Serial Experiments Lain Turns 25

One of the most interesting cyberpunk/psychological/techno horror series that was released to the world and still holds relevance to the world today turns 25 and that series is Serial Experiments Lain.

The series was created by Yasuyuki Ueda and done by Triangle Staff Studio with music done by Reichi Nakaido, Chiaki J Konaka was the writer and was directed by Ryutaro Nakamura. The series is about a girl named Lain a 14-year-old girl who is getting an e-mail from a dead classmate she dives into The Wired and the line between reality and fiction is so blurred that she doesn’t know what is real and fake.

What makes Serial Experiments Lain so special is that during the time the series was released back in 1998, the world at the time already had to deal with global paranoia, social alienation was at an all-time high, the fast pace of reliance on technology and making the world a smaller place thanks to the introduction to social media and the influence it will bring to the world in both a positive and a negative point of view which mostly is negative. Now if this sounds so familiar to you, you are right because it is what is going on in the world today thanks to advanced technology that we can now carry in the palm of our hand, and anything you say online will make or break you in the real world. Throw in all the bad human emotions such as lack of communication, loneliness, depression, mental illness, and of course lying to yourself and to everyone and that is what this series throws at you.

To this day Serial Experiments Lain is more relevant to today’s world than it was back in 1998 and pretty much gave us a small glimpse of what we were heading to now. The animation has aged somewhat well and the artwork is still wonderful to see today. Go watch this series and be open-minded to it with the topics and themes it will throw at you and while the ending is a bit weak, it’s better then what most anime series were ending like back in 1998.