Right, I was referring to you claiming Shirow didn't have pages and pages of that bullshit, I'm pretty sure it was his shtick even before Sonada picked it up. Pretty much everything he's done since the GitS manga has had massive tldrs about the setting, the technology, all that crap, because if there is one thing Shirow loves doing, it is predicting technology.
Probably the biggest offender I can remember here is in my favourite work of his, the Dominion manga, in which he dedicated something like 12 pages at the back of the book to spreads about how the Bonaparte tanks worked, their equipment (the machine guns are equipped exclusively with rubber bullets and the central cannon can be replaced with a fire hose!) and of course the fact is a major plot point in stopping the bad guys that Leona has an intricate knowledge of the structural integrity of cannon firing range walls combined with her filling out paperwork earlier on in the story specificially requesting HEAT rounds for her Bonaparte.
Heck, there's even a little comic at the back where the characters just blather about tanks for like eight pages. Or maybe that was Appleseed? My memory is a bit fuzzy.
This stuff largely gets overlooked in the adaptations of Shirow's work to the screen (because Oshii is a fucking HACK goddamn him) but it's all there in the comics and it can honestly get pretty fascinating. It's one of the main reasons I've wanted to track down Orion, aside from Cthulhu Rape (TM), because the robot featured in Black Magic is in there, and that's my favourite animated Shirow work (and by work I mean Terminator and Alien condensed into one badass fucking awesome fucking holy shit this rules fest).
Yeah, I know he does that, but that stuff is mostly excised from the story in Shirow's book. He used to take great pains to not allow all his prediction junk interfere with the flow or readability of the story. I look at that stuff in the same way I do the maps and appendicies to LotR or something. They're not part of the story, they're supplementary reference material that you can read at your leisure or disregard.
Sonada makes you sit for pages and pages in the middle of the damn story - in the middle of action sequences even - so he can, again, pound it into your brain that the CZ75 original military edition is the greatest handgun ever produced or whatever. Or how the cannons in Exaxxion use gravity to alter their trajectory (WITH TWO PAGES OF DIAGRAMS).
I went and did the ultimate nerd-arguing-on-the-internet thing and went to get my own copy of GitS off the shelf and actually looked through it. Here are the following scenes that could be called pointless fetishism:
- The two page conversation in chapter 3 (Junk Jungle) between the Major and Togusa, while Togusa drives the van.
- 5 out of the six pages of chapter five (Megatech machine 2), but this is arguably important, as it shows how the cyborgs of the GitS world work and are made, which is pretty crucial to understanding the book.
- The first page of chapter 7 (Phantom Fund)... and it still includes a key plot panel.
- The first two pages of chapter 8 (Dumb Barter) (debateable, since it's mostly plot, but I'll add this since that's a LOT of expository dialogue.
- Technically, there's also all the ethereal dialogue with the puppeteer, but since that's actually the point of the book and is fascinating, I wouldn't count it.
Other than that there's a *lot* of created
jargon, but that's not really any different than the dialogue on your average cop show on TV. It still moves the plot or action along. Agreed that most Shirow adaptations are very poor. I can't watch any of those anime at all. It's like trying to watch grade six flash-animation version of the Foundation series or something.
version: Shirow's fetishism helps deepen the immersion in his worlds, whereas Sonada's fetishsim is jarring and throws you out.
