Motoko Kusanagi, A Cyborg

How does life feel when you’re full cyborg? The shell you inhabit is amazingly similar to a human body, but it is not a body. It analyzes pressure, temperature, color and so on. It analyzes reality and it sends data to your brain, which is a cyberbrain but still has some gray matter, which is your own. You can’t drink alcohol and get drunk the same way you would if you were human. When you touch the skin of someone you love, you don’t get the sensation you’d get if you were human. You don’t shiver. You don’t fall ill. At least, the way human beings do: but you get cyberbrain sclerosis or cyberbrain autism (closed shell syndrome).

What happens to a personality of a woman who lost her human body as a 6 year old child, who became a woman when she got a shell of a mature woman? Glimpses of inner self of Motoko Kusanagi are seen here and there, like in episode 5 of the Stand Alone Complex, when she says to Batou: “It’s that time of the month” (translated “Must be a loose wire” in the American release). Yes, Major sounds a bit cynical. That’s her defense reaction to what she has to go through. So strong. So fragile. This combination has always been driving me mad in women.

One may feel uncomfortable seeing someone in exactly the same dress as oneself. In the original Ghost in the Shell anime movie Motoko sees someone who has exactly the same shell. In the last episode of the Stand Alone Complex, when Togusa rides on a bus, he sees someone who looks exactly like the Major, but it’s someone else. What would you feel if you realized that you actually were serial? She knew that inside, unlike usual cyborgs, she was empowered by secret military technologies; she knew that she was actually unique and that her ghost was unique, but still...

In the last episode of the S. A. C. 2nd GIG Motoko Kusanagi confesses that she can’t even remember her real name. The key to Motoko’s fears is given in chapter 5 of the original Masamune Shirow’s manga: “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve really already died, and what I think of as ‘me’ isn’t really just an artificial personality comprised of a prosthetic body and a cyberbrain.” And further: “What if all that’s left of the ‘real you’ is a couple of lonely brain cells?”