Three Mediums, One Question
The idea that unites an anime from the 90's, a 19th century work and a modern visual novel
Lately I’ve been bouncing between three very different genres: I watched the late‑90s anime Serial Experiments Lain, experienced the 2024 indie visual novel Z.A.T.O.: I Love the World and Everything in It, and read the 1894 symbolist oddity The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob.
Three different countries.
Three different centuries.
Three different mediums.
And somehow they’re all obsessed with the same idea: Identity. Identity that isn’t stable, but shifts, dissolves and rewrites itself.
Lain: Identity as signal
Serial Experiments Lain came out in 1998, right at the moment when the internet was a curiosity but not yet a lifestyle. It follows a quiet middle‑school girl named Lain who receives an email from a classmate who has just died. From there, she begins slipping between the physical world and “the Wired,” a proto‑internet that feels more like a collective unconscious.
The show treats identity like a broadcast. It’s something that can drift depending on who’s perceiving you. It seems to question whether identity has objective meaning at all or whether it is simply a by-product of how others see us.
It’s not Who am I. It’s Which version of me is real, and does that even matter.
Z.A.T.O.: identity as distortion
Z.A.T.O. is a 2024 visual novel by Ferry (Nopanamaman), and it’s one of the strangest things I’ve read in a while, and that’s saying a lot. It follows a girl named Asya who can perceive and alter the “code” underlying reality. These alterations, called distortions, aren’t superpowers so much as metaphors for trauma, memory, and self‑construction.
Every distortion she creates is a fragment of herself. A wound. A wish. A version of who she might have been. Identity here is a story you tell yourself until it becomes true or possibly until it collapses.
The Book of Monelle: identity as grief
Marcel Schwob wrote The Book of Monelle in 1894 after the death of a young woman he loved. It’s not a novel so much as part parable, part dream, and part elegy. Monelle isn’t exactly a character rather she’s a voice and sometimes a command.
The book treats identity like something grief dissolves and remakes.
Where Lain multiplies and Asya distorts, Monelle simply vanishes. Identity becomes a ritual of letting go.
Why these three together?
Because they show how the same theme can echo across wildly different forms:
anime
visual novel
symbolist prose
Three mediums, three aesthetics, one shared truth.
Identity is not a solid object. It’s a process.
And maybe the reason these three works resonate despite coming from different centuries and different mediums is that identity feels less solid today than ever. We live in a world where the self is constantly being performed online, mirrored back to us through algorithms and fragmented across platforms. Identity has become something we manage.
In that sense, Lain’s shifting selves, Asya’s distortions, and Monelle’s dissolving presence don’t feel abstract or symbolic. They feel familiar. They feel like the way we live now.
We all have:
the version of ourselves we show at work
the version we show to friends
the version we curate online
the version we carry inside
the version we’re trying to grow into
And sometimes those versions overlap, sometimes they contradict each other, and sometimes they even glitch. That’s why these stories hit so hard. They’re about identity in the age of constant reinvention. They remind us that the self isn’t a statue. It’s a negotiation between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.