Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex/Awesome

""Hey! Dumbass at the window! Get on over here!" "What the hell is with this geezer's tactical competence?""
 * The Major has a tendency to become a walking, talking CMOA on a regular basis. A "Crowning Existence of Awesome", if you will.
 * My personal favorite was episode 23 "Equinox". To elaborate:  "And I was never in a single school play either." indeed.
 * The Major actually has another moment. An earlier episode had a Humongous Mecha chasing her, Batou, and a VIP that had info on the Government Conspiracy. She leads the mech away, and soon gets her ass handed to her, to the point of the mech blowing off her arm and attempting to squish her head into the pavement. Cue the cavalry with their BFG managing to stop the mech cold... then we get to see Motoko get up, take the giant gun, and proceed to unload the rest of the bullets on the fallen mech up close, singlehandedly (literally), all while the pilot is begging for mercy. She doesn't kill him, but a point is made: never piss off The Major.
 * What I got from the scene was that she did kill him, by denting the chestplate until he couldn't breathe anymore.
 * In the next episode, when they arrest Niimi, Aramaki mentions that Gayle (the aforementioned pilot) gave them recordings of his conversations with Niimi. So she probably didn't kill him.
 * I always thought Aramaki was lying.
 * Aramaki mentioned that Gayle was very cooperative afterward... Why? Because the Major scared him shitless once the tables were turned. So no, she didn't kill him.
 * Aramaki gets a good one in the first season when, tied up and armed with nothing and unable to communicate outside the building he's in, he rescues his friend, talks the people who have taken him hostage into switching sides, completely fakes out the corrupt police trying to assassinate him, his friend and the hostage takers, then has the classic Aramaki moment where he confronts the police and has them arrested. Section 9 works for him for a reason.

""Section Nine's specialties are cyberwarfare and busting heads in.""
 * Ishikawa has a CMOA in the last episode of SAC 2nd Gig, when


 * I would just like to point out part of what makes the above moment so special is that Ishikawa's forte is Data Gathering, not combat, and that he's usually working behind the scenes. So him doing something a bit more physically kickass instead of mentally is good deal of what makes this moment so utterly awesome. In a similar way, something that felt like a CMOA for Batou, Section 9's Number 2 Badass (after the Major), is when, rather than his usual kicking physical ass kickass stuff (though he does have a few CMOA that follow along those lines too), he's telling Gouda that he sucks, and why, deconstructing his plan, well, what Section 9 know of it so far. Sure,, but still, that scene must have left a massive dent in Gouda's ego.
 * How about when he needed extra processing power and so he
 * Another moment is when, at the end of Stand Alone Complex, Ishikawa releases the data seeds and then catches the Umibozu commandos in an explosion. And nearly walking away from it, then snarking at The Captain while he's being beaten.
 * last stand, after Batman Gambit? The following episodes were pretty much CMoAs for everyone.
 * The Tachikomas are cute little Crowning Moments on legs. Everything they do ends, eventually, in a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * Tachikomas Also qualifies as a Tear Jerker. What's particularly striking is that, when the Tachikomas are on the brink of despair over their   This is tantamount to the Major, of all people, admitting she was wrong.
 * Just to hammer the point home, remember that they are intelligent tanks, designed and built as weapons. They gain sentience and what do they do? Turn against their creators? No.
 * And later, at the end of 2nd Gig, The Tachikomas
 * Both of these were made all the more awesome by the fact that  and   respectively.
 * Essentially anytime that Run Rabbit Junk plays one or more members of the team are about to do something awesome.
 * During the Ghost In The Shell anime series, Togusa uses more-than-usual force to subdue a cybernetically-enhanced suspect he saw assaulting a woman. Being a cyborg, said suspect had to have several bullets shot into each of his limbs before he stopped. During the trial, Togusa is crucified by the suspect's defense attorney for having a (false) anti-cyborg bias. When it becomes apparent the suspect is going to be let off, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the officer's superior, blackmails them into ending the trial with a guilty verdict. She does this by hacking into Togusa's body and pretending he's going to quit the force and go to the press with "secrets". And yes, she does this in the middle of court.
 * In this troper's opinion, Togusa's CMOA came near the end of the first season when he risks his life, and actually gets shot, finding a critical piece of evidence that (arguably) led to the solving of the Laughing Man case. What makes this particularly badass is the fact that you have to consider that he is one of the few members of Section 9 who doesn't have a large number of prosthetics, and the only one without military training. In other words, he was about ten times as vulnerable in this situation as anyone else on the team would have been, and his biggest concern was to just get the necessary info to the right people. Awesome.
 * Togusa is pretty much continually awesome in Stand Alone Complex, even compared to the movies in part because of this, but also because he has that "first responder" instinct, rushing into places others are running away from. He's like Murphy in Robocop, except he studiously avoids becoming a cyborg.
 * Saito and the Major each manage to get a CMOA in the same episode, fighting against each other. The big point? They got their Crowning Moments simultanously.
 * The series itself probably has a CMOA when Section 9 uses American Spy Satellites to listen to every single electronic communication in post-cyberpunk Japan in real time.
 * This troper would like to point out that the Laughing Man is in itself a Crowning Moment of Awesome. At the very least, it's an all-pervasive cultural phenomenon unintentionally started by someone who's possibly the world's most skilled hacker, and is quite probably  spontaneously spawned by pure injustice. To top it all off, the Laughing Man is specifically stated, in-canon, to be an entity that's too cool to exist. Awesome.
 * ...So the Laughing Man is Anonymous?
 * Episode 4 of 2nd Gig, where Section Nine goes up against the rampant AI Jigabachi AV attack chopper and it's standard Jigabachi cousins. The entire scene is full of awesome, from the Tachikomas playing cat and mouse with the Jigabachis missiles and gunfire, to the Major physically restraining an attack helicopter by herself, to Saito pulling off a million to one shot on the Jigabachi AV's cockpit.
 * And the famous scene where the Major kills a guy through a skyscraper window, then fades into the night, while in freefall.
 * Every. Single. One of them.
 * I couldn't have been the only one who thought Goda's demise was awesome!
 * One of The Major's girlfriends is a nurse who reports organs being stolen. When Section 9 track down the thieves she and Batou pretend to be Yakuza, chasing after them with Tachikomas and scaring them into confession, before The Major goes after the mastermind with a large knife, threatening to cut him up and sell his body parts on the black market.
 * Batou  in episode 24. This man can sure hold his ground.