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How to make a pretentious anime:
- Introduce a protagonist devoid of personality, rendered as a blank slate with minimal backstory, hollow existence and no purpose in life. Subject them to betrayal, physical mutilation, and an endless barrage of suffering. Make him emotionally numb and only humanize him when he's fueled by rage and desire for vengeance.
- Insert an outsider character whose actions instigate a catastrophic, bloody conflict between the city's three rival gang factions, but leave his motivations intentionally and frustratingly vague and unexplained to add an air of contrived mystery to their character.
- Never fully explain the story to the audience to create a ... pretense of intellectual depth through obfuscation and ambiguity. Don't be afraid to use this tactic whenever you notice that your story has fundamental shortcomings and lacks substantive content.
- Paint the cityscape in a bleak, lifeless and desolate palette. Portray the city's denizens as lifeless husks suffering from existential dread brought by living in a dystopian, desolated wasteland of a rapidly decaying city.
- Populate the denizens' everyday life with brutal and graphic scenes of violence and crime. Introduce constant conflict between the city's gangs happening in broad daylight to reinforce the oppressive dystopian atmosphere of the city. Show its inhabitants constantly living on edge, resigned to their grim fate.
- Employ as many unconventional avant-garde animation techniques and a disturbing, unsettling soundtrack in a transparent attempt to elevate the show's lacking narrative through artistic production values. Try to elicit an emotional response from your audience through contrived and insincere audiovisual manipulations that act as superficial substitutes for genuine storytelling and character development.
- Employ as much symbolism and abstract imagery as possible, even at the expense of coherent storytelling. Hammer the viewer with an incessant barrage of symbolic scenes to instigate a profound feeling of forced intellectualism. Make the audience feel like the show is deep and profound simply by making it absurdly incoherent and devoid of intended meaning.
- Make the characters deliver ponderously vague monologues on the nature of existence and the human condition. But don't actually offer any unique or insightful perspectives. Instead, regurgitate surface-level cliched existential thoughts that add little substance to the narrative and serve only to artificially inflate the anime's pretense of depth.

Yep. Here we go. That's Texhnolyze for you.
My final rating: 2/10

Lain is a prime example of a show that tries too hard to be avant-garde and artistically profound, but ends up feeling nonsensical, emotionally manipulative and disturbing to watch with its use of vivid imagery and weird sounds. It strives to be "le different" from mainstream anime, but in doing so, it becomes a frustratingly disjointed and nonsensical mess that's incoherent at times and not enjoyable to watch.

The plot is told in a confusing manner, lacking sufficient explanation. Instead of offering clear storytelling, the anime tries to tell a story by relying on intense, dramatic or artistic scenes that are deliberately vague and open to ... interpretation, with eerie music playing in the background to create a pretense of importance and significance, and to manipulate the viewer's emotions.

This type of storytelling is typical for pretentious writers who try to create "deep" stories by focusing on artistic flair and ambiguity over substance. Furthermore, the characters' pasts, motives and actions are left intentionally ambiguous or unexplained in order to appeal to watchers who love to inject their own delusions and headcanon into the story. This anime is a pointless drivel. In its pursuit of avant-garde status, it sacrifices coherence and entertainment value, and may leave the viewers frustrated and detached from its convoluted narrative.

Lain is the perfect example of how prioritizing style over substance leads to a disappointing viewing experience.