I have come to dislike Cyberpunk as a whole. (Ghost in the Shell's original manga prompted this)

I have come to hate Ghost in the Shell and the Cyberpunk genre as a whole. After seeing the trailer for the new anime pop up in my feed, I decided to attempt to read the original manga as I find mystery adjacent media intriguing. For context, I have seen sporadic episodes of the anime with the CGI sequel nobody appears to like. Ghost in the Shell is a large franchise with a lot of versions, but I feel as though this really doesn’t matter with what I’m about to say.

It is a bit depressing and counter-intuitive to talk about media this way, as I feel as though I’m barely interacting with it. This rant may come across as unfocused, as I’m really just using GITS as a jumping off point for something I despise in media. I also have to acknowledge, there are a massive amount of Cyberpunk narratives out there, and I’m certain one at least would hold up to my criticisms of the genre (assuming my criticisms are good in the first place). For that reason I can’t actually criticize the entire genre at once, so this is more of a rant about some common things I see regarding them, with Ghost in the Shell prompting this out of me.

A quick and complete tangent before I potentially say something worth hearing, and I don’t know where else to put this, but they try way too hard to make Major hot and cool, but it just has the opposite effect in creating a disconnect in the way I’m supposed to view major for me. I don’t really like her as a character, but going deeper into it is kind of pointless. There are like… 6 different versions of her and I haven’t thoroughly versed myself in all of them enough to say much. (Manga, Movie, Western Movie, TV-Series + Sequel + Game, OVA 1, New and currently unreleased OVA). TLDR I think she’s “boring” and it’s not retroactively interesting enough. Completely simplifying things here, and I just want to be a bit of an ass here, but she’s like a sex prop and I get tired of it quickly, even if the series is supposedly attempting to do something with that idea. I’m SURE the gay sex scene is essential to her character, so glad they’re keeping that in the new one….

I love the “idea” of introspective media, narratives are a perfect place to entertain questions… so long as there’s a purpose behind those questions and the entire series is not hiding behind “complex” questions to make up for it’s inability to give value and purpose to anything a series tries to do. But go figure, like a lot of media in a similar vein, Ghost in the shell fails to create any reason to engage with the questions of it’s “dead-end” future that has absolutely no bearing on our modern world.

Words can and will express how much I hate “character study” or “exploration” as a defense for writing that cannot give purpose to the events that unfold within it. The mere presentation of a character or concept does not carry any thematic purpose, as themes are an argument rather than a description. If the content and effects of the narrative can be completely replaced with an essay on the hypothetical matter, then I feel the narrative has failed completely as something worth engaging with. Media is a lot of things, but when a story is just a report on a subject that an essay could cover much more thoroughly with much less wasted investment, I find it frustrating. The presentation and outlining of a pointless character will remain pointless no matter how elaborated upon it is

Ghost in the Shell asks a lot of questions, but it can’t create a reason as to why those questions should even be considered in the first place outside of “It’s a conundrum in the story.” It may matter to the characters, but the characters themselves lack thematic purpose outside of being the method these questions are delivered in the story. The narrative hides behind and props up the idea of being “human” as if everything anybody does has inherent value just because. It doesn’t actually have a take on what human life is itself, because it’s metric for viewing life has no established argument behind it. It leads to a very shallow approach that can only validate platitudes the audience most likely already agrees with because the various takes on cybernetics the story presents are almost always negatively aligned, and thus linear in their presentation due to this “intensity.” The few positive examples of cybernetics are drowned out comparatively (Such as disabled people being able to regain their limbs), and there’s barely a discussion to be had regarding them. It’s smashing a positive against extreme negatives and expecting the contrast to be interesting

It expects the viewer to “come to their own conclusions,” but all that means is that the media does not offer anything to the wider conversation regarding these things; piggybacking off of the real world importance of them rather than being able to create it’s own importance. The story does not to need to solve these problems. but it needs to make something of these problems and come to some level of conclusion regarding them to offer up a purposeful contribution to them. But in everything I’ve seen, thanks to the way these stories approach themselves, leave me walking away with absolutely nothing but wasted time for attempting to wring some purpose out of what I’ve just watched.

If Ghost in the Shell is a criticism of anything, I couldn’t tell. The series merely presents scenarios and moves on from them as nothing more than something pointless to observe. When everything occurring is so heavily based on it’s pointless, cynical future, there’s nothing to take from it other than what applies to the narrative’s world itself. Our world is fundamentally different than the world where any links between the cybernetic future and ours have to be stretched so far, Ghost in the Shell’s contributions become nothing more than a tangent in the wider conversation to be had.

Media cannot really criticize something, as criticism requires a pre-existing target, and when said pre-existing target is completely made up by the author to serve their own narrative purposes, anything said should be taken with a grain of salt no matter how “based in reality” it is. The only real way to criticize something is to praise the alternative, as praise requires a favorable argument to be built out of nothing, which is much more suited to a medium biased towards whatever party made it. This is what I believe to be a prominent issue of Cyberpunk narratives, their critical/cynical world is, in of itself, pointless to engage with over simply keeping up to date with current events and trends as they pertain to our world.

I feel as though I should do my due diligence as an audience member and engage more with these stories, to fully complete them and take in what’s presented, but everything about them make me realize more and more that I’m wasting my time on fictitious problems that don’t exist, will not exist, or only have tangential barring on our modern world. I’ve found the Genre to be full of smoke and mirrors, and any time I try to challenge myself as a reader and aspiring author with it, I get a little saddened.

Please tell me if I’m just blind to something here…