@El-Matematico:
I watched like 5 episodes and dropped it. My feelings towards it was that keeping track of what's happening was meaningless because many scenes didn't convey anything or have an impact the overarching narrative.
Yeah, Serial Experiments Lain has a really non-linear story, so it can get confusing.
It also bothered me that some of Lain's friends reacted badly to her "changing", since she was a walking vegetable in the beginning of the series. Too many times someone talked to her and her response was a confused look and silence. Changing in Lain's case meant starting to speak and developing a personality.
Oh, that never bothered me. They were so used to her being this one way, so for her changing how she approached herself and people's reactions made sense to me, to be honest. I feel like they were not expecting her to act any different.
And there was an episode that had a heavy "video games makes kids murdereres" vibe.
I remember that episode, but I didn't really get that vibe at all. I believed it got explained later with the KIDS act or something, and with how the Knights wanted to revive that.
@.access:
SEL was my favorite anime for the longest time (until I watched MoNoNoKe), but is not the kind of anime that everybody will enjoy: most of the time there is this oppressive silence, oppressive lack of motion, it is the kind of anime that tries to cause an effect on you by forcing you to go through its emptiness more than through its metaphysical ramblings and that's the kind of thing that can get annoying if you are not in the mood to watch paint dry. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it myself if I wasn't in the perfectly right mood for it when I stumbled on it, so it was really a matter of the right anime at the right time.
Yeah, I get it about not everyone being able to enjoy it because of how different and non-linear it is compared to other similar media. I honestly enjoyed it a lot and I plan to watch it again. To be honest, I can really related to lain a lot with how I feel about myself.
To this day, the soundtrack alone is able to send me back to the same place I was back in 2002 when I first watched it, so to this day it is still in a very special place for me.
Yeah, the soundtrack is quite good! My favorite is the opening song!
A few months ago I decided to watch it again after nearly a decade and I was sure I was going to hate it for its edginess, but somehow I think I managed to enjoy it even more than on the times I watched it as a teenager/early 20's. The scene with the father on the last episode… I started crying when the first chords started playing and went like that until it was over.
Yeahhh the ending really was sad to me, for her to finally have peace, and she felt like this was the only way.
Also this track is one of my favorites in any anime OST ever:
I like the song! It's pretty peaceful and it gives me feels xD
@Sakonosolo:
It was something I had always known about when I was younger and I think I might have watched a couple of episodes in the early or mid 00s but it was only in the last few years I watched it all the way through. It has a nice aesthetic but it is a bit hard to follow if it even has deeper meaning to a lot of the stuff it throws at the watcher. There being multiple Lains is one of the better parts imo, and seeing how they act. Ultimately I didn't find it as great as its reputation suggests (I much preferred Haibane Renmei, which has the same character designer) but it's still pretty good.
Yeah, the multiple Lains bit really showed how she was struggling with the different parts of herself from what I seen. I didn't really hear about it till like very recently. Now, I understand where two of my friends' usernames came from.
@PatTraverse:
It was really ahead of it's time in the sense that the internet was not like today when this was made yet predicted tons of things that are happening today on social media.
Yes, indeed! It showed the communication of the internet and how it is important to connect, and Serial Experiments Lain was created in 1998!