A friend died today. I didn’t know her in real life, but she was still one of the best friends I ever had. I met her on Twitter, and we became good friends. She was one of my best friends, actually, and I wish I could have known her in real life. I only learned that she died today, and at first I thought it was just a joke. But just now, only a few minutes ago, I’ve finally realised that she actually is dead, and I don’t know what to feel. I decided to write this because I couldn’t ignore what happened, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I wish I could have said goodbye to her, because I will miss her a lot. I wish our friendship could have become closer and stronger too. I’d have loved to have had one last conversation with her, but I guess at least the ones we did have were all nice ones. She was really funny and sweet, and I couldn’t imagine her ever saying a bad word to anyone. She was sensitive to the feelings of others, more than most people are. She used to say that she was a vampire, and I think that she was very good at being one.

And, though the shadow of a sigh

May tremble through the story,

For “happy summer days” gone by,

And vanish’d summer glory-

It shall not touch with breath of bale,

The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

This book is in many ways a mirror image of the first one- they’re both very similar, but with some elements reversed. Alice in Wonderland was set during the summer, for example, while this one takes place in the winter. The mood of this novel also reflects that seasonal shift slightly. There’s a sadder, more mature tone to this book. It’s very subtle, but still noticeable. Some people think it’s because Lewis Carroll was older when he wrote this, and so closer to death. Despite that, though, at heart it’s still a carefree children’s tale, more focused on humour and nonsense than on the gentle melancholy that’s detectable in many parts of the story.

The story begins with Alice chatting to one of Dinah’s kittens when she falls asleep and begins dreaming. Of course, like the first book, it’s never clear when Alice exactly does transition from the waking world to the dream world, but soon she has passed through to the other side of the Looking-Glass, where, just like before, she wanders about, encountering many strange and unusual characters who present her with wordplay and riddles. This book does have more of a plot to it than the previous one, though, as Alice sets out as a pawn to journey to the other end of the chessboard and be crowned Queen. (Much like how Wonderland was populated by playing cards and caricatures of famous figures from the Victorian times, Looking-Glass World is populated mostly by chess pieces and nursery rhyme characters.)

With this book, Carroll once again brings up many interesting questions that are never actually answered in the text. It’s actually quite fun to come up with theories about what it all means. For instance, is Looking-Glass World an alternate dimension to Wonderland? Not only are there the similarities and differences listed above, but Alice even encounters two characters named Hatta and Haigha, who in the Tenniel illustrations resemble the Hatter and the March Hare from Wonderland exactly, but none of the characters even acknowledge this. Actually, Alice never even mentions any of the adventures she’s had in Wonderland. Maybe she’s a different Alice entirely. And come to think of it, what if when Alice passed through the looking-glass, her reflection ended up in the real world and is meandering about in Victorian England, lost and confused?

The theme of identity pops up again when Alice finds herself in a forest that causes her to forget everything.

The riddle most people remember best from this book, though, is that of the Red King. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum tell her that he’s dreaming everything, and that if anything wakes him, they’ll all cease to exist. This gets confusing when you remember that he’s supposed to be a part of Alice’s dream, so he’s dreaming inside of her dream that she’s dreaming he’s dreaming about her and everything. Whose dream is it?

This book is filled with imaginative scenes and characters, but the one I love best is the White Knight. The reason why is because some people think that he was actually intended to represent the author, and it’s a pretty plausible theory when you think about it. He’s one of the few characters who isn’t rude to Alice, and she in turn treats him far more politely than she does most of the others. In fact, she’s almost affectionate towards this doddering, but harmless and well-meaning old man who somehow managed to rescue her from the Red Knight. He’s also the last person Alice encounters before going on the become Queen, and is fond of inventions, the sort of thing Lewis Carroll loved.

As I said before, Lewis Carroll was older when he wrote this book, and Alice Liddell, the girl he originally made the stories up for, was older too. And as the years went by, the Liddells became estranged from Carroll. Alice didn’t see him much after that, though when she was a young woman she did come to him to get her photograph taken. There’s been a lot of theories about why this happened, but most of them are pretty silly, and even kind of insulting to Lewis Carroll’s memory. I can’t explain why the Liddells distanced themselves from him, but I guess in Alice’s case that was bound to happen sooner or later. She got older, and so I suppose he didn’t seem that important to her anymore. Yet, he still cared for her, and was afraid of losing her for good. Even if they couldn’t ever be friends again, at least he could write this book to preserve his memories of it. And I don’t see how anyone could view him as a bad person after reading this, one of the greatest and most touching  fantasy novels of all time.

This is dedicated to my dear friend Angel, who died just recently, and loved Alice too. I miss her.

Bud Cort played the character of Harold in my favourite film, Harold & Maude. It’s a beautiful film, and I think that everyone should watch it at some point in their lives. Cort was the perfect person to play Harold. He appeared slightly younger than his age (he was in his early twenties at the time), and was very soft-spoken, with a gentle, quiet voice that suited both the character’s awkwardness and his morbid nature.

 Groucho was a famous actor and comedian from the early days of film. His real name was actually Julius Marx; Groucho was just a sort of character he played, who appeared in many different films (under different names, though, such as Doctor Hackenbush) along with his brothers. They were a popular comedy team, and each was brilliant in their own right. Groucho is probably the one that most people know best, though. He mostly relied on wit, sarcasm and silly conversations with others rather than physical comedy, though he did make good use of his humorous appearance and cigar.

Both are definitely two of my favourite actors, so I was very surprised and happy to learn that they actually knew each other, and were very good friends. They even lived together for a while. It turns out that after filming Harold & Maude, Cort started going to see a psychiatrist because his father had MS. Cort’s psychiatrist introduced him to Groucho, who happened to be another of his patients. For some reason, Groucho wanted to help Cort in some way, and after a car accident, suggested that he move in with him. And so, he did. Bud Cort now owns one of Groucho’s teeth, which was given to him as a present. Cort accidentally swallowed the tooth, but he managed to get it back. He now keeps it as a sort of memento of their friendship.

I think it’s a very sweet story, almost as sweet as Harold & Maude, but not quite.

His or her hymn cannot hear your sins.

Hearing her here cannot be unheard. She is a tree, grown and forming herself from pure abstract sound, creating organic architecture, textured by hums and sighs. She is humming her hymn for him, hesitantly, his height hearing sight combined. Singing her hymn is not a sign. It is her hymn, not his, and not there for their use. Hanging hymns upon the hooks of hunger, like old coats. Heresy breaks and speaks to the hymns, humbly like bees. It is caught in their humming, suspended overhead like a summer song of a painting. Singing for sins cannot combine the crime of the hymn, for her peals of pleading screams are drowning out the shouting. Her horrible hiding finds and slides into hedges here and there, to hear their hurting hinges upon which the hymns creak.

The hymns are old, and holding not a thing.

With this episode, there’s a very noticeable change of tone. The influence of the Wired seems to have become stronger, and the feelings of alienation and starkness are no longer hiding underneath the surface. While Layer 01 took place mostly during the day time, the majority of this one is set at night-time, in the Impossibly Cool Club known as Cyberia. (A possible reference to Siberia?) Still, there is a familiar sense of routine, though; there are certain shots that are to be found in every episode, mostly of the neon-lit city at night.

The episode opens with a young man at Cyberia, taking acella, which seems to be a kind of drug or something similar, that accelerates your sense of time and awareness of the world around you. This doesn’t go too well for him, though. I’m not exactly certain what happens,  but it doesn’t seem to have a very good effect on him. What’s really interesting, though, is that there is a girl at the club who looks exactly like Lain. After giving out to him, she leaves, and as he stares at her, we get to see the first shot of many depicting her inside of a static-filled TV screen.  The next day, Lain’s friends are all making jokes about the girl who resembled her. Once again, they come across as incredibly condescending- pretty much how my friends treated me when I was her age. Alice, the only one who actually treats her with any respect, suggests that Lain should join them the next time they go. After some persuasion, Lain finally gives in, which leads to this episode’s dark and enigmatic climax.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on in the plot than just that, though. Because the show takes its time, we get to notice a lot of small but very interesting developments, such as Lain’s growing obsession with the Wired. She starts using her phone in class, and after her new Navi (computer) arrives, Lain cannot wait to set it up, which her father is just as eager to do. Actually, speaking of her father, the few scenes that do feature Lain’s family are some of the most interesting. There’s one moment where Lain witnesses her parents kissing, which seems almost out-of-character, considering how aloof they all are from one another. And then there’s that weird comment Lain’s older sister makes about imaginary friends. It could be just a joke, but the awkward silence that follows suggests something else.

This episode contains the first mention of the phrase “Everyone is connected”, which ends up becoming arc words for the show. It also features the first appearance of the Men in Black, who stalk her without even bothering to conceal themselves properly. Not only that, Lain is haunted by ghostly figures and weird silhouettes- a sign that the boundaries between the real world and the Wired are becoming weaker? Whatever the case,  it certainly serves as an effective piece of psychological horror.

To end the review on a lighter note, Lain looks adorable in her teddy bear onesie.

This episode continues on from where the previous one left off, with the police arriving after the incident at Cyberia. As Lain and her companions are escorted out of the club, a mysterious voice-over asks who Lain of the Wired is. Such voice-overs pop up quite regularly in the show, with most of them being snippets of online conversations, or small chunks of exposition delivered in the style of a Wikipedia article explaining something about technology or the Wired. The latter sounds like a very awkward, wooden way of moving the story forward, but it actually works quite well, and is actually pretty fitting for an abstract, experimental show about the internet’s impact upon real life. The story moves in more than one direction, often going sideways as well as forwards, and sometimes ideas, concepts, events and even characters are presented to the viewer, with little (or no) explanation as to how they fit into the plot or help resolve things. It’s left up to the audience to interpret and come to their own conclusions about it all. SEL is one of the few works of fiction that manages to present its ideas in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the story, and still manages to be engaging emotionally. This is mostly because the emotional and intellectual elements are intertwined (because, after all, everything is connected), with the ideas being legitimately interesting ones rather than pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and the emotions being genuine and sincere. The creators of Lain know how to tell a good story, and this knowledge is essential, no matter how unconventional your work is. If the plot had simply been a vehicle for the creators’ ideas, it probably wouldn’t have been as thought-provoking. I am as fascinated by Lain’s character, personal problems and relationships with others as I am with what’s going on in the Wired, and the shows ties all this together perfectly.

But anyway, Lain is taken to the police station, where the police question her, with little success. After her ominous remark at the end of Layer 02, Lain has gone back being almost completely silent. The police call her parents, only to find that nobody’s home. (Lain’s family and their neglect of her just continues to get more and more unnerving.) Eventually, they let her go, and as usual it’s only Alice, out of all of Lain’s friends, who shows any concern for her, or regret about what happened. (The other girls would probably have left the station together before Lain’s interview was done if Alice hadn’t been there.) When she arrives home, Lain finds the house to be completely empty, which she just accepts as normal after a while, and goes to bed. This is one of my favourite scenes out of the whole series, with minimalist piano music playing in the background and a calm, still atmosphere. It’s also interesting to note that Lain’s Navi was left on the whole time she was away, and even says goodnight before she goes to bed. It’s as if the computer is becoming more and more a part of her life.

Despite her innocence, Lain seems to be a pretty self-sufficient character. She doesn’t panic when she finds her whole family is gone; she just gets on with it. Of course, by the next day, her family is all there again, as if they had never been missing in the first place. Lain’s mother is still as callous towards her as usual, criticising her for oversleeping, with no concern for how her daughter might have been affected by the traumatic events of the night before. Actually, nobody seems in the slightest bit affected by it. When she arrives at school (after hearing disembodied voices talking to her on the train), all the other girls are chatting and joking about it. One girl even asks if the guy who had caused all the trouble had been cute. They all seem disconnected from what happened, kind of like how some media can make people desensitised towards violence.

More weird voices and apparitions follow, until Lain finds that some unknown person has sent her an envelope containing some sort of device for her Navi. Her father either doesn’t know what it is or simply doesn’t want to tell her for some reason, and in the end she goes to Cyberia in order to get some answers. (Again, her parents aren’t really that responsible if they’re allowing a fourteen-year-old with very little social skills to wander around town at night and go back to the nightclub that she almost got killed in.) After encountering a young man who mistakes her for the “other”, more dominant Lain, she goes over to a trio of little kids (who are way to young to be anywhere near Cyberia; I don’t think there’s anyone in  Lain’s world who actually knows how to take care of children properly) who tell her that this device can give her unlimited access to the Wired. One of the kids remarks that he’s seen Lain on the Wired before, but again, this is the “other” Lain. People sometimes act differently online than they do in real life, and so this alternate version of Lain may be a split personality, or something similar. Or perhaps Lain just feels more confident online than in real life, and so can show another, less repressed, side of herself. Then again, that still doesn’t explain why this alternate version of Lain keeps on appearing in the physical world, or why Lain seems to have no knowledge of this.

As well as all of this, the level of paranoia in the show is steadily rising, as the Men in Black are now watching Lain’s house 24/7, and the enigmatic organisation known as the Knights are mentioned.

I am sad to say that I never got to be a proper alien. But I was a UFO for a while, and that’s something at least. It was much nicer than you’d expect it to be. My passengers were always pleasant, if a little hard to understand. You can’t breath in space, and it’s pretty cold there too, but luckily UFOs don’t care very much about that sort of thing.

A lot of people think they’re aliens, or want to turn into aliens, but that’s something they’ll never get to be. Instead, they will either stay human for the rest of their lives, or spend a brief amount of time as one of their vehicles. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s just the way things turn out.

Being a UFO is even kind of fun once you get used to it, though you don’t get to travel as much as you’d think. Aliens actually like to spend a lot of time just hovering over Earth, doing absolutely nothing.

In the end, every single person ends up becoming an alien. They don’t turn into one; they just become aliens, maybe just for a minute or a week, or sometimes for a whole year. Nobody even notices this, because the change is so subtle.

All of those alien abduction stories and UFO sightings are so fascinating. I sometimes wonder if any of those photos or videos are of me. It’s hard to tell with UFOs.

Aliens cannot sigh, and this scares me.

The aliens that flew me abducted a couple once. It was weird to feel two humans so inside of me. It seemed horribly wrong. With the aliens, I didn’t mind, because they were so inhuman. But these two people were just like me. In a way, though, it was nice. Once I got over the unease a little  bit, I began to realise that this was, in a way, the sort of moment I had always wished for. I was able to communicate with them, and get close to them without having to even say a word or use any body language. It was wonderful. I think that the world would be a better place if we could do that all the time. Imagine how perfect it’d be if we could just stop speaking altogether.

The best part of being a UFO was getting to meet some astronauts. They rubbed some dirt from the moon in my eyes, hurting me, and then wandered off. My eyes watered, and I let out a little cry of shock. I shouldn’t have been able to hear that in space. It’s a vacuum.

This book, along with Cameron Roger’s excellent The Music of Razors, is one of the best debut fantasy novels I have ever read. Both are so good that I can safely say they’re spiritual successors to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and are terrific examples of what modern fantasy literature can be like at its very best. Anyone who wants to start writing fantasy should definitely give them a read. They achieve something that very few novels in any genre can properly manage: subtlety.

Written by KJ Bishop, The Etched City is considered part of a literary movement called the New Weird. Along with Magic Realism (I’ll do a post on both of them, eventually) it’s one of my favourite subgenres of fantasy fiction. The New Weird is a subversive and strange movement, its main rule being originality. Rather than sticking to the tropes normally associated with fantasy (swords, quests, dragons, etc) the New Weird either tries to subvert them, or simply ignore them altogether. Bishop’s novel is one of the best things to come out of this movement, especially since it indulges more in classy elegance, as opposed to the pulpy, visceral, grotesque qualities that are already becoming a tiny bit clichéd. (Though I adore those too.) It’s set in a fantasy world, but there’s very little adventure or fight scenes here. (And it should be noted that, when they do appear, they’re handled very well.) It’s also not a feudal, Sword-and-Sorcery setting either, which is refreshing, but a 19th century-type setting. Bishop’s world-building skills are wonderful, because she makes this world seem pretty normal, and so when something fantastical does happen it’s all the more effective. I guess you could call it reverse Magic Realism.

The plot is not a very tight one, and focuses more on characters than events. It does tie together perfectly by the end, though, which is something I always love. When a book is planned well but at first comes across as organic and meandering, then you know it’s a well-written one. The main character is Gwynn, a bounty hunter who starts working for a criminal gang in the city of Ashamoil, where he also meets and falls in love with a beguiling artist whose works have otherworldly properties. His friend Raule, is also in the city, working as a healer. She collects weird foetuses. There’s lots of exotic imagery and ideas here, so if you like slow-paced, dark, mature fantasy with a poetic quality to them, then I highly recommend this novel. It’s nourish, with some faint Steampunk elements, and mixes together a lot of different cultural inspirations too. I usually prefer books set in colder places, with a stark and isolated feel, but this one is an exception, despite the powerful heat emanating from every page.

“Don’t worry. I’m still me.”

Lain has changed, something that has not gone unnoticed by her friends and family. First of all, she’s no longer new to technology, with her room now full of gadgets and computer screens. (This provides some of the show’s best visual moments, especially when you can see the screens reflected in her eyes.) She’s also spending a great amount of time modifying her Navi, and communicating with all sorts of people online. When her friends start talking about all the suicides that have been happening recently, they’re very surprised to discover that Lain had actually heard of them. Despite the fact that she still lacks social skills, she’s no longer as out of the loop as she once was. Even more surprising to them is that she’s suddenly far more talkative than ever before. (I found this kind of disappointing, though luckily she doesn’t end up changing too much. I despise it when people are confident, or talk too much.)

This is probably my least favourite episode from the series (though even at its worst, Lain is still amazing), mostly because the horror elements aren’t as subtle as usual. Mostly, Serial Experiments Lain makes use of psychological horror, and while we do get to see a few creepy apparitions every now and then, the scary stuff mostly stays lurking in the background or beneath the surface, adding more to the atmosphere than to the plot. Here, however, we get something with a more traditional horror story feel. The suicides mentioned above seem to be somehow linked (then again, everything is connected, thanks to the Wired) to an online game called Phantoma. People who have been playing Phantoma find themselves being pursued by spooky children, all the while convinced that they are trapped inside the game, despite the fact that they are no longer on the Wired. This is not a major plot point, and isn’t really brought up after this episode, but SEL isn’t all about just advancing the plot anyway, as I’ve said before. Despite the clichéd creepy children, the stuff to do with Phantoma is still very clever, as it shows how the boundaries between the Wired and real life are becoming more and more indistinct. One of the characters even has a pretty clever theory as to why the kids are present in the game, which fits in nicely with the ideas that are put forward in this episode.

The general theme of the fourth layer seems to be how people so easily confuse the online world with real life, and how the two can be affected or altered by one another. On the Wired, Lain is determined and fearless, using this attitude and her near-limitless access to find any information she wants, something that has already given her a reputation online. Those who use the Wired often take on different personalities, sometimes without even realising it. It greatly affects how society views such things as identity. For instance, when she asks a guy at Cyberia for information about the game (something that she doesn’t even have to be physically there for), ze says that it’s for kids, even though the people being pursued were all adults, and ze even claims that Lain would be too old to have any interest in it. This would be straightforward enough, except that this guy seems to know Lain physically, so he should have some idea of how old she actually is. The lines between the two realities are definitely blurring. Lain’s father even warns her that there is a difference between them, something that she is dismissive of.

As for the title of this episode, it also links to this idea. During one montage of people communicating over the Wired (they appear quite often), somebody mentions the Knights, a secret society of hackers, and voices the theory that they’re just a myth, a thought that exists within the Wired. According to zir, there is no actual group known as the Knights; the idea of them just came into being over the Wired, and this idea could be kind of seen as the Wired’s faith. This could be true, but then again, what about the Men in Black? Don’t they have some sort of connection to this organisation? Why else would they be waiting outside of Lain’s house, watching her?

Time passes strangely in comics.

It’s one of the many fascinating things about the medium, and while I am not an expert on comics, I am an enthusiast, and so I’d like to write a little bit about it here. Actually, I really want to do a lot of posts on this kind of thing, not just on comics but on story-telling in general, and the workings of fiction, especially when it comes to speculative or experimental literature. There’s so many interesting things to think about, stuff that I’ve only just recently started to get interested in but I certainly intend to learn more about. I’m only really just grazing the surface here, though, and I do have the suspicion that everything I say here is just trite and unimaginative, but at least I’m enjoying myself and attempting to learn new things. So please forgive me if I come across as childish here.

I highly recommend Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud to anyone who is interested in this sort of thing.

Spider-Man’s adventures were first published in the sixties. At the time, he was only around fifteen years old. At the moment, Spider-Man is supposed to be in his mid-thirties, despite all the time that has passed in-between. This is a good example of Comic Book Time, which is a pretty simple enough concept. Basically, in a lot of comic books and newspaper comics (though less so in graphic novels, because those usually aren’t published periodically), time moves differently than it does in real life, and so it’s hard to match up the two properly.

Time often goes by much slower in these kinds of comics than in real life, or the passing of time is ignored or left to be ambiguous, with the characters gradually maturing and becoming older. This sometimes happens by accident, because both the creators and the readers are growing, so the characters end up growing in some ways too. This isn’t always planned, and often happens very subtly, in an almost organic way.

Peter Parker as a teenager.

Peter Parker as an adult.

This is understandable, because if these comics stuck to normal time, then there would be some complications. The Amazing Spider-Man was a monthly comic, so if it had stuck to normal time, then Peter Parker would be too old to fight crime by now, or he’d even be dead. The same goes for most other superheroes. As for newspaper comics, a lot of the humour-based ones aren’t about telling a story where time moves forwards and the characters age. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any character development; it just occurs in a different way.

For instance, when the strip is just beginning, the cartoonist may not yet have a good grasp of how to use their characters properly, but as they draw more and more comics, they learn how to use them better, and so the characters end up having a stronger and more mature feel to them. Also, as I said before, the aging process can sometimes just end up happening whether the creator intended it to or not. Peanuts started out with most of the the characters as either babies or very young children (Snoopy was even a puppy, originally), but over the decades they got older, which was more fitting to the gently dark humour of the strip.

I guess it’s important to remember that, with some comics, the audience and intended mood/themes are important factors in all of this. With comic magazines like Spider-Man, X-Men and Superman, or with manga, there’s usually an ongoing storyline, with loads of different plot threads that often take months to resolve, and often pop up again, sometimes years later. If time stayed static, the reader wouldn’t be able to connect as well, because the storyline needs continuity. As well as this, many people develop a connection with these characters, and in quite a lot of cases, grow up with them. Spider-Man was relevant when he first was created because he was the same age as the kids who read his adventures. And, in order to stay relevant, he has to age along with his readers, albeit at a slower rate. 

A humorous comic about kids, on the other hand, often needs less aging, because turning the protagonists into teenagers or adults might take away from its original relevance. Calvin and Hobbes, for instance, kept its main character permanently six years old, and that was one of the reasons why it was such an amazing strip. Calvin and Hobbes was set within its own little self-contained, timeless world, whose beauty would have been destroyed if Calvin had aged even a year. (This is in the same way that Peanuts would have been less magical if we actually got to see any of the adults.) His staying six didn’t make the comic stagnant, because the comic wasn’t about him growing up. 

Gasoline Alley is a comic strip that’s famous for having its characters age in real time.

On the other hand, there are a few comics that age their characters in real time. Gasoline Alley (see above) is well-known for this, and has been running for decades now. And then there’s American Splendor (which I haven’t read yet, but soon will), which is an autobiographical comic where the main character obviously had no choice but to age.

Comic book time can sometimes get rather confusing, though, because, in comics, there aren’t really any exact measurements in time. Does every installment of a newspaper strip take place on a different day? What about when newspaper comics have story lines that last weeks, or even months? This is actually one of my favourite things about comics, though; measurements of any sort, or anything to do with maths confuses me, and so it’s nice to have a medium where you kind of have to just accept that time flows oddly, and not over-think things. (Which is, sadly, what I’m doing right now. But I’m not taking any of this seriously; it’s just for fun.)

The Family Circus isn’t technically a comic, but it is a good example of a newspaper cartoon where the characters haven’t really aged.

When it comes to monthly superhero publications, though, it gets even more confusing. In a few old Spider-Man comics, he’d mention stuff like having fought [X] villain last month, which means that every single month, one new adventure would pop up, and then the rest of the time, everything would be normal. But where it really starts to get confusing is when you start to think about how, if Spidey is in his thirties now, but it was the sixties when he started out, shouldn’t he be just living in the nineties or something by now, instead of the 2000s? Of course, stuff like this involves willing suspension of disbelief, which is very common in lots of fiction, but especially when it comes to superheroes. It’s also another thing I would love to write about here soon.

I hope that this post wasn’t too awful. Please forgive me if it was.

At the moment, I am completely in love with Coldwave, which I think is the French version of Post-Punk music, with links to stuff like minimal electronica (which is also brilliant). If you’re into Gothic rock or dark wave, then you’ll probably adore it as much as I do. In fact, I actually like French Coldwave music a lot more than its English counterpart at present.

Finding out about Coldwave music was such a thrill for me, because it’s the sort of thing that I had always been looking for and hoping to discover. The moods and emotions it conveys are ones that I sometimes feel (or wish I could feel) myself, but can never find a way to properly explain to others. Coldwave isn’t the only type of music that gives me this sensation (trip-hop and ambient works too), but it is one of the few that manages it properly.

Coldwave is like melancholy, elegant synthpop, with substantial style and stylised substance. It is dark in a mature and subtle way, and makes me think of empty rooms, blank walls, black-and-white photos and fragile nudes. Coldwave is perfect to listen to during a rainy evening in the city. It is feminine and maybe a little bit futuristic, too. I can just imagine a lot of trendy, unusual people listening to it in some sort of underground lair.

Also, if you want to listen to more Coldwave/dark wave stuff, then I highly recommend these three YouTube channels.

As I said before, one of my favourite images from the show is of Lain’s room, dark and filled with computer screens. Here, the transition from bedroom into some sort of hacker’s lair is complete, with Lain’s father (who is, by this point, very concerned about what’s going on) entering to discover what her room has become- it’s inexplicably cluttered with large amounts of expensive-looking technology, including a coolant system. The floor is even covered with a shallow pool of water, for some reason. How Lain acquired all of this happened off-screen, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. Stuff like this is one of the many reasons SEL has a surreal, magic realist feel to it, and actually explaining stuff like this would destroy its atmosphere. The extreme redecorations her room went through seem to be more about conveying the mood than anything else, and about showing how Lain’s time on the Wired is affecting the reality around her.

Inside the Wired, Lain communicates cheerfully with the Knights, laughing and chatting in a carefree manner. “Why are you guys so nice to me?”, she asks, but whatever answer they give her, we never get to hear. The audience only hears the Knights’ voices in this scene as electronic murmurs, kind of like a more unnerving version of the adults’ voices from the Peanuts cartoons. It’s pretty interesting how the Wired is represented in the series, especially because it’s such an abstract concept in some ways. I usually think of sites like WordPress or Twitter as physical things, and so it kind of confuses me then when I remember they’re not. They aren’t actual places or anything, yet I can see them and interact with them. Maybe if I understood more about computers, I wouldn’t be so confused about all this. But anyway, because of this I find the way the online world is represented here to be very intriguing. Often, it is shown as some sort of void, which Lain usually can just float around in, though there’s one scene in this episode where Lain walks down a very slim pathway suspended in black nothingness. Lain herself appear as she normally does in real life, though most other people use avatars or false identities. Like with her room, there’s a trace of magic realism here, too, as it isn’t made clear whether Lain is actually physically in the Wired, or merely so sucked into it that the audience just sees it this way.

Lain’s father isn’t the only lone who’s concerned. Alice, as usual, is the sole one of her friends who seems deeply troubled by Lain’s behaviour. Lain is now constantly on the Wired, even during lessons, and when told that she shouldn’t be alone all the time, Lain replies that she meets people all the time online. Eventually, Lain’s friends coax her into going out with them, and they even get her to wear some make-up. However, things once again get strange. A child stands motionless with his arms outstretched to the sky, and other children begin to do this too, as the clouds part, revealing an apparition that resembles Lain. Interestingly, this is one of the few weird events that everyone seems to notice, and not just Lain herself, or one or two others.

When Lain comes home, she is very determined, instantly going to look for information. (She almost seems to have switched personalities with Mika, who may have been totally broken by what happened in Layer 05, staring with an eerily vacant expression at the TV and oblivious to everyone else.) In the Wired, Lain speaks to the Cheshire Cat- an Alice in Wonderland reference. (As you might imagine, this show did get some inspiration from the Lewis Carroll books. They both share themes of personality and identity, and Lain’s friend Alice was even based on Alice from the books.) Lain is unimpressed by the Cheshire Cat, and acts uncharacteristically dismissive of zir. She asks about the game from Layer 04. Ze isn’t much help to her, but does mention something called KIDS. Lain uses this information to find out about the Kensington Experiment, which was carried out 15 years ago. She confronts Professor Hodgeson, who is living out his last few moments over the Wired, who explains that he had been studying parapsychological ability in children, and was trying to harness their mental energy. This resulted in many children dying, and so he destroyed everything to do with it. However, information about it must have gotten on o the Wired, and now someone is trying to use the game KIDS to replicate the experiment.

Lain’s emotions are at their strongest here than in any other episode. She’s far more human than before, maybe because she feels more comfortable online than she does in real life. Usually, she’s far more reserved, but here we get to see her happy, angry, outraged, annoyed and so on. She even rushes out to confront the Men in Black at the very end, which is pretty impressive.

I always feel a little bit nervous writing posts like these, because the people who read my blog all seem to be really groovy, so I don’t want them to see how incredibly un-groovy I am by talking about this sort of thing. Still, this is something that I do feel the need to discuss, especially since I want to focus a lot more on how to craft a story. Please forgive me for this.

I feel that touching moments are some of the most important in fiction, and when done right, they really can be some of the most gratifying, both for the audience and for the creator. Of course, these are incredibly difficult to write properly, and they do take a lot of thought and skill in order for the audience to be properly affected by them. There’s no set guide as to how to write them, because sticking to a formula doesn’t really work for stuff like this. At the same time, however, most of these moments or scenes usually share a lot of elements in common, often slightly intangible ones. The most obvious of these elements is sincerity; you can’t have something hollow masquerading as heartfelt or poignant. It just doesn’t work. These moments are often quite delicate, because they reflect the fragility of the emotions they’re meant to convey. If not written with honesty and with respect for the audience’s intelligence, they can easily just shrivel up and die, or appear trite and synthetic. (Not that something being synthetic is necessarily bad, but we’ll get to that in another post.)

As well as this, subtlety is hugely important. I think that, if you’re a writer, one of the most important things to remember is that subtlety is hugely important, especially if you want your work to be taken seriously. I guess  most people are aware of how important subtlety and sincerity are (and I might seem a little bit trite myself for even talking about them, since I’m basically just repeating something that many others have said before), but at the same time, I do come across a lot of works that really don’t understand how to be either. True, sincerity is more of a spontaneous thing that cannot just be generated at will, but it still has to be channeled properly into written form. Otherwise, it’ll just fall flat. And as for subtlety, even some very mature, adult works can’t get it quite right.  It requires extreme effort and concentration, and a lack of subtlety can sometimes even take away from how sincere your work comes across as. Sometimes, but not always. Sincerity and subtlety often go hand-in-hand, but there are times when something a bit cruder can have just as big an impact.

I find it kind of sad that, on one hand, you have lots of over-the-top stuff that looks like it was inspired by a focus group, and on the other, you have art that tries way too hard to be edgy and challenging, completely forgetting that having a softer side doesn’t make you any less of an artist. Of course, not all art needs something touching in it (because diversity is always essential), but being dismissive of that sort of thing is just immature. As for the focus group kind of stuff, I feel nothing but contempt for it. This can be kind of problematic, since there are some people who will actually get annoyed with you for that. There’s quite a number of people who believe that, since something is just entertainment, you shouldn’t bother thinking too much about it, which is an attitude I am strongly against. Just because I don’t find melodramatic films like Titanic to be moving doesn’t mean I hate anything romantic. I love romance in fiction, just a different kind. I prefer love stories and tragedies to be executed in a different way, with less theatrics and more quiet moments. Then again, who am I to judge which is better? I guess it’s important to appreciate both.

Some of my favourite touching moments are ones that come from unexpected places, such as cartoons, or works of a normally very dark and edgy nature. These always seem to be some of the best, since they come out of nowhere, almost spontaneously. I guess this is because they don’t really have any need for moments like this, and yet they put them in anyway. It isn’t because the creators felt they had to do it to satisfy their audience, but more because they wanted to satisfy themselves. When something like this happens, it isn’t even that the work in question is showing hidden depths or anything; it’s just that they’re showing a side to them that we hadn’t really noticed yet. The work’s scope was already broad enough to include heartwarming bits or tearjerkers, which is obvious because of how well the creators can balance all the different moods; we just hadn’t had the chance to be shown that yet.

I feel like this sort of thing reflects real life just as well as something that’s more traditionally realistic. After all, in reality, everything isn’t always silly, but it isn’t always serious either. And I guess it’s kind of sweet that even some of the darkest, toughest artists out there have felt the compulsion to create something bittersweet, because it shows that, no matter how much of a rebel you are, you may still need to express something more vulnerable. Even Throbbing Gristle, one of the most terrifying and shocking bands ever, has done a love song.

It’s these that often haunt me the most, because of how perfect they are. I admire anyone who can achieve this sort of wonderful moment in something normally thought of as wacky and silly, or as sick and scary. And they’re always so fleeting too, which bothers me because I want them to last longer, so I can stay inside of them forever. And I guess this brings me to one of the most important elements of a touching moment: it should be unsettling in some way. Even if it’s happy and uplifting, it still has to make the audience a little bit uncomfortable. I don’t necessarily mean uncomfortable in a bad way; I just mean that it affects them so much, they cannot get it out of their minds, and it troubles them as they try to make sense of it. Because, for something to be poignant or a tearjerker, it has to be slightly inexplicable or mysterious, too. Nobody can truly explain why these powerful emotions are being felt, but that’s what makes the work so engaging and so inspiring. You don’t even have to write something that’s obviously sad; often, people feel things that they cannot explain, and if you can convey these subtle, fragile emotions through art, then you have created something that is truly beautiful.

I have a very lovely friend who happens to be a very talented songwriter. She can play both the ukulele and the guitar, and she just put up her most recent song, “Under”, on YouTube just a while ago.

It’s a pretty groovy song, is it not? Here’s another one she did:

And if you liked those (which I really hope you did), please take a look at her YouTube channel. It’d make me happy if you did.

“That’s all, folks!”

Imagine most fictional worlds as taking place in a single, simple room, one with four walls. The fourth wall is invisible, and it is this one that the audience views everything through. Breaking the fourth wall is when a character becomes aware that they are fictional, and acknowledges this in some way. They can do this through aside glances, mentioning that they aren’t real, or even speaking to the audience/creator. Sometimes, the creator gets involved in things, and that can get very interesting indeed, since the writer/artist is basically the fictional reality’s god.

Breaking the fourth wall is often used for meta-humour, such as when a character explains that ze did something because “it’s in the script”. When done well, these jokes can be both funny and clever, but some of them are so over-used by now that they can come across as a bit lazy at times. I guess that, when people first started doing it, the whole idea must have been really original and creative, and so while there were (and still are) writers and artists using it in clever and innovative ways, there were many other people who just copied them in the hopes of looking intelligent. The important thing to remember, though, is that merely being self-referential isn’t enough to create something that is funny or smart. That can end up just coming across as pretentious or a little childish. Anyway, breaking the fourth wall doesn’t always have to be done to be clever or anything like that. A lot of the time, it can just serve as a simple joke, perhaps a little predictable, but still funny.

Despite being a bit over-used in some ways, I still think that the idea still has a lot of potential to it, and there’s plenty of books, TV shows, comics, films and plays that use the idea in some very interesting ways. I also like it when people break the fourth wall in a less light-hearted way. This is less easy to pull off, because it really requires a lot of effort to come across as serious rather than silly, but when done right it can be incredibly effective. The whole idea of a fictional world having walls is pretty interesting, too. Does a fictional universe have boundaries? What shape is it? Is there only a void outside of where the scene is taking place? I think that the phrase was originally to do with theater, because most plays are acted out on a stage, which kind of resembles a room with a missing door. This can be seen with comic panels, picture frames and TV screens, too, though breaking the fourth wall becomes much more abstract when you consider literature, music or poetry. How do you define the shapes of their worlds? And what about a play where there is no stage, or where the audience can sit in the stage itself? There’s still so many different things to be explored when it comes to this.

There seems to be wires, coming out of the hole in the wall of Lain’s room, almost like vines. I read on TV Tropes that all the computers and stuff in Lain’s room looked like it was growing, almost organically, which is an idea I really like. I may not understand most of the references to technology or philosophy in the series, but this is the sort of thing I can understand, and it’s one of the reasons I love Lain.

Lain’s started talking to her Navi, and notes that the version of her on the Wired is becoming less and less like her real-life self. (Actually, it’s kind of interesting how, even in our non-Cyberpunk world, we see the online world as not being real, as if it was an imaginary world.) Her sister is watching her in the hallway. Mika is still in a pretty much zombielike state, which makes her one of the creepiest things in the show so far. (Which is a rather big achievement.) Lain is a little confused by Mika’s behaviour, but I guess compared to everything else that’s going on, it’s the least of her worries. (Still, Lain’s family is scarily disconnected- they’re dysfunctional in the most functional of ways.)

This episode is a little bit more “normal” than some of the others. Most of its weirdness comes from all the conspiracy stuff that’s going on, but many of the scenes involving Lain have a much more realistic feel than usual. There’s one very cute scene where Alice and Lain get to be alone together for a while, and Alice even apologises to Lain for the way she’s been treated. As for the rest of Layer 07, though, there’s a lot of paranoia fuel to be found. We get to see a businessman who will become very important later on, and a weird, unhygienic guy wanders the streets in some sort of headgear, desperate to join the Knights. At one point, he mentions deus, which I think means God. Later on, the phrase “Deus ex machina” (God in the machine) is supposed to have some sort of significance in the series, though I’m still not sure exactly how.

Who are the Knights? It seems like they could be anybody, really. It turns out that the Knights and the Men in Black are two separate groups, though, as the latter take Lain to meet their leader. He’s waiting for her at the general office at Tachibana labs, which happens to be the place that Lain’s father works. A tachibana is supposed to be some sort of little orange, and the company is meant to be Apple Computers, basically. There’s supposed to be a lot of references to Apple in the series, and it’s supposed to make a lot more sense if you have a good knowledge of computers and their history. Sadly, I know nothing about this, so it’s all lost on me.

The leader of the Men in Black scares Lain by telling her that her presence is unnatural, and that the Knights have a special interest in her. He asks her if her parents are even really her parents. It’s quite possible that they aren’t; Lain can’t even remember their birthdays. Lain is scared, and to be honest, I’m scared, too. A lot of the scary stuff in SEL comes from the overwhelming parts of everyday life, the stuff we don’t want to think about too much or we’ll collapse. Lain does end up collapsing for a while, only to suddenly change into her more dominant self, refusing to let these people intimidate her. She claims to not care that the boundaries between the two realities are falling apart, and leaves. Following this episode, things get much darker than they already were.

This is a film that I have mixed feelings about. I enjoyed watching it, but I’m still not really sure how good a film it actually is. One hand, it’s funny, original and touching in places. On  the other hand, there’s a lot of plot points that are left unresolved (not in a good way), and I get the feeling that it doesn’t really know what sort of film it wants to be. And then there’s the way it portrays Goths. It’s a really pleasant surprise to see that the makers of a big film like this actually had some knowledge of the sort of music Goths listen to, and the sort of clothes they wear, but there were times when I felt that the Goth characters were more caricatures than real people.

The main character, Cheyenne, is a middle-aged Goth and former rock star, who bears an obvious resemblance to Robert Smith of The Cure. (Cheyenne’s real name is even John Smith.) He retired after a fan of his committed suicide, and now lives in a large Dublin mansion with his wife. Cheyenne is now incredibly jaded and washed out, appearing uncomfortable and awkward in every scene he’s in. Not only that, he has an incredibly nasal voice, which I actually kind of liked, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that would get on a lot of people’s nerves. His best friend is a young Goth girl named Mary, who happens to be played by Bono’s Daughter. I found their relationship really interesting, since I’m a big fan of the whole “unlikely friendship” genre, but sadly, it isn’t really developed that much, and she’s kind of forgotten once Cheyenne learns that his father is dying, and travels to America to see him. This is my main problem with the film; it really seems like two films that were squashed into one, without enough time given to balance them properly. It could have branched off into a lot of different directions, but misses the opportunity to do so. There’s stuff about Cheyenne playing matchmaker between Mary and some non-Goth boy who fancies her, and this other really confusing subplot about her missing brother, neither of which are ever really fleshed out. It doesn’t even seem intentional; it’s just as if the writers forgot about it completely once they moved on to the other parts of the movie.

Aside from that, though, This Must Be The Place is really good. By the time Cheyenne arrives in America, his father is already dead, and so he never gets the chance to make his peace with him. Instead, he decides to track down the Nazi who had abused his father in Auschwitz. From this point on, the film becomes an oddball road trip sort of picture, with Cheyenne encountering all sorts of interesting people along the way. This could easily have resulted in a lot of twee, forced weirdness, but it actually works really well, and there’s plenty of clever, funny moments in it. Unfortunately, the ending wasn’t really that satisfying, and actually kind of annoyed me. It’s not necessarily bad, but if you’re into the Goth subculture, then you probably might take issue with it. I guess a big problem that this movie has is that it almost understands what it’s doing, but not quite. It almost gets what Goths are like, but it still seems to portray it as a kind of childish thing. Goths are self-deprecating by nature, but at the same time they do want to be taken seriously and not treated as just a walking joke. It’s cool to see a fictional Goth who isn’t some moody heavy metal fan, but I don’t think the creators actually “got” what musicians like Robert Smith are all about. Smith (the real-life one) still has big hair and wears make-up, but still looks cool despite being middle-aged. And people forget that The Cure did plenty of upbeat pop songs, too. Still, I guess that maybe This Must be The Place isn’t about all Goths. Rather, you could say that it’s more about someone who adopted the Goth look in an attempt to create an identity for himself, but unfortunately it just wasn’t right for him, and he never figured out how to leave it all behind.

It’s a confused film, but still worth watching more than once. 3/5

I really love fantasy novels set in towns or cities. They have this certain atmosphere about them that I really like, an atmosphere that I first discovered after reading two novels that were also my first introduction to the world of modern fantasy: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Ever since then, I’ve enjoyed searching for novels that manage to convey that certain strange feeling all urban spaces possess. Communion Town is the most recent of these that I’ve come across. In many ways, it succeeds very well, though I’ll grudgingly admit that there are times when it doesn’t quite get it right.

Communion Town is technically a book of short stories, but I feel it counts as a novel too, since each of the ten stories are set in the same city, and all are slightly linked in some way. Every story shows a new side of the city, which is just as fleshed out as the characters themselves. The book is kind of a cross between two subgenres of fantasy fiction: magic realism and urban fantasy. The city is treated as an ordinary, mundane place for the most part, but as each story unwinds, the elements of strangeness it hides are subtly revealed. Monsters exist within the city, which is something that its inhabitants treat as normal, though they do not cross paths with the creatures very often. There’s other strange things, too, and, like the best strange things, are never fully explained. For the most part, the author, Sam Thompson, manages to make this work, with every story containing a new and intriguing idea. Sometimes, though, it feels like he’s trying to convey a certain mood, without actually succeeding in doing so. Still, every chapter is worth reading, as they all contain some surprise, and a great amount of imagination. It’s not perfect, but what novel is? I’m definitely looking forward to Thompson’s next book. Apart from the stories involving the monsters, my favourite would have to be The City Room, which had one paragraph that was so emotionally intense and so incredibly accurate about childhood that I had to stop reading for a while. 4/5

This is one of my favourite episodes. It gets the atmosphere just right for the most part, and the soundtrack is wonderful, with lots of minimalistic, electronic bleeps that really adds to and heightens its sense of paranoia. It’s also got some wonderfully creative visuals, especially when it comes to the bits involving Lain and her mental breakdowns. Lain’s character seems to be developing a bit, too- she even looks a tiny  bit older in this episode, and appears to be more confident in her abilities, as she becomes more aware of who she truly is. Of course, she’s still a frightened and innocent character at heart, but that doesn’t mean she can’t have strong moments. This episode is also a very quiet one, and as I’ve said before, its subtlety and use of silent moments is part of what makes Serial Experiments Lain such a great series. It’s also what makes it so creepy at times, and Layer 08 is one of the most terrifying, tapping into adult fear and paranoia so as to make viewing it incredibly unsettling in places.

The internet can be kind of a scary place. It’s so large and vast that it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by it, especially since there’s so much stuff that you could easily do wrong on it. This episode shows the nasty- or rather, nastier -side of the Wired, as rumours are spread, including one about Alice. It turns out that she fancies one of her teachers, and that secret has now been leaked to the whole school. Lain is suspected by her friends, but Alice, of course, is certain that Lain couldn’t have done it. Lain herself isn’t so sure after going into the Wired during school and encountering “God” again, though. There’s this really great image of Lain surrounded by rows of people without any heads, just chattering, disembodied lips, drowning her in multiple conversations, some of them rather unpleasant and disturbing. (One of these faceless people mentions something about a creepy, childlike creature appearing in somebody’s room- this has already been mentioned a few times previously during the bits where Lain is using the Wired, and it does become important later on.) This entity who claims to be God speaks to her there, taunting her and claiming to be the other Lain. “God” explains that ze is not all-powerful, and neither did ze create the Wired, but ze has always been present there, everywhere. Lain’s alternate personalities become very important in this episode, with their presence becoming stronger and more prominent, rather than staying in the background.

Back in real life, everyone is staring at Lain, including her teacher. A message on her screen reads “peeping tom”, and upon seeing that, she runs from the classroom. As she races through the hallways, she sees that everyone in the school is looking at her, though it is possible that she’s just become incredibly paranoid, and is merely imagining things, or exaggerating them in her own mind. Lain is desperate to find Alice now, convinced that it was her fault all along. And, later on, it turns out that it sort of was. Lain’s evil self (and she is, indeed, blatantly evil; this alter ego of her’s is one of the few things in the series that isn’t really subtle) has been watching Alice fantasize about her teacher, and has been telling everyone. Alice is strangely not surprised to find evil Lain sitting on her bed while she’s online; she’s shocked to discover who has been spreading all the rumours, but takes evil Lain’s presence there for granted, not ever wondering how she came to be in her room. This, again, is one of the magic realist bits of the series, and I think it’s meant to show how confused the two realities have become, and how they’re overlapping. Nothing is private anymore, because Lain of the Wired is everywhere, and Alice ends up paying for the innocent mistake of not realising this. 

There follows a really cool visual bit where the two Lains confront each other. Lain becomes surprisingly aggressive, and mentions that her evil self is acting like the side of her she hates. Lain appears very tranquil on the surface, but it seems like she might be hiding a lot of internal conflict, and is a little bit emotionally repressed. Lain is then surrounded by more rows of people, all with bobble heads resembling her. (Identity seems to be very important in this episode.) “God” appears to her for the first time, rather than just being a disembodied voice, taking the form of some sort of silvery fluid. Ze tells her that she’s always been present, sharing people’s private information. Lain retorts that he’s lying. Ze then tells her that she has the power to delete everything.

And so, Lain tries to delete the memories of what happened, and it works. The next day, Alice and the rest of her friends act as if none of it had ever happened. What follows is one of the most poignant scenes in the anime, one that seems to foreshadow what happens later on. Confident Lain abandons Normal Lain’s body. Normal Lain might as well be a phantom, as she is replaced by one of her alter egos. She’s on the outside now, and all she can do is watch as they all talk and laugh together. Even Lain’s shadow looks insubstantial, like the shadow of a glass of water. It seems almost like Lain is witnessing the relationship she could never have had with any of her friends, acted out by an impostor. Totally isolated now, Lain turns to her Navi for solace.