A new streaming series in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, known as The Ghost in the Shell, has been released, and is now available on Amazon Prime Video (as of July 7).
While video adaptations of Shirow Masamune's acclaimed 1989 manga Ghost in the Shell have tended to be more cold and philosophical (2002's Standalone Complex, for example, concerned a wave of copycat crimes without an original), judging from the first episode, this series sticks a lot closer to the manga – it's warmer, funnier, more cartoonish, and the characters are less competent – while being no less action-packed.
How is the animation quality? If you sent this episode back in time to 2003 and told me it came from the year 2026, I could believe you; it stacks up favorably against Standalone Complex, which IGN described as "the most expensive season of TV anime ever produced at the time." It's good enough that I'm tempted to look for other series by this same studio.
How is the dub? Not bad. The music? Better than 2013's ARISE. Neither quite live up to the standard set by Standalone Complex, but both the dub and the score on that show were legendary, so few things do.
How is the decision to stick closer to the manga? Time will tell (only one episode is out so far), but it's probably the right call. The presence of tube televisions is reminiscent of Netflix's 2024 reboot of Ranma ½, choosing to present a classic manga as of a time period.
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Finished watching Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin again a bit ago.
A few thoughts.
The animation quality is fantastic. It's well-shot, written, and paced. The music is spot-on. The plot is moving. It's amazing.
One aspect that stands out more on this viewing is the way each character is intensely his or herself. Every line of dialogue reveals something about the character's nature, and just about none is wasted. The series gives you reasons to sympathize (if only for a little while) with characters like Degwin or Kycillia even though their actions are power-hungry and cause terrible consequences.
Ghiren Zabi especially stands out - he shows an incredibly fluid ability to manipulate ideology, and actually seems to get more skilled at this over time, yet at the same time he's as slippery as an eel. You can easily see how he could get people to follow him, and also how he can figuratively broadcast on the national mental wavelength.
It's actually less political than I remember. For some reason, I thought that there was more content covering the oppression of Spacenoids, the internal factions within Munzo (which became Zeon), and the formation of ideology. There was actually much less oppression of Spacenoids than I remembered, though there is certainly plenty of rioting and sending tanks to suppress riots.
That said, the series is still highly political. This gets into the whole 'politics in media' thing.
The Origin is a sequence of events leading up to a gigantic space war, proceeding through the early phases of the war until right before the first episode of the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam (though with a few tweaks). It's a thrilling story of escapes and intrigue and murder and violence!
However, it all generally feels quite natural. A mobile suit may be an absurd form of military unit, but other than this, everything has its proper weight and momentum. It's a story told with great consideration, by someone observant and experienced.
I originally wrote that last line as a guess based on watching the series. The eye with which the author observes the characters suggests a great deal of life experience, and an understanding of individuals, their nature, and their course of development. In fact, there was an interview of the now 77-year-old author Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, who was on the staff for the 1979 original:
It was over 10 years of hard work, but I could depict the outbreak of the war in the prehistory of 'Gundam' and the absurdity of the elitism advocated by the Principality of Zeon to some extent.
He appears to believe that the idea of newtypes was over-emphasized in later series after 1979, resulting in confusion and support for elitism.
Just watching five minutes of one episode of The Origin was enough to help a concept click in a peace theory I have been working on. I don't mean a related episode. I had left it on pause a week or so before, and when I returned, after a few minutes of watching Char and his comrades, it came to me that I could reapply the tension and officer models that I use for ideology.
The Origin has an interesting contrast with Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, another incredibly dense series set in the Universal Century, set sixteen years after the war that The Origin shows us the beginning of.
Where in The Origin, newtypes are of relatively little importance, in Unicorn, they take center stage. Where The Origin is a story told by an old man who cherishes people, Unicorn shouts at you as loudly as it can. So loudly that it fills your senses. So loudly that you can finally hear.
Between the two, it's my opinion that Unicorn is more dense. I found myself coming back to watch different scenes repeatedly, pause, and then pace and think deeply about the nature of the world.
I recommend both highly. However, I don't know what it would feel like to see either while having no familiarity with the Universal Century timeline.
There was an argument on Twitter probably a year or so ago. Is fiction valuable? I think that depends on which fiction we're talking about, at what time, for whom, and for what purpose.
Regarding Freiren: Beyond Journey's End and the idea used there that the demons are a predator species that evolved speech in order to lie, and can never be trusted...
A lot of people have been quick on the draw with the take, "It is... how you say... le fascisme. C'est problematique."
Others have said, "Well it's fake, so it doesn't count."
I'd like to throw out an alternative. What if the author was socially bullied in their youth to off-the-charts levels?
You can get the idea of a creature that speaks solely to prey on humans from imagining a sapient human-hunting predator and adding a dash of evolution... but you can also get that idea by watching a particularly nasty human and then working backwards.
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I've read through the post that was linked, and an earlier related post by the same author that preceded it.
Her position is that the traditional publishing industry is essentially buying books as lottery tickets, paying for most of them using the few big winners they can't predict.
NorthShoreWave - The personal qualities of NSW specifically.
LLMs - Is AI a threat right now? Mostly as spam.
How Many Readers? - One famous book had 3,000 readers on an email list before its Amazon e-book debut, and went on to traditional publishing.
Funding Options - Many authors and artists are currently using subscription services. Some reasoning and numbers are provided.
Illustrations - Should you use illustrations? This lengthy section does a bit of fundamentals analysis of posting to suggest that maybe, you should.
Interaction - Reader replies are one method by which a post will spread.
Search - The people who want to read your story can't read it if they don't know about it. Writing a good book is essential, but only half the battle.
Some thoughts for you:
1 - NorthShoreWave
You implicitly asked if we had discussed your story in detail before, but the answer is that we hadn't. I have a sense of what you're trying to accomplish based on what I've observed of your character. While you think of yourself as seething, I think you're actually wise, compassionate, self-aware, and able to view things from multiple perspectives. A significant number of people are much worse at practicing at least one of these virtues. On its own, that's not enough to write a best-seller, but I think it does provide you with an advantage.
2 - LLMs
Based on my experiments (see @mitigatedai for some logs), I wouldn't worry about competition from AI. For you, the chief issue caused by AI will be spam. AI moves sideways (different text) and downwards (less meaning). I may tell LLMs to "combine Inspector Gadget and Death Note," but...
Do I actually use the information provided? No.
3 - How many readers do you need?
From one of those publishing posts, to get a sense of the number of readers you need...
Andy Weir first published The Martian as a serial for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, then as a traditionally published novel with Random House.
“I had an email list with about 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much,” he tells me. “When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn’t do anything to market or publicize it. All I did was tell my readers it was available there.”
The book was on Amazon for five months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014.
Note that being a provocative firebrand doesn't necessarily mean you'll sell copies. Some politicians with tremendous name recognition failed to move copies of their books.
4 - Funding Options
I don't recommend using a Kickstarter to publish your book at this time or in the near future. You just don't have the name recognition, but also, Slashdotter Caimlas (who I don't know, so I don't know how trustworthy he is) wrote:
I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works.
Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.
A lot of publishing is done online these days, often through subscription services such as Substack (for essays) or Patreon. (Kindle Unlimited is also a subscription service, costing $12/mo.) As an example, the webcomic Spinnerette has a Patreon (bringing down $3.3k/mo), and then runs Kickstarter campaigns for print runs (volume 8 raised $27k).
To give you an estimate, Spinnerette's Patreon has only 536 subscribers, and pulls down $3.3k/mo, but you probably haven't heard of it. El Goonish Shive, which I'm confident you have heard of, brings in $3.6k/mo on 2.4k subscribers. The famous Kill Six Billion Demons has ~5.4k subscribers, bringing down ~$8.4k.
In Patreon terms, a good foothold to try for might be 100 subscribers at $3/mo each, with an initial focus on getting to 50.
5 - Illustrations
You've posted some drawings. They have some character, showing that you have the basic aptitude to develop the skill if you applied yourself to regular practice. However, the proportions are too far off to attract much attention (except as a stylistic choice, which, I can tell, it is not).
This blog tends to break things down into their abstract fundamentals for analysis. I promised myself I wasn't going to do that here, but eh, we'll do just a bit.
To quote one of the publishing articles...
“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”
Let's stop to think about this.
a. Banter - Fame
There is one layer to this that you can't do much of anything about, which is that people will watch the same shows their friends watch in order to have something to talk about with their friends.
b. Investment - Background
However, there is another layer over which you have more influence. It's very easy to make a quick judgment of a movie based on its visuals, or a short trailer. It's also relatively easy to judge short songs, since they're only a few minutes long (but I don't find myself doing this often).
In order to judge a book, you have to read the text and process it. You can't make a snap judgment off a single picture, because you have to read the text first to produce the mental picture.
This website does have viral text posts, but they're like...
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood me, Anon. Go read all 5,640 posts again.
Some of these posts can get a bit long, but it's usually a back-and-forth where each individual post is short. Often, they'll mix in images, or memes.
People supposedly read at 200 words per minute. Based on that estimate, this blog's most viral post of all time can be read in 5 seconds. That's about the same amount of time someone would spend looking at a jpeg.
That doesn't mean people don't enjoy effortposts. They will follow a blog upon encountering a good effortpost! They just don't like or reblog them.
I think you already know this part, but for "acceptable" length for reblogging, it's usually best to keep it under one "Tumblr page," meaning around one screen length on desktop, or around 200-300 words. I've talked about this part before, but if the reader can see the end of the post, it feels like less of an investment to read the post, and reblogging it won't fill up a friend's Tumblr dash.
Obviously that's tough for long-form fiction, because it has to load more context about the characters in order to establish the stakes. (Unless it's fan fiction, where the audience already knows the characters.)
c. Investment - Strategy
As you know, this blog will sometimes post political cartoons and other illustrations as part of its general stream of content.
The obvious strategy is just to have some nice-looking character images or images of scenes from the story. It can be "read" faster, so it's more shareable.
I think that strategy suffers from a weakness in that it's easy to just look at the image and disregard the text. This would reduce your fiction blog to an art blog - and it is not an art blog.
Therefore, I would like to gently suggest - and keep in mind, I do not have any published novels - a different potential approach. This proposal is speculative, and this technique is not widely used.
Do you know that famous Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties? Rockwell is a master of telling a story with just a single still-frame painting.
Rockwell has to tell the whole story in one picture, because that's the medium he's got to work with. This limits how much story he can tell. As an author, you don't have to limit yourself to what can be told in just one image, because you have the text.
This strategy would involve a two-step maneuver.
First, the image at the top of the post communicates the essentials that the reader needs to know about the characters through the composition of the scene (so that they don't need to read background material), as well as various subtle details, while raising questions, also through the use of details/etc, to increase the viewer's curiosity.
Fortunately for the viewer, second, the questions raised by the image are answered in the text right below it.
The post would form an entry point into a network of related posts; tags for particular characters could be linked at the bottom, or links to other posts in the sequence.
Secondary characters would be ideal for this, because you can manipulate their scenarios/context/character to fit the short format, while your overall project will focus on the main characters and thus have a greater, long-term narrative investment for appropriately larger payoff.
As I wrote in my post on 'text wall memes,' people will read text in an image, and they'll even reblog it, but it's contextual. So again, this is speculative, but it should be feasible. It's a matter of creating the appropriate context.
d. Investment - AI Art
I don't think you should use AI-generated art. Yes, people will be able to tell, but the even bigger problem...
Compare this AI knockoff to Norman Rockwell's original Girl with Black Eye.
The expression is wrong. The pose is different. This is a completely different story from the one Rockwell was telling! The prompteur 'borrows' the right 25% of the image from Norman's original because he can't reproduce it. And what is that random white cloth on the left side of the image?
There is a significant reduction in the amount of intention in the image. Putting it back in involves working over the image, repeatedly, usually with inpainting, and often working against what's in the AI's training data, forcing it to pull from more and more improbable parts of the distribution (until eventually, there's no matching data in the training at all; you have to get out and draw it yourself).
I'm going to borrow a post of my own here from 2019.
This isn't oriented towards the strategy I've described, and it only got 21 notes, but note the teacup with steam and tea bag tag, the obscured flag in the background, and the Youtube-style video tracker on the bottom. The combination of the special effect, text that looks like a subtitle, and video tracker imply that the image is a screenshot from a streaming anime.
The character is casually (as indicated by the cup of tea) sitting at a computer desk (as indicated by the faintly sketched keyboard and hand position for a mouse). What's that flag in the background? It certainly doesn't belong to any extant country. (In fact, as the artist, I'll tell you - it's based on an O'Neill Cylinder.)
Obviously this art is very much just a sketch in quality terms. An AI rendering usually looks much fancier. However, an AI would not put that detail in.
e. Investment - Technical Skills
However, I will suggest the use of software if you go this route. (Or the hiring of an artist, but that could get expensive.)
Your issue is with proportions. Lots of people have trouble with proportions. (You also have trouble with hands. Lots of people have trouble with hands.)
One way to deal with this is to just train. You'd be surprised at how fast you improve if you draw from realistic sources such as photographs an hour a day for a year, even if it's just a quick sketch. You probably aren't willing to do so. You have other things to worry about, including writing.
However, you could use posing software. You could save the proportions of several characters and position them throughout the scene, as well as having a grid for the ground and potentially other props to help with positioning of items like lamp posts or the edges of buildings. (I've experimented with posing software a bit myself.)
Dan Shive (of El Goonish Shive) does not use posing software as far as I know, but he has used 3D software. Although his style is cartoonish, one thing people like about him is that he does put effort in at improvement, and the quality of his work has improved substantially. (That was actually the inspiration for the second part of the "in 2028, Hollywood runs out of ideas and adapts El Goonish Shive" post.)
6 - Interaction
Though shorter posts tend to go more viral, I find that posts which someone can reblog and share their opinion tend to show up a lot in my top posts (as long as they're only about one tumblr page long). The MOON PRISON poll is a good example of something that's approachable and neutral, but fits heavily with the themes of my blog, but other posts may take a political position that invites disagreement, resulting in discourse, and get reblogged that way. (You may also remember the silly Swift Pill poll.)
I don't recommend courting disagreement on purpose. Not only is this bad for the social environment, but it tends to make people go crazy.
7 - Search
I think you've probably noticed some of this already and are working with it (posting short excerpts, initial art). Most of this is, again, speculative. This is all just information for your consideration.
Writing a good book is the first problem. Getting the readers who would enjoy the book to find it in such a noisy environment is the second problem. I think you can do it, but if your trajectory isn't currently looking as good as you want (e.g. # followers on your story's sideblog), I would recommend expanding your strategy so that you're in a good position when the book itself is ready to launch.
(And his overall response is actually pretty stupid if you step back and think about it, but that's kind of the point.)
The main character of Tanya the Evil is specifically told that he's being reincarnated this time, but won't be reincarnated next time (unless certain conditions are met).
For this to be an exception suggests that most people are reincarnated, most of the time.
And he gets reincarnated to another world. This suggests there are many, perhaps a huge number, of material worlds. This also means he doesn't get reincarnated to the future or past of his own world, which means that all the material work he did is just completely gone relative to his own position.
This should radically change someone's frame of view.
He should relax a bit, optimize less, become less attached to material things, view other weaker people more along the lines of children than as resources to be dominated.
Even if he wins the war (which we know for a fact that he won't), he only has a lifespan of 60-70 years remaining, whereas if he reenters the cycle of reincarnation, his effective lifespan would be indefinite.
He hasn't even noticed this, because he hasn't really stepped back to re-examine everything. He's so angry about having been killed in a world in which people reincarnate that it hasn't even occurred to him.
Apparently, someone decided to take the most basic premise of Youjo Senki, of a guy who dies in our modern world and is reincarnated into the scenario, "You are a girl. It is World War 1, in a world where magic is real. You have been drafted into the army and sent to the front lines," and make another illustrated story about it.
The contrast is jarring. Youjo Senki is entirely on another level.
That probably means there are relatively fewer people who can understand it, although we also see people stumble over simpler works.
