What Happend To Lain's Sister

Serial Experiment's Lain is one of those shows I want to force people to watch when they are all like "Lost has so many unanswered questions and I can't handle it".  I swear if they watched Lain those people would fucking shit themselves until they die.  Death by mystery.  Unlike Boogiepop Phantom and Paranoia Agent SE Lain takes a box of cockroaches approach to world building, story telling, and plot.  They just throw it down and watch stuff scatter, coherency be damned.  It is kind of amazing that something like that would even get made and be mainstream enough to be on tv and stuff but hey we are living in wonderful times. 

While there is a lot that is unexplained about Lain there is also a lot that can be if you are willing to take the time and really think things through.  That doesn't mean there is one right answer to what happened Lain isn't nearly coherent enough for a grand unifying theory.  However, one mystery always bothered me, and that is what happened to Lain's sister.

It is pretty obvious from the get go that her family are plants, creations by the god, or something that didn't do a biological function to create Lain.  I think we can all get on board with that.  Her sister however, always seemed like a weird outlier.  For one she stays around till the end of the anime lurking in the dark going "beep beep" over and over again.  Two she seemed to be utterly in the dark about what Lain is.  When she first started screwing around with her Navi she asks her dad, "Is that normal?" and he dad just kinda blows her off.  NO IT ISN'T NORMAL AND YOU ARE AN IDIOT FOR ASKING but hey what can you do.  Then there is her episode. 

Before that there is another episode.  I can't remember the name of it but it is about the computer game that was causing people to see the wired in real life.  It was the episode where a couple of seniors killed themselves and the kid accidentally did something aweful.  The game was called phatasma or something like that.  That is the first case where in the anime where the wired crossed over till real world and effecting people who were not Lain and stuff like that.  It was also the first time Lain got actually involved in the strange things going on in the Wired.  She tried to help the last kid but she said, "I can't go where you are".

At any rate the next episode is the "Fullfill the Prophesy episode" it is also the episode where her sister looses it.  Somewhere either late in the game episode or early in the "Fullfill the Prophesy" episode Lain tells her dad that the real world and the wired aren't as separate as people believe. 

What I beleive is that the game Phantasma wasn't a work the Knights but instead the work of "God".  I think it was his early attempts to affect the real world by turning it into the wired.  The next episode I think he tries to extend his reach further and target's Lain's sister.  Why?  I don't know exactly.  However, I am positive that she comes under some form of attack and ultimatly she is pulled out of the real world and into the wired.  What replaces her sister is some sort of weird shell that starts to break down.  We have a lot of evidence to suggest that Lain is in two places at once a lot of the time and most of the anime seems to be a mergering of her two selves.  When her sister split in two her replacement sister told lain that there was nothing by the doorway when in fact there was some strange wired after image which is the last vestiges of her real sister fading away.

Lain was distracted all episode talking to dolls and eventually her parents.  Or rather images of her parents.  I think she wanted to save her sister but all this happened before she had a proper control over her abilities.  I think this is also why her sister stuck around the whole anime long after her parents left.  Anyway that's what I think and I love you all.