Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • How exactly did the Individual Eleven kill each other?
    • Stand two people across from each other, and give them like a yardstick each or something long (NOT a sword) and ask them to "cut each other's head off" at the same time. If both slash right-to-left, then its physically impossible to get a clean slice all the way through on both people because either your arms or swords will bump into each other. Yet, somehow, during the cutaway, the IE bent the laws of physics and matter to simultaneously chop each other's heads off.
      • People have elbows. If they hold their arms bent while slicing, the blades don't cross paths until after their heads have come off, or actually move away from each other if they use a backhand slice and start with their swords touching. For the latter, building up enough speed to cut cleanly can be attributed to cyborg muscles.
  • In the final episode why do the Tachikomas have to sacrifice themselves in order to intercept the nuke? They were ordered by the Major to make room for several million people, but they couldn't move their own A Is to a server that isn't about to be turned into a gaseous chunk of metal? Even accepting the possible counterargument that they aren't authorised to move their own files, why not ask any of the humans of section 9 to give them authorisation? Plot Induced Stupidity combined with Rule of Drama?
    • There is a scene were they appear to do just that. there's a server saying Tachikoma's memory or something. Considering solid state society this seems to have worked
  • In one of the last episodes of the second series, it's mentioned that the micro-machines that 'scrub' the radiation only work when they are deployed right after an explosion, so they are sucked into the blast area or something. So how were they at all useful for removing the radiation caused by WW 3, seeing as as far as I understood it, they were invented after the war?