Lain's Alternate PS1 Ending
Life & Death on the Wired
(CW: suicide)
The ending of the PS1 Serial Experiments Lain game is something that sat with me for a while in how it relates to the TV show ending. In the game - oh by the way Lain got a PS1 alt-history visual novel retelling in 1998, produced coterminously with the anime, you can play it here - Lain commits suicide in order to ‘ascend’ into The Wired, as opposed to kinda-maybe-never really existing to begin with as she does in the anime. The story leading up to this ending is completely different, primarily involving Lain in therapy, but the same themes are all there in both versions at their core so these endings do speak to the same concepts.
I think I bounced off it a bit at first because it does not stand out in its execution. The PS1 game is not well-made, with a god-awful interface and clunky progression, and a tiny budget that can barely squeak out a few animations to sell its key moments. Some of them work but their quality is a few tiers below anything the anime had. It has its good parts as a game, don’t get me wrong, just that on selling individual ‘peaks’ via art it is not gonna shine.
Also Lain kills herself with a gun?
It’s...jarring, it’s not the kind of thing Lain seems like she would do. It’s so analog and brute-force, connecting to an entire world of violence and power that Lain never had anything to do with. I can see why it is done this way - as I have mentioned before, Serial Experiments Lain is ‘secretly’ a member of the horror genre and is pulling from a lot of that genre’s tropes. The visual novel has a lot more elements of gore and body horror, leaning into that identity harder, so this level of violence fits better here. Additionally in Japan guns are a lot more rare as a thing a child would have, they are Advanced Technology out of reach, a bit more similar to a computer (in 1998) than in the west. Hell, Lain came out before the Columbine High School Shooting happened (1999!), kids-with-a-gun just had a different meaning everywhere. It is still off-putting though, a method chosen for omg-shock that drops your jaw when you are 14 but falls flat as an adult.
Once the execution wore off though, its implications for the narrative really started to claw at me. The “Lain of the Wired” concept is bound up in the common cybernetic idea of the ‘upload’, porting yourself over to live on the internet. The anime has that in spades of course, Lain eventually lives only as a ghost in the machine; but it’s overall a happy ending, one she chooses to protect her friend and where she gets to look out over them as essentially a caring spirit as they live their lives. It buys into, fundamentally, the possibility of the upload to preserve the self.
The PS1 game sets up a similar premise through its buildup - Lain grows digitally powerful but emotionally distant from everyone in her own life, each of her relationships falls apart one by one, her attempts to compensate for that within reality fail, and so she rejects reality. She chooses to ‘upload’, but through doing so she turns away from the idea of preserving the ‘human’ self at all, as becomes apparent as she builds up to her suicide via her conversations with her “Lain of the Wired” alter-ego:
This is a far harsher view on that process - “the rest is just data”, hot damn. Throughout the game you see this ‘data’; the game is structured as you, the player, diving into a computer system pulling up archived logs, often out-of-order, to tease out her story.
In between the logs you find these little audio-visual clips of fragmentary & disconnected sentences with no connection to the ‘story’. She likes cake, she is getting bored of her ‘outfit’, she shares philosophical musings on various topics.
And some, particularly the later ones, are stained with a desperation to connect with others. “Do you want to find me?” “Only play with me” “Stay with me”:
But this is *all* Lain is. There is that “Lain UI”, which stands in her for ‘will’ and present existence; but it is mechanical, it never engages or responds, an abandoned prototype. Everything else you read is a log of past Lain, things that happened before, when she was alive. In those logs she even explicitly rejects the idea of making a “backup” of herself, referring to her past life as “useless”. The fragmentary data files you find are what is left. The way they combine facts, trivialities, and desires gives them a semblance of life, but only a semblance; just the embers of a ghost still clinging to the machine. That is what the vaunted “Lain of the Wired” amounted to.
Which is way more accurate to what we are all going to be, on this internet on our earth. ‘Uploading’ isn’t real, concepts like these are used in stories as literary devices to analogize to the audience, and to that audience “living on the internet” looks exactly like the fragments Lain left behind. That life is made of social media posts, art, websites, publications, a web of data. Yet it’s a web that all ties back to the living person, that only has life when you know there is a real person behind it all. Otherwise it is just data.
Of course “your posts don’t have consciousness”, that is trivial to say, but it goes beyond that, to how the things on here lose their relevance so quickly once separated from the ‘consciousness’ that made them and drives them. “Your posts don’t have meaning absent the creator behind them” is perhaps a bit bolder statement, and while not logically true it is emotionally true, true in important ways, for the audience to see in Lain’s ending a version of their own end. How many posts from the dead do you read? That truth hits.
This ending is I believe a case of medium-is-the-message; anime just aren’t in the business of having finales with that level of bleak nihilism. But an experimental horror game aimed at the niche obsessive fans, the ‘franchise’ isn’t riding on that, it can afford to roll the dice. Which is why, despite all the game’s technical flubs, it is the ending I still get sparked into thinking about in odd moments months after playing - like today it seems, if I am writing this.
Throwing a bit more kindling onto the embers I guess.