I've started watching Serial Experiments Lain, and it's pretty weird so far. One interesting thing I've noticed is that the show uses some of the same voice filters as Killer 7.
The last thing we watched, cartoon/animu edition
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Ohh, there's one I need to go back and rewatch. It has been years. Don't expect it to get any less opaque as you go. The best way I ever described it to anyone, I told a friend I was recommending it to that it tells its story in a way that reminds me of the way Donnie Darko told its story. I need to get back into going through my anime backlog. Although, I think I'm going to rewatch Lycoris Recoil first. I enjoyed it and I never did watch the additional episodes added last year.
Loved the show back then, but honestly I think it was more for Abe art and some of the weird fucking thing that happen later on. Some of the message was a bit too early, it works better with social media rather than the then state of the art forum board.
Still absolutely worth watching, I use Lain as my avatar for a bunch of stuff online and still regularly listen to the OP. Would love for them to reboot it, but I can't see it being done with another art style and I don't think Abe is still active.
I was right to bring up Killer 7, because Serial Experiments Lain is pretty much on the same level of abstraction. Actually, it might be even less comprehensible somehow. I've watched 8 episodes and I have no idea... about anything. Everyone acts like aliens wacked out on hallucinogens. I don't think there's anything the last 5 episodes could possibly do that would make the events of the show understandable to me.
At least when you have an assassin with 7 different personalities and 7 different bodies fighting invisible suicide bombing terrorists you know where you stand.
At least when you have an assassin with 7 different personalities and 7 different bodies fighting invisible suicide bombing terrorists you know where you stand.
Watched Season 2 of Superman: The Animated Series. I'm quite enjoying the show overall, but I do find it a bit funny that both of the first two seasons have had a fairly major Darkseid episode as the penultimate episode, and then the last episode/two-parter episode be a relatively lighter affair.
I appreciate it, but even certain characters or the personalities themselves have no idea what the fuck is going on in the game. And if they do, they're not saying shit.
Of course, the game makes no sense, but at least you understand "kill the terrorists." You get that one solitary strand of purpose that you can keep a death grip on throughout a tidal wave of incomprehensible events.
If you say so. I saw the anime once, but it was one big fever dream that I never needed to revisit.
I get that. I have said that Lain is kind of my jam... but to put that into context, I'm someone who liked Southland Tales almost as much as Donnie Darko. So... I get that my take on something might be the oddball response.
Donnie Darko made more sense than Lain, and least I was able to enjoy it. even though I'm not the biggest fan of DD.
Southland Tales is a brilliant piece of satire that's become more relevant each year since it came out and comes a lot closer to feeling like a Pynchon novel than anything P.T. Anderson ever directed.
Love Lain, too, although for different reasons. Lovely little piece of Y2K tech paranoia. Chiaki J. Konaka was really cooking with it and Texhnolyze. And Digimon Tamers, of course. Shame what became of him.
Watching The Way of the Househusband.
It's a comedy about a former yakuza who treats chores and housekeeping with the intensity and dramatic heft of someone who's carrying out terribly important and/or violent orders from his oyabun (which in this scenario would be his breadwinning wife). Every episode is a farse, made up of five or six quick slice-of-life vignettes. Very silly and cozy and funny. Just don't tune in for the animation - it's slideshow tier.
It's a comedy about a former yakuza who treats chores and housekeeping with the intensity and dramatic heft of someone who's carrying out terribly important and/or violent orders from his oyabun (which in this scenario would be his breadwinning wife). Every episode is a farse, made up of five or six quick slice-of-life vignettes. Very silly and cozy and funny. Just don't tune in for the animation - it's slideshow tier.
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Donnie Darko is made to sound a whole lot more confusing than it actually is, IMO. It's a complex and a bit convoluted at times, but I had a fairly solid grasp on what was going on by the time the movie wrapped up.
Finally finished Serial Experiments Lain. I realize I only started the show on Monday, and it's just 13 episodes (and half of one was a clip show that I skipped through), but man does it feel a lot longer than that! It just feels like nothing of any consequence happens at any time. It's just a stream of random nonsense interspersed with extremely long reaction shots and then the show just forgets about whatever happened and moves onto the next random thing. None of it has any coherence, or lasting impact. It's just stuff happening and pseudo-philosophical ramblings. There isn't a single character that reacted to things in a way I could understand.
I feel like the show completely forgot to establish it's premise and left me trailing behind as it's laying down what it thinks are amazing reveals and plot twists and I'm still trying to wrap my head around why the fuck the internet can magically affect the real world?! I think the explanation was supposed to be in the episode that had around 10 conspiracy theories randomly cut into it, but it didn't make any sense.
I hate shows like this because I get invested, and spend all that mental energy trying to fit everything together and then it just doesn't fit. It's like spending hours trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle and when you are done you realize you were missing a third of the pieces. It's just frustrating, and feels like a waste of time and effort. Maybe it's more enjoyable with the aid of certain substances, but I wouldn't know.
There's one last thing that bothered me more than anything else in the show, and that is all the water on the floor of Lain's room! Everybody walks into this room, full of electronics, and nobody comments on the fact that there are puddles of water everywhere! That's going to ruin the building, and think of all the mold and mildew that is going to grow in that dank environment! Not to mention the shock hazard.
Also there was a teacher dating an 8th grader? Yikes!
I feel like the show completely forgot to establish it's premise and left me trailing behind as it's laying down what it thinks are amazing reveals and plot twists and I'm still trying to wrap my head around why the fuck the internet can magically affect the real world?! I think the explanation was supposed to be in the episode that had around 10 conspiracy theories randomly cut into it, but it didn't make any sense.
I hate shows like this because I get invested, and spend all that mental energy trying to fit everything together and then it just doesn't fit. It's like spending hours trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle and when you are done you realize you were missing a third of the pieces. It's just frustrating, and feels like a waste of time and effort. Maybe it's more enjoyable with the aid of certain substances, but I wouldn't know.
There's one last thing that bothered me more than anything else in the show, and that is all the water on the floor of Lain's room! Everybody walks into this room, full of electronics, and nobody comments on the fact that there are puddles of water everywhere! That's going to ruin the building, and think of all the mold and mildew that is going to grow in that dank environment! Not to mention the shock hazard.
Also there was a teacher dating an 8th grader? Yikes!
I haven't seen Southland Tales, but I didn't like Donnie Darko at all either, other than the cover of Mad World. I found it kind of obnoxious and the only way to make 'it was all a dream' worse is to make it 'it was all a delusion caused by brain death'. I'm sorry, it doesn't matter how clever you think you're being, there isn't any way to make that twist good.
I've always thought that was kind of the message of things like Lain, or Donnie Darko (although as you, thebobmaster, and BrawlMan pointed out it did come together.) And even your dislike of how Darko wrapped up is a part of that. It really was a kind of corny wrap up, and I still see that as intentional. The dénouement was really short, comparatively. It really ends like it drove off a cliff. Most times I would see that as a writer going, "can't figure out a way to finish this... EJECT!" But one of the themes of Darko was how important things were in the present, regardless of how things would end. And that was true for the story's structure as well. It was at its best in act 2, and the ramp up to the finish. Lain was kind of similar; I always found it at its best when it was just being beautiful, dreamlike, and bizarre. And much like my actual dreams, it is just stream of consciousness that makes little linear sense.
But, if you didn't like Lain or Darko then best steer clear of Southland Tales. You will probably wind up in the same category as the vast majority of folks who saw it. Most people don't like it.
I love Donnie Darko, but its one of the only movies I can think of where the director's cut is worse than the theatrical cut.
Yeah thats mostly what I remember, you watch it for the art and the "wtf was that?!", but honestly the story was trying a bit too hard to sound edgy/smart and ended mostly making noise. I do recall that there were a couple of in show UI that I really liked.
Apparently the PS1 game is really interesting, but I never played it, not even sure its available in english.
Funny you should mention that, because half the reason I decided to watch the show was because I've been watching a lot of Dungeon Chill, and he has a massive video going through the game (and a ton of supplementary material) that I wanted to watch.
Also, he mentions a fanport of the game to browser that includes English (and other language) subtitles that you can play here: https://3d.laingame.net/#/
Had a sampling of anime with friends and acquaintances.
The first one was Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers, a kind of legacy sequel to some action show of yesteryear. I arrived halfway through the first episode so I could not figure out what the plot was supposed to be, but it was very anime: lots of action involving teenagers in colourful armored costumes and some gobbledygook exposition. It was very colourful and the animation was really good, so props for that, but I wasn't exactly hooked by it.
The second one was The Invisible Man and His Soon-to-be Wife, an office romance comedy based on a four-panel manga. It's about an invisible man and a blind girl who work at some sort of agency tasked with finding missing persons or something, and consists mostly of short, humorous vignettes instead of a longform narrative. It's also set in a fantasy world with animal people, elves, aliens and all sorts of silliness. What I appreciated the most was that it didn't feel the need to explain itself: there's just blob aliens at the agency in one scene, then a dog-person in the next. Making all the goofy stuff feel so mundane is what made it charming. It was cute enough, if a bit overdone in how awkward the main female character was. Not anything special, but I enjoyed it well enough.
Head and shoulders above everything else we watched was Journal with Witch, where a teenage girl loses her parents in a car accident, and moves in with her blunt, likely autistic aunt. There wasn't much of a plot in the first episode aside from her moving in, it was more about how each character was dealing with the aftermath of a sudden death. I found it incredibly engaging, and very well done in dealing with such complex and potentially fraught subject matter. It's hard to say what I specifically liked about it, because it felt like it was mostly setting up explorations of themes like isolation, loneliness and grief. But I found the drama very gripping, the characters interesting, and the artstyle beautiful. I'm going to keep watching it.
After that there was The Darwin Incident, a story about the world's first "humanzee", ie. a boy hybrid of man and chimpanzee named Charlie. Exceptionally for an anime it's set in the U.S, but that didn't seem to come to play much in the three episodes we watched. Charlie enters high school, and what follows felt mostly like a treatise in subjects like veganism, animal rights and militant activism. The three episodes didn't really grip me. Veganism as a subject I have very little interest in, and the extensive dialogue scenes discussing the subjects I mostly tuned out. What I was puzzled by is why they decided to make Charlie basically an expressionless robot when chimpanzees are one of the most expressive animal species on the planet. I don't know if it's budget issues or anime's general tendency for stoic, blank-slate protagonists, but come on! Your main character is a freak of nature, you should make him boisterous and lively and expressive.
The last thing I watched - or more like suffered through - before leaving was the prequel(?) to the latest Fate series, Fate Strange Fake. According to the host the series was supposed to be accessible to people without knowledge of the larger series, which to my understanding is one of the deepest lore black holes on the planet on par with franchises like Warhammer 40k. If the intent was to make it accessible, calling it an abysmal failure would still be too kind. It brought back every frustration I had with my previous attempt with Fate, which was five episodes of Fate: Zero back around the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. To call the narrative incomprehensible and the storytelling inept would both be understatements: I can hardly even call it storytelling. It felt more like being recited an 800-page RPG rules manual out loud. There was hardly a single line of dialogue that wasn't some sort of exposition: endless yapping about the world mechanics, the various factions involved, and the backstories of the zillion different characters. But not, you know, any sort of attempt to explain what exactly the Holy Grail is in this context. Or a single reason to give a single shit about anyone.
It was the epitome of what I personally call "nerd-wank": things happen, but without any grounding or context everything just becomes hollow spectacle. Characters say things out loud in dramatic tones to signal that what they've said carries huge significance, but because I neither have an idea of who anyone is nor what anything means, they might as well have been making fart noises for all it mattered. At the end two characters spouted more exposition at each other amidst explosions and particle effects, and I was bored out of my skull. What's even more frustrating that less exposition would actually have made it more comprehensible, because the concepts involved are ultimately not that complex: a tournament involving mythical figures is about to begin, and various factions are using rituals and artefacts to summon their respective champions to the fight. That's really the gist. But the show just kept blabbering on about mechanical minutia, items and pointless detail in favor of giving me anything to engage with. How anyone is supposed to get into this garbage let alone enjoy it will likely elude me for the rest of my days.
The first one was Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers, a kind of legacy sequel to some action show of yesteryear. I arrived halfway through the first episode so I could not figure out what the plot was supposed to be, but it was very anime: lots of action involving teenagers in colourful armored costumes and some gobbledygook exposition. It was very colourful and the animation was really good, so props for that, but I wasn't exactly hooked by it.
The second one was The Invisible Man and His Soon-to-be Wife, an office romance comedy based on a four-panel manga. It's about an invisible man and a blind girl who work at some sort of agency tasked with finding missing persons or something, and consists mostly of short, humorous vignettes instead of a longform narrative. It's also set in a fantasy world with animal people, elves, aliens and all sorts of silliness. What I appreciated the most was that it didn't feel the need to explain itself: there's just blob aliens at the agency in one scene, then a dog-person in the next. Making all the goofy stuff feel so mundane is what made it charming. It was cute enough, if a bit overdone in how awkward the main female character was. Not anything special, but I enjoyed it well enough.
Head and shoulders above everything else we watched was Journal with Witch, where a teenage girl loses her parents in a car accident, and moves in with her blunt, likely autistic aunt. There wasn't much of a plot in the first episode aside from her moving in, it was more about how each character was dealing with the aftermath of a sudden death. I found it incredibly engaging, and very well done in dealing with such complex and potentially fraught subject matter. It's hard to say what I specifically liked about it, because it felt like it was mostly setting up explorations of themes like isolation, loneliness and grief. But I found the drama very gripping, the characters interesting, and the artstyle beautiful. I'm going to keep watching it.
After that there was The Darwin Incident, a story about the world's first "humanzee", ie. a boy hybrid of man and chimpanzee named Charlie. Exceptionally for an anime it's set in the U.S, but that didn't seem to come to play much in the three episodes we watched. Charlie enters high school, and what follows felt mostly like a treatise in subjects like veganism, animal rights and militant activism. The three episodes didn't really grip me. Veganism as a subject I have very little interest in, and the extensive dialogue scenes discussing the subjects I mostly tuned out. What I was puzzled by is why they decided to make Charlie basically an expressionless robot when chimpanzees are one of the most expressive animal species on the planet. I don't know if it's budget issues or anime's general tendency for stoic, blank-slate protagonists, but come on! Your main character is a freak of nature, you should make him boisterous and lively and expressive.
The last thing I watched - or more like suffered through - before leaving was the prequel(?) to the latest Fate series, Fate Strange Fake. According to the host the series was supposed to be accessible to people without knowledge of the larger series, which to my understanding is one of the deepest lore black holes on the planet on par with franchises like Warhammer 40k. If the intent was to make it accessible, calling it an abysmal failure would still be too kind. It brought back every frustration I had with my previous attempt with Fate, which was five episodes of Fate: Zero back around the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. To call the narrative incomprehensible and the storytelling inept would both be understatements: I can hardly even call it storytelling. It felt more like being recited an 800-page RPG rules manual out loud. There was hardly a single line of dialogue that wasn't some sort of exposition: endless yapping about the world mechanics, the various factions involved, and the backstories of the zillion different characters. But not, you know, any sort of attempt to explain what exactly the Holy Grail is in this context. Or a single reason to give a single shit about anyone.
It was the epitome of what I personally call "nerd-wank": things happen, but without any grounding or context everything just becomes hollow spectacle. Characters say things out loud in dramatic tones to signal that what they've said carries huge significance, but because I neither have an idea of who anyone is nor what anything means, they might as well have been making fart noises for all it mattered. At the end two characters spouted more exposition at each other amidst explosions and particle effects, and I was bored out of my skull. What's even more frustrating that less exposition would actually have made it more comprehensible, because the concepts involved are ultimately not that complex: a tournament involving mythical figures is about to begin, and various factions are using rituals and artefacts to summon their respective champions to the fight. That's really the gist. But the show just kept blabbering on about mechanical minutia, items and pointless detail in favor of giving me anything to engage with. How anyone is supposed to get into this garbage let alone enjoy it will likely elude me for the rest of my days.
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