![]() There’s these lingering feelings of loneliness and post-pandemic internet addiction. “There’s an appeal to being able to socialise without going out, being seen as who you are online and not in real life. “I feel like during the pandemic, a lot of people were living a Lain-esque life, shut-in and seeking out connections online,” agrees Soulgem. Her fragmented subjectivity, embodied in the multiple Lain alter egos inside the Wired, her socially awkward and reclusive personality, and her lack of origins, make her the perfect representative of girlhood online. It makes sense that teen girls see themselves in Lain. This appeals to the chronically online cool people as we relate to female characters that are mentally unwell.” “We relate to Lain so much she is an underground countercultural cyberpunk icon. “A lot of people think being a femcel is a subculture that spawns from incel culture but in my honest opinion a femcel is a subculture that spawns from the female experience and teenage girlhood as a whole,” says the admin behind Instagram meme page. In particular it attracts the sort of chronically online e-girls who self-identify as femcels and yandere GFs, who post about being mentally ill and listen to Mitski. “ Lain explores everything from false identity to parasocial relationships, which is an inevitable part of technology becoming so ingrained in our lives,” says Soulgem, the founder of Cyberus Zine. The memes depict scenes of Lain enmeshed in computer wires, or in a bear suit, with chemically imbalanced captions about mental illness and being terminally online. They maintain the spirit of schizoposting, a kind of experimental posting – video, meme or text – that adopts certain aesthetics that are legible to certain people sharing a community without didactically saying anything coherent. Today’s lainpilled content takes the form of surreal TikTok videos and roleplay that pull on themes of disassociation to create an overarching feeling of alienation. A fan site Wired Sound For Wired People has been visited over 35 million times, so clearly something is resonating. On TikTok, the hashtag #lainpilled has over 29 million results, while a quick search on YouTube generates hundreds of video essays. Nowadays, the idea that we can abandon our physical selves completely and live a completely virtual existence isn’t too far-fetched, especially with advancements in VR and the metaverse. But nearly 25 years on, the anime has taken on new meaning for a generation of zoomers, whose terminally online lives aren’t too dissimilar from that of the Wired. One of the first instances of the internet depicted in popular culture ( The Matrix came out the following year), Lain’s mind-bending depiction of a virtual realm, where people can evolve into god-like beings, might have seemed dystopian upon its release. This premise takes both the characters and viewers on a dark and uncanny journey into a virtual house of mirrors where identities emerge and mutate, and where the notion of reality is constantly called into question. She claims to have found God in the Wired. It follows the titular Lain, a 14-year-old girl who becomes obsessed with computers after she receives an email from a dead classmate who tells her that she did not commit suicide but has merely “abandoned her physical self” in place of the virtual realm. Released in 1998, Serial Experiments Lain is a cyberpunk classic that takes place in a virtual world called the Wired, which bears an eerie resemblance to today’s internet. “I could never explain this to someone that doesn’t use the internet like I do,” says one commenter. With over 240k views, it’s one of the many surreal and unsettling videos on TikTok under the hashtag #lainpilled after the cult anime Serial Experiments Lain. The words “femcel lainpilled” flash onto the screen. “9/11 was bad” repeats an automatic voice on loop. ![]() A boy stands in an empty corridor wearing a Twilight t-shirt.
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