It’s Wine Week! I’m planning to post five days’ worth of history about my first animation project, Wine to Those in Anguish.
So there I was, walking in the dappled shade of a trail near work, turning over and over in my mind the events of the anime series serial experiments lain. I had just finished watching the entire surreal series, and it was taking me several days to deal with. There was just so much to think about.
I reflected on the ending, in which lain discovers and has to deal with the fact that she’s an artificial creation, genetically engineered to fix the Wired. (Well, maybe. lain‘s reality is never crystal clear; she may have been human after all.) I thought, That’s sort of a shame. I’m saddened that the big revelation is that she’s not real. What would it be like if that were reversed? What if she thought she was created, but instead she was actually human?
Boom.
I was suddenly enveloped in the vision of an anime series, not unlike lain, in which the protagonist is a young girl who thinks she was genetically engineered to solve some particular huge human problem. But it turns out she’s real.
I envisioned the girl having been brainwashed and living in a laboratory. Scientists were keeping here there…why? Some major human problem…perhaps a disease. There’s some disease that only she can heal. But it’s not a normal disease, since she can’t physically travel around the world healing people, so it must a disease she can heal from a distance. A psychic disease.
Who would brainwash and lock up a little girl? A highly driven scientist, an older man who becomes a
And the story centers on the girl, who thinks she was genetically engineered to heal the disease, realizing she’s human and breaking out of the bondage of this lie.
Neat. And I promptly let the idea drop back into the simmering cauldron of ideas in my mind. I was surprised that this idea was so vivid, but I didn’t afford it too much thought. I have ideas often; this was just an unusual one.
I had no idea that this was a beginning.