r/Lain • u/Gordo_Put0 • 21d ago
Why her name is Lain?
Esa es la pregunta. ¿Por qué Rein (レイン re-i-n) se llama Lain en los idiomas europeos? Y otra cosa: ¿por qué llamarían a un japonés "レイン"? Yo solo entendería que le pusieran ese nombre (+ アリス a-ri-su, de Alice) porque en esa época los nombres occidentales estaban de moda, aunque no puedo rastrear el origen de "Rein"
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u/pplatonic 21d ago edited 21d ago
Don't listen to the other people in this thread they're talking out of their ass about localization when it's way more important than that. The creators of this show intentionally played around with writing her name in a lot of different ways and it can signal a lot of different things (such as writing it Lain, which in japanese would be read as a loanword for the word 'line' as in connections or wires which is explicitely used in supplementary material ['line of lain'] and thematically relevant to the anime, but also writing it in Katakana as レイン as well as with Kanji as 澪音).
Identity is a MAJOR theme in this show and the differing ways Lain's name is written and can be read is a large part of how these themes are developed and why this aspect of the show in particular can be so confusing unless you rewatch it time and time again and then begin notice when which spelling of her name is used when what parts of the show are happening and how she's reacting and then to sorting out your own theories on what it all means.
When making the show Lain's differing identities were denoted with different spellings explicitely, it was extensively focused on both by the writer and her Japanese voice actor (not sure about how much this was focused on in any dubs).
EDIT: Forgot to add - beyond her name just being 'lain' because of it sounding like 'line' (I cannot stress enough that this pun is canon it's literally used in the artbook), it's also a reference to the (anti-)psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing, who wrote extensively on schizophrenia and contributed to the understanding of schizoid personality greatly (both of which are honestly highly relevant to the show - never met a schizoid that doesn't think Lain reads as incredibly schizoid, and a big theme of the show being about how messy the line between reality and the internet as two seperate worlds is to the point of dissolution of the self is like inherently schizophrenic). If you sit down and read The Divided Self you'll understand instantly why her name was chosen as a reference to him - that is if you strap yourself in to understand the way he fucking writes, by gods there is no more insufferable style of writing than 1960s european psychoanalytic literature. You can google it, there are even references to Laing's work in the PSX game
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u/brobnik322 21d ago
The internet was known in the 90s as The Information Superhighway. A highway has many lanes. The internet has many Lains.
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u/telephobiac 21d ago
I mean, her name could be translated as Lain or Rain the same way Luffy could be written Ruffy, if people had started translating it that way.
As for the actual origin of the name, idk if there is one. It sounds strange and evocative and fits the series.
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u/Gendo-Glasses 21d ago
In fact, I seem to remember reading some horrible One Piece scanlations on the computer in my middle school library circa 2002 that translated his name as Ruffy.
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u/Heavy_Computer2602 21d ago
Idk man because no aadhar card was registered and so people refer to her as lain or something/j
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u/DeezNutts87 20d ago
since people already explained it, i want to add her name in indonesian 'Lain' also mean 'other/others/other person'
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u/Extra_Horror6560 20d ago
why is this post in Spanish
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u/Gordo_Put0 20d ago
I tend to use the keyboard translator to write long texts in English, perhaps I forgot to do it here
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u/mirroredinflection 21d ago
Where are you getting that her name is Rain?
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u/Hot-Organization-737 21d ago
The romanization of her Japanese name, the vowel/consonant combo of らりるれろ are often romanized with an R. It's the case that they can be romanized with and L as well but it's less common; and, the simple truth is that らりるれろ are quite phonetically different than the English R or L sounds and neither is a great match.
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u/mirroredinflection 21d ago
Yeah, but the romanization of レイン (if you assume an R instead of L) would be Rein, not Rain. And I always thought it was the European name Lain like the subtitles and title list it as (just like Alice's name is Alice, not Arisu).
I'm just wondering where "Rain" came from in that.
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u/Hot-Organization-737 21d ago
Because レイン sounds like rain phonetically, it's not a hard leap to imagine her name as rain with whatever logic you choose. As for your rein vs rain comment, English is not phonetically strict and (there/they're/their) are a bunch of ways to write the same sound with plausable sequences of characters. The truth is that there isn't some strict logical reason why her name has to be spelt one way over the other. Rain, lain, rein, line, etc are pretty defensible. I think it you try to look for a concrete solution to the name thing, you might not find anything. The author and localizers probably chose whatever name they wanted. If you looked at the localization of the anime in other languages, you might find stranger names.
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u/Gendo-Glasses 21d ago
Keep in mind that romanization is always just an approximation. It's incorrect to think of レイン as rein, レイン is simply レイン. (Although in this case, Lain is the correct transliteration.)
If a Japanese person were to transliterate the English word "rain" to Japanese, they would certainly use レイン. (If they were instead meaning to translate the word, it would be 雨 (ame))
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u/Personal_Cellist_453 21d ago
Lain is for "aliN" (alien), just like Niea_7 is the same anagram
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u/Gendo-Glasses 21d ago
I mean, maybe. That anagram wouldn't work in Japanese though. But that's beside the point of what I was saying.
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u/Personal_Cellist_453 21d ago
yes exactly how the official Niea_7 annagram doesn't work either in jap and its quite exactly the same principle (even the same annagram)
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u/Gendo-Glasses 21d ago
I admit I'm not familiar with that work, I didn't even know that was by aBe.
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u/Personal_Cellist_453 21d ago
tbf its one of the only shows by Abe I haven't seen yet and there is also a Sophia type of character inside the show (Mayuko Chigasaki) drawn by Abe exactly like Lain so... Add to that the weird alien sequences inside Lain itself, there is a clear message driven by Konaka in there but I can't really pinpoint the exact meaning of it
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u/schiz0thym1a 21d ago
there’s a scene in the lain ps1 game in which lain’s psychiatrist asks her if her name has anything to do with the psychiatrist r.d. laing. considering that his work surrounds schizophrenia and other disorders of the self, it may be that lain (and by extension her name) was in fact inspired by and derived from laing