Not even close to tragic

Okay, so Lain isn't eliciting nearly the kind of emotional response that Gunslinger Girls manipulated out of me.

It seems to be one of those Ooh-look-at-me-aren't-I-so-cyberpunk, WTF-for-WTF's-sake series, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's got a stark hi-contrast comic-book look to it, which is overall pretty interesting. Narratively there's an interesting use of repetition and patterns. Dramatically, though, there's nothing hooking me in; the characters aren't doing much for me, and the overall trippiness just gets a little more tedious than mysterious after a while. Still, it's not unwatchable, and I'll finish renting it; I just wouldn't rank it all that high and I won't buy it unless something hits me in the last couple of discs. I'm a little dissappointed, I guess.

.hack//SIGN is a bit too, well... wordy. It's got all that great Mashimo expressiveness and mise en scene that I love so much, but yack yack yack! Doesn't help that I'm watching this one with the dub; there's obviously some flawed male VO talent out there that I wasn't subjected to with the halfway-decent dub Noir had. Anyway, Madlax had hooked me right away; .hack rings more like Avenger in that I'm willing to watch more, but I'm not ga-ga over it. Though Avenger had Layla Ashley... ultra-dangerous and/or brooding women really rank high on my list. The various women in .hack aren't quite doing it for me, so to speak... That said, I'll perservere with renting it (even though the next two are at an "orange" status in the queue which means it might be a while before they get here).