The Ghost in the Shell #08 — Harassing Yacht People
August 25th, 2026
Can't have a swimsuit without a closeup crotch shot.
Impressions:
Gee, I wonder why she abruptly started acting supiciously. Maybe we should bring up that it started right after the Puppet Master incident. Where it declared itself to be a ghost. In some kind of, I dunno, shell-like container. I'm not really sure what the first half even added to the whole Puppet Master lore or story. What was new? The exact scientists that developed it? It's timeline of being a chatbot from the far far off future of 2025? That the previously unseen random dude is taking the fall for it?
Anyway, that half of the episode padded out and then ditched, it's time to move into scuba time close-up ass shots of Motoko. Stay classy. But that too requires six minutes of debriefing before it can begin. A debriefing that ends up not actually making much sense. They were set up to publicly expose them as black ops, but also, they just went in guns blazing off apparently zero intel. Both sides are problematic here. First, that they would have any issue with this at all with all the random murdering in full view of the public characters have done. No, I haven't forgotten the random ax terrorist thing. Second, that they would be this stupid and mass murdery off nothing whatsoever. As far as setups go, this was quite literally nothing. I wasn't even clear that they were trying to capture the random dude to start with.
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residentgrigo
Ep 1–3 had extended scenes to stretch material worthy of 2 episodes (+ 2 shorts). It’s barely noticeable in the pilot but grows episode by episode, with the clearly unfinished Spider-Man nonsense at the start of EP 3 standing out the most. That action scene arguably doesn’t exist in the manga, even off screen, but there were no wholly original scenes in this anime. Until now! Act 3 of this anime is back to its Act 1 tricks. Everything till 8:20 in the car doesn’t exist in any Shirow publication or anywhere else. The same goes for 12:25 to 16:30. Who is Poseidon? Its future Japan was first seen in Shirow’s professional debut, Appleseed, and now appears in nearly all of Shirow’s works. GitS 2.0 from 1997 should be when Poseidon entered GitS proper on the page but the anime Jumps the gun. So only the final 5 pages from the ending of the last case and the opening 11 pages of this one were adapted. Exactly half is filler. Even EP 3 covers more ground!
Pandora in the Crimson Shell has Project 2501 awaken in the far-off future of 2022, in a 2015-dated chapter from Vol. 8 of 26, and then start interacting with people. She but technically they has more page time in that manga alone than any Shirow version of Motoko, even if the post-merger forms of Motoko + the hentai works are all counted against just pre-2030 Niko-chan solo. She has no body in the whole story, as all but the final volume doesn’t leave 2022, but she selects Motoko as her prime candidate to merge with during an internet walkabout in 2022, where we see Motoko as part of Unit 501 from Arise. The ending of PitCS Vol. 23.
Shirow was involved in the pre-production of SAC S1 (but not other parts of SAC), and to a lesser degree Arise, so bits from those have entered his canon in a twisty way, despite no new “pure” GitS chapter having been made since the tankobon-only epilogue of GitS 2.0 in 1998. GitS 1.75 (2019–2025) uses his canon, or so the publisher says, but nothing of note happens in it with Shirow uninvolved. Not that Shirow’s own GitS 1.5 matters, lol. 4 out of 8 known chapers were finished.
Does this new 2001/Robocop homage conflict with modern Shirow canon? Maybe, but good luck getting any of his works to connect. Sometimes even in the same volume! His infamous woman-on-horseman hentai “Wild Wet West” was retconned into being a canon part of GitS due to Juliona Trans being revealed as a high-level AI in Greaseberries Vol. 4 (2019). It officially canonised ALL his hentai works as per “Word of God”, publisher(s) and theghostintheshell dot jp. Cybersex has basically become a JoJo Stand battle equivalent in-universe. And with that, back to the land of sanity. As sane as this story gets.
Here are all cases dated so far, with the anime retaining dates 1-to-1, with notes on what a basket case the whole cast and plot have been so far. This will be relevant next week.
March 4, 2029: The hotel assassination where Aramaki learns of Motoko. Next ep will confirm that this was their first face-to-face. This info is later semi-retconned in PitCS Vol. 14, but he simply knew of a full-body cyborg girl being used by the military, as his granddaughter is a full-body cyborg. Aramaki’s granddaughter has the exact backstory of Motoko from SAC, but she is childhood friends with Raizo from Arise (blue dreamlocks) and not S2 anti-villain Kuze. (Mamoru Oshii helped to develop Kuze.)
PitCS and Arise are official sister projects, as both grew from the same made-for-anime pitch by Shirow, but Arise is officially its own closed canon of 5 OVAs, a 7-volume gaiden manga (the only printed GitS worth reading, with releases in Italy and on K-Manga), and a concluding film. PitCS became the official spine of Shirow’s canon, though.
April 10, 2029: Motoko is a fresh face in S9 for the fake-ish orphanage case. What even happens… and those exo-suits are Gen 1-Landmates from Appleed. S9 itself just opened operations and is rewarded with ongoing blanket diplomatic immunity at the end. Lethal Weapon 2 and 007: License to Kill are summer of 1989 releases and late-80s Batman comics infamously got derailed with this nonsense, leading to Joker becoming the Iranian Ambassador, so it’s not just Shirow harping on about this back then. Motoko goes AWOL from the military for S9 (major might only be a nickname in this canon) and makes an enemy with a general for no reason. We first learn here that Motoko and arguably S9 don’t care about the fate of civilians. The manga ending of the EP 4 material has Batou show open contempt for the 2 slave girls. Innocence and this anime fixed his attitude, despite similar dialogue being delivered very differently.
“Mobile Armored Riot Police” is the official name of S9 and not the whole department, in case that comes up in a trivia section.
July 27, 2029: The Puppet Master enters the story, ending in the market shootout where we fully see that S9 doesn´t care about civilian casualties. They are the anti-terror police, but points for accidental realism? Batou then tries to create a mass-casualty event at an embassy and Motoko tries to steal money, aka evidence, on screen. Of all the S9 messes, this seems the most extreme and they fail to note wintermute´s presence. Hups, I mean, Puppet Master.
The two 4-page and fully canon omakes, extended beyond the breaking point in EP 3, go here but have no dates. A new 4 person lesbian gang bang beeing set up is anime original. The woman undergoing surgery doesn´t go to the cafe with them and is unrelated to Motoko´s other sex friend.
October 1, 2029: The child sex slaves case where Batou tortures a Yakuza for the love of the game and has a more shitty attitude in the manga, as mentioned. It ends with Motoko being shipped off to England on a 2-month solo training. Aramaki now makes an enemy with the military, but he tried to stop an Epstein ring, so good on him. The brain-in-a-jar “comedy” rapist is a recurring gag character in PitSC, for those who want to keep the child abuse hilarity rolling. He is the world’s first known full-body cyborg.
December 24, 2024: The USSR case where Motoko executes the far-left axe maniac, who is a civilian, and causes a car crash in full view of the public on foreign soil. It ends with Motoko stealing Russian gold to wire to the family of the dead rookie, who Batou was looking after. Aramaki notices this and asks for it to be kept off the books. Not the worst type of corruption, but how many enemies will the mishandling of this case cause?
PitSC explains that Perestroika failed in one of its appearances by Cruzkowa Bosyeltnov (the 80-something female organ harvester in the body of a pigtailed teen) from SAC S1. The in-universe East Bloc is flourishing, as Shirow failed to read the room in this 1990 chapter. How do you sleep through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? The USSR doesn’t exist in other GitS canons.
May 2, 2030: The shaggy-dog agency-vs-agency insanity with her Section 1 boyfriend, where both units nearly kill each other, leaving both organisations and another foreign entity with a grudge. An unseen case S9 failed to put to bed of course led to this revenge bonanza, and Motoko commits one of her MANY on-screen murders to stop an ongoing investigation in its tracks at the end. Wow. The 2nd worst mess.
July 15, 2029: The actual Puppet Master case where Batou gets to act out his road rage and all security protocols go out the window.
September 9, 2029: This week’s shaggy-dog story about Israeli interference (previously done in Appleseed) that loosely inspired the messy finale of SAC S1, where the CIA took this role. But as noted in the review, what is the point of framing Motoko “McBain” Kusanagi? We know for a fact that most of the actions chronicled by me were done in the open, in a world where every cyberbrain records what it sees. Just roll the tapes! Bonus points for forensic analyst Ishikawa not knowing his own prime minister. The pink stealth-suit colors are from the manga. Of course they are.
In conclusion: Masamune Shirow’s Section 9. Threat, or Menace? Motoko’s current home, Mars Risk Management Technology B&S, ain’t much better, but they mostly stick to sex crimes. More on that once the curtain falls with EP 10. I’ll try my best to grasp who Gariona Ronne and her sister from W Tails Cat are by then but WTC Vol. 5 only releases after the finale of this anime. The Glitch Witch (anime) project, the interquel between PitSC and GitS where the Puppet Master takes center stage, remains in development hell, so chances are very high that his hentai sequel to 2.0 is coming first, even if it takes until Vol. 6 to fully transition.
The 1995 movie, while not perfect, is a miracle. It was made with only the 340-page manga and then just two GitS 1.5 chapters in existence, both of which (and the later two) are disregarded by adaptations to this day. Dito for GitS 2.0. Only Vol. 1’ chapters 2, 4 (four pages), and 7 were fully untouched, if Innocence is counted, as it technically adapts most scenes from chapter 6. Barely recognisably, but it does. Chapters 4 (+ 5) and nothing else, are essentially included in SAC 1, but we are talking about 4 + 4 pages. So only the Orphanage, SAC S2 ends with the opening sake tasting but has Motoko drive away from S9 and the manga’s plot, and the USSR case, which Shirow’s movie 3 was supposedly going to take cues from, are fully original to this anime. You already saw it all folks.
Not that the world has seen anything quite like this anime. I, once again, promise that Shirow’s GitS does not get better after Vol. 1 but it is easy to prefer even the Kafkaesque fetish heavy chaos of GitS 2.0 to the Motoko/Ronne hentai of today. I sadly didn´t know how good we had it back then.
Next week: Will Saru’s Batou get to say a slur or get to make a gang-rape joke? Will the middle eastern nations involved be pointed out by name? GitS was Shirow´s first undisputable Seinen work.