#ghostgits

But my mind repeatedly refers back to this scene, so here's my personal reminder post of it's actual dialogue.

"

Batou: Chief, you've ever questioned the ethics of the neural surgeons who monkey around inside your brain? Chief Aramaki: They undergo psychiatrical evaluations, especially those in security. They're subjected to a stringent screening of their personal lifes. Of course, the ones who check are only human. Batou: I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it.

"

Or is it more to do with how the original GITS felt more like the real world, thus leaving the Death Note setting otherworldly & its characters feeling more transcendent of reality? GITS is a sci-fi story, & in the grand tradition of that genre, it tried to root itself as an extension of the real world, through subconscious markers like realistic names, differentiating specific existing governments being very relevant to the story, realistic subtleties in gender issues, etc. All nuanced backdrop dressing, to accomplish, as the proper hardcore scifi genre often strives, a feeling that this story could very well take place in OUR future. Not just hypothetical, but OUR future. Hardcore scifi tries to convince a current day audience to take their “thought experiments” very seriously & to confront even disturbing questions about society, human nature, possible evolutions, relations to technology, seemingly alien but valid philosophical concepts (like transhumanism), etc. Scifi establishes its claim to realism in nuanced setting details.

But let’s face it: Death Note was not about convincing us that this might really happen in a possible future. It’s fantastical. The main characters have unrealistic names (for a Japanese setting) like “Light”, “L”, & “Misa Misa” (sounds like a pop idol, which is a fantasy world itself). There are Shinigami flying around. The setting & interpersonal relationships are boiled down to this tunnel vision onto the main characters alone. As it should be. Death Note is about the mind games between these characters & the purely philosophical questions they pose about morality, that transcend any specific time/place in humanity. (Maybe that’s why it’s just as relevant, 10+ years after its initial publication.) It doesn’t need to convince us that this COULD happen in OUR world. That’s not the point of Death Note. So it doesn’t have to bother with the full tapestry of human subtly & nuances in the backdrop world/people. That’s why the cast is operatic & singularly motivated. Making these implausible geniuses real isn’t as important as the moral questions they pose. It’s not our world, but the concepts are things we DO NEED to ask ourselves. So maybe I don’t see Light as “Japanese”, but as this character who embodies moral questions. o.o?

BTW, Netflix’s Death Note did take advantage of an opportunity for diversity by casting L as African-American. I won’t deny them that. 👍

These little Tachikoma shorts were always my favorite things from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.  ^-^  I love how the Tachikomas can have all these existential questions about themselves without freaking out and getting hostile, the way humans do. And the Major tells you not to chatter, because you chatter *during* missions!  

If you ask me, vocal language communication is built for the Tachikomas to be able to communicate with humans.  Humans don't like speaking directly mind-to-mind, because it invades privacy and breeds paranoia and eventually, hostility.  And anyways, immediately communicating thoughts as they come, is dangerous for humans, because the first instinctive thoughts that humans have are usually impulsive nonsensical reflexes that don't reflect each person's chosen self, or even worse, deny each person the opportunities to choose Who to Become, with every thought/action.  So I think that one Tachikoma advocating vocal speech as self-expression and development of individuality, is correct...even in terms of the Tachikomas.  Because even though the Tachikomas were all designed to be homogeneous, they do each have individual and unique experiences, separate from each other, throughout the day (up until they sync up their logs, daily).  So the more individual and unique experiences each one of them can have, as different from each other as possible, the more they bring to their collective mind bank when they sync up at the end of the day.  And that just makes for a fuller collective mind, in the end.  But collective thoughts wouldn’t be good for humans because if all humans shared all their thoughts immediately, as they flowed (as that one Tachikoma advocated as a "should"), then thought would eventually become homogeneous, like a hive mind, even without the digital synchronizations.  I expect this, from the lack of time delay, allowing less and less time for individuals to react to others' thoughts with extraneous emotions; then eventually people becoming too accustomed to everyone's immediate thoughts flowing into them, blurring the lines between individual minds; and then everyone just thinking of themselves as one whole hive mind instead of autonomous individuals.  (Maybe people would even become dependent on the constant presences of extraneous minds, and become too lost to function as individuals!  O.O!  Scary!)  So the lack of individuality would breed a severe lack of diversity.  And like the Major said in the first movie, "If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable.  And there's always more than one way to view a situation.  What's true for the group is also true for the individual.  It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness.  It's slow death."  (https://youtu.be/kyqGdQEvTHI)  They say in biology that the danger of clones (of everyone having the same genes) is that when a sickness is very effective at eliminating the species, there's not enough chance for at least one member of the species out there, to be capable of fighting off the disease.  Like that fungus that almost wiped out the entire global agricultural industry's bananas recently.  It's the same in terms of minds, personalities, and society too.  Homogeny is weakness.  It's less tools prepared for the future unknowns.