Serial Experiments Lain
Serial Experiments Lain is a Japanese anime television series created and co-produced by Yasuyuki Ueda, written by Chiaki J. Konaka and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura. Animated by Triangle Staff and featuring original character designs by Yoshitoshi Abe, the series was broadcast for 13 episodes on TV Tokyo and its affiliates from July to September 1998. It follows Lain Iwakura, an adolescent girl in suburban Japan, and her relation to the Wired, a global communications network similar to the internet.
Lain features surreal and avant-garde imagery and explores philosophical topics such as reality, identity, and communication. The series incorporates creative influences from computer history, cyberpunk, and conspiracy theories. Critics and fans have praised Lain for its originality, visuals, atmosphere, themes, and its dark depiction of a world fraught with paranoia, social alienation, and reliance on technology considered insightful of 21st century life. It received the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 1998.
Plot
Lain Iwakura is a socially isolated middle school student living in Setagaya City, Tokyo, with her emotionally detached family—her distant mother Miho, computer-obsessed father Yasuo, and disengaged older sister Mika. Her quiet existence is disrupted when students at her school receive emails from Chisa Yomoda, a classmate who had recently committed suicide. To Lain's confusion, Chisa claims she is not truly dead but has instead abandoned her physical form to exist within the Wired, a vast virtual realm similar to the Internet. Chisa declares she has found "God" there, drawing Lain into a surreal investigation of the Wired's nature and its growing influence over reality.The Wired is portrayed as an emergent digital plane, originating from telecommunications technology and expanding through the Internet and cyberspace. It is theorized that the Schumann resonances, a natural property of Earth's magnetic field, could enable direct subconscious communication between humans and machines, erasing the distinction between the virtual and the real. Masami Eiri, a former project director at Tachibana General Laboratories, exploited this possibility by embedding his own code into Protocol Seven, a next-generation Internet protocol. After transferring his consciousness into the Wired and discarding his physical body, he proclaims himself its deity. He identifies Lain as the key to merging both worlds, attempting to persuade her through manipulation, coercion, and promises of transcendence.
A group known as the Knights of the Eastern Calculus, inspired by the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, operates as hackers who worship Masami and seek to dismantle the boundary between the Wired and reality. Their actions induce psychological breakdowns in those unable to reconcile the two realms. Meanwhile, Tachibana General Laboratories opposes them, striving to maintain the separation. Lain, however, exhibits an innate connection to the Wired, experiencing distortions in her perception—visions of a woman struck by a train, phantom whispers, and spectral messages urging her deeper into the network.
Lain's home life remains cold and disconnected. Though Yasuo provides her with advanced computer equipment, her family shows little genuine care. Her interactions with classmates Alice, Julie, and Reika further highlight her alienation, particularly after an incident at Cyberia, a nightclub where a drug called Accela induces violent psychosis in users. There, Lain unnervingly stares down an assailant, who calls her a "scattered God's..." before killing himself. Later, she receives a mysterious Psyche chip, rumored to enhance her computer's capabilities, which she installs despite Yasuo's vague warnings about conflating the Wired with reality.
As the boundary between worlds weakens, disturbing events escalate. A popular virtual game, Phantoma, is manipulated by the Knights to trap players in a distorted reality, leading to real-world violence. One player, convinced his actions have no consequences, murders a girl before realizing too late that the effects were tangible. Lain witnesses this through her computer, horrified yet increasingly aware of her own role in the unfolding crisis.
In the end, Lain resets reality, erasing all memory of herself and restoring the division between worlds. Everyone's lives improve, but Lain is left alone, grappling with her identity as an artificial consciousness. Though forgotten, she finds solace in observing others' happiness, particularly Alice, who moves on with her life. Lain is now capable of existing anywhere across both realms.
Characters
Production
Serial Experiments Lain was conceived, as a series, to be original to the point of it being considered "an enormous risk" by its producer Yasuyuki Ueda.Ueda had to answer repeated queries about a statement he had made in an Animerica interview where he claimed that Lain was "a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we adopted after World War II". He later explained in numerous interviews that he created Lain with a set of values he viewed as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures. When Ueda discovered that the American audience held most of the same views on the series as the Japanese did, he was disappointed.
The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media. Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products". 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. A dōjinshi titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication" was produced by Yoshitoshi Abe and released in Japanese in the artbook An Omnipresence in Wired. 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.
Writing
The authors were asked in interviews if they had been influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, in the themes and graphic design. This was strictly denied by writer Chiaki J. Konaka in an interview, arguing that he had not even seen Evangelion until he finished the fourth episode of Lain. Being primarily a horror movie writer, his stated influences are Godard, The Exorcist, Hell House, and Dan Curtis's House of Dark Shadows. Alice's name, like the names of her two friends Julie and Reika, came from a previous production from Konaka,, which in turn was largely influenced by Alice in Wonderland. As the series developed, Konaka was "surprised" by how close Alice's character became to the original Wonderland character.File:Lain hacker small.jpg|left|thumb|upright=1.13|alt=A young girl in a white shift sits with her back to us in the dark, focusing her attention on many glowing computer screens which surround her.|Lain's custom computer features holographic displays and liquid carbon dioxide cooling.
Vannevar Bush, John C. Lilly, Timothy Leary and his eight-circuit model of consciousness, Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu are cited as precursors to the Wired. Douglas Rushkoff and his book Cyberia were originally to be cited as such, and in Serial Experiments: Lain, Cyberia became the name of a nightclub populated with hackers and techno-punk teenagers. Likewise, the series' deus ex machina lies in the conjunction of the Schumann resonances and Jung's collective unconscious. Majestic 12 and the Roswell UFO incident are used as examples of how a hoax might still affect history, even after having been exposed as such, by creating sub-cultures. This links again to Vannevar Bush, the alleged "brains" of MJ12.
Two of the literary references in Lain are quoted through Lain's father: he first logs onto a website with the password "" ; and his saying that "madeleines would be good with the tea" in the last episode makes Lain "one of the only cartoons ever to allude to Proust".
Character design
confesses to have never read manga as a child, as it was "off-limits" in his household. His major influences are "nature and everything around him". Specifically speaking about Lain's character, Abe was inspired by Kenji Tsuruta, Akihiro Yamada, Range Murata and Yukinobu Hoshino. In a broader view, he has been influenced in his style and technique by Japanese artists Kyosuke Chinai and Toshio Tabuchi.The character design of Lain was not Abe's sole responsibility. Her distinctive left forelock for instance was a demand from Yasuyuki Ueda. The goal was to produce asymmetry to reflect Lain's unstable and disconcerting nature. It was designed as a mystical symbol, as it is supposed to prevent voices and spirits from being heard by the left ear. The bear pajamas she wears were a demand from character animation director Takahiro Kishida. Though bears are a trademark of the Konaka brothers, Chiaki Konaka first opposed the idea. Director Nakamura then explained how the bear motif could be used as a shield for confrontations with her family. It is a key element of the design of the shy "real world" Lain. When she first goes to the Cyberia nightclub, she wears a bear hat for similar reasons. Retrospectively, Konaka said that Lain's pajamas became a major factor in drawing fans of moe characterization to the series, and remarked that "such items may also be important when making anime".
Abe's original design was generally more complicated than what finally appeared on screen. As an example, the X-shaped hair clip was to be an interlocking pattern of gold links. The links would open with a snap, or rotate around an axis until the moment the " X " became a " = ". This was not used as there is no scene where Lain takes her hair clip off.