Ghost in the Shell/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Batou: "If it looks like you've gone in too deep I'm pulling the plug and taking you home!"

  • Non Sequitur Scene:
    • The lesbian sex scene in the original. Comes out of nowhere, is never brought up again in that book.
    • Man/Machine Interface had a sex scene involving a female African soldier getting gang-banged by 3 other soldiers. Shirow admitted to removing it from the North American release because it really added nothing to the story.
  • Contested Sequel: The film Innocence. Some fans consider it an Even Better Sequel, others a pretentious bore.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Kenji Kawai's breathtaking score for both films. The climax of Innocence is practically a ballet.
  • Designated Hero: While she's on the job, the Major is not a nice lady; at times, she seems to approach being a Heroic Sociopath. For example, in Section 9's first mission to determine if they would even be approved as an organization, Motoko ends up saving the lives of boys who were working in hellish totalitarian conditions and barely being fed. When they ask if she was here to help them, she told them that they have to make their own lives and not rely on hand-outs. Ouch.
    • And that's not even close to the worst thing she does.
  • Erection Rejection: A sizable faction of the fans maintains that Man/Machine Interface is unreadable because of this. The other faction maintains it is only readable because of that.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: The first movie can be interpreted as the Major leaving behind her attachments to her human existence and becoming a being of pure thought. The second movie's plot is more straightforward, but still contains lots of mind screwing.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In America, it's a bona fide classic. In Japan, it's considered to be average.
    • Average in sales, not in quality. To Westerners it was one of the earlier examples of serious, artistic animation, while in Japan it was nothing unheard of and was, well, slow-paced and artistic; rarely a recipe for a box office hit.
  • Paranoia Fuel: The possibility of having your brain hacked. In the second film, we get to see what the result of such hacking looks like from the point of view of the victim. It's rather unnerving.
  • Uncanny Valley: Both films play with this, especially Innocence with those eerie geisha robots, Haraway the forensics scientist, Kim and the really creepy-looking doll Togusa brings home to his daughter at the end. Discussed in Innocence:

"It's the uncertainty that perhaps something that appears to be alive actually isn't. On the other hand, it might be the uncertainty that doesn't appear to be alive actually is."

  • Woolseyism: The English title is the subtitle of the original work. The actual Japanese title, Kokaku Kidoutai, translates to "Mobile Armored Tank Police". (Shirow Masamune mentions in the preface to Man/Machine Interface that the Japanese title is a huge misnomer for M/MI, because the story is no longer about the police, nor does the protagonist ride in an armored tank. He considered changing it, but...nah.)
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