Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Public Security Section 9 : Tactical Existentialism

2026-May-30

I tried to finish a 700ish page history book about the European Revolutions of 1848. (For the record, that book is Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. Published in 2023) I had heard such good things about it. So, so many. I can feel guilt weighing down my inner intellectual street cred. Knowing I stopped at page 300 on a juggernaut among recent history non-fiction book critics. The critics are right in giving accolades to this book. It is an excellent book as long as you are very very interested in every single European nation 's history in the years 1848-1849. I thought I might have been but there were more nations that I could fit inside my brain’s bandwidth.

It was my own fault for thinking a 700 page book would give me the survey level view of this event. Or that it would stick mostly to Germany, which was the area where I had the most queries. I did not find a ‘Germany’ chapter. Rather they were chronologically distributed. My own faults in book reading would not matter as much if the writer did a better job at telling a riveting story instead of stating so many facts in a sludgy staccato of names and places.

Instead, what is getting reviewed is ostensibly about political revolution. The target for today is the second volume of the 2000’s Ghost in The Shell anime series Stand Alone Complex. AKA The 2nd Gig. The twenty or so episodes of this 2nd Gig had a political revolution as the big plot that the episodes worked around. This evolving plot line about refugees stuck in Japan after no longer being economically useful served to give the cast of Ghost in the Shell many occasions to be a cohesive team of cybernetically enhanced military personnel more often performing the duties of the police than a conventional military agency.

I did not look further than what was mentioned in each episode about what these ‘refugees’ and ‘world wars’ meant despite so much of this series involving political identity. The show’s creators did a bang up job keeping the story flush with the relevant parts of what social upheaval was happening without needing to know what particulars are about the civil unrest happening onscreen. Besides, this is Ghost in the Shell. The stories about asylum, borders, and coalition governments are not what this show is about. Brain in a jar questions are what this movie/anime is about.

I will only mention the movie and anime and not the manga because I have yet to have read it. I have heard it is much less serious and pushes the sexual provocativeness of the female protagonist much more. I have not watched anything from this franchise produced after 2nd Gig. So the span of what gets mentioned here is just that limited setting of GitS. Maybe I’ll try that ‘Arise’ series one more time. I do here it’s set in the same universe as Stand Alone Complex rather than another retelling.

Brain in a jar philosophical pondering paired with exquisite military scifi design, that looks like plausible extensions of the tech available in the 1990s, are the two core tenets that put me in a mood for Ghost in the Shell. I hope brain in a jar philosophy questions are still what courses through the newer series and in the manga that spawned it all.

As had been mentioned before in numerous posts here on the fredlambuth.com blog, anime or manga is not exactly my bag, baby. At least not as much as you’d expect. There is just too much of the stuff produced year after year to say ‘I like that’. Not only the deluge of produced content, I often find that when the subject material of an anime is something to my liking, often there will be characters, plot points, voice acting styles, and facial animation choices that I abhor that throw off my enjoyment.

Saying I like the 90s and 2000s productions of Ghost in the Shell is easy because the fact that it is an ‘anime‘ is almost incidental to its Japanese production team. The story is set in a futuristic post-cyberpunk japan, with stories that use the geography and history of the nation, but no more than most any show that uses its settings well in their storytelling.

What the 90s movies and Stand Alone Complex series do is not use a single instance of anime cliches that are built to please the lowest common denominator of Japanese societal tastes. Not once does a character’s face break into a caricature of a happy or sad face. There are no comic relief bit characters. There are no singing interludes. Ghost in The Shell is an animated cyber cop show set in futuristic Japan with hardly any pandering to a Japanese audience.

Just the kind of show that would catch my interest when I was using Adult Swim’s programming schedule as my only consistent form of media consumption in the 2000s. Adult Swim gets mentioned in the same breath as anime on this blog rather consistently. They really should get credit for evangelizing anime past my ethnocentric pretenses. Their promos often got me to at least stick around a little once the anime block started.

Ghost in the Shell was an easy one to get past my high falootin’ animation tastes that blocked my interest in a lot of other anime getting broadcast there at the time. The super high-speed low-drag tanks, helicopters, assault rifles, combat armor, prosthetics or anything technical on the show looked so good at first glance. Once that got me inside an episode, I did not once detect a tiny girl character that cries often, or a dirty old man that is always bothering the young ladies, or a talking animal. This was a serious show that not once let go of how serious they were.

This seriousness is one of the few caveats I have about this series. It would likely not be one if I spoke Japanese. The dialogue on GitS : Stand Alone Complex does make literal sense when I hear the dubs or read the subtitles. The economy of how each character's speech is composed does not match English speaking rhythms. Every character on this show speaks quickly yet in a formal rehearsed manner. At the end of each conversation I cannot rightly say I get their gist. One sentence at a time their words seem understandable and often witty. When a character is done speaking, I find myself a little mystified about what they were trying to get across or how they proved their point.

A problem like this only occurs when watching anime that aims for a more serious pretense. These brain in a jar problems and backroom political exchanges I’m sure are difficult to write in your own language. The writers making what they wanted in Japanese and not considering how it sounds in another language is a sin I can easily forgive. Everything about the show is so top notch that this complaint feels like a beautiful flaw to remind the audience that it is indeed a product of Japan despite the lack of anime cliches.

I had qualms about the writing and voice acting for Blue Gender, as mentioned in the last blog post. It too was an anime that got its American release on Adult Swim in the 2000s. It too had the components to draw me in despite the waryness I had for Japanese animated products. Blue Gender also had little to no animated cliches. Sure, there were cheap tricks done to make the animation budget go further but I can ignore those. My qualms were about the writing.

Its writing sins were much stronger than what I find in Stand Alone Complex’s witty infodump style of dialogue. Blue Gender was a melodrama shoved into a 1990s tech savvy anime body. The dialogue would often get ludicrous, which could be forgiven as something lost in translation. What Blue Gender did that borders on anime cliche is adhering to soap opera techniques of writing character and dialogue. I imagine Blue Gender creators were excited to tell their grandiose Adam and Eve story, just as much as the Ghost in the Shell writers were in telling their story about finding personal identity in a computerized existence. The Blue Gender creators did not exercise restraint in their presentation. Instead they resorted to characters shouting their emotions out loud all the time. The complaint of Ghost in the Shell having super dense and clever conversations that often go over my head seem quaint in comparison.

Ghost in The Shell does not go one hundred percent without resorting to some broad anime cliches. A supporting character on the show is a squad of nine automated armed robots who speak with a squeaky little girl’s voice outloud or in network audio. These armed tanks use a voice that in most anime would be reserved for a comedy sidekick character. Something like a six year old girl dressed in a school uniform who serves little to no purpose in aiding the plot. The character that most often makes the anime happy or crying face. In GitS : Stand Alone Complex the tinny voice comes from a tank shooting a heavy machine gun or hacking other robots. The end of each episode does include a reel of the tank girls making super high brow epistemological conversations for the first few episodes. Eventually those turn into anime hijinks. They seem like good steam vents to let out the pressure the GitS creators had as a offscreen byproduct for making their series through the Japanese production pipeline.