The Ghost in the Shell #05 — Random Axe Attacks

August 4th, 2026

 

Why not run her over instead?

Impressions:

Back to messy, incomprehensible episodes filled with things that seem like foreshadowing but are just one-off gags, people getting incredibly dramatic and excited over things that I legitimately think have never before been mentioned, and a deluge of babble severe enough to drown an elephant. I'm not sure which I'd say was most egregious, but the Fuchikoma had like three separate bits through the first half where it almost but didn't quite get into huge trouble before completely vanishing for the rest of the episode. Then again, Motoko took an axe to the back in an assassination attempt and that was just… I guess a flavor thing for the universe.

As for what they were doing, it was just raiding another lab. One of Batou's rookie friends got killed by someone involved though, so he was being all pissy, but for the life of me, I couldn't have told you if this person had even been mentioned before they revealed the corpse. And then they just shot the guy in the back after a brief fight, so that's the whole revenge story, is it? Similarly, Motoko fights-but-not-really some dude who likes to possess statues, which was her getting tossed into a wall once and then three paragraphs of the guy saying he needed to run away before he gave up and it was back to listening to talking heads wrap up the entire geopolitical situation involving fifteen new proper nouns that may or may not have never been mentioned before and may never be mentioned again. It's all so untethered from the characters, except for the dramatics over Batou's new dead friend, which ain't fixing things.

Posted in Ghost in the Shell | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • residentgrigo says:
    August 5, 2026 at 12:34 am

    The sci-fi Russians, first seen in the hotel prologue, are explicitly confirmed in this 1990 chapter to be the actual Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, so the manga’s future was outdated upon release. The entire Neuromancer trilogy + Burning Chrome had already been published in Japan before chapter 1 debuted, Blade Runner had long since become a cult hit on home media there, and fellow cyberpunk IPs such as Akira and Bubblegum Crisis were in full swing. You can’t really call this copycat a trailblazer.

    That makes the bad ideas and clunky writing easier to notice than the good ones. Spidertanks had already appeared in Shirow´s Dominion and Appleseed. They have better artwork and more relevant settings. The catgirls at the market are also from Dominion. Both were abandoned so he could make Ghost in the Shell, to then quit it twice.

    G2.5 (Ghost in the Shell 3 “G3” Pilot Film) – Mamoru Oshii (2009)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3P0pkqnwe4

    Oshii’s failed pitch for a third film seemingly homages this statue fight, but it’s sadly awful, so it’s for the best that it was never approved. He also made too many flops in a row in the 00s but GitS: Innocence and The Sky Crawlers are both good.

    Reply
    • Ark noir says:
      August 5, 2026 at 7:54 pm

      I thank god for your g.i.t.s info posts.

      Reply
      • residentgrigo says:
        August 6, 2026 at 5:40 pm

        The power suits, briefly seen here or in the first episode, are directly copied from Appleseed. The Bay City setting is lifted from Akira (1982) or Patlabor: The Movie (1989). The establishing shot of Olympus in Appleseed Vol 3 is pretty much how the artificial island looks in the GitS manga. All of Shirow´s leading woman are the same character and so on.

        The descending skyscrapers from Evangelion are a direct homage to Star Blazers (1974)´s pilot, despite how unique that visual looks, so even the greats reheat old ideas. The Matrix or Star Wars 1977 have no truly original bones in their bodies either, but they tell coherent stories. GitS, on the other hand, grafts Dominion onto Appleseed and calls it a day after heavily plagiarizing Neuromancer 1, including its ending. The Matrix at least stole in style. Last week´s child sex slave plot and the endless diplomatic immunity false stops are also from Appleseed Vol 3. Shirow clearly saw Lethal Weapon before writing it and never let go but he also held back his worst impulses during Appleseed, as its artbook proves. He restrained himself from overloading it with already-drawn nude pinups or endless lore dumps, instead exorcising a lot (but not all) of that into a guidebook. GitS wasn’t that lucky. It has the Frank Miller problem, where the author becomes too big to edit. Shirow also never worked with assistants, so none of his output gets filtered. The anime tones that down somewhat as its mostly clear what one is looking at but all 3 volumes/versions of GitS are hard to look at in their own ways. The statue sequence is especially incomprehensible on the page.

        Now for some praise. The neural network shots when people “jack in” are pretty cool, but the manga hardly invented the human nervous system. Even the Fuchikoma have them? Maybe less cool here. Still, they’re certainly better than the dumb internet diving, complete with revealing swimsuits, GitS 2.0 has. SAC and others sadly copied that basic idea, straight out of bad 90s Spider-man comics. The IP should have stuck to the more surreal Cyberspace imagery it used at first, but even Vol 1 ends with people sitting in a void looking at screens. That’s just the Holodeck.

        Reply

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