So I've watched Gits SAC and SAC 2 at least twice, but I still have a really hard summarising the storylines for both...

Actually DESU it's been a while (at least 2 years) since last seeing things. I do remember being a little unengaged throughout that episode. I do love this series though, probably my favourite. I mean it's so philosophical and touches on so many issues that I feel have ended up being so pertinent. I'm guessing a lot of it was because Japan experienced a lot of that interned cultural phenomenon stuff before the rest of us, so they were commenting on things which to us would come later.

You are now remembering that kid turning down an invitation for sex with a naked Major.

There's also a big Japan chuuni complex, what with them being the first company to invent radiation absorbing nano-bots, turning them into the main world superpower after nuclear World Wars 3 and 4

Shirow came up with somewhat different designs and then the dumb whore in charge of character designs for SAC made all the designs worse, less sexy, less expressive, less attractive, because she was demonstrably unable to accurately copy his style even with a model under her eyes

>188203261
Just watched this some months ago, so long ass but still not very detailed summary coming through:

The Laughing Man narrative in the first season is that Section 9 is led to look into the Laughing Man investigation unit when one of its officers dies when trying to get Togusa information. They discover the entire team has been subverted by their own department, having surveillance nanobots implanted in their eyes to keep watch on them 24/7. When the head officer the conspiracy has paid off gives a press conference to try and diffuse the situation, the real laughing man hijacks one of the other officers to declare he's coming out of hiding because this display is just too ridiculous to let go. This seems to trigger a rash of assassination attempts from random people on the guy, all by people declaring themselves to be the laughing man.

Through a series of investigations and breaks, Section nine pieces together what happened. The Laughing Man incident from years ago was a spectacular display of public media theater, triggered by the kidnapping then public blackmailing of the eponymous CEO of Serano Genomics by a hacker who was so good, he could hack everything around him on the fly to disguise his face with his logo and pretty much be a ghost in their modern cybernetic society. The public narrative is it was part of a scheme to blackmail Serano Genomics and other big tech companies for money, but it's revealed this part was just an inside job by the companies or perhaps a copycat criminal. The original kidnapping and media spectacle was done by the "real" Laughing Man to try and expose the cover up of a medical debacle that was instigated by a huge and widespread government and corporate conspiracy. Section Nine begins to piece this part together when they run into, through Togusa again, a non-profit group of people looking to address wrongs done by the way the medical tech companies, those targeted by the Laughing Man, dealt with Cyberbrain Sclerosis.

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Cyberbrain Sclerosis is a little defined but largely fatal disease that affects cyberized humans. For awhile, the medical community and big meditech companies were putting their efforts into a nanobot solution. However, some kind of vaccine developed by a doctor known as Murai was discovered to work as a cure. This ended up being suppressed by the medical establishment backed by the meditech companies through a combination of good old fashioned medical tribalism and greed. But the disease ended up affecting many high ranking, rich, and influential people who would go on to use the Murai vaccine to cure themselves while blocking the approval of that same vaccine for wider use.

Because of their investigations, Section Nine begins to run afoul of the medical tech conspiracy and their government contacts, the most immediate of which are the Japanese version of the DEA who go around trying to frame Section Nine and other threats to the conspiracy on bogus narcotics charges. The Laughing Man is also active again and runs into Section Nine several times over the course of their investigations (The Chatroom episode and Autism Center episodes standout here). Eventually, the Laughing Man saves The Major from an assassination attempt during a routine body switching procedure. In doing so, he hands over all of his information to her, leaving it to Section Nine to finally bring an end to things. He'd once been super idealistic and gung-ho about stopping it, but the sheer power of the conspiracy and his inability to do anything about it to change society despite his tremendous hacking skills left him dissillusioned and led to him disappearing for years after his first public appearance.

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The Major uses the information to get evidence from Serano himself, who was and is somewhat sympathetic to the Laughing Man. They learn the head of the conspiracy is the current Japanese Secretary General. However, politics prevents the rest of the government from moving on him and Section Nine's existence is leaked to the press as a treanous, extra-legal government spec-ops team. All of this results in the Prime Minister throwing Section Nine to the wolves for political capital, while keeping Aramaki safe and promising to properly deal with the secretary general after the elections. Section Nine has to fake their own deaths and go on the lamb.

After some epic climatic action that's not actually very narratively important to describe, the threat passes and they all manage to meet back up. Section Nine is secretly reinstated again while the conspiracy is publically revealed and dismantled. Aramaki and the Major attempt to recruit the Laughing Man, who works in an out of date paper library where he reveals the last, largely trivial but still meaningful piece of the conspiracy. He's not even the "original" Laughing Man at all. He stumbled across someone else's info they'd gathered about the Murai Vaccine conspiracy and then followed up on it himself. This reveals the meaning of the show's subtitle: a Stand Alone Complex is when a copy is made of something that didn't originally exist in the first place. It's sort of a cryptic way to refer to how people try to copy something but in doing so add their own spin to it. The Laughing Man was basing his ideals off of someone he'd never met and then went on to inspire this whole counter culture meme around himself and his logo that also wasn't really based on him. It's about people styling themselves after something, intentionally trying to ape it, but they'd never really understood or even misinterpreted multiple sources as one, to create what they think is a copy that is actually almost whole original.

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Didn’t Gouta get assassinated before he could defect to the American Empire?

There's a few other odds an ends that aren't terribly relevant to the plot but are interesting to consider with regards to world and Laughing Man story. Namely the Tachikomas and their increasing self awareness and eventual heroic suicide.

Give me a bit and I'll try to do season two. Like the other user, I don't remember it as well even after having watched it again along side the first one, so I'll need to double check episode summaries to get my order of events and reveals somewhat cohesive to how the story did it all. It's probably the more solid season from a strictly technical standpoint, but the main plot and conspiracy is simply nowhere near as impactful and resonant as the Laughing Man. The first season of SAC is probably my favorite piece of GitS media out of all of them because of how it combines all the different flavors of the setting, from a complex cyberpunk plot to wacky individual adventures, all without going too completely off the rails and heady. Both SAC seasons manage to marry the philosophical questioning of GitS to more down to earth, practical concerns in their plots, I feel.

Probably my favorite episode overall. One of the best portrayals of internet culture in a show.

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Yes. The major (while using thermoptic camo) shoots him from within an elevator as he was about to step into it.

It's like the third fucking time in the show they do a version of that sequence. Everyone has to do it in every iteration of the franchise.

It's a good shot though, at least.

>So I've watched Gits SAC and SAC 2 at least twice, but I still have a really hard summarising the storylines for both
to be fair there's a lot going on especially in the first season, doing a basic plot summary is easy (hacker uncovers government/big pharma conspiracy and Section 9 inadvertently gets involved) but you'd be missing a lot of pretty vital info that plays into the larger picture.

>Also, is Pepe the Laughing Man?
in a way there's parallels between the two, like you said the image of each was hijacked and used by other groups for purposes contrary to the creators' intents. However in the case of the Laughing Man it gets a bit complicated because unlike Matt Furie and Pepe, Aoi never coined himself as the Laughing Man, and the creation of the Laughing Man as a phenomenon was done mostly by those partaking in corporate sabotage/espionage who found themselves with a convenient cover story, and entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck off of a modern icon. Aoi went underground after he held Serano at gunpoint on live TV so he had no hand in what transpired afterwards, it was just the work of people taking advantage of a media sensation. With this in mind, is Aoi really the true creator of the Laughing Man as an image?

I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually prefers Shirow's newer style to his old work.

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I want her to ride my face

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In b4 oily horse cocks.

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this girl was also a semen demon

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Alright let's try this:

Season Two ends up being a bit more convoluted, or perhaps simply lacking the strength of a simple but deep conflict to build off of.

The basic premise goes that Section Nine is brought into a more active state following the events of Season 1 when a terrorist group proclaiming themselves to be the Individual Eleven and calling for the end of Japan's refugee policy takes over an embassy. This starts off a long running chain of conflict between Japan and its post-war continental refugees. This includes an assassination attempt on the new Prime Minister by a man with an unmoving face and refugee terrorist attempts to steal plutonium. Through this Section Nine runs into Goda, a strange government agent with a particularly disfigured face who has unspecified delusions of grandeur in remaking society through the refugee crisis. After tiring of his bullshit, Section Nine begins their own personal investigation into the Individual Eleven.

Along the way, and it's not immediately important but of course it's one of the most well known things about the season, the Major has a nostalgic episode about how she became cyberized along side an unnamed boy in the same accident. Eventually Section Nine discovers a link between the Individual Eleven and an essayist supposedly being the influence for their group, their name taken from one of his last essays. However, neither Section Nine nor even the terrorists themselves can produce a physical copy of the essay. Section Nine learns there is no Individual Eleven essay and it's merely a memetic virus that triggers brainwashing in those who read all the other real essays and turns them into agents of the terrorist group. The Individual Eleven terrorism culminates into a bizarre public spectacle where they line up and decapitate each other on camera. One of them, the one who attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister, backs out at the last minute and flees.

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The investigation then shifts to finding out just who this lone survivor was and what exactly Goda's plan is. The team explores the past of the survivor, known as Kuze, in the Japanese forces deployed during the last war and his connection to the refugees. The most pertinent thing they learn is Kuze has a seemingly unnatural charisma, easily forming connections and opening people up to him wherever he goes. Despite being under the influence of the anti-refugee Individual Eleven, once he's broken free of the virus Kuze ends up being the charismatic leader of the refugee movement itself. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis reaches a breaking point where the refugees take over Dejima island attempt to form their own separate nation state.

While Section Nine is attempting to capture Kuze while he's attempting to obtain plutonium to hopefully decapitate the refugee leadership, but their operation completely fails and they take at least one casualty among their new recruits and multiple other wounded. While trying to hack him the Major ends up discovering she recognizes who he is, but the implications of this are left until latter. Despite the failure, there turns out to have never been any plutonium, it was just another plot by Goda to further drive the situation out of control. The rest of the cabinet is pushing for immediate military invasion of Dejima under the bogus nuclear threat, but the PM, advised by Aramaki, instead manages to call for a UN inspection that delays any activity for at least two days. As other forces in the government move to cut them off, Section Nine plans to take the plutonium the discovered in another one of Goda's false flag operations to Dejima so they can then make sure it's turned into the UN along with Kuze.

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>tfw the author drew her having a bunch of lesbian sex in the early manga
>tfw it's because Shirow didn't want to draw a mans ass
Based.

Around this time Batou has what is essentially the only real confrontation with Goda over his convoluted plan. The exact specifics of it escape me but the entire purpose seems to be to try and return Japan to sort of military driven state along the lines of early 20th century Imperial Japan by pushing the refugee crisis to the breaking point. He's managed to rope in American Empire interests as well.

Gunfights breakout between the refugees and the Japanese military, which pushes the situation further and further towards full scale invasion as Section Nine infiltrates Dejima. The refugees have been using Kuze's own cyberbrain as some kind of hub, with him allowing them unrestricted access to him to answers all of the questions and concerns and to keep on top of the situation. In a confrontation with the Major, Kuze reveals that his plan is beyond simple ethnic separatism but instead intending to create some kind of new, structurally flat society by migrating everyone to the net beyond physical bodies. Obviously the Major thinks he's mad, but as time runs out and the American Empire launches a covert nuclear strike on the refugees, it beings to look like their only way out even as the rest of the team manages to publically get the plutonium out of Dejima. During the course of this, the Major implies that Kuze is the boy she knew from the accident that permanently paralyzed both of them and led to them being cyberized at a young age.

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The Tachikoma's make another heroic sacrifice by directing the satellite housing their AI into the nuclear missile to save everyone while the PM is able to oust control from the rest of her cabinet and reassert her authority over the situation. With Kuze in custody and Goda's conspiracy thwarted, things seem to be looking up. Goda attempts to defect to the American Empire, but the Major manages to do the old window head explosion trick on him. Unfortunately, in the chaos Kuze is assassinated to prevent him from causing any more problems, with his last words implying he'll completely jump into cyberspace, leaving his body behind.

Attempting to get the order of all this straight reveals the ultimate problem in 2nd Gig's plot: it's a lot more convoluted and largely around much more heady ideals of how societies function. Season 1 had what is ultimately an almost quaint plot about corporate greed and a government cover up, but its build around the digital society of GitS and the memetic culture hero of the Laughing Man. Still, I'm rather fond of Kuze even if he's not as good of secondary anti-hero as the Laughing Man. Unlike the Laughing Man, Kuze's entire success depends not on hacker skills but personality. It's an understated bit of comedy that Section Nine is left baffled by how he's able to charm people, assuming it to be another sort of virus. But in the end Kuze is simply one of those guys who's larger than life and is able to handle the incredible strain of interfacing individually with everyone of the refugees at once through the net. Overall, I think 2nd Gig is better made, in terms of animation and perhaps pacing. Most of the Laughing Man story is told in giant chunks after a few episodic stories and then a short break of another few one offs, while 2nd Gig much more expertly weaves the narrative through seemingly standalone stories and minor breaks in the plot. The Laughing Man is just that much better of an idea, though, in the end.

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the muddiness of second season makes it feel more real with the The Laughing Man case things kid of fell into place better not that it was too perfect or anything the second just had a grittier feel

That map is hilarious given the current stat of affairs

It was always pretty whack. The whole Russo-American Alliance feels particularly weird with how it's broken up.