Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, a few devoted fans of anime sat hunched over their computer keyboards. The sound of the modem was loud and screechy, but it signaled their journey to Usenet, and groups where they could – for many, for the first time in their lives – talk with folks who had similar interests as they did. Among those fans were a small group of folks who were interested in characters who – it seemed to them –  were, androgynous, or butchy or otherwise queer.

Back in those days, when a new character showed up who definitely, probably had a crush on a character of the same sex or even more rarely a couple who were clearly a couple, this group would rejoice! We are represented! They would celebrate with fanfiction, and music videos and art and cosplay and other rituals.

As years passed, we were given more of this; more couples, more characters who represented the things we looked for in media. But the more we got, it seems, the less we’re satisfied. This is true not just with anime, but with every media. Why is it that attempts by media companies at representation now feel so flat and stale when formerly it was so exciting?

Your Story

Over the new year holiday I was reading articles about media franchises that were/are not for me, and the reactions of those various audiences….and thinking about how much work we, as fans, put into a franchise to make it our own.

Trans and queer kids read Harry Potter and felt the story about a kid who is othered by his family spoke to them, personally. It makes perfect sense that they did, of course, and their love for the series that validated their existence was fierce. Which made the ongoing betrayal of that fandom by the creator just that much worse. Molly Fischer’s Who Did J.K. Rowling Become? seeded an idea in my head.

Following upon that, I read Andrew Tejada’s Representation Without Transformation: Can Hollywood Stop Changing Cartoon Characters of Color?  and I saw the exact *same* questions being asked. As media does a better job of diversifying stories…why are we more unsatisfied than when we had no representation at all? I thought back to those Usenet days, when a character might appear on screen for one episode and still become a Yuri icon.

Because we had less representation, we were more easily satisfied with what we could get.

The gold area in the target was bigger- merely seeing someone like ourselves on screen or on the page…or even someone whose issues we could slot into our own….was enough to be cause for celebration. A gay character in a movie who wasn’t predatory, murderous or mentally unstable was a triumph. Something that showed a non-straight, non-cisgender person in a positive light – even if they were played by a straight actor, or the portrayal wasn’t perfect – was significant. The bullseye was easy to hit, because so few companies bothered even trying to shoot at the target.

Creative studio CLAMP was given endless amount of queer cred, simply because they had same-sex characters who sometimes touched, or had obvious affection for one another, even if it was often unspoken and invisible. They were not queer creators writing about themselves; they were a creative team giving us a glimpse of how they’d like to see us. We accepted it as how they thought we’d like to be seen. This is Your Story, they said, and we accepted gratefully.

Our Story

In 2013, Adachi and Shimamura (安達としまむら) was a light novel series in Japan. The first volume had come out 2012 and by 2013, there were two volumes. I read the first and was unimpressed. Over the years, as the series progressed and picked up fans, my initial review would on occasion receive unsatisfied comments, because I had failed to anticipate how the series would progress over 8 years.  ^_^ In 2013, some Yuri fans in Japan were delighted by this series which contained a reference to the author’s previous work and evolved into a romance.

By 2013, I had already seen Yuri go through a number of shifts and changes. We’d had Aoi Hana / Sweet Blue Flowers, for almost a decade by then. We were in a boom of Yuri, with three manga magazines, a handful of out creators, a lot of queer fans online.  Straight fandom was happy enough with another schoolgirl story, but queer fandom was already asking where were the adults?  Where were the lesbians? Where were the queer people in these queer stories?

We were no longer as satisfied with media crumbs as we had been. When in 2015, Yuri fans got a new gateway Yuri series, Bloom Into You, it had both lesbians AND adults! (This is exactly why I’d like to see more adult role models in teen lit. For a lot of queer teens, seeing one adult who is open, happy and out can make the most extraordinary difference.)

Yuri as a genre had already left girl-meets-girl stories behind, here we were able to see something that looked more like our story. But, even as we got closer, many of us were waiting impatiently for queer Yuri to become more widely available. When folks began to identify with Yuu as aromantic or asexual no one argued that they were wrong. What we said was, “this may be Our story, but it might not be Your story, so don’t be surprised if Yuu ends up not aro or ace.” The odds that the series might miss that mark grew, even as it hit other marks in the gold. Because the targets had become more specific, it became less likely that all of them might be hit.

Because we had more representation, mediocre representation fails to satisfy us.

We wanted more. We wanted what all marginalized groups have wanted – to be represented in our media. If this story is ours, we argue, then we should be involved. Valid criticisms of Disney’s movie Soul argue that they missed opportunities to make the story as authentic as they might have. Intentions aside, some folks felt it was praiseworthy for aiming in the right direction, while many critics saw it as Disney handing out another Your Story. I had a similar reaction to watching Kinky Boots, a story many older straight women had told me they enjoyed. I mostly saw all the old, tired stereotypes. This is “Your Story,” the straight audience was saying. Look, how happy it is!

MY Story

Fans aren’t always looking for specific reflection of their selves. Obviously not, as so much of fandom has been built upon media created by and for and, most especially about, people unlike us. We’ve been happy enough following Frodo and Sam and Luke and Han, and Kirk and Spock. It’s just that after decades of that, some of us want stories that make space for people like us.

The closer media comes to representing us, the higher the emotional stakes are for us.

Now, in 2021, when we see media that purports to represent us, we’re looking at, not just who it is for, but who made it, who is in it – who the cooks and servers are, as well as who is at the table. It’s not that we don’t believe that someone outside whatever we define as “us” can’t possibly tell a story well, it’s that we’d really just like to be included when our story is being told as a bare minimum. Without me in my story…is it really my story?

Even worse, if the so-called representation fails to hit the mark, there’s more emotional risk and, in some places, actual physical risk. If a mainstream media shows say, femme lesbians as good and butch lesbians as predatory, that could have serious real-world repercussions. Which is why you saw gay men angry about gay representation in The Prom. It might be their story…but the guy playing it wasn’t them. Worse, it annoyed the hell out of folks who thought an opportunity for a not-tragic gay story was missed.

When the shot comes close to the gold, but fails to hit it, for some folks, it might as well have missed the target altogether. When I watched the trailer for The Happiest Season, I thought, “Well, this may be Our Story, but it’s not My Story.” It’s a story that spent a lot of time in the unfun stereotypical pain of being closeted and very little time in the joy of being in love. I do not in any way object to other people enjoying it – but it’s not for me. At all.

A Yuri story in which no one is gay or there is no recognition of the couple as a same-sex couple from characters around them; where there is no society, they have no friends who are gay or a community…or media…or a functional Internet… feels obviously inauthentic at this point.

Hitting The Gold

For decades, we’ve accepted corporate entities and straight creators telling us “This is Your Story.”

Now, we are even getting Our Story told in a lot of media. And as we get more, sometimes, I might even get My Story and you get Yours. Certainly, in this day and age of crowdfunding and social platforms, there’s nothing at all stopping any one us from telling our own stories exactly the way we want to. And yet, I am still not quite satisfied. ^_^ Today, as I look into the next decade and the next century of Yuri, I plan on pushing myself and the media I consume towards one goal:

I want media that actively models the world I want to see for people who have not yet imagined it.

This is a real limitation of looking for our reflections in media – we’re looking to see who we were, and who we are. I want media that tells both us and those who are not us, who we can become.

When the media we create and the media we consume represents us in a way that expresses and models how we want to be seen and be treated, then we have queer representation that hits the mark.

On April 23, 2020, a new iteration of Ghost in the Shell franchise, Ghost in the Shell, SAC_2045, will launch on Netflix. But that is merely a coincidence in regards to this article. I have wanted to do a massive overview of all of the Ghost in the Shell media for years. In fact, I conceived of this idea back in 2008, when I introduced the film Ghost in the Shell: Innocence at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

Update: I have attempted, and failed in a similar analysis of the manga franchise as of August 2020 in The Future is Always Obsolete: Ghost In the Shell Manga Franchise.

Since we are all home for the duration, I took it upon myself to re-watch all of the Ghost in the Shell visual franchise in the order in which it was created. I chose this path because the nature of the story makes it nearly impossible to create a linear chronology. Instead, what I have found is three separate functional verticals of visual media:

The movies – which are all, ultimately, homage to the first movie. (There are homages to the movies in the TV series as well, but not as concentrated as in the movies.)

The television series Stand-Alone Complex, which is, after watching everything, still the only one I’d recommend to anyone expressing interest in this franchise.

The OVA, then television series, Arise, which significantly rewrites earlier points so is effectively an alternate universe/timeline completely. A 2015 stage play was based on Arise.

Here are my mostly free-form thoughts about the media as I watched it, talked about it on social media and thought out loud about it.  I plan on doing a similar overview for all the manga iterations in a second part. This article presumes you have at least a passing familiarity with the Ghost in the Shell franchise; characters plot(s), etc. If you do not, I recommend the Ghost in the Shell Wikipedia entry for background.

So here we go, a Deep Dive into Ghost in the Shell: Visual Media 1995-2020

Ghost in the Shell (1995): Directed by Mamoru Oshii, written by Kazunori Itou. Based on Masamune Shirow’s manga, this movie established almost all the key visual elements of this series which will be replayed and reconfigured over and over and over in every subsequent iteration. It also established the franchise belonging to Oshii as much as it did to Shirow. Shirow’s love of technology and its symbiotic connection with human consciousness is meshed with Oshii’s love of philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity, creating a dialogue that will continue to be replayed for the next 25 years.

That said, this movie is the proto-incel movie of the ages, with a constant stream of women’s naked bodies, often violently dis-articulated, mannequins without agency or will, some faffing about the meaning of “humanity,” detailed backgrounds and cool lead characters doing action-y things. It’s basically unwatchably dull if you try and *watch* it.  ^_^

What most fans liked about it are those very key visual elements that will be rehashed endlessly: The opening segment that shows a female cyborg body being built;  Kusanagi jumping off the building functionally naked; Sexaroids attacking clients; Kusanagi ripping her arm pulling open a mecha, and, finally, Kusanagi rendered into an inert torso, talking about procreation and immortality with another entity in a disembodied head. 

Kusanagi talking with Batou about her existence after scuba diving, becomes an important scene. This scene not only comes back later, it births the kernel of the plot for the 2017 live action movie. The Major muses in the original movie about not knowing if there was a “real” Kusanagi Motoko before her; maybe there was an accident and her personality was stolen. This is one of several possible histories given to Kusanagi through various iterations. Most importantly for this article, it is in this scene that Batou states plainly that the Major’s cyborg body does not legally belong to her and if she retired it would revert to the government. I imagine that we are to assume that should she choose this option, she could have her brain transferred to a civilian model, but it is not made explicit. 

Watching this movie now, it becomes clear that a murder mystery, political intrigue and stultifying expressions of selfhood, combined with detailed animation, made a lasting emotional impression on generations of viewers.

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, First Gig (2002-2003): Directed and Written by Kamiyama Kenji.

For this first time away from Oshii’s shadow, the characters feel more like the characters from the original manga, with in-jokes, personal lives, senses of humor. That they busted each other was part of what we love about the original manga. There was very little humor in the movie. Here, everyone teases Batou, even the Tachikoma. 

The plot is pleasantly outside the same old set up of the original’s obsession with self. A little less fetishizing of the female body, but not much. There’s more time to make the characters feel human, and to deal with the life parts of their lives.

The Tachikoma lighten the mood – then darken it. They get the “am I real” conversations and their evolution from machines to “people” in real time is devastating. It’s like watching pets age from babies to dying of old age in 26 episodes.

The story is good, and for the first time, the story and the technology appear to be linked inextricably, instead of the plot being a murder mystery with technology. 

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, 2nd Gig (2004-2005): Directed and written by Kamiyama Kenji.

I remembered  2nd Gig as being my favorite, but now that I have re-watched it, I remember why. Everyone has personality; the Major has some backstory, Paz, Bohma and Saito actually get lines*, the Tachikoma are the humanest of them all. All the “what does it meant to be a human?” is actually tied into a plot and not just random waste-of-animation musing, like it will be/was in Innocence.

This series is the closest to an ensemble cast we’ve seen up to this point. The story is  convoluted and shows signs of using random quotes from obscure authors as a plot point, a McGuffin and pointless waste of time all at once…. a narrative element that stuffs Innocence to impossible density. This series proposes another possible history for Kusanagi’s backstory.

Because Kuze exhorts Kusanagi to leave her physical body due to it’s limitations – one of which is that it does not belong to her – I feel that this is the closest thing to a lead-in Innocence has. Perhaps Kuze’s appeal in SAC:2nd Gig resonates with Kusanagi in a way that the Puppet Master’s did not because she feels an affinity for Kuze, which we’ll touch on later when we talk about her history

Animation is generally good in SAC, backgrounds don’t get that crazy detail they get in the movies, but the people fare better overall.

If anyone is asking me, at this point, Stand Alone Complex is by far and away the best iteration. It has enough of the things you vaguely remember from the movie, and enough of the best bits of the manga characters that it’s approachable and fun and *human*. This series ends where the manga begins, which is another nice tie-in.

I enjoy the music from this series the most, as well. Both OPs are excellent and are the only music from this series I have in my collection.

*Imagine being cast as Paz and telling your mother. “Hey Mom! I got cast in one of the most famous series in the world! No, no lines but sometimes I get to say “Roger.”

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, (2004) Directed and written by Mamoru Oshii. I absolutely love this movie, but am well aware that it is densely packed with obscure references rather than having a plot, and, while extremely beautiful, not really a “fun” movie at all. The title is slightly confusing, too, as Ghost in the Shell 2.0 was the 2008 remake.

Innocence: Look at this multi-million dollar animated scene of a detailed Gothic structure at ridiculously high resolution and detail!

Also Innocence: Let’s use our massive animation budget to show the same scene of two guys not moving…three times.

There is a nod in the opening to being chronologically after SAC 2nd Gig, but not specifically in the same timeline. Innocence still insists that the Major did not own her body; this was part of the drive for the Major to upload herself into the net, before Innocence begins. 

Innocence is a series of visual callbacks to the original movie, and is almost wholly divorced from the manga. Indeed, it is wholly divorced from Kusanagi at all.  So, while the usual visual relics aren’t in this movie, we get a lot of the background events reworked. The floats parading through the streets is breathtakingly beautiful…and the music throughout is obviously a nod to the original movie.  At hi-res, the CGI in Innocence is outstanding. The animation is almost uncanny valley in places. I probably watched this movie on my home screen in higher resolution than I saw it in the theater the first time. ^_^ This deserves the highest resolution possible, just to take in the excruciating visual detail.

The bulk of the series is a giant game of “guess the reference.” Quotes and visual cues clog up the dialog to the point of making it all but impossible to follow the story. The joke I always share is that when I saw this movie in the theater, when I watched the credits I shouted “Bellmer!” (because, although I recognized the gynoids instantly, I could not remember his name,) and woke all the people around me up. ^_^

Hans Bellmer’s designs for the gynoids befuddled me, but then…I’d forgotten Japanese jointed dolls, which they kind of, sort of resemble. Not *so* odd, I guess. But still unappealing from my perspective. Bellmer was a misogynist fuckhead among other sexual dysfunctions. The idea of using his not-even-slightly-idealized female forms for sexaroids is strange, but in a sense I think it’s another version of the grotesquery/female torso obsession Oshii plays with in his iterations of this franchise. 

There’s a hint of grappling with mortality and morality but in the end, the Major – who is never really there at all – is the one who makes the point. And Batou fails to be a good person, which is a shame, but is a shout out to the manga.

As a coda, 2501 seems the *least* secure code you could pick, Batou. /facepalm/

Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society (2006) Directed by Kamiyama Kenji, written by Kamiyama Kenji, Suga Shotaro, Sakurai Yoshiki. As far as I know, this was my first time watching this iteration, but it seemed very familiar. Not sure if that’s because it’s basically the same kind of thing, I had seen it before, or something else.

I initially placed it between SAC 2nd Gig and Innocence, but it could just have easily come after Innocence, if Batou had managed to make it through his mid-career crisis. In any case this was another very-good ensemble piece – maybe the best for all the Section 9 characters overall, with more lines for everyone.

Amazing animation at the beginning, it settles down, but is generally very good.

I really liked that we finally see the Major using her consciousness in multiple different bodies. That’s a feature of the manga I really liked and felt that it would have been awesome – and sensible- in an anime, but was rarely used.

The music being so different from the rest of the series sets it apart in a kind of a pocket universe in which the Puppeteer makes a comeback.  This was more of an OVA for the SAC series than a “movie”. Kamiyama Kenji gets my vote for writing any further Ghost in the Shell content. He really *gets* the things that can make this an interesting setup, then uses them and doesn’t get bogged down too much in philosophical discourse.

Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (2008): This remake of the 1995 movie is the same, with a few small changes. CGI is inserted in key scenes, including the opening, and much of the mecha is rendered in CGI. I remember clearly that this spliced nicely into the “get your CGI out of my anime!” wars. ^_^

There is, however, one important change.

In the final scene of the original movie, the Puppet Master is voiced by a man. In Japanese, the role was played by Kayumi Iemasa, and in English it was Tom Wyner. In 2.0, while in English the same audio track was used, in Japanese, the Puppet Master was now voiced by Sakakibara Yoshiko. Giving a woman’s voice to a non corporeal entity obsessing about procreation and immortality radically altered the feel of the scene.

In both iterations of this movie, the backgrounds are detailed and painstakingly animated. It’s easy to see why the movie was hailed as a masterwork of its time. But time moves on and here, it all looks a little worn.

Ghost in the Shell: Arise (2015 – 2016) Directed by Kise Kazuchika, Written by Ubukata Tow. Arise is annoying. There I said it. Not only does it retcon what little we know about the major, but every single voice is different. Feels like an AU, rather than canon, which is a weird choice for a 20th anniversary.

But, let’s talk about that retcon: How many times has it been mentioned that the Major’s body is not her own? Well, now it is. And it is, before Section 9 is formed, so all those meaningful conversations about her existence and her body are all now moot. What a strange choice, to overwrite a core concept that is one of the few enduring “facts” we have.

Also, if the Major’s body is cyborg, why does she wear underwear? She doesn’t need anything to catch bodily fluids, or stop chafing or provide support or anything people wear underwear for. Creepy, boring fetishes are creepy and boring. (see: Sex and Sexuality).

Oh wow, Kusanagi’s mentor is the bad guy. I was so surprised. That wasn’t completely predictable from the first second we saw her in her low-cut uniform blouse and non-regulation hair. 

The story doesn’t make a lot of sense within itself. As a kind of alternate universe fanfic of how the Major’s group was formed, it’s a lot of glitz, without the kind of storytelling I look for in Ghost in the Shell…like someone who sort of got it did the writing…and in, fact, felt like Ubukata Tow through and through. Using different voices for everyone definitely made it feel even more AU. This series is the weakest link in the franchise in every way. Character designs are uninspired, and the fact that it borrows so much from the original movie feels less like an homage here than a lack of originality. Before the original movie, all of it had already happened?  Okay.

攻殻機動隊ARISE:GHOST is ALIVE Stage Play (2015): This is a stage version of Arise. I did not expect the dancing. In retrospect I should have. 

Ghost in the Shell  (2017): Directed by Rupert Sanders, written by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger. The main problem with the live-action Ghost in the Shell is not that it’s “bad,” its that it is a pretty fair retelling of the first movie with a made-by-Hollywood plot inserted and Hollywood whitewashing, which made Oshii and Shirow happy, but pissed off everyone else. 

Let’s set aside the choice of actress for just a moment. That’s a main point, but IF the live-action had been a perfect retelling of the original, with a Japanese actress, people would still have not liked it, because it was *never* the story (which was barely there in the original) that people remembered. It was the emotional impact…and a series that is 20+ years old, that has used those same visual references over and over, cannot ever recapture that initial emotional impact.

Most of the visuals are homage to the original movie: Idealized “build a body” and same not-quite nudity. Similar music, heavy drums, women singing.  False memories. Boat scene. Arm rip. Togusa’s got bad hair. Batou’s got dogs. Optical camo was handled well. The jump, murderous servobots, scene in her room by a window, garbage guys…all homage. The end theme is literally the opening of the original. Laying next to puppeteer/Kuze, air strike…it’s all there. And despite that, the problem is not that this movie lacked nuance – it actually added in nuance. It gave the Major a definitive backstory. Oulete is not Haraway, she actually cares. Major finds out who she was and gets an actual history.

There were some changes of course. “Major” is treated like a name, not a rank. She’s given a new name, Mira Killian and Section 9 isn’t a government department, she’s a corporate tool for an evil corporation. Those are changes that did need to be made for the actress to work. Overall they actually wrote a halfway decent story with some extremely stupid points. For instance, how did I forget that “Initiate the hack.” is a line in this movie? It’s so memorable. Also, “I’m trying, but she’s being hacked!” Scenes from the original are taken out of the context of the original, so the garbage guys scene isn’t as full of pathos. As the garbage guy is screaming “2571!,”  not 2501,  all I could think was now Batou can get a new code for his front door. (Haha GitS continuity jokes.)

Of all the visuals that were supposed to feel futuristic, the one that totally didn’t work were the giant floating faces all over the city as adverts. None of them had logos. What were they for? We’ll never know. That’s not how advertising works.

So, now, we can talk about the actress. Scarlet Johansson is not, IMHO, a good actress. She is bland looking and an indifferent actress. Her primary appeal is to be blandly attractive so an assumed-male audience can not care about the female characters she plays while they stay sexually attracted to her. To Shirow and Oshii, getting a top-name Hollywood actress to play “Major” would have been a triumph. HOLLYWOOD! ScarJo! It’s just that we all thought it was a terrible idea. So instead of writing a story about Kusanagi Motoko, they wrote a story around “why this Japanese character is white now” which was a less-optimal, more-insulting use of the audience’s time.

To make this movie excellent all they needed to do was bring back her manga-version body hopping and hire non-white actresses to play her, too. If there had been a single scene in which she networked with several other iterations of herself – played, ideally, by top name actresses from other parts of the world – they would have created a way to make their use of Johansson less annoying, while nodding to the original manga.  To make it brilliant it needed very few changes: One scene, with Major interfacing with these other selves. Especially if they played up the idea that she’s a networked entity, that’s all it might have taken.  But…they didn’t and it left fans of the franchise thinking they Hollywood is a bunch of imaginationless twits.

Oh well.

Possible histories for Kusanagi

Through the series, we’ve been given several alternate stories for Major Kusanagi Motoko.

Movie: She has no idea if she was ever a person. Maybe there was an accident and her personality was stolen. Batou and Kusanagi talk about how her body belongs to the government

SAC 2nd:  She was cyborgized very young, and it’s implied that if she and Kuze are not the actual boy and girl in the story told to her by the curiosity shop owner, their individual stories are similar. Hence her sympathy and affinity for Kuze at the end of 2nd Gig in a way that the Puppet Master never evinced.

Arise: Retcons the first movie, when she wins ownership of her body and a trust fund to pay for it before her team is official. Furthermore, in Arise, we’re told she was cyborgized young, and raised by a scientist, but that history is erased as the series goes on, so in the end, we still don’t know what her history is.

Live-Action movie: Takes that throwaway line about an accident from the first movie and builds a history around it. She was Kusanagi Motoko, her death was pointless. Hanka robotics takes the brain, puts it into a fully cyborg body and trains it to be an enforcer.

And this doesn’t even touch on the body of manga, so expect a few more backstories there.

Sex and Sexuality

Kusanagi’s “sexiness” is a constant in the franchise, but it’s realized differently by different directors. Shirow and Kamiyama have an ass fetish, Kise liked tits, Oshii likes torsos without limbs, all of them like female bodies fakely naked or clothed in underwear. We know this because they did this over and over. And over.  Every director’s specific fetish is just as obvious as all the others’. Isn’t that tiresome?

Kusanagi’s clothes are horrible, fetishy weird things throughout. The designers ought to be scolded. They make me chafe looking at them. Body suits suck. Flesh-toned bodysuits are ridiculous. If she’s a cyborg she won’t care that she’s naked. None of her clothes make any sense beyond the titillation of people with limited sexual imagination.

But what is interesting is that just as surely as she is “sexy,”, we learn her sexuality – if that’s even applicable in a networked cyborg. Although she is always shown as female – and she and Batou discuss that in SAC – what does sexuality even mean when gender and sex can be as fluid as the buyer wishes? So I’m choosing to call it pansexuality, rather than bisexuality because we never really know anything about her or her partners ultimately. Shirow has her as a pansexual.  Kenji Kamiyama keeps that in SAC. And once again in the live action, we get a brief glimpse (although weirdly that’s been cut for the Amazon Prime release?) of the same. 

Final Random Thoughts

Let’s just take a second and talk about a couple of those emotionally impactful scenes that we’ve all come to know and expect. Some of them make no sense. ^_^

We know Kusanagi’s extremely heavy cyborg body can be damaged, so in what universe does it make sense for her to leap off a building? She’s not flying, she’s falling. She’s hurtling herself downwards like a boulder. Her body and the building she crashes in to should be wreckage.

But the one thing I want to rant about is the, IMHO, extremely bizarre scene in every iteration where Kusanagi rips her arm opening a mecha’s access port.  Isn’t it obvious that she’d ask to have that arm significantly reinforced after the first time? I just cannot with that scene. 

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 So here we are in 2020, waiting for a new series. Which Kusanagi Motoko will we get?

The good news is that the news series is once again directed by Kamiyama Kenji and Aramaki Shinji.

Which is why I predict that SAC_2045 will be to SAC what the movies all are to the original – an homage, using something similar to SAC 2nd Gig‘s plot done with CGI…because technology changes more than story in the technological world of Ghost in the Shell.

But, with Kamiyama at the helm, I’m hoping we’ll get a new story, something that will make us all love Section 9 all over again.