossible – if you make a harem with well-written, realistic characters and relationships, it generally ceases to be a harem and becomes a romance instead
Question:
But most anime romances seem to just be love triangles, where in the end the main character abandons the actually complementary romantic choice to stick with the weird/sickly/frail girl. I haven’t seen a single romance where the main character actively pursues both girls. What makes the “fundamental nature” of this genre less storytelling-friendly than magical girls or mecha? And how about The World God Only Knows, doesn’t that kind of work in this territory already?
Bobduh:
There are a few elements to discuss here, so I’ll take them one at a time.
First, you’re making some pretty broad assumptions about romance there. They’re not all about love triangles, and the nature of the characters involved is a lot more diverse than the setup you’ve outlined.
A romance anime where the MC actively courts both females
School Days probably is what you’re looking for – it’s pretty hard to have a protagonist remain sympathetic while willfully courting multiple women. School Days plays this straight; most harems play it for laughs, because in a realistic situation it comes off the way it actually is – dickish and narcissistic. The World God Only Knows only maintains sympathy for its protagonist and works on a narrative level by combining comedy, amnesia, and the fact that his harem-acquiring is based on an unrealistic, fantastical plot contrivance that forces him to act this way. It’s also self-aware and constantly draws attention to the tropey nature of anime characters, further distancing itself from reality. This is necessary; the closer this situation veers to reality, the closer it veers towards the MC being an asshole.
Fundamental nature of genres
The way I see this is that for magical girl shows it’s “girl transforms into frilly version of self with powers to fight evil.” With mechas, it’s “boy pilots giant robot.” Both these core concepts are silly, but they don’t inherently fight against good storytelling or characterization. Meanwhile, harems are fundamentally “boy/girl is surrounded by lovers who fight for their affection.” There are a lot more hoops you have to jump through to make a premise like that valid for a meaningful story – it’s not impossible, but it’s more of an inherently problematic premise than either of the other two, and seems very difficult to justify in a way that respects all of its characters and works towards a coherent and worthwhile point. I think School Days actually does this, but it does it by saying “all these characters are insecure and dependent, the MC is emotionally dead, and this genre is a rancid pit” – it doesn’t create a distinct story using the trappings, it just attacks its own genre.
Deconstructions
I honestly just don’t find deconstructions that interesting in the abstract. I don’t need a deconstruction to tell me that boys riding giant mechs is a silly idea – like I said originally, Evangelion and Madoka work because they are less interested in tearing down their genre than they are in telling great stories and saying meaningful things using some of the tools of those genres. To me, this is less deconstructing the genre than redeeming it – finding something meaningful to say with traditionally meaningless tools. I find School Days a lot less impressive than those works because (along with it having a much lower standard of aesthetic craft and storytelling) it never goes any further than tearing down its genre – but like I said, the harem genre is a very hard one to tell a great or meaningful story within, so perhaps that’s just the best a show can do with those raw materials.
Management: I’m aware I basically plot out the most standard possible genre piece here. The point was not to outline something potentially groundbreaking, it was to illustrate the amount of work a first episode generally has to do regarding narrative structure. A really great first episode would require a much larger infusion of creativity than the structural hack job I perform here.
Question:
Little Witch Academia was awesome! Do you think it could be turned into a full series?
Bobduh:
It was great, but it was also solidly self-contained – it told a fun, breezy story that doubled as a metaphor for that “showy entertainment is needed to inspire the young” theme (words on that if you’re interested), and everything was written/characterized to the extent needed for this one thing. It answered all narrative questions it raised and fully articulated its thematic intent – I think it’d have to be quite different to work as a series.
Question:
Can you elaborate on that? What made the OVA unsuitable as a first episode, and what would have to be changed to make it work?
Bobduh:
Well, the main problem is that like I said, it basically answered all of its own questions, which is something a first episode generally doesn’t do (though this obviously isn’t a rule, and I’m not the story police – for instance, Cowboy Bebop’s first episode is virtually entirely self-contained, though it does actually raise the core theme of the difficulty of escaping your past identity and choices). Anyway! The conflicts Little Witch Academia raised were:
Additionally, the thematic point that I’m fairly sure this show as trying to make was:
“Ostensibly low-art popular entertainment like the flashy shows of this protagonist’s idol are actually not just entertaining, they are incredibly important as inspiration for the next generation – as an example, here is a story of that actually occurring within a piece of this kind of entertainment created by a group of people who were in this way inspired.”
The OVA resolves every one of those conflicts entirely (she saves the school, thus resolving 1 and 4 – she does it by using the wand of her idol, thus resolving 2 – she ends the series by being rescued by and bonding with her rival, thus resolving 3). While doing these things, it acts in its entirety as the thematic argument I outlined. This is all great storytelling, and I think the piece totally works on a surface and thematic level because of it.
However, if I were to make a full series of this, I feel something like this would act more as “proof of concept” than a first episode – you can’t really have the first episode of your show not leave any suspense, or unanswered questions, or possible new avenues for conflict, or not-fully-explored themes.
How would I go about fixing this?
The world would certainly have to be a bit broader – the current cast/characterization would possibly work for a very simple monster-of-the-week thing, but seeing as how we’re trying to make a good series here and the OVA has already displayed the creator’s interest in actually raising interesting thematic arguments, I’d like to aim a bit higher than that.
Currently, a decent bit of runtime in this OVA is dedicated to articulating the various beats of the thematic argument (the initial performance, arguments both with her rival and with her friends about her validity, all the business with the wand, the final reconciliation) – in a full series, I wouldn’t recommend this, and would probably just have a hint or two of this thematic concern.
The surface conflict would probably have to be shaved a bit and tuned down as well – having our hero save the school from a dragon probably works better for a one-episode OVA than a series that’s supposed to rise in tension throughout, plus having her save the school immediately too easily resolves the conflict of her finding her place at the school as someone who hasn’t come from a classic wizarding background.
Instead, we’d probably want a little more runtime dedicated both to characterizing her friends and rival a little more deeply, perhaps providing first glimpses of a couple more secondary characters for future conflicts, and probably providing a more full picture of daily life at the school. I feel one of the main strengths of this material is “Harry Potter but as an anime with vivid, humorous animation,” and one of the main strengths of Harry Potter was, in my opinion, how entertaining they made life at the school seem even in the absence of any crazy tension or dark forces. Again, since we’re stretching the darker stuff across a greater number of episodes here, I feel the first episode would probably be lighter in tone in general, and ride more on its humor than its adventure-adrenaline rush, as more pieces of the starting template are set in place.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be a conflict, though – my first instinct would be to have our Protagonist’s desire to prove herself result in some disastrous consequences, with some theatrical conflict that would hopefully complicate the rivalry between her and Rival, possibly accidentally unveil a hint (perhaps only to the audience) of some larger, darker conflict to come, and likely clue the Protagonist in to the possibility that her Idol exists somewhere at the school. This would hopefully offer plenty of opportunity for the story to go in a variety of directions and hints of things to come while still offering immediate entertainment through humor, likable characters, immediately understandable rivalry, the first steps in exploring a very imaginative world, and a fun, brief dose of action to top it off.
Anyway. Those are my first thoughts on how I’d go about converting this to a series.
So, now that the viewing club has actually moved on to a show I both haven’t seen and am very interested in watching, I suddenly realize I’ve successfully doubled the number of episodes I’ve assigned myself to commit serious thought to every week. And I was already barely hanging on in the first place. So we’ll see how this goes – I might keep this looser and more brief throughout, and then try to collect my thoughts at the end, or something. Anyway. Roll tape.
Actually, one more thing. It occurs to me, upon beginning yet another series that I’m going to talk about for likely far too long, that someone might very well ask, “Why are you wasting your time with this?” And that’s a fine question! So gimme a second here.
Brief, Optional Tangent on Media Appreciation/Analysis
First, this is how I enjoy media, and this is also how I enjoy conversation. I like the craft, power, and potential of art, and I like discussing these things with other interested people, and these writeups are the best way I’ve found to have my cake and dissect it too.
Secondly, and this is purely personal, I really like that some people seem to appreciate my doing this. It’s a lot of work, and it eats a good number of free hours, but unless I’m working on my own creative projects, one of the best ways I can think of to spend my free time is in doing something that other people find worthwhile and meaningful. So that helps a lot.
Finally, I really do think there is something to this kind of stuff. I don’t think analysis kills art, or kills enjoyment – I think it deepens and broadens it, and gives it both personal resonance and larger context. I’ll close this little prologue with a quotation I just read in Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” which, while ostensibly about the process of translation, I think also digs pretty well at what I and hopefully other people out there get out of the process of continuous reflection and unpacking.
“Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make his words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its connotations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. But just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit illusions.”
End Tangent
Sorry. I’ll stop now. Let’s watch some cartoons.
Episode 1
0:50 – I already like this sketchy, angular, un-idealized art style.
2:00 – Wow, I know I’m in for a good ride when even the OP seems heavy with thematic weight. These images of Lain observing life going on as mediated through a variety of screens makes me think this’ll be about some extremely relevant themes; the stuff writers like Anno and Urobuchi have yet to convince their audiences to believe in
3:19 – Okay, so it seems likely this show will have a lot of scattered thematic puzzle pieces, making a play-by-play a kind of tricky proposition. But I’ll bite! First three puzzle pieces: Lain in the screens [a pretty obvious-seeming metaphor], “Why won’t you come? I wish you could come here” [here as in outside?] and “Why you should do that is something you should discover for yourself” [these messages seem like meta-comments to the reader, which means that whether they’re meant to scream the themes or mislead, they’re not part of the narrative]. The puzzle I currently see is one about guiding people trapped in mediated lives to experience the real world. Let’s see what else we got
4:34 – More hints, and a clarification. The “I don’t need to stay in a place like this” seems to represent her final whisper or final thoughts – so perhaps those block texts are actually within the narrative, at least mentally. Also, both in the OP and contrasted against her death we have the figures kissing in very un-romanticized ways. My first thought there is that “honesty/dishonesty of human connection” is also key
5:05 – “If you stay in a place like this, you might not be able to connect.” Okay, so that one’s already been made overt.
Unrelated, I really, really like this visual design. The darker scenes with neon highlights reminded me of Blade Runner, and now this incredibly high-contrast daytime creates a whole different kind of stylized dream world. Very distinctive choice, and appropriate for a show that I assume will be handling the validity of various realities
8:18 – “She killed herself last week – come on, the teacher told everybody!” Tidy bit of storytelling there, with a line that both establishes the prologue for our protagonist while also revealing more about her disconnection and lack of engagement with the world around her
9:01 – Wait, is their lesson all code in some programming language?
9:39 – “What’s it like when you die?” Ooh, so perhaps all that text represents the emails
10:00 – Those constant phone lines, connecting everyone. Also, the soundtrack being just a mechanical hum both increases the fuzziness of her worldview and simulates the hum of a computer
12:46 – “I’ve only given up my body.” Okay, now the actual plot is starting to catch up to the themes that every other element of the show is articulating. Here we go!
13:46 – “Why did you die?” “God is here.” Man, was instrumentality/singularity such a big concern in the late 90s/onset of the internet age? Does this relate to all that Bowling Alone stuff about the loss of communal societies, a concern that I think was pretty much swept away by the supremacy of internet community/culture? It’s weird to try and think about what poignancy these ideas might have had in their own moment in history
14:30 – That bearsuit’s adorable. Also, that dinner conversation kept up the Bowling Alone view of community, even within the family unit
17:04 – Her father only speaks to her from behind a wall of computers, his face always obscured from her view
18:10 – What are these visions she keeps seeing? Her classmates blurred, her fingers emitting steam, the wires dripping blood… oh, goddamnit, I was about to say “I see no connection between them,” and then I realized all three of them work as separate visual metaphors – she can’t fully interact with her classmates, her fingers will be the keys to her new reality, the wires contain the life of her dead friend.
Still don’t know if they’re meant to just mean she has an overactive imagination or something more fantastical, though
20:36 – Not sure what to make of that train vision/nightmare yet. Not enough information. The train is key, though, we’ve had too many scenes of Lain on the train, standing at the door, staring out at the wires
21:00 – Again, I’m still not sure how sane we’re supposed to believe Lain is, and whether things are actually crazy or she’s just really good at day-visions and conflating memories with reality
22:36 – Her friend smiles and disappears, leaving her alone on the street, stranded between the endless wires
And Done
Oof! Great first episode, rich in thematic imagery, riding a fun, ambiguous line between fantasy and reality, and maintaining a great, creepy mood throughout. I can’t wait till next… oh wait.
…this is gonna be a long night.
By the way, I’m sticking with my writeup structure for now purely because it’s easier for me than first noting all my thoughts, and then straightening them into a paragraph-based impression at the end. I just don’t have enough time to do the full essay routine – hopefully nobody minds too much. Anyway.
Episode 2
0:31 – So I assume there’s a dialogue to be constructed of all these prologue lines. “I want you to come out here.” “What are you scared of, I just want you to try it for a bit.”
3:25 – Well! A lot happened in that club, but I don’t think I have quite enough fragments of chaos to see where that end of the plot is going yet. But that was supposed to be Lain at the end there, right?
4:22 – And her sister looks at the ceiling when talking with her. Man, connecting is hard!
5:15 – But this man, almost merged with the telephone pole, makes direct eye contact as she passes
8:02 – Jeez, remember when characters actually had personalities, and weren’t just tired tropes? Yeah, I got a pretty distinct and separate impression of all three of these girls here, and then of course there’s a bit of “identity is something you can construct” going on, but it’s basically just a hint
8:48 – Wait, so that lecture on the drug was just the show itself telling us, the audience, about it? That’s kind of weird. I do like the idea of a drug that accelerates your perception of experience in the context of a show that’ll clearly be about the internet age, though
9:35 – Again, the storytelling is understated and great. Lain gets excited when she receives a text, which I assume is because her lack of friends makes her assume it’s from her internet friend – but it’s actually the girl who befriended her that morning, which disappoints her, so she cancels the trip so she can wait for her “real” friend instead
13:02 – Another one of those awkward kissing embraces, this time beside Lain’s new computer. Still not sure what they represent, I’m just noting them for now
14:54 – Hm. Her sister waiting at the door. Another piece… goddamnit, there’s a lot of chaos to sift through here
16:01 – Aw yeah, all dolled up for clubbin’ in my little felt hat
19:00 – “You’re that scattered god’s…” Big clue here.
And Done
What the hell? Did he imagine her saying that? Lain definitely looks like someone at the club – both he and the other girls saw that person. But he seems to think she’s some harbinger of the internet leaking into the real world, which is something foretold by Lain’s own maybe-visions, maybe-delusions. Is this other Lain only relevant in his mind? And did she actually say those things, in that voice – was that also in his mind, or is she really more than she herself realizes? I guess until I definitely know whether this show’s primarily interested in sci-fi, psychological horror, allegory, or some/all of these things, I can’t make any definitive calls here. The themes are still consistent, but what their delivery vehicle actually consists of… very ambiguous
Okay. Gah. Once more into the breach
Episode 3
0:14 – Once again starting with those same city shots. There’s actually a lot that reminds me of Aku no Hana here – the repeated visual markers, the menacing, droning soundtrack, the long periods of silence, the unreliability of the narrator, the jagged, kind of unsettling character designs, the general claustrophobic tone. It’s intriguing to see these various tangible markers of this slow-building psychological horror style of storytelling be used for such different purposes
1:00 – “I called your house, but no-one picked up.” How unreliable is this narrator?
2:05 – Lain’s such a mentally removed character that it’s hard to tell where the post-traumatic stress ends and the personality begins
2:23 – God, I’m so loving the stark color contrasts and angles of this visual design. Shades of Bakemonogatari here, and that’s a good thing for your show to be reminding me of
3:12 – Her parents sleep in separate beds, her family is completely silent at dinner, and her sister can’t make eye contact with her. If connecting with people in the real world is this hard, why bother?
6:59 – Alright, so all this “Lain is some strange bringer of a new integrated reality” stuff seems to indicate this series doesn’t entirely take place in her crazy headspace. There’s the creepy G-Men following her, her doppelganger, the drugged-up dude who “recognized” her, her own alter-ego response to that guy, her consistent visions of a world verging on her own… my current assumption is “actually a sci-fi story, but thematically relevant to our impersonal real-world order”
9:56 – “I’m saying it’s strange we can’t take his death serious- IS THAT A LOVE LETTER???”
Also, I guess they’re implying that Lain is herself becoming a receiver for signals from the internet?
13:22 – “Do you know what this is?” She extends the gift to her father, who stands distant in the doorway. He leans slightly forward, barely closing the gap between them, and then turns away
14:18 – What is with this embrace/kissing motif? I’m sure it’ll make sense eventually, but they’re really laying it on thick
15:05 – Okay, so now the associates of her doppelganger are actually referring to her as Lain. Multiple personalities? Memory issues? Versions of herself are the first net intruders into actual reality?
Goddamnit, I’m feeling really stupid here… it normally doesn’t take this long for me to figure out a plot. Let me…
Hm…
Okay, if I’m going to draw any conclusions, I can’t assume everything is ambiguous. So for this conjecture, I’ll just assume that Lain’s reality is at least real according to her. Then…
Alright, she’s already under guard by the G-Men. This implies she has either always been important, has recently become important, or was important at some point in the past, and they’re making sure she doesn’t become that important person again. Her family seems incredibly distant, and barely treats her like a human being, outside of her father’s assistance in getting her Wired. She’s distant from everyone at school, though Arisa is making efforts to be her friend. We have seen no other hobbies, and she expressed no interest in technology prior to this point.
Recently, due the encouragement of a dead girl who’s apparently both real (she remembered walking home with Lain once, though that could have been observed) and alive within the internet, she has begun ingratiating herself into internet culture. Concurrently with this, she has begun seeing visions of internet wraiths, as well as hearing voices that seem to come from the internet.
Very recently, a version of her with an entirely separate persona was observed at a club, and various people at that club seem to know her by name. In fact, one man was incredibly distressed by her presence, saying she’s related to a “scattered god” – which is relevant to her dead friend, who said that “god is here” within the internet. When confronting this man, her voice changed, and she authoritatively told the man that we are all always connected, which caused him to commit suicide.
So what do we have here? Internet-based singularity story, with Lain as the fulcrum, for some reason? Seems likely. I can’t think of any clues that hint at how she’s already known, why she’s receiving these visions, or why she’s being watched. Perhaps we’re actually only seeing the second half of a story… but it’s too early to know. We’re not there yet.
19:02 – “You never saw us. We’re not here, you see.” Here’s another big clue. Now we know for sure they’re real, and also they seem to be hinting that projection from the net is already possible, which might explain alternate-Lain as well. Still not there yet.
Also, I’m not really commenting on thematic/imagery stuff any more because it’s all pretty damn consistent throughout the show (eye contact, the wires, etc), and it all seems to point towards the same themes. This mystery’s interesting, so I’ma figure it out
19:24 – “Are you listening, Mom?” Their mother is completely emotionally absent – she avoids all interaction with her daughters whenever possible, and never seems to address them directly. Again, another file for the drawer
20:15 – And now we have another new Lain saying welcome home to her sister. This is also the second time her sister has tried to connect with her – her success or failure in this will probably continue to gain relevance
And Done
Interesting stuff so far. The thematic concerns seem pretty obvious, but I’m enjoying figuring out exactly how this world works, and the aesthetics are great. This is a very entertaining show
…“Looser and more brief.” Good joke.
…damnit. That actually got so long that now I feel obligated to coherently format it. Alright, screw you all. Summary time.
TL;DR:
I’m very much enjoying it so far, and it simultaneously feels like a very carefully and wildly written series – in that there are a lot of ideas at the same time, but the direction and visual storytelling is always very sharp.
Visually, I’m greatly enjoying it. The visual aesthetic is very distinctive; the blurred, neon cityscapes remind me of Blade Runner, and the stark, angular, high-contrast, nearly abandoned suburbs remind me of a cross between Bakemonogatari’s visual design and Aku no Hana’s mood. The constant blurring and repeated visual motifs (the telephone wires, two figures embracing in a kiss, the various repeated backgrounds of Lain’s world) all contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere and question of how much we can trust this reality – which is perfect, because this seems to be a show specifically about the validity of identities and realities.
I love the sound design, which is another of the many elements that reminds me of Aku no Hana. The droning sound sets an uncomfortable, creepy tone, further contributes to the hazy, distorted reality, and mimics the sound of a computer’s hum. All relevant things.
The writing is generally solid and the dialogue is great, though I’m not sold on the way the show seems to sometimes directly tell the viewer things without associating that knowledge with any specific character – the biggest specific example of this is when the show explained that drug to us. Maybe there’s another layer there in that our perception is more full than Lain’s, but stuff like that tends to remove me from the story as it’s happening.
Thematically, it seems pretty obviously to be about the ways our society has begun to disconnect physically, the replacement of that connection with connections of the online variety, and whether these new realities are as legitimate or “real” as the original one. It attacks this theme from a variety of angles – first, there’s all the visual stuff drawing attention to the dreamlike world, as well as Lain continuously observing the world through a variety of frames, as well as that motif of the telephone wires outlining her world. Secondly, there’s Lain’s actual relationship to the world around her; she seems disconnected even before being contacted by the dead girl, and the scenes with her family constantly emphasize the distance and lack of connection between them. Finally, there’s the central mystery of the show, wherein it seems that Lain’s own personal reality is being invaded by elements of the internet, and that this connection has also spread to the point where alternate, potentially fabricated personas of Lain are being witnessed by other people in the real world. This idea of the relative validity of realities is transposed against ideas of the subjective and potentially self-created nature of identity, or at least persona. It hasn’t been fully explored yet, but the show seems to be trending towards that idea.
…as a side note, it always bears mentioning that this show came out in freaking 1998. So, even if its themes don’t really come across as revelatory to us, I’m guessing they were pretty damn prescient at the time. No piece of art exists outside of a larger context.
Finally, the actual plot of the show is pretty interesting too. It’s been keeping things pretty ambiguous so far, though Lain’s sister’s interaction with the G-Men seems to indicate that a lot of Lain’s reality isn’t actually just in her head. Her visions and sudden, random leaps into other personas (in the club, greeting her sister) are clearly linked to the creation of online identities in some way, and her relationship to this “scattered god” is likely the reason the G-Men are so interested in her, but it’s all very ambiguous still. I think they’re spacing out hints very well so far, and I’m certainly interested in whatever happens next.
TL;DR to the TL;DR:
Bob like Lain.
