31–40 of 177 posts
His designs are present in Lain, Niea Under 7, Haibane Renmei, Despera, Phenomeno, Texhnolyze and others. I really like his artwork and I made a habit of buying one of his artbooks everytime I visit the Akihabara Mandarake building.
Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example: Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the…
The "meeting in person is odd, interactions are typically machine-mediated and remote" thing was also done (most famously) by EM Forster (1909; collected 1928), and also by Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956 publication; based on a 1948 novella, though I don't know whether that element was present in it as I've only read the novel). Probably a bunch of others, too. I'd rank the oracular qualities of Asimov's sci-fi fairly low, so far as that matters (shrug), especially for any original and not already-tropey-by-the-time-he-did-it ideas of his.
Asimov's use of the trope in that story had more to do with creating a setting as much the opposite of the packed-like-sardines city-world of the first Robot Detective book than trying to predict anything, or to present the mostly-remote-interaction society thing as a novel notion per se. The defining characteristics of the society on that planet were extreme wealth, individualism, and personal-security paranoia. Their interaction habits fell out of those traits and preferences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird thing is that Evangelion and Lain (and other stuff like them) came out in the early 2000s, and really fit that era. Steins;Gate came out in 2011, but feels like an early 2000s anime, in both visual style, writing, mood etc. I suppose that's somewhat fitting given the content of the show though.
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).
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 and would try to get out of plot holes by introducing another 20 characters every so often (he liked designing them but not writing them). And for some reason his main strength was fashion but then he moved the plot to a world where everyone wears the same plain black and white robes.
Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example: Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the…
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 want to make more episodes.
Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0].
A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series?
0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.
Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example: Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the…
What’s the title of the book?
Third (edit: second) "Robot" novel (human detective pairs up with a robot partner and solves crime mysteries). The world's written that way to provide a polar-opposite setting from earlier settings for that series (an incredibly tightly-packed and bustling city). In both cases, the natives of the worlds have adapted to their situation to the point of pathology—people from Earth (the city-world) tend toward agoraphobia, for instance. The whole setting is part of a sci-fi trend of settings that suppose Earth will become crushingly overcrowded with humans, leaving space as the only escape from that.
EDIT: other poster is correct—I got the book wrong the first time (I had it as The Robots of Dawn, from the same series)
Lain catches a lot of flak in anime circles for being "edgy" or "deep for the sake of being deep" in that it tries too hard to be something thought provoking, but lacks any real substance. People still assign what they think the show is trying to say, but because the show is so abstract anything sticks. I tend to agree with the above point, but it has been quite some time since I watched it. I wonder if a new persona…
Even if you if you think the show is lacking substance, however you define that, there's more to a show than just the story. The character designs (and art direction in general), music, sci-fi setting, Apple references, etc. are all other reasons for its critical success & popularity (or maybe cult following is the right term, I don't know). That the soundtracks and artbooks are still so sought after is a testament t…
It'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 -…
Mostly because Chiaki Konaka is incapable of writing endings. I don't think Lain is that abstract (there's some early parts that look like it but I think are meant to be representative of schizophrenia), but it is hard to follow what the last episode is saying even though they're talking nonstop. With such a heavy script you can't always trust the translation to present it well either.
Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example: Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the…
What’s the title of the book?
Serial experiments lain is my favorite anime of all time. I'm shocked at hoe obscure it continues to be, even in hacker circles. I figured that coding in lisp is all she needed for the show to become a cult classic - but here we are...
https://lainzine.org (a Neocities site)