The worlds behind Digimon Adventure: Become Light and Break the Barrier Between the Real World and the Wired

Introduction

My original plan wasn’t for this to become its own blog post, but it ended up being much larger than I expected. My objective with this blog is to introduce some major works that inspired the creation of “Digimon Adventure”.

It’s nearly an understatement to say that “Digimon Adventure” greatly changed the worldview of Digimon from the V-Pets, at least in the depiction of the world. But why was that the case? And what were the inspirations for the world as depicted in the anime? It wasn’t something that came out of nowhere, and there’s a very interesting history behind the main themes of Adventure.

However, just knowing the names of the inspirations isn’t enough; in order to truly decipher the world of Adventure I feel that I also need to decipher the works that made Adventure what it is. For that reason, this long blog exists to breakdown the inspirations used by Hiroyuki Kakudou in the development of some of the main themes of Digimon Adventure and, as an added bonus, the inspirations and ideas for other two staff members who worked in the Digimon Adventure franchise.

Background on the Development

When someone starts making a new work, that work will be based upon various things that person has learned. When someone adapts a work, the adaptation can be a very direct translation of the original work to a different time or medium, or it could be a total reinterpretation that adds to the original work the cultural baggage of the person in charge of the adaptation, someone with the desire to make something completely new, or someone just wanting to better understand the original work and extract more meaning from it.

With Digimon, the adaptation of the original material was a challenge that no one knew what to do with. In a way, that already started with the original release of the series, with only one person in development thinking ahead in a way to make the series something more like manga and anime. The result of this was the general perception by the original staff that “Digimon had no story and no characters In fact, that perception was one that basically everyone shared, including Volcano Ota himself, who directly stated that he didn’t even dare to call Digimon characters; they were just products.

Since Digimon ended up continuing with Version 2 and eventually the Pendulum series, the staff just had to somehow make it work as if the intention had always been to have continuations. Even the compatibility between different versions had to be developed in such a way that it could fit on a device that wasn’t supposed to do that. So there were various limitations to the way the series could grow.

The development of File Island and Folder Continent, which you have read about in the two previous chapters, was all about making something that, at least going by what the staff members themselves said, the series had needed since the start. But even with all the developments they made, they were completely unsure if companies could use their work to make something like a complete series. And in fact, they really didn’t know.

We know more about that situation nowadays since one of the original drafts of the anime has been revealed on the Digimon Partners website. The original plans were much more similar to an adaptation of Digimon World than a unique project. However, the staff around that time had basically no idea how to make a story based on that work, and that ended up being solved when Hiromi Seki asked Hiroyuki Kakudou to direct the series, trusting his previous work in Bikkuriman as an example of him being able to manage multiple characters with unique settings like the Digimon.

The choice would be more important to the future of Digimon than I think Seki initially thought. One of the biggest problems with the development of the Digimon series was the lack of someone on the staff who was familiar with computers, and that completely changed with Kakudou. Out of his more unique particular skills, Kakudou was known as a peculiar director who was able to do CGI on his own personal computer (this detail will be important again later on). So if there was something that the staff at the anime didn’t know about computers, Kakudou would be available to explain the meaning and find a translation for those concepts so they could be better understood by the staff and viewers as well.

Since Toei just opened their own CGI department and wasn’t allowing Diigmon to use it, the original plans of making the Digital World in CGI needed to be scrapped; that was the only way they thought they could do something that really felt computer-like. Although Kakudou would make his own CGI on his computer to complement the series, he couldn’t just make all the series on his own, so it was instead decided to make the Digital World using traditional animation and follow the idea that it was a world so advanced that it looked just like the real world, following Clarke’s third law that stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

So instead of a direct adaptation of the settings of the LCD Toys, the staff decided to translate the series as a whole into something that felt more familiar, although in the background Kakudou would hide some details that made the series still feel “computer-like”.

In regards to making Digimon Adventure, Kakudou wanted to make something that was special and unique. The late 90s and early 2000s were full of revivals of old Japanese shows being introduced to a new generation, like the new era of Ultraman that started with Tiga and later changed with Dyna. He commented on this in the 2nd volume of the Digimon Adventure novels, which I ended up buying a few months ago.

Series Director is a title unique to Toei Animation; compared with directing on usual TV anime, it’s roughly the same as Chief Director. They have to work with various people, so you could say directing is a work that doesn’t fit me, but I decided to take that opportunity because I saw the potential of making something with a different genre.
It was something I saw from the Heisei-era Ultraman Series that started with “Tiga” and now had already become “Dyna”. It was an opportunity to look back at the usual rules and create something a bit different. Or, do what the first “Ultraman” did and start a new genre. I wondered if that kind of thing could be done within TV animation.
It was the perfect opportunity to make original stories and human characters other than Digimon characters.
In the story, I thought to adopt elements from children’s literature, like fantasy, SF, horror, adventure, and all others I found interesting. I had the intent of trying to adopt all of them.

So “Digimon Adventure” was a story thought of as a culmination of Kakudou’s entire history with stories, which explains a lot of details in the series that are homages to various other series. When the original series first ended with episode 54, Kakudou made an update to his episode commentary from his blog, citing all kinds of works that inspired him to make the series.

To Two Years’ Vacation, Treasure Island, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the West, The Blue Bird, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dracula, A Princess of Mars, It, Stand By Me, Summer of Night, Stinger, Lord of the Flies, The Crystal World, The Last Adventure, Capital City Disappearance, Crystallized Star Cluster, Legend of the White Devil in the Land of the Gods, Genma Wars, Kunlun Commando Unit, Steal the Agni, Invader Summer, OKAGE, City of Flame, and many others that I couldn’t write here, all the stories that have entertained me up until now, all the monster movies, and Ultraman, especially Ultraman Tiga, I give my thanks.
Kakudou on Episode 54: “A New World” (Translated by Kazari)

I am not someone who knows about 99% of those works, so I really can’t comment on them, but there are two works in particular that shaped a lot of the worldview and settings Kakudou wanted to depict with Digimon Adventure and are his answer to questions he thought the original material didn’t answer. So before I dive directly into all the lore of Digimon Adventure, I want to first look at the two series that helped shape it.

Foundational Works

While thinking about the original concept of Digimon,” Kakudou had difficulty figuring out the meaning of the “evolution” that Digimon undergoes. This element would be questioned later on, as I’ll show in the review itself, but the general idea was that just transforming into something wasn’t evolution proper, at least not the scientific meaning of it. So what could it be? The answer, at least for Kakudou, was in two works connected by the same writer, Chiaki J. Konaka, “Ultraman Tiga” and “Serial Experiments Lain”.

Note: There’ll be spoilers about the story and a discussion about the development history, you might want to skip this post if those are stories you want to watch first. Most of what I will share regarding Tiga will be from the last episodes and interviews with the development staff. With Lain, I’ll be making a more detailed review of the series itself, and I’ll reference events that contain complicated topics like depression and suicide, so be warned about that.

Ultraman Tiga: The light is within everyone

After years without a TV series, Ultraman Tiga was released to be the face of the series for the 21st century and give shape to the Heisei era. The main writer and planner for Ultraman Tiga was Masakazu Migita. Tiga was made with the leftovers of the idea he had for a show about “the very first Ultraman”.

His entire planning was seen as too different from the standard of the series, with Koichi Takano saying “That isn’t Ultraman”. Ultimately some of the ideas were toned down and used in Tiga. For example, Tiga came from a time 30 million years ago, basically a being that transcends time and space, predating by many ages the story of the Ultraman featured in the previous series, but Migata’s original idea for Tiga, which motivates some of the most fundamental settings of Tiga, is far more epic than even that.

Migita: Before “Tiga”, I made a proposal for “The World’s First Ultraman”, but I jumped too high with the and Director Takano said “This isn’t Ultraman” (laughs). “The World’s First Ultraman” was about a wild Ultraman who has time-slipped from space 63 billion years ago to the earth in the near future, he was wild like a gorilla. I tried to go back before “Godzilla” going with “King Kong”, the classic Kaijū story. I was keeping mind the legend that Eiji Tsuburaya, the founder of Tsuburaya Productions, used King Kong as a reference when making Godzilla.
Book: Earth is Ultraman’s Star

Details about the initial planning were shared in Kodansha’s “TV magazine special edition Ultraman Tiga” (Photos by 勇士经常是孤独 from Baidu group).

This was put together in a proposal called “Shin Ultraman,” which was popularly called “The World’s First Ultraman” among those involved. “The World’s First Ultraman” was a Lifeform of Light that was born at the same time as the Big Bang; later, that would evolve into the existence of the Super Warriors of the Land of Light; it then transcended time and space to live with modern humans, but it was a wild existence; that was the plan of a Powerful Ultraman as it never has been before.
TV magazine special edition Ultraman Tiga

Another important element that the directors allowed Migata to keep from his planning was the idea that “the protagonist becomes light to fill the body of Tiga”. This was basically the core element of the entire idea behind the mythology Migata developed and the central message of Tiga: the meaning of “light” and what it means for humanity. First, let’s see some comments from the book “Earth is Ultraman’s Star (Tiga Edition)“

That is right. So, how can a human become a Titan on their own? “Oh, I wish I could turn into Light”. That is a warrior of light, so by becoming light they are able to fill it from the inside. Becoming light, there’s an image that the size is infinite, isn’t that right? I think everyone has an image that light can take any shape.
Migata (Earth is Ultraman’s Star)

Of course, Light is the only thing that could fill Ultraman Tiga and bring it back to life, but what exactly is the meaning of light? Where does it come from? In the same book, Migata gave an explanation from his view of light.

Migata: That is the case, isn’t it? Well, it’s something like the world before the Big Bang. That of light, a world that is both vivid and nothingness. That is what we could call God.
Kiridōshi: At the beginning of the draft for Episode 1 of “Tiga”, you wrote, “There was light at the beginning.”.
Migata: Perhaps the speed of that light decreased and it became mass; it became a copy of God; it became me; it became you, Kiridshi-san; it became everyone. It’s the starting line inside of me; it’s not even restricted to humans; everything started with that light. If I had written like that, I would be in trouble with people calling me religious, so for now…
Kiridōshi: You didn’t tell anyone (laughs).
Migata: I just did it without saying anything.
Kiridōshi: That part was cut from Episode 1, but it’s interesting that complexity is depicted in the series as a whole.
Migata: I personally have thoughts about the existence of God. I have this interest in where I am before death and where I’ll be after death. But I thought that if I did too much, they would say it had a “relegious scent,” so I had to resist doing that, but then Konaka Chiaki-san participated with the script of the 3rd episode and showed a bang. That was when I understood “This is a good series to do that”. Regarding the series as a whole, Hasegawa Keiichi-san’s power was great. In the extreme, Hasegawa-san suggested that the power of Light could be understood by the existence of Darkness. That is why it was necessary for us to gradually introduce fragments of Darkness. In the end, I think we were able to depict a stage in which everyone could become light.
Earth is Ultraman’s Star

So going from this interview, the Tiga’s light wasn’t just something that “appeared alongside the Big Bang”, but rather it was God itself that existed before the universe existed, There in pure nothingness there was only light, it was in the act of creation that divine light “slowed-down” and became something physical. So what does it mean to become light? Migata also explained that.

Ultraman is the Whip of Love
Kiridōshi: In the planning materials for “Tiga” there was already the term “Earthling Ultraman”, but how did you think of that?
Migita: The fact that humans dive into Ultraman means that Daigo is the very soul of that Ultraman. At first, I thought that catchphrase could bring out the new appeal. However, Daigo’s consciousness when he becomes light is the core. The human aura, it doesn’t come out when he’s transformed. To become light is to manifest divinity, it’s the manifestation of the godly nature within humans. That is “I’m the giver of love”. Beating monsters, you could call that love, if we create drama with how bad the monsters are, even violence can be seen as an act of love.
Earth is Ultraman’s Star

Being very literal with his idea that “Light = God”, going by Migata’s conception there’s a divine element inside of every human, and becoming light is the same as freeing yourself from the physical existence and manifesting your divine side. He couldn’t be very direct with this in the series, as he explained later, he didn’t even want to depict the notion of Tiga getting hurt for thinking that would limit that divine existence.

Kiridōshi: Regarding human nature, if Daigo gets hurt, that weakens Tiga; that wasn’t recommended by you, Migata-san, was it?
Migata: Hmm… In that case, there wouldn’t be any meaning to becoming light. Why become Light to begin with? I think that by adhering to the body, we are harming its holiness. Of course, that isn’t to say, “Do not care about the body”. It’s something influenced by the idea of living with creation centered on the soul rather than living centered on the body.
[…]
Kiridōshi: Like if there was a CM about Ultraman eating ramen, that couldn’t be anything other than a parody.
Migata: Exactly that. Of course, as soon as someone sees it, they can comprehend, “Ah, I understand. That is because he was injured before”, but I feel that hurts its holiness.
Kiridōshi: Do you still think like that?
Migata: Yes, I’m stubborn (laughs).
Kiridōshi: However, since you, Migata-san, wrote the lines “Both Light and Human” in episodes 1 and 2, can’t that be understood to mean that Ultraman isn’t God but a human being?
Migata: That is right. I thought “Maybe that is what they will understand”, but you can also take the implication from “Both Light and Human” that humans could become gods. That is why it shouldn’t matter how much the human Daigo suffers. If he is hurt, he can’t transform; he lacks the power to become light; he’s wandering on the verge of death, what that type of direction holds, I do like that narrative style. It doesn’t matter how much he has suffered before transforming, but after he transforms, it’s preferable to have the feeling that he’s at his very best with all his effort. For example, that was the major theme in “Eternal Life” until Daigo raised the Sparklence. Those people who inhale Gijera’s essence and become lazy aren’t being controlled by Gijera, you know. It was a story about everyone choosing pleasure of their own free will.
Earth is Ultraman’s Star

Now going on to include other people’s views, there was an interview in the COMIC BOX magazine with Migata, Konaka, and Keiichi Hasegawa. In fact, let’s start with Konaka himself.

Anyway, I think that started with a conversation about “What is light?”. Daigo is the one who inherited the light from Ultraman. And then the theme was humanity’s evolution towards the light. Of course, everyone’s ideas influenced each other. For example, in Hasegawa-san’s “Vampire City,” there was this image that Daigo couldn’t become light in a space where there was only darkness. I really liked that.
Chiaki J. Konaka

Migata: I think that Tiga is the higher-dimensional “consciousness of light” inside Daigo. That is why I dislike the way it’s depicted in the episodes that if Daigo gets hurt, Tiga gets weaker.
Konaka: When I first started, I also had discussions with the direction, it was about whether or not we should clearly depict Ultraman’s consciousness. But, for example, in “The Devil’s Judgement”, which I wrote, director Muraishi directed Tiga to give a thumbs up to the people after winning. “Oh, that was Daigo’s right” (laughs).
COMIC BOX

Although not on the same scale as Migata, Konaka does see Ultraman as something special. It’s just not quite at the level of a God as Migata likes to think, but it’s definitely something like a miraculous existence.

I think that Ultraman’s very existence is a miracle. It’s not something that was created by humans. If that was the case, it wouldn’t be anything more or less than the guardian of mankind. But Ultraman’s existence is much superior. Although it’s not God.
Chiaki J. Konaka

Although there are bits and pieces of the general idea of these concepts across the entire series, it’s in the end that the message gets very clear in the fight between Tiga and Gatanothor, the evil god. More precisely, Gatanothor is a very clear reference to the Cthulhu Mythos that Konaka added as it would fit with the intended ending and he also wanted to expand the worldview of Ultraman and connect it with the Cthulhu Mythos.

I don’t think there were many like-minded people who were thrilled with the image of Ultraman winning over the evil god Cthulhu, but now it seems that it has become an event of the century that is still mentioned. However, although I showed a hero who could win against the evil god Cthulhu, I have a great objection to it being used as “Why Japanese people don’t fear Cthulhu”. That wasn’t the intent of making Ultraman win. The reason I introduced Cthulhu was because I wanted to connect the Ultraman-like world with a different Worldview, I wanted to expand the last event in a meta-like way. It was a final episode that welcomed the original Ultraman to the modern era with the same enthusiasm as in the past. I thought it was time to break free from the tradition of Ultraman like something Zetton-like.
Chiaki J. Konaka

So to understand more about this final confrontation that happens in the last two episodes: “Master of Darkness” and “To the Shining Ones”.

The episode starts with a dark mist crossing the ocean, and at the same time, the entire world is being attacked by a flying monster. After some time, the mist, called darkness, reaches the Dive Hangar headquarters in the ocean. The base is able to detect that something is trying to enter but is totally unable to detect what it is. It’s something that doesn’t seem to be material; it’s something that no physical force seems to be able to affect, but you can feel in the air that there’s something strange.

What comes out of the mist from the depths of the ocean is the Master of Darkness, Gatanothor, who was said to one day envelop the world in darkness. Ultraman Tiga starts to fight with the dark being, but it’s ultimately defeated, and after an attack in its core, it loses its light, returning to its form as a stone statue.

In the following episode, in the aftermath of the battle, the GUTS wants to use a machine to give light again to Ultraman Tiga, but as pointed out there, it wouldn’t really be physical light. Their attempt to save TIGA ended up failing, not just because they ended up being stopped by Gatanothor but also because the very nature of light and darkness in question here is not really physical but rather mental and spiritual.

Ultimately, those who actually saved Tiga were the children all around the world who still had hope for him; that hope turned them into light and helped to make up the form of “Glitter Tiga” in a final battle with all of them becoming Tiga so the Evil God could be defeated.

Human beings always challenge the unknown; their hearts embrace both fear and curiosity. No matter what trials may await them in their path, because of human nature and because humans are humans, they are always going to move forward. From the perspective of the great universe that spreads infinitely, humans are just a very small existence. However, people have in their hearts a light so great that it surpasses the great universe. Humans can grow even bigger as long as they hold the light inside their hearts…
New Light (Ultra Tokusatsu PERFECT MOOK Vol.22 Ultraman Dyna)

If you think about those elements, I guess you can already see all the ways Digimon Adventure is similar to it, which is expected because Kakudou gave special importance to Ultraman, especially Tiga, in the list of referenced works. For example, if you think that the finale of the Adventure series was very similar to Tiga, that was intentional. Going into more detail about this, in the release of the novelization of Tiga written by Konaka called “Ultraman Tiga: To the Shining Ones” in 2019, Kakudou commented on how much the specifications of the novel reminded him of the inspirations in Digimon Adventure.

I finished my reading of the Tiga novel. It reminded me of how much Digimon Adventure was influenced by Tiga; I greatly valued it during the time I wrote it. Evolution and Light.
Hiroyuki Kakudou

So, let’s talk a bit about not just that one, but the two novels written by Konaka that explain in more detail what light and darkness are. The first is “The Abyss Walker,” which Konaka wrote in 1998 and focuses more on the nature of the final enemy in a more Cthulhu-like atmosphere. The story was reprinted once in 2001 in a collection book, but since the new novel references it, Konaka shared the short story as a whole.

A big part of the novel is explaining more of the atmosphere, but since I don’t have space or the ability to translate the novel as a whole, I decided to focus on the part of the ending that describes the nature of the darkness spread by Gatanothor and its desire to consume the entire world’s light.

With a cry, the darkness is being spat out.
The sky is painted black like mucus. What that darkness will bring is… destruction…
Anything and everything that exists shouldn’t have existed in the first place…
That unpleasant darkness will undoubtedly decay this planet to the very end.
Those who saw the darkness had their lights of hope extinguished; those who touched the darkness had their bodies changed into non-form; that darkness had a will of its own; obeying the orders of the Great Old One, it’ll erase all light.
I look up when I hear that cry.
Are they related?
Countless blood-colored monsters with insect-like wings fluttered through the darkened sky that became mucus-like at an unbelievable speed, breathing out spheres of blood-light, they were reducing to ashes an unknown town of an unknown civilization.
I hear.
The cries of sorrow from those who perish.
Is this a memory of the past? Or something that will happen in the future?
Countless flesh-colored tentacles grow from the shell of the Great Old One; they wriggle as if each of them were a separate living creature.
Really…
Some of the tentacles have never slept; they have existed for an infinitely long time.
It might have risen above the distant seas just to observe the people who rule this planet and the civilizations they have built.
Without a doubt, it has been doing that continuously until the day of destruction arrives.
“Soon, It will be revived.”
I was on my knees, and in front of me stood Tetsuo Naiharato.
In the darkish face, there were countless insects resembling ragworms swaying instead of hair.
“These are omens for its resurrection, and they are going to continue to happen.”
For the first time, Naiharato showed a small resemblance to a happy feeling.
“It feeds on the light emitted by those who evolve.”
What that man is saying. In the first place, that man…
“Who are you? This… great god? Can I call it a god? What exactly is that?”
“I am neither a believer nor an apostle. I am a prophet. This resurrection and the planet being once again covered by darkness are destiny. The words that have been entrusted to me, I’ll convey them to everyone from now on.”
Naiharato walks past me and walks towards the door that I came from.
His steps left thin footprints in the sand.
The anxiety of being left behind struck me, and I stood up and followed.
That was the intent.
But, my point of view slowly fell to the land.
My body was no more.
My body was eaten by countless oarfish.
I’m just a head, and I’m lying quietly on the sand.
If the deep-sea boat visits here again, it may find my head turned into a corpse.
However, when that time arrives; when the planet is once again covered by darkness and all of humanity is extinct; as I’ll be nothing more than a mannequin head, I won’t be able to know anymore.

Here we get things named directly: light is the “light of evolution,” and “darkness” is what erases that light, leaving nothing behind. You lose your hope, you lose your body, and it brings everything into a state of nothingness from which everything shouldn’t have come. In Episode 25 of the series, Konaka explored this in the script that was shared by Chinese fans. In the episode itself, it’s a bit vague what really gave Tiga power again—the light physically gathered by people or something else—but he answered that in the script.

Warped in the light of the buildings, Tiga gradually shines its body (It became Multi). It stood up with full power! Tiga (Multi) shines divinely. What gave him power wasn’t the physical light. The light of people’s hope gave that power.
The Devil’s Judgement

But of course, the most significant source of this information is the novel itself, “To the Shinning Ones”. Some chapters of it were translated by fans, and the entire novel was translated into Chinese by Chinese fans, so I have a general idea of the content.

To the Shinning Ones: Prologue
A long time ago, this planet was born.
Before long, the planet breathed, and so great oceans and great lands were formed.
By the time the first living beings were born, races from various distant planets had migrated to this new planet.
Those races had once built civilizations on this planet, but before long they collapsed.
Time passes, and then others arrive on this young planet, from other galaxies, other comets, and planets that don’t exist anymore.
And then the existence of the Lord of Darkness arrived with its followers.
They enslaved all those who were born on this planet, Earth, and also those who migrated from other planets.
However, even the Lord has fallen into a long sleep inside the temple where it is worshiped.
A huge meteorite crashed, almost all living beings died, and then many years passed.
Nevertheless, there were survivors.
Among the animals that escaped deep underground, some achieved evolution into gigantic bodies.
Completely different immigrants from most of the races that have been on Earth have arrived.
They already had a highly developed culture and intelligence.
They adapt to the environment of this planet, Earth, and build their own civilization.
However, even now, there was still the influence of the Lord of Darkness, who was sleeping in the temple.
The Lord of Darkness, who detests the prosperity of a brilliant intelligent civilization, summoned servants from the planet of darkness.
The Lord of Darkness, who detests the prosperity of a brilliant, intelligent civilization, summoned servants from the planet of darkness.
The “Dark One” and its followers sealed the brilliant civilization of the “Earthlings” in the despair of darkness, the “Earthlings” lost their sanity and perished.
“Earthlings” already accepted the fate of the collapse of their own civilization and species.
However… There was an existence that saw and was against the rampage of the “Dark One”.
It was light and its power.
There were among the “Earthlings” those who didn’t lose their courage; they absorbed the light emitted from the distant Orion Nebula, and so they changed their forms into gigantic “Warriors of Light”.
The “Dark One” and its followers were sealed deep inside the temple by the Warriors of Light.
After they were sure of what happened, the “Warriors of Light” turned into stone statues.
The “Earthlings” thought there was peace, but once again, major changes in the Earth’s crust were about to happen.
The “Earthlings” didn’t have a planet to return to again, and they couldn’t stay on this planet anymore, so they were forced to leave “Earth”.
And the continent with the temple sank into the ocean.
A long period of time passed with an absence of intelligent species, but eventually new “Earthlings” evolved and started to build a civilization.
They are a new species that is different from the “Earthlings” who once lived on this planet; however, the Earth, that planet itself, secretly passed on to them the memories of the prehistoric “Earthlings” as light.
The divine and powerful existences of darkness that once ruled over this planet affected turning points in the history of humanity.
A species that is close to the Lord of Darkness infiltrated the new “Earthlings”.
That species, which is close to human consciousness and thoughts, was eventually secretly passed down among humankind as an abstract-like existence called “Demons”.
The “Dark One”, the most powerful Great Old One god, sleeps in the temple with its followers; they will sooner or later attempt to once again rule this planet.
Until that day arrives, humankind must prepare.

As those who live on earth continue to evolve, grow, and develop their civilization, this is akin to an increase in the light. The power that opposes evolution is darkness. In a way, you could see the story of Ultraman Tiga as the story of the evolution of humanity itself, and in the way it ends the original series, they all showed the potential to become Ultraman Tiga, which is akin to becoming light itself.

The form depicted in the final battle, known as Glitter Tiga, may be the one closest to the idea of Tiga that Migata had for him, more specifically the notion that it’s a being of infinite light that is a whole different dimension compared to the others. In a way, it feels a bit special to see this as the manifestation of the evolution and hope of mankind—their light. At least that idea has continued to be shared by other materials and staff members outside of the context of Tiga’s development alone.

The Greatest Power of Light!
The power that is held by “Light”, is truly infinite. It’s wonderful, as when various lights rained upon Tiga and the true power of Nexus.
Definitive Edition Great Ultraman 100 Secrets Super Encyclopedia

For Director Abe, does Noah, like Glitter Tiga, transcend the existence of Ultraman?
Abe: You could say that’s how it feels inside of me. Among the Ultraman, I think they are on a different dimension. Isn’t Ultraman King a “King”? (laughs). Noah has this strong image of “God”. So I had the intent of placing it as a god-like being among the Ultraman, so I depicted him as if he was in a completely different dimension.
Yuichi Abe

Other than Ultraman Tiga and Gatanothor, the novel also mentions “another existence” that is similar to Gatanothor itself and also human consciousness and thoughts. That existence is most likely referring to the Kyriel people. This Bilibili post (And also this one) has a collection of materials about the development of their setting by Konaka, and it gives a bit more of an idea of how to understand the worldview of Tiga.

The existence that challenges Tiga is named “Kyriel People.” Instead of people from a different planet, you could say they are people from a different dimension. They are defined as having an existence similar to Yapool from “Ultraman Ace”. However, they overlapped with the image of something with a meaning similar to the devil in Christianity. Kyriel is a coined word, but the idea might come from Kyrie Eleison in Christian terminology.
Chiaki J. Konaka

The subtitle “Devil” is just an allegory, but I think that the Devil mentioned in Christianity may have been the Kyriel People, so in the beginning of the scenario I added such an explanation. There aren’t many examples of writing such a preface in a simple scenario. Even I don’t have other memories of doing that myself, so I think that scenario was a bit more ambitious.
Chiaki J. Konaka

※ Kyriel People are spiritual lifeforms from outside the universe. Their vanguard probably came to earth during the Middle Ages. Their form was observed in a variety of ways and drawn by artists. The people of Earth both feared and worshiped the Kyriel People, unknowingly calling them demons. They do not live on specific planets; instead, they construct their own worlds on holographic space-time faults. For humans, it’s a place they call “Hell”. Kyriel People are about to open the “Gates of Hell” and paint the earthly world into darkness…
Kyriel People Settings

The setting of the Kyriel People can be thought to be closer to beings from a different dimension rather than aliens. “The Devil’s Prophecy” is a story in which the Kyriel People, who had been like forgotten gods, are reactivated after the appearance of an Ultraman named Tiga and the media beginning to report on his activities.
Chiaki J. Konaka

Ultraman Tiga, Gatanothor, and the Kyriel People are the basis for understanding the more metaphysical aspect of the worldview of the series. Following the details given all the way back by Migita the origin of said existence is older than the universe itself and non-physical, after the universe was created certain elements became physical, although they still have the potential to become “light”, that is to evolve back into the infinite transcendental existence they once were. That experience is kept in the thoughts and memories of the living beings and the potential to once again become light is represented by Ultraman Tiga.

Evil God Gatanothor
The embodiment of the darkness that destroys mankind, it tried to warp the Earth into darkness. Attacked the Power Type with its huge tentacles and showed the strongest power, making him lose his light. Because its body is so huge, its entire body is rarely shown.

The opposite of that is the darkness that brings death and attempts to reduce everything back to nothingness, and Gatanothor is the personification of that darkness. The Kyriel People can be thought of as something in-between, they are already pure spiritual beings of pure thought that in many ways transcend mankind, but they are still very similar to Gatanothor in a certain way. In the script, their original forms are called Etheric Body/Mental Body (エーテル体の意思体). In the shot-story “Kyriel People” written by Konaka, they are defined as “The shadow to Ultraman Tiga’s light”.

The final episode of Tiga can be thought of as something that is huge in the history of mankind, as it’s literally the destruction of darkness itself and humanity experiencing what they can become as they evolve.

However, since a new serialized sequel to Tiga was made with Dynas (I even mentioned information from its guidebook), the world depicted later on wasn’t the complete revolution that could be implied from Tiga. It seems there were interviews with Konaka that had him comment on that necessary difference.

Nevertheless, since the novel written by Konaka wasn’t just an adaptation of the series he helped to write but also a different worldline, he had some freedom to change certain elements. And the end depicted in the novel did showcase something that was much bigger than what ended up happening on TV.

The children of the world knew what to do next. Finish off the Evil God. Spreading their hands sideways, they concentrated and charged the surrounding spatial energy. Standing in front of Gatanothor, Glitter Tiga enters the stance to fire the Zeperion Beam. The Children do the same and Glitter’s Zeperion Beam burns Gatanothor. With a terrifying scream that sounded like the rumbling of the earth, Glitter Tiga delivered the final blow to the blazing Gatanothor in the form of Glitter Timer Flash. Hitting both fists against their own chest, an explosive power was released from the Color Timer. That amazing energy erased both the very existence of Gatanothor and the darkness from the Earth—no, from the universe.
Ultraman Tiga: To the Shining Ones

Just by reading this, I guess you might have already noticed the references that were used in Digimon Adventure from Ultraman Tiga. However, this is still just the first work I wanted to introduce.

Serial Experiments Lain: Break down the barrier between the Real World and the Wired

Background

Serial Experiments Lain is, in many ways, a completely different beast compared to Ultraman Tiga. While Tiga was a 1-year-long revival of one of the most famous and important franchises in Japan, getting information about it was very hard. I had to spend hours finding sources from books and magazines on Chinese forums, and every time I found something new that made me completely restart my plans for the previous topic.

Lain is a very short 13-episode series that was created in an attempt to expand the project of a Playstation game into a Media-mix. Luckily, most of the interviews and magazines are easily available thanks to the fanbase, and more importantly, there’s a review blog made by Konaka himself where he goes into detail about the production of Lain as he rewatches each episode.

As a media-mix project, the worldview of “Serial Experiments Lain” is spread across many media, not just the game and anime, but even some of the promotional art that was made for the project often had some unique piece of text written by Konaka himself that expanded the worlds and themes. Not only that, but considering the very core concept of the series, many elements are mysteries completely open to interpretation, and this makes the analysis I want to make harder.

Although with Ultraman Tiga there was also a considerable number of staff members with different views of the work, I could be more specific about the intended interpretation because Kakudou himself pointed to the recent novel and said “This reminded me of what I used”, but with Lain the situation is different. That is why I want to explore the series with more caution.

Since Lain is only 13 episodes long, I think that it’s possible to look at each episode directly as I share what I found from the development history.

Out of the various staff members that are related to Lain, the ones that are closely associated with it as creators are:

Yasuyuki Ueda: Producer of the series, was in charge of both the game and anime. He wrote most of the original game’s actual game text and the series’s basic plot.
Yoshitoshi ABe: Character design, made the artwork featured in various promotional materials and short mangas.
Nakamura Ryuutarou: Director of the anime series
Chiaki J. Konaka: Writer for both the anime and game. While the actual game text was written by Ueda, the script of the 30-minute anime scenes featured in the game was written by Konaka himself. He would write every episode of the anime series.

All of them, along with various other members, helped to create the series, and I want to focus on only them because that’s what I have the most resources about. Although there’s a bit of almost everyone in the games, some of the main branches of the series are each considered to be a world of each individual member. The game is Ueda’s world, the short illustrations and manga are ABe’s world, and the anime is Konaka and Ryuutarou’s world. This is more important to the analysis later, but there are both overlaps and differences in each of them and it’s integral to the nature of Lain itself.

Also, since the interviews are more easily available than Tiga’s interviews, I want to present them first and do what I did for my video resource.

AX Magazine: A magazine that featured a lot of Lain artwork made by Yoshitoshi ABe and added text by Konaka, there were also a few interviews there.
That Of Lain Which Couldn’t Be Spoken Of Until Now: Interview with Yasuyuki Ueda, talks about the development of the series and a bit of how to understand Lain and the differences of each branch.
Visual Experiments Lain: A complete book about the anime series, has interviews with staff members like Ueda and Konaka and a complete review of each episode with background information.
AnimeJump: Interview with Yasuyuki Ueda.
A Fan’s View: Interview with Yasuyuki Ueda.
Otakon 2000: Transcript of a Panel discussion with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe. Has a lot of varied questions about the series.
Online chat with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe: A long conversation with both Ueda and ABe at an online chat for SCIFI.
HK Interview: Interview with Konaka for the HK magazine, has a lot of interesting information about the development of the series.
Animerica Interview: Interviews with Ueda, Konaka, and Nakamura. Has a lot of interesting information about the content of the series.
welcome back to wired: A personal blog by Chiaki J. Konaka created in preparation for the fan event “Club Cyberia”, It’s a very personal look as Konaka rewatches the series and shares his interpretation and history of the development. Other than being useful for my future Digimon Adventure review, this post exists to shed light on the content shared in this blog for the non-Japanese-speaking part of the fandom.
Equater’s Production: Some of the text present on ABe’s artwork is hard to read from the sources I use, this website compiled the text there and also some interviews.
SHIFT: Japanese web-zine, has a BBS-style interview with all 4 staff members I mentioned before. Has really interesting information.
Serial Experiments Lain Official Guide: An official guide for the PlayStation game that brings details about the worldview, including a dictionary of terms and an interview with the development staff.

Before the Release

“Serial Experiments Lain” started broadcast on July 6, 1998, but there was already some information about it before the release thanks to promotional material. The two main materials I would like to mention are the April and May issues of the AX Magazine. Sadly the May issue isn’t archived in the Fan Wiki, but Equater’s website already has the text from those magazines extracted.

First, from the April 1998 issue, it’s basically just an introduction to the Lain, but the text already carries the central theme behind the series, the nature of Lain and its mystery.

AX April 1998
Are you ready for starting “lain”?
We’ll give you something of “lain”.
(You could feel something, you couldn’t feel anything.)
“lain”is a main title of a PIONEER LDC’s new project named “serial experiments”, and it’s a name of the girl who you see now.
you may not know, you may not understand, and you’ll forget it.
Next AX may show you unformatted style pages.

The second text from the May 1998 issue is the first of the many Konaka texts included with Abe’s artwork. Most of the later texts will be dialogues from the series itself, but this one is yet another introduction to the series and its themes.

AX May 1998
“Weird Tale”――
This story is fictional, but the phenomena that occur in it symbolize aspects of reality which are recorded here. I predict that when the words are amplified, the phenomena will come true.
“Weird Tale”――
Each phenomenon insists on existence individually seeks its own place. But for the sake of mutual understanding, I must stress that that is just one of the arbitrary concepts which are connected in a logical yet disorderly way, like the synapses of the brain.
lain is lain. lain is lain. Each is different and all are the same. People become aware of their own species by communicating with one another.
A man is not just a “terminal” at the end of a line. By communicating with others he gains continuity, because he relays thoughts from one to another. Connection means continuity.
This is true not only for the axis of coordinates, but also for the passage of time. If communication is intentional , the dead should revive and emerge from the place where they once were,to reappear on the coordinate of time. That is where the connection begins.
One needs to understand that the starting point of the connection is merely a space in which all that one possesses is one’s body,and the meaning of the body itself starts to waver.
Do not be afraid of this story.
Be afraid of lain.
Be aware that you are connected.
Be yourself, be continued.
text by chiaki j.konaka
graphic by yoshitoshi abe
translation by akiko matsumoto

This text alone is already amazing, so let’s break it down to see what we can expect from Serial Experiments Lain.

The first paragraph is an interesting warning about “this is a work of fiction”, but “it might become true”. While I was researching Ultraman Tiga, I found an interesting post on Chinese forums about Konaka’s description of the children’s desire to help Tiga, and there was also a certain quote said to be by Konaka.

The words you utter have power in them. You could say that concepts such as Logos and Kotodama symbolize the truth of ideas manifesting in reality.
Chiaki J.Konaka

This is a very classic idea of magic: what we say has a deeper meaning, and the more you say something, the more it literally becomes true. In a way, it’s an early idea of merging what is fictional or pure idealization into reality. There’s a blurry line that separates thought from matter, and one can influence the other. In the same post, there’s a statement by Konaka that seems to say that was what happened at the end of Tiga: children all around the world thought of what to do to help Taiga, and that ultimately was solved by all of them becoming light and so one with Tiga.

So what is being told there is literally a version of that, and by immortalizing that story in words and sharing it, that might become reality.

Regarding the story itself, the first paragraph talks about the natural individual existence of everything. Each phenomenon asserts its own existence, and not only does its own existence not depend on anything, but it also desires its own place as an individual existence. However, that is just one of the arbitrary concepts, but in order to achieve mutual understanding, they are nevertheless connected both logically and chaotically, like the synapses in the brain.

“lain is lain. lain is lain.”

This is a part of the text that is better noticed in Japanese. As we are going to address later, there are multiple “views” of Lain, and in Japanese, they symbolize that difference by using three different alphabet systems. The first is “Lain” as written with Kanji “玲音”, the second is written with Katakana “レイン” and lastly, it is written with the Latin-script alphabet “Lain”. Although the texts featured in the images are nearly always translated into English, they also have a Japanese version alongside it as can be seen in this image and the difference is clear in that version.

In general, the basic understanding they developed for the series is that although each “Lain” is different and you can notice in drastic moments which one is which, they are all still the same entity. As Ueda said in an interview:

For me, there was just one person called Lain. Depending on the form, she may be in the Real World, or in the Wired, or only on a program; she only has those names for certain moments. Lain is different from us because she doesn’t have a physical body. The only difference is that she doesn’t have a physical body; in the sense of understanding her own existence, she is no different from us. No matter how much she changes, she was created as an “individual” that doesn’t change deep down. When interpreting it within the TV series, that part is shown by her love for her father, which might have left an impression of something that can be understood closer as a physical existence. Even if you feel that, as a whole, this is an experiment (laughs), well, for me, she’s nothing more than a singular existence; I don’t sense her as being three persons; it’s not like the name “Lain” is different; that approach is a measurement of portions of the conflict, about the different ways of using the devices.
Yasuyuki Ueda

What comes next is the notion that humanity only exists as a group, as a species, because of their connection. By maintaining communication, this continuity is formed, and they are both parts of the same process. By connecting, we all have continuity.

Lastly, this continuity isn’t something that is maintained only across space but also time. In a way, communicating across time and bringing the dead back should be possible. It’s all a matter of connection and communication.

But that connection has a start while we still have a physical body; is it possible for it to continue beyond the body? What if we start to question the very needs of the body?

Creating the Worldview

The development of the anime was a bit different from that of the game. While in the game Ueda basically directed everything and wrote most of what happened, in the anime Konaka was given basically total freedom, and he was still unsure of what he would do when he got to the point of ending the series. According to himself, he only had a vague 12-episode structure, but many things could still change, and they certainly did.

In this development, Konaka continued to make use of some old key concepts he started to develop years ago, as he explains in the Alice6 blog post. Although that wasn’t the first time Konaka and his brother used “Alice in Wonderland” as a motif, it ultimately worked to solidify this Alice-like idea of a girl who falls into an absurd world”. Of course, this could ultimately be linked to some ancient Cthulhu-like power, but with Lain, he thought that exact approach wasn’t needed.

In the PlayStation game, the main scenario is a representation of the network, so Konaka wanted to use the network itself as a motif for the animated series. However, depicting the network in a virtual reality way was already something established in Japan with works such as “Venus City”, and TV animation still couldn’t compete with such depictions. This is a bit similar to the challenges Kakudou would have while working with Digimon. Of course, Konaka continued with his attempt to bring the cyberspace that has so far been only a concept to life and express it in a more real way, something he thought he could do from his experience with the scenario of “Alice in Cyberland”, another Playstation game.

In the game “Alice in Cyberland” the network has evolved into a virtual reality structure known as “Cyberland”. Not only is all the information in the world shared and everyone is connected at all times, but it’s also possible to use a Dive System to convert your mind into data and dive into the world of Cyberland. This virtual reality is structured in a hierarchical way; there are 8 known layers, and the deeper you move across the layers that are normally inaccessible, the more you’ll find hidden information. However, there’s still a deeper ninth layer that is mysterious. The general idea once again made use of “Alice in Wonderland”, and when it came to making SEL, there were still some clear leftovers of this game in Konaka’s mind that manifested in many ways, such as bringing the characters back in a star-system way. Although most viewers and other people in the production wouldn’t know about that.

One reference we can still see even in other projects by Konaka, like Digimon Tamers, is this multilayered structure based on the Model OSI; each episode of Lain is called a “Layer” in reference to that. In a nuanced way, each episode could reveal something that might contradict the previous and result in a completely different understanding. According to Konaka, during that time seeing things as layered hierarchies was a really novel way of thinking.

While developing SEL, Konaka wanted to express the idea that the world of the network was somewhat different from the Real World, which is why he called it the Wired.

Layer:01 Weird

Starting from the opening, you can already see some foreshadowing in the nature of Lain. According to Konaka, although it’s not stated directly, the world where Lain lives lacks the linear flow of time, and so in that scene, everything stops while Lain is able to continue to move.

In these first episodes, the depiction of the Wired was as limited as possible. In “Alice in Cyberland” the story basically starts with a dive into virtual reality as being possible, which happened because it was a story that took place in the “future”. However, as stated in the opening, SEL is a story that takes place in “Present Day, Present Time“, so depicting such virtual reality wouldn’t really be possible. Since he couldn’t really make this a “cyber-themed” story, he instead decided to tell a story that focuses on the general phenomenon of people connecting with each other, something that can happen in both physical and non-physical ways. As such, although in future episodes he would need to start making more use of the Wired, in the first episodes he decided to avoid depicting the Wired as much as possible.

In the book “Visual Experiments Lain” the pages for the first episode have a small text written by Konaka that describes a bit the general idea of the great use of telephone and electric wires.

• Night Shift Series, 32nd Installment
[Wired] Written/Photographed by Chiaki J. Konaka
When you look at photos of New York from around 1920, you can see an abundance of power lines crossing under the skyscrapers. It looks like a completely different city from now.
The city quickly removed the overhead wires, burying powerlines and telephone wires underground, achieving their current landscape.
Conversely, in Japan, the electric wires show no signs of disappearing, and that network continues to spread across cities, rural areas, and even the mountains.
The electricity supports people’s lives, while the telephone lines connect people. I think that the fact that these are always visible above our heads is a very cyber-like thing.
In the scenario for an animated series, I obsessively wrote down depictions of electric wires each time.
The work has the motif of people being connected by the unconscious realm; the scenery with telephone poles and electric wires was shown to symbolize that.
However, from my personal tastes, I cannot help but feel that the current situation in Japan is somewhat miserable.
Telephone poles on narrow roads, electric wires that cut off when typhoons come and cause power outages—their existence is by no means pleasant. I’m wondering if they will be buried underground soon. When that time comes and I have to create another work centered on the theme of communication, I will surely have to worry about what to use as a symbol for that landscape.

The first scene of “Serial Experiments Lain” depicts the suicide of a girl named Chisa Yomoda. The general idea is similar to that of a similarly named character from Alice6. The scene is surrounded by the idea of not belonging and a lack of connection in the real world. In the scene, we can already see the shadows with red dots; this idea was from Ryuutarou and represents the overlap between the Real World and the Wired. Deeper into the shadows, that is where the Wired is.

The first mysterious incident starts when many students start to get a new E-Mail from Chisa. This is a basic set-up of a horror story, and normally Konaka goes for a fundamentalist horror story; in fact, many people normally seem to only think of Konaka in the framework of doing a Cthulhu-like story. However, that really isn’t the case. The production of Lain happened during a time when he was tired of that kind of horror and wanted to do something else, and as he explained in other interviews, there was no need to tie SEL with that kind of horror. Anyway, the mix between the digital and horror elements seems to be a very common thing, ghost e-mails are one of the most common ones from what I know.

In the PlayStation game, the objective was for the player to uncover data about the history of Lain and follow the journey that ended with her giving up her life to continue existing without a body. According to Konaka, the anime was supposed to end in the same way. In the Official Guidebook Ueda implied that the general idea was to have the same overall plot being repeated across different media, the same character in different situations.

However, at the very start of the story, Chisa already gives her own life in the belief that she doesn’t need one and is now with God in the Wired. In a way, Chisa already did what Lain did in the game. Alongside other events that are going to be depicted here, Konaka decided to not end the series in the same way as the game; if anything, he decided to break the continuous experiments.

“Serial” means “continuous”. “Experiments” means “experiments”. Together, they mean “continuous experiment”. It’s the continuous depiction of a single girl in different media, including games and anime. Furthermore, the works were created to really rely heavily on the imagination of the audience; the experiment was to give a sense of reality to extremely unrealistic things like games and anime. That was our intent.
Ueda

In a general way, wired is this world’s version of the internet and what can be used to connect everyone. In the glossary for the PlayStation game, there’s a quick explanation of what the Real World and the Wired are.

Serial Experiments Lain Official Guide Glossary
Real World: The world of reality in which we usually live. It is based on the schema that “matter” equals “existence”.
Wired: The Network World cited in contrast to the Real World. It’s constructed by all kinds of mass media, such as TV, telephones, and personal computers. In this world, matter is also treated as a kind of data and has a different value than in the Real World.

While the concept of the anime was to feature the “Present World, Present Time”, but distorted in a way that writing fiction allows, the game version was depicted as the vague “near future” that allows such fantastical technological developments.

World
Without the Computer Network, the world no longer functions
A bit more in the future from the present, where we live. Nothing works anymore without the network, computers, TV, and telephones. Even without direct contact, everything can be done over the telephone or the computer network… Such changes in communication have led to changes in values and have greatly changed the way people exist. The world of reality where our physical bodies exist, the “Real World”, and the world beyond the network, the “Wired”. Which way is reality, which way is fiction; The boundary between them, they are going to invade each other’s territory.

In the development of the anime, Konaka wanted to bring a baseline horror to the story as a way of creating something that was simple for viewers to engage with; it was a normal TV series with no big elements to sell, so they needed something to bring engagement. The starting idea he had was about a possible connection between the afterlife and the network, and that was used to create this first episode. However, since Lain was in constant development, Konaka’s ideas for worldbuilding would change a lot.

That is right. So I was very worried that there would be no mecha to sell, or even monsters. My main genre is horror, or rather, I think of myself as a horror writer, so the first thing I wanted to do is establish it as horror. From there, if it could transform into something unexpected that I couldn’t even anticipate, it would be a straightforward way of creating it, and I thought the audience would find it easy to follow along. From the horror style, the topic of “getting an email from a dead person” was introduced; it was an attempt to overlap the afterlife with the network; that was the thesis behind the TV series “lain”. However, that wasn’t the conclusion; rather, it started with the idea that “(maybe) there’s a connection between the afterlife and the network”.
Chiaki J. Konaka

Layer:02 Girls

The second episode starts in the new scenario for the anime, Club Cybereria, and introduces the drug Accela, which increases the processing speed of the brain. Although it was originally a common drug, portraying realistic drugs wasn’t allowed on TV, so it was decided to make it look mechanical.

While walking to the school Lain sees one of the mysterious “men in black” behind a telephone pole. According to Konaka, their role in the series wasn’t planned to be as big as it ended up being. They appear to play more into the mysteries of the series and initially appear in a way similar to Chisa, as “something not of this world”.

The main thesis of “Serial Experiments Lain” is the idea that everyone is connected. The meaning of that statement is more fully explored later on, but it’s surely something that gets mentioned a lot. The Wired is clearly a mechanism for that, and in the beginning, Konaka used the model of the “world after death”, which is why horror elements were used. This explains the mysterious ghosts that Lains seems to be able to see, but after a few chapters, a different phase starts. The original plan in the scenario was for this to be part of the introduction of the “other Lain”, but the director decided it was too early to show that. This was supposed to be another demonstration that for Lain, reality, and fantasy are connected, and the intent is that this becomes even more pronounced the more she connects with the Wired.

The last scene of the episode has the Accela user losing control and starting to shoot with a gun while saying that the Wired isn’t allowed to interfere with the real world. He points the gun at Lain, who answers, “No matter where you go, everyone is connected,” making the user kill himself. This was yet another moment of Lain confronting suicide, but now with a gun. According to Konaka, this was yet another example of how the anime would go into a different dimension when compared to the game.

Layer:03 Psyche

The third episode is more direct in introducing the many facets of Lain, happening maybe even before the events of the anime series. She seems to be present in Wired and in other places; others know about her, but this specific “Lain” doesn’t. People having different personas in the Real World and the Wired is common, but the way Lain herself works is very different.

As I explained before, in order to differentiate the four faces of Lain, the script made use of different alphabets. Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and Latin-script alphabet.

Layer:04 Religion

The fourth episode focuses on bringing about the change in Lain’s character in a more direct way. Here is introduced a game that seems to make people die after playing. Lain is more connected with the Wired, and her control over it increases, which allows her to interact with other characters from long distances using the Wired without them noticing.

Not only is Lain having more power to influence the Wired, but other people are also getting more in touch with the Wired, with Phantoma players still seeing the game while outside of the Wired, and Lain is somewhat able to appear to them, although the range of her powers is limited to help in that situation. This mysterious situation seems to be due to something in the protocol and the mysterious group known as the “Knights”.

Later, Lain’s father appears, saying that the Wired should only be a space for communication where information is exchanged, but it’s not the real world. After everything that happened, Lain already has reasons to believe that the two overlap more than her father says. She wants to enter the Wired, a process called “Metaphorize” (メタファライズ). It shares the name with the same process from Alice in Cyberland that allows someone to dive into Cyberland; it would also be used later on in Digimon Tamers with the same similar meaning. According to Konaka, he chose that name because on the internet, an imaginary world, everything is a reference, everything is a metaphor.

The Layer04 image was released in the August 1998 issue of AX Magazine and can be seen as a tease for the 5th episode that was broadcast on August 3, 1998. This is a conversation where Lain is asked a few questions that she answers. The more interesting ones for the context of this blog are the following:

layer:04 Religion
–What kind of place is Wired, to you?
　[…A place where people connect with other people–the top level of the real world hierarchy.]
[…]
–Who told you that?
　[(silence)]
–Who?
　[…God]
–What god?
　[The God of Wired.]
–There’s a God of Wired? You believe that?
　[(silence)]
–Answer me.
　[(silence)]
–Answer.
　[…There is if I believe there is…]
–That answer isn’t good enough.
　[…There is…a God…]
–All right, fine. The God of Wired is the god of the top level of the real world hierarchy–in order words, a being that controls the entire world. Is that right?

Layer 01’s artwork had that introductory text by Konaka that mentions that when something is repeated, it might become true. A concept that overlaps with that is that of God, something that becomes a big subject in the next episodes of Lain. The general idea is that a god is defined by its belief; if something believes that someone is god, then that being is god.

Another idea is the view of the wired as the “top-level” or “higher level” from the Real World, the term in the Japanese text is “リアル・ワールドの上位階層” (riaru wārudo no jōi kaisō). Of course, there’s a bit of overlap with the concept of an afterlife.

This issue also has an explanatory text on the general idea of Serial Experiments Lain, the way the three main serializations are tied together, and an interview with the staff.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE “lain”?
What’s “serial experiments”?
What did you feel when you first saw the first episode? Many readers may be interested in it, including this magazine’s serialization. Therefore, in this first part, as an introduction, we will try to decipher the keywords to get closer to the world of “lain”.
–First of all, what the title “Serial Experiments” means?
The literal translation means “continuous experiment”. From the start, this work called “lain” was created with the assumption that it would be linked to the game software for the PlayStation (scheduled for release in September). This magazine’s serialization is being written by the original staff of the PlayStation version and the TV version. Regarding its placement, it’s after the TV version in the time axis but before the PS version. Therefore, this magazine’s serialization exists as a middle ground between both (As astute readers may have noticed, the subtitle of this magazine’s serialization corresponds to the TV version’s scenario).
–The continuity is in both the parts and the whole… Consequently, let’s review. This story doesn’t seek a solution. What is being asked is “actually” “experience” this world, which similarly to the real world, Is multifaceted.
What’s“NAVI”?　What’s“Wired”？
In the stage of this work, information systems and communications networks have advanced; it is the near future when we won’t be able to function without computers and the network. First, as a basic understanding, let’s check the terminology in this world.
— NAVI; What is the Navi?
NAVI is an information terminal that is equivalent to a modern computer. In this world, it holds as much media power as television.
–WIRED; What is the Wired?
In the first episode, her father, Yasuo, speaks to Lain without looking away from his customized NAVI. “You know, Lain, in this world, whether it’s here in the real world or in the Wired, people connect to each other, and that is how societies function.” The Real World and the Wired. The world of reality with physical bodies is the Real World, and the world on the other side of the network is called the Wired.
interview with STAFF & CAST
What’s“lain”？ Who’s“玲音”？
So, how will the TV version be structured? The following is part of an interview with director Ryutaro Nakamura and Kaori Shimizu, who plays Lain, after the first post-recording session.
–So, what is “lain”?
Nakamura: When I first received the story, I got the impression of something like a horror. It was a stimulating scenario, and at first, I struggled to come up with the right concept. However, as I collaborated with the scriptwriter Konaka-san during the process of visual conversion, our synergy deepened, and our unique ‘Lain’ gradually took shape. In terms of the storyline, the impressions you get from watching the first episode will change dramatically as it progresses. I believe you’ll definitely enjoy it.
Shimizu: Game’s Lain is quite a mysterious existence. But on TV, she’s human-like. I feel like I’m starting to understand what a child she is.
–What is the WIRED?
Nakamura: For example, the world of the unconscious, with ghost-like beings and sentimental beings, and the cyber world… All of them are about the same and linked to the reality of the physical body. Personally, I think that is what Wired is all about.

About the timeline stuff, this seems to be an odd explanation that not only tries to tie the three versions together but also puts the PlayStation version as happening after the TV version, which clashes with most of the other explanations that although normally go with the idea there’s no actual timeline connection, they do see the TV being in the “future” with an “older Lain” in contrast to the PlayStation version. I wonder if this was a very early conceptual setting when they wanted to do it the other way around, or if it was just a mistake and they wrongly described the two in the wrong timeline placement.

However, the second explanation about continuity kind of overwrites a real “true timeline” and instead asks the viewer to experience the world in all its facets. This is the actual objective of the series, as stated by Ueda in different interviews.

The approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products. In the game, users can interactively access the fragments of Lain’s memory. Then users can actually feel the Lain who exists inside the Web. In the TV animation, people can understand Lain by following the story. In the end, I wanted people to understand Lain, the girl. Ultimately, I want them to love her. The CD is sort of like a byproduct, or second product, so there’s no big relation to the game or the anime there. The game’s basic viewpoint is the record of Lain when she was little. In the animation, we didn’t specifically say that Lain in the game and Lain in the anime are the same person, but the creative staff assumed the two are one and the same person, and Lain’s memory in the game had a big influence on the anime. So she’s not a person who had a fixed personality created by our concept.
Ueda (Animerica Magazine)

Serial Experiments Official Guidebook
What is the relationship between the game version and the anime version?
The TV Anime version of “lain” aired late at night prior to the release of the Game version. Could you please tell us the relationship between these two versions of “lain”?
Udea: In the first place, planning for both the game and anime versions of “lain” started at the same time. We started developing the game, which takes more time, first, and were actually planning to release the game before the anime aired, but as is often the case in this industry, the game ended up being released later (laughs).
The Game Version and the Anime Version—these two works seem to be completely different in both story and setting, but is there a chronological connection between them?
Ueda: When you understand that the settings are different, you’ll consider that there are no chronological connections between the Game Version and the Anime Version. But when it comes to this work, the settings don’t have an important meaning. Of course, you might consider that the differences in the setting are because memories are being rewritten, but Lain’s existence isn’t just that.

The explanation about Wired shows something interesting because it at least shows that the ideas Konaka had for Wired weren’t only his, or at least they were known by people in the production other than him. Regarding the settings, Konaka explained in his blog that much of what he tells there are his personal settings he never got to talk with Nakamura and he might have had a different interpretation of the subject, so it’s interesting to see that at least one element seems to fit with both of them.

Something curious about it and the relationship between the anime and the game is that, at least for Konaka, he doesn’t remember wired being a thing in the game when it actually was.

“Wired” was a tag for two of the tracks, Lda158 and Lda206, and is mentioned by name a few times. The fan translation seems to have translated “Network” as “Wired” a few times, but there were some tracks that did make use of the “Wired” itself. The most important moment I could find very close to the end was during Track Lda237 as a part of her last words.

Lda237 (Ain translation)
Do you know where…I’m going?
I don’t know either. Since after this I will be born.
Is this the evolution of humanity?
If you want to think that way, thinking that way is best.
Is a human without a body not a human?
There are people with bodies who aren’t human, too.
Me? Am I not human?
Lain is lain.
What does it mean to be human? If you have a body, does that make you
human?
I am me.
Is it based on where you live? If you go to live in the real world, you
need a body.
Killing yourself is just really stupid. Just dying is better.
Am I unneeded? Will I maybe someday be needed?
Yeah, maybe. But, to live in the Wired, I don’t need a body. I need the
records of my body though, don’t I? Where are the records of my body
growing old?
Could my value system maybe change? Do I have different needs?
There’s no guarantee it’s you.
Hey, lain, what are the things you need in the Wired?
Will and existence. The rest is mere data.

Since the game focuses more on the psychological aspects, there isn’t much usable for this post, although the way it’s described does feel like something that is discussed in the anime that does matter here. As one last time mentioning the game directly, I would like to mention the tracks Dc1036 and Dc1037 that have Lain mentioning the concept of a neural network being something very old, and in a way, it might already exist and have been mentioned in different ways over the years, just never proven so far. More precisely, after asking questions in the network, she gets an answer about someone of the idea of creating a neural network and connections.

It’s finally here. “Lain, regarding your inquiry, I think your approach is correct. The concept of a Neural Network is quite old, but modeling neurons, it doesn’t matter how many super parallel processing systems you create; it’s just not possible.” Impossible… (laughs) “But if we assume it could be possible, we might be able to grasp the network of the unknowable realm that connects humans. The Kabbalah, the Akashic Records, or perhaps what Jung called the unconscious… There are various ways to describe it, but currently, no one can prove its existence. By the way, if you are interested in such things, what exactly are you researching? What is your goal?”
Lain (Dc1036 and Dc1037)

This is an interesting statement considering that out of the most popular explanations regarding Serial Experiments Lain the most common one regarding the metaphysical is a connection with Jung’s Collective Unconscious. However, as Konaka said in the Animerica interview, “Lain” doesn’t really focus on Jung’s concepts, and any other similar concept, including the Kabbalah and the Akashic Records, could have fit the same way; the purpose was more to establish some higher unity of humanity and the world. The game works well to reference those concepts since we know that Konaka wrote the script for all the animated cutscenes.

Q: Have you always been interested in Jungian philosophy? How do Jung’s ideas apply to Lain?
Konaka: We used the phrase “collective unconscious” in Lain, but we could easily have substituted “kabbalah” or ” akashic record.” So this work isn’t particularly based on Jungian philosophy.

For completionist’s sake, the Serial Experiments Lain Official Guidebook has those terms in the Glossary.

Serial Experiments Lain Official Guidebook World Dictionary
Kabbalah: A Series of books said to contain the secret teachings of Judaism. Refers to the doctrines of Judaism, especially those that preach mystical theories.
Psychoanalysis: Observation and analysis of the deep layers of the psyche, including unconscious behavior. The psychologist Jung systematized it theoretically.
Jung’s “Unconscious”: The deep layers of the heart that can affect the spirit daily cannot be grasped except through dreams, hypnosis, and psychoanalysis. Proposed by Jung, the master of psychology.

Layer:05 Distortion

The 5th episode is basically when all the major themes I want to talk about start to appear. So from now on, I’ll have more to talk about, including the ways Lain influenced Digimon.

This is the first direct contact between Lain and the mysterious god mentioned in the first episode. It’s a conversation about the current state of humanity in regard to evolution, and it’s basically discussing the topic that started this whole blog: What is evolution?

This god seems to think that humanity has stopped to evolve, or at least, it’s at a rate completely different from other living beings. This was a topic Kakudou also mentioned in regards to Digimon, more especially in About Digimon 3, 4, and 5.

I was thinking about how mankind would evolve in the future, and although the most significant of the changes up until now would be the increase in brain size, we’ve hit our limit. Even now, when a fetus is born, the skull is divided into three parts and forced through the birth canal. It would not be able to sustain even 1.5 times the force.
Hiroyuki Kakudou (Tanslation by Kazari)

But I don’t think there are many other parts that would change either. It seems like the number of teeth would be decreasing, but you’d think that some kind of period of evolutionary change would be coming. So, if we’re not talking about a physical change, how about a change in the spirit or the soul?
Hiroyuki Kakudou (Tanslation by Kazari)

Human thoughts are quite limited by our physical features and the structures of our brains. So what if there could be someone else besides simply just your body? If something exists to supplement yourself, that existence itself would be evolution.
Hiroyuki Kakudou (Tanslation by Kazari)

This is a more extreme view of what we can observe as evolution, as it’s more of a notion that it’s something drastic, and the expectation it should be something drastic. This vision seems to be in the sense that “humans can still evolve in small ways, but the general shape of the human body is already at the limit, or close to it”.

Kaudou makes a vague mention of the “Obstetrical dilemma“, basically the hypothesis that humans are already at the limit of how they can be born and it’s already a complicated process to be done without help. There are many critiques of the hypothesis, but it seems that at least the notion of “humans are at the limit of what the body can evolve to, so they might need to evolve something other than the body”.

In that case, god suggests that humans did find something that can help them to evolve beyond the limits of the body of flesh, the network. You might have already seen that in the previous topics regarding Lain’s last words in the Game version.

Of course, this “god” character is not supposed to be a real god; according to Konaka, this is supposed to be the tale of a “false god”, because a true god would never say something like “I’m God”.

There are four scenes that depict a younger Lain interacting with someone. The first is a talking doll that can tell stories. Lain asks her to tell a story she doesn’t know, but since there’s nothing Lain doesn’t know, then there’s nothing that the doll can tell. However, she can explain that for every event, there’s a prophecy that describes it, and an event comes into existence thanks to the prophecy.

According to Konaka, the epistemology that the doll is referring to is about the observer/measurement problem.

Although the series already had a lot of depictions of what we could only call ghosts, this is the first time the “world of the dead” (冥府, meifu) is actually mentioned; it’s written looking like blood in a tissue given to Lain’s sister Mika. According to it, since the underworld is overflowing, the dead don’t have a destination anymore.

The second scene focuses on the nature of time and the prophecy. The mention of history being connected points reminds me of the Layer:01 text. Something I often don’t see mentioned is when the mask says that a “prophecy is being fulfilled”, Lain answers that it isn’t a “prophecy”. However, other than the general discussions about prophecies, they are literally talking about different things that Lain just didn’t know.

The objective, according to Konaka, was to showcase that “予言” is different from “預言”. Both are read in the exact same way, so you can’t understand just by listening. In fact, reading “Scenario Experiments Lain” also wouldn’t make this clear, because although in the scenario the mask is written saying “預言”, Lain’s line is written with hiragana (よげん). Maybe this was to symbolize that Lain was younger and wouldn’t know that there were two “よげん” (yogen).

“予言” refers to merely predicting the future, and “預言” refers to a revelation from God; it’s the conveyed words entrusted by God to the people.

So, as kind of a tease to the answer to the questions Lain is making, the mask is basically telling that a “prophecy” is a decree by God itself.

The next one to appear is a ghost-like Miho, Lain’s mother. She says that it’s reasonable to see Wired as the “upper layer”, the physical reality is nothing more than a hologram of the information that flows through the Wired. This is the same thing that was said in the layer:04 text, and considering that the Layers artworks were seen as the “in-between” of the past and the present, and these scenes are depicted as happening in an abstract past, it makes sense for them to be connected and talk about the same thing.

According to Konaka, that understanding of the Wired was one of the viewpoints he arrived at after thinking about a way of understanding the Net World since the start of the planning. From a mystical perspective, it would be what is called the “Astral world”. A space filled with ether and even a single event can affect people in completely different places through non-physical means.

Here I’d like to introduce the manga “The Nightmare of Fabrication”. This short manga was part of the “Omnipresence in the Wired” artbook, It was drawn by Yoshitoshi ABe, and serves as the missing Dc1029 track of the game, although it somewhat connects with the anime in regards to the depiction of the Wired and a certain character that appears in it.

Broken things can’t be recovered. Dead people don’t revive. I’m speaking to you from a higher layer of the hierarchy that isn’t bound by the rules of this world. […] Memories aren’t anything more than just records. Thoughts and emotions are nothing more than limited calculations of said record. Between this humanoid vessel and the true real world, there is a difficult-to-cross wall. Lain, your existence… It’s the very possibility for humans to cross that barrier.
Masami Eiri

The manga features Lain, having difficulty trusting her own memories and not having anyone to talk with, trying to insert a mechanism that would allow her dog toy to talk and later improve that with AI and make more of everyone in her life, but it’s destroyed by the mechanism.

As she cries, a ghostly appearance starts to talk with her, from what he calls a higher layer, and gives her a new toy and tells her that nothing is real more than the memories that can be experienced, memories that can be overwritten, and Lain did that before. The true real world is something that humans can’t experience, all they have are records that are limited by the human bodies, but there’s a way for humans to cross the barrier between the false and true realities, and Lain is the key.

The last conversation happens between Lain and “her father” (or rather, something that is taking the form of “her father,” as was the case with the previous three). Here he discusses that maybe what flows in the Wired isn’t merely electronic information. This reminds me of the way Konaka depicted “light” in Ultraman Tiga; although there’s a clear physical understanding, there’s also something deeper than it.

Considering that in the physical world, “god” only exists as a concept, it makes sense it could have some actual existence in the Wired if we follow Konaka’s idea that the virtual world is a world of metaphors, of concepts. Of course, this “Deus”, isn’t truly god, but it’s something that is somewhat getting to the power of one and can affect the Real World with “prophecies” (預言).

The prophecy here made Mika destroy her own cognition not supporting the weight of what was happening. According to Ueda, Mika became a victim of the Wired, she followed Lain’s steps of delving into the Wired and got stuck in this nether world in between, so while she still exists in the physical world, her mind is trapped in the Wired and barely can interact with the puppet her body became. According to Konaka, what appears in that scene is the abstract-like residual thoughts of Mika, Lain can see that, but can’t do anything about her yet.

While making this episode, Konaka wanted to depict that “reality” as people perceive it is at risk and wanted to use the new concept of network communication as a model for that. Although that is the general theme of the series as a whole, Layer:05 was the episode that most embodied the feeling of reality itself being distorted.

Layer:06 KIDS

Now that the world was basically broken in the last episode, we are going to see certain themes more and more as Lain starts to learn more about the Wired and humanity’s connection.

Lain’s Navi is already as big as her room, and she can fully render herself in the Wired. While nearly everything else appears as a bizarre abstract space, Lain can appear as herself, but that still isn’t the full extent of what she could do if the next-gen protocol comes out. Visual Experiments Lain gives a description of that place called “Inner side of WIRED”. It’s a place with no real existence, and what appears there is a reflection of will. Interestingly enough, it was thought to make the scenes inside the Wired with CG, but the team couldn’t get it done completely for various reasons.

Inner side of WIRED
The inside of the Wired is quite like a dream space. Inside this space, her existence is unrelated to her being in reality; it’s a reflection of her will. While those around her can only access it with their voices, Lain can access it with her entire body.
Rather than digital processing, it’s primarily reproduced using cel animation. Considering that these are images within the Digital Virtual Space of the Wired, one might think of reproducing the images using full digital processing with computers, and the staff naturally thought about it, but considering the schedule and the fact that some meticulous staff members got really into the work, it seemed that creating scenes using analog cel animation was more efficient, and they came to this conclusion.
“I wanted to do full digital, but in that case, you can’t do things halfway,” we heard from Mr. Nakahara. We also wanted to see the ‘Inner side of WIRED’ done with full digital processing. It would have resulted in fantastic scenes in their own right.

In the streets children seemed to be sensitive to something in the skies, they saw a “goddess” Lain before anyone else, and with their hands raised to the heavens they seemed to worship her. According to Konaka, the image was something like a heavenly maiden (天女) or Avalokiteśvara (観音菩薩). He also says that it’s the Wired Goddess created by “evocation” or more directly, it’s part of the idea that “God becomes God by being believed in”. Of course, a single child’s faith wouldn’t be able to do this, but as children start to spread this faith, even more now thanks to Wired, that faith increases at an accelerating pace, allowing the truth of the world to be changed.

Back in the Wired, we are introduced to someone who only appears with a moth, something Lain equates to the Cheshire Cat. He explains that the closer someone appears to their physical self, the better the Metaphorize is. Most users can barely manifest their ears to hear; some better users can manifest their mouths and speak. Lain is someone who is more unique and is able to Metaphorize her entire body.

Still in the Wired Lain, she “moves” to the place where Professor Hodgeson is, someone who is able to explain more of what is happening. Something interesting to note about the nature of the Wired, at least according to Konaka, is that since everything in it is non-physical and all form is shaped by will, there’s not really any distance at all, so movement in the Wired could be equated to a teleport, so the two scenes happened back to back and Lain didn’t need to walk to where Hodgeson is. The same seems to be the case with time; at least Konaka talked about this when analyzing the opening, and Hodgeson states there’s a difference as if it were eternal (In the original text he says “美しい時間・・・永遠のような静けさ” which roughly means “Beautiful time… It’s unmoving like Eternity”).

Konaka also calls seeing the past as something “transcending time and space“. It might not be the intention, but if experienced reality from the memories is really all that exists, and perceived history might change alongside memories, it makes you wonder if in the context of “Lain”, records and history are one and the same.

Lain thinks that what she saw earlier was something similar to Hodgeson’s project, KIDS. In children, there’s a very faint PSI, a parapsychological ability. On its own, it’s weak in most children; it can barely be used to affect the physical world like bending a spoon or having good intuition, but the KIDS project attempted to gather their individual PSI and do something big with it. However, the Orgone box was overloaded, and the children were killed in the process by a big explosion. Hodgeson attempted to erase his research, but it somehow ended up in the WIRED, and now it’s being used by a group; it’s making use of the children but with no need to use the receptors he built.

The following are some descriptions of the system and the power children hold from the Visual Book. According to Konaka, the explanation presented in the anime was greatly reduced from the original scenario, so some context ended up missing from it.

Visual Experiments Lain
The KIDS’ devices are arranged in a colosseum-like fashion, with 16 Outer Receptors lined up in a row. Needles with bundled cords pierce the base surface of a box resembling an Orgone box (an unknown energy concept conceived by one of Freud’s disciples, Wilhelm Reich, and the Orgone box is used for storing it for applications like biotherapy). Knights obtained this experimental data and successfully replicated similar phenomena through emulation using NAVI, which exists everywhere, without Outer Receptors.

03 Kids
The power that only children possess. The things that only children believe in. The things that only children can see… Both children of the past and children of the present hold this power; it might be because of the faith that only children have.
The strange behavior Lain saw in the children on her way to and from school is like “kage okuri” (影送り). When adults witness these, they let out a bittersweet smile, tinged with nostalgia and self-deprecation, as they reconcile with what they lost in exchange for their growth. However, what happens if there’s an existence that didn’t finish all the adjustments?
Maybe the strange things Lain is always seeing are remnants of that. What does this eternal girl hold…

This was a very interesting exploration of some very important key components of what is about to happen. In a way, Konaka’s early comments about “words being amplified becoming true” gained a very literal meaning considering the power teased here. In a way, it’s as if they are all somewhat connected.

Layer:07 Society

This episode was planned as the debut of the Knights, a group that has been mentioned and acted in the shadows during the previous episodes. But just showing the members of the group would be boring, so it was decided to instead focus on someone attempting to enter the organization and following their ideals. Right now Lain seems to be in a state that she at least agrees with some of the Knight’s ideals, such as the idea that the real world isn’t really real. At least from the one who wants to join the organization, he seems to want to leave the physical world and break down the barrier between it and the Wired.

While Lain is being questioned by Kurosawa, boss of the MIB, she starts to be overwhelmed by questions that imply that her own history has been fabricated, and in answer to that, her “Lain of the Wired” persona manifests. Considering that she is there without being connected to a device, Kurosawa states that the barrier between the two worlds really is starting to crumble.

Layer:08 Rumors

And now we are introduced directly to the big element of the setting, Protocol 7. According to Konaka, it’s similar to the “9th layer”, maybe a reference to the depiction of layers in “Alice in Cyberland” (he in fact gave the sequel script the title of 7th Protocol as a reference to SEL). Basically, although the story takes place in “present day, present time”, it is still a bit advanced. When SEL was made IPv5 was already a thing, so he decided to depict the Wired, a more advanced network, as IPv6, and the one after that would naturally be IPv7.

Of course, the depiction of Protocols isn’t very realistic in the series, and he was met with fierce opposition from Ueda in regards to depicting Protocols as MacGuffins. Ueda had studied UNIX and just thought that it was unthinkable to use IPs the way Konaka wanted, but after much discussion (literal yelling according to both of them), we ended up getting the protocols as they are in the series.

Although the main focus regarding the growth of Wired is Lain, the network as a whole is evolving and becoming more detailed. The first time Lain appeared in Wired, the vast region was mostly a single road representing a one-dimensional space; barely no one was able to interact directly, and the ones that could would be represented in a cartoonish way. But here the space spreads in a two-dimensional way, and although Lain is still the only one that was able to translate her entire body, the depictions of the others here are much more complete than the Cheshire Cat. Of course, Konaka said he didn’t do this consciously.

Now Lain finally interacts directly with the “God of the Wired”. But what kind of god? According to him, he isn’t god in the definition of the creator of the world, but being omnipotent isn’t something even God could be; instead, he’s a god that is omnipresent and yet can only slightly influence the inner workings of the world. He is also Lain, the source of the part of her that always existed in the Wired, and the body in the physical world is nothing more than a hologram of that part.

In this episode, we had three scenes with three different versions of Lain. The Lain of the Real World was in the class while the Lain of the Wired looked for God when the conversation ended and Lain returned to the class, she was unsure of what happened and we see more of the two worlds connecting. In some scenes, it seems that Lain influences the world physically; Konaka said that he didn’t add that to the scenario, but he thinks Nakamura added it. After Lain collapses, she wonders what she did to Alice and we are introduced directly to “lain” (Written like that in English letters), one that acts like a devil. She was the one who spread rumors about Alice.

The Lain of the Real World is in her bed, feeling what is happening in Alice’s room. While in an empty space, the Lain of the Wired confronts “lain,” denying her existence as a part of herself, but it’s actually the part of her that she hates.

Back in the tatami space, Lain is surrounded by various bodies with the same face as her. God explains that they are herself. Since Lain shares the same existence as him, she’s omnipresent in the Wired and, as such, is also with everyone every time. Since she always knew all that they did, she did well in sharing the secrets because information in the Wired should spread freely. Lain disagrees with that notion; she can only be in a single place, and her existence is proven by her physical body. If she were someone like God said, she should be able to just delete what happened. God agrees and says she can, and so she does.

Layer:09 Protocol

For the purposes of this post, this is the most important episode. The initial context comes from this post.

It all started around 1996 when making video movies on your own became more technologically possible thanks to new programs such as Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop. A new plug-in called “CineLook” that added various effects to a video was released. Konaka learned about it in a magazine and was very interested in it, so he decided to import the program since it hadn’t been released in Japan yet.

In that context, in 1997, as he worked on the OVA “Mahou Tsukai Tai!” that introduced him to anime production, there were also other multimedia projects being made. One of the projects that they were developing was a Drama CD. One of the stories was titled “Frozen Railroad Crossing” (凍った踏切), a reference to a short movie directed by Junichi Sato during his independent production days called “Frozen Night” (凍った夜)

In the Drama CD, the main characters would appear in an independent film. For the release of the CD and the end of the OVA, it was decided to make an event to commemorate it with the fans. To make something special, they thought of screening Sato’s movie, but since it was too scary and had nothing to do with the anime, they instead decided to make their own original short film. Konaka didn’t work on the Drama CD script but decided to do the short live-action. The short was just 3 minutes long, and the last scene had the main character crossing a railroad in slow motion with animated feathers that would make her float. The animation was drawn by someone, but Konaka himself wasn’t able to do the live-action composition because he was still a beginner, so he asked someone he just met, Hiroyuki Kakudou, to make that composition (You can read about the production of the last scene here).

Konaka had previously met Kakudou in a closed meeting room for computer communication. He was a member of “Group Ebisen”, an independent anime circle well-known in the independent film industry, and he was already making independent special effects films. Since both of them shared similar hobbies, tastes, and knowledge, they quickly became friends. Eventually, Kakudou came to work in the 9th episode of Serial Experiments Lain as Episode Director.

The introductory monologue is an interesting one. It’s one of the few moments that showcase the idea of an always-present God, instead of one maintained by belief. It might represent the strange state of the world after the previous reset. This episode is mostly a documentary and works explaining the backstory of the Wired, it’s Konaka’s favorite episode.

The story uses the 1942 Roswell incident as the starting point; many other real-world events would connect with this and result in the creation of the Wired. In this episode, it was decided to finally depict directly that Lain is able to connect to the Wired without any special mechanism working to do that; she just needs to be able to look at the screen and dive into the Wired. Lain is currently trying to understand what happened and how she was able to undo something that happened. She is still denying that she always existed in the Wired.

The objective of this is to present the creation of the wired network as a natural part of the creation and evolution of the Computer Network. Of course, it’s not something that was created in a single day but rather a great number of related events that needed to build a way to transfer huge amounts of information at high speed.

However, the concept of a network of information isn’t exclusive to something computer-aided, and different mechanisms are also mentioned. As stated in the PlayStation game, the concept of a collective network isn’t anything new, and the development of computers is merely a way to help with that. Dolphins are mentioned as an example of a species that somehow was able to make such a network with their own bodies inside the water. The dolphins in that scene are computer-generated and were made by Kakudou himself. Later elements that helped the creation of the network include Memex and Project Xanadu.

What we had so far was the natural evolution of the concept of the Computer Network, the use of the Schumann resonances as a way to create a wireless network was Konaka’s own imagination. In the world of Lain Eiri Masami developed a hypothesis to use the Schumann resonances to create a network across the entire planet, with humans being connected at an unconscious level. He encoded the SR factor into the 7th-gen protocol and later died. It was he who became the entity known as God. The concept was inspired by Nikola Tesla’s World Wireless System.

Layer:10 Love

The episode starts with Eiri talking with Lain; the structure was made as a psychodrama with the two reading each other’s minds. Here Eiri explains what he did by encoding Protocol 7 to act in a higher phase: he was able to learn how to leave his own body and live forever in the Wired as an omnipresent being able to control information. Here the Wired is once again related to the afterlife and it calls back to the first episode and what Chisa said. However, even that isn’t still a god if there are no worshipers; that is when the Knights are formed, an organization created by Eiri’s manipulation that places him in the rank of a god.

About the term “higher phase” used here, in Scenario Experiments Lain the dictionary includes the following definition of phase.

Phase
The network protocol is made up of several layers. It seems that Eiri engineered it to be even higher than what is normally used.

Later on, back at the Wired, Lain is now able to talk with the collective voices of the place and starts to ask questions. She asks who the Knights are, it’s said that their origin can be traced back to the Knights Templar and they were making use of the invisible human network, the collective unconscious, long before Wired was created. Nevertheless, Lain concludes Eiri became a god because the Knights worshiped him, and so she wants to know who all of them are.

Thanks to Lain, the MIB was able to locate all the Knights members and is now acting to kill all of them. They don’t believe the Wired should be a special world but rather a sub-system that supports the working Real World. They also plan to delete Eiri’s presence in the Wired and rewrite Protocol Seven, removing gods from both worlds and restoring the status quo.

This was expected to be the end, but Eiri explains there’s still one believer left: Lain herself. Lain was created by Eiri with the Wired; it’s the real form, and the physical body is nothing more than a homunculus of artificial ribosomes and a hologram of the true self. If this is true or not, Konaka says he thinks this “might” be true, while Ueda and Ryutaro think that is “highly possible”.

Layer:11 Infornography

Lain continues to be connected to the Wired. Eiri says that she isn’t hardware, but rather software with a body. Later on, Konaka says the Wired isn’t governed by the sense of “present”, she meets both Chisa and the boy who used Accel. They talk to Lain about needing or not needing a body. The boy introduces Lain to a gun and teaches her how to use it. Although the story wouldn’t end like the game, Konaka thought he still needed to give Lain a gun at least once in order to match the game.

Lain is now back in Alice’s room. According to her, she now has destroyed the border between the Real World and the Wired, meaning that she can go anywhere she wants and undo something that already happened. She wants to once again remove the rumors the other Lain started and restore the world to its proper place.

Layer:12 Landscape

The episode starts with Lain now stating she figured out the way the world works, it makes sense considering what she did last episode. She now understands that someone’s existence is only a thing when it’s in someone’s memory. Therefore, it was not that there were many of her, but rather that her own existence was present in many people’s memories, and not everyone shared the same understanding.

In the news, Protocol 7 is explained as something that would allow for the sharing of information between the Wired and the Real World, and now they all need to love Lain. According to Konaka, the release of Protocol 7 was what allowed Lain to overwrite memories in the last episode.

Now starts a long monologue by Eiri. It’s all about his views on human nature and evolution beyond the physical body, something that not only humans should look for, but this state where everyone is connected is seen as the original state of living, and all he wanted was to bring this back. In the end of the monologue, Lain appears, but it’s a new Lain (れいん, written with Hiragana) and is the same one who spoke during the intro.

Deep underground, the MIB met with their client again, and they figured out that Eiri having a body or not just never mattered, and he was most likely behind everything, including their client, who was also in touch with Eiri and wanted to connect with the Wired without the need for a device. They end up dying from the ghosts of those they killed. It wasn’t the grudges of the dead that tortured them, but rather what was left of their human consciousness. Although Lain appears in one of their eyes, it was still an element that wasn’t sure if it would appear outside of the scenario, and Konaka wanted viewers to not interpret this as something that Lain did with malicious intent.

Alice goes to Lain’s house and meets with her in her room. Lain explains that all she did was allow everyone to connect. Originally, everyone was connected at an unconscious level, the collective unconscious; everyone is just an application original, without the need of a body, so she broke down the barrier between the Wired and the “real world”, it didn’t matter which one was real. Alice didn’t agree with this and touched Lain’s face, saying she was wrong. Lain was cold, but Alice could feel she was alive. Alice picks up Lain’s hand and makes Lain touch her chest so she can feel the warmth.

Lain agrees with Alice, but now Eiri appears, saying that Lain has a bug that needs to be removed. Lain confronts Eiri, saying what she doesn’t understand is him. All he did was remove the devices from the Wired, something he thinks accompanies human evolution, and those who evolved further could gain greater abilities. But who gave him the right to do that? Who gave him the idea to raise the collective unconscious to the conscious level? Eiri sees that as implying the existence of a true God.

Lain says that Eiri would never really understand without a body. Eiri gets crazy with this and calls himself omnipotent—the one who gave Lain a body and an ego from something that was omnipresent and scattered through the Wired. Now Lain disagrees with all his views. She doesn’t see the Wired as a higher layer anymore; Eiri is now a god inside the Wired, but before the Wirei was created, he wasn’t. So he was just an acting god standing in for someone waiting for the Wired to reach its current state.

Layer:13 Ego

In this episode, Lain finally gets over her body; she’s connected everywhere and only exists inside of those who are aware of her existence. After everything that happens, she once again resets the world, but now she isn’t anywhere in the physical world. According to Ueda, Lain’s existence caused confusion between the Wired and Reality, causing events like Mika being trapped between the real and the virtual. In order to fix everything, Lain removed her own existence from reality and reset it in order to keep the two worlds separated, returning everything to normal. Now it’s as if Lain never existed.

In a small world, Lain meets her other self that appeared in the last episode, Lain (れいん). She explains that Lain erased her existence from everyone’s memories, and now she is nowhere. This solved the problems; no one is dying or being hurt, no one hates Lain, and information of the dead isn’t coming out of the Wired. However, Lain continues to be confused.

According to Lain (れいん), just like the other said in the last episode, the Wired itself wasn’t the higher layer, and that was where Eiri was mistaken. As the MiB said, the Wired was merely a field that allowed for the constant exchange of information. However, it couldn’t really be something that could share the entire shared unconscious of human memory.

The Wired was, in fact, something that connected to something else, but what? Lain (れいん) says maybe people don’t need to know about that; they have always created and prayed to various gods, always thinking to have finally found what the truth of the world is. But did they? When Lain was starting, Konaka first thought about how to express virtual reality, but not knowing exactly how to show it, he ended up going with something more familiar and equated the Wired with the afterlife, some higher layer of reality. Here he’s saying he changed his mind; the Wired is merely a tool that can be used to access that higher world and allows for strange things to happen, but in his own opinion, that didn’t make the Wired the higher layer itself, and on its own the Wired had no meaning. He talked about that during the HK Magazine interview.

HK Magazine
HK: For example, if there’s electrical information about humans, it is accumulated in what is called the afterlife, or rather, the world of the Wired, so you decided to depict it as occasionally appearing in the world of reality floating and seen by ordinary humans as ghosts.
Konaka: Information suddenly somehow manifests, and then when the world of information and the world of reality synchronize, there might be moments when something resembling spirits can be seen; that is what served as my initial starting point. That wasn’t the conclusion, but just the starting point. So if we insisted on it, asking what the Wired is in the anime version of “Lain,”, it would be the middle region between the world of reality and the possible afterlife, maybe something resembling heaven or hell… It’s Middle Earth, the place that connects the two. On its own, there’s no significance behind it, and that was the conclusion shown in the anime series. The way I personally feel about this is “Yeah, that is possible (but there are other possibilities too)”. But there’s no clear conclusion; at least I don’t think it’s the higher level in the hierarchy.

Lain (れいん) says Lain should just become God; she would be omnipresent, lack the same needs as humans, could just watch over everything without doing anything, and if she wanted, she could just start everything again with another reset. However, Lain just collapsed over this idea and is now surrounded by darkness.

What appears in the darkness is Lain’s father as the light in the skies; it’s a scene modeled after Plato’s allegory of the cave.

The importance

This post is mostly made of images from the original series, but what really lays the groundwork are commentaries from books, interviews, and even blogs that helped to shape the idea of what was there during the development. But they aren’t supposed to be the absolute truth of these works. When a work is being made, it’s finished by the collective effort of all the staff who helped to make it, and when it’s released, it’s for the viewer to understand and create his own view of the work. Konaka’s blog isn’t the “correct answer”, but rather a space he created to reveal settings that he didn’t have time to make clear in the work itself and his own personal ideas. Of course, everyone can create their own interpretation of the work, and Ueda’s main intent with the series was exactly for that to happen and promote a clash of ideas.

Ultimately, that is how it’s always happening, and every work is made in a way from a clash of ideas, even if the clash is the sole author arguing with themself trying to choose a certain interpretation from a certain concept they have in their mind. However, the more a certain work moves away from its source and is reinterpreted by others, it’s possible that the original theme that was put in the work gets lost over time, and something that goes completely against it takes its place.

During TSUBU-CON 2019, there was a meeting with the staff in charge of Ultraman Tiga, and Hirochika Muraishi, the director, took the first few minutes to talk with Konaka about light regarding the scene during episode 25 when Tiga receives light from everyone. He explained that he originally thought Light was merely something physical, but after seeing everyone with their flashlights to save Tiga during the shooting, he felt as if their souls were on fire and realized that Light was in fact inside their hearts, and he understood more about that during the last episode when all the children became Light.

Of course, the real understanding of what Tiga represents might vary; the original concept was from Migata, and his original idea couldn’t be realized because the director thought it just wasn’t Ultraman. Konaka also had his own understanding of Tiga and Light, and although he wrote episode 25 and the last episodes, it’s unclear how many people on the staff agreed with him or Migata, and even more, who in the audience understood their message.

It isn’t impossible to think that someone didn’t get the concept they were trying to show, but what if someone later made something inspired by Tiga but completely changed the concept? What if instead of understanding the message of why GUTS couldn’t save Tiga and that it was only thanks to the children that Tiga was saved, that person would just focus on the notion of getting more technologically advanced and ignore that the real light was the light of hope and not a huge flashlight?

But at the same time, making the story very close to the point of not letting any interpretation in also doesn’t feel right. There should be a nice balance in between that allows the core message to be understood without killing the spirit of imagination.

My objective here is to understand the core ideas for the world of Digimon, figure out the different ways that it changed over the years, and see if there’s some core to the various cores that could unify all of them under the same ever-expanding world. But doing so requires understanding what was on the minds of those who created the series, and that is nearly impossible. The works I introduced here, for example, all allow for a certain level of interpretation, especially Lain. So although I looked for all this background material, it’s not really possible to expect that Kakudou knew all of that, but at the same time, it’s clear that at least some level of this material made its way into the production of Adventure, although the degree is uncertain.

Preview page of the final episode when Digimon Adventure was aired. Ah, even though “IT” is written there, “serial experiments lain” isn’t written, that’s not good. Also, “Sengoku Jieitai” (or “Akuukan Yousai”) too.
Hiroyuki Kakudou

Director Ryutaro Nakamura’s obituary. Although I only contributed to the storyboard and helped with CG in one episode of “serial experiments lain,” without that, “Digimon Adventure,” which began the following year, might not have become the kind of work it did. Thank you for your hard work. Thank you.
Hiroyuki Kakudou

Digimon Adventure came to be as a further extension of the relationship between the Computer Network and Evolution that was shown in the 9th episode of lain, so the beginning of Digimon Adventure’s 33rd episode, which features the Shibuya-type Digimon, is an homage. Also, it’s obvious that the source for the image of Yukio Oikawa is Masami Eiri.
Hiroyuki Kakudou

As those of you who have seen my tweet exchanges with Konaka-san up to this point know, Digimon Adventure was made under the great influence of Konaka-san, Ultraman Tiga in terms of scenario, and “lain” in terms of concept and visuals.
Hiroyuki Kakudou

This blog post started with the question “What is Evolution?”. Digimon clearly change their forms in a process known as “evolution”, but what makes that a real “Evolution”? The answer lies in “Ultraman Tiga” and “Serial Experiments Lain”.

Everything once started with “light” and represents something that lies beyond the physical body. It’s one unity beyond time and space, connecting everyone and everything as a singular existence. Everything was like a thought, like an ideal. It’s not wrong to see someone calling that state of existence godlike.
Our individual existences have emanated from that light, becoming what we are now: physical beings. “Evolution” is nothing more than the pursuit of the light, to become more than what we are now and closer to the ideal forms.
The clearest example of evolution is the change of the physical body, but our spirits, which keep the closest connection with the origin, also evolve, getting closer to the point where they’re going to once again reclaim what they once were. When the physical body is at the limit of its evolution, it’ll be time to engage with the evolution of the soul.
The original collective network of existence never disappeared from mankind’s myths, and over the ages, many have attempted to describe what existed beyond and connecting everyone. Plato’s allegory of the cave. Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. Jung’s Collective unconscious. They are all different ways to describe the same structure. Humans have always attempted to name their gods, and without knowing it, the collective myths do shape reality in a way. The more something is said, the more it becomes true.
It’s not wrong to expect that over the years there have been overlaps between the physical reality and the non-physical, especially if caused by humans who didn’t know any better; if that happened, maybe what are known as demons or ghosts is a result of the fault perception of spiritual beings who are like human thought and exist in space-time gaps.
The key to evolution is the exchange of information. The more humans can restore the state of shared consciousness and recognize that everything is connected, the closer they are to the origin. And currently, information has been shared more than ever, thanks to the development of the computer network that covers the entire planet.
A field that is used to exchange information and is somehow a closer existence to the state of pure thought than physical reality. By using it, it might be possible to allow humans to see the side of them that they have never seen and to manifest what is kept hidden in their hearts. In a way, it’s a modernization of already existing systems used since ancient times. However, computer technology needs to be seen as a mechanism that helps in the process and not be confused with the higher reality itself. It exists as the middleman, allowing for the exchange of information and aiding human evolution.
With the advancement of computer technology, humanity might be able to reveal their true forms, become light, and break down the borders between the real and the digital.

The above is a summary text that I made with the main elements from the two works that find their way into the structure of Digimon Adventure. I don’t think that Kakudou knew about all the elements that are present in either Tiga or Lain. Some of them are obscure information from newer books, but it might be possible that Kakudou used a similar inspiration as Konaka, since according to Konaka himself, the two share mostly the same hobbies and knowledge.

Hiro Masaki and the Hyperreality

Digimon Adventure isn’t the work of a single person; however, under the context of this post, there aren’t many staff members I can explore and break down their inspirations like I did with Kakudou. I wanted to diversify more with this analysis, and I found interesting information from another two people who worked in the series. The first is Hiro Masaki.

According to Masaki, His father bought him complete collections of children’s literature and encyclopedias when he was in school, and they all greatly influenced him while writing Digimon. From the encyclopedias, he thought that the Digital World was a world made up of existing data in a similar way to Baudrillard’s Disneyland. He looked in the encyclopedias to figure out these concepts and explore them in Digimon. So in many ways, his understanding of how data worked in the Digital World was based on the work “Simulacra and Simulation”.

The general idea is that when we are creating something, it acts as a simulation of something we know. So a drawing of the environment is a simulation of that environment. As we consume media and use it to develop more works, we are using simulation itself as the basis for another simulation; it becomes a simulacra. As this process continues, there might be a point when works with no relationship to physical reality are made; they become pure Simulacrum.

Hyperreality refers to a point when there’s confusion between what is real and what is merely signs and symbols with no relationship with reality whatsoever. It happens when we start to make more simulations with no real origin and no place in actual reality, and it reaches a point where we can’t help but use the hyperreal in place of the real.

I have always wondered how exactly Masaki wanted to depict the relationship with the Digital World regarding Simulacra and Simulation, and I think I got a better understanding after writing this post and Konaka’s concepts of Rearise and Metaphorize. It might be the case that the Digital World lacks a proper foundation of reality; instead, it attempts to simulate reality. But as it’s based on pure information from the real world, it might use simulations themselves as the basis and become a place that starts to lose its resonance with reality. It becomes a world of pure figures and symbols, of ideas and metaphors.

The biggest difference with the actual concept is that the hyperreal, as depicted by Baudrillard, is a consequence of humanity’s own way of understanding reality and does not have a literal physical influence over the world. Considering that the Digital World can overlap with reality and affect it, what we have here is a realistic concept that makes use of idealism to take shape. It’s like a blend of the realist and nominalists branches of the Problem of Universals.

Hosoda and the cry of Cicadas

Mentioning Masaki was still, in a way, very related to Kakudou since they were working on the same version of Digimon Adventure. It might feel strange to the average viewer that tries to connect everything with a realistic timeline, but even though the Movie and TV Anime versions of Digimon Adventure are connected in a timeline, they are not related to each other regarding the settings, and the development was mostly different for each of them. So mentioning Masaki still brings the same general concepts from the TV Anime, but bringing Hosoda and the movies (And Episode 21), it’s like connecting two distinct works with distinct settings that are vaguely connected by the same characters and time placement (it’s like a less extreme version of Lain’s media-mix world). Both Kakudou and Hosoda sees each of them as being completely different.

One important element about Hosoda’s major works in the Digimon Adventure series is the lack of the Digital World itself being shown. Unless we consider “Digimon Adventure 3D: Digimon Grand Prix!”, basically none of Hosoda’s works portrayed the Digital World itself. It showed Digimon going in and out of their world and even the network world, which theoretically is between the two but not the proper Digital World. That isn’t a coincidence and reflects Hosoda’s view of Digimon. He explained in detail his understanding of the summer and the difference between the “real” and the fantasy” in an interview for the Digimon Adventure Movie Storyboard Book.

Note: The text below is from an interview from “Digimon Adventure: Storyboard – Mamoru Hosoda“. The page of the book containing the part was shared by UlforceSoul on Weibo. The entire interview was translated in Chinese for the “Digimon Database” and was also done by UlforceSoul. Similar to the infamous interview from the “Digimon Movie Book“, this interview also goes into detail about Hosoda’s intent in the portrayal of Taichi and Hikari’s relationship, and it’s in a way related to his view of the Digital World. For that reason, I’m going to mention it here. If you don’t want to read that, you might want to skip the collapsed text.

Digimon Adventure: Storyboard – Mamoru Hosoda (Click to Open)

Interviewer: I like the scene where Hikari appears for the first time. She is a child, but she is so glamorous.
Hosoda: When you think there is no one in the room, suddenly she is there. What’s more, Hikari is a mysterious person, or rather, she’s a child who can see things, but if she acts a lot, that sense of mystery wouldn’t appear. That is why we wanted the feeling of “She’s already there” and “Was there without anyone noticing”. I wanted to put out the feeling that although she’s his young sister, it was as if he was meeting his girlfriend for the first time.
I read a book when I was a student, and there was an image that has remained in my head since that time. If I’m not mistaken it was written by “Yukio Mishima”, there was a passage like this in it: Mishima woke up in the morning still in his sleepwear, he was doing unfinished work or something. There his young boy “shosei” was silently cleaning the veranda. Both of them are silent, and each of them continued to do their own work, then in an instant, when he looks above his texts his eyes meet the houseboy’s eyes. His eyes gaze at him without looking away. The houseboy can’t take his eyes off him either, so they stayed silently looking at each other. Outside, there’s just an echoing sound.
So, that’s all the content, but it gave me a strangely sexual image of a moment on a summer day, and I found it intriguing. Taichi and Hikari, they are an old brother and his younger sister, but I was considering creating something similar with the two. It’s a summer day, it’s hot and humid, and the cicadas are chirping. Cicadas are chirping, so it’s a quiet and mysterious space. And there a human nature that is normally kept hidden, such as having a love affair in daylight, is allowed to materialize. I think of it as an image of you being able to see accidentally for just an instant something that feels immoral, something you shouldn’t see. During episode 21, outside of the main story, you can feel the intent of the director’s side spreading out. That was my intent, the moment when Taichi returns to the Digital World at the end, you can feel it’s strangely bewitching.
Interviewer: From that last sentence, could you please explain a little more about the sexual image you talked about?
Hosoda: I don’t know if it’s true, but when I read the works of Yukio Mishima, it seems to me that he was clearly bisexual. At that time, there was this air wavering between the work at hand and the fantasy of a possible sexual relationship with his houseboy. Reality and illusion, it’s said that these two intertwined in the midday sunshine on a summer day. I think that kind of feeling overlapped with Taichi’s wavering heart as he was torn between Koromon, who exists in the digital world, and Hikari, who exists in the real world.
Interviewer: I understand.
Hosoda: I personally think that episode 21 is a sequel to the Digimon movie. In short, Hikari, who could not speak in the first movie, became able to speak in episode 21, and has become a presence that attracts Taichi.
Interviewer: Both the 1st movie and episode 21 are “Digimon”, but they aren’t set in the Digital World.
Hosoda: Yes. For me, “Digimon” is always about the real world, and I felt that Digimon exists in the real world. That was very strong in me. But in the TV series, Taichi and his friends go to the Digital World to continue their adventures. I was aware that the story that was going on in the series and the “Digimon” that I created were completely different.

In Hosoda’s view, influenced by Yukio Mishima, Digimon in the Digital World do not exist in reality; they are unreal and instead are the same as something imaginated, from fantasies, from dreams. However, on a hot summer day while Cicadas are chirping, we are surrounded by a mysterious space where the real and fantasy overlap. In that space, what we keep hidden inside us is allowed to manifest. It’s the contrast between reality and illusion, and the moment when what is only a thought that could be hidden can be expressed.

Digimon, while being able to manifest in the real world, are real beings. For Hosoda’s depiction, by contrasting the realistic environment with the unrealistic ecology of the Digimon, the contrasts bring forth an even stronger sense of realism. In that way, while Taichi was in the digital world, he was actually in a dream, and only when he returned to the real world in episode 21 did he return to what was real alongside Koromon (or could it have been the opposite?). The anime, however, directly depicts the Digimon in the Digital World, and Taichi continues his adventures there, so it’s different from the way Hosoda wanted to depict the Digital World as merely a fantastical place that doesn’t really exist

Conclusion

Digimon started with the “Digital Monster” toyline. Although there was a background world to the toy, the staff didn’t think too much about it and didn’t consider that it had a “story” or even “characters”. When it came to expanding the series to multiple media, it wasn’t known how to do that. Especially for what should have been a 1-year anime series.

The very idea of “Digimon” as digital monsters living in a digital world on top of the computer network was very difficult to manage at the time. First, there was a lack of working staff that knew how to manage the concepts. And second, because of technological limitations, the first thought to depict virtual reality was using CGI, and Toei didn’t allow the series to make use of their newly made CGI department or outsource it completely. In that situation, the anime staff decided to follow other examples from that time and make use of their concepts to work with Digimon.

Out of all the concepts, the director had the hardest time figuring out the meaning of “evolution” that could fit with Digimon and the Digital World, and in that situation, he decided to follow two works from one of his greatest friends, Ultraman Tiga and Serial Experiments Lain.

And so started a story that connects humans and digimon and tells how humanity as a whole evolved thanks to the connections formed with the computer network and allowed them to release the light from their hearts.

Digital World Archive

The worlds behind Digimon Adventure: Become Light and Break the Barrier Between the Real World and the Wired

Introduction

Background on the Development

Foundational Works

Ultraman Tiga: The light is within everyone

Serial Experiments Lain: Break down the barrier between the Real World and the Wired

Background

Before the Release

Creating the Worldview

Layer:01 Weird

Layer:02 Girls

Layer:03 Psyche

Layer:04 Religion

Layer:05 Distortion

Layer:06 KIDS

Layer:07 Society

Layer:08 Rumors

Layer:09 Protocol

Layer:10 Love

Layer:11 Infornography

Layer:12 Landscape

Layer:13 Ego

The importance

Hiro Masaki and the Hyperreality

Hosoda and the cry of Cicadas

Conclusion

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Introduction

Background on the Development

Foundational Works

Ultraman Tiga: The light is within everyone

Serial Experiments Lain: Break down the barrier between the Real World and the Wired

Background

Before the Release

Creating the Worldview

Layer:01 Weird

Layer:02 Girls

Layer:03 Psyche

Layer:04 Religion

Layer:05 Distortion

Layer:06 KIDS

Layer:07 Society

Layer:08 Rumors

Layer:09 Protocol

Layer:10 Love

Layer:11 Infornography

Layer:12 Landscape

Layer:13 Ego

The importance

Hiro Masaki and the Hyperreality

Hosoda and the cry of Cicadas

Conclusion

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