I’m really enjoying Claire Napier’s ongoing interrogation of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell property. There are three entries in Napier’s “Ghost in the Shell: The Major’s Body” thus far. The first focuses on the first film, the second on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and the third on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a television series. Napier’s doing a kind of writing I like a lot, where she takes a close look at what the work is saying and figures out where she stands in relation to it. The subtext, the themes, the shots the animators choose to create versus how we perceive them…this is good stuff and well worth looking over.

Napier’s posts are extra-interesting to me, as a lapsed Ghost in the Shell fan. I remember watching the movie for the first time on VHS with a few family members, and I watched all of Stand Alone Complex, but it’s been years since I really dove into the franchise, if I ever did at all. Everything I consume now gets passed through a critical lens that I wasn’t capable of back then, so this works as both a trip down memory lane and the revelation of new data.

She asks a lot of questions or points out a lot of things I’d never thought about, like the subtext of the Major often being nude while her male coworkers are clothed. The thing I like the most, something that’s sprinkled throughout the posts so far, is the way she discovers meaning in small things. We all do it, and sometimes it’s derived from subtext (Yes, Superman IS the perfect dad you never had!) and sometimes it’s pure conjecture based on our own experiences intersecting with the text in different ways.

I really appreciate that kind of writing. When I was doing comics journalism/criticism on the reg, a lot of it was boiled down to The Work and The Work alone, thanks to deadline and market pressures. There’s not a lot of outlets that’d pay for those weird, personal, noodly projects and an even smaller audience is interested in reading them. But I cherish posts like that, because it’s like getting a shot directly from someone else’s brain. “This is what this means to me,” freed of any concern about explaining whether the subject is good or worth buying or whatever. It just is what it is.

“The Major’s Body” is particularly poignant for me, because I know Shirow’s work reasonably well, and like most of my friends, I’m disappointed that he’s descended fully into “galgrease” softcore pinups to appeal to otaku instead of the ground-breaking, thought-provoking, world-building comics he made his name on. Appleseed is amazing. A poster of a lady coated in baby oil embracing a dolphin? Much less amazing. So Napier’s thoughts on GitS and The Major join my thoughts on Shirow and galgrease, giving me more ammo to mull over and figure out.

That kind of enthusiasm and conversation is infectious. I watched the first part of Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a prequel series, the other night specifically because I saw these posts and wanted to brush up before reading them. I’m finally going to rewatch Stand Alone Complex now, just to see how it looks and feels with adult eyes.

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