Lain

As someone growing and being raised by the internet, and getting further into it (with an obsessive quality) in my teenage years, her character is extremely relatable. The dissociation in social settings and in class coming out of loneliness and detachment from people your age (and vice versa), emptiness really spoke to me (I also drew spirals in class, looked at my hands and they were weird). Magnetism of escaping, submerging self into web chats and niche communities, despising and neglecting the real world (refusing to exist in it, even?), losing and disconnecting from real-life self was really familiar as well.

The whole show has an eerie, alienated atmosphere, which felt like home; watching it was similar to dreaming; and I've always watched it sleep-deprived, at night.

When I first watched the show as a young teen, Lain was the first character in fiction I could fully relate to, that had a similar perception and lived in a relatable unsettling, bizarre world. I didn't know the word "dissociation" at the time. At the time, I took it as some divine sign I had to study technology and programming, installed a Linux system on my personal computer and was proficient in it in a few months (of suffering and breaking my system).

This AMV is awesome. I keep coming back to it.