Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

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Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:22 pm

If you know both series and how Lain interacts with and effects the Wired you might already see where I am going with this.

The way she ends up actually in the Wired and able to rewrite reality through it is unique while most others in Serial Experiments Lain who join the Wired end up leaving their bodies behind to die.

What if Cyberization were started as a way to keep bodies from suffering from a disconnect with the spirit? How many people in GitS do not have brain cases even if they are otherwise fully Human? Its a preventative measure to ensure there is a digital anchor to ensure the soul can return from the Wired and find the body still alive and well where it was left.

Anyone have any ideas to help shore this up and maybe suggestions about how a Wired and Cyberized people's history could have progressed between the time of SEL and GitS?

I want this to be the root of what is effectively a Ranma and GitS crossover but Ranma's time frame is before Lain.

My idea to make sure he makes it to that time frame is that he has a long, normal for him, life at the Tendo Dojo seeing the advances around him as he raises his family with Akane. the GitS time frame happens after she has died of old age. Similar to Highlander Immortals though he hasn't aged along with her. Reason for that is the already used "Drowned Young Girl" aspect to his curse. Not to mention how good a Martial Artist he is by that time training so many students and building from both their mistakes and new challenges over the intervening time.

I'm not sure if it is far enough in the future though for Akane to die that way. Would it make more sense to say she died of her own cooking slowly poisoning herself on accident as Ranma continued to try to teach her to avoid making toxic sludge? Should anyone else from the NWC still be around? All the Curse victims come to mind but then again their curses might have cut down most of their life expectancies.

I'd like to make it so Ranma remembers the accidental deaths from people entering the wired in Lain's Time and having lost students to it. Ones that at first he though just stopped class because they were too caught up in their VR games. It would be one of the things to flash back to. Finding they died by watching about it in the News or reading about it in the paper. But still feeling their Ki around networking cables and the like. It would be something to flash back to. And inspire him to try contacting those souls in the Wired with Meditation and Ki control. Eventually letting him access the Net of GitS without needing any Cuberization or computer at all.

He ends up assumed to be full prosthetic, from the not aging naturally , and under the attention of The Major's team because he appears some time on the Net when they are researching something else happening in the area and he's suspicious because they cannot find any records of cyberization. Technically Ranma is an impossibility and an impossibility hanging around a case, even on accident, is too big of an unknown to leave alone.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Battlekrome » Sun Oct 10, 2010 1:38 am

almost could mix in a bit of .Hack//Sign or such into this without much change

Akane ending up basically invalid / bed ridden would almost be better (kinda like in solid State society)

(also which continuity? Movie or Stand alone complex? (iirc timeline is sac 1 2 solid state - movie 1 movie 2)

as for NWC... Shampoo most likely... except old and wrinkled like cologne
Ryoga probably (possibly old wizened like happosai or dead depending on akari)

most of the rest most likely dead
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sun Oct 10, 2010 8:12 am

I don't know enough about .hack to try to add any in. But I also won't stop anyone else from wanting to build on this idea for their own stories and doing so.

Haven't heard of "Solid State Society" before just now so I'm not quite sure what you are suggesting if it is more than just the obvious bedridden coma.

For GitS I was thinking of sticking with SAC and 2nd Gig of SAC just because those are what I have on hand and I have not had cable since before they started localizing anything newer.

Would Shamps or Ryouga be that wrinkled? I'm a proponent of the 300 year old Cologne and Happi Its part of why I have such an easy time accepting Ranma having no trouble being alive this long and relatively unchanged.

Could any of the others like Miss Hinako or Gosenkugi have lived long enough to get Cyberized and still be around that way or would that be pushing it? Remember Motoko broke her doll and was one of the earlier full body cyberizations.

Should Ranma still have classes and active students? Possibly even training groups for special circumstances for the Government? They have Aramaki's division why wouldn't they also have a full div of Martial Artists to call on for other situations? Ones where Finding or preserving information and potential termination of targets are not involved.

These suppositions and guesses are try to figure out how Martial Artists could still be in the world even if they are nearly no true profile in the current society.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Wyrd » Sun Oct 10, 2010 8:18 am

This sounds interesting. Of the cursed, three have curses that are sometimes translated as including age, Ranma with spring of young girl, Ryouga with spring of piglet(I've seen it as both young black pig and small black pig), and Shampoo with spring of kitten. If Ranma's male form isn't aging either, then in both of those cases their human form shouldn't age. Curses which don't include an age component, such as duck and panda, could actually cause the cursed individual to age at the rate of their cursed form. This works well with the idea that the ones who aren't aging are the ones whose cursed forms are eternally young.

Hinako could easily still be around due to the nature of her curse. I wouldn't expect Gosunkugi to survive that long, but if he did I would expect him to jump at the chance for 'upgrades.'

Akane could die or wind up crippled from a number of things. Poisoning herself through her own cooking is good if you are going for a humorous story, but if you are going for something more serious I would suggest either a fatal/debilitating training accident, death by childbirth, or dying by whatever killed her mother(the most common answer I've seen for this is cancer, though there are other predispositions she could have inherited).

Something you might want to read up on if you have the chance is the current form of Shadowrun. They have a group of people who have recently learned to tap into the net without any equipment at all. I forget what the game calls them. In many respects, they are using the astral projection power to enter the spiritual plane of the net. This is the only plane they can enter, and it is one that regular mages cannot enter. If you are interested in knowing more about this I could pull out my books and look up some references for you. I was never interested in playing one, so I haven't really read through it as much as I've studied the parts that were more relevant to my interests.

By projecting himself onto the net, Ranma should have advantages over those using hardware, but also weaknesses because he doesn't have programs of his own to aid him and doesn't have the means, at least at first, to transfer data to hard copy or to a device of his choosing. Wondering through the net and treating what he has to learn to get by in there as a new form of martial arts would be a good way to cover his learning to use what would otherwise be very out of character for him.

Time-line wise, dates are really the easiest thing to adjust in a story. If you want the GITS part of the story to happen after Akane died of old age but don't think enough time would have passed by the time listed for the original, push the dates back and say that in your version of the universe things took a little longer to develop. Serial Experiment Lane was a wonderfully surreal series, but it doesn't work until at least a decade after canon Ranma, preferably two decades, but again you can adjust these dates if you want them to start while Ranma is still in school. You might consider having it be Ranma's children in high school who start talking to their dad/mom about how their friends keep dropping out of class only to hear later that they just dropped dead at home. Ranma, who has as much time as he wants to spend on the issue since he is in charge of the dojo and can control his own schedule, starts investigating. He goes to the houses of his kid's friends and finds residual ki in their computers, leading him to suspect that they are somehow being attacked or drained by the net, only later discovering that their spirits are still intact, merely separate from their bodies.

For a story like this, I would suggest keeping Nabiki around as the family accountant for a while, with possibly one of her own children filling that role now. Wise investment and cutthroat tactics could give Ranma the funds needed to start buying up the equipment to set up a computer lab like in Lane so he can study the system and figure out what is going on. It might be a good idea for Ranma to have been intentionally avoiding computerization before that, possibly to the extent of refusing to let his kids have more than the schools require him to give them, thus explaining why he doesn't start picking up on ghost ki signatures before this.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sun Oct 10, 2010 9:33 am

Wyrd you've done your Wondering Wandering typo again. Wonder = astonishment or thought Wander = Ryouga traveling aimlessly.

First Edit:
Now to actually give a bit of a time line. I see Ranma 1/2 as being more or less ending just shortly before Japan began investing in the Microcomputer Revolution. Ranma would end up in College through the first Technological boom. Graduating about the same time cell phones become affordable for the first time.

Lain takes place after in home VR becomes possible which if we look at fastest AU possibilities for trends in actual real life could have been a possibility in the late 90's. Its that kind of track, diverging from the reality we live in, that has any potential for brain cases to be an upgrade someone could survive by the time SAC is suppose to take place.

As for Shadow Run I only have the SNES game and I know it left out almost all the source material just to have fun with the character classes but at least I'm not completely ignorant of it.

Second Edit:
Shampoo was Spring of Drowned Cat. So that could explain her aging to look like cologne given the shorter life span. But I would see her and some other Curse victims potentially seeing Cyberization as a way to defeat the Curse.

There is no part of their cursed body left to get splashed after all.

And on the Aging I was thinking you would age as fast as your current form should. But having a curse with an age modifier like Ranma and Ryouga or Luckosai or however his name was spelled. Happy's friend who fell into the spring of drowned young man. They would only age in their Birth Form and when in their cursed form they would lose age at the same rate. Half time in curse form means all aging is negated.

Mousse and Shampoo would age faster because their shorter lived curse forms would be dragging them to early graves. Burning through their life while they are in curse form. Genma however ends up with little change because Pandas have been seen to live just about as long as Humans in similar environments.

For Akane maybe she got lost to the Wired and only Ranma and some of the others knowledge of Ki and Shiatsu points managed to make it so they could place her body into a Coma instead of letting her die?
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Wyrd » Sun Oct 10, 2010 10:02 am

Wyrd you've done your Wondering Wandering typo again. Wonder = astonishment or thought Wander = Ryouga traveling aimlessly.


I know the difference, but my fingers sometimes forget, especially when I don't go back to double check for errors. Sorry.

Shadowrun is an extremely interesting series for a great many reasons, has some rather good novels written for it(and admittedly some rather bad ones), and really should get more attention than it tends to. One of my favorite bits is that the world ends in 2012 and nobody notices for close to a week, because the end foretold by the Mayans was a prediction of the cycle of magical energy in the world. This is why in their mythos there is a golden age at the beginning of the world leading to a slow decline: until that 'world' ends and the next one begins, as a society based on magic is at its greatest at the beginning of the cycle and useless near the end.

The way the series looks at where we are going with technology, especially cyberspace and cybernetic implants, can be very thought provoking.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sun Oct 10, 2010 10:17 am

Well people now have replacement prosthetic limbs that they can actually put sensors in to allow for sensation that people can train with to be able to control their grip strength again. That is Present day Cyber tech.

To help clear up the Time line a little more I see the events of Ranma 1/2 fitting in somewhere between 1983 and 1985 between the birth of the Personal Computer and the start of the Interface war where Apple claimed Microsoft stole their GUI.

Ranma ends up going to college because he finds out its true you can't have a State recognized dojo without being a College graduate. He ends up graduating about the same time everyone has Pagers and people can just start affording the earlier blocky cell phones. He will have ended up being a Teacher at his Dojo for a while before Lain is possible.

There will end up being a great need to innovate and save people from losing their souls to cyberspace that will fuel faster invention and survivable technologies that grows into the world seen in GitS.

And all of this is really back story not the story its self but it helps to know the foundation is sound before building a house on it.

First Edit:
Think of it this way. We have from 1985 until 1989 to go through before people even have Analog cell phones and 1992 is for Digital Cell phones where you can start having screens on them or any chance of programs to add to a phone slowly killing off PDA Personal Data Assistants.

So how about Ranma finishes College in 1993. And then Lain's events happen in 1998 or would that be crowding the GitS time line too much for all the advances?

Second Edit: Double checking years. Lain was released in 1998 and I had spaced it when I was typing it seems kinda fitting. As to GitS the Manga is 2030. I don't have the Manga so I was thinking of having it be 2040. Not sure if the Global World War will be in there or not. Who knows it might be possible to spin it that it is caused by the panic from people losing their souls literally to the Wired.

Edit three:
Only partially caused. After all there are allot of GitS events that depend on it. Most Conflicts have a trigger event and panic over unexplainable, or nearly so (No one believes the explanation), deaths would be a sound motivation. People who refuse to believe or just don't know the cause to something like that will quickly take up the Blame Game.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Mitchell » Sun Oct 10, 2010 12:11 pm

A possibility there Spok. Hmm...for all that there is a Tendo Dojo and and Ranma was meant to take over it, I always saw his school as very much one master, one/two apprentices system ratehr than general teaching. However that's neither here nor there.

Shadowrun as a crossover would be interesting, very interesting. And honestly I'm not really sure I would agree with any but the 'fast aging' people really agreeing to cyberization. A total conversion prosthetic body like the Major's or Batou's leaves like the cyber brain as really the last part of the person still natural flesh and blood. How that would really mesh with high level martial artists who regularly play around with ki could be interesting (If you bring Shadowrun into it, almost certainly anybody who is a total conversion will not be able to use ki ever again, since its very much like the after a certain point of cyberization you start to damage your ability to use 'ki/magic' etc in Shadowrun. Sure you make up for it with potentially godlike strength/speed but still.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Wyrd » Sun Oct 10, 2010 1:00 pm

The physical adept of Shadowrun is based on the same cultural beliefs that Ranma's abilities, heck the fighting abilities of just about every over the top martial arts series, are based on. One of the things about physical adept characters is that they start off weaker than someone who builds a cybered up fighter, but with some time and experience to level the characters, they far outstrip the potential of the best cyberware available. If you wanted to go with more of a Shadowrun crossover, you could have the characters from Ranma be physical adepts who managed to squeak by on the limited available magic before the awakening, and could even have Lane and the other people getting lost in the wired be the first examples of technomancers. Since nobody knows what to expect from magic mingling with high tech, completely missing something like this would be easy. By current rules, any cyberware at all weakens your ability to use magic, including a physical adept's ability to use ki. Physical adepts perceive and use magic differently than mages, so it could be a reasonable plot element that Ranma is one of the first adepts skilled enough to detect their spirits in the net to become sufficiently involved in the technology.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Mitchell » Sun Oct 10, 2010 2:25 pm

Lain wouldn't be one of the first people who got lost in the wired, she was a deliberate creation to bridge the gap between the wired and the real world. While its been a while since I looked through my shadowrun source books iirc there were 'net gods' or something lurking deep in the net in places only net adepts could get to, Lain would be be, at least in the end of the series at least one of those. From the wording, she was a creature born in the net, the heroine in thousands upon thousands of net stories/games/etc before her scattered data was pulled together to form her idenity and then given form to blur the barrier.

However yeah on the physical adept thing, very much a good point there with the hedging on a very limited amount of magic (though you would need to justify Jusenkyo/magic artifacts that Ranma etc run into. Jusenkyo could possibly be justified by Saffron I guess (rather than the greater dragons like Big D who cant stay awake on the low levels of magic the rebirth etc Saffron went through even in the end of the magic cycle keeping some level of magic around Jusenkyo but that's just something of the top of my head.)

Hmm talking about shadow run reminds me of that fic by greaver on the florestica library, wish there was more to it than just one thing.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sun Oct 10, 2010 3:51 pm

On Jusenkyo I think its more a case of Saffron and the Musk being there because it is a point of high magic not the other way around. All sorts of things including potentially all sorts of magical beings have died in the springs and the powers of their remaining magics are making it so the magic beings can actually wake up here while there isn't enough magic left to sustain them away from that point.

Don't forget Asura. The curse couldn't empower a being that much without greater magic still being trapped within the curse of the springs.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Mitchell » Sun Oct 10, 2010 4:19 pm

Hmm them being drawn to Jusenkyo over the years rather than the other way around sort of makes sense though I doubt just them dying in the waters would be enough of a justification. OVer the six ages immortal elves, greater dragons and other ridiculessly powerful/wise/smart beings have tried to get around the decline in magic. However it can be done I think.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Wyrd » Sun Oct 10, 2010 5:26 pm

Shadowrun already has places of power, places where the magic levels never dropped quite as low as in the rest of the world. The springs of Jusenkyo could be one of the strongest pools of remaining magic, enough to sustain Saffron and enough that they could awaken a dragon, but not enough to keep that dragon awake and healthy. There could quite easily be a dragon sleeping somewhere near there. I rather like the dragon from Hearts in Ice as living there for that purpose.

On the matter of Lane, I recalled something about her starting in the net, but was posting along the lines of what I was seeing here as it has been several years since I last saw it. I like the idea that Lane was born into this world because of all of the spirits that had been getting lost in the wired, a living net god of the deep resonance coming to the world of flesh to try to create a bridge back for those lost souls.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Spokavriel » Sun Oct 10, 2010 6:45 pm

Lain was a real living person in the living world but she also ended up developing two autonomous personalities that continually existed in the Wired. Her gaining control over her other selves lead to hear learning she had the ability to rewrite reality as easily as she was rewriting the Wired. Effectively making her a Goddess due to her lack of limitations.
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Re: Serial Experiments Lain as the root of GitS reality.

Postby Mitchell » Mon Oct 11, 2010 2:23 am

Wyrd wrote:On the matter of Lane, I recalled something about her starting in the net, but was posting along the lines of what I was seeing here as it has been several years since I last saw it. I like the idea that Lane was born into this world because of all of the spirits that had been getting lost in the wired, a living net god of the deep resonance coming to the world of flesh to try to create a bridge back for those lost souls.


Prepare for spoilers.








Actually it would be, if you want to keep Lain sort of going the same the other way around. With the invert of protocol seven, which contained parts of the resonance on the planet etc, Masami Eiri programmed a simucram of his personality into the all persuasive protocol. The Protocol was designed to allow seamless interaction between the real world and the wired without the use of a tertiary device, and in fact its heavily implied if not stated that the wired was actually the collective human consciousness (which could easily be the astral plane one earth here). Masami Eiri and others such as Chisa were not so much trying to draw souls back from the net into flesh, as to utterly erase the border between the real world and the wired. Eiri was of the view that to further evolve as a species humans would have to ignore the long process of nature and as a species take a step forward, abandoning the limits of the flesh. An example of this is Chisa at the start who kills herself but her 'soul' is drawn into the wired.

Lain was if anything a god because to her there was no difference to the real world or the wired, wherever there was technology her reach extended. Her 'role' as a being created by Eiri was to be drawn into the physical realm and as she developed with the help of the Psyche chip, to break down the border. Throughout the series which is admittedly weird, Lain questions her humanity, and in the end plugs herself into the wired directly and downloads it into her head. Eiri was utterly astonished she could do such a thing, though he did warn her that her body wasn't designed to handle so much information. After revealing to Eiri that he was not god (he had gained godlike powers because of his personality resonating with the pulse of the earth and the all pervasive technology using the protocall he included his brainwaves in) she erased herself from existence (well from any record she had ever existed, and put herself as an outside observer before meeting Okami-sama/her father at the very end) and even brought back the people harmed by the Knights of Eastern Calculus/the MiB and the conflict she was drawn in.

Lain, the personality we mostly follow was not the original though she is the one that people talk about when they talk about Lain, a goddess and yet nothing more than the noise on the wires.


Actually in a shadowrun setting I should also mention the KIDS experiment, where a thousand kids, people with the most powerful parapsychic abilitis were focused at one point, an explosion happened and killed all of the kids and to a degree created a doorway to the wired.
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