FrankTrollman wrote:So you've got the Major's rant about how if everyone on her team was wired up that they'd become predictable and they could get wiped out. And that's a cool rant, and it is excused Togusa being kind of a dead weight in that movie. But that's just it... he was actually pretty much dead weight in that movie. At no time did anyone ever demonstrate getting their ass kicked because they were too wired and didn't have enough human left inside to be unpredictable. That never fucking happened. People lost because their tech wasn't good enough, but not even once did even a single fucking person lose anything because their tech was too good.
As far as I remember, the only opponents in the first movie, where Kusanagi and Togusa have this discussion, are the guy with the invisibility cloak and the spider tank. So that's one fight Kusanagi wins and one she lose, before Batou brings in a (much) bigger gun.Blade wrote:That's because Major Mary Sue is augmented, and she can't have any real weakness. And she must be shown to be better than anyone else. So no matter what the in-universe explanation is, the truth is that Togusa is mostly here to make augmented people look good, and bad augmented people threatening (so that Major Sue will look even more badass when killing them).
"Ghost in the Shell," which span over a handful of comics, two movies and a TV serie, was rewritten a lot over two decades. The Mamoru Oshii films were actually written by another person, with little to no involvement from Masamune Shirow. The original comics could be considered as cyberpunk, with a trans-humanist conclusion in the two last chapters, while the movie used the same characters and some of the events for a full-fledged trans-humanist story.
The scene in the movie where Kusanagi tells Togusa about predictability is based off a similar scene in the comics, rewritten to be shorter and have a more trans-humanist, cryptic tone. In the comics, the actual topic is firing range performance (where Kusanagi casually mentions that Saito is just as bad as Togusa - it's only later that his eye-patch was retconed into a bad-ass sniper eye replacement).
Not that Togusa is much more useful to the team in the comics. He is primarily Dr. Watson: a convenient way for the author to provide plot exposition. By the end of the comics, he nonetheless takes on intelligence gathering duties and oversees a rookie, basically taking on Ishikiwa usual role (which is not much of a combat monster either).
The movies and the SAC series entrenched ideas that were very much absent from the original comics, especially the first chapters. Kusanagi has a boyfriend (even if it does not last), take soothers... And in the end, she fails.
She botches a mission, get on trial and must leave Section 9. Not that she really tries to defend herself or even cares at that point (when the attorney remark there is about one second between the moment she see her victim and she shot, she answers "Exactly 0,82 seconds" - that's what loss of humanity sounds like), because she's on her way to jump from the cyberpunk train onto the trans-humanist air balloon. That conclusion, on the other hand, is pretty much what established Ghost in the Shell pivotal role between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk trans-humanist.