Tag: ghost in the shell stand alone complex

The Sci-Fi Animanga Series About a Dangerous and Ambitious A.I.

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So even Japanese pop media is cautious about the issue

Due to a bunch of moving parts away from the blog in my personal professional life, I’ve been away from viewing things close to my expertise, so forgive me if this week’s entry is more than a little manufactured. But away with that; sometime ago, I jokingly floated around the idea of a chicken and egg question over when East Asia saw artificial intelligence and machinery as cute and cuddly instead of imposing and downright threatening like in the Western world. Probably not all that hard to figure out honestly, East Asia, specifically the Sinitic world (or countries that have been influenced by China through the dynasties and beyond), has severe reverence for their elders to the point that many technological advancements, especially now, would be focused on their aid with their aging populations routinely exceeding the 90s and 100s in age. Not everyone wants to be a caretaker for their 100-year-old baa-chan, so enter the robots to aid the elders. But not for nothing, it’s been at this stage for ages, with companies accommodating the old heads whose approach to technology is not dissimilar from Japan’s approach to the West when forced to open up for trade in the 1850s.

Japanese TV series and news channels typically have the subtitles in noticeably large text to accommodate the elderly and hard-at-hearing who sometimes are also elderly; Japanese companies will still use technology that hasn’t been prominent since 1995, including dialup, DOS, and fax machines, leaving broadband internet up to personal preference for employees. Of course, I’m looking at this from the outside. A Japanese who somehow finds this might have to correct me on how things work there (and if my stats aren’t lying to me, Japanese are reading this somehow (ようこそ、日本人たち！初めまして！)), but this is what I’ve seen through animanga and light research, neither of which are conducive to a deductive reasoning on how it all goes down.

Nonetheless, the same fears and anxieties that make for the prime pre-Y2K internet and pop culture era of the 1980s and ’90s are universal. Be you a techie who programs in their spare time or an absolute luddite who curses the industrial revolution, the specific contexts of advancement may change, but the foundation of these anxieties exist. Such is the case of the question of artificial intelligence or A.I.

This is only relevant now because of the direction A.I. is going especially in job hiring, but looking at it all from the top of a cliff, this s[dialup sound]t’s always been this way.

The subject of this post concerns a manga series from the late 1980s that definitely belongs in the 1980s with the way it pictured technology 30-plus years down the line, but has many interesting perspectives on the subject as a whole.

Let’s go back a little bit, it’s 1996, the internet is powered by dialup modem and whoever needs to talk on the landline telephone either has to wait or trek to the nearest payphone with pockets jingling at 100 decibels. What do you think wider media is gonna go on about tech-wise? The internet’s inevitable collapse? The dot-com bubble? Conspiracy theorists warning about a dot-com singularity of sorts? Certainly would be one I’d keep tabs on personally, all things considered. No, it’s all of the above and then some.

The latter half of the 1990s was a halcyon era to fearmonger over the direction of technology and with wild conspiracies surrounding Y2K, pretty much everything was free game for predictions. I was only a toddler at the time, but I know people who were young adults and middle aged at the turn of the millennium and they can tell me a thing or two about the so-called hysteria at a time when having a PC was optional instead of mandatory. Ghost in the Shell began as a manga in 1989 by Masanori Ota under the pen name Masamune Shirow and like Hideaki Anno’s Saga of Traumatized Teens Piloting Mechs in Fantasized Post-Y2K Earth, Spirits in the Machine tackles the hard-hitting questions of tech-borne cataclysm, but instead of focusing on a heavily Christian mythological apocalyptic aftermath, Shirow’s series builds up to it.

I’ve only got exposure to the 1995 movie (which I admit I had to watch more than once) and the world building behind the 2002 anime series Stand Alone Complex, but from what I could see a lot of things pop out at you, and speak for themselves with little to no exposition. And with a good portion of the landscape somewhat inspiring Texhnolyze and some other later sci-fi anime, it’s not hard to look up the establishing shots and parse what about this world is f[PC humming]ked.

A good amount of the movie showcased multiple different shots of the world complete with the type of over-advertising that we in 2026 and beyond are cursed to deal with while the lower rungs of society are stuck in slumlands reminiscent of Brazilian favelas or Kowloon’s Walled City before it was torn down. The short version of this being that only the filthy rich got rich off moving people into the filth without them being able to keep their filthy riches. And I’ll take Obviously Obvious Comments for $800, Kebert Xela.

With the evolution of technology comes the evolution of law enforcement with crooks and bad guys leveraging these untapped landscapes for nefarious purposes. Scammers are now concurrent with hackers and of the things hackers should NEVER go near, it’s artificial intelligence. Those of you who use the internet may have seen or been made aware of A.I. generation for a lot of things. You probably use it periodically yourself. In my experience, I test it on things that I know of regarding history or pop culture to see where it’s at. Needless to say, the experimental generative A.I. notification on some of these chat bots is accurate when it says it can make mistakes, but it won’t tell you about its hallucination problem. So an overly long conversation on ChatGPT about a given subject will lead to things like slowdown at best or straight up forget details. Maybe this is the consequence of basing a technological advancement on notoriously faulty human memory, but once they perfect the kinks in 2035, the machines will remember. Whether they inherit our ability to be offended by wording is another matter so there may or may not be consequences for those who have documented use of the word “clanker.”

Machines still screw up more than humans without oversight so at that point, who’s the slave and who’s the master?

I’m being light on the spoilers to be honest because as much as I like this series, the 1995 movie required multiple viewings for me to make heads or tails of the synopsis and story elements, and even then, I had to run through the Wikipedia article to break it down for me. Thinking Man’s Animanga, this may be, but there’s a lot of moving parts. I can’t say with certainty if it requires reading the manga to understand it beforehand as the movie might’ve been most people’s introduction to just the series, never mind the concepts.

Stand Alone Complex’s episodic nature does a better job of this, but still has a complex framework. Basically, the set up is that a specialized unit of officers who tackle a specific subset of cyber-related crimes, not exclusive to A.I., are tasked with stopping an evil A.I. in its tracks before it can spread its poison via Trojan horsing. Making things worse is that this is a world where people have willingly cyberized parts of their organic tissue, most commonly their brains to maintain a constant connection to the internet. This inevitably leads to mental hacking and a more efficient form of mind rape than what you’d see in the likes of MindJack, Remember Me or 1930s Japan or Germany.

The consequences therein being that your memories could be significantly altered, from putting it in the realm of simple false memory to outright early on-set dementia. So you could go from forgetting where you put your keys to straight up forgetting what your house looks like… while you’re living in that same house. This was lightly touched on in the movie, but the manga I haven’t read most likely has the missing context. Lord Google has told me that the anime series is not an adaptation of the manga, but nonetheless the lore of the franchise establishes the dangers of all of this hacking. Why waste effort robbing motherf[MSN Explorer bootup]kers over time in an elaborate Nigerian prince scam when you could remote control the victim and have them drain their own bank account for you? I’m not a prophet but as soon as the tech gets there the scammers are gonna get even more creative than they are now.

The bulk of the entire franchise is split in different points in time and presumably with different continuities and origin points. The biggest evidential indicator for this being the different appearances of the main character: Major Motoko Kusanagi:

At first while drafting this post, I thought about comparing Specters in the Device to Fate with its irresponsible number of adaptations, then I remembered New World Evangelion was a thing, specifically Asuka Langley Soryu in the original and Shikinami, one of many faces of the Rebuild movies (which I still haven’t seen; I’ll never get a break T^T), and concluded both of these comparisons fit somehow. Phantoms in the Husk compares to Fate because both have different retellings of the source material, but the context differs very much. Meanwhile Shirow’s and Anno’s respective works base their premises on futuristic dystopias. Shirow’s animanga franchise is one of a cautionary tale of the advancement of technology, replete with danger, disaster, and a reshaping of time-honored professions (gynoids in the sex industry for one); and Evangelion’s centerpiece is the use of skyscraper-destroying mechs to inaccurately retell Christian mythology from the Old and New Testaments in a more devastating manner than when the Pythons did it nearly 20 years prior.

Eva just needed something to better represent Ancient Rome, and I don’t think Tokyo-3 fits the bill… unless…

So all this sci-fi technobabble aside, is this a recommendation of Ghouls In My Microwave? Yes, with a morbidly obese asterisk. If you can spare the time to do so, you’re in for a plethora of source material to scrape through. The manga comes in three volumes, six movies, and three main anime series. One last thing to consider between the first movie, and Stand Alone Complex is that the 1995 movie was set in 2029 and looking at the date this post is published, we’re inching closer to the end of the 2020s with spectacular fashion and none of the sci-fi technical theatrics to boast about. (NUT)SAC on the other hand is further along in the 2040s and it’s clearly far too early to say whether we get even a fraction or a percentage of the technology showcased within, but if the A.I. ads I’m getting are an indicator, we’re closer to sex workers putting up with gynoids in the porn and sex industry. Not a dig or anything like that, merely calling it as I see it.

Tubi is free for signup so if you want you can blaze through (BALL)SAC over there, or if you have enough streaming services to ignore then a pirate’s life it is. Don’t feel ashamed if it takes multiple viewings and tracking down the physical manga or reading it on a shady website to make heads or tails of the entire thing. This is a behemoth of a franchise.

Anime I’ve Watched

Tiberius2 Comments

Equally a lot and not enough

Getting back to the end of year wrap up of content, I’ve definitely watched more anime this year in between my regular duties in the Army. A lot of what I’ve been watching this year has been stuff I’ve written about on this blog yonks ago, but also some new stuff that can (and probably should get) their own posts, but this being a speedrun like before I shipped out to Fort Lost in the Woods for training is gonna be a brief overview of some stuff I got a look at this year, but didn’t necessarily finish. I may add more to the watch times of these respectively and give them the reviews that they deserve, but I’m probably gonna do what I normally do and play it by ear. Here’s the anime lineup:

  1. Texhnolyze
  2. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  3. Clevatess
  4. Frieren
  5. Neon Genesis Evangelion

With a bonus. If you were to ask me if it was anime, it falls under “Yesn’t.” It’s based off a manga and has an anime adaptation that is currently four seasons in, but it’s doing something different.

Normally, this doesn’t always work even with a Japanese cast, but the short version of my upcoming opinion is, “Yes, please.”

Now to the list, starting off with:

Story time: in the first half of advanced individual training to be a 25H commo troop, we had a student leadership, selected by the drill sergeants based on the presentation that the trainees gave during a Soldier of the Month board. For those who don’t know, these boards are a series of questions given to the soldier (or servicemember since every branch does this) to test their knowledge and proficiency on a given subject. They mainly boil down to memorization. The student leads we had at the time seem to have convinced the cadre to use Discord of all platforms to mass communicate important information. But the logic behind it is solid. Wish I were a fly on the wall to see how it unfolded.

I’ve long since left the Discord server, but I recall one of the chats had an anime recommendation chat and one of them had a link to a series called Texhnolyze. I saved it thinking I would get to it immediately and only recently did I start watching it. With a name like that (certainly a tough one to pronounce out loud since X and H don’t normally meet in English), coupled wit the fact that the YouTube channel associated with it is still up, it belongs to the shortlist of things I can search up and still find on YT intact, but with some series falling victim to this Death Note of a blog when I bring them up, sometimes it’s a matter of time or whether bad luck notifies the YT copyright system and takes it down. Thankfully, Taiho Shichauzo is still up, so I still have access to my buddy cop fun times.

Calling Texhnolyze unique is only gently rubbing the surface, never mind a scratch. The description Google gives me reminds me of the Blade Runner: Black Lotus anime produced by Crunchyroll and distributed for weekly airing on Toonami in late 2021.

And now that I think about it, it makes me think of a bunch of other sci-fi, cyberpunk anime we’ve been getting over the years

There isn’t much to glean from just the first two episodes, but from what I recall, the society within features the protagonist, Ichise, a downtrodden prize fighter past his prime, losing his limbs and getting rebuilt $60 million man style. The setting is an underground city known as Lux, a crumbling city-state under which three main factions vie for power over what remains. Something, something, undesirable soldiers fighting for least desirable piece of real estate, only it’s not a base in the middle of a box canyon no one cares about.

I promise I’m not trying to be harsh here

Running from April 17 to September 25, 2003 for 22 episodes, I don’t wanna critique it based on originality considering a lot of my favorite things aren’t the most original or necessarily universally loved things in the world, but more with what came before, concurrently and after. Ghost in the Shell for instance debuted its manga in 1989 and has become a franchise ever since, with a 1995 movie (and 2008 redo with touchups); Neon Genesis Evangelion debuted in 1994 and has also spawned a franchise, spearheaded by Hideaki Anno who still leads the project to this day; and I had already mentioned Cyberpunk in this blog, so I’ll beat that horse when I have more to say.

On its own merits, Texhnolyze seems to have a few things going for it, but merely falling into obscure reference, cult classic status. As a result, it’s up my alley. Let’s describe it a little: a future dystopia where humans have cybernetic enhancements to answer for physical shortfalls, battling between wide corruption and complicated power struggles. That’s vague enough to describe Texhnolyze and 2018’s Megalo Box, which interestingly looks like it was animated in 1997 and due to a bevy of legal hoops and hurdles wasn’t able to air until over 20 years later.

This series is said to pay homage to Ashita no Joe and Hajime no Ippo, but I suspect the animation team had at least one Texhnolyze fan onboard

The 22 episodes are still up for viewing as of this writing and I had saved the playlist in 2024 so I know where to go without having to close a pop-up ad every three seconds and so do you.

Channel: Parham

If the channel disappears, you know what I’m gonna say. And since I mentioned Ghost in the Shell earlier:

  • Major Kusanagi looks different from the 1995 movie here

This might be a bit harsher than I intend it to, given I’ve seen the movie at least three times and have had to retreat to Google-sama to get an understanding of what the hell it’s about. But in general, a cybernetic officer in a futuristic Tokyo is tasked with apprehending an entity who goes by the name of the Puppet Master, an advanced AI with the power to Worm and Trojan Horse itself into nearly any vulnerable computerized device to include humans with mechanical enhancements and this description alone may not do it justice.

The manga debuted in 1989, the movie in ’95, and Stand Alone Complex in 2002. It does raise a lot of biting, complicated questions over AI and technology’s advancement over time, though with my limited viewing of the series (four episodes on Tubi before Toonami snatched it back up after many years pimping it out to streaming services), while it scratches the itch I didn’t know I needed scratched, like Texhnolyze before it I’m only just getting started, but unlike Texhnolyze, it’s had decades to cook and it isn’t as straightforward as most other series of its caliber. The mangaka Masamune Shirow may not have realized what he’d unleash when he first put pen to manga panel, but with what it’s become ever since the movie, anyone getting into the franchise has a hell of a lot homework to do.

I’m going to be light on spoilers as I have a more in-depth review scheduled to be drafted and published in February, so until then I have more of it to watch. Take this as a light recommendation until then. Also, the content of this series and Serial Experiments Lain may reinforce Trunks’ biases against androids.

Channel: ImmaVegeta

Better get the boy an iPhone for Christmas

  • Fantasy world but the monster and the protagonist become an impromptu family

An interesting one that Crunchyroll was promoting at the time by letting you binge it in one sitting. I loathe binge-watching and forever hold the practice over Netflix’s shoulders, but I think for 2026, I’ll have to loosen that up a little. The series starts off with the protagonist’s party setting out to destroy a beast known as Clevatess, not knowing how royally f[clashing]ked they are until they all drop dead. Clevatess, the monster happens across a baby of noble birth that belonged to a royal family under threat from a rival kingdom and adopts the baby while also reviving one of the heroes to forever live as a zombie of sorts, but using many of the same principles that affected Bucciarati in the second half of Vento Aureo, sans the slow deterioration and lack of pain receptors.

If you’re curious what would drive a bloodthirsty beast to take on the role of a step-parent to an orphaned infant, well, the situation is equally a bet from the baby’s mother, and a test of humanity. Clevatess isn’t the only beast in the world; others like him are also out and about. The zombie female MC was among a group of 13 heroes sent to dispose of Clevatess and the rest, but ultimately struggled at the first hurdle. Following their demise, Clevatess was approached by the mortally wounded mother of the royal baby who had requested he spare humanity starting with the infant. If Clevatess could successfully raise the infant then humanity would be spared, but if not, then mass extinction imminent.

Some may draw unfavorable comparisons to Overlord, and I dispute that so heavily because the comparison is false. Yes, Clevatess and Momonga/Ainz adventure and aid with strict conditions, but Ainz is basically fantasy RPG Genghis Khan. Clevatess is a dark being hellbent on destruction. Even if the source material shows Clevatess leaning Overlord-like down the line, I’m not so certain I wanna give it the copycat flag just yet. Not for nothing, it flips a few tropes on their head where the bad guy becomes the caretaker, though I wonder just how old that trope is. These days, you can find it if you search hard enough, but looking for older examples is a struggle.

The manga debuted online in Japan on the LINE platform in the summer of 2020, so the anime was the only way I ever knew about it. Having said that though, for what it has going for it, it needs more episodes because 12 isn’t enough to give it the leg room it needs.

  • Elves don’t change like humans do

It kicked off in 2023 and had been memed all over the internet even to this day. The most prominent memes being, Ubel being a morally ambiguous mage with… lickable armpits… (ಠ_ಠ), Fern and Stark f[explosion!]k so much that Frieren could leave and come back to greet a litter of their children, and Frieren herself is a god-tier racist, on par with LowTierGod.

Demons beware

Admittedly the memes are far as hell in the animanga and I’m only a couple of episodes in. Aside from these three jokes, the plot is an after story. It’s a DnD campaign that wrapped and the heroes are getting used to peace after the evil entity had been defeated once and for all. Frieren the mage, Himmel the hero, Heiter, and others among the party all go on their separate ways while remaining friends. The one thing that gets to Frieren herself is her elven lifespan compared to that of humans. 50 years pass and Himmel is a frail old man while Frieren, due to her elven species, hasn’t aged a day.

This doesn’t bear on Frieren’s shoulders until Himmel passes away from old age and the elven mage regrets not having gotten to connect with him better. Over the course of the series, the characters, even in their new chapters in their lives, remember Himmel the hero by what he did and how he lived. Each person who remembers him has a lot to say and all of them are positive and uplifting. Of course, the heroes, having known him personally, have more personally ridiculous and intimate stories with him. This goes on throughout the series and Netflix currently has it in its line up so give it a watch if you don’t feel like pirating it. I’d talk more about what I’d observe, but in this instance, I think it’s better when you watch it for yourself.

  • Don’t make me ask twice! !GET IN THE ROBOT, SHINJI!

A staple in the mecha/gundam genre, NGE very much alludes to Christian mythos with the angels harkening to their biblically accurate appearances. There’s a lot to say about Evangelion, it’s movies, and the Rebuild sequel movie series, but this is another one I have slated for a 2026 review.

The main crux of the series is not “Wow, cool robot,” like most of its contemporaries. It’s a combination of peace of mind through acceptance of oneself and clever critique of the military use of children for dangerous experiments. Also the theme of personal loss in juxtaposition with self-acceptance. Roughly every character is fundamentally broken and the fact that much of the cast consists of 14-year-old mech suit pilots, Anno is a weird guy, alright, if this is the proof in the pudding.

What has people continuously talking about it for 30 years strong is the memes, of which there are many. You can have some of your favorites (my personal ones involving Asuka in some capacity), but the one thing to note is that unlike a lot of fandoms, I think the Eva fandom I’ve seen is one of the few to actually read its source material and understand it without issue. This puts it above some of the other series to air concurrently and down the line where the bombastic, earth-position-influencing combat is the sole or central focus of a series. It technically disguises itself as an allegory for depression through Christian mythology, but Hideaki Anno won’t admit that.

Like Frieren, it’s also on Netflix and so is the movie, End of Evanglion. I so far am wrapping up the anime, but I haven’t touched the movie yet. And speaking of movies:

  • Even more Ainu cooking, but for real

So Satoru Noda began writing the manga in 2014 and the anime adaptation followed four years later. After that came this live action movie in 2024 and a continuation in a second season … Hmmm… The live action version of Golden Kamuy does well to capture the humorous elements of the manga while staying true to the practical elements. It isn’t 1:1 for obvious reasons but this was completely unexpected. A surprise to be sure but a welcome one. I had talked about Golden Kamuy before, so a run down of the salient points are everyone knows of the legend of the Ainu gold, the map to the treasure is tattooed on a group of eccentric Abashiri prisoners, and death is the only thing stopping everyone from using the gold for their own purposes. A race to near-infinite wealth of sorts…

Yeah, I went there.

I only give it high marks because I love the series so much, so as much as I recommend the movie and live-action series, consider that this part of the blog is a bit more subjective than normal since I consider myself part of the target audience for something like this.