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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
Can finally cross Serial Experiments Lain off my watch list. And I thought I wasn't smart enough for SAC 2nd Gig. About 6 episodes in, I looked up "when does Lain start making sense," and I read a comment that I think helped my enjoyment of the series tremendously:
minor spoilers
5 years ago, reddit user alvaropacio wrote
Understanding that I shouldn't take anything too literally, whether it's happening in the Wired or not, helped me to at least avoid trying to pick apart every detail about the show. It also helped me to grok that the line between the real world and the Wired isn't as concrete as we might think.
What I could understand were themes of the internet playing a bigger and bigger role in people's lives, and people having different personalities online and offline (though not as literally as Lain's). It's been said before, but this show was eerily prophetic about 21st century life. There's even an Apple Vision Pro user in it! There are also more philosophical questions about the nature of reality, which I am just smart enough to notice, and not smart enough to actually talk about.
End of series spoilers
What even is reality? For example, at the end of the series, we see a new world, one where the people who we've seen dead are still alive. Did Lain literally resurrect them? Did she prevent them from having died in the first place? Maybe she made them entirely anew, and buried the evidence of their deaths like she did in the one shot manga. Maybe they only exist in the minds of the people who perceive them. Maybe that very perception is what makes them real.
My understanding is that the ambiguity is the point, and I cannot wait to see other people's interpretations.
It gets the same rating I gave to SAC 2nd Gig. My inability to understand it hurt my viewing experience a bit, but I can acknowledge that it's objectively extremely good. 9/10, bears a few dozen rewatches.
ETA: The more I think about the show, the more I lean towards giving it a 10. The last show that had me thinking this hard was From The New World, and it got a 10 from me because it had me thinking hard about the ethics and implications of the events of the series for so long afterward.
The biggest thing I'm arguing with myself about is the concept that "if no one remembers it, it's the same as if it never happened at all."
spoilers for the 18 page doujinshi
It seems like the series leans towards that concept being true. However, at the end of the doujinshi, Lain finds the collar she cut off of the Bike-chan that was destroyed. Of course, the fact that Lain doesn't remember Bike-chan's destruction and subsequent recreation doesn't mean it never happened. No amount of memory erasure, no perfect copy of Bike-chan, will erase the fact that the one she started with was destroyed.
Bike-chan is, of course, just a doll, but this carries some implications for the events of the series. All those people that died... died. Of course, this doesn't matter to those that are still alive. To them and the people who know them, they've always been alive, and they aren't any less real than the originals.
A rant about the realness of copies of people, spoilers for Star Trek's 'Second Chances' and Black Mirror's 'San Junipero'
Idunno. I have similar feelings about other media with these kinds of perfect copies taking the places of their originals. The big two that come to mind are Star Trek's transporters, and Black Mirror's San Junipero. Everyone who goes through a transporter gets The Prestiged. There's even an episode of TNG where we see a Riker who wasn't properly killed by the transporter. Is the Riker that arrived on the Enterprise any less real than the Riker that was left on that planet? Of course not. He's the Riker that we've come to know and love. Well, one of them at least.
In San Junipero, the Kelly and Yorkie that we see at the end of the show are not the same Kelly and Yorkie that we saw in the beginning. Ultimately, the decision to upload their consciousness to San Junipero or not doesn't really matter. They're copies. Perfect copies, who are just as much real people as their originals, but copies nonetheless.
This has become a rant within a rant. Have I mentioned how much I love the details tag on Tildes? If I were on Reddit or lemmy, I would have deleted all of this because it's too much text.