Groan... ah, the move 'home' from college.

My dorm room's ten base-T,
Sweet surfing liberty,
of thee I sing!

Sorry. Now, on to actual subject matter:

Since you poor fellows have diluted my beautiful, pure stream of votes (I got, what, four?) with why you -liked- Lain and Eva, I guess I should rant about why I hate it (short rant, I promise!)

Eva I hated because of it's characters. But, it was looking up. Everything was building to a scene where Shinji would save the day! Snurf, no dice. makes the whole series frikkin useless, and those 'human instrumentality' scenes at the end seemed awfully tacked on, as if to apologize for not explaining the Angels sufficiently.

As for Lain, I hated the way it was vague and uninformative for the sake of being vague and uninformative (I think someone said this better in another post in another forum... about another series, maybe?). The person who made Lain obviously looked very closely at the market and said, 'the people of Japan would really love a good bizarre mystery thing' and, taking advantage of the sudden surge in popular strangeness, made Lain, the ultimate success in writing for your market, but ultimately empty. I especially liked how when they finally established Lain as a character, they tossed her personality away and replaced it at least once.

Phoo, I liked Foucault's Pendulum - although similar on the surface, it not only had a more intelligent and clever exploration of events, it also had a good, solid twisted ending, as opposed to Lain, which I predicted starting from the second DVD.

On the other hand, the Illuminatus Trilogy is only good to read if you want to simply sit through chaos and come out the other end with brain fodder for stranger dreams. Those whole ressurected waterlogged Nazi zombies made the book worth reading... but not if you're in the mood for an actual story.

Lastly, Red Dwarf played today on the British channel for about three hours, and one of the episodes is when they explain exactly how JFK was assassinated, and who the mysterious man behind the grassy knoll was. It was extremely funny, despite my general ignorance in theories about said event (I'm a -story- buff, not a -paranoia- buff...)

Okay, sorry for that long rant. I just think it's interesting that I can agree with so many people on so many things, but then they love some series I can't stand (Like you, Glenn! And Paul, if he reads this! You have NO TASTE!). I was just curious to see if there was a connection between why people liked EVA and Lain and why I disliked them... I guess not, but I'll tell you my criteria;

Neither Lain nor EVA, in my opinion, were written to be stories. One was written to be a soulless, highly successful media phenominon and the other was written as a form of self psychology, at least in the end. I guess it's just me that notices these perhaps imagined things.

-Craig
Need something to read?
http://www.wpi.edu/~perko
Updated daily now that finals are over!