what is liminality pt2

Sometimes later comes much later than intended.

So, my fixation on the concept of Liminality started almost nine years ago... It's hard to beleive it's been that long, both in the idea that it's been a great amount of time, and at the same time not a lot of time at all.

It really does come down to how you perceive it. Nine years is almost a decade, but nine years is also not even a third of my lifetime.

You'll find that I often look at things from multiple angles. 

Anyway, at the time a new anime franchise was starting up called .hack (say : "Dot Hack"). Brief synopsis - in the near future the world is more-or-less addicted to a virtual reality online game that is NOT WoW, and a group of people begin to unravel the mystery and secret of the world they virtually live in.

As a side note, if The World ever became a real game, I would drop FFXI in a heartbeat.

But anyway, the franchise was being executed in an interesting way. There was an actual full 26 episode tv series known as .hack//sign which began the story of a group of people who essentially open the door to the discovery of the secret of The World. Following this was a series of four PS2 games: .hack//infection, .hack//mutation, .hack//mutation, and .hack//quarantine. These four games tell the story of the results of the events that happened in The World due to the events of //sign.

Included with each volume of the games is one episode of an OAV series collectively known as .hack//liminality. These four episodes tell the story of what's happening in the real world at the same time as the games are happening.

Interesting stuff, I know. For the most part I ignored the OAV, as I had four games to beat. They ended up being very interesting indeed after I finally got around to watching them.

The word 'liminality' stuck out to me. Prior to then, I had never heard of it before. Interesting sounding word. But that's all I thought of it at the time.

Later on, listening to my various .hack soundtracks (me being a completionist collector), came across a song titled "Liminality." It's a really pretty song and I might share it someday. But it was while listening to the song that I finally got curious enough to look into Liminality's meaning.

I've already posted the dictionary definition for it. But knowing that I could finally understand what it means in relation to .hack's story. In that story both the online world and the real world are two distinct and separate realities whose borders should never cross. Yet the players in the online world are people who live in the real world. They constantly pass that threshold between the two existences, sometimes becoming completely different people from one world to the next. 

The idea of Liminality is very strong here, as people are always on the edge of one world or another, one existence or another. 

So for me, this idea that you can be one thing in one world, but something completely different in another world even though you are still the same you.... it bears more thought.

And I've been thinking about it for nine years now.