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Just finished watching Lain for the 2nd time. Still more or less as lost as I was the 1st time. I'm still not sure what exactly happened to Mika, amongst other things, like what attacked the men in black. I think I get what it's trying to sell metaphorically/symbolically, but I'm still lost on a lot of the specific events and their interconnectivity. It doesn't help that a bunch of the people who claim to "get it" have their theory contradicted by what is depicted in series.
I can't seem to parse the significance nor reason behind the Knights fusing those two games together, or how a boy trapped in said game manged to shoot a girl and kill her despite not having a gun.
There's also the Lain at Cyberia before Lain ever actually visits Cyberia. I've heard that this was actually a fake made by the Knights, but no explanation for the purpose. There's a small line in episode 9? when Lain is with Taro, about the data inside Cyberia being strange or manipulated but the English dub doesn't really imply the above explanation.
Then there's other oddities; the alien, Lain in the sky, what the Knights were doing with the Kids project, Lain's room being blown up by the Knights bomb (I understand this was placed by the messed up Mika) only to not be mentioned at all after the fact, Lain doing the first memory rewrite and the "other" Lain stealing her place with Alice and the others, which was also not mentioned after the fact, as well as that seemingly contradicting the events leading up to the last rewrite where she takes the form of the alien and confronts Alice about "spilling her secrets" despite her having already removed everyone's memories of that...
I'm sure I just have a flawed understanding, but I don't see how to piece these all together. I'm more concerned with the literal, what is actually being depicited as happening over the symbolic or metaphoric. Honestly, I find Texhnolyze to be the better series, but the more I examine the 2, the more I see the similarities.
