Is Serial Experiments Lain a [heretical] retelling of a part of the book of revelations?

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youtube.com/watch?v=Q_d-dRXi05s
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
youtube.com/watch?v=L79-aKSppRQ
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A false prophet will claim to be the voice of God and attempt to command the world but will be overcome by God.

I don't believe Lain is THE God, but she has Christ-like parallels from a narrative perspective.

>endlessesotericism.wordpress.com/2015/09/22/the-key-to-understanding-serial-experiments-lain/
i loved this analysis

I have an issue with its focus on the internet because I don't believe the internet is any more important than a plot element to what Lain is trying to say, but there is some interesting stuff here so far.

Yeah, internet is just a plot device to explain something bigger, that is always existed: the collective unconscious. Ueda said that in a interview

also i dont fully understand this scene yet

youtube.com/watch?v=Q_d-dRXi05s

BIOMERGE ACTIVATE

You don't seem to understand

As far as I understood, SEL was kept open ended literally for the sake of discussing what everyone's individual opinions on it were. This interlocks with the overarching theme of, not just the internet, but communication as a whole, on both a mass unconscious level and a directly concscious, interpersonal level.

Also how the fuck are you gonna act like the wired is just a plot device it's literally half the setting

Back to /x/ you go

When you have a specific story in mind, you don't tend to make it "open ended". Lain's plot is pretty straightforward in that there's a single thing going on that can be established. Ueda's also said that Lain was about certain Japanese sensitivities, and that he wanted American and Japanese audiences to respond differently to its themes (notably saying he wanted Americans in particular to think that the things being said by Lain were "screwed up") to establish cultural debate. To me, that implies that there is a specific set of thematic material that Ueda thought one side was going to respond more positively to, and that the other would respond negatively to.

Because Ueda literally said that the wired was just used to apply real world elements to the story. It provides a nice plot based connection to the themes of everybody being connected and Eiri's transhumanist goal to revert people to the primordial state of non-bodied connection. I'm not saying it has no purpose, but it is not integral to Lain's themes and the series was not trying to say anything about the internet.

>Is Serial Experiments Lain a [heretical] retelling of a part of the book of revelations?
nope

I literally just finished this series a few minutes ago.
There is obviously a shit load to digest but I feel that I missed a lot of stuff
.
Who was the programmer who made Lain? Maybe I'm bad with same-face but I couldn't figure out if he was the pissed off guy at the very end saying he'd quit.

Then there was the whole thing with Lain's family being fake. It seems that they were hired specifically to lead Lain on into achieving her purpose. But taking that into account, I honestly have no fucking idea what was going on with her sister. Maybe they were programs as well?

Then of course, there were episodes that had some weird info dumps that didn't really incorporate themselves into the story, such as the nano-machine drug, the "kids" program that somehow made into a game that memed a little girl into being a monster or something. I'm not sure what the point of that was beyond some kind of involvement with the Knights, whom I don't really understand the point of either.

Am I missing shit or is this all David Lynch tier mysterious for a reason?

there are very few places in life where our voices can truly be heard

do we exist .. what is the nature of existence ? what does it mean to be human and have knowledge of one's self?

what types of games are we playing by ourselves in our own head? how much of outside reality are we actually comprehending?

>Who was the programmer who made Lain?

Eiri. Long hair, tape all over him. Tachibana scientist who killed himself and went to the wired. He says he programmed her, but turns right back around and says she was hanging out in the wired before he found her and gave her a body, so it's debatable based on what evidence you interpret as what.

>Then there was the whole thing with Lain's family being fake. It seems that they were hired specifically to lead Lain on into achieving her purpose.

Her dad worked at Tachibana and was supposed to keep her away from Eiri. Her mom knew roughly about it, her sister probably didn't and was told she was an adopted sister or something. Both her mom and sister act cold to her for this reason. She's just something injected into their lives that they have to deal with. Her sister got stuck between the wired and real worlds by the Knights, and they probably used her not-corpse to spy on Lain.

>Then of course, there were episodes that had some weird info dumps that didn't really incorporate themselves into the story

They all had their purpose. The drug, not so much other than a subtle antitranshumanist thing, maybe some plot things based on subtle bits of information that's up for debate. The Visual Experiments Lain artbook has a little quote beside its image saying something like "It makes you more perceptive by speeding up your mental processes and slows everything else down, but is that something you really want? You might not be able to reverse it." The KIDS was an old psi experiment that the Knights stole information about and were using to cross the real and wired worlds. The kids that were playing different games got crossed and real people died. The Knights are a group of prankster hackers who follow Eiri in the belief that people should be connected without the need for bodies.

Ah I see, I never caught the connection between the goal of the Knights, but seeing as how seemed to be trying to control Lain, in hindsight it makes sense, they were following Eiri.

I also completely forgot about Eiri in the sense of his character reveal starting with his suicide, but obviously they don't show him as some sort of cyber god until the part when he shows himself as such.

>They probably told Mika she was adopted
I thought they roughly portrayed Lain as not actually being in the family for very long, if not any more than around the beginning of the show.
But considering very little weird shit happens when Lain still thinks she's human I guess she probably joined the family roughly at the beginning of the school year.

So where did she get all the tech? Was it just being supplied by her dad? Did she just unconsciously start to spawn it?

What was it about late 90's American sensitivities and Japanese sensitives he wanted to see clash? I for one found nothing Lain says to be particularly out of line, or would I have had to been a christian to find issue with them?

it's just random bullshit you guys

no its just pretentious trash

No it isn't, it's like the game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R except instead of an area around Chernobyl it's a 14 year old girl who lives in japan.

I can't speak for Japanese sensitivities. If I had to guess based on themes and how they are presented alone, I would guess he figured people were starting to move away from their humanity and togetherness. Perhaps he thought the western world was bringing a more pro-transhumanist perspective.

It's also useful to note that he was surprised and a bit disappointed that both Japanese and American audiences ended up responding to Lain in similar ways.

I want fanart of Lain as a Stalker or C-Con

It's a vague and unexamined ~collective unconciousness~ in that case. If it were only that it would be completely outdone by Eva, which explores it from mulitple personal perspectives in a Jungian or maybe Freudian light.

Ironic, because despite the entire world becoming more invested in the internet, Japan is the one who replacing every shred of what makes up their humanity with anti-social shit. Hentai and love hotels replace affection, robots to replace an aging workforce.

Well I don't blame him. America is a big place and we're anything but a unified culture despite NY and California trying to change that through their media power. Accurately gauging the American social atmosphere is close to impossible, at least outside of cities which have oh so been artificially worked into the same identity.

Love hotels exist mostly because of a lack of space. If you have a family in a tiny house or still live with your parents as many do, you need somewhere else to do it.

I would say Lain tied it into in-universe metaphysics in a way that Eva instead left more unexplained.

Just like STALKER, it's probably inspired by the noosphere. Trying to make it a detailed thing would have been unnecessary since the internet is the ultimate zenith of the noosphere concept.
That is to say, in the Lain universe the noosphere always existed but technology had amplified it to such in incredible extent as allow Eiri to directly tap into it.

Basically Eiri and the Knights + the internet are the C-consciousness in Stalker. Physical Lain is the Zone

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

In Eva, Instrumentality was an abuse of the fundamentals life to achieve a collective consciousness, I don't think anything implies there was ever a noosphere since instrumentality is simply being over-taken by an anti-AT field, AT field defining individuality.

I thought they were mainly used for prostitution though. Get off from work, hire a yakuza whore and spend the night in a love hotel; a replacement for normal female companionship that is slightly closer to normal than the majority of jap men who just jack off to virtual waifus.

Either way japan got screwed hard with their current environment at some point. I believe it will probably rebound but having a huge population of men AND women in their 30's who have never been in an intimate relationship is evidence that something went wrong with modernization.

I most often see love hotels referenced in media when it's a normal couple looking to have a special night, surprisingly barely ever involving prostitution.
I'm absolutely sure that they're used to have sex with prostitutes as well, but I think it's far closer to a 50/50 split that it would be love hotels existed in the west, for example.

waifu=/=anime girl
Agreed with the rest of the post, though. I believe something similar will happen to you guys in the west in the near future, anime or no anime. This is a byproduct of modernisation. Some people have begun retreating and withdrawing from all social interaction, and the thing is, this is not unprecedented. Calhoun's mice and his behavioral sink theory followed the exact same route.
Japan is one of the most modernised countries with the highest levels of technology, and this is the reason why they're suffering from this. I assure you, it's not an uniquely Japanese phenomenon. You people in the west might not have anime girls to fawn over, but there will be something similar eventualy.
Look up "hypersocialisation" and "hypernormalisation" if you want to read more things in the same vein.

STALKER?
Are you talking of the movie of Andrej Tarkovskij?

Well, I guess that was the best explanation of lain I have found on the internet.

>To reiterate: The events in episodes 1-9 probably never happened, but are false memories given to Lain so that she can gain a human-like sentience. The events prior to episode 9 use symbolism and reinterpretation of the same events to feature Lain as human and Lain as internet simultaneously. Episode 10 features a conflict between prospective gods, in which a false image of Lain is destroyed. Lain reconstructs herself in Episode 11. Lain as person no longer exists after episode 10, which is why the show is so confusing. One episode after the grand reveal, it becomes insignificant to future episodes.

I never expected to see that movie and that director on Sup Forums. How the fuck do you know about our old soviet movies?

They mean the game, which is in some parts based on the book. Scientists used the site of the '86 Chernobyl disaster to conduct secret psi-experiments on humans, and a few of them volunteered to combine consciousnesses into one in order to tap into the Earth's noosphere to try and remove traces of anger and greed from human thought, but accidentally warped reality and let loose a radioactive and physically anomalous hellscape around Chernobyl.

i just know he was considered the soviet Kubrick.
i still have to watch his masterpiece Solaris, that inspired Xenogears

wasnt the anime more about the experiments of John Lilly?
youtube.com/watch?v=L79-aKSppRQ

lain with storyboard
youtube.com/watch?v=SrTR7zTEPys

>14
I thought she was like 11

Calhoun's experiments were about overpopulation, unless what you're saying is the inter-connectivity of the world via Information technology is simulating overcrowding.

I'm talking about the videogame franchise, which is loosely based on the film by Andrej. I've never seen the film, but the game is about Ukrainian treasure hunters entering an area called The Zone which spans Chernobyl.
The Zone is a bizarre expanse where reality breaking anomalies occur (gravity wells, electrical discharge patches, random combustion) and strange mutated creatures appear. The STALKER's hunt artifacts, random debris warped by anomalies that retain special properties (I.E force fields that deflect bullets) that are of interest of scientists.

While the game first makes you think the Zone is caused by the power plant meltdown
It's revealed the Zone was an experiment gone wrong. After the Chernoybl incident Russian scientists did illegal experiments in the area because it barred from the public due to contamination.
The scientists were researching the Noosphere as a collective unconsciousness and in their research fused 5-7 people together into a single consciousness called the C-consciousness. As capable force, C decided to manipulate the noosphere and purge things like greed and hate from humanity. Instead it punctured a hole in the noosphere and line between thought and reality shattered, creating the Zone where laws of physics were eroding.
C later pretended to be a wish granting rock but I don't remember why.

she'14, like her VA

>blocked in my country
Why does this happen? I genuinely don't understand.
Fuck funimation anyway.

>that part when Lain tries to casually bring up what the guy at Tachibana Labs said about her not knowing basic information about her family or herself to her parents
>mfw
There’s just so many parts in this show where you can’t help but feel unbelievably sad for her.

Pretty good theory, except she clearly bypasses the need by re-introducing herself to Alice in physical form.

Lain shouldn't have reset. Literally just wait a bit and explain to Alice everything after she calms down. Then it could have been me and my best friend God.

how can anyone think this show makes any sense
don't get me wrong I really enjoyed it

>inter-connectivity of the world via Information technology is simulating overcrowding
This is what I was trying to say, but I couldn't exactly express it. Modern social media with billions of users is effectively mimicking overcrowding. I'm not necessarily saying that social media is a bad thing, but you can likely notice some degree of degradation of culture in recent times, which coincides with the rise of the Internet and social media.
But there is also something else I'm concerned about. It's about the isolation of people in this environment. It's about modern "online information bubbles", like Facebook, that basically trap people inside a bubble. People get served things they like, but not necessarily things that they don't. I can understand why this is done, but people can really get out of touch with the world like that. It's not just Facebook that is prone to things like that; the avoidance of things one doesn't like is natural, and it's as old as humanity itself. But the internet taps too much into this process, and twists it. Older mainstream entertainment was well, mainstream. Everybody watched the same news, everybody read the same newspapers, everybody watched the same show. This is a big oversimplification, and I know myself that this is not really true, but compared to today, entertainment was centralised, and people generally held the same beliefs, with small varieties here and there. People nowadays withdraw into their own small gated communities in an unprecedented way and avoid any harm, anything challenging their beliefs. This is most noticeable in developed countries, and, well, when you have many groups thinking they're right, conflict is born.
It's not as serious as I'm making it sound just yet, but unless something is done, the future will be just like that.

>in an unprecedented way
Don't know how that got there, ignore this.
Oh, and entertainment was "relatively centralised". There are people who didn't watch nor read the newspapers, after all.
I also can't really eloquently express my thoughts in English, so there may be plenty of gaping flaws in my arguments.

I see what you;re saying. We're an intelligent species but we're still driven by certain instincts that once only existed within smaller populations, like the tribe.
Distance separated humanity and thus the flow of information. Now humanity can link up and share ideas without ever coming into contact.
But in nature, we use to kill the other tribe. Different culture, different color, different language. Us Vs. Them.

You're looking at an inter-tribal mash up on a massive scale done through the airwaves and cables. The knowledge of all the things outside of you brings them in conflict and so distinction erodes through cultural influence.

But there lies a contradiction, the human need for some degree of distinction, thus snowflake syndrome.

Well summarised, and well said. You said what I was trying to say in way less words than me.
Regarding the need for being different, it's fine. It's natural, and often needed. We are humans, after all, not robots manufactured so we can be all the same.
Snowflake syndrome is acceptable as long as it's not taken too far, it's fine as long as many snowflakes don't begin to clump together in a snowball and begin to influence society in a bad way.
If snowflakes hadn't existed, history would've never been the same, so they're not a bad thing.

not entirely a bad thing*

I don't think 1-9 "never happened", I don't know why he thinks that. It makes more sense that they occurred entirely as a means to give Lain sentience.

She came into life normal because they fabricated a normal person from a collective consciousness that has NEVER lived as one person before. The only false memories were the in-the-moment identity Lain perceived herself as having once becoming a human.

What did she mean by this

When only one person in the end perceives you as having actually been a person, you don't have much left to love.

I agree, they definitely happened, they were just artificially created in order to give Lain that sense of identity, self, and ego, rather than just being a blank slate AI popping into existence suddenly.

Lain altering reality so that Alice was aged up and dating her teacher warms my heart every time I think of it.

I see what you did there.
I realised why they used an English song recently. It's because the internet connects people across the globe.

Same.
But I was a teenager when I watched it. Maybe it's time to give it a rewatch

That, but also the lyrics apply to it and that singing style seems popular in japan.

>Present Day
>Present Time
>HAHAHAHA
What was this for anyway?