Maybe I'm missing something but after watching the movies and the anime it feels filled with cop-loving and pro-status quo wankery, with anyone resembling a leftist being either a criminal or insane (or both).
I swear it must be idiots cropping a single quote from the manga or anime and going all "omg gits is so woke!!", ignoring everything else.
i'm criminally insane and i love gits you ableist fuck…
but seriously it's not pro-cop as it is questioning the practices of an advanced but crumbling due to internal conflicts police state, and kusanagi is just there like wtf are my body and my memories in this capitalist cyberhellscape?
Yeah, they explore those topics a lot in the movies, but in the serial anime they're pretty much the government's lap dogs, doing anything from hiding shitty stuff the government is doing to killing refugees looking for liberation. The last thing was like if I was watching an anime about the American government oppressing black liberation movements yet painting them as the good guys, while showing figures like Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the same vein as Hitler.
the series is about a bunch of cool cops, my dude. there was nothing leftist about it
its pretty much just this
the main character is one of those "they might be right, but they're still doing something illegal" kinda fuckheads even though her unit does shady shit all the time in the name of "justice" aka helping the government or themselves but flip their shit whenever someone else does it
centrism!
don't fall for the "insert anime here" is leftist meme.
Anime never has a leftist message, it may come close like in TTGL with it's revolution plot, but in the end they always create a centrist liberal democracy at best.
The current japanese culture isn't compatible with revolutionary thinking. For them, a revolution is always about changing from a militarist dictatorship to a liberal democracy.
this. i liked it years ago and it isn't vacant but the character is just an inquisitive agent who fulfills her duty in the end, with her own righteous bents. she never goes beyond the logic of society or he rinstitution
anime is almost always conservative. rurouni kenshin is a great example
there's an argument to be made that GiTS is meant to critique its own premise by showing the dangers of a society where technology is so advanced yet is used by the police state to control people's lives.
Recall that the two main villains of the anime-the laughing man and Kuze-both turned out to be good guys with better motives than the government they were fighting against.
The only truly evil main antagonist was Gouda, and he was a japanese nationalist war hawk who tried to manipulate a political crisis so he could restore japanese nationalism.
Even the communist villain in the OP picture, while a one off bad guy, was ultimately proven right at the end of the episode with the plot twist regarding the billionaire she wanted to assassinate.
GiTS is only reactionary if you assume that the writing staff wants you to sympathize with the protagonists all the time which clearly isn't the case. It's not explicitly pro-socialism but the show does work as a cyberpunk critique of militarized police and the way that technology can be exploited by the surveillance state.
t. leftypol brainlets
Subtext is for pussies.
it isn't like that, we're just saying that the anime's message or the character's way of thinking never passes liberalism. just like how stupid pol people think galaxu heroes is fascist
*pulls up from underneath on a skateboard, covered in oil*
think i found your problem, 'ere
nobody mentioned the author's intentions.
the revolutionary in the anime, his role accoriding to the protagonist was more of a chirst opium to give people hope but it was put as if it could never lead to anything, an impossibile and delusional dream. the society in the anime was absolutely nihilistic and the major doesn't really believe in anything like that. the show is not reactionary but just liberal. it's a good show for the times we are moving towards.
My main gripe with such stuff is that a lack of clarity on the author's intent when he's trying to criticize something is that he might instead end up looking as a supporter in the eyes of many, myself included.
anime must be the most blunt, in your face and expository artform that exists.
this is stupid, even if it isnt leftist
as far as leftism actually goes for this anime it has two things going for it
its setting is cyberpunk which people meme as being automatically leftist
its theme is transhumanism, which people lump together with leftism
so basically nothing, but its not particularly rightist either
only a few novel productions. anime is mass-produced trash..
You clearly underestimate people who constantly cheer for the cops in media like this, regardless of message. Like, dozens of American TV shows are cops doing cop stuff, and people enjoy them a lot.
I'm not even arguing for whether GitS is leftist or not, I just dislike how it shows police in such a good light. Even if it's only the unit the main characters are in, they still do shitty stuff but somehow they aren't like "your average cop" so it's okay.
I mean, that just seems like accurate writing for a futuristic neo-japan cyber hellscape. To get the full scope of what is happening in such a setting both on the streets and behind the scenes, you need characters who are constantly in contact with both and do so on such a consistent basis that it doesn't raise eyebrows too hard. It's why the protagonist for almost all noir fiction and film is a private detective, he's the type of person who's used to the working in the underbelly of the city and also having to deal with the affluent suspects or employers. It's a role that also helps with serial novelization as the story will almost always end with the detective arresting and/or stopping the sympathetic perp and the protagonist making some remark on either how he understands the perp or how he's just doing his job or how the city makes these people and it never changes before ending the story and moving to the next one. The characters exist to allow us to observe the world and make our own conclusions on it while maybe sometimes observing how they view it. A character obsessed with justice but conflicted on what that means is a good character for such a world.
are you retarded? not every main character is a hero, one of the main fucking tenants of gritty writing, which is a requirement for cyberpunk, is that everyone is gray.
the protagonists in ghost in the shell are not heros and are not presented as such
what about togusa 🤔
Not really.
Or at least, I think character arcs tend to differ from western media to a point where central characters often blur archetypes like hero, villain, anti-hero, etc. Maybe I'm wrong here.
I haven't seen much GiTS, but I do remember the revolutionary antagonists being decidedly sympathetic and the protagonists coming across as frustratingly brutal/obedient. You don't even have to look at American cop media for contrast - with the exception of the leading girl, Akira had its protesters largely looking like assholes.
American cop shows tend to portray everything through a really stubborn cops'-eye-view where actions taken are almost never taken with moral conflict. And when they are, the action usually pays off without broader negative implications. GitS is openly portraying The Banality of Evil by comparison. Not only are illegal (or legally questionable, rights-violating) actions carried out by cops in the pursuit of "justice" (whether it's something as basic as catching a serial killer or something as specific as getting the death penalty for someone detained in another country) actively 'explained' and justified on American shows, they're also portrayed as though they are purely case-by-case and never systemic. The characters in GitS, on the other hand, carry out orders largely justified from above and with deception in order to meet uncertain goals.
At the end of the day he's in a cyberpunk right wing death squad.
the major is fucking hilarious as a character
-shows off her tits to a ten year old boy and asks him to have sex with her, and doesn't care about protecting him
-dumps her kids in random cyberbodies and lets the secret services hunt them down while she hangs around playing chess in space
-rudely tells a penniless, malnourished kid to get a job right after he thanked her for freeing him from slavery
-forces a man to shoot his own teenage son
-unloads half a magazine into a teenager's head at point blank range without warning, and later brags about it in court while dismissing the value of human life
-only started helping with the Solus Locus investigation after Batou had figured it out, absolutely didn't give a shit about all the little girls getting used as raw material for sex dolls until her buddy Batou got involved
and in all cases
-constantly mistreats and endangers fuchikomas and tachikomas, while also submitting them to social experiments just to see if they become too autonomous
If I were Togusa, I'd be careful to keep my kids as far away from her as possible, she might try to eat them or sell them to organ traffickers
Major is shit, she literally executes people in broad daylight under orders without any trial.
This is why Togusa and Batou are the real main characters. Never cared for the Major.
Togusa is an incredibly complex interesting character in the framing the postcybernetic world. How they managed to keep him cohesive is almost insane.
He is simultaneously the fucking new guy, the team pet, the cynical hardboiled detective, the every-guy AND the most relatable to a normal human we get in Section 9.
he's le more human good cop. nobody there questions the basic social function of their institution
Who does? I think people here have been calling GitS fascist for years.
in the 2nd movie he just goes guns blazing into places, he's just as bad as the major
nothing there is too contradictory. he's basically us, the ironically more alien human that also retains the most "classic" character features of a crine-fighter
Compared to the rest of the team, Togusa is definitely the most "naive" (but in a good way) and by-the-books member of section 9
I love gits, it's like top three anime for me. It's not leftist but it is transhumanist as fuck. And, we all know the real goal of socialism is rule by the ubermech.
I didn't really think GITS was leftist, more a targeted critique of an illiberal liberal state
Kill la Kill is the only leftist anime.
It uses Marxist words Proletariat, Bourgeoisie, Working class. Anything that makes Marxism more known is good.
You all disgust me.
Bingo. Trying to read a political endorsement into GITS will get you nowhere because that's the whole damn point. The entire political structure of GITS is constructed of layers upon layers of useful idiots and the self-interested and amoral hypocrites that make use of them for their own goals.
The world of GitS is ultra-capitalistic. It is ruled by overtly corrupt governments who utilize legal, 'legal' and illegal technology (from autonomous gunships and tanks to farming autistic children's computational skills to cyborg/robot death-squads to cloned figure-head leaders, those are just a handful that I remember) to maintain the status quo. The show itself is an exploration of hyper-capitalist authoritarian governments meeting cybernetics and AI in a 'not-too-distant future', and it paints a pretty grim picture for 99% of humanity, does it not?
I think that there is something to be said about the aspect of the show that glorifies the 'police work' that Public Security Section 9 does, and how honorably chief Aramaki is presented (he basically always does the right thing, does he not? I don't recall any of his character flaws - does he have any?). However, as is the case with a lot of cyberpunk, it isn't so much about these characters as it is about the world they live in and how they relate to it. For Section 9, they're essentially mercenaries (and for at least a while in season 1 they are literally a rogue department). Little is said in the show about the notion of justice, rather, I get the sense that the agents of Section 9 are just trying to survive in a world that's basically just crazy (the dizzying heights of ultra-wealth contrasted with the suffering that almost everyone in the lower classes experiences - very much late capitalism). They've found a niche with reliable work that relates to their skill-sets, so that's what they do. What a person 'wants' to do in this world is usually explored through the antagonists in this universe, and it's almost always related to some combination of sex, money/power, and death (now with robots).
This is a really good point that I hadn't really considered this way before. Good stuff user.
good post user
CYBERPUNK IS LEFITIST IT DEPICS A ULTRA CAPITALIST SOCIETY TO BE CYBERPUNK IS TO BE ANTI-CAPITALIST LAIN IS WITH US
Doug pls
Fuck off
Yeah, you tend to get fuckwits like pic related that completely miss the point
You do realize that a film can be relevant to leftists without it featuring revolutionaries wrapped in red flags with the Internationale blaring in the background, right?
I need more like this. Like some shitty bourgeois romcom gets interrupted Blazing Saddles style and never shifts back in tone.
...
Hmmmmmmmmmmm
>the actual villain was always in the background, detested by the whole cast, his whole plan failed and he died a pathetic death
Hmmmmmmmmmmm
We as leftists should be pushing for greater diversity in films like this, and carefulness towards portraying convention authority figures in a positive light.