Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long-ass post! CW for discussions of grooming, mental illness, trauma, etc. Not super in detail, but mentioned.
Serial Experiments Lain is an anime that I've been meaning to watch for over a decade and only recently got around to. I grew up on the internet without any adult supervision, making my first GaiaOnline account at age 7, roleplaying in the forums by age 8 (and subsequently getting groomed by some of the roleplay partners I had, the effects of which I have yet to fully unravel) and somewhere around there getting my first virus by googling "Sims 2 free online" and clicking on every link on the first two pages of results, figuring out how to change locales and install visual novels at age 10, getting banned off GaiaOnline at age 11 for being underaged and remaking under an account where I never said my age, eventually making a Tumblr at age 13 and getting sucked into Kin Tumblr from an IRL friend about a year later up until 2018, and even more events that I'll spend the next decade chewing all my therapists' ears off about that I either don't care to talk about here or have completely repressed. Naturally, as a result of being chronically online for far too long, I have a particular interest on how the internet has changed from its very first moments versus how it is now, but when I first saw a picture of Lain when I was on an anime aesthetic Tumblr blog somewhere in 2014 and looked up the anime, my first thought wasn't "hm this could be an interesting anime talking about the perils of ignoring the real world in favor of the internet, perhaps a surrealist journey asking what we would be willing to do for those we love", my first thought was "wow I bet I kin her, I should watch the anime and see if I can make some icons of her for my kin page".
Obviously, it was 2014 and I got distracted by DRAMAtical Murder and decided to make Noiz my personality for like a year instead, but that's not really here nor there. Point is, I've known about this anime for a long-ass time and kept saying I would watch it but didn't until my girlfriend asked if we could watch it together. Over the course of a few months, we watched it at night, and I finished it on Monday the 12th.
So. My initial thoughts were that it does a very good job of setting up the unsettling atmosphere through its sound design and color. I hesitate to use the word "visceral", because I feel it falls just short of that. It's intense, even when there's nothing but a soft whirl of a computer fan. It uses the silence and negative space incredibly, and I have never seen an anime able to set up anxiety so well using so little. It's genuinely impressive on that front, and I'm a little sad I'll never be able to experience it for the first time again. The closest I've ever watched able to set up scenes so genuinely chilling without leaning towards extravagance is Boogiepop Phantom, an anime I'm also upset that I can't ever watch for the first time again. Less is more, in Lain's case.
Onto the plot. I know many, many, many people found it confusing and convoluted. Perhaps I'm insane, but I felt it was relatively easy to follow, even with some of the more esoteric symbolism and metaphors. That's not to say, of course, that I think I understood it better than everyone else, just that I had no particular difficulty gleaning meaning from it.
That said... Oh boy. I love denpa, I love surrealism, I love imagery and symbolism and metaphors, but it felt very much like it ended up struggling under it's own weight closer to the end. It didn't collapse, but it was creaking, and I'm surprised the load-bearing tightrope didn't snap under it. It regained its balance by the last episode, so hey, that's good!
The animation is pretty comparable to other anime aired around the same time, at least to me. There were a handful of wow moments, any animation errors weren't glaringly obvious, at least to me, and I feel like any wonkyness added to the atmosphere, so...
Ultimately, I really enjoyed it! Solid show.
MED'S AWESOME SCORE:
4.5/5, -.5 because of how much I felt it struggled near the end but again, it caught itself before slipping past the point of no return.