3 episodes in

>3 episodes in
>the whole show seems like random 2deep4u for the sake of it
what the fuck Sup Forums does this actually ever get good or have I been memed?

...

what show is this

What, too deep4u?

Meme'd. Super hard, the likes you have never seen before.

Watched the whole series and still didn't understand its popularity.

I would imagine it was pretty damn good for its time though, seeing as the internet was just becoming a mainstream thing and the idea that connecting with the internet would make you a god was pretty neato.

Watching a 1998 anime about technology in 2016 will just not give you the same perspective.

Watch all of the episodes＼(^o^)／
It gets better, and by the last episode it gets kickass (>ω

uwu

Game is better
Play it instead

I just wanted to be an anime connoisseur...why do I have to watch this garbage god damn it.

Go live 10 years and watch another 200 anime and then come back to it. You're too young.

Anyone with a brain can figure it out. But you should probably go back to watching Squidgirl.

4th episode got me hooked

> (OP)
>Anyone with a brain can figure it out. But you should probably go back to watching Squidgirl.
Fukkin REKT

OP don't seem to understaaand...

I'm 22 and I've seen over 200 anime. I really don't like anything by Abe and Lain is the closest one of his shows I would say I liked, and only slightly. Is my taste pitiful?

Rakka thinks you're pitiful. She also thinks you should kill yourself just like she did.

How can anyone be this retarded

Really? Usually people dislike Lain and love Haibane. I can understand disliking Lain because it's really in-your-face and intrusive, but Haibane is super laid back and slowly introduces you to it's themes and characters.

What is that hexagonal box on the ladder?

Haibane is a mess. The story is simpler than primary school math and the moral is more blunt than a rolling pin. Lain is a literal fucking master piece. If what you're saying is true then I haven't met people like that, and I would imagine you've met those people off-site like the filth they are.

Who are you quoting?

a shame, he seemed an honest man.

Are you suggesting there's anything coherent about the first 3 episodes? Because I'm genuinely offended by this. I mean there are some obvious inferences, but none of them feel earned, the plot if you can even call it that, doesn't develop in an organic way at all and is largely disjointed by a very slow exposition that's more a total lack of budget than avant-garde.

I'm willing to bet Lain would have never been the essential hipster namedrop it is today if not for the fucking bunny suit, too.

The story isn't its strength at all but people like to pretend it is to make the anime seem deeper and more inaccessible when the only thing remotely appealing is the 90s Rei-esque mute moeblob in pajamas pandering which won faggots over and who now pretend otherwise to differentiate themselves from other weebs as 'cultured'.

Oh come on why can't BAe fans get along. Even Niea_7 was pretty good and that's his worst work.

bear suit*

Freudian slip...because like bunny suits it really was just shameless pandering

projecting this hard
>filename
Another classic post.

>moeblob
now I've heard everything

>no real personality
>dressed up in cute outfits
>not a moeblob
ok user SURE

>total lack of budget than avant-garde.
Not to encourage your shit posting but to us this as a topical spring board. It seems a lot of art comes not out of bigger pools of resources but in the ingenuity shown when the creator is denied a lot of convenience.
Art springs from technical adversity more often than not.

more buzzwords
keepem comin

>t. Evangelion 25/26 are a masterpiece crowd
the sad part is there's people who actually believe that

finish the show, its easier to understand in retrospect

I like the last two episodes of GunBuster too. Wanna try harder?

I'm one of the anons with the best taste on this board and I have to confess something.
Lain is actually pretty shit and I have been lying all along when I was calling it a masterpiece to fit in with the hypster kids on 3x3 thread.

You have my pity.

Autism-chan deserves better than you.

Please don't shitpost to start a lain thread.

You're confused. He Lain posted to start a shitposting thread.

More like 2 ez, I was really hoping it would keep me guessing till the end, but half way through it starts wrapping itself up pretty nicely.

Ah, I can see that now looking at the thread. Apologies.

My Little Computer God Can't Be This Cute!

my nigga ippo

>does this actually ever get good
Episode 5 is where things start getting interesting, by which I mean it's where the pacing goes from 0-100 and you're expected to keep up with all sorts of anachronism and heavy symbolism.

Episode 5 is where it "gets good", but it's only a few weeks after you've finished watching the full thing, or even during a re-watch that you'll start to really appreciate it. It's simply doing too much for any viewer to take in it all in the first time they watch it.

>he hates lain because he couldn't understand it
>he hate episodes 25/26 of NGE because he couldn't understand it
>he hates the last two episodes of gunbuster, which shouldn't be hard to understand or dislikeable at all
>yet he thinks his taste is somehow superior
Wow, this is actually really sad.

this

My computer can't be this cute.

>I'm one of the anons with the best taste on this board and I

Stopped reading there, ought to filter out any sentence starting that way.

he is right though

Although I'm surprised by all these anons who hate lain, most of the complaints are about pacing or being convoluted, does that mean that most people thought the visual and audio style were decent to good? Because I certainly thought so.

Hey so I hey I started watching this So and I just Have to Ask: Does this Sup Forums ever actually memed or have I fuck your Asswhole 3in 2deep4u?

Are you th ink you think there's anything coherent anything argument annus? Bescue I ME Genitally Offriced by THIS.

Who she have while tht satyr sure subsomatized, but the amasipehere, mosque, thymes envalue GREATER than sum of its parts. Simely enuu element satyrscaping (palut) vs entire mix?

I'm I guile to be Lai nserial Experiments Lain would have never been esutra hipster shitpost if not for the fucking bare soot two.

>The strength saty sength daper paretend she 90 raysquire mobeb panjas fagets diftation cultade
but to WHO she argue the Lain so WHO argue setyr to the ovary stench of the show? NOT for Body. in unasynteny to that the Primarchial Elements with Greatest ephemerance are Those Anischeralities as I had mentired preceentarily.?

Did I stutter? Come back to Lain at 32 and at least 400 watched. You'll appreciate my advice when you get there.

t. 30 year old

I felt exactly like that when I first tried watching Lain 3 years ago, dropped it at episode 6. I picked it back up this year and it's one of my favorite anime now.

>does that mean that most people thought the visual and audio style were decent to good
Of course. Yoshitoshi ABe's art is always a joy to see, and the OP is great! The only reason Lain isn't universally loved is because there's a rift between those who think that it's shallow pretentious garbage, on the one hand, and people who think the former group just don't get it, on the other.

>t. 30 year old

Can see how people a bit older (who were actually of some age back then) could appreciate it more.

I've just finished this show and I'm still wondering why people adore it so much.
I understand that this show is really advanced for the time it was created in, and it's message still applies to today's problems. But that doesn't compensate for many mistakes it makes throughout the whole series.
Almost all dramatic scenes totally lack tension and dynamics, episodes feel dragged out and cheap, each conveyed message is repeated constantly without a real reason, it feels really forced and unnecessary. Besides Lain, none of the characters are memorable, most of them are underdeveloped or binary.
There is almost no real dialogue. It's mostly built on semi-deep questions answered with empty words, another question or trivial buzzwords. I was really tired after hearing "Dare?" or "Anata, nani?' from Lain for the hundredth time.

I guess, opening is pretty good...

>2deep4u

getting tired of this meme desu

I'd actually say the opposite, I think it's all the more relevant today than it was back in the day. A lot of people today take the technology we have for granted and kind of brush over the fundamental concepts and questions briefly explored in lain. Especially going forward to the sorts of futuristic possibilities shown in lain, for instance augmented reality which will probably break into the public sphere in a big way in the coming decade. It's of course not the same as seeing it in the context of back when web2.0 was coming online, but I still thought the message was relevant to today's world.

It's good from the start onwards. Don't baby people into watching things they clearly aren't up to watching.

It looks almost like an accordion, but it's hard to tell.

>examples like this show that it's literally just about having developed more experience/taste
>people will still shit post it when they aren't ready for it

It's my favourite anime series, and I stand by what I said. Episodes 1-4 are mainly there to construct the setting and key characters of the narrative, and are deliberately slow for thematic reasons (which I like); however, that doesn't mean that they aren't slow paced, especially in comparison to the rest of the series.

When I first saw it I was mildly intrigued by the end of episode 2, but the insanity of episode 5 was what drew me into watching the rest of the series as things continued to escalate. That's why I recommend to give it either 2 or 5 episodes when first watching it.

It's a concertina.

What is there not to understand about Lain?
I'm not trying to be a super hipster, but honestly, what is so confusing?
Do people really not get it?
It's about a girl who has issues maintaining interpersonal relationships and understanding people, so she turns to technology and gets lost in the web. Within this internet system known as the wired, humans exist more as a concepts of ego in a realm and its not data transfers across webpages like in our own real life. Slowly the wired begins to meld into the personalities of humans and eventually into the real world itself. Lain has the powers of a "god" within the wired and as it begins to transfer into the real world where she has powers due to her "god" status within the wired. There are other side plots like the experiments done by the originator of the wired ( the old man lain meats ) and things like how there are multiple lains who impersonate her and destroy her life by taunting and fucking with her friends posing as her within the wired. There is a lot more going on but that is the general plot and its really not that fucking hard to understand unless you have extreme attention issues or shit taste. Its not even a full 24 episode run for christs sake. Its okay to not like the show but if you genuinely dont comprehend the plot youre a fucking retard.

Well personally I felt that as a whole it was cohesive, even if characters other than lain felt empty that ended up fitting into the concepts of exploring lain's internal identity as created by others. Also as cliched and empty as it sounds I felt the rest of the incongruities added to the otherworldly or collective-dream atmosphere. I mean I realize it's easy to say "it's not a bug, it's a feature" and brush off complaints, but I really do see it in that way even if I can't properly explain exactly why I feel that way

I would agree that some of the repetition was too much, but as for the "deep questions answered by trivialities" I have to say that I don't really think that there really is a truly adequate response to such questions, and should there be I would not expect to find it in a 13 episode anime. While I wouldn't say that it really fully answered the questions it posed, I did enjoy the attempt, and at moments I thought there were emotionally powerful scenes -the final scene with her father for instance- that made the whole experience quite enjoyable even if individual parts lagged. All of this of course on top of my enjoyment of the aesthetic choices in both sound and visual design.

I don't think it was perfect nor expect others to think so, but I felt on the whole it was unusually artistically pure and at least attempted to do something interesting, so for those reasons is why I personally think it may be one of my favorite anime. Admittedly lot of it comes down to personal taste and emotive responses to things I can't properly articulate, but there you have it.

Conflating ego with the wired was a mistep. Wired is a vehicle to the great unconscious not the thing itself. That's why wired Lain is just a smug bitch and the unconscious Lain's can actually do things.
Close but not 100. Though, even the best interpretations have one or two inconsistencies better explained by another. Such is the joy of Lain. Better than people who can't keep up by episode 3 like OP.

Yeah I agree completely with your musings on how the show is left to be interpreted.
I also agree with your points of how the wired is more of a "greater consciousness" concept and not ego, but I think when trying to explain it to someone as if they were a person in the show helps understand the wired on a surface level. If you were someone in lains world about to log into the wired, the concept of being a representation of a personality would make more sense than to try and convince them its a melting pot of human cerebral tang. Maybe it sounds like im backpedaling on my ideas but I cant find the perfect words to fit what im trying to say. I do agree however that the true nature of the wired is to free oneself completely from the ego and i think that is moreso one of the greater points you could attempt to argue the show is about. How the acceleration and constant interactivity of the internet causes us to lose our sense of humanity and all the information flows so quickly and inward it begins to blend into a sea of nightmarish nothing. Again, its hard to say "this is exactly what the show means" because its left to be a personal interpretation. I think the fact we can even articulate ideas about it on this level goes to show the quality of the writing, t b h

Nah, here's what I remember from when I watched it

Lain is the collective unconscious of humanity which has become attuned with the wired which itself had become attuned with the magnetic resonance of earth. Lain is displaced by the scientist who was creating the new wired protocol when he figured out what was happening, because he wishes to become in practicality God by controlling the experience of all humans. However in spite of the scientists planning lain becomes more than what she was, she becomes more than the reflection of human minds while she is displaced, acquiring subjective and irreplaceable experience. The multiple lains are incarnations of the way that she is seen by other people and herself, some of them are conjured by rumors that pervade the wired, and thus the collective unconscious, some by those she knows directly, and many by her own self image. However the "real" lain, the one that has lived asserts herself over the other versions that exist. Anyways, as the wired begins to bleed into the real world, and displace it lain becomes more and more powerful, eventually confronting and usurping the scientist who hoped supplant reality with the wired, telling him that that is an undercurrent to human existence, not a higher plane and that maybe god is just fucking with him or something. In the end she forces a new reality on the world that is like the old, and is content to stop existing, however her experiences as a "real" person have given her a life of her own, and she still exists even when no one is conscious of her. Or something like that.

At least that's what I think happened, I'm sure I got some facts there wrong.

Nah I feel it and I think your idea of what happened is completely plausible too.
Honestly I change my opinion on what I think the show is about and sometimes I sit more on the metaphorical side of it and sometimes the more literal side. I think its made to be taken either way.

>tfw I constantly tell people to power through and watch all of Lain, that it will make sense in the end
>tfw it doesn't
>tfw I say this to meme them as hard as I can the way some other cunt memed me years ago
>tfw I'm pretty sure everyone does the same thing

There are 2 types of people in this world user, those who watched Serial Experiments Lain, and those who haven't. Each camp is essential to the other...where do you want to belong?

>implying we don't watch it for the moeshit

Well it doesn't all make sense, but the core of it does seem to make enough sense for interpretation. As for the rest, well there's something to be said for not solving every mystery for the viewer.

True enough, as you said large parts are up for interpretation, that was just my own shaky one.

I can't wait until one of your friends actually gets it and tries to talk about it with you. That would be fucking hilarious.