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The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
81–90 of 177 posts
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#82It's interesting how two people can have diametrically opposite readings of the same piece of art. I read the Wired as not less real than the real world, as the influence could flow in both directions, with events in one place causing effects in the other. The ultimate confirmation of that is the final scene, which was actually depicting Lain meeting her grown up school friend some 10 years later, while Lain stayed -…
> Where new worlds could be built, shaped by the will of the participants as opposed to the hard rules of physics, therefore granting a whole set of new universes in which to search for meaning. There was a social oriented MUD in the 90's exploring that.
It really saddens me that I no longer have the time to sink tens of hours a week into MUDs - the extremely low barrier to start one up meant that there were a lot of extremely interesting ideas out there - and the interactivity meant the art was a lot more engaging than more dead-tree related mediums.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a nitpick, but Neon Genesis Evangelion came out in 1995 and Lain in 1998. They do tend to be representative of their period, i.e. 90’s tv anime productions. The early 2000’s where characterized primarily by the Big 3 Shonen Jump titles (Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece).
> The early 2000’s where characterized primarily by the Big 3 Shonen Jump titles (Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece). This category only exists in the minds of Westerners who were pirating shonen manga at the time. It's not the most popular anime in Japan at any point. It's also funny Bleach made this list since it was frankly terribly written and not as popular as the other two. The author had no control over his story…
Hey, lets introduce a group, the Quincy, that spends quite a lot of the first part of the series proclaiming they proudly use bows and not swords.
And then let’s finish the series by having their king, and all his powerful vassals, very blatantly fight only using swords.
Very consistent.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#84Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they…
A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex charact…
I'd suggest Inuyashiki. It's somewhat robot-y and explores responsibility and human weakness in a different way from Evangelion. I think it's on Amazon Prime.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#85Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they…
Have any good adult animes come out these past few years? There's always been a lot of gross stuff but I'm starting to lose faith in the medium when I see stuff like Mushoku Tensei being praised as wonderful in the mainstream, the latest few seasons have felt like complete garbage.
Assuming by "adult", you mean an R rating and not an NC-17 rating, check out Dorohedoro. I think it's on Netflix.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#86Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they…
Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was…
Getting into anime in the US in the early 00s via friends who got into it in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a lot of filtering that had already happened here in the US. So something sort of missed was the realization that Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap) still applied to anime. It's just that in the US most of what had made it here was generally the better quality by some measure (better animation quality, better story, better characters, etc.). Not universally, crap still made it through, but it wasn't 90% crap.
Fast forward to today, you have access to the full gamut of anime series and movies. Completely unfiltered by others unless you specifically only watch things that others (that you have some trust in or similar taste to) have watched and promote. And thanks to legit streaming services and less than legit streaming services and torrents, you can much more easily be one of the first people in the US to watch something so it's now much easier to find the crap if you don't specifically go through the filtering process of time or critics or peer group taste and recommendations.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#87Lain does seem quaint when viewed today. But, it was thrilling at the time. A frequent theme was hearing background conversations of random users traveling through the wires. The idea of a couple having a fight and breaking up over “The Internet” was still weird. When the series was made, people were just starting to mainstream the practice of having serious personal interaction online and no one knew where it would…
I would recommend watching also Dennou Coil - it seems to me like similarly prescient description of how advanced Augmented Reality might look like - where you are in a physical world but can't be sure anymore that what you see is physically here or was added (or altered!) by the undistinguishable AR overlay.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was…
Getting into anime in the US in the early 00s via friends who got into it in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a lot of filtering that had already happened here in the US. So something sort of missed was the realization that Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap) still applied to anime. It's just that in the US most of what had made it here was generally the better quality by some measure (better animatio…
In Canada it was a little different than the US. We had some early animes that were actually dubbed up here you guys didn't have. We also had a totally different version of Dragonball up here originally.
I noticed back then too, watching different dubbed versions of different animes, the censoring would be different depending on whether it was American or not.
We also didn't really get much funimation stuff until later on, which as far as i know, whatever you think about their early work, was pretty fundamental in popularizing anime in the west.
Honestly, back then most of the anime I watched were fan translations of varying qualities I found on file sharing programs i watched because I found them recommended on websites.
Once I found out the anime we got here was often heavily altered compared to its original form, I kinda just focused on what was recommended online. My friends weren't really into anime or anything so it wasn't really something I could get peer recommendations on or anything.
I never really got into a lot of those popular ones of the time. I just kept searching out the weird obscure stuff that never made it here.
These days though, there's so much, I honestly wouldn't even know where to begin. I guess the last 'anime' I watched was Castlevania, but I'm not even sure if I would have classed that as anime back in the day.
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you liked Robotech and Evangelion, you might want to check out some of the Universal Century timeline Gundam shows. Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam are the classics, but for something with gorgeous modern animation, check out Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, it's a prequel series that follows the main rival character from the original through his childhood and up to the start of the war that's the setting for th…
> Oh, and check out Legend Of The Galactic Heroes. It's an epic along the lines of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, with like 30 'main' characters and maybe 300+ named characters throughout its run. Huge in scope and scale, but always willing to take a couple minutes and reflect on philosophy, politics, and the horrors of war. It's a seriously adult show. Would echo this recommendation. It's a massive commitment to wat…
Words of warning though - if you watch Legend Of The Galactic Heroes (or read the novels), read
Webers Honorverse books as well some of the space battle material on Orions arm 99% of warship depictions in SF will look to you unrealistically small-scale and mundane in comparison.
Like who goes in to battle with less than 20 thousand warships (LotGH), closes to less than 100 000 km before firing (Honorverse) or starts a campaign without god-AI driven relativistic autowar swarms of death (Orions Arm)? ;)
Re: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
#90Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they…
A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex charact…
Eureka Seven is a great scifi anime that gets missed due to some similarities to NGE.
Mushishi is an excellent philosophical supernatural journey.
Samurai Champloo is very accessible samurai stories (Samurai X is less accessible but good)
Soul Eater (and pretty much anything by the Bones crew) is great unqique fantasy with some interesting themes. Wolf's Rain is another thoughtful one.