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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Ghost in the Shell kind of barely dealt with this. Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episode 1 focused on a politician who liked to drink and swap artificial bodies with women. The strangeness of that sort of behavior is tangentially mentioned in a couple lines of dialogue. They are the first generation of people with easy body swapping so this is a secret worthy of an eyebrow raise.

It's also regularly questioned why The Major uses a female chassis, with even other members of her own team spelling out that a male chassis allows for greater muscular strength. Her counterpoint is to beat Batou with his own fists. For a while, fan theories thought she might have been AMAB before cyberization, although 2nd Gig very heavily implies that she was the "little girl" that was a fellow plane crash survivor to Kuze (though diehard fans of trans Makoto suggest she'd started IDing as female at that age).

In a future where the (upper?) middle class and above can afford artificial bodies, what would it even mean to be trans? They choose body aesthetics the way we choose car styling. Picking a generic hot girl body from a catalog as the major did would be as easy for a guy as a girl. Those fans are silly, I would have thought officially wrong and better yet totally irrelevant the premise of pure brain-body disconnect.

Perhaps relevant is Batou's choice of a purely functional body. They animate him head and shoulders taller than everyone else and with expressionless metal eyes that can sort of see through active camouflage. And in one episode he admits to having no penis. He's a huge jacked expressionless cyborg spec ops Ken doll. High speed low drag enabled by sci fi technology.

There's also her apparent surprise and amusement at being accidentally installed in a male chassis by Batou at the end of the original manga.

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