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Literary Quotes in Innocense - Ghost in the Shell




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Tempest
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 6:31 pm Reply with quote
I was wondering what other people thought of the literary quotes in Innocence... or more specifically, how many other people don't find them out of place?

Like most, at first I found the quotes rather odd. Why the hell are these people constantly quoting Shakespeare, the bible and so on... I mean, it would be okay if one character who was supposed to be particularly deep did it, but why was everyone doing it?

I found that it was bad writing to have everyone unrealistically quoting deep and somewhat obscure literature. As if the writer / director was speaking through the characters...

The it dawned on me, the people in Ghost in the Shell have something that we don't. Their e-brains provide them with a huge capacity to store information, in pure text format, the entire collected works of Shakespeare is only a couple megs in size. In the future, these people are probably walking around with instant access to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Why not waste 1% or so of that on storing public domain documents that are... fun to quote.

In the fictional history of the Ghost in the Shell Universe, people who wanted to appear deep probably started doing this years before the movie takes place. And over the years, it probably became a common custom to quote literature in everyday conversation...

Thoughts?

-t
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ShellBullet



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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 6:47 pm Reply with quote
Wasn't it in the first movie that the Major made a quote from the Bible about once being a child and Batou didn't know where it was from.
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Cloe
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 7:25 pm Reply with quote
While use of quotations is certainly justafiable using your logic, I still find the over-use of them to be jarring and completely overbearing. And I wonder why, as ShellBullet almost mentioned, quotes weren't used so generously throughout the first movie, Stand Alone Complex, or even the original manga.
Just because people may persistantly quote and make obscure allusions all the time in the future doesn't mean that taking advantage of that possibility and beating the audience over the head with it is good screenwriting.

I like your explanation, though. It opens up the imagination to all kinds of futuristic possibilities. It would be nice not to have to carry around an external hard drive anymore... Wink
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Tempest
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 7:45 pm Reply with quote
Cloe wrote:
And I wonder why, as ShellBullet almost mentioned, quotes weren't used so generously throughout the first movie, Stand Alone Complex, or even the original manga.


Lack on continuity?

Or perhaps the "fad" became popular sometime between the first and second movie...

Quote:
Just because people may persistantly quote and make obscure allusions all the time in the future doesn't mean that taking advantage of that possibility and beating the audience over the head with it is good screenwriting.


Good point.

-t
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BoygetsfireD



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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 7:53 pm Reply with quote
I was talking to a friend of mine (one of his favourite animes is GitS) and he said that the reason they do it is that because they have the space in their "brains" and they want to sound deep/they just have all the quotes that they like
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ferrarimanf355



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PostPosted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 10:11 pm Reply with quote
tempest wrote:
I was wondering what other people thought of the literary quotes in Innocence... or more specifically, how many other people don't find them out of place?

Like most, at first I found the quotes rather odd. Why the hell are these people constantly quoting Shakespeare, the bible and so on... I mean, it would be okay if one character who was supposed to be particularly deep did it, but why was everyone doing it?

I found that it was bad writing to have everyone unrealistically quoting deep and somewhat obscure literature. As if the writer / director was speaking through the characters...

The it dawned on me, the people in Ghost in the Shell have something that we don't. Their e-brains provide them with a huge capacity to store information, in pure text format, the entire collected works of Shakespeare is only a couple megs in size. In the future, these people are probably walking around with instant access to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Why not waste 1% or so of that on storing public domain documents that are... fun to quote.

In the fictional history of the Ghost in the Shell Universe, people who wanted to appear deep probably started doing this years before the movie takes place. And over the years, it probably became a common custom to quote literature in everyday conversation...

Thoughts?

-t


Well, it's always fun to interpret and speculate stuff like this, that's for sure. Perhaps that's why there's all that linking up stuff... although in all honesty, I'd rather quote the greatest movie of all time instead of literature. No, not Citizen Kane... Days Of Thunder. Very Happy

Cloe, you more or less hit it on the head. I'm a little worried about seeing Innocence, mainly because all the talk about philosophy kinda messes with what makes Stand Alone Complex and the mangas so damn enjoyable: it's easily accessable (for me, at least), yet it still has that deep philosophy that doesn't hit you over the head with a frying pan. And then there's Batou. I like the Batou in the mangas and SAC: jovial, outgoing, the first one to crack a head and some one liners. I don't want him to be all gloomy like what I'm hearing about Innocence. I do kinda have some hope that Oshii learns from this and makes whatever he's thinking of doing next (I'd bet dollars to stinky day-old doughnuts that his next magnum opus is going to be a third GitS movie, loosely based off the Man-Machine Interface manga) a tad more accessable.

And if I had an e-brain, I'd use it to store this:

Shocked
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abunai
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 9:27 am Reply with quote
tempest wrote:
The it dawned on me, the people in Ghost in the Shell have something that we don't. Their e-brains provide them with a huge capacity to store information, in pure text format, the entire collected works of Shakespeare is only a couple megs in size. In the future, these people are probably walking around with instant access to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Why not waste 1% or so of that on storing public domain documents that are... fun to quote.

Umm..... some of us don't need e-brains to do that. As you say, the storage capacity needed is negligible. All you need is the desire to retain the information in long-term memory.

tempest wrote:
In the fictional history of the Ghost in the Shell Universe, people who wanted to appear deep probably started doing this years before the movie takes place. And over the years, it probably became a common custom to quote literature in everyday conversation...

Seriously, you don't need to postulate a future fad. This sort of thing is absolutely de rigeur at any faculty of the humanities I've ever visited.

- abunai
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Tempest
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 2:47 pm Reply with quote
abunai wrote:
Seriously, you don't need to postulate a future fad. This sort of thing is absolutely de rigeur at any faculty of the humanities I've ever visited.


Yes, but we're not talking about a bunch of academics here, we're talking about cops.

I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing is not common in the local precinct, or even special investigations units similar to section 9.

So I was looking at what would have changed from today's society to the society in GitS that would have caused something that isn't currently common (in that milieu) to become common.

The options are, bad writing or a sociological change than isn't blatantly explained in the movie.

-t
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ShellBullet



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PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 9:19 pm Reply with quote
abunai wrote:
Umm..... some of us don't need e-brains to do that. As you say, the storage capacity needed is negligible. All you need is the desire to retain the information in long-term memory.


Even the somewhat minimal amount of work needed to memorize a few lines of text is more than most people want to invest (unless it's a quote from Dave Chapelle). Having the ability to instantly memorize anything you want would make a differance.
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JETBLACK87



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PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 10:57 pm Reply with quote
Even the somewhat minimal amount of work needed to memorize a few lines of text is more than most people want to invest (unless it's a quote from Dave Chapelle). Having the ability to instantly memorize anything you want would make a differance.[/quote]

Wasn't it Shakespeare who once said "I'm Rick James bitch"?
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Glory Questor



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PostPosted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:34 pm Reply with quote
My take on this is that Batou was probably studying them to understand some of the ideas that Motoko Kusanagi was hinting at.

Until her "ascension" at the end of GitS, Batou probably didn't think much on what Motoko had to say. Since Innocence begins many years after the end of GitS, Batou was probably reading through texts and trying to understand what happened to Motoko.

He most likely thinks that, to join her in the Net eventually, he has to gain the same level of awareness that she attains. That was another theme throughout the movie, especially when he stares at the android in plastic when they are interviewing the plant manufacturer.

If he had eyes, they would be showing us the loneliness, the agony. Batou was in love with Motoko, but now that she's "grown out of her shell", he still misses her.

(spoiler[Note that she does care about him, too, despite her "ascension", especially when she appears at the end of the movie to assist him in uncovering the secret behind the geisha androids. It's more like she's waiting for him, protecting him along the way, and perhaps Batou is getting closer to the point where someday they will be together again.])
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