Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Eps. 3 & 4 now o

[dudemqnguy]

Fansubs available on Direct Connect and DC++. CrazyCatgirl Anime hubs are the most populated and therefore the most likely to have the Episodes. If you can't get on, just keep hitting 'Re-connect' untill something catches.

the server is: hub1.crazycatgirl.com

You may be redirected onto another of the four hubs, but that's ok.

SPOILER WARNING!

Now to the review. Episode Three is the one of greatest interrest to this crowd, as it actually has a story centered around a boy's love for his robot girlfriend, and his desire to make her unique by wiping out all the other robots of the same obsolescent model. The police discover who is causing these bizarre instances of self-destruction, and go to catch the perpetrator who is already desperately trying to flee the country with his gynoid girlfriend. Forced to go on foot, the chase becomes somewhat pathetic and sad, since the robot is an older model, and is stiff, slow and clumsy. In the end, when surrounded by the police, she twists her lover's arm behind his back and forces him to surrender to them, while saying that she doesn't love him, and didn't really want to leave. It turns out later that their entire interraction was quoted from a twentieth-century movie that he loved, although she improvised a bit at the end. It gives one the sense that she wasn't merely an unconscious wind-up toy, but a self-aware being, and that perhaps his destruction of the others of her kind was closer to an act of murder than at first thought - This is all left a bit ambiguous though.

Episode Four is more in the realm of political intrigue and official abuse of power and doesn't really impact on the area of cyborgs and robots. It is complex, and doesn't boil down so easily as the previous episode (not to mention the fact that it ends in a sort of cliffhanger), so I'm not going to try.There is, however, a fascinating subtext about how people would interract with their environment if computers were directly connected with human brains - Printed materials such as books and newspapers, when they exist at all, is no longer in text, but in barcodes. The major emphesis with cybersecurity would not be a concern for theft of data, or of pimply delinquents crashing networks, but the more immediate fear of having one's body highjacked and being controlled like a marrionette - Or of having one's own memories and very identity erased. Hacking then becomes not merely a crime of trespass and destruction of data, but frighteningly akin to kidnapping, rape, and even murder. It was a major theme in the movie, but I am getting a much better sense of it in the tv series.

I wonder if a hacker of humans would have the same facile, greasy justifications for violating a person as current hackers do for violating a computer system.

Anyway, neither episode is worth getting excited about if you can't find them or don't have a fast enough connection, but they are pretty interresting. The opening animation is now fully rendered 3D, and is pretty cool on it's own, but combined with the music, it will give you goose-bumps.

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