I’ve been watching Needy Girl Overdose after hearing people describe it as “Lain 2.0” because the creators were inspired by Serial Experiments Lain.

Maybe that’s why I’m struggling with it.

What made Lain work wasn’t just that it was weird. It had purpose. When it suddenly stopped to talk about something like the Schumann resonance, it wasn’t random “look how deep we are” material. It served the story. It added to the atmosphere. It made you question what was real. It was experimental, but it knew exactly why.

That’s why Lain has such a devoted cult following (and yeah, I’m definitely part of it). It’s incredibly 90s with that “the Internet is mysterious and magical” vibe, yet somehow it’s still timeless.

With Needy Girl Overdose, though… I keep feeling like the creators confused “being artsy” with “looking artsy.”

Every few minutes it feels like the show remembers there’s supposed to be a plot, briefly returns to it, and then goes right back to flashing walls of text and abstract imagery. Sometimes an artistic reference lands. Most of the time it just feels like teenage angst dressed up as profound philosophy. Ironically, it ends up feeling as shallow as the influencer culture it’s trying to critique.

Maybe that’s also because the original game didn’t have a huge narrative to build on. I played it too, and honestly there wasn’t all that much story there in the first place.

I wanted this to be Lain 2.0. I really did.

So far, though… I’m pretty underwhelmed.

I’m curious what everyone else thinks. Do you genuinely see it as a worthy spiritual successor to Serial Experiments Lain, or is the comparison doing it a disservice?

    • MiRRoRMaN@ani.socialOPEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Thats very true and thats also the sense I’m getting from Needy girl overdose. Interestingly the game isn’t like that at all, no weird shots or cuts in it as far as I can tell. So I think they maybe made this creative choice to give it more substance, yet failing at that. I mean you can’t just put some random footage trough a video and then claim its deep, if it isn’t relevant to the story or somehow works to tell the story. If anything the story is very confusing and barely even there, its just teenagers moping and talking about edgy stuff thats 3edgy5me.

      With Lain it was different, Lain could have weird cuts, weird in between footage and yet it helped tell the story, there was a much deeper story underneath and it had that substance. Ironically if they tried to take a page out of the Lain book a lot of it was actually NOT talking. There were a ton of long almost uncomfortable silences in Lain, characters not saying a word at all. Sure it sometimes had sort of narratives, but the rest of it was really up the viewer to notice and then interpret. Which was beautiful, Serial Experiments Lain to me truly is art. Wherest Needy girl overdose is just pseudo-intellectual drivel and random imagery and flashing texts pretending to be art.

      I do truly appreciate the risk the studio took, but they themselves made this comparison and drew inspiration from Lain and with that they set the bar incredibly high. You don’t just go out and learn Macromedia Flash and then decide hey I’m going to make the next Akira, and not expect people to catch on. It just won’t work, you can’t force magic like Lain to happen, it just happens. The right people, the right time, everything aligned perfectly. You can’t force that kind of magic to happen. It needs to happen on its own.

      • catalyst@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        13 hours ago

        Ironically if they tried to take a page out of the Lain book a lot of it was actually NOT talking.

        This is a great point. NGO characters are incapable of shutting up.

        • MiRRoRMaN@ani.socialOPEnglish
          2·
          11 hours ago

          They talk so much its hard to follow anything they’re saying, I’ve become almost an expert at speedreading subtitles. They make the characters from Re:Zero seem short and to the point in comparison. And thats saying something! or saying a lot, actually.

  • catalyst@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    13 hours ago

    I watched the full season and by the end it was a serious struggle. I think I hated it?

    The first episode had me excited. It seemed like it had something interesting to say and a dark mystery to unlock. And I loved all the crazy visuals, especially the OP.

    Unfortunately the endless walls of dialogue that felt gripping in the first couple episodes quickly became droning, self indulgent, and well just kinda dumb. The writers like to bring up metaphors and literary references they think make them sound smart but really don’t.

    Ultimately the plot didn’t really develop the way I’d hoped and I lost interest. I made myself finish it just in case things got better. There’s an episode near the end, I think it’s 11, that is frankly gross.

    I’m not sure how far you are into it; Kache has one “hell yeah” moment but past that her character just kinda ceases to matter, which is odd considering she was kinda the focal point at first.

    • MiRRoRMaN@ani.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      Thats the problem with anime’s like that, when watching becomes a chore instead of a fun thing to watch. Anime should in the very least be enjoyable to watch and not feel like daily homework. I intend to battle my way trough till the end I’ll keep you guys up to date if it was worth the watch for me.