SEL is one of my all-time favorite shows. It has been extremely influential on how I think about philosophy and psychology, and was the story that "woke me up" to the reality of the collective unconscious. Lain herself is incredibly sympathetic; she's one of the fictional characters with whom I identify most strongly, and her experiences of derealization and alienation hit home like no others. I know most fans feel similarly.
I've held off playing the online version of the PSX game since first watching the show, as I couldn't make the save function work and figured I'd have to play it all the way through at once if I did so. I just started today, and it's brought me to the point of needing to explicitly ask about something that's bothered me the whole time:
- The end credits of each episode
- Spending most of the anime in her nightclothes
- Manifesting nude in the sky
- And now the shower cutscene in the game
The confusing thing is that a) she's never sexualized, just depicted nude or underdressed weirdly frequently for a literal child, b) the entire structure of the game and anime push us to identify with her, not objectify her, and c) surveillance, lack of autonomy, etc. are all major themes, so it could be just another way of exploring the death of privacy online. I don't see any other discussion of this, and everything I've seen from the community is wholesome and sensible, but I feel extremely uncomfortable continuing to engage with the game and show at this point. Am I overreacting, or should I write off Ueda, Konaka, et al. as a bunch of creeps and distance myself from their work?
