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Amanda's Serial Experiments Lain Notes

The following entries for Lain are all researched and provided by Amanda Alvis, who I give a very big thank you to.

Layer 01: Wierd
Chisa Yomoda: An average schoolgirl that is shy and reserved that goes to Lain's school and once walked home with Lain from school. In the first episode, she commits suicide or a "bodydump". She, however, leaves her personality on the Wired, and thereby, sends e-mails to everyone she knew in the Real World. She represents how one could actually believe that the Wired, or the Internet in our case, could be believed to be more real and appreciative than the Real World, or everyday life.

The Iwakura Family
Iwakura Yasuo: An actor or scientist that raises and actually is concerned for Lain. He even buys her a brand new top-of-the-line NAVI computer. Reappears in Layer 13: Ego as a God/Father figure, a Bodhistavva figure, or a higher intelligence,whether divine or alien.

Iwakura Miho: Another actor that acts as Lain's cold, impersonal mother.

Iwakura Mika: Another actor posing as Lain's older yet indifferent sister. In Layer 05: Distortion, she goes insane due to her reality crumbling down around her. Compared to Lain at first, she is the self-gratifying Id which Lain becomes at near the middle of the series. She even tries to connect to the Wired through her insanity by impersonating a 56 k modem trying to connect and always getting a busy signal through a telephone line.

Mizuki Alice: Lain's best friend that tries to incorporate Lain in the other girls's activities such as going to Cyberia, a club and cafe for a younger, more technological crowd that plays hard-core house and techno music. Her name, Alice, comes from Lewis Carroll's heroine from Alice in Wonderland. However, Mizuki Alice, isn't proud of her name. She is kind and caring, and in Serial Experiments Lain, she represents the good and the love of humanity in which Lain is trying to preserve and protect.

Iwakura Lain: The main character of the series. She is a 13-year-old girl that is extremely shy and withdrawn. Her most distinguishing feature is the long strand of her hanging down the let side of her face with a cross-style band on it. She has an extremely quiet and demure demeanor to her. This means that she hardly has any friends save for Alice, Reika, and Julie. Reika and Julie frequently tease Lain though. Alice, who has always leaps to her defense, is her only true friend. Her father, Yasuo, is concerned about her. Her mother and sister, Miho and Mika, are cold and indifferent. Her family is quite ordinary though they have a cold, distant, and strained relationship. At the beginning of the series, Lain appears to be a normal reserved school-girl. It is soon apparent that her experiences are hardly normal. She can see and experience inexplicable things that others are ignorant about. She, like the others in her class, gets an e-mail from Chisa Yomoda that asks Lain to come to the Wired. This prompts Lain, who has always been apprehensive about NAVIs,(computers), to work up the courage to explore the Wired.

As she goes deeper into the Wired, the other "her" appears in places she would never go, perpetrating actions she would never do. The "Lain of the Wired" is this deadly doppleganger. In Layer 02: Girls, it becomes clear that her image was a sign of power and of fear. The guy on Accela who shot himself recognized Lain or her doppleganger, claiming she had "no right" to make him do anything. Alice and the others thought they saw her at Cyberia before as well, but they dismissed it since the Lain they saw at Cyberia was the complete opposite of the Lain they knew. In Layer 03: Psyche, the first lines are about a girl named "Lain" on the Wired, and she is known by J.J.(the D.J. at Cyberia) and Taro (a kid that is of a trio of kids who are regulars at Cyberia). Taro tells Lain that he would want to go out on a date with the "wild Lain"-even though she had only been to Cyberia once prior to this visit.

As the episodes go by, more and more damage is done as she comes closer to meeting her doppleganger. Already plagued by the knowledge of the Lain of the Wired, her reality and life as she knows is dismantling around her. She loses her faith in the reality that her family is her "real" family in Layer 05: Distortion. By the time Layer 07: Society rolls around, she has already been informed that her family is a fraud. In Layer 08: Rumors, she loses Alice, her best friend, due to the antics of the "Lain of the Wired". By this time, she is isolated again from the outside world. She starts to question whether or not she was actually "born" as humans are born as well.In Layer 10: Love, the question that is brought up is that of God and whose choice is to be a God. Just as Eiri Masami did by trying to become the God of the Wired, yet he was eventually overthrown by Lain as well as killed by her NAVI.Therefore, Eiri Masami as the male magus overstepped his bounds by trying to become God via creation of Lain by creating a homunuclus by arificial ribosome. Whether or not she is a God or born as humans are, that is undecipherable. To tell you the truth, I believe my interpretation is that she is just an ancient primal Goddess, either Gaia or Eris, given human form as a teenage girl through a sophisticated biological experiment through Tachibana Labs, Inc. with a bit of Roswell alien technology. It would explain her powers of accessing memory, from people living or dead, or mainfesting her whole form in the Wired. She can also make her other "self" appear in the Real Wold. She can cause chaos and disorder, just as Eris did, or she can be amother-like figure like Kannon or Gaia. She is just emerging into her powers by limited telekinesis. It can cause a large disturbance in both the Real World and in the Wired.

Layer 02: Girls
Psyche: Pronounced "puh-shoo-kay". In Greek, it is"sy-key". Psyche was the soul and lover to Eros in Greek mythology. In Serial Experiments Lain, it is an add-on chip that, when attched to the motherboard of a civilian NAVI, it enhances the power of a normal NAVI computer, especially the newer models. It isn't ready to be availiable to the public. It is said that it comes from Taiwan, and may have originated from the Knights. Using the Psyche chip, one can connect and interface the Wired without the use of devices such as keyboards, mice, or even voice control. Instead, it allows "full range and full motion" via Protocol 7 and becomes analogous to human thought processes. This might be the true analog Memex that Vannevar Bush had envisioned.

Layer 03: Psyche

Layer 04: Religion
PhantomA: A new MUD that can be played online in the Wired. The PhantomA game unknowingly got crossed with a kindergartner's online game of Tag. This game utilizes the brainwaves of the players, and drains their energy.Normally, tricking players through a simple video game isn't simple. However, PhantomA exists much more than a simple video game. It is a GUI (Graphical User Interface), as well as a "sensorial interface". The Graphical User Interface (GUI) covers up the Command Line Interface (CLI) of the mechanisims used to hypontize the players. If the CLI was visible, the game would not be realistic or easily playable. Therefore, players need to work with the GUI in order to operate the game, while at the same time, aren't aware of how the system is using them. In Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning ...was the Command Line, he defines sensorial interface as "a user interface...more than just graphical"(Stephenson, 52).

A sensorial interface takes control of all the senses, forcing the user to truly feel like he is in the game. Through this device, PhantomA is made more convincing. Due to this, players are more susceptible to the mind control process that ensues. If one feels like he is in reality, he will take it as reality, and unless he is met with "metaphor sheer", relizing the world is a hoax, he will stay in that world, and is subject to its effects and surroundings.

Layer 05: Distortion
Prophecy: A foretelling of a highly significant event, usually by a prophet or an oracle. In Layer 05:Distortion, this subject is brought up when Lain asks the doll in her room to tell her a story that she has never heard before. Iwakura Mika, also in this episode, goes insane and becomes withdrawn due to her hallucinations and the reptetiton of the phrase: "Fulfill the Prophecy". To be more exact, the full phrase that drove her mad was: "The other side is full...The dead have no place to go. Fulfill the Prophecy".

Men In Black(M.I.B.s): Two men in black suits with EyeNAVIs on their heads. Karl is the one with blonde hair and clear sea green eyes that tells Lain that he loves her. The second one either appears to be of a Latin origin or of Japanese origin, and has a ponytail. Both of them work for Tachibana, Inc., and at one time, knew about Eiri Masami. Usually, men in black aren't like these two. In American "myth", as it might be called, these people are known for UFO cover-ups or something that a specially trained govenment agent might do for a top secret agency. They are also known as the Spookshow.

Layer 06: KIDS
The Kensington Experiment a.k.a the K.I.D.System(KIDS): An experiment that was initially made to study the PSI power of children. It actually came to be an a system that harnessed and controlled the PSI power of kids through the outer receptors attached to their heads. As a consequence, this absorption of PSI power left the children drained as Professor Hodgeson later found out. When the power overflowed and overloaded the system, it killed the children involved due to the immense psychic energy that was released. Professor Hodgeson, in his grief, smashed the K.I.D.S System to pieces and swore that nothing like that would happen again. He couldn't bring the souls of those children back though. The plans for the K.I.D.S technology was ressurected by a Knights member when he/she retrived the files from his trash can on his NAVI coputer. That is what led to the ressurection of K.I.D.S. This is what caused the giant shaped like Lain to appear in the clouds above Tokyo.

Professor Hodgeson: The man that created and destroyed the K.I.D.S. System. He explains the K.I.D.S. technology and the Kensington Experiment to Lain in Layer 06: KIDS.

The "Lain" Giant in the Clouds: A psychic illusion generated by the PSI power of children by the ressurected K.I.D.S. System of the Knights. This might be an allusion to that Lain might be a goddess or as the Knights trying to communicate to Lain to try being the "God" or "Deus of the Wired".

Cheshire Cat: A disembodied mouth of a Wired user that talks to Lain and guides her poorly to Professor Hodgeson. This is a direct reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's character of the Cheshire Cat.

Layer 07: Society
Society and Lain: By this point in the series, we pretty much are drawn into Lain's journey from an ordinary, extremely shy school-girl to a 13-year-old superhacker wunderkind. Her whole reality has been disjointed and is about to become offline due to some earth-shattering questions about her life by a Tachibana, Inc. CEO. He asks her about her parents and her own family. she cries because she doesn't know the answers to his questions. It appears, ultimately, that the portrait of the family in S.E.L. is a reflection of our own modern society. So, family ties are very important in our society as a whole. Lain's family turns out to be unreal at this time, and so does any family bond established throughout. Her family exists only in name and they allseem miles apart. In short, this is a family that shows no social purpose. This is quite a similar trend because in our hectic information age, society is actually faced with a negative trend of individualisim.

Literally, her family is falling apart on the outside. With the rise of the Internet, we have paid for it. As all this is happening, her life begins to break down around her. Her very existence is in question throughout the rest of the series. All of the anchors in her life, one-by-one, are taken away. In Layer 05: Distortion, Lain begins to question her family by asking in a soft voice if her parents are really her parents. In Layer 07: Society, Lain is taken to Tachibana Labs by the Men in Black on the premise that all her questions will be answered. After all the exec's questions about her parents and her past, she cries and relizes that she doesn't know the answers. She now knows that her family wasn't hers to begin with. They just acted that way until she was able to fend for herself. They had always known what she was--and Lain, stripped of her family and identity, could only stammer that it was all a lie. She had to be real and she had to have a real family. As Lain's family leaves her, her father sneaks back to the house to say goodbye to Lain and to tell her that he really did love her.

Even more devastating to Lain was when she found out about Alice's secret--and she was accused of being the one to tell everyone about it. In actuality, it was the Lain of the Wired that spied on Alice and started it all--but Alice believed it was the Lain she knew. Alice cuts herself off from Lain as a result of feeling betrayed and hurt that Lain would do something so low. To add insult to injury, that was the most hurtful thing that could happen to Lain. Not being able to see Alice so hurt, she does everything in her power to set things right again.(Recounted from Layer 08: Rumors).

In Layer 06 : K.I.D.S., the knowledge that her presence on the Wired was extremely strong, and Professor Hodgeson commented on her her strength of presence and power on the Wired. The Cheshire Cat told her that people are only limited to having one "real" body part on the Wired and yet she was able to have her whole body on the Wired. In Layer 07: Society, it is revealed to Lain that she is a program created by Tachibana, Inc. to correct Eiri Masai's coding in the 7th gen IP protocol. All that mattered to Lain was that Alice had become a helpless victim in these conflicts. Alone again, Lain became isolated again. Left with only the Wired, she connected and fought to find a way to correct things for Alice.

Ultimately, she relized that the only way to save Alice was to sacrifice herself; or delete the memories of herself from the minds of other people and then reset everything that had happened. Eiri's argument that Lain had always existed on the Wired as an omnipresent being who had always seen everything and had access to other people's memories caused her to motivate her to do this. Lain deleted herself, freeing Alice from the anguish of her secret.

Lain not only sacrificed herself for Alice, but also because she wasn't meant to exist in the Real World, or everyday life. Over the series, it is questioned whether Lain is real and the deep price of being either real or non-existant. All in all, though Lain's world appears normal ('life-as-is'), it is implying a dark and bleak outlook. It is basically Marshall McLuhan's 'global village', but seen through ominously dark shades.

Lain Bear Suit: Lain's teddy-bear pajama suit, though cute, is alos a symbol. It is the barrier between her and her family at home, as a matter of fact, it is an exaggeration of this need. It might also be the "Wendy Complex", a girl's version of the Peter Pan Complex, the psychological complex in which one has the urge to keep one's childhood forever.

Nezumi's NAVI: Nezumi's NAVI, although a backpack-visor unit, has Apple's "HotSauce" a.k.a. "Project X" browser interface. HotSauce was developed at Apple for a different browser interface.

"Lain of the Wired": Lain's alter-ego or alter-egos on the Wired as it may seem. Later in Layer 08: Rumors, this "Lain" will be a "Peeping Tom" that sees Alice's secret affair with a teacher. "She" causes lain to be isolated again from society. Apparently, this "Lain" is the one causing all the trouble in Lain's life. "She" brings Lain an omnipresent state and quality to her, a state and quality of being everywhere and seeing everything everyone does at once.

"Deus of the Wired": The "God of the Wired", or so it seemed for a time. This "God" had the Knights as worshippers until they were all killed or they commited suicide. In fact, the "Deus of the Wired" was Eiri Masami, the creator of the 7th generation IP protocol.

Reality and Lain: As in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, the questions of "Who am I?" and "Is this real?" come into play frequently throughout the latter part of the series. Ultimately, like Lain herself, we all come to these questions once or multiple times in our lives; some earlier than others even. Halfway through the series, we see the lines and borders between the Wired and the Real World begin to blur, meld, and eventually fuse and seperate. With this hapening, it is obvious as to why Lain is confused about her reality and her own identity. As she finds out, the answers are hard to find and define after all is said and done.

It becomes hard to find all these answers within the state of constant flux that the series is always in. All in all, she finds out she is herself and that both worlds, the Real World and the Wired World, are one.

Layer 08: Rumors
See above entries for "Lain of the Wired".

Note: About Lain being everywhere at once and looking up people's secrets, this is similar to "surfing" the Net on multiple sites and looking at 'blogs, or weblogs. Weblogs are similar to a person's diary that is sent out on the Internet for everyone to see. With the power of the Internet and the ability to have multiple sites up, that kind of gives us a certain omnipresence, and by looking at a person's journal on the Web, it gives us knowledge about their secrets and everything about that person.

Layer 09: Protocol
Eiri Masami: A former member of Tachibana Labs, Inc. and the "main" villain of the series itself. He was the one who devised the Protocol 7 code which allowed humans to connect to the Wired without the use of "devices". After being found out and fired, he commited suicide by throwing himself in front of the Yamanote Train Line # 13. Right before this however, he downloaded himself onto the Wired itself via the Protocol 7 code with the Schumann Resonance encoded within it. This code enabled himself and others such as Chisa Yomoda and the raver on Accela to be translated over to the Wired. Once on the Wired, Eiri took over the position as the "God fo the Wired" or the "Deus of the Wired" that the Knights had been worshipping since the very start. Over the course of the latter part of the series, he tries to convince Lain that she must love him since he is her creator. However by about Layer 12: Landscape, Lain comes into her true power and knocks Eir off his proverbial pedestal as the Deus of the Wired. By becoming the Goddess of the Wired, she discovers the "loophole" in Eiri's plan. In the end when he discovers that there is an actual God and that he was just an acting god, it throughly devestates him as he tries to pull all his physical body parts/organs together into a huge, Akira-esque, ever-swelling metamorphosing conglomerate. In this form, he attacks Lain and Alice. Lain kills Eiri with parts of her NAVI. After the "Reset", he is just an ordinary disgruntled worker trying to quit his job as a programmer.

Douglas Rushkoff: Author of several books including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, Exit Strategy a.k.a. Bull: An Open Source Novel, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judiasm, Playing the Future: What We Can Learn From Digital Kids, Ecstacy Club: A Novel, The GenX Reader, Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture as well as several other articles, books, and readings, social and pop culture theorist, journalist, and software developer.

This following quote is from the sources of fusionanomaly.net and Alex Burns at Disinfrormation (www.disinfo.com) concerning his 1992 book Cyberia:

"The book,Cyberia, was the first of several books to capture the new subcultures that arose from the collisions of psychedelics, raves, industrial music, hacking, chaos theory, and early computer networks.Through his direct experince and seminal case studies, he conveyed the memetic drift of the 1960's hippie rebellion mutating into other new forms. 'Cyberia' offered readers an insider's view into hedonistic explorations of human consciousness. In 1994, it is best read as a snapshot of cyberculture's early years."

Marshall McLuhan: A visionary of mass media. In media, he studied both their overiding effects on society and their character as an extremisim of the senses. He also created the concept of a "global village" and to predict it's social effects.

Mebious: The manufacturer of Lain's NAVI's cooling system. On the pressure gauge, "mebious.co.uk" is written. There is a company in Pleasanton, California called Mobius Computer Corporation and that the mobius strip, discovered by Ferdinand Mobius in the latter 1700's, is a representation of Jean Baudrillard's principle of postmodernisim.

References to Movies and Literature

Reference to 2001: A Space Oddesey: On one of the casings of a NAVI in Lain's room, there are the words "HAL 5000" written on it's side as a tribute to the HAL 9000 computer aboard in that very movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Reference to George Orwell's 1984: In Layer 07: Society, the people who created the series decided to pay tribute to the ultimate story of the individual against society story by putting "Big Brother" stickers on the computer nerd's computer system.

Layer 10: Love

Layer 11: Infornography

Layer 12: Landscape

Layer 13: Ego
Ego: The title of Layer 13. According to Freudian parts of the psyche, an ego is the true deciding persona of a person and one's true self. It is pretty much a balance beteen the wildly primitive and childlike Id and the overtly-cautious Superego.