WHAT IS SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN?

!! SPOILER WARNING !!
I basically spoil the entire plot of the series here, so if you want to watch SEL blind, turn back now!

Serial Experiments Lain is a 1998 anime mini-series that follows the story of 14 year old Lain Iwakura, a shy middle school student without many friends. Lain's life suddenly changes one day when she receives an e-mail from her dead classmate Chisa Yomoda, who had committed suicide. Chisa tells Lain that she's abandoned her physical self and found "God" in the virtual world of The Wired.

The series follows Lain as she delves into the world of computers and the realm of The Wired. She begins to lose her sense of self while traversing the world of The Wired, developing multiple personalities both in the physical and The Wired world. Lain soon finds that she's not a real person after all, simply a sentient computer program built to sever the barrier between the real world and The Wired world. And with this, at the end of the series, she's challenged to accept her place as the real Goddess of The Wired, becoming an omnipresent being across space and time.

Serial Experiments Lain was created by Yasuyuki Ueda, directed by Ryutaro Nakamura, written by Chiaki J. Konaka, and utilizes character designs done by Yoshitoshi Abe. It was animated by Triangle Staff. The series is known and popular for its surreal pyschological imagery, philisophical content, its eerily accurate predictions of the modern internet, and for being one of anime's poster childs of the cyberpunk aesthetic.

WHAT'S MY CONNECTION TO LAIN?

I first watched SEL at a weird and uncertain time in my life. It was Summer of 2022. My old cat that I'd had since childhood was dying of cancer, I was in the slow process of deep cleaning my room, I was about to go back to college in-person in a few months for the first time since the end of 2019, it was the middle of the afternoon and I was hot and delirious from sleep deprivation, and I watched it off of a weird, sketchy website I don't remember the name of. And honestly? This was the perfect setting for me to first watch SEL in. I was in the perfect place for this anime, and I would not have done anything differently to set the mood for it had I had the choice.

I won't exactly say SEL was something that immediately changed my life, but it's stuck with me, and I've grown more attached to it as a piece of media - dare I say a goddamn art piece - over time. Despite how surreal, paranoid, isolating, and a little puzzling the series is, it's a very comforting anime for me. It might've been precisely what I'd needed to watch, at the exact time I'd watched it, as I saw myself in Lain the character, and the isolating feeling the series had, ironically, made me feel like I wasn't alone.

I was tired, losing my cat, who I considered my best friend despite of all her grouchiness, and I was getting ready to form a social life again after the pandemic. And topping all that off, as a young autistic woman with anxiety that grew up with unrestricted internet access in the late 2000s, Lain made me feel seen, like I was in company of someone who understood me very well. Perhaps it's not a series for everyone, but Serial Experiments Lain is, regardless, a series that's personally very dear to my heart.